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0:01:14 Stress is the great equalizer, but the goal of life is really about making sure that this
0:01:18 stress can serve you rather than harm you.
0:01:21 Resilience and stress go hand in hand.
0:01:26 Every single society has some concept of toxic resilience because it’s a manifestation
0:01:28 of hustle culture.
0:01:32 Multitasking is a myth, it’s a scientific misnomer, there’s actually no such thing.
0:01:37 Life is noisy in 2024, how are we going to quiet down the noise?
0:01:38 It’s just about…
0:01:56 Welcome back to the show, Young and Profiters.
0:01:58 Today we have a very important topic.
0:02:00 We’re going to be covering stress and burnout.
0:02:05 As entrepreneurs, we are even more stressed than the general population.
0:02:11 We deal with more uncertainty and unpredictability, we have a lot of dependency on our clients,
0:02:15 our customers, our employees, our families are dependent on us.
0:02:17 We’re also more socially isolated.
0:02:22 On top of all this, we’re very passionate and passion is a double-edged sword.
0:02:26 The more passionate you are, the more emotionally dependent you are on your work, where every
0:02:31 failure seems like a personal failure, a personal setback.
0:02:33 And so as entrepreneurs, we’re more prone to stress.
0:02:38 In fact, 25% of entrepreneurs believe that they’re burnt out right now.
0:02:44 So I’m bringing on Dr. Aditi Naurakar to the show to help us reverse our burnout and stress.
0:02:48 She’s an expert on the topic, she’s a doctor and author, a TV correspondent, she wrote
0:02:50 a new book called The Five Resets.
0:02:54 I can’t wait for this conversation, it’s so important to take care of our mental health
0:02:55 Young and Profiters.
0:03:00 So without further ado, here’s my conversation with Dr. Aditi Naurakar.
0:03:03 Hi Aditi, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.
0:03:05 It’s such a pleasure to be here, Hala.
0:03:07 I’m so excited for this conversation.
0:03:11 I actually have been studying mental health and business for the past few weeks.
0:03:16 I just had this webinar this past Wednesday where I was sponsored by BetterHelp and I
0:03:22 covered things like neurodiversity and entrepreneurship, mental health and entrepreneurship, stress burnout
0:03:27 relationships, and I had so much fun studying for this and I had wished our conversation
0:03:30 was just a little bit earlier, but I’m doing it again next week, so I’m like, whatever
0:03:34 I learned from Aditi, I’m just going to put it in the presentation and use it.
0:03:37 I can’t wait to just learn from you today.
0:03:42 So my first question to you is just to really understand how stressed are we all?
0:03:44 How stressed are we as a society?
0:03:48 I know we’re just coming out of the pandemic, so can you help shed some light on this?
0:03:54 We are seeing unprecedented rates of stress and burnout right now, Hala.
0:03:58 As a doctor, I’ve known that stress and burnout has always been something that people certainly
0:04:04 come to me and other doctors about, but the statistics are staggering right now based
0:04:11 on lots of different sources and data from different touchpoints here in the US and abroad.
0:04:17 We’re seeing rates of 70 to 74% of stress and burnout and that number is slightly higher
0:04:20 in those who are entrepreneurs.
0:04:25 That’s like saying in a room of 30 people, 21 people are struggling with stress and burnout.
0:04:28 So if you feel this way and you’re an entrepreneur, you are not alone.
0:04:33 It is not your fault and there is a way out based on what we’re going to talk about today.
0:04:34 Amazing.
0:04:38 And to your point, entrepreneurs feel so stressed out and I personally believe one of the reasons
0:04:43 why it’s one of our strengths is that we’re so passionate, right?
0:04:48 But being passionate is actually a double-edged sword because we then really tie ourselves
0:04:49 with our work.
0:04:50 We are our business.
0:04:56 So then anytime there’s any sort of setback or failure, we feel like it’s a personal failure
0:04:58 rather than a failure in our business.
0:05:00 And so it makes us more and more stressed out.
0:05:03 So I can’t wait to hear so many of your strategies.
0:05:04 I read your book.
0:05:05 It was so good.
0:05:11 But first, I want to talk about how stress is actually not necessarily a bad thing.
0:05:15 You say there’s good stress, there’s bad stress, and you call it a biological phenomenon that
0:05:18 has actually helped us evolve as humans.
0:05:20 So can you explain that to us?
0:05:21 Yeah.
0:05:25 So when you and I and everyone else, when we say, “I’m so stressed,” or, “It’s been
0:05:29 a stressful week,” what we’re describing is the bad kind of stress.
0:05:32 But in fact, there are two kinds of stress, like you say.
0:05:35 There’s good, healthy, productive stress.
0:05:39 And then there’s unhealthy, bad, dysfunctional, and unproductive stress.
0:05:43 The good kind of stress, scientifically, we call that adaptive stress.
0:05:46 And the bad kind is maladaptive stress.
0:05:48 So examples of good, healthy stress.
0:05:49 What are they?
0:05:54 It’s when you start your own company, or when you’re a new founder, that excitement that
0:05:59 you have, or rooting for your favorite sports team, buying a car, graduating, expanding your
0:06:00 team.
0:06:07 There are so many examples of healthy stress in your life that help drive your life forward,
0:06:10 help you get excited, get up, and take on the day.
0:06:17 But when that good, healthy stress gets high out of balance, off-kilter, and it really
0:06:20 starts going haywire, that’s when problems can arise.
0:06:25 And that’s when it transforms to unhealthy stress.
0:06:31 Like you said, because we have those two kinds of stress, the goal of life is not to live
0:06:32 a life with zero stress.
0:06:34 It’s actually biologically impossible.
0:06:37 You need a little bit of healthy stress to get up in the morning and take on the day,
0:06:41 whatever your day may be, whether you’re an entrepreneur or not.
0:06:46 But the goal of life is really about making sure that this stress can serve you rather
0:06:47 than harm you.
0:06:49 So it’s not about zero stress.
0:06:53 It’s absolutely impossible to have zero stress in your life.
0:06:56 You need a little bit of stress, but it just needs to be in balance.
0:06:57 And that’s the goal.
0:06:58 Yeah.
0:07:02 I want to get really nerdy and talk about what actually happens to us biologically.
0:07:07 And I think I want to start this off by understanding what is the purpose of our nervous system?
0:07:09 Well, there’s two kinds of nervous systems.
0:07:15 First, you have the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system.
0:07:17 These are just big scientific words, but we’ll break it down.
0:07:22 So your sympathetic nervous system is fight or flight.
0:07:25 Your stress response lives in your sympathetic nervous system.
0:07:29 It’s governed by a part of your brain called the amygdala, which is a small almond-shaped
0:07:32 structure deep in your brain.
0:07:35 And in scientific terms, we call this your reptilian brain or lizard brain because it’s
0:07:40 that part of the brain that hasn’t evolved the way the other parts of the brain have.
0:07:44 And your amygdala is what powers and drives your stress response.
0:07:48 And so that’s what the fight or flight or sympathetic nervous system does.
0:07:51 The goal is survival and self-preservation.
0:07:53 It’s about keeping you safe.
0:07:59 And so when that amygdala is on, that is the sense that you feel, that feeling of survival.
0:08:04 And so what’s happened now, the purpose of the amygdala and the sympathetic nervous system,
0:08:07 your fight or flight system, evolutionarily, it was to keep you safe.
0:08:12 So when you face a tiger in the forest, you know, when we were all cave dwellers back
0:08:16 in the day, evolutionarily, you would face a tiger in the forest and you would fight
0:08:18 the tiger or you would flee.
0:08:21 That’s what the fight or flight response is.
0:08:27 But now all of these tigers, these metaphorical tigers aren’t this one moment in time and
0:08:28 then you have a moment of rest.
0:08:30 It’s these things that just never go away.
0:08:36 So for entrepreneurs, funding issues, challenges with growth, challenges with meeting the demands
0:08:42 of consumers, all of these business issues that people are facing, they’re happening
0:08:44 at a low hum in the background at all times.
0:08:50 So that amygdala is just on at all times and your amygdala needs a break.
0:08:55 Your brain and your body both need a break biologically to be able to thrive.
0:08:59 And so we can talk a little bit more about that entrepreneurial mindset.
0:09:03 You know, I had a clinical practice in Boston, which is like the entrepreneurial capital
0:09:04 of the US.
0:09:10 So I had lots of patients who were entrepreneurs and just what do you do and how do you manage
0:09:15 to be able to be a successful entrepreneur, but protect and preserve your mental health
0:09:16 in the meantime?
0:09:17 Yeah.
0:09:22 I can’t wait to talk about some of your strategies to reverse stress, reverse burnout.
0:09:26 But I want to understand more about the feelings that we get when we’re in fight or flight
0:09:31 mode, because it’s not like we know, like, “Hey, my parasympathetic nervous system has
0:09:32 turned on.”
0:09:34 You don’t know that, right?
0:09:39 So our parasympathetic is actually the good stress, is that right, or where you want to
0:09:40 be?
0:09:44 Well, the parasympathetic system, whereas the sympathetic, what we talked about fight
0:09:48 or flight, the parasympathetic is rest and digest.
0:09:51 And the good news is that both systems can be on at the same time.
0:09:52 It’s like a light switch.
0:09:54 So when one is on, the other is off.
0:09:56 It’s mutually exclusive, and the other is on.
0:09:57 The other is off.
0:10:03 So what you’re aiming to do with time is to get out of that sympathetic, amygdala mode
0:10:08 and back into that parasympathetic rest and digest mode, where other parts of your brain
0:10:09 are taking over again.
0:10:14 That part of the brain that takes over is called the prefrontal cortex.
0:10:16 Again, long scientific word.
0:10:19 If you put your hand on your forehead, it’s the area right behind your forehead.
0:10:23 And that prefrontal cortex is what adulting is all about.
0:10:27 It governs memory, planning, organization, strategic thinking.
0:10:29 It’s ideally what entrepreneurs like.
0:10:34 They want a really strong prefrontal cortex when you’re an entrepreneur or a worker in
0:10:39 any capacity, whether you work for a large corporation, whether you’re at home and work
0:10:40 from home.
0:10:44 So there are so many reasons why you need that prefrontal cortex and what happens with
0:10:51 stress and burnout is that the amygdala hijacks the functions of the prefrontal cortex and
0:10:52 drives the train.
0:10:56 And what you want to do is you want to slowly, through various things that you can do to
0:11:03 reset your stress during the day, you can get that prefrontal cortex back into the driver’s
0:11:04 seat.
0:11:05 So you’re making good decisions.
0:11:09 So you’re having that forward thinking and strategic thinking.
0:11:13 One of the biggest things that happens when you are feeling stressed is that you often
0:11:19 get in your own way, and you are so stuck in the here and now and that immediate sense
0:11:20 of survival.
0:11:21 It’s not you.
0:11:22 It’s not your fault.
0:11:23 There’s nothing wrong with you.
0:11:27 It’s actually how your biology is built because, like we said, the amygdala is all about immediate
0:11:31 needs, survival, self-preservation.
0:11:33 It cannot think about a future.
0:11:36 It’s all about what’s happening in the here and now.
0:11:39 And that’s why we want to dial down the volume of the amygdala.
0:11:40 Yeah.
0:11:41 It makes a lot of sense.
0:11:45 So I know one of the big concepts in your book was about resilience.
0:11:48 And you say that resilience is really dependent on stress.
0:11:53 So I’d love to understand your definition of resilience and how stress plays a part.
0:11:54 Yes.
0:11:57 Resilience and stress go hand in hand.
0:12:02 When you think about what is resilience, the scientific definition is that it’s your innate
0:12:04 biological ability.
0:12:05 So we all have it.
0:12:11 And it’s that ability that you have to adapt, recover, and grow when life throws you a
0:12:14 curve ball or you have a challenge.
0:12:16 Now resilience doesn’t function in a vacuum.
0:12:21 You need a little bit of stress, that healthy positive stress for resilience to show itself.
0:12:27 What happens, though, is that that word resilience, you and I hear it, and others who are listening
0:12:31 to this conversation may hear the word and have a visceral response because it’s gotten
0:12:34 a really bad rap over the past several years.
0:12:39 The word resilience is a positive connotation, but it feels very negative when you hear it.
0:12:43 And the reason it feels negative now, you’re like, “Oh, don’t tell me to be resilient.”
0:12:47 It’s because that definition has changed and morphed societally.
0:12:52 We’ve moved away from true resilience towards toxic resilience.
0:12:53 And so what is true resilience?
0:12:56 True resilience, it’s like I said, it’s your innate biology.
0:12:59 We all have that ability to be resilient.
0:13:01 It honors boundaries.
0:13:04 It honors your human limitations for rest and recovery.
0:13:10 And it really focuses on self-compassion and leaning into that versus toxic resilience.
0:13:15 Toxic resilience is when you and I hear the word resilience, immediately you cringe.
0:13:16 That’s toxic resilience.
0:13:18 It’s a mind over a matter mindset.
0:13:20 It’s productivity at all costs.
0:13:23 It’s like all systems go all the time.
0:13:25 It’s the energizer bunny here in the US.
0:13:29 Just keep going in the UK, keep calm and carry on.
0:13:35 Every single society has some concept of toxic resilience because it’s a manifestation
0:13:37 of hustle culture.
0:13:43 And so I hope that the entrepreneurs listening, what they take away from our conversation
0:13:46 is that you can be resilient and you can still get burnt out.
0:13:50 That’s called the resilience myth that people think, “Oh, I can’t be burned out.
0:13:51 I’m so resilient.”
0:13:57 Those two things because what you’re likely living through is this idea of toxic resilience
0:14:01 because we’ve been taught from a really young age that resilience is about tolerating a
0:14:05 lot of discomfort but that’s not actually true resilience.
0:14:12 And so I want to dismantle that idea of resilience as being toxic and rather lean into your true
0:14:16 resilience which really honors your need for rest and recovery because then that is how
0:14:22 your brain, newsflash that your brain really needs rest and recovery to be productive and
0:14:26 to really be functioning at its optimal level.
0:14:31 So I found out from reading your book that a lot of your passion for stress and burnout
0:14:36 actually came from a personal experience where you were in a very toxic place in your life.
0:14:41 You were in residency, you were working 80 hours a week and you were so stressed that
0:14:44 at one point you thought you had a heart condition.
0:14:45 That’s right.
0:14:46 Yeah.
0:14:47 Talk to us about that time in your life.
0:14:52 What were you going through and how did that bring about your passion to start figuring
0:14:56 out how to recover from stress and burnout?
0:14:57 I was a medical resident.
0:14:59 It’s similar to entrepreneurship.
0:15:02 You are just on and working 24/7.
0:15:08 I worked 80 hours a week like you said and saw death and dying on an everyday basis.
0:15:13 Things that no mere mortal should see, we in medical residency, you see it.
0:15:19 And back then, 25 years ago when I was in training, no one talked about words like self-care or
0:15:21 self-love or boundaries.
0:15:23 There was none of that.
0:15:26 And so I was taught in my medical training early, early on.
0:15:30 I mean, we’re talking like the second year of medical school.
0:15:32 I was taught that pressure makes diamonds.
0:15:34 That was the mantra we were taught.
0:15:41 And so anytime I was in a situation that was difficult or I had done a 30-hour shift and
0:15:46 I was really tired, anytime I said, “Oh, I want to rest,” I would say, “No, no, pressure
0:15:50 makes diamonds,” and I was a diamond in the making.
0:15:55 And then my diamond cracked and it cracked one fine day out of the blue.
0:15:56 I was rounding.
0:15:57 I was in the cardiac ICU.
0:15:58 I was the senior resident.
0:16:02 I had just finished a really brutal call where we had a lot of patients that we admitted
0:16:08 to the hospital and I was finishing up in the morning just checking in on every patient
0:16:10 before I headed home.
0:16:13 And I suddenly felt like a stampede of wild horses across my chest.
0:16:14 Never happened before.
0:16:16 It felt like, you know, knock the wind out of me.
0:16:19 I sat down immediately, profusely sweating.
0:16:22 The nurse and I, she and I had worked together a lot.
0:16:25 She gave me some orange juice and I drank it quickly.
0:16:28 And then the feeling passed within seconds and we both kind of laughed it off.
0:16:35 And then I got up and I kept working, which just goes to show you how much you are indoctrinated
0:16:37 with this idea of pressure makes diamonds.
0:16:42 That feeling of the stampede of wild horses never happened again at work, but it happened
0:16:47 almost every night as I was going to bed for weeks and weeks until I finally hit that point
0:16:50 of thinking, okay, I need to go see someone, a doctor.
0:16:57 So I went to go see a doctor and they did the medical tests and checked my heart and
0:17:02 echocardiogram like a heart ultrasound, EKG, all of the blood tests, anemia, thyroid, electrolytes,
0:17:05 all of that and everything checked out fine.
0:17:11 And so my doctor was lovely and she said, oh, everything’s great, big reassuring smile.
0:17:13 It’s probably just stress, just try to relax.
0:17:14 I know it’s hard.
0:17:18 I’ve been there medical residency and just like, you know, I should be out of her office.
0:17:21 So what I got was relax more.
0:17:23 I’m like, okay, relax more.
0:17:26 I went to movies, hung out with friends.
0:17:30 I was single at the time now, married and a mom.
0:17:31 I went out.
0:17:32 I was still working 80 hours a week.
0:17:34 I didn’t have a ton of time, but I did what I could.
0:17:39 I had dinners with family and friends, retail therapy, went to a spa, took a vacation.
0:17:44 I did all of these things to try to relax more, but nothing really worked.
0:17:48 And the only thing that worked was when I put my scientist hat on and I was like, okay,
0:17:53 I need to figure this out, stress, brain, body, like what is happening to me?
0:17:55 Why am I feeling like this?
0:17:59 And then once I read all of those studies because I had access to all of the literature
0:18:00 and the science.
0:18:04 So I started reading all of the science and the studies of what happens to your brain
0:18:06 and your body when you’re feeling stressed.
0:18:07 Why am I feeling this way?
0:18:12 Because my first reaction, to be honest, when she said, you’re probably just stressed,
0:18:16 my first reaction, I scoffed, I was like, oh, come on, stress doesn’t happen to people
0:18:17 like me.
0:18:18 I’m resilient.
0:18:19 Again.
0:18:22 Because I was living that resilience myth, right?
0:18:28 So then I slowly over three months started following through the science and started putting into
0:18:30 practice all of the things I was learning.
0:18:31 And then I found my way out of stress.
0:18:36 And when I found my way out of stress, that’s when I said to myself, I want to be the doctor
0:18:39 that I needed during that time.
0:18:44 So my response to a stress patient wouldn’t be, oh, just try to relax more.
0:18:47 Very well meaning, but not helpful at all.
0:18:48 I want to dig into that a bit.
0:18:54 What was the problem with your doctor saying, hey, just relax?
0:18:56 Again, not her fault.
0:18:58 It is not a personal feeling of physicians.
0:19:00 I am a physician.
0:19:08 It’s simply that stress is seen in society as this magical, mythical creature with vague,
0:19:12 no boundaries and just, oh, try to relax.
0:19:17 Because no one really understands stress and understands, oh, you can actually do things
0:19:21 to help you change your brain and your body for less stress.
0:19:23 You can work with your brain and your body.
0:19:29 The medical system, our conventional medical system, doesn’t address stress head on simply
0:19:35 because doctors do not have the time to talk about stress with their patients.
0:19:41 One study that I did early in my medical research career, there was a study early on
0:19:46 that showed 60 to 80% of all doctors visits have a stress-related component.
0:19:51 So people like me who go to their doctor saying, I think something’s wrong with my heart.
0:19:54 And then they do the full workup and say, no, no, it’s just stress, right?
0:20:00 So 60 to 80% of doctors visits have some form of stress-related component to it.
0:20:05 And yet, only 3% of doctors actually counsel their patients for stress.
0:20:10 And so when I did that research and discovered that huge gap, I wanted my work to close that
0:20:11 gap.
0:20:16 And so the reason that doctors don’t necessarily counsel patients for stress, again, not a
0:20:22 personal feeling, doctors would love to, but to be a good doctor in terms of primary care,
0:20:28 doctors have to work 27 hours a day to fulfill the basic requirements of their job.
0:20:32 And no one has 27 hours a day to do their work, right?
0:20:35 You have to sleep, you have to eat, you need to spend time with your family.
0:20:42 And so there are impossible, impossible demands placed on doctors to do all of these things
0:20:46 that are well outside the bounds of what a regular human can do.
0:20:49 And then in addition to that, so that’s why stress often just falls on the wayside.
0:20:53 Because if you’re thinking about, you know, a patient’s cholesterol and cancer screening
0:20:58 and heart disease, and which meds they need and what referrals they need.
0:21:02 It’s like, I call it the doorknob question, you know, like when someone’s hand is on the
0:21:06 doorknob, like anything else, it’s like, Oh, actually, I am kind of stressed.
0:21:08 And then you say, I’ll just try to relax again.
0:21:09 No one’s fault.
0:21:11 It’s just the way the system is designed.
0:21:17 And then the other thing is just that stress as an entity isn’t really well understood.
0:21:23 I think one of the biggest ideas that I want to share is that stress can be quantified
0:21:24 just like blood pressure.
0:21:29 And we should start treating it like that so that we can do certain things and then measure
0:21:30 it.
0:21:34 Your audience, entrepreneurs are all about data and metrics and measuring things.
0:21:36 And so there’s a way that you can measure stress.
0:21:41 There’s a quiz that I have in the five resets, my book, that you can measure stress and then
0:21:42 try a couple of things.
0:21:46 And then every four weeks, check your stress score again and see if it decreases because
0:21:50 we should start thinking about stress like blood pressure in the same way that you do
0:21:55 certain things to lower your blood pressure and then you keep monitoring.
0:21:59 Let’s hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors.
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0:26:15 It’s so true because stress is also the root cause of so many other worse conditions that
0:26:19 the doctors are prioritizing like Yuri’s saying, but if we just addressed some of these root
0:26:23 causes, we’d all be a lot better off.
0:26:27 I want to understand from you some of the big aha moments that you had when you first
0:26:32 started looking at your own stress and trying to reverse your own stress and burnout.
0:26:35 What were some of the big things that you were like, “Oh my gosh, this is such a big
0:26:36 finding.
0:26:37 I can’t wait to share it with the world.”
0:26:44 I think the aha moment that crystallized my future, my forward path, and career was
0:26:47 just that, “Wait a second, I’m stressed.
0:26:52 All of these things are happening to my body because of stress, and then, oh my goodness,
0:26:57 I can do certain things in my day to day to reset my stress.”
0:27:02 That was out of the bounds of anything I had even considered first that I could get stressed
0:27:03 because I was resilient.
0:27:06 I was living the resilience myth, which is resilient people don’t get stressed.
0:27:10 We’re superheroes, but in fact, that is not true.
0:27:14 We are all just simply mere mortals, and your brain and your body need rest.
0:27:20 If you’re working 80 hours a week and not having any time to decompress, that medical
0:27:27 resident journey is very similar to an early stage entrepreneur, even a middle career entrepreneur
0:27:31 who’s just working constantly, thinking, “Oh, this is how it has to be.
0:27:35 I’m resilient, and I’m going to just keep going and going until you hit your breaking
0:27:37 point.”
0:27:43 That was my aha moment that you could come out of stress by doing really simple things
0:27:44 consistently.
0:27:49 Five or 10 minutes every day, I would do a few things.
0:27:52 I started prioritizing a 10 o’clock bedtime.
0:27:57 Studies show that the hour between 10 to 11 is considered the golden hour for sleep for
0:28:05 lots of things, cardiac, mental health, well-being, and so I prioritized sleep and really focused
0:28:06 on a 10 p.m.
0:28:07 Bedtime.
0:28:08 I started setting a bedtime alarm.
0:28:09 9.30 was my bedtime alarm.
0:28:12 It went off, and it told me, “Okay, I need to wind down.”
0:28:14 Back then, we didn’t have smartphones.
0:28:15 I’m kind of a dinosaur.
0:28:19 We had foot phones, and so I have to shut down everything and say, “Okay, it’s time
0:28:20 for bed.”
0:28:26 That was one of the first things I did, and then once I started prioritizing my sleep,
0:28:29 everything changed, and then I started learning breathing techniques.
0:28:33 I talk about some of these breathing techniques in the Vibre sets, but understanding that
0:28:37 your breath, that was a big aha moment for me.
0:28:40 Understanding that your breath can be connected to your stress, and that when you modulate
0:28:45 your breath and do different sorts of exercises to help with your breathing, you can decrease
0:28:46 your stress.
0:28:52 The reason for that is that your breath is the only biological process in the body that
0:28:56 is under voluntary control, so you and I can do a breathing exercise, and we can do it
0:29:01 together and breathe in for a certain count and breathe out for a certain count, and then
0:29:05 when we stop focusing on our breathing, it just happens naturally, involuntary.
0:29:09 It’s the only process in our body that’s under voluntary involuntary control different
0:29:14 from your brain waves, or your digestion, or any other bodily process, and that is
0:29:20 why your breath can often be that light switch between on and off, between the sympathetic
0:29:24 system, fight or flight, and getting you back into rest and digest, because when you’re
0:29:30 in that sympathetic mode, when you’re anxious, your breath is short, shallow, and you’re
0:29:36 doing this thoracic breathing, so you’re doing, you know, it’s up here in your chest.
0:29:41 When you are feeling rested and relaxed and not stressed, your breathing is coming from
0:29:46 your belly, deep belly breathing, it’s slow, deep, and relaxed.
0:29:49 And so that was a big aha moment, because I started focusing on my breath throughout
0:29:50 the day.
0:29:54 What was interesting for me for my personal journey is that I didn’t jet off for six
0:29:58 months to Bali and do this amazing holiday, even though I would have loved to.
0:30:01 To this day, I’m like, “Oh, sign me up for that plan.”
0:30:09 I continued working 80 hours a week, continued my residency, and just kept going, but brought
0:30:15 in a lot of these things, and over time, it still worked, because I was able to reset
0:30:17 my biology and the brain and the body.
0:30:23 Just like your entrepreneurial audience, it’s not like you have to abandon all these plans
0:30:28 that you have, it’s just about paying a little bit closer attention, changing some routines
0:30:29 you may have.
0:30:31 And so that was another big aha moment.
0:30:33 And then I’ve continued to have a lot of aha moments.
0:30:40 I think another really big aha moment was, as a doctor, I would see patients, so I would
0:30:43 understand one-on-one what was happening with patients.
0:30:50 And even in my crowded waiting room, I would notice that there’s this stress paradox, which
0:30:54 is this idea that people are all suffering with stress.
0:31:00 70 to 74% of people in the UK, one study showed 90% of people.
0:31:06 So you can kind of say that everyone, you and I together today, are struggling with
0:31:10 stress and burnout and some capacity, of course we are, for just regular people living in
0:31:13 this world at this time in life.
0:31:18 But when I would notice that in my waiting room, no one was talking to each other.
0:31:22 We’re all facing stress and burnout, but the paradox is that it’s a universal thing
0:31:28 that’s happening, and yet we are completely isolated in the experience, which is wild.
0:31:33 And another aha moment was on a much bigger scale when I started giving talks.
0:31:38 So when I started speaking to audiences of 1,000, 10,000, 20,000, 50,000, then I noticed,
0:31:43 oh my God, this stress paradox and the stress and burnout that people are feeling that I
0:31:49 would see one-on-one in the waiting room when you see patients, it was happening on this
0:31:56 huge scale, really, I kind of understood, wow, this is a universal problem that people
0:32:03 are facing across ages and genders and types of jobs people have and where they live, stress
0:32:05 is the great equalizer.
0:32:06 So good.
0:32:10 And I want to take a moment and just move away from the signs for a second and talk about
0:32:16 your career, because the best business ideas come about when you’re solving your own problems.
0:32:19 And you talked about how you wanted to be the doctor that you didn’t have when you
0:32:21 were a resident, right?
0:32:25 So talk to us about how finding this passion of wanting to help people with their stress
0:32:29 has actually changed the trajectory of your career.
0:32:30 That’s a great question.
0:32:36 I never really thought about this as a career path.
0:32:41 I know that early, early on, people would read my long emails and say, “You’re a great
0:32:44 writer,” and I thought, “Okay, cool.
0:32:45 What am I going to do with that?
0:32:46 I’m a doctor.”
0:32:52 And what was interesting is that my journey now, so I was a regular doctor.
0:32:54 I never wanted to go into stress and burnout.
0:33:00 I just was a internal medicine resident taking care of patients in the hospital, diabetes,
0:33:03 strokes, heart disease, that sort of stuff.
0:33:05 And my personal experience changed the trajectory of my life.
0:33:09 So I started then focusing, you know, when I finished, when I got out of that stress
0:33:13 struggle myself and I wanted to become the doctor I needed.
0:33:14 So I went to a fellowship.
0:33:16 It was in Boston at Harvard.
0:33:21 Focus specifically on stress and burnout and how to bring those in, the mind-body connection,
0:33:25 how to bring those in to regular conventional medical care based on the research I did.
0:33:30 And then I think what’s happened to me is it’s been very organic.
0:33:33 And then I started doing more talks and speaking.
0:33:38 I think when doctors often, and you might notice this with any entrepreneurial group,
0:33:43 what often happens is you are in your own silo, like it’s an echo chamber and you’re
0:33:49 in your own place during the pandemic is when it really hit me because I would share things
0:33:52 with my friends and most of my friends are not doctors and I’d say, you know, because
0:33:55 with stress, bup, bup, bup, bup.
0:33:59 And I’d say, you know, because everyone knows that and they would say, what, what did you
0:34:00 just say?
0:34:02 No one knows that you need to write about that.
0:34:05 And I thought, come on, of course, everyone knows that.
0:34:09 So I had to like almost give myself permission to say, oh, really?
0:34:12 Not everyone knows that study because you forget, you know, you’ve been doing this for
0:34:13 decades.
0:34:16 You’re like, oh, everyone knows this stuff that I know.
0:34:18 And then I started writing more about it.
0:34:21 And then believe it or not, I never really wanted to write a book.
0:34:26 My patients used to ask me when I would counsel them and write out my things for them.
0:34:31 They would say, Dr. Nukkar, you really need to write a book about this stuff.
0:34:32 Really?
0:34:38 You don’t really realize what you’re sitting on in terms of your own information or guidance.
0:34:41 And then it’s almost like my audiences asked for it.
0:34:45 So when I would give talks, then everyone was like, have you ever thought about a book?
0:34:50 Now the book is available in 15 languages and 35 countries and it’s a bestseller and
0:34:51 people are reading it.
0:34:59 And of course, there’s that connection to the material and the book because stress is
0:35:03 this great equalizer and we’re all facing stress.
0:35:07 So my own journey really was just very naturally unfolded.
0:35:09 It was very organic.
0:35:14 It’s funny because a lot of people reach out to me to ask me, how did you become a Harvard
0:35:15 doctor?
0:35:17 How are you doing your TV stuff now?
0:35:18 How did you write a book?
0:35:21 And it wasn’t like I had this grand plan at all.
0:35:25 And I just continue to evolve based on what the need is.
0:35:29 To me, in fact, it feels very similar.
0:35:32 When I’m speaking to a patient, I don’t see patients currently.
0:35:38 When I’m speaking to a patient and that aha moment that the patient has, that light bulb
0:35:40 moment of, oh my God, I feel so good.
0:35:42 I understand what you’re explaining now.
0:35:48 That is why I do what I do for that sense of mental health to be accessible to everyone.
0:35:50 That’s why everything in the five resets is free.
0:35:55 Nothing costs money because I’ve had patients who’ve had lots of varying resources.
0:35:59 And so that light bulb moment is what I live for.
0:36:02 And it’s kind of the same thing when you’re talking to a large audience, when you’re explaining
0:36:06 the science in a way that’s simple, that someone can say, oh my God, I’m going to try
0:36:07 that today.
0:36:08 Yes.
0:36:10 And it just so happens that it’s not in a waiting room.
0:36:12 It’s a group of thousands of people.
0:36:15 And so when I do my TV work, same thing, same concept.
0:36:17 To me, it doesn’t feel all that different.
0:36:21 Though I think to others, it feels like vastly different.
0:36:22 I love your story.
0:36:26 I feel like it’s very inspiring because I know a lot of people who are in jobs where
0:36:32 they’re a doctor and a lawyer and they want to be entrepreneurs, but they feel like they’re
0:36:35 stuck because they went to school for so long.
0:36:40 But entrepreneurship really allows you to use all your skills, all your passions, allow
0:36:43 you to become your full self, because here you are doing things that you’re good at,
0:36:47 being a doctor, curing stress, speaking, writing.
0:36:52 And now you get to do all those things that are uniquely your skills and put it out to
0:36:53 the world.
0:36:59 And I’m sure, do you feel like you are living a much more fulfilled life because you’ve
0:37:04 taken the leap to become an entrepreneur and not just hold yourself to just being a doctor?
0:37:05 Yeah.
0:37:06 What a great question.
0:37:11 I really do feel like there are so, so many doctors or lawyers.
0:37:15 It’s a career track because you go to school for so, so long.
0:37:18 And it’s this idea of, okay, I’m stuck.
0:37:24 I’m often the informal career counselor for so many of my doctor friends and colleagues
0:37:28 because so many people are feeling stuck and feeling like there’s no way out.
0:37:35 I would actually say to people that resonates and you might be at a job for like 20 years
0:37:38 in a company and you’re trying to make partner or whatever it may be.
0:37:41 And you’re like, oh, I just feel so stuck.
0:37:43 It’s not really a departure.
0:37:49 So when I made this pivot, it wasn’t a real departure for me because I was still using
0:37:50 all of those skills.
0:37:53 So nothing is really ever wasted.
0:37:58 So the connection, you know, the skills of building rapport and the therapeutic connection
0:38:02 that I made with patients, I just translated that into the written word.
0:38:08 So then I wrote about that, I connected with my reader or when I do my TV segments, I connect
0:38:13 with the audience because it’s a skill that is so transferable.
0:38:18 And especially if you are in a profession like medicine or law or you’ve done something
0:38:24 that you’ve studied for many, many years, chances are every skill that you have learned,
0:38:26 you can use it in another way.
0:38:32 And so yes, to answer your question, I feel deeply fulfilled now in a way that I didn’t
0:38:33 before.
0:38:39 I think for me, my early, early years when I was 18 years old and I was at Barnard, which
0:38:43 is the women’s school of Columbia for college, I really wanted to be a journalist.
0:38:48 I was so hardcore wanting to be a journalist and my parents were immigrants and Indian
0:38:52 doctors and they were like, oh, you’re going to be a doctor to follow the lineage of the
0:38:56 family because my grandparents were doctors, my uncles and aunts were doctors.
0:39:00 And at the time I was like, okay, they know best, I’ll be a doctor.
0:39:04 And I ended up falling in love with the human body and the workings of the body.
0:39:09 But really I went into medicine because I loved the human story and I love that connection
0:39:12 with people, which is what I wanted to do with journalism anyway.
0:39:14 And then I found my way to journalism, right?
0:39:15 I found my way to health communication.
0:39:22 So if you are feeling stuck, I get that it is real, but it’s more of a message to you
0:39:26 in a signal rather than a life.
0:39:29 It’s not like you have to say, okay, it’s my life sentence to feel stuck.
0:39:33 You can get out of it, but it really just takes small glimmers.
0:39:35 You don’t have to just shift your whole life.
0:39:39 You can make small changes to a little bit every day.
0:39:44 The other couple of things that I’m hearing you say while somebody feels stuck is what
0:39:47 are all the things that people are telling you you’re good at?
0:39:51 Your patients were saying you’re such a good writer and you started doing some speeches
0:39:53 and you were getting really good feedback.
0:39:59 Those are clues of what you should start dabbling in or even thinking back to what you used
0:40:02 to enjoy when you were a kid or be good at when you were a kid, right?
0:40:04 So a lot of people don’t even know where to start.
0:40:05 Those are the places to start.
0:40:09 What is everybody complimenting you on that’s not even your day job?
0:40:11 Yeah, it’s one of my first resets, in fact.
0:40:16 In the book, I write about this one patient in particular, but it’s uncover your buried
0:40:19 treasure and uncover your childhood treasure.
0:40:25 So Carl Jung, who is a philosopher, talked about this idea of what do you do that makes
0:40:28 the hours pass like minutes and what did you do as a child that made the hours pass like
0:40:29 minutes?
0:40:34 For me, communicating, so whether it would be like talking to a patient and explaining
0:40:42 something, educating, that was always something that felt really easy to counsel someone,
0:40:47 to educate someone, to show them the information and explain it in a way that simplifies complex
0:40:49 scientific information.
0:40:54 And so there are so many skills like that, write it all down because I think for me,
0:40:57 in hindsight, I’m like, huh, maybe if I had written down all of those things, like you
0:41:02 say, it’s a great idea to gather all of those things that people are saying and just write
0:41:05 it down like, good writer, good communicator.
0:41:08 And then you’re like, okay, what do I do with this?
0:41:09 Yeah, love it.
0:41:10 Okay.
0:41:11 So this is a great transition.
0:41:13 I want to spend the rest of the interview talking about your new book.
0:41:19 It’s called The Five Resets, Rewire Your Brain and Body for Less Stress and More Resilience.
0:41:24 So can you first talk through us at a high level, your five resets, what are they?
0:41:33 The five resets, it’s a roadmap and it helps you get you out of that here and now and amygdala,
0:41:36 high stress and into a better mental state.
0:41:42 So we can go through each of those resets, there are five of them and in those five resets
0:41:46 there are about 15 science-backed strategies, everything is based on the science.
0:41:51 So the first reset is get clear on what matters most, again, it helps you get out of that
0:41:55 immediate survival mode and towards a thriving mode.
0:42:00 And of course I talk about the amygdala prefrontal cortex in it, but really it’s that idea of
0:42:06 switching your brain and resetting it away from the amygdala to the prefrontal cortex.
0:42:10 The second is find quiet in a noisy world.
0:42:17 We talk a lot in that chapter and that reset about figuring out a way to protect your mental
0:42:23 health while still remaining an informed citizen and a productive member of society, but how,
0:42:29 how can you carve some quiet in this hyperconnected world, particularly if you’re an entrepreneur?
0:42:34 The third reset is to sink your brain to your body, it’s about the mind-body connection.
0:42:38 We spoke a little bit about that, about the breath and how the breath can help get you
0:42:44 centered in the here and now, but there are several other strategies.
0:42:48 The next is about bringing your best self forward.
0:42:51 And so how can you bring your best self forward?
0:42:55 What are some of the things that you can do to help bring your best self forward?
0:43:01 Come up for errors, another one that really focuses on creating pause and breath throughout
0:43:08 the day, simply because we are moving at a frenetic pace right now.
0:43:10 All of us are in every industry.
0:43:16 And again, based on what we talked about earlier, Hala, it’s a myth to think that you are going
0:43:18 to be able to continue on and on.
0:43:23 An example that I give in the book with a patient is an entrepreneur because I’ve had
0:43:25 many patients who have been entrepreneurs.
0:43:30 And one question I often ask my entrepreneurial patients is, what is your end game?
0:43:35 People are going on all cylinders and they’re not really thinking about the end game or
0:43:40 they are kind of thinking about the end game, but not about how what they are doing now
0:43:42 is going to serve the end game.
0:43:47 And so if your end game is longevity or just physiologically, if you just want to live
0:43:54 to a ripe old age of like 90 or 100 or your company, if you want to have longevity with
0:43:57 your career and your company or if you want to sell it and then start another company,
0:44:02 whatever it is that you want to do, thinking about the end game and beginning with the
0:44:07 end in mind is important, particularly when it comes to your mental and physical health
0:44:09 and stress and burnout.
0:44:13 Because if you want that end game and if you want that longevity, there’s certain things
0:44:18 that you’re doing now that are not actually serving that end game.
0:44:22 So the fourth reset is come up for air.
0:44:25 And then the fifth reset is to bring your best self forward.
0:44:30 So all five resets are a roadmap to get you to that endpoint.
0:44:34 It doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to follow each reset in that order.
0:44:39 You can read the book and decide which one really speaks to you at this moment.
0:44:43 But I would say start with the first reset because it’s really important to have a roadmap.
0:44:48 You know, when you know where you are headed and you have a map to get there, it just makes
0:44:52 it easier for you to get out of your own way, which is a lot of what stress is.
0:44:54 So let’s stick on the first reset.
0:44:58 It’s called get clear on what matters most and you say that you need to know your end
0:44:59 game.
0:45:00 Yes.
0:45:04 And remember, I was telling you about this BetterHelp webinar, I actually realized that
0:45:08 when I was thinking about what stresses people out and I was like, I think a big stressor
0:45:11 is that people don’t know what they want.
0:45:16 And so I’d had everybody do this activity to think about their future you imagine yourself
0:45:21 in five years and then think about the things that you need to do now to get you to that
0:45:22 place.
0:45:25 And then how are you going to schedule that in your life and make sure that it actually
0:45:26 happens?
0:45:29 So in the chapter and I was like, well, this reminds me a lot about the exercise and the
0:45:32 thought process that I was trying to get people to do.
0:45:34 So talk to us about the end game.
0:45:39 Why is it important to know what you actually want to be less stressed?
0:45:45 I love that framing of the question and when it comes to my question of what matters most
0:45:51 to you, we often have these things like the work that you’re doing, thinking, okay, from
0:45:54 the business standpoint, where do you want to be in five years or where do you want to
0:45:58 be in 10 years, the five year plan, the 10 year plan, we all have that.
0:46:03 But what I would suggest is before even getting to that five or 10 year plan, because you
0:46:08 are feeling so stressed and you can’t even think because of your amygdala, you can’t
0:46:11 even think about next week or next month, let alone five years from now, right?
0:46:15 Because when you’re feeling that sense of stress and burnout, your amygdala is on high
0:46:16 alert.
0:46:18 It’s all about immediate needs and survival.
0:46:22 So think about where you want to be in three months or two months.
0:46:25 And instead of thinking to yourself, what’s the matter with me?
0:46:27 Like, why do I feel like this?
0:46:28 What’s the matter with me?
0:46:32 Think about what matters most to you and create a most goal.
0:46:38 So most is an acronym, M-O-S-T, M is what’s a goal that you can achieve in three months
0:46:40 that’s motivating.
0:46:46 O is it objective, S is it small, and T is it timely and something that you can actually
0:46:48 achieve.
0:46:49 And I have had patience.
0:46:54 I give lots of examples in the book, The Five Resets, but there are so many examples of
0:46:56 most goals.
0:47:02 Some patients have said, I want to have enough energy to start to organize a church social.
0:47:08 Another one said, I want to sleep better so that I can finally have the wherewithal to
0:47:12 get a new job, because I’m not sleeping well, I feel depleted, and I then can’t look for
0:47:13 a new job.
0:47:17 Others have said, I want to write a children’s book once I finish getting out of my cancer
0:47:18 therapy.
0:47:23 But range of those answers of what matters most to you is huge and vast.
0:47:25 This is not an existential question.
0:47:28 It’s not like, what’s the meaning of life and what’s your purpose in life because that
0:47:29 feels so, so big.
0:47:32 It’s simply, what do you want to achieve in the next three months when it comes to your
0:47:34 mental health and stress and burnout?
0:47:36 Do you want more energy?
0:47:37 Do you want to feel less fatigued?
0:47:41 Do you want to focus better, better concentration?
0:47:43 Do you want to be more productive?
0:47:47 Do you want to feel a greater sense of well-being or joy or less burnout?
0:47:51 Now that word we use and we throw around, but it actually, there’s like a million flavors
0:47:52 of burnout.
0:47:58 So some people feel hypervigilance with burnout, others feel very lethargic.
0:48:04 So name something that you feel is getting in the way of your day-to-day life and focus
0:48:05 on that.
0:48:11 And then understand that it takes eight weeks to create a new habit for your brain and that
0:48:14 your brain falling off the wagon and getting back up and falling off and getting back up
0:48:17 is part of the habit formation process.
0:48:23 That’s how your neural wiring, your brain connections and circuits form.
0:48:27 And give yourself eight weeks to start and then take the stress score, you give yourself
0:48:31 a stress score, take the quiz every four weeks and over time you’ll start decreasing your
0:48:32 stress.
0:48:36 But when you have that most goal, then you know what you’re working towards rather than
0:48:40 this vague, ambiguous thing of I want to feel better.
0:48:41 I want to have less stress.
0:48:42 I want to be less burned out.
0:48:45 But what does that actually mean in your everyday life?
0:48:48 How does it show up for you in your everyday life?
0:48:52 So another activity since we’re talking about exercises, and you brought it up earlier,
0:48:54 it’s find your buried treasure.
0:49:00 And I just love this because I feel like especially as entrepreneurs, a lot of us self-identify
0:49:01 with our work.
0:49:03 We are our work like I was saying before.
0:49:07 And we’ve got to be more than just our work or else we’re just not going to be balanced.
0:49:11 So talk to us about this exercise and how we do it, why it matters.
0:49:14 I love this exercise.
0:49:20 And the genesis of this exercise actually came from several of my patients, but also
0:49:23 one of my colleagues, my doctor colleague.
0:49:27 I remember once, it was like a Tuesday afternoon, we were swamped with patients and we were
0:49:30 finishing up our charts.
0:49:34 And he says to me, “Oh my God, it’s only Tuesday, I can’t wait for Saturday.
0:49:35 Can’t wait to play the guitar on Saturday.”
0:49:38 And I said, “Oh, you are having a concert?
0:49:41 Are you going to be performing with your band?”
0:49:45 And he said, “No, I just can’t wait that I usually play my guitar on Saturdays.”
0:49:47 And I said, “Oh, but what do you mean?”
0:49:52 Like, I was so confused because he was clearly stressed and burned out, finishing his charts.
0:49:55 I said, “Oh, do you have to go get the guitar from some place?”
0:49:57 Like asking all of these follow-up questions.
0:49:59 Why Saturday?
0:50:01 What’s the deal with Saturday and playing your guitar?
0:50:02 It was Tuesday.
0:50:03 And he was like, “Really?
0:50:04 Spent?”
0:50:06 And he said, “No, like that’s just my day for to play guitar.”
0:50:08 And I was like, “Oh, do you rent a studio?”
0:50:10 Like many follow-up questions.
0:50:13 And he’s like, “No, it’s just, what do you mean?”
0:50:15 Like he looked at me like, “Saturday is my guitar day.
0:50:18 Well, why don’t you just play it tonight when you get home?”
0:50:21 And he looked at me like I was nuts.
0:50:24 And I was like, “Why are you waiting for the weekend to do something that you love?
0:50:27 I mean, just play for five minutes when you get home today.”
0:50:30 And he was like, “Wow, I never thought about that.”
0:50:32 And so he did.
0:50:35 He played the guitar that day and felt immeasurably better the next day.
0:50:39 And he came in on Wednesday morning and he was like, “A ditty?
0:50:40 That was amazing.
0:50:43 For example, if you suggested this, I played my guitar for five minutes.
0:50:45 It totally felt so great.
0:50:47 It made me feel like I was playing for an hour.”
0:50:53 And it was so interesting because I thought, “Wow, he’s been withholding a sense of joy
0:50:55 and pleasure that he could get every single day.”
0:50:57 Again, not a lot of time.
0:50:58 Five minutes.
0:51:02 He’s been playing the guitar since he was very young, loves it, feels such a sense of
0:51:05 purpose and meaning and joy from guitar playing.
0:51:06 Just a couple of songs.
0:51:11 But he saves it for Saturday so that he can work all week and not have that joy.
0:51:14 It was baffling to me.
0:51:18 And I’ve had so many similar stories with patients where they’re like, “Oh, I love,
0:51:22 I don’t know, whatever it is, yoga or I love painting.”
0:51:25 Oh, but I can only do that on Sunday.
0:51:26 But what do you mean?
0:51:29 Why can’t you just have a little thing that you just do to all or just paint when you
0:51:33 come home from work for like five minutes or when your kids are asleep?
0:51:35 I don’t understand.
0:51:40 And then it was that idea of like, “Oh, wait a second, hang on, again, it’s the resilience
0:51:45 myth, it’s this idea that we have to tolerate lots of discomfort rather than leaning into
0:51:46 our joy.”
0:51:51 And so, again, doctors are all about pattern recognition, that’s how we diagnose things.
0:51:56 So for me, recognizing patterns and stress and burnout, it’s the same as recognizing
0:52:00 pancreatitis or heart disease or whatever it may be because I’ve been doing this for
0:52:01 so long.
0:52:02 So I was like, “Oh, this is a pattern.
0:52:03 I see what’s happening here.
0:52:06 It’s the resilience myth, you’re rearing its ugly head.”
0:52:10 And so, find your brave treasure is simply that, that’s the genesis of it, but simply
0:52:15 think about one or two activities that you did as a child that brought you lots of joy,
0:52:20 like Carl Jung says, that made the hours pass like minutes and figure out how to bring them
0:52:21 into your day.
0:52:26 So I give an example in the five resets of one of my patients with end stage cancer who
0:52:29 loved making clay figurines.
0:52:34 So she would hang out outside on her stoop growing up with her sister and they would
0:52:36 make little clay figurines.
0:52:41 So when I saw her in a consult, I was like, “Can you go to the art store and pick up
0:52:43 some clay figurines?”
0:52:45 So of course, same reaction, “What do you mean?
0:52:46 Why?
0:52:47 Why would I do that?”
0:52:49 She’s a high-powered lawyer.
0:52:55 And again, it’s this idea of doing something simply for joy’s sake, not to get ahead, not
0:52:59 for an award, not because someone’s gonna see it, but simply because it brings you joy.
0:53:01 For me, it’s art.
0:53:04 For me, it’s also yoga or being in nature.
0:53:08 I mean, there’s so many, you know, it has to be easy and accessible.
0:53:12 It doesn’t have to be this huge thing, just something small that you can do every single
0:53:16 day at the end of the day or at the start of the day or during your lunch break or whatever
0:53:17 it may be.
0:53:21 So it’s a way to find your brave treasure and then it connects you to that part of yourself.
0:53:26 So what happens scientifically, not to get all scientific, but it gets into the state
0:53:28 of flow.
0:53:32 And when you do something like that, like whether it be guitar playing or painting or anything
0:53:38 that you enjoy writing, the reason that that expression of making something that you’re
0:53:42 spending hours on past like minutes, it’s because it gets you into a state of flow.
0:53:45 And the state of flow for your brain is very therapeutic and healing.
0:53:51 It signals a cascade of lots of neurotransmitters and hormones and other things in your brain
0:53:53 to help decrease stress and burnout.
0:53:55 So that’s the scientific reason for it.
0:53:59 But science is sometimes boring and people don’t want to hear the science, and instead
0:54:03 it’s like find your buried treasure, find something that you love doing as a child that you can
0:54:05 do just for five minutes again.
0:54:10 Well, you just inspired me to make sure I start singing every single day, every day
0:54:11 my whole life.
0:54:15 And sometimes I’ll just burst down to song, but I feel like I’ll make a point that I need
0:54:21 to just start singing every day, schedule it in during lunch hour or you have a break.
0:54:23 We all have natural breaks in our day.
0:54:28 So whether you are a working parent, you might not have kids and you might be caregiving
0:54:31 in some capacity, I understand that we all have our work.
0:54:33 We have our caregiving responsibilities.
0:54:38 Life is very, very full and busy, but there are natural moments in the day when you can
0:54:39 sing.
0:54:40 Sing in your car.
0:54:45 If you’re drive to a place, actively schedule it in to sing.
0:54:49 That’s the other tip is that when you’re trying to find your buried treasure, it’s not like
0:54:52 suddenly an hour of time is going to free up for you in the day.
0:54:55 And then you’re going to suddenly during that time say, “Oh, I should play my guitar.
0:54:56 I should sing.”
0:54:57 Of course not.
0:54:58 That’s not how life works.
0:55:00 You have to schedule it in.
0:55:03 So schedule it in every single day.
0:55:08 The reason you want to do something new every day, and like that’s why I said to my colleague
0:55:12 about the guitar playing or to my patient with clay building for you with singing.
0:55:16 It’s because when you are learning something new, it’s easier to do it every day rather
0:55:19 than once in a while because you avoid decision fatigue.
0:55:20 That’s how your brain works.
0:55:24 So if you’re like, “Oh, I’m going to start a fitness resume or I’m going to sing, I’m
0:55:28 going to sing Tuesdays and Thursdays at this time,” chances are something’s going to come
0:55:30 up on Tuesday and you’re not going to do it.
0:55:31 And then Thursday, same thing.
0:55:36 And so instead, if you just say to yourself, “Low hanging fruit,” I have to practice my
0:55:39 singing for five solid minutes.
0:55:40 Dr. Nookar told me.
0:55:43 It’s like, “Doctor’s orders for five minutes every day.”
0:55:44 Then you will.
0:55:45 Then you’ll fit it in.
0:55:48 And that’s how you create a habit by doing a little bit every day.
0:55:52 We’ll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors.
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1:00:50 You’ve got a second reset called quiet and a noisy world.
1:00:53 Now we are full of distractions.
1:00:57 Like social media, everything is distracting us.
1:00:59 Life is noisy in 2024.
1:01:02 How are we going to quiet down the noise?
1:01:07 The key with this reset is digital boundaries.
1:01:11 And particularly when you are an entrepreneur, when you’re hyper connected, of course you
1:01:14 want to be an informed citizen of what’s happening in the world.
1:01:17 You want to look at trends and market reports and all of the things that’s happening in
1:01:20 your industry, but not at the expense of your mental health.
1:01:25 And so often what happens is you are always on the go, you are so stressed with your work,
1:01:29 and in addition during your downtime, you are scrolling headlines and news and social
1:01:31 media to see what’s going on.
1:01:32 These are not benign things.
1:01:37 They have a direct impact on your stress response or your amygdala and how your brain functions.
1:01:39 And it worsens your stress.
1:01:42 So instead, digital boundaries, what can you do?
1:01:45 At night, when you’re going to bed, keep your phone off your nightstand.
1:01:48 I know it’s radical, but it works.
1:01:50 Keep it away.
1:01:54 So first thing in the morning when you wake up, you are not checking your phone because
1:01:59 that has a influence on your brain cascade and all of the hormones and neurotransmitters.
1:02:01 Keep it in another part of the bedroom.
1:02:04 I’m not saying, again, this is not about becoming a digital monk.
1:02:08 It is simply about decreasing your reliance on your devices.
1:02:12 In fact, studies show that it’s not abstinence that works for mental health and well-being
1:02:15 when it comes to technology, but rather decreasing your reliance.
1:02:17 So that’s the first boundary.
1:02:19 The digital boundary is geographic.
1:02:20 Keep your phone off your nightstand.
1:02:24 And when you’re working during the day, to decrease that sense, I call it the primal
1:02:27 urge to scroll because it’s your amygdala.
1:02:31 When you’re scrolling, what you’re doing is the same thing that cave dwellers did when
1:02:35 you would have that night watchman scanning for danger while the tribe slept.
1:02:36 Now we are all our own night watchman.
1:02:40 So when we feel that sense of stress and hypervigilance and feeling unsafe, which is what the amygdala’s
1:02:44 job is, you scroll, you scroll your headlines, you scroll the news, you scroll because it’s
1:02:45 like, am I safe?
1:02:46 Is everything okay?
1:02:48 You scan for danger.
1:02:50 And so how do you quiet that amygdala?
1:02:51 And how do you decrease?
1:02:53 It’s your primal urge to scroll.
1:02:56 It’s a form of self-preservation.
1:03:00 You keep your phone out of arms reach if you work in a cubicle in a drawer so you’re not
1:03:06 looking at it, so that you get that prefrontal cortex to take over again so you’re more intentional.
1:03:08 So that’s another boundary.
1:03:11 And then another digital boundary that you could do is try grayscale.
1:03:13 I use the grayscale all the time.
1:03:15 In fact, I can show you right now.
1:03:19 I have it automatically on my phone.
1:03:24 What it does is it switches my phone to black and white.
1:03:27 And there’s a way that you can program that.
1:03:30 Your audience is very tech savvy, of course.
1:03:33 Grayscale is essentially moving your phone away from color to black and white.
1:03:38 And since our phone is our primary news consumption device, and it’s especially helpful at night
1:03:41 when you are sitting on your couch after a long day’s work and you want to go to bed
1:03:45 early because we talked about 10 o’clock bedtime, but who actually goes to bed at 10?
1:03:47 You’re usually going to bed at midnight or later.
1:03:48 Why?
1:03:52 Because you scroll and then you finish your two hours of mindless scrolling and you’re
1:03:53 like, “What was that?
1:03:54 What was the point of that?”
1:03:56 Anyway, because it’s not actually helping your brain.
1:03:58 It’s not reducing your stress or burnout.
1:04:02 And so instead, what you could do is set grayscale.
1:04:07 And what you do with grayscale, there’s a couple of different steps to get into grayscale.
1:04:12 It decreases your screen time because it makes scrolling less interesting and less enticing
1:04:13 for your brain.
1:04:17 And so you’re like, “Oh, I don’t really want to scroll here.
1:04:19 It’s kind of boring and I’m just going to go to bed instead.”
1:04:23 And so that’s another way to create some quiet eye work in journalism.
1:04:25 So this is not about censorship.
1:04:27 You want to be an informed citizen.
1:04:28 These are troubling times in the world.
1:04:32 You want to know what’s going on, but not at the expense of your mental health because
1:04:36 you want to make sure that your cup is full, that you are rested, that your brain and body
1:04:39 are rested so that you can continue to serve in the way that you’re serving through your
1:04:40 work.
1:04:46 Yeah, I’ve had an especially hard time this year because I’m Palestinian, 100%.
1:04:51 For me, social media is extremely triggering right now.
1:04:58 My whole feed is just gruesome and dismembered bodies and little kids dying every day, every
1:05:00 day for nine months.
1:05:08 One of the things that I would say about that, Hala, it’s that studies have found that it
1:05:10 increases your risk of PTSD.
1:05:14 So it’s not just that something happening thousands of miles away.
1:05:20 It’s not about secondary PTSD, but in fact, consuming just like you’re describing, Hala.
1:05:27 Graphic videos and content and images has a direct influence on your brain so it can
1:05:28 influence.
1:05:33 Just consuming these graphic videos and images can increase your risk, your personal risk
1:05:40 of PTSD now, first-hand PTSD, and studies have also shown that it can worsen your risk
1:05:44 of health conditions later, years later.
1:05:48 So all the more reason to, of course, you want to be an informed citizen during these
1:05:53 difficult times, but you also want to protect your mental health.
1:05:57 Yeah. I’m just trying to balance with all that. It’s hard because I need to know what’s
1:06:03 going on and report what’s going on kind of and, man, I just hope this nasty, nasty, I
1:06:08 don’t want to call it a war, but whatever it is ends.
1:06:11 And then you have, you know, then the election is coming up.
1:06:14 People are feeling a sense of hypervigilance with that.
1:06:19 The past few years, the past four or five years, the reason we are all feeling this way
1:06:22 is because there is no respite.
1:06:27 We finished the pandemic, and then we’ve had a racial reckoning, then we had several
1:06:31 climate disasters, then we’ve had humanitarian crises.
1:06:32 Now there’s an election coming up.
1:06:37 So this news cycle and things happening in the world, because we are so hyper-connected
1:06:40 to everything at all times, there is no respite.
1:06:43 It’s just one onslaught after the other.
1:06:46 And so what’s often happening, I describe it in the five resets.
1:06:49 I talk about how your brain is like a dam.
1:06:54 And so right now, many people are feeling worse than they ever were.
1:06:59 And it’s years after the pandemic, because we were promised after the pandemic, everything
1:07:00 is going to be normal.
1:07:01 Everything is going to be great.
1:07:02 But that’s not how the brain works.
1:07:03 Every headline showed that.
1:07:07 And I would actually look at those headlines and either roll my eyes or laugh because
1:07:09 I was like, that is so not how the brain works.
1:07:11 Your brain is built like a dam.
1:07:16 And so what happens is, when you are going through an acute crisis, you shore up your
1:07:18 internal reserves.
1:07:21 Just that crisis passes is when the dam breaks.
1:07:26 You feel psychologically safe, your defenses come down and the dam breaks.
1:07:29 I’ve seen this over and over with my patients with cancer, for example.
1:07:31 They get the diagnosis of cancer.
1:07:34 They’re seeing their oncologist, radiation therapist, they’re getting chemotherapy,
1:07:35 et cetera.
1:07:37 They’re seeing me in my office.
1:07:39 They do not shed a tear.
1:07:43 They finally finish their treatments, get a clean bill of health.
1:07:46 And their oncologist says, great, congratulations, you’re cancer-free.
1:07:48 Come back in six months for your checkup.
1:07:52 They’re in my office the next day weeping.
1:07:56 And they’re confused because they’re thinking, wait a second, I should be celebrating.
1:07:57 How come I’m crying?
1:07:59 I didn’t shed a tear during the treatment.
1:08:04 It is because when you feel psychologically safe and that acute crisis is over, is when
1:08:07 the dam breaks and your true emotions emerge.
1:08:12 Similarly, what many of us are feeling now, if you ask people, like, how are you feeling
1:08:13 with your mental health?
1:08:18 People are actually feeling worse now than they did back in 2020 or 2021 when we were
1:08:20 in lockdown during the pandemic.
1:08:24 Of course there was struggle and people were struggling then too.
1:08:29 But the reason is because a lot of those pent-up emotions are coming up to the surface now,
1:08:33 coupled with all of the things that are happening in the world.
1:08:39 So if you are feeling a sense of stress and burnout, it’s a very human reaction to what’s
1:08:44 happening first biologically with the dam breaking and also what’s happening all around
1:08:50 us and what’s coming up for those of us who live in the US with the election and what
1:08:52 that could mean.
1:08:57 So eye-opening, everything that you’re saying, the fact that your mind is a dam and you don’t
1:09:02 even realize the stress you’re in in the moment and it really just happens and hits you later.
1:09:04 So thank you for helping me through that.
1:09:07 We talked a bit about the mind and the body.
1:09:11 The last question I want to ask you on is really about productivity because we’re all
1:09:15 working really hard as entrepreneurs and I really loved a phrase that you had in the
1:09:17 book called monotasking.
1:09:22 I’m actually going to steal this from you because I love it so much and I know multitasking
1:09:24 is the worst thing we can do.
1:09:25 Multitasking is a myth.
1:09:27 You make errors when you multitask.
1:09:30 You really can’t multitask effectively.
1:09:34 So talk to us about monotasking and how is it related to stress?
1:09:35 Multitasking is a myth.
1:09:36 It’s a scientific misnomer.
1:09:38 There’s actually no such thing.
1:09:43 When you multitask, you are doing two things at once.
1:09:45 It’s called task switching.
1:09:47 You’re not in fact doing two things at once.
1:09:52 You’re doing one thing and then the other thing in rapid succession back to back and
1:09:55 your brain is really wired to do one thing at a time.
1:10:02 So what happens with multitasking or task switching, multitasking or task switching weakens your
1:10:03 prefrontal cortex.
1:10:06 Remember that part of the brain that we talked about at the start of our conversation, which
1:10:10 is about strategic thinking and planning and memory and organization and all these important
1:10:16 things, multitasking or task switching, it decreases your productivity ironically, decreases
1:10:21 your cognition, your memory, your attention, all these things that you think multitasking
1:10:23 is not doing.
1:10:29 So the antidote to multitasking is actually monotasking, doing one thing at a time.
1:10:34 And the way you monotask, I laid out in the five resets because that’s a very common question
1:10:35 I get.
1:10:36 It’s like, how can I do one thing at a time?
1:10:41 I live in a world where 10 things are expected of me all at once.
1:10:45 So you can focus on time blocking as a technique.
1:10:48 And that is simply, let’s say you have four tasks to complete in an hour.
1:10:51 Spend 10 minutes on task one, take a two minute break.
1:10:55 Spend 10 minutes on task two, take a two minute break and on and on.
1:10:58 So as you move through, you’re not doing all four tasks at the same time.
1:11:00 Again, biologically impossible.
1:11:01 You can’t actually do that.
1:11:03 That’s not where your brain is doing anyway.
1:11:07 And when you do monotasking or time blocking, it preserves your mental health.
1:11:12 It preserves your prefrontal cortex and increases your productivity, believe it or not.
1:11:17 And tell us about the fake commute because I feel like so many entrepreneurs work from
1:11:19 home especially.
1:11:21 I definitely wanted you to share this one.
1:11:25 Fake commute is what I do, really suggest it.
1:11:30 So when you think back to your days of being quarantined or even when you’re working from
1:11:34 home, your brain needs compartmentalization.
1:11:39 So think back pre-pandemic when very few people were working from home.
1:11:44 You would go to your office and then you would come home and the commute serves two roles.
1:11:48 So first, just getting you from point A to point B. But it also serves a psychological
1:11:49 role.
1:11:51 It gets you out of home mode into work mode.
1:11:57 So now that 80 plus percent of people, they prefer hybrid work.
1:12:00 That’s the new model, the future of work is hybrid.
1:12:01 And that’s a wonderful thing.
1:12:02 It helps with stress and burnout.
1:12:05 It increases your autonomy and productivity and lots of things.
1:12:08 But you are losing your commute, your everyday commute.
1:12:14 So how can you keep that brain compartmentalization with the commute but also have all of the
1:12:15 benefits of hybrid work?
1:12:16 You can fake your commute.
1:12:21 So on the days that you’re working from home for five or 10 minutes, set up your workstation,
1:12:26 head outside, take a walk, check your schedule, go through what you need to accomplish for
1:12:29 the day, let your brain transition out of home mode to work mode.
1:12:31 At the end of the day, repeat the process.
1:12:36 It’s a way to preserve that sense of brain compartmentalization because we are all different,
1:12:37 right?
1:12:40 Our home mode is so different from our work mode, especially when you’re working from
1:12:41 home.
1:12:46 It’s really important to create some boundaries and even with your brain to create some compartmentalization.
1:12:51 So the fake commute is just a way to do that, but still have all of the benefits of working
1:12:56 from home, but your brain just needs a buffer time to transition.
1:12:59 Well, Aditi, this is such an awesome conversation.
1:13:01 Thank you so much for all your time.
1:13:02 I learned so much.
1:13:06 Where can our listeners learn more about you and everything that you do?
1:13:15 You can follow me on social at draddinarukar.com at draditi, n-e-r-u-r-k-a-r.
1:13:21 You can also check out my website, fiveresets.com, number fiveresets.com.
1:13:22 Amazing.
1:13:23 Thank you so much for your time.
1:13:24 Thanks, Hala.
1:13:30 It’s such a pleasure to join you.
1:13:34 Stress, like the good doctor said, is truly the great equalizer.
1:13:40 And so, my friends, if you’re feeling stressed or burned out, you are far from alone.
1:13:47 Remember in a room of 30 people, 21 are likely to feel stressed and burnt out.
1:13:48 But there’s a way out.
1:13:51 And that does not include having zero stress at all.
1:13:55 Stress and resilience go hand in hand.
1:13:59 And the right amount of healthy stress will help energize you to face and adapt to the
1:14:01 changes you confront.
1:14:06 That’s true resilience, not the toxic kind that tells you you have to be productive at
1:14:08 all costs.
1:14:11 Not a single one of us is the energizer bunny.
1:14:15 And everybody needs and deserves rest and recovery.
1:14:20 So how can we help reset our bodies and minds during times of stress?
1:14:27 Well, Dr. DT said, first, get clear on what really matters to you, and take small but
1:14:29 repeatable steps to get there.
1:14:33 Remember, it takes eight weeks to create a new habit for your brain.
1:14:36 Second, find your buried treasure.
1:14:41 Wake up that guitar or paintbrush for five minutes and connect with yourself.
1:14:46 I know I’m going to try to sing every day, even if it’s just in the shower.
1:14:49 Next, lean into some mono-tasking.
1:14:55 Switching between tasks decreases your productivity, your cognition, and so much more.
1:15:02 Now I have to say this concept of mono-tasking as opposed to multitasking has been sort of
1:15:04 life changing for me.
1:15:10 It’s really helped me level up my productivity and focus and concentration.
1:15:17 I use something called the Pomodoro Technique, where basically it’s 25 minutes or 45 minutes
1:15:19 of uninterrupted time.
1:15:25 I time myself using my Apple phone, I say Siri, put 25 minutes on the clock, and then I time
1:15:28 myself to do a task.
1:15:35 And in the past I’ve been pretty good at focusing, but adding this layer of saying, “Hala, you’re
1:15:43 doing this mono-task for 25 minutes,” which means no task switching until that timer goes
1:15:44 up.
1:15:48 And in your two to five minute break, after you’re done with your task and you’ve done
1:15:53 what you said you were going to do, then you can go look at your social media apps.
1:15:58 Then you can go check your dating apps or your stats, your reviews, or whatever the heck.
1:16:00 No task, do not task switch.
1:16:01 Do not multitask.
1:16:07 Finally, if you work from home all or part of the time, try faking your commute.
1:16:14 Head outside, take a walk, just 10 to 15 minutes to let your brain transition out of home mode
1:16:17 and into work mode or vice versa.
1:16:19 I really hope that I could take that advice.
1:16:23 I would love to take a walk in the morning because I’m always sitting at my desk and
1:16:28 I’ve tried to do that in the past, but I haven’t gotten into a routine.
1:16:30 So let’s try it together, Young and Profiters.
1:16:35 Do you know somebody else who’s been stressed or burnt out and could use a little guidance?
1:16:41 Well then why not share the love and the knowledge with them by sending them a link to this podcast.
1:16:45 And if you did enjoy this episode of Young and Profiting Podcasts and you learned something,
1:16:49 then please drop us a five star review on Apple Podcasts.
1:16:53 Nothing helps us reach more people than a good review from you.
1:16:57 And if you prefer to watch your podcast as videos, you can find all of our videos on
1:16:58 YouTube.
1:17:01 Just look up Young and Profiting and you’ll find our episodes there.
1:17:05 If you’re looking to get in touch with me, you can find me on Instagram or LinkedIn by
1:17:06 searching my name.
1:17:07 It’s HalaTaha.
1:17:12 Finally, I want to give a big shout out to my incredible YAP production team.
1:17:13 You guys are amazing.
1:17:15 Thank you for all that you do.
1:17:30 This is your host, HalaTaha, aka The Podcast Princess, signing off.
1:17:32 [Music]
1:17:35 (gentle music)

0:00:05 Today’s episode is sponsored in part by Teachable, Fundrise, Mint Mobile, Working Genius, Indeed,
0:00:06 and Shopify.
0:00:11 Teachable makes it easy for creators to monetize their content with full control.
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0:01:04 Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/profiting.
0:01:10 As always, you can find all of our incredible deals in the show notes.
0:01:21 Hey, app mam.
0:01:23 Today we are doing something special.
0:01:28 We are going to replay a webinar that I did with BetterHelp called “Keep Your Sanity
0:01:29 While Scaling.”
0:01:35 The webinar is really designed for entrepreneurs with neurodiversity like ADHD, but it’s relevant
0:01:41 for anyone, corporate professionals, freelancers, solopreneurs, entrepreneurs who just want
0:01:44 to live better, more productive lives.
0:01:49 We cover things like why entrepreneurs are more likely to be neurodiverse and have things
0:01:53 like ADHD and bipolar disorder and dyslexia.
0:01:58 We also start to understand all the ways that entrepreneurs have more anxiety and stress
0:02:01 than others and why that is.
0:02:06 We also learn about how entrepreneurs are more lonely than the general public.
0:02:08 We spend less time with our friends and family.
0:02:10 We’re more isolated.
0:02:13 We have relationship problems.
0:02:16 Then we go into ways to maximize your life.
0:02:19 Ways to build in routines with your productivity.
0:02:23 I give some free downloadables that we’re going to put in the show notes that are literally
0:02:25 life-changing.
0:02:32 I’m going over strategies like the ruthless prioritization matrix and the Daily Hustler
0:02:34 Huddle Tracker.
0:02:39 These are two things that are going to transform the way that you handle your tasks throughout
0:02:40 the week.
0:02:42 It is going to make you feel so much more organized.
0:02:44 It is going to make you feel so much more centered.
0:02:50 It puts your work and your personal life at balance because you’re able to plan not only
0:02:55 your work life but also your personal life in a way that’s going to make you feel grateful
0:02:58 and ready to tackle on the week and the day.
0:03:01 Guys, this is going to be an interactive workshop.
0:03:04 This is different than other podcasts that I’ve had.
0:03:06 You want to grab a pen and paper.
0:03:13 You want to make sure that you are ready to work, ready to receive all this amazing information.
0:03:15 The last part of this webinar is all about relationships.
0:03:17 How can we increase our social capital?
0:03:23 How can we dig the well with our relationships before we’re thirsty, before we need anything?
0:03:25 How can we listen better?
0:03:30 Because at the end of the day, relationships is about communication.
0:03:35 When it comes to good communication, it’s really just about meaningful questions and
0:03:36 being a better listener.
0:03:38 I’m really excited to share this with you guys.
0:03:41 I poured my heart and soul into it.
0:03:46 By the way, shout out to our sponsors of this episode, BetterHelp, our sponsors of
0:03:47 this webinar.
0:03:50 I usually put out my courses for hundreds of dollars and we were able to do this for
0:03:53 free because BetterHelp sponsored us.
0:03:59 When it comes to weekly and daily routines, something that all of us entrepreneurs, especially
0:04:03 neurodiverse entrepreneurs, need to keep us on track, weekly therapy is going to be
0:04:05 a game changer.
0:04:08 As entrepreneurs, we often feel like we can’t show any weakness.
0:04:13 Again, we’ve got these stakeholders, employees, families, customers, investors.
0:04:18 We’ve got to make sure we look strong and often that means we’re not really sharing
0:04:22 about our mental health because we don’t have anybody to share it with.
0:04:27 BetterHelp allows you to speak with a third party that’s not going to judge you.
0:04:32 That’s not one of your customers or clients or somebody who you employ.
0:04:38 That’s a safe space for entrepreneurs and you don’t want to DIY your mental health
0:04:39 union profiter.
0:04:44 If you want to try BetterHelp, go to betterhelp.com/profiting for 10% off your first month.
0:04:48 Again, that’s betterhelp.com/profiting for 10% off your first month.
0:04:49 All right, guys.
0:04:51 I’m so excited for this webinar.
0:04:55 Let’s jump right in.
0:04:59 Let’s start off discussing the entrepreneurial mind.
0:05:01 A little game here.
0:05:06 What is the common denominator between all of these amazing entrepreneurs?
0:05:10 Aside the fact that they’re entrepreneurs, what do all these entrepreneurs have in common?
0:05:15 Richard Branson, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Barbara Corcoran, Jenna Kutcher, and Damon
0:05:16 John.
0:05:17 All right.
0:05:18 We got a lot of answers.
0:05:25 Took action, growth mindset, bold, creative, commitment, had vision, entrepreneur, their
0:05:34 go-getters, think differently, brave, ADHD, highly experienced continuous learning, smiles.
0:05:37 Some people got it partially right, but nobody got it right yet.
0:05:38 All right.
0:05:40 Let’s get the answer up.
0:05:41 Else got it.
0:05:46 They are all highly successful neurodivergent entrepreneurs with mental health conditions
0:05:51 like ADHD, dyslexia, bipolar disorder, and/or autism.
0:05:57 Guys, some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world were brought about by neurodivergent
0:05:58 founders.
0:06:02 This is becoming more and more of a thing as people do research on entrepreneurs.
0:06:06 They’re realizing that so many entrepreneurs have neurodivergence.
0:06:10 Let me just go back to this slide really quick.
0:06:12 Almost all of these guys have ADHD.
0:06:15 The only one that doesn’t have ADHD is Elon Musk.
0:06:20 Elon Musk and Bill Gates have Asperger’s, which is the type of autism.
0:06:26 Richard Branson and Barbara Corker have ADHD and dyslexia, so entrepreneurs often have
0:06:29 one neurodiversity or even more than one.
0:06:36 Aristotle has this great quote that no great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.
0:06:41 When you think about entrepreneurs, they’re typically highly creative.
0:06:44 Creativity is also associated with mental health conditions.
0:06:49 A lot of famous artists had mental health conditions.
0:06:51 I love this quote because it’s super relatable.
0:06:56 Just to have the data back this up, almost half of entrepreneurs suffer from a mental
0:06:58 health condition.
0:07:02 49% of entrepreneurs have a mental health condition compared to non-entrepreneurs where
0:07:07 just 32% of them have a mental health condition.
0:07:11 According to a study by researchers of the University of California, the types of mental
0:07:19 health conditions that make up this 49% are ADD, ADHD, depression, anxiety, dyslexia,
0:07:21 addiction, and bipolar disorder.
0:07:26 Those are the primary conditions that a lot of entrepreneurs have.
0:07:28 If we break this down even further, this is another study.
0:07:32 There have been many studies about this, and like I said, it’s becoming this trend that’s
0:07:34 starting to bubble up.
0:07:39 29% of entrepreneurs have ADHD compared to just 5% of the general population.
0:07:44 30% of entrepreneurs have depression compared to just 15% of the population.
0:07:49 11% of entrepreneurs have bipolar disorder compared to just 1% and 12% of entrepreneurs
0:07:52 have addiction compared to just 4%.
0:07:58 Why do entrepreneurs have these mental health conditions?
0:08:03 When it comes to things like stress, anxiety, depression, addiction, a lot of it is just
0:08:04 because they’re an entrepreneur.
0:08:06 It’s hard being an entrepreneur.
0:08:07 There’s stress.
0:08:08 There’s uncertainty.
0:08:09 You’re working alone.
0:08:10 There’s social isolation.
0:08:16 There’s so much pressure for stakeholders and clients and your board and whatever it
0:08:17 is.
0:08:21 There’s also barriers to mental health resources because a lot of us don’t have insurance.
0:08:25 If you’re a freelancer, a solopreneur, I just rolled out insurance to my company like three
0:08:26 months ago.
0:08:31 A lot of us don’t have insurance yet because we’re startups.
0:08:36 A lot of us are fusing our identity with our company.
0:08:37 We are our work.
0:08:43 Any negative thing or failure that happens, we are really down on ourselves because we
0:08:48 believe that we are our work and we have to work on creating identities outside of being
0:08:49 an entrepreneur.
0:08:53 Then the last one is really interesting.
0:08:57 Our neurodiversity also makes us more likely to become entrepreneurs.
0:09:03 We didn’t necessarily fit into the mold of traditional corporate world.
0:09:05 For example, ADHD people are always late.
0:09:10 ADHD people might miss deadlines, but they’ve got amazing strengths like the ability to
0:09:14 hyper-focus and being extremely innovative.
0:09:21 A lot of the strengths of neurodiversity across ADHD, autism, bipolar disorder are really
0:09:27 similar in terms of its hyper-focus, its innovation, its being able to problem solve, and all
0:09:30 of those things make us good entrepreneurs.
0:09:34 A lot of us are just predisposed to become entrepreneurs eventually because we don’t
0:09:36 fit into corporate.
0:09:39 Let’s talk a little bit about … I’ve been throwing out the word neurodiversity.
0:09:43 A lot of you guys may not have heard of this word yet.
0:09:47 Let’s talk about the difference between being neurotypical and the difference between being
0:09:49 neurodiverse.
0:09:52 Neurotypical refers to how a brain typically functions.
0:09:57 Because it’s the most common way for people to think, this is what shapes all of our culture
0:09:58 norms, our society.
0:10:03 This is why everything is based on being an early bird, going to work nine to five.
0:10:09 This is why being on time is just as important as the quality of work that you do when you
0:10:11 work a job.
0:10:15 Neurodivergence is really referring to the natural differences in brain function amongst
0:10:21 individuals with autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and bipolar disorder.
0:10:25 The whole concept of neurodiversity is that people experience and interact with the world
0:10:27 around them in many different ways.
0:10:32 There’s really no one right way of thinking, learning, and behaving.
0:10:35 For instance, ADHD, it’s not a disorder.
0:10:37 It’s not a dysfunction.
0:10:39 It is a unique way of thinking.
0:10:44 It is a unique way of being, and there’s lots of strengths that come about it.
0:10:45 I wouldn’t want it any other way.
0:10:50 The reason why I’m such a successful entrepreneur with a company that’s on track to make $10
0:10:55 million in 2024 is because of my ADHD superpowers.
0:10:59 I’m proud to have it because I’m different, and that’s okay.
0:11:03 There’s no right or wrong, of course.
0:11:05 Neurotypical people are very successful.
0:11:07 Neurodivergent people can be very successful.
0:11:09 There’s no right or wrong way of thinking.
0:11:10 Do you think?
0:11:16 By the way, I’m undiagnosed ADHD, and I have an ADHD coach and everything like that, but
0:11:20 I’m token ADHD, the inattention type.
0:11:24 If you don’t know, we’re going to go through some of the symptoms.
0:11:30 How do you know? Because as you’re going to learn in a bit, something like ADHD is really
0:11:32 a spectrum.
0:11:35 You can have a little bit of ADHD, you can have a lot of ADHD.
0:11:37 It’s a spectrum.
0:11:40 Society favors neurotypical workers.
0:11:46 I alluded this to this already, but school, the way that school is set up, the way that
0:11:51 companies are set up, they’re really for people who can maintain sustained, effortful focus
0:11:58 and attention to repetitive, low-stimulation tasks, whereas neurodiverse people really
0:12:03 have a hard problem working on things that they don’t have personal interest in.
0:12:08 They have really low self-control in general, especially people with ADHD.
0:12:13 Many traditional jobs require patience, persistence, organization, self-discipline, and the ability
0:12:16 to work towards delayed or abstract rewards.
0:12:19 Let’s talk about the good news.
0:12:25 As neurodivergent entrepreneurs, we are working with our brains and not against our brains.
0:12:29 We essentially get to lean into all of our strengths.
0:12:31 People who are neurodiverse, like I mentioned, they’re innovative, they’re problem-solving.
0:12:34 They have high creativity.
0:12:36 Also, we don’t like being put in a box.
0:12:38 We don’t like this traditional structure.
0:12:40 Some of us stay up really late.
0:12:41 I’m a night owl, guys.
0:12:43 I can’t fall asleep until 1 a.m.
0:12:45 I’ll be working until 1 a.m.
0:12:50 I worked on this presentation on Monday ’til 3 a.m. because I get my best creative work
0:12:55 done super late at night and hyper-focus at night.
0:13:00 Everybody’s different, and being an entrepreneur allows us to lean into these really flexible
0:13:04 work lives and do the best work that we do personally.
0:13:10 By the way, neurotypical colleagues make the best co-founders and executive teams.
0:13:14 Even if you’re neurotypical, that doesn’t mean you can’t be an entrepreneur.
0:13:19 That might mean that you would team up with an innovator like me and become a co-founder.
0:13:22 For example, Kate on the call is my business partner.
0:13:29 I created the idea of YAP Media and innovated it, and now she helps me manage it and operates
0:13:30 it.
0:13:35 I believe she’s neurotypical, and she has all the strengths that I don’t have.
0:13:38 We work as such a great team.
0:13:40 Even if you’re neurotypical, that doesn’t mean you can’t be an entrepreneur.
0:13:44 It just means that you might not be the one inventing something or continually inventing
0:13:49 something and problem solving, but you might be the one organizing and handling all the
0:13:54 operations and the finances and things that neurodiverse people may not want to do or
0:13:56 may not be good at.
0:13:59 Let’s talk about ADHD and entrepreneurship.
0:14:00 Just some quick stats.
0:14:06 People with ADHD are 60% to 80% more likely to have entrepreneurial intentions than others,
0:14:09 and they’re two times more likely to start a business.
0:14:16 It’s so cool that it just happens to be what people with ADHD end up doing.
0:14:20 We want autonomy, achievement, those kinds of things.
0:14:22 Let’s get into ADHD and entrepreneurship.
0:14:24 What is ADHD?
0:14:29 It affects executive functioning, which is memory, attention, organization.
0:14:33 These are typically the cognitive abilities needed to achieve goals, and there’s three
0:14:34 types of ADHD.
0:14:36 There’s the inattentive kind.
0:14:38 That’s when you have difficulty paying attention.
0:14:39 You’re forgetful.
0:14:40 You’re easily distracted.
0:14:42 There’s the hyperactive kind.
0:14:43 You’re fidgety.
0:14:44 You’re talkative.
0:14:45 You’re impatient.
0:14:46 Then there’s the combined kind.
0:14:47 You have symptoms of both.
0:14:51 For example, I have the inattentive kind.
0:14:57 One thing I want to note is that ADHD, and this is becoming more and more of a common
0:15:00 ideal, is that it’s really a continuum.
0:15:01 It’s really a spectrum.
0:15:03 People have varying amounts of ADHD.
0:15:08 I remember I talked to one of the most famous brain experts and psychologists in the world,
0:15:13 Dr. Daniel Amon, on my podcast, and I asked him an ADHD question, and his response to
0:15:15 me was, “Everyone has ADHD.
0:15:18 It just depends how much you have it.”
0:15:22 He’s an expert on ADHD, and that was mind blowing for me because I was like, “Oh, that’s
0:15:26 so interesting because I’ve got a business partner, Jason, for example, who’s kind of
0:15:29 like a mix of me and Kate.
0:15:33 He’s got neurotypical things about him, and then he’s got a lot of stuff similar to me
0:15:38 that’s neurodiverse, and I never really knew what he was, and it makes sense because it’s
0:15:39 all a spectrum.
0:15:45 You might have some qualities, a little bit of ADHD, and there’s other mental conditions
0:15:47 that are like this too, like anxiety, depression.
0:15:49 It’s all sort of like a spectrum.
0:15:52 How much are you deviated from the norm?”
0:15:56 So ADHD is not really a thing that you have or don’t have.
0:16:00 That’s becoming more and more of a common thought out there.
0:16:06 So ADHD in the workplace, poor time management skills, this is why we don’t fit in in corporate
0:16:11 chronic lateness, mis-deadlines, difficulty completing mundane repetitive tasks that are
0:16:12 not a personal interest.
0:16:16 What happens if you try to do a repetitive task is you keep multitasking because you’re
0:16:18 just bored, you get distracted.
0:16:22 Also difficulty with relationships, which we’re going to talk about later.
0:16:26 Difficulty getting along with managers and colleagues sometimes because you have emotional
0:16:27 outputs.
0:16:31 It’s really hard to control your emotions when you have ADHD.
0:16:36 So here are some signs that you have ADHD based on the two different kinds.
0:16:42 So hyperactive is you fidget, excessive talking, you interrupt others, you have lack of impulse
0:16:43 control.
0:16:47 In attention to ADHD, you might have trouble with organization, especially with things
0:16:48 you don’t care about.
0:16:53 So for example, I might be organized in something I care about like a project, but if it’s something
0:16:58 I don’t care about or it doesn’t matter or no one’s seeing it or judging me on it, I’ll
0:16:59 be disorganized.
0:17:04 Forgetting instructions, losing track of time, being late, forgetful, misplaces and loses
0:17:08 things, not listening well or paying attention.
0:17:13 You might have a doomsday pile, like one of your drawers just has like a bunch of crap
0:17:14 and you don’t even know what’s in it.
0:17:19 That’s like an ADHD symptom, trouble concentrating on repetitive work, emotional outbursts or
0:17:25 emotional response, leaving some tasks unfinished, especially if you’re not interested in it.
0:17:31 Your symptom is you buy things and you already have them, like I’ll have like eight contact
0:17:34 solutions even though I’ll go to the store and buy more because I’ll forget that I have
0:17:38 them and that’s the symptom of it not remembering what you have.
0:17:42 So let’s talk about some neurodiversity superpowers, okay?
0:17:47 What are the superpowers of ADHD, autism bipolar disorder?
0:17:53 So ADHD superpowers, like I mentioned before, I’m so happy I have ADHD because I feel like
0:17:58 it makes me uniquely me and I think very differently from other people and I have strengths that
0:18:00 make me unique and successful.
0:18:09 High energy, alertness, full of ideas and innovative, strong problem solving abilities, risk takers,
0:18:14 we take proactive leaps of faith, we can hyper focus and do intense work for long periods.
0:18:20 Guys, when I’m focused, I feel like I get four hours of work done in 10 minutes.
0:18:22 I can really get things done fast.
0:18:25 I just might procrastinate till the last minute.
0:18:30 Resilient and resourceful, ability to see opportunities that people don’t see, comfortable
0:18:35 on chaos, highly curious, more likely to be optimistic, which is also why people with
0:18:37 ADHD tend to be late.
0:18:42 We often think we have more time than we do and we’re just optimistic about how much
0:18:44 it’s going to take to complete a task.
0:18:47 So very optimistic, okay?
0:18:51 Just remember that your weaknesses can also be your greatest strengths.
0:18:54 All right, autism spectrum disorder, very different superpowers.
0:18:57 Again, this is something that is on a spectrum.
0:18:59 They literally call it autism spectrum disorder.
0:19:05 Some of the most famous entrepreneurs in the world, like Bill Gates and Elon Musk, have
0:19:08 Asperger’s, a type of autism.
0:19:10 So higher rates of giftedness.
0:19:14 People with autism often are really good at mathematics, music, art, okay?
0:19:18 The ability to focus really well, attention to detail.
0:19:24 I have two employees that are on the spectrum, my favorite employees.
0:19:26 They are so motivated.
0:19:28 They are so skilled and gifted in their specific area.
0:19:33 They get obsessed with being the best they possibly can and the thing that they’re experts
0:19:34 on.
0:19:35 They never make a mistake.
0:19:41 They are doing lots of UA type stuff and they don’t get bored with really repetitive work.
0:19:42 It’s stimulating for them.
0:19:43 They like it.
0:19:45 They’re doing sort of perfect.
0:19:51 Such a good thing that you need in a business is people who are good at really repetitive
0:19:54 attention to detail tasks, right?
0:19:59 Very strong work ethic, very loyal, enhanced memory skills, superior problem solving, really
0:20:04 good at constructing systems and operations and very good at pattern recognition.
0:20:09 So again, lots of strengths and if you’re an employer, for example, you really want to
0:20:13 consider having neurodiverse workers.
0:20:17 You want to have people who have different ways of thinking in your organization.
0:20:22 Now, bipolar disorder, this is really associated with high creativity and art.
0:20:28 So some of the most famous artists like Vincent Van Gogh, Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway,
0:20:30 Tchaikovsky, they all have bipolar disorders.
0:20:35 So very artistic, very creative, high ambition, increased risk taking, tenacity.
0:20:42 Actually, all neurodiverse people have tenacity and resilience because we grew up being different
0:20:43 people.
0:20:49 Learning in school and traditional jobs that we didn’t really fit in and we had to learn
0:20:50 to overcome those obstacles.
0:20:54 So a lot of people that have neurodiversity are resilient.
0:20:58 They know how to adapt, they have tenacity and grit.
0:21:01 That is also common across everybody with neurodiversity.
0:21:04 Also people with bipolar are really outgoing.
0:21:07 They’re extroverted and they’re really open personalities.
0:21:14 So those are some of the superpowers, but our superpowers can also become our kryptonite.
0:21:17 There is a high price of hustle.
0:21:20 So I love this quote from Elon Musk.
0:21:25 He says, “Running a startup is like chewing glass and staring into the abyss.
0:21:29 After a while you stop staring, but the glass chewing never ends.”
0:21:31 What does this quote mean to you?
0:21:34 What do you think Elon means by this quote?
0:21:35 Jackson, really good.
0:21:40 Elon is telling you that there is so much that you do not want to do but have to do.
0:21:42 The pain doesn’t end even if you can clearly see the business.
0:21:45 Yeah, you guys did really well with that.
0:21:47 So let’s break it down.
0:21:49 Running a startup is like chewing glass.
0:21:53 So really what he means here, and I watched a video where he literally breaks down what
0:21:54 he meant.
0:22:00 So as an entrepreneur, you’re constantly in the know of everything that’s going wrong
0:22:01 in your business.
0:22:02 You have the insider information.
0:22:08 You know all the little things that are broken in your business, you also know all the things
0:22:10 that only you can work on.
0:22:12 It’s things that you can’t delegate, unfortunately.
0:22:13 You’re the only one who has the knowledge.
0:22:17 You’re the only one that can work on it and make it right.
0:22:21 And there’s all these things that are out there that you want to work on.
0:22:22 You want to innovate.
0:22:23 You want to create new.
0:22:27 You want to work on things that are fun, that you enjoy.
0:22:32 But unfortunately, you have to work on the problems your company needs you to work on,
0:22:33 not the ones that you want to work on.
0:22:36 This is what chewing glass is.
0:22:40 And if you’re neurodiverse, the hardest thing is to chew glass.
0:22:45 The hardest thing is to do things that you don’t want to do because you want to have
0:22:46 dopamine.
0:22:47 You need dopamine.
0:22:48 Your brain works differently.
0:22:52 You can’t just be okay working on things you don’t want to do.
0:22:53 So we need to combat this.
0:22:58 This is what I’m going to talk about in the productivity section of today’s class.
0:23:01 And staring into the abyss.
0:23:06 This is that you feel the pressure that your company is constantly facing extermination.
0:23:11 So 90% of all startups fail and 80% of them fail within five years.
0:23:16 And what he means by chewing glass never ends and the staring into the abyss does is because
0:23:21 eventually, if you chew glass and do what you need to do, you get a foundation, you
0:23:25 get some cash flow, you get some padding, you save up for emergencies.
0:23:30 And then suddenly, even if something goes wrong, you’re not going to face extermination.
0:23:35 But the first two, three years of entrepreneurship is this, running a startup is like chewing
0:23:37 glass and staring into the abyss.
0:23:40 So that’s what he means by this quote.
0:23:45 So let’s talk about why entrepreneurs are so stressed out.
0:23:50 Entrepreneurship is full with uncertainty and unpredictability, market dynamics, financial
0:23:51 instability.
0:23:52 You always need to innovate.
0:23:57 There’s so much pressure, constant decision making, risk taking, and responsibility for
0:23:59 clients, employees, and stakeholders.
0:24:03 Graham Altman has this awesome quote, he says, “Bounders end up with a lot of weight on
0:24:07 their shoulders, their employees, their families, their customers, their investors.
0:24:09 And we have to make everybody happy.
0:24:12 Your family wants more time, your business needs more time.
0:24:16 Your clients want cheaper prices, your employees want more pay.
0:24:20 It’s hard to keep everybody happy and it’s all on your shoulders.”
0:24:21 Leads to some high stress.
0:24:26 So what are you most stressed about right now in your business or in your job?
0:24:28 What are you most stressed about?
0:24:34 Burnout, finances, clients, cash flow, financial instability, generating more income to fail,
0:24:38 cash flow, all right.
0:24:41 Let’s talk about some of the dark sides of passion guys.
0:24:46 So like I mentioned, one of the things that make neurodiverse people awesome is that we’re
0:24:52 like highly passionate, highly creative, but there’s a dark side of passion.
0:24:58 The more passionate about your business you are, the more that you usually self-identify
0:25:02 with your business and you’re emotionally dependent on your work, the more likely you’re
0:25:07 going to suffer from burnout because you’re working late hours, you’re exhausted, you’re
0:25:11 not spending time with friends and family, you’re not exercising, you’re not eating right.
0:25:15 And that’s going to lead to health issues, stress, burnout, anxiety.
0:25:18 In fact, 25% of entrepreneurs say they are burnt out.
0:25:24 And 95% of entrepreneurs are unsure of how to create an adequate work-life balance.
0:25:28 70% of entrepreneurs feel lonely throughout the journey, 62% of entrepreneurs feel they’re
0:25:32 sacrificing their present lives for future success.
0:25:34 Let’s talk about why entrepreneurs are lonely.
0:25:39 So first of all, working in excessive hours and blurring the boundaries between work and
0:25:40 professional life.
0:25:47 So we spend less time with friends, family, kids, 60% less time with spouses, 58% less
0:25:51 time with kids, 73% less time with friends and family.
0:25:56 We need to change those numbers so that we can be more balanced.
0:26:01 On top of that, we’re socially isolated, we often work from home, we often work by ourselves.
0:26:05 When we’re starting, we often have small teams, we don’t have the same work balance where
0:26:09 you go into the office and you’ve got 100 people you could become friends with.
0:26:14 Also, if you’ve got neurodiverse conditions, you have it even worse.
0:26:20 So for example, somebody like me with ADHD, I have trouble paying attention to conversations.
0:26:24 I’m forgetful of anniversaries and birthdays and I’ve lost friends because they don’t forgive
0:26:25 me for that.
0:26:27 I’m late to events.
0:26:31 I might have poor emotional responses, I’m upset, I can’t control my emotions as much
0:26:35 as I’d like to, it’s something I always have to work on.
0:26:39 And so that causes issues in relationships, people end up thinking that you’re careless.
0:26:44 Autism, bipolar disorder also has negative impacts on relationships if they have their
0:26:46 own things that happen.
0:26:52 Bipolar disorder, they get into these really bad moods and so it’s confusing for people
0:26:56 that they have relationships with because they have totally different moods depending
0:26:58 on how they’re feeling.
0:27:01 So knowing all this, how do we maximize our potential?
0:27:03 How do we maximize our productivity?
0:27:05 How do we maximize our relationships?
0:27:08 How do we maximize our mental health?
0:27:13 First of all, we’ve got to address the root causes.
0:27:15 So I’m just going to be really blunt right now.
0:27:19 Let’s talk about the top 20 reasons that startup fails.
0:27:24 No market need, running out of cash, not the right team, getting out competed, pricing
0:27:29 cost issues, user unfriendly product, product without business model, poor marketing and
0:27:30 so on.
0:27:34 These are the top 20 reasons, but let’s laser in on the top three reasons.
0:27:38 No market need, ran out of cash, not the right team.
0:27:42 In fact, no market need is leading by a lot, 42%.
0:27:47 The next one’s at 30%, the next one’s at 20% and guess what?
0:27:49 Everything is related to no market need.
0:27:51 That’s the main reason.
0:27:56 If you calculate all of this, it’s like 80% of the reason why startups fail or 90% is
0:28:01 because of no market need because no market demand is no money and not being able to afford
0:28:03 or attract the right team.
0:28:07 And so off the bat, if you’re an entrepreneur and you’re not working on the right idea,
0:28:13 you are setting yourself up for bad mental health, bad relationships, bad productivity,
0:28:16 low self-esteem, all these things.
0:28:20 You need to realize it’s a dead horse and get off of it.
0:28:25 And one of the biggest problems with not having the right idea is that usually the problem
0:28:27 is too specific.
0:28:28 There’s no audience for you.
0:28:33 Your target clients like finding a needle on a haystack, nobody wants your offer.
0:28:38 Something’s wrong with your offer and a lot of the reason is nobody wants it, right?
0:28:43 Your offer is not desirable to an audience that you can find en masse.
0:28:48 So off the bat, you got to work on the right idea and you got to be honest with yourself.
0:28:52 Am I just working on the wrong idea right now?
0:28:56 Is there something I can be doing with my skills and talents where it wouldn’t be such
0:29:00 an uphill battle to get clients and customers?
0:29:04 Can I make it less specific so that more people want it?
0:29:07 Another thing is that you want to make sure you pick a diverse team.
0:29:10 So neurotypical and neurodiverse people make the perfect match.
0:29:15 A lot of the times, if you’re founding a company with others, it’s like like-minded people because
0:29:18 you guys are all friends, but you got to make sure that you’re all different.
0:29:23 Because if everybody is on the technical side, for example, nobody knows how to manage finances,
0:29:26 create a business model, secure funding, you want a diverse team.
0:29:30 And the other thing is because entrepreneurship is a lonely journey, you might really want
0:29:35 to think about having a co-founder, finding a partner that you can work with and you guys
0:29:37 have different strengths, right?
0:29:39 It makes it more fun, less lonely.
0:29:44 I got to say that I have so much fun being an entrepreneur because Kate and Jason, my
0:29:47 business partners are literally my best friends.
0:29:53 I have so much fun with them and I feel like compared to other entrepreneurs, I have like
0:29:59 a really full life because I’m basically working with partners that started as colleagues
0:30:01 and now have become my best friends.
0:30:05 So before you give away equity and make things permanent, make sure you actually enjoy the
0:30:09 people’s time because you’ll be spending a lot of time with your co-founders.
0:30:12 Let’s hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors.
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0:35:18 Let’s talk about developing routines.
0:35:19 Question for you all.
0:35:23 How often are you speaking with others about your mental health?
0:35:25 Let me know in the chat.
0:35:26 Some people are saying weekly.
0:35:30 Some people said always, but like almost everybody is saying never right now.
0:35:31 All right.
0:35:32 Let me ask you another question.
0:35:35 Why aren’t you speaking to anyone about mental health?
0:35:38 And if you are, why are you?
0:35:39 Why or why not?
0:35:47 Not their business, stigmas, no one cares, too busy, not everyone understands, no one
0:35:50 cares about your mental health, freedom of judgment.
0:35:51 All right.
0:35:55 So we’re going to get into routines, guys.
0:35:58 Number one, you want to start therapy.
0:36:02 I use BetterHelp and you guys should really think about starting weekly therapy sessions.
0:36:07 If you want to be a better entrepreneur, if you want to be a better person, a better husband,
0:36:12 boyfriend, dad, friend, therapy is where it’s at.
0:36:19 We always want to talk about our mental health and especially as an entrepreneur, because
0:36:25 as an entrepreneur, you have to create this facade that everything’s okay constantly.
0:36:27 You can’t even tell your business partners you’re feeling down.
0:36:31 You can’t tell your employees how you’re feeling.
0:36:36 You need to have this confidence all the time and it makes it really hard to share what’s
0:36:39 going on to somebody in your life.
0:36:44 But a mental health professional is somebody that you can talk to in confidence and private.
0:36:48 I saw a lot of you guys saying it’s nobody’s business, for example.
0:36:52 So you want to make speaking with a mental health professional a regular weekly habit.
0:36:55 So for example, I have a therapist Blair.
0:36:58 I meet her every single Sunday, no excuses.
0:37:01 So you can talk about your fears or stressors without any repercussions.
0:37:05 You can go to betterhelp.com/profit and get 10% off your first month.
0:37:09 Our help is sponsoring this webinar, so shout out to them.
0:37:14 So how does therapy help entrepreneurs, non-judgmental space to discuss your worries, broadens up
0:37:19 your perspective and understands whatever role you’re in is going on?
0:37:23 So sometimes when we’re so upset about something, we can’t really see the facts.
0:37:26 We can’t really understand the bigger picture.
0:37:28 Also integrating lessons learned from failures.
0:37:33 Your therapist starts to get to know you, knows your stories, their writing notes.
0:37:36 So they can remind you like, hey, this happened before.
0:37:40 Is this some sort of a pattern that you need to work through helping you handle emotions,
0:37:44 helping you handle conflict and avoiding burnout?
0:37:49 Because as entrepreneurs, it’s often always about doing something for somebody else.
0:37:51 Doing something for your employees, doing something for your clients.
0:37:55 This is an hour out of the week that is all about you.
0:37:59 Your company will benefit if you take care of yourself.
0:38:03 Help is awesome because it’s professional, it’s affordable, convenient, and effective.
0:38:08 Number one, it is so much more affordable than any other therapy that I’ve ever done.
0:38:15 And I have to say that I tried therapy four years ago and it was maybe four times as expensive.
0:38:19 And I remember I’d always feel like thinking about, oh, like how much money I’m spending
0:38:22 on this and is it even worth it or whatever.
0:38:26 I never have those thoughts anymore because it is so affordable, it is worth its weight
0:38:28 in gold.
0:38:31 But it’s the best therapist I’ve ever had.
0:38:35 I feel like because BetterHelp has such a great company culture, they’ve got therapists
0:38:37 that actually want to be there.
0:38:43 It’s not a therapist that only has four clients, which is kind of what I had before and it
0:38:46 just made me feel like they just wanted to keep me as a client.
0:38:48 I don’t feel like a client to this therapist.
0:38:51 I feel like their job is to be a therapist.
0:38:54 And if I don’t want to do therapy with them, there’s somebody else who’s going to do therapy
0:38:55 with them.
0:38:59 And keeping me on as a client is like actually caring about my mental health.
0:39:03 It’s way different than any other therapy that I’ve ever had.
0:39:07 And best therapist by far, really good training and things like that.
0:39:12 It’s also super convenient in the past when I had a therapist that had to like go back
0:39:15 and forth on text and it was like super annoying to try to find a time and it always had to
0:39:16 be the same time.
0:39:19 I can literally change whatever time I want to treat.
0:39:23 I keep it on Sunday and I change whatever time I want on Sunday.
0:39:24 And it’s effective.
0:39:28 You can do video calls, you can do phone calls and chat.
0:39:32 I prefer to do phone calls because I like to like multitask and like clean while I’m
0:39:35 talking to her and stuff like that.
0:39:40 And then you can also look at classes, especially if you’re like you’re going through something
0:39:46 like a breakup or you’ve got something specific, they have all these classes all the time.
0:39:50 If you like webinars, for example, you’ll love BetterHelp because they just have like
0:39:52 all these webinars all the time.
0:39:56 So for example, I went through a breakup and I was like so upset.
0:40:02 And I remember one weekend I just went to all these breakup relationship classes and
0:40:06 was just trying to make myself feel better by being around other people who are going
0:40:08 through the same thing.
0:40:13 If you want extra therapy and you want to do some group sessions, you can also do that.
0:40:15 So that’s just a little bit about BetterHelp.
0:40:16 It’s so easy to use.
0:40:19 Again, it’s the best therapy that I’ve ever done.
0:40:21 I never promote anything that I don’t support.
0:40:26 So if you guys want to try BetterHelp, go to betterhelp.com/profit and you can get 10%
0:40:27 off your first month.
0:40:32 That is the number one routine that I would recommend to start off with is getting your
0:40:34 weekly therapy sessions.
0:40:39 So let’s move on to the next routine, weekly and daily prioritization.
0:40:45 So you guys need to learn to ruthlessly prioritize and block out specific time to complete tasks
0:40:49 so you can focus on projects that truly matter so that you can chew blasts.
0:40:50 You got to prioritize.
0:40:51 What do you want to work on?
0:40:53 What do you have to work on?
0:40:58 And McKinsey found that only 52% of executives said that how they spent their time matched
0:41:00 their organization’s priorities.
0:41:02 So that’s not good.
0:41:05 We need to learn how to prioritize.
0:41:09 So Benjamin Hardy, who you got to get familiar with because he’s going to show up a bunch
0:41:16 in the presentation, he is an organizational psychologist, he’s an expert on productivity,
0:41:20 and he says 10x is easier than 2x.
0:41:21 That’s counterintuitive.
0:41:24 How could 10x be easier than 2x?
0:41:29 Because if you want to grow exponentially, you can’t just do double of everything you’re
0:41:30 doing now.
0:41:34 Could you imagine if you just doubled everything you’re doing now, you would just get burnt
0:41:35 out.
0:41:37 You can’t just double everything you’re doing.
0:41:38 That’s impossible.
0:41:42 However, what if you leaned into the things that really worked?
0:41:45 What if you got smarter about the way you worked?
0:41:51 That’s how you actually 10x.
0:41:53 It’s doing the 20% of the work that’s going to get you 80% of the results.
0:41:55 That’s going to 10x your results.
0:42:00 So the Pareto principle, you guys have probably heard of it, the 80/20 rule, 80% of results
0:42:03 come from 20% of your actions.
0:42:06 So when you really think about it, you’ve got to remember 10x is easier than 2x.
0:42:08 You can’t just double all your work.
0:42:11 You’ve got to work smarter.
0:42:12 You don’t want to get burnt out.
0:42:15 So the 80/20 rule.
0:42:18 How do you waste your time by doing the wrong things?
0:42:20 You’re just not working on the wrong things.
0:42:22 They’re counterproductive.
0:42:25 By not doing the right things, you know what you need to do.
0:42:27 You’re just not doing it.
0:42:30 Or you don’t know what the right things are.
0:42:35 By doing the right things in the wrong way, you’re multitasking, you’re not paying attention.
0:42:38 You don’t have the skills and deliberate practice.
0:42:41 And also from not learning from our experiences.
0:42:44 You might be doing the right things, but you’re just never getting any better.
0:42:46 You might need to slow down, pay attention.
0:42:48 You might need to get some training.
0:42:52 You might need to delegate, get a business partner, somebody else who can do the tasks
0:42:54 more efficiently can do it better than you.
0:42:56 So these are ways you might be wasting your time.
0:42:59 Now, this is what I use every single week.
0:43:03 And I’m about to give you guys a free downloadable for a lot of stuff that I’m about to go over,
0:43:05 which is pretty cool.
0:43:11 I do this every single week, not only for my work life, but for my personal life.
0:43:14 What is urgent and important that I need to do this week?
0:43:19 What is non-urgent and important that I need to schedule for upcoming weeks?
0:43:23 What is urgent and non-important that I need to delegate or outsource?
0:43:26 What is non-urgent and non-important that I need to drop for now?
0:43:31 I do this every single week for my work and personal life so that I can keep myself on
0:43:34 track and make sure that I’m always doing the things that I need to do.
0:43:40 Now every single morning, we do something at Yap called a daily hustler huddle.
0:43:43 It’s basically a mental health and productivity tracker.
0:43:47 If you guys want to download this, it’s youngandprofiting.co/tracker.
0:43:49 You can make a copy to download it.
0:43:51 And so every single day, start off your morning.
0:43:52 How do you feel today?
0:43:54 What’s your one word open?
0:43:55 What are you grateful for today?
0:43:59 What is your business high, personal high, or recognition?
0:44:01 Who do you want to recognize today?
0:44:07 So for example, you might say, I’m so happy that we closed so many deals this week.
0:44:12 You might say, I just learned how to make sourdough bread and it’s really cool.
0:44:18 You might say, I want to recognize Kate for helping me put on the Better Health webinar.
0:44:20 What are you grateful for today this morning?
0:44:24 Did you hit your goals from yesterday, keeping yourself accountable, making sure that if
0:44:27 you need to reorganize because you didn’t hit your goals from yesterday, did you hit
0:44:29 your goals from yesterday?
0:44:31 What are your three to five work goals for today?
0:44:35 And what are your three goals for your health and relationships today?
0:44:41 Okay, so again, as entrepreneurs, we’re constantly deprioritizing ourselves, our own health,
0:44:44 our own mental health, our own relationships, and this can be routine.
0:44:50 So it might be go to my therapy session, go to my gym class at 7.30, make sure I spend
0:44:53 time with help my kid with their homework.
0:44:56 What are your three goals today for your health and relationships?
0:44:58 And like I said, those can be routines.
0:45:01 And what’s your one word close after you did this activity every single morning, which
0:45:04 takes less than 10 minutes, 15 minutes max.
0:45:06 How do you feel?
0:45:10 Now a pro tip, if you have co-founders, if you have a team, you can do this together
0:45:11 every single morning.
0:45:16 So for example, me, Jason, and Kate do this every single morning at 8.30 AM.
0:45:18 It keeps us aligned.
0:45:20 It’s like a gratitude practice.
0:45:23 It helps us understand how each of us are feeling that day.
0:45:26 And by the end of it, we all feel better and ready to go.
0:45:29 Then I do it again with my marketing and sales team later on in the day.
0:45:31 We do like a shortened version.
0:45:37 One of the keys about being successful is actually knowing what you have to do.
0:45:41 And whenever you have a project, you want to break your projects into smaller tasks.
0:45:44 You want to chunk your projects, right?
0:45:48 It’s not enough to just have this big goal, create a website.
0:45:49 It’s not enough detail.
0:45:51 You’re going to get overwhelmed.
0:45:53 You’re going to procrastinate.
0:45:56 You’re not going to be motivated because it’s just too big to tackle.
0:45:57 You need to chunk everything down.
0:46:02 Also, it really just helps with really making sure you understand the project.
0:46:04 You understand every single step that you need to take.
0:46:08 I’m always telling my team, OK, you’ve got this project.
0:46:09 What are all the little steps?
0:46:13 I want every single little step that you need to take to complete this project.
0:46:19 And guys, writing things down itself gets things out of your head.
0:46:21 David Allen came on my show.
0:46:25 He’s the founder of the Getting Things Done system.
0:46:27 And he taught me about open loops.
0:46:30 If you don’t write something down, it just stays in your brain as an open loop.
0:46:35 It actually literally keeps you up at night because you haven’t gotten out of your brain
0:46:36 and written it down.
0:46:41 So even just the action of writing it down de-stresses you.
0:46:44 So very important routines to start.
0:46:47 Successful entrepreneurship is not sexy.
0:46:50 And the vast majority of success as an entrepreneur is doing the things you know you shouldn’t
0:46:52 be doing but aren’t, a.k.a. chewing glass.
0:46:57 So I want to help you guys learn how to chew glass in a less painful way.
0:47:00 So first of all, you’ve got to learn how to say no.
0:47:04 And you’ve got to get comfortable with saying no.
0:47:08 Because behind every no is a deeper yes to what you actually want and need to do.
0:47:12 If you could still down focus– and I got this actually from Alex Tirmuzzi.
0:47:15 He also came on my podcast.
0:47:20 Focus is saying no to everything that is not what you said you would do.
0:47:25 So you have this new priority matrix where every week you’re ruthlessly prioritizing
0:47:28 what is absolutely the things that I have to do this week.
0:47:33 That means that if something happens during the week or the day that is not what you said
0:47:35 you would do, you’ve got to say no.
0:47:39 And through your head all day you should be running this filter in your head.
0:47:40 Is this what I said I would do?
0:47:42 Is this what I said I would do today?
0:47:43 No?
0:47:44 Okay, no.
0:47:45 I can’t do it.
0:47:46 I’m sorry.
0:47:50 I’m not bad at first because we don’t like to disappoint people.
0:47:53 But you can say no with grace.
0:47:57 And really you’ve got to remember that saying no is saying yes to yourself and your goal.
0:47:59 So let’s think about it for a second.
0:48:03 What is one thing you’re going to start saying no to?
0:48:09 Other people’s demands going out, saying they’re going to parties, gambling, weed, junk food,
0:48:16 alcohol, endless scrolling, yeah, feeling pretty aligned, distractions, yeah, awesome.
0:48:20 Let’s get into productivity hacks.
0:48:22 Stephen Kotler’s flow state.
0:48:27 So I have a whole episode on this and at the end of this I give you guys some continued
0:48:29 episodes for your learning.
0:48:36 But the net net of flow state is you need to block off and schedule 90 to 120 minute chunks
0:48:41 of time for uninterrupted time to complete your high priority tasks.
0:48:46 So it’s very important to block off 90 to 120 minutes a day to do those things that
0:48:49 you set in your priority matrix that you need to get done today.
0:48:52 And ideally you want to batch similar things together.
0:48:54 The other thing is you want to turn off distractions, right?
0:48:57 Turn off your phone, tell your friends and family that you’re unavailable, if you work
0:49:01 from home, close your door, get focused, right?
0:49:05 Another tip Jason, my business partner does, he puts earplugs in his ear.
0:49:10 And that makes him pay attention more because even things like birds chirping can distract
0:49:11 you.
0:49:17 When you’re a flow state, motivation, productivity, and great increases, 500% above baseline, creative
0:49:20 decision making spikes between 400 and 700%.
0:49:25 You can only get into flow if you’re not distracted for 90 to 120 minute chunks of time.
0:49:28 So you have to do everything to cut off distractions.
0:49:31 Now you want to task batch your calendar.
0:49:33 You want to schedule everything.
0:49:36 I know this seems ridiculous.
0:49:43 When I first came across this idea, my friend Tim, who co-founded the company with me, did
0:49:46 this and I thought it was freaking insane.
0:49:50 Now I do it and I’ll never go back and it is the best way to make sure that you have
0:49:55 time for yourself, your friends, your health, your business.
0:49:58 And so that you actually do what you said you would do.
0:50:00 You’ve got to schedule it all.
0:50:01 It’s not just for meetings.
0:50:04 A lot of people treat their calendar like it’s just for meetings.
0:50:06 Chapters are not just for meetings.
0:50:09 Schedule everything on there, your flow time, your personal time.
0:50:12 And the thing is, is that you can’t multitask.
0:50:14 Multitasking is not a thing.
0:50:15 Multitasking is the myth.
0:50:16 No such thing.
0:50:20 When you say you multitask, I think like, “Oh, that means you don’t get your work done.”
0:50:23 That’s not something to brag about.
0:50:27 Multitasking leads to a 40% drop in productivity, 50% more errors.
0:50:31 People who are interrupted and have to switch back takes 50% longer.
0:50:34 Every time you get interrupted, it will take you 20 minutes to get back in the zone.
0:50:37 If you don’t schedule the time to do the things you need to do, you’ll never become
0:50:40 the future you that you want to become.
0:50:42 So schedule everything.
0:50:46 Some of the things you might want to schedule is times to eat, times to shower, times to
0:50:50 check email and Slack, times to get into flow, times to spend with family, social media,
0:50:53 news, meditation, bedtime, TV, entertainment.
0:50:58 I don’t watch TV, but if you guys have to watch TV, schedule it.
0:50:59 Weekly prioritization.
0:51:00 Right?
0:51:03 Usually it’s Friday or Monday, spending time with your extended family, spending time with
0:51:09 your spouse, date night, adventure time with kids, time for therapy, time for personal growth,
0:51:11 time to spend on a hobby or charity, right?
0:51:14 So you want to think about what are you scheduling daily?
0:51:16 What are you scheduling weekly?
0:51:17 Think about it.
0:51:18 Actually plan out your days.
0:51:19 And here’s the thing.
0:51:20 You don’t have to be rigid.
0:51:24 I change my routine like every month, every week even sometimes.
0:51:26 I’ll change like one thing around.
0:51:31 You can change it up, but put what you need to do down in a schedule and stick by your
0:51:32 schedule.
0:51:33 Okay.
0:51:36 So another technique to help you chew glass.
0:51:40 And this is my modified version of the Pomodori technique.
0:51:43 So I change this to add a reward.
0:51:46 This is what I do to myself to get my work done.
0:51:49 So you choose a single task to focus on.
0:51:52 Then you decide on a reward you’ll give yourself for doing it.
0:51:57 So for example, I might say I’m going to work on this better health presentation for 45
0:51:58 minutes.
0:52:02 And when I’m done with it, I’m going to have a half of an ice cream sandwich.
0:52:05 I love ice cream sandwiches, right?
0:52:11 And I tell myself, I can’t have an ice cream sandwich until I finish this 45 minute chunk.
0:52:12 That’s the thing that I changed.
0:52:14 The regular Pomodori technique has no reward.
0:52:18 I added a reward to gamify it for myself.
0:52:21 You take a two to five minute break, you take your reward, and then you start the timer
0:52:22 over again.
0:52:24 You’re still in flow.
0:52:29 If you do this three, four times, then you’re going to take a bigger break, a 15 to 30 minute
0:52:30 break.
0:52:32 So that’s the Pomodori technique.
0:52:36 Something else I want to talk about is the times to get our work done.
0:52:41 Daniel Pink breaks down the three stages in the day for most people if you’re an early
0:52:42 burp.
0:52:46 So peak our mood rises in the morning, best for analytical work.
0:52:50 Truff, our mood declines in the early at mid afternoon, best for administrative work.
0:52:54 So this is why people need like a coffee at 3 PM or 2 PM, right?
0:52:58 If you ever need like a caffeine boost, it’s because typically if you wake up early in
0:53:01 the morning, you feel really tired at this point.
0:53:05 And then you get a surge of energy in the evening.
0:53:07 And that’s best for creative work, four or 5 PM.
0:53:10 So if you’re an early bird, these are your stages.
0:53:14 But not of all of us are early birds and especially neurodiverse people.
0:53:16 For example, I’m an eye doll.
0:53:19 Sometimes I have to be forced to be a third bird, but I’m an eye doll.
0:53:23 So there’s three types of birds, and we’re going to find out what bird we are.
0:53:26 There’s a lark, a third bird, or an owl.
0:53:30 And it’s all based on your chronotype or your circadian rhythm.
0:53:35 So a lark is a morning person, an owl is an evening person, and a third bird is somewhere
0:53:36 in the middle.
0:53:42 It’s a buzzfeed quiz that literally takes two minutes to do, three minutes to do.
0:53:47 So again, take the quiz, youngandprofiting.co/bird, take a few minutes.
0:53:51 And if you score 80% on lark or owl, that is your type.
0:53:54 If you have more of a balance, you are a third bird.
0:53:58 So if you’re a night owl, you’re going to be doing analytical tests in the evening.
0:54:01 Whereas your lark, it’s the early morning.
0:54:04 Admin tasks are mid-afternoon for everyone.
0:54:07 Creative tasks, owls do well in the morning.
0:54:11 And I tried this, and it really works, like I’m so creative in the morning.
0:54:14 Making impression, everybody’s got to do it in the morning, sorry owls.
0:54:20 Making a decision late afternoon, evening for owls because we’re not alert in the morning.
0:54:24 Okay, let’s talk about temptation bundling.
0:54:29 So I learned this from Katie Milkman, and she says temptation bundling is when you pair
0:54:32 something you don’t like to do with something that you love to do.
0:54:34 It’s a great strategy.
0:54:39 So for example, only watching your favorite TV show while you fold laundry, only listening
0:54:43 to your favorite podcast while you exercise, only eating your favorite snack while you
0:54:48 pay your bills, only getting a pedicure while checking your email, only scrolling your social
0:54:51 media if you wake up by 6 a.m.
0:54:56 So temptation bundling can help make unpleasant tasks seem less stressful, increasing the
0:54:57 chances of doing these tasks.
0:55:01 The key is that you only allow yourself to do the thing you love if you’re doing the
0:55:03 thing that you hate.
0:55:07 So the five-minute bundle exercise is basically in a two-column list, you’re going to write
0:55:13 down the pleasures you enjoy and the temptations you want to do, and in column two you’re going
0:55:17 to write down the tasks and behaviors that you should be doing, but often procrastinate
0:55:18 on.
0:55:20 And then you’re going to write down as many behaviors as possible.
0:55:24 And then you’re going to want to link one of your instantly gratifying wants and behaviors
0:55:27 with something that you should be doing.
0:55:30 Some last tips for chewing glass and we’re going to get on to some mental health stuff
0:55:32 is gamifier tasks.
0:55:34 So can I finish this task in 25 minutes?
0:55:41 One of my favorite things to do every morning to keep my kitchen and desk space clean is
0:55:42 I play a game.
0:55:45 Can I clean my kitchen by the time my coffee is finished brewing?
0:55:47 I do this with everything.
0:55:50 Can I clean my whole house by the time this laundry is done?
0:55:54 Anything that has some sort of timer, I’m like gamifying and like making myself do some sort
0:55:59 of chore because otherwise it’s really hard for me to do it.
0:56:02 Can I read 20 pages of a book today?
0:56:06 Another thing I love is let’s say you end a meeting early or you’ve got like a five minute
0:56:09 break or a 10 minute break in between your next meeting.
0:56:12 Can I do this email in five minutes before my next meeting?
0:56:15 Can I call my mom in this 10 minutes before my next meeting?
0:56:16 Right?
0:56:20 So like if you have little chunks of time squeezing in something that you have to do
0:56:24 and seeing if you could do it, also breaking your projects into daily challenges, you must
0:56:27 complete to win the game.
0:56:30 Let’s hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors.
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0:58:12 Young Improvinters, when I started my podcast, I had a volunteer team.
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0:59:42 If you’re anything like me, you didn’t start your business to spend all your time managing
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1:01:17 All right, my favorite part of today’s presentation, reducing stress and anxiety.
1:01:22 This I think is the most life changing stuff that I’m about to go over, that I was most
1:01:24 excited to go over with everyone.
1:01:28 So let’s talk about Benjamin Hardy’s The Gap and the Game.
1:01:33 Most people, especially highly ambitious people are unhappy because of how they measure their
1:01:35 progress.
1:01:39 As entrepreneurs, we’re constantly measuring ourselves on new goal posts.
1:01:43 Our goals are constantly moving and moving and moving and moving.
1:01:47 When I first had the idea to start a podcast, first I wanted to launch my podcast.
1:01:49 Then I wanted to get $10,000.
1:01:52 Then I wanted to be the top 200 podcaster.
1:01:54 Then I wanted to be a top 10 podcaster.
1:01:56 Then I wanted to have a podcast network.
1:01:59 And the goal just keeps moving and moving and moving.
1:02:04 And if you’re always measuring yourself against your future self, against this ideal that you
1:02:09 have, against your top competitor, you’re always in the gap.
1:02:13 You’re always thinking of yourself as a loser who’s not there yet.
1:02:18 You’re always thinking about everything that you aren’t yet, right?
1:02:25 So Benjamin says that we need to measure ourselves against our past selves.
1:02:30 When we measure ourselves against our past selves instead of our future selves, now we’re
1:02:31 in the game.
1:02:35 Now we’re doing game thinking because think about it.
1:02:40 You were so much different than you were last year, five years ago, 10 years ago.
1:02:41 You’ve gone so far.
1:02:44 So again, with my example, I’m a top 100 podcast.
1:02:47 Six years ago, I didn’t even have a podcast.
1:02:52 I’ve 1000xed my progress since then.
1:02:54 And that makes me feel really good and positive.
1:02:58 And when you feel really good and positive, you attract more of that in your life.
1:03:04 So measuring your current self versus your former self has enormous psychological benefits.
1:03:06 But you don’t want to stay there for too long.
1:03:09 You need to also think about your future.
1:03:13 So if you want to be happy, if you want to be content, if you want to be not stressed,
1:03:18 not anxious, you need to have a happy past and an exciting future.
1:03:19 That is the formula.
1:03:23 You need to have a happy past and an exciting future.
1:03:24 So let’s talk about reframing your past.
1:03:26 This is so important.
1:03:30 You can apply the Pareto principle, the 80/20 rule, to your past.
1:03:36 Chances are that 80% of how you’re framing your past is not really useful to you anymore.
1:03:40 Your memory and the narrative of your past is actually not fixed.
1:03:42 It’s constantly under revision.
1:03:47 And I talked to Layla Hermose and she mentioned that a lot of your own memories aren’t even
1:03:48 reality.
1:03:52 Like they’ve done studies where people don’t even remember reality correctly.
1:03:58 And your past is basically a story that you tell yourself that you decided is the story.
1:04:03 But you can change that story because your past determines how you feel and your self-esteem
1:04:04 in the present.
1:04:07 So you constantly want to be looking at the past with a gain mindset.
1:04:11 You want to try to reframe your past and frame it positively.
1:04:12 How did you grow?
1:04:13 How did you learn?
1:04:17 The other thing you want to think about is that you are not your past self.
1:04:20 Benjamin taught me this and this to me was mind blowing.
1:04:24 I couldn’t stop thinking about this because it’s so true.
1:04:28 You are literally not even the person you were 10 minutes ago, not even the person you
1:04:32 were yesterday, not the person you were last week, not the person you were last year.
1:04:33 You have different experiences.
1:04:34 You have different perspectives.
1:04:36 You’ve learned new things.
1:04:38 You are not your past self.
1:04:39 You made a mistake 10 years ago.
1:04:41 You are not that person anymore.
1:04:42 Somebody hurt you.
1:04:43 Somebody broke up with you.
1:04:45 Somebody did you wrong.
1:04:47 They’re not that same person anymore.
1:04:49 So who are you even mad at?
1:04:50 Who do you resent?
1:04:52 They don’t exist anymore.
1:04:54 The past doesn’t even exist, right?
1:04:57 And it’s up to you to think about what your past is.
1:04:58 How do you grow from it?
1:05:00 I’ll give you guys a quick story.
1:05:06 When I was 22, I got fired from an internship that I had at a radio station where I worked
1:05:07 for free for three years.
1:05:11 And when I first started getting interviewed on podcasts, I’d get asked about this.
1:05:15 And I used to tell this story about how I worked for Angie Martinez.
1:05:17 She kind of like abused me.
1:05:18 She was really tough.
1:05:20 She never paid me a dollar.
1:05:21 Then she fired me.
1:05:23 She blackballed me from the industry.
1:05:26 She tried to crush my dreams.
1:05:28 And I used to tell this story.
1:05:32 And when I talked to Benjamin, I realized, why am I still telling this story?
1:05:34 The story does not serve me.
1:05:39 And if I can look at this maturely, maybe I wasn’t ready for the job.
1:05:43 Maybe there was something wrong with me that Angie saw.
1:05:45 Angie taught me so much.
1:05:49 The whole reason why I’m so good at radio and production now is all the skills that
1:05:50 I learned from that experience.
1:05:53 Maybe she thought I was ungrateful.
1:05:54 And how much have I changed since then?
1:05:56 I’m not even that same person.
1:05:58 Angie’s not even that same person anymore.
1:06:03 So why am I telling this story and making myself feel like a victim and attracting more
1:06:05 of this victimhood in my life?
1:06:08 So I stopped telling that story.
1:06:11 So a positive past sets you up for a positive future.
1:06:14 I want you guys to think about what is a negative story you tell about your past that you will
1:06:16 start to reframe.
1:06:18 We talked about past.
1:06:20 Now we need to talk about future.
1:06:26 So it’s good to think about your past, reframe it, have a game mindset, retell the negative
1:06:30 stories that you have in your life, relearn the negative stories that you have about
1:06:36 yourself so that you can feel positive in the present and be able to be somebody who
1:06:38 you want to be in the future.
1:06:41 So many people don’t think about their future self.
1:06:44 You assume you’re going to be the same in 10, 20 or 30 years from now.
1:06:50 I’m literally nothing like the person I was 10 years ago, nothing like it, nothing like
1:06:52 I’m a different person.
1:06:54 You are going to be different than you think in five, 10 years.
1:06:59 You’re going to be wildly different person than you think if you’re intentional.
1:07:03 So you need to remember you’re never your past self and you’re always growing into your
1:07:05 future self.
1:07:06 So what does that mean?
1:07:08 You need to get clear and connected with your future self.
1:07:12 You need to decide who you want to be in the future.
1:07:15 And then you need to use that vision of the future to guide and direct who you want to
1:07:16 be.
1:07:23 One thing that we have as entrepreneurs is that we tend to define our future in only
1:07:25 the context of entrepreneurship.
1:07:27 Even I was just doing it right now.
1:07:31 I was talking about being a podcaster and how like that was all I was, right?
1:07:33 I’m not just a podcaster.
1:07:35 I’m a best friend.
1:07:36 I’m a sister.
1:07:38 I’m a lover.
1:07:39 There’s a lot of things to me.
1:07:40 I’m a workout addict.
1:07:43 I have more things to me than just an entrepreneur.
1:07:49 And it’s the more things that make you well-rounded, that make it so if something happens in your
1:07:54 business, you don’t have stress, you don’t have anxiety because that’s just one small
1:07:55 aspect of your life.
1:07:56 It’s not everything.
1:07:58 You need to start separating your identity from your business.
1:08:01 I need to realize that your work does not define you.
1:08:06 And that means you need to decide who your future self is in work and outside of work.
1:08:08 Who do you want to be?
1:08:09 How do you want to become a well-rounded person?
1:08:12 So this is where you guys bring out your pen and paper.
1:08:14 We’re going to do it together.
1:08:18 So this is called the I am I should future you exercise.
1:08:20 This is something I want everybody to do.
1:08:27 So get out of pen and paper, write a two column list, write I am on the top of one column,
1:08:30 write I should on the top of the other column.
1:08:35 For the I am column, I want you guys to imagine yourself in five years.
1:08:39 Write what you see about yourself, who you envision, who you want to be in five years
1:08:40 in the I am column.
1:08:43 So I am a loving dad.
1:08:45 I am an amazing daughter.
1:08:47 I am a talented painter.
1:08:54 I am an accomplished skier, whatever you want to be, you’re going to write it in the I am
1:08:55 column.
1:08:57 Do that first.
1:09:02 Once you’ve thought about who you want to be and remember, don’t just do things about
1:09:03 work.
1:09:08 Do things about your personal life because we need to start to acknowledge the fact
1:09:14 that we need to make time for relationships, make time for health and mental health.
1:09:16 Then you’re going to write I should.
1:09:20 What are the things you should be doing now to be more like the person you want to become
1:09:24 and think about as a daily, weekly or monthly task.
1:09:25 I’m a loving dad.
1:09:28 I should drive my son to school every day.
1:09:32 I should spend 30 minutes every day doing homework with my son.
1:09:33 I’m a talented painter.
1:09:36 I should take a painting class at least once a month.
1:09:43 I should practice painting every weekend because then we’re going to take those items as homework
1:09:49 and put it in your weekly and daily and monthly tracker and schedule it in your calendar and
1:09:52 become more of who you want to be because it doesn’t happen by accident.
1:09:55 It happens by intention.
1:10:00 I am column, I should column, write down the adjective and persona, the thing you want
1:10:06 to become more of, loving dad, loving mother, great sister, talented, pianist, whatever
1:10:11 the heck you want to be and then what are the things you should be doing today in the
1:10:17 present and think about it as a daily, weekly or monthly task to do this.
1:10:19 Really quick, we talked about the past.
1:10:21 We talked about the future.
1:10:23 Let’s talk about our present.
1:10:28 We also need to feel best in our present and when things are going wrong, it can be hard
1:10:32 to just focus on your future self and ignore all the things that are going wrong.
1:10:36 One of the things that you can do is practice self distancing to reduce your anxiety in
1:10:37 the moment.
1:10:43 Ethan Cross taught me about the Batman effect, so thinking about a superhero, which really
1:10:44 is the future you.
1:10:45 Who do you want to be in the future?
1:10:48 How would future you handle this situation?
1:10:53 If you were everything you wanted to be and you had all the strengths and you improved
1:10:56 as a person, how would you handle the current moment?
1:10:59 The other thing people say is to talk to yourself in the third person.
1:11:01 Talk to yourself like a best friend.
1:11:06 Self distancing gives you more space to think rationally, to think about the facts and view
1:11:12 a situation with less emotion, less passion so that you can just think clearly.
1:11:14 You might want to think about who is your superhero.
1:11:20 For example, Beyonce has Sasha Fiers so that she can go on stage and be sexy and be an
1:11:21 entertainer.
1:11:23 It helps because it’s not you that has to perform.
1:11:24 It’s Batman.
1:11:26 That’s a Batman effect.
1:11:31 Now, if you are struggling with stress and anxiety, you’re a perfect candidate to get
1:11:33 therapy with better health.
1:11:36 Not everything in life should be DIY.
1:11:42 Therapy really helps with stress, anxiety, burnout, relationship stressors.
1:11:44 It gets to the root cause of what’s causing your stress.
1:11:46 You really don’t want to do mental health DIY.
1:11:50 This webinar was great, but it’s not going to solve all your problems.
1:11:53 Now we’re going to talk about improving relationships.
1:11:58 The last section of today, so number one, Jordan Harbinger is one of my best friends.
1:12:03 He’s my mentor and he taught me about digging the well before you’re thirsty.
1:12:05 Here’s the thing with relationships.
1:12:06 You need them.
1:12:08 They’re your greatest insurance.
1:12:14 If your company shuts down, if you need a new job, if you need help, your network is
1:12:16 how you get it.
1:12:19 But the thing is, you can’t just reach out to people when you need something.
1:12:22 That’s very transactional and people won’t want to help you.
1:12:27 That means you’ve got to continually nourish and nurture your relationships before you
1:12:28 actually need them.
1:12:33 You want to grow your social capital by reaching out to people when you don’t need them.
1:12:38 One of the ways that Jordan provides value and is of service to his network is by introducing
1:12:41 his contacts to one another.
1:12:45 He has this program constantly running in the back of his mind where he’s identifying
1:12:50 people’s needs and finding somebody capable and trustworthy to help fulfill them.
1:12:54 If somebody tells him, “Oh, man, I wish I could figure out LinkedIn,” he’ll be like,
1:12:56 “Oh, I got the perfect friend.
1:12:57 Hala can help you.”
1:12:59 He’s always sending me these emails.
1:13:00 “Hey, I got this friend.
1:13:01 He’s interested in LinkedIn.
1:13:02 Do you want an introduction?”
1:13:06 He’s doing these, it’s called double opt-in intros where he’s asking me, “Do I want
1:13:07 an intro?”
1:13:08 He’s asking them if I want an intro.
1:13:11 Then he’s making an intro together because you don’t want to necessarily put, especially
1:13:14 if somebody is famous or something, you don’t want to put them on an email thread without
1:13:16 letting them know.
1:13:19 Also, people are more likely to help you if you keep in touch before you need their
1:13:20 help.
1:13:26 Again, you need a job and you’ve got some contacts that works at a Fortune 500 company.
1:13:28 You haven’t talked to him in six years.
1:13:29 You go ask him for a job.
1:13:31 He’s going to be like, “What the heck?
1:13:32 I don’t even know you.
1:13:34 Why would I recommend you for this?
1:13:35 I don’t even know you.”
1:13:40 But if every three months you’re reaching out, you’re giving him a helpful article, you’ve
1:13:45 made introductions to him, you’ve just asked him how he’s doing, then, “Oh, that Hala girl,
1:13:46 she’s so sweet.
1:13:47 She’s awesome.
1:13:48 Of course, I’ll recommend you.
1:13:49 She’s awesome.”
1:13:53 So you want to think through, what are all your dormant contacts?
1:13:57 Because right now, you probably don’t need anything from them.
1:14:01 Perfect time to make a list of your dormant contacts and reach out to them.
1:14:06 So go think back from your school times, from all your past jobs, from your neighbor’s
1:14:09 dad, whatever it is.
1:14:13 Write down all your most important dormant contacts that you have and get their contact
1:14:18 information and start creating a plan to rekindle that relationship before you need
1:14:19 them.
1:14:20 Dig the well before you’re thirsty.
1:14:26 Jordan also has an awesome practice called the Daily Connect for Method, and he does
1:14:30 this while he’s waiting online in Starbucks, walking to the gym.
1:14:34 He just does it in his free Q-time, he calls it.
1:14:38 So he basically gets four people from the bottom of his text messages, his social media
1:14:42 DMs, or email every day to reconnect and just see what they need.
1:14:44 And he sends them a very simple message, “Hey, it’s been a while.
1:14:46 What’s the latest with you?”
1:14:49 So when they reply, it just kick-starts a conversation.
1:14:53 It likely will lead to an organic opportunity to ask what they need to spot an opportunity
1:14:54 to be of service.
1:14:57 So this is called Connect 4.
1:15:02 And now this is the last portion of today’s session, and this is all about listening.
1:15:07 Nor are diverse people, especially for ADHD, I think one of the things that hurts us in
1:15:11 our relationships is our inability to listen properly.
1:15:17 And I think this impacts lots of people, because we’ve just been trained to be selfish, and
1:15:20 we, as people, like to talk about ourselves.
1:15:25 But listening is always about the other person, if you’re really trying to deepen a connection
1:15:30 and to make somebody basically like you more and want to spend time with you.
1:15:32 And there’s levels of listening.
1:15:35 So there’s inward listening, which is like the lowest level.
1:15:39 You hear what the other person says from your perspective, and you relate it to your own
1:15:40 experience.
1:15:46 So your friend says, “I really love Vietnamese food,” and you’re like, “Oh, me too.”
1:15:50 Or you say, “Oh, I never had it, but I like Thai food.”
1:15:51 That’s inward listening.
1:15:55 You hear what they say, and immediately you’re like, “What’s my experience about that?”
1:15:59 This form of listening helps us find commonalities and shared opinions.
1:16:03 It’s a key aspect of likeability, but you’re being very selfish in the conversation, you’re
1:16:06 not deepening your relationship.
1:16:12 inward listening is when you make it about the speaker, and you relate to what you hear
1:16:13 about what they said.
1:16:16 So I really love Vietnamese food.
1:16:17 Oh, really?
1:16:18 What’s your favorite plate?
1:16:19 Where do you like to eat it?
1:16:20 Oh, really?
1:16:21 I never had it.
1:16:22 What’s your favorite dish?
1:16:23 Is it spicy?
1:16:25 Is it not spicy?
1:16:29 So you’re asking them about their opinions, and you’re digging more about their interests,
1:16:32 and you’re showing that you care about them because you’re asking about them, and people
1:16:34 love to talk about themselves.
1:16:37 The last one is listening intuitively.
1:16:41 So this entails not only focusing on the words a person says, but the tone of their voice,
1:16:42 their body language, and even their energy.
1:16:45 So, oh my God, I love Vietnamese food.
1:16:48 Oh, you sound so excited about this.
1:16:51 Do you want to go to Vietnam or something?
1:16:52 Right?
1:16:55 Listening to what they say, and realizing that there’s more to what they’re saying aside
1:16:58 from just what they’re saying, listening to their voice, their body language.
1:16:59 Okay?
1:17:00 So these are the three levels of listening.
1:17:06 You want to practice getting up the ladder, making sure you are doing at least inward listening,
1:17:09 you are doing outward listening, and you’re listening intuitively.
1:17:14 So we’re going to do one game to close this out, and we’re going to find out what kind
1:17:15 of listener are you.
1:17:16 All right?
1:17:19 So one last game to close this out, and then we are done with today’s session.
1:17:21 So what kind of listener are you?
1:17:25 Rate the following listening scenarios from one to ten, with one being most like you,
1:17:26 and ten being the least.
1:17:27 All right?
1:17:28 Let’s get started.
1:17:30 Write yourself one to ten.
1:17:35 Your coworker is telling you about how her boyfriend of three years abruptly dumped her
1:17:36 the night before.
1:17:41 You appear to be listening, nodding, smiling when appropriate, making those sad eyes when
1:17:43 she tears up.
1:17:46 You even interject the occasional, “Uh-huh.”
1:17:49 But in your mind, you’re planning what to order for lunch.
1:17:50 This is like so me.
1:17:53 I’m like ten all the way in this one.
1:17:57 One means that you’re not really like it, and ten means you are like this.
1:17:59 This reminds you of you.
1:18:05 If you scored highly on this, you’re a faker, okay?
1:18:06 That’s your listening style.
1:18:07 You’re a faker.
1:18:11 On the surface, you appear to be fully engaged in what the other person is saying, but if
1:18:15 they only knew you were thinking about your lunch, you’re completely checked out and thinking
1:18:17 about other topics when people are talking to you.
1:18:20 This is like ADHD classic.
1:18:21 How to improve?
1:18:22 You got to be engaged.
1:18:26 You got to ask questions about what the other person is talking about.
1:18:29 This will help keep you engaged and make the other person feel hurt.
1:18:33 The other tip that I got from my ADHD coach is actually staring people in the eyes and
1:18:35 really looking at them in the eyes.
1:18:41 If you’re on the phone, staring at yourself in the mirror because it makes you feel like
1:18:44 you’re looking at somebody else in the eyes.
1:18:45 Ask questions.
1:18:51 Make yourself pay attention because your job is to do some outward listening, what we just
1:18:55 learned about, to ask questions to dig deeper, to keep yourself engaged, make the other person
1:18:56 feel hurt.
1:18:59 Make sure that you’re actually paying attention.
1:19:00 All right.
1:19:02 Rate yourself one through 10.
1:19:06 Your friend is telling you about a new marketing idea they want to pitch to their boss.
1:19:10 You feed off their enthusiasm and start spreading out your own ideas.
1:19:13 No need to wait for them to finish their thoughts or even pause to take a breath.
1:19:17 You need to get all of your ideas out before you forget them and your brilliance on this
1:19:19 topic is lost forever.
1:19:22 It’s so funny how everyone’s different, right?
1:19:26 Some of these I’m like, I don’t relate to at all and some of them are like, it’s totally
1:19:27 me.
1:19:28 Okay.
1:19:29 The interrupter.
1:19:32 No need to wait for the other person to finish their sentence.
1:19:34 You’ve got something really important to say.
1:19:37 You better get your thoughts out before you forget them.
1:19:38 How to improve.
1:19:42 You’ve got to turn your attention away from your own ideas and switch your focus to the
1:19:43 speaker.
1:19:45 Try to understand their motivation instead of your own.
1:19:47 Again, outward listening.
1:19:48 Ask about them.
1:19:49 Don’t make it about you.
1:19:52 You want to deepen your relationships and make people like you more, want to spend more
1:19:55 time with you, care about you as a friend.
1:20:01 You can’t just be interrupting people and not letting them speak their thoughts.
1:20:05 There’s time and place for you to give your ideas, not when somebody is having their own
1:20:09 idea that they probably spent a lot more time thinking about than you.
1:20:13 Your boss is presenting the next team project.
1:20:16 Everyone else is paying attention, taking notes, but you just keep wondering, where’s
1:20:17 his logic?
1:20:19 Does this even make sense?
1:20:22 Why did she use that word?
1:20:25 Your boss seems very excited about the new project, but her feelings are not important
1:20:26 to you.
1:20:30 You just want to understand the overall theme and logic of what she’s talking about.
1:20:32 The logical listener.
1:20:36 You can barely focus on what the other person is talking about because you are too busy trying
1:20:39 to uncover the logic and pattern of what they’re saying.
1:20:40 Where are they going with this?
1:20:41 You ask.
1:20:45 You often miss parts of the story because you’re just searching for your logic.
1:20:48 You got to get out of your own head and connect with the speaker.
1:20:54 Maybe offer a compliment, ask a personal question, also practice remembering the information.
1:20:57 It’s okay to order it, but don’t judge it.
1:21:00 Just listen before you judge.
1:21:02 Listen wholeheartedly before you judge.
1:21:06 All right, your significant other starts telling you about their crazy day at the office, but
1:21:09 before long, you have hijacked the conversation.
1:21:11 You had even a crazier day.
1:21:12 You’re sure of it.
1:21:13 They won’t mind you sharing your story.
1:21:15 It’s probably more interesting than their story anyway.
1:21:17 We’ve got a lot of high scores in this one.
1:21:19 There’s a Fisher.
1:21:23 You listen to others while seeking out the perfect opportunity to jump in and show them
1:21:25 how their story relates back to you.
1:21:27 You often say things like, “The same thing happened to me.
1:21:29 Let me tell you about the time.”
1:21:30 How to improve.
1:21:34 Fill that lull in the conversation with a question or clarification or offer some words
1:21:37 to show you understand their experience.
1:21:41 Leave your ego out of the conversation and find other ways to feel good about yourself.
1:21:46 Your son’s teacher is explaining what she will be focusing on over the next quarter while
1:21:50 she’s talking or thinking, “What’s wrong with this picture?
1:21:52 I just know there’s a flaw in her argument somewhere.
1:21:54 I’m not argumentative.
1:21:56 I just like a good debate.”
1:21:58 You’re just trying to figure out what’s wrong with what she’s saying.
1:22:03 All right, if you scored high on this one, you are the rebuttal maker.
1:22:08 You don’t consider yourself argumentative, though you’re always accused of being difficult.
1:22:12 You have a knack for finding what’s wrong with what other people are saying and you feel
1:22:15 obligated to let them know about it.
1:22:19 Look for the why of what the speaker is talking about rather than the what’s wrong, letting
1:22:22 the conversation naturally run its course will ultimately yield the answer that you’re
1:22:24 looking for.
1:22:28 This hopefully is eye-opening to make you think about like, “Oh, man, I really need to stop
1:22:29 doing these bad habits.”
1:22:30 Right?
1:22:31 All right, last one.
1:22:35 Your coworker combines in the way that they’re considering leaving their job to travel for
1:22:38 a few months, but they’re not sure if it’s a good time.
1:22:41 This is an easy problem, you think, “Actually, it’s not even a problem.
1:22:43 I can solve this for you in no time.”
1:22:47 By the end of the conversation, they’ll be set straight and much happier.
1:22:50 All right, we’ve got some 10s, we’ve got some low scores.
1:22:52 You are the advice giver.
1:22:54 You see yourself as a great giver advice.
1:22:58 You love to help other people with problems even when they didn’t even ask for guidance.
1:23:01 You often don’t even need to hear their full story to know what they should do.
1:23:03 You’re just that good.
1:23:06 Okay, this reminds me of Tim.
1:23:10 Practice sympathy instead of problem-solving, giving the other person room and time to find
1:23:14 their own answer will be better for them and for the relationship between the two of you.
1:23:17 You may even get a thanks for listening.
1:23:21 Nobody likes to be given advice when they didn’t ask for advice, especially if you don’t
1:23:22 know anything about the topic.
1:23:26 You just want to listen, especially when somebody has a problem.
1:23:31 Most of the time, they just want you to listen, unless they explicitly ask you for advice.
1:23:35 All right, guys, that is the session.
1:23:39 If you guys want to thank me, write a review, a five-star review on Apple.
1:23:44 If you guys felt like, man, this was an awesome two hours with Hala, write me an Apple podcast
1:23:45 review.
1:23:50 Check out BetterHelp, they are the sponsors of today’s presentation, would not be happening
1:23:51 without them.
1:23:56 If you got value from this, you’re definitely going to get value from having therapy, being
1:23:59 able to talk to somebody one-on-one every single week.
1:24:02 Make sure you avoid burnout, have somebody to talk to that’s not going to judge you.
1:24:04 It is really affordable.
1:24:09 You will be less stressed out and be more productive and be happier.
1:24:11 It will make you money.
1:24:14 Investing in yourself and your mental health is good for you.
1:24:15 It’s good for business.
1:24:19 All right, guys, until next time, bye all.
1:24:20 .
1:24:30 [Music]
1:24:33 (upbeat music)

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0:01:13 900 million people in 142 countries feel unfulfilled in what they do.
0:01:17 How many of us are intentional about where we want to take our lives?
0:01:23 We pursue what we should do for a career versus what’s really driving the passion inside of
0:01:24 us.
0:01:30 And when we chase the money, the possessions, and we realize that none of that is bringing
0:01:36 us fulfillment or happiness, we’re left with this profound sense of quiet desperation.
0:01:39 Passionstruck is really about how do you close that gap.
0:01:58 Young Improfiters, do you ever feel stuck?
0:02:00 Do you feel like you’re just settling for good enough?
0:02:05 Do you feel like you really haven’t found your North Star in your life or your career?
0:02:09 Well, today we’re going to talk all about passion and purpose.
0:02:13 Joining us on the podcast today is John R. Miles, who has followed his passions throughout
0:02:21 his career, going from the U.S. Navy to becoming a C-suite executive in top Fortune 500 companies,
0:02:25 to now being an accomplished podcaster and new author.
0:02:30 He’s got a new book called Passionstruck, 12 Powerful Principles to Unlock Your Purpose
0:02:32 and Ignite Your Most Intentional Life.
0:02:35 John, welcome to Young Improfiting Podcast.
0:02:38 Hala, thank you so much for having me.
0:02:42 Your show is incredible, and it’s an honor to be here to serve your community.
0:02:44 I’m so excited for this conversation.
0:02:46 I think it’s going to be so valuable for everyone.
0:02:49 So I want to just dive in right into the meat and potatoes of today’s interview, which
0:02:53 is all about becoming Passionstruck.
0:02:55 So you’ve got this very popular podcast called Passionstruck.
0:02:57 I always see you around the charts.
0:03:01 You’re doing an incredible job teaching people about entrepreneurship and how to have purpose
0:03:02 and passion.
0:03:05 You also have a new book called Passionstruck.
0:03:09 And so I’m curious to understand, what does Passionstruck mean to you, and why are you
0:03:12 so compelled to teach on the topic?
0:03:16 I love this question, and thank you for it, and I’ll give you the origin story.
0:03:23 So first to answer it, Passionstruck is about having an intense, what I say, almost inexplorable
0:03:29 drive to mold one’s life in the pursuit of becoming our ideal self.
0:03:36 Now this phrase wasn’t even in my vocabulary up until about four years ago.
0:03:43 And as I was on my own journey of how do I cross the gap from where I was, which is
0:03:49 really in the state of being my odd self, to going on my own journey of trying to become
0:03:56 my ideal self, I started studying luminaries, many that people on the show will have heard
0:04:02 of, people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Oprah, et cetera.
0:04:10 And I started to wonder in my research, what allowed them to break through and to themselves
0:04:17 reach this state where they are willing to put it all on the line with the goal of taking
0:04:22 on a problem that they see so inherently needs to be solved that they’re willing to devote
0:04:23 themselves to it.
0:04:28 And I was talking to a friend of mine, Keith Crotch, he founded a company named Arriba,
0:04:32 was the CEO of DocuSign in case people have heard of his name before.
0:04:38 And he says to me, “Well, it sounds like what’s happening is you’re going from being stuck
0:04:41 in your life to becoming Passionstruck.”
0:04:48 And that phrase just hit me and from that point forward, I knew it was the one that
0:04:53 I was destined to use, but I really feared it wasn’t going to be available until I found
0:04:57 it that it was miraculously on GoDaddy.
0:04:58 I love that.
0:05:03 And here you are now, this whole journey, ten-year journey of working on Passionstruck.
0:05:05 So you have a really impressive background.
0:05:10 You started in the military, in the Navy, you went into corporate, you had C-suite roles,
0:05:16 senior executive roles at big companies like Lowe’s and SwissWatch, very, very impressive.
0:05:21 And I’d love to understand throughout all these phases of your journey, were you Passionstruck,
0:05:24 were you more Passionstruck in one experience than another experience?
0:05:27 I’d love to learn a little bit more about your career journey in that way.
0:05:34 One of the things I talk about a lot on the podcast and in the book is this need to reinvent
0:05:35 ourselves.
0:05:39 And I think it’s something that more and more people are going to experience on a faster
0:05:41 pace than even I did.
0:05:47 But I went through periods of my career, some of them self-induced, some of them induced
0:05:53 by external circumstances where I found myself needing to reinvent myself.
0:05:56 Coming out of the Naval Academy, I was absolutely Passionstruck.
0:06:02 I had been selected as one of only a few people who got a coveted billet to go work for the
0:06:05 National Security Agency.
0:06:10 And the backstory for me is I had always wanted to be a Navy SEAL, but I had some traumatic
0:06:17 brain injuries when I was playing rugby that precluded me medically from going that path.
0:06:24 But being an officer, especially working for the NSA, it’s kind of like being the CFO
0:06:28 in a company or the head of HR, where you cut across all the different disciplines of
0:06:29 a company.
0:06:33 I got to do the same thing when it came to the Navy and Marine Corps.
0:06:41 And so I was able to not only get the opportunity to work directly with SEALs, and I was assigned
0:06:43 to Naval Special War for Unit 10.
0:06:51 But I also got to deploy on aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, submarines, aircraft,
0:06:57 and really had a very fun Passionstruck part of my life.
0:06:59 And I wanted that to continue.
0:07:03 And so when I got out of the military, I did so only because I’d gotten an appointment
0:07:06 to become an FBI agent.
0:07:11 And I’m literally Thursday or Friday the week before I’m supposed to report on a Monday.
0:07:17 I just left military service when I get a call from my Detailer telling me, John, Congress
0:07:19 can’t pass the budget.
0:07:21 Your class, unfortunately, has been recycled.
0:07:27 My naive sense is thinking, OK, I’ll go back in a couple months.
0:07:32 What I found out in a couple months was that it was literally going to be three to four
0:07:33 years later.
0:07:35 And so I quickly had to pivot.
0:07:41 This led me to join Booz Allen, a management consulting firm, which turned out to be a
0:07:42 blessing in disguise.
0:07:49 It was such a great transition for me because they had a lot of military veterans and knew
0:07:51 how to transition them.
0:07:54 And then I went from there to Anderson Consulting.
0:07:59 And so that was a really passion-struck period of my time learning the corporate world and
0:08:03 really changing my trajectory from where I thought it was going to go.
0:08:08 And then I would say I faced another pivot that I never expected.
0:08:15 When I was at Anderson, we had about half our office dedicated to supporting Enron.
0:08:20 And when Enron had their terrible fall, so did Anderson.
0:08:25 And so I found myself in a matter of weeks, again, pivoting, having to reinvent myself.
0:08:31 And this time, I went into the Fortune 500 world first as a chief information security
0:08:36 officer, then went to Lowe’s, then eventually to Dell.
0:08:41 And during that journey, I was absolutely passion-struck until I would say the tail end
0:08:48 of Lowe’s going into Dell, where I really found myself starting to experience being in
0:08:54 this quandary that Henry David Thoreau describes as quiet desperation, where I really found
0:08:57 myself stuck down a career path.
0:09:01 That looking back, I never expected myself to take.
0:09:06 And now I couldn’t seem to pull myself from its grasp.
0:09:13 And that really led me into a period of soul-searching where I wasn’t passion-struck on the journey
0:09:19 to finding myself again and eventually creating this brand at the back end of it.
0:09:21 As you were talking, I had an idea come to my head.
0:09:23 I don’t know if you already say this.
0:09:26 You can be passion-struck or you can be passion-stuck, right?
0:09:30 And it just really depends how you’re feeling throughout your career.
0:09:31 So talk to us.
0:09:33 What are some of the feelings of feeling passion-struck?
0:09:37 What do you feel when you’re in the zone, you’re passion-struck?
0:09:43 You have this deep, exceeded desire that goes beyond ambition.
0:09:48 It’s this relentless quest for growth, for impact, fulfillment.
0:09:55 It’s the kind of passion that transforms anything that you face into stepping stones of growth
0:09:58 and really discovery.
0:10:03 And in order to do this, there are a number of mindset shifts and behavior shifts that
0:10:06 are required to achieve this state.
0:10:11 And it’s fundamentally rewiring how we think, how we feel, and act.
0:10:20 And most importantly, intentionally aligning our values with our long-term ambitions and
0:10:27 aspirations and making sure that they are all interconnected, not as it often happens
0:10:29 where they’re independent variables.
0:10:32 So you were alluding to this.
0:10:36 At the end of your corporate career at Lowe’s, you started to feel stuck.
0:10:39 And I learned that something really triggered this.
0:10:41 It was a couple of traumatic experiences.
0:10:46 You actually were faced with an armed robber in your house, and you had a gun pointed to
0:10:47 your head.
0:10:49 And at that point, everything changed for you.
0:10:53 So talk to us about that moment, some of the events that happened that led you to eventually
0:10:57 become an entrepreneur and what you were feeling that day.
0:10:58 Yeah.
0:11:02 So this was just a normal Tuesday.
0:11:08 And I was in my normal routine, took my daughter to school, went to the gym.
0:11:10 At this time, I was going to Orange Theory.
0:11:15 And then something happened that was completely out of normal.
0:11:20 We had an electrical fire at the gym that started in their air conditioning systems
0:11:25 that forced me to go home earlier than I typically would have.
0:11:33 Unbeknownst to me, the person who ended up confronting me had been canvassing my whereabouts
0:11:35 and looking at my patterns.
0:11:40 And it used this moment when they knew I would be away to come into the house.
0:11:47 And so I walked in on them unexpectedly for them and unexpectedly for me.
0:11:51 And you’d kind of get that feeling in the back of your mind that something’s just not
0:11:52 right.
0:11:57 And I had gotten in the house to change clothes so I could do a different workout routine.
0:12:02 And when I went up the stairs, was confronted with that burglar pointing what turns out to
0:12:04 be my own handgun at me.
0:12:10 And when that happens, I don’t care whether it’s in combat or in this situation, you’re
0:12:12 forced into a decision.
0:12:17 Either you’re going to charge up the stairs and try to take them out and there’s probably
0:12:23 a low likelihood of having a positive outcome without yourself being shot.
0:12:28 Or there’s how do you elude this threat to live another day?
0:12:36 And in the split second that I had chose that second option and was able to elude them and
0:12:37 get out of there.
0:12:44 And I guess the double whammy of what I experienced was just a few days later, I remember spending
0:12:48 the weekend with my really good friend, Tim, talking about all that had happened.
0:12:50 I was starting to process it.
0:12:57 Monday morning comes around, I’m in New York, ready to do some interviewing and a keynote.
0:13:01 When my phone starts blowing up, I answer it and it turns out that my friend Tim, who
0:13:06 had been there to comfort me, had committed suicide.
0:13:12 And so in a matter of five or six days, I had these two traumatic events really hit
0:13:20 me and it caused me to just awaken inside and realize that my life could have been over.
0:13:28 Tim’s life just ended, I need to rethink everything I’m doing and to chart a new course.
0:13:35 So that was really the impetus for me then spending a couple of years really doing profound
0:13:38 introspection into how I wanted to transform my life.
0:13:43 I want to stick on this a bit because I feel like it’s so important for us to be the best
0:13:45 versions of ourselves.
0:13:50 We really need to think positively about our past and reframe our past.
0:13:56 And I know that you had a lot of self-blame turn up after these events.
0:14:01 Can you talk to us about some of the self-blame you were facing and how you were able to reframe
0:14:03 your past a bit to move forward?
0:14:04 Yeah.
0:14:08 So this is something I really talk about in the first principle in my book, which I call
0:14:15 “Becoming a Mission Angler.” And the origin of this phrase, “Mission Angler,” is I wanted
0:14:22 to pick phrases or metaphors that people could understand so when they read the chapters
0:14:25 or heard about them, they would remember them.
0:14:31 So where I live here in Tampa Bay, we live in some of the best fishing area in the world.
0:14:37 And my friends who are really master anglers, they don’t just get on the boat on the weekend,
0:14:43 in any direction at any time, and just go and hope they’re going to catch fish.
0:14:49 They go out with a very disciplined, intentional plan of knowing what’s in season, knowing
0:14:56 where it’s located, knowing the tides, knowing the moon phases, et cetera, and being extremely
0:14:59 intentional about their pursuit.
0:15:04 But how many of us in our own lives are that intentional about where we want to take our
0:15:09 lives? And in my case, it wasn’t only finding that direction.
0:15:13 There was also a huge gap that I had.
0:15:19 And this was a gap where earlier in my life, I had experienced profound trauma, both as
0:15:26 a child in combat and then later on in my life as we had just discussed.
0:15:33 And for me, it was really dealing with this trauma that I had put aside, because when I
0:15:39 was growing up, and especially when I was in the military, we were told to suppress it,
0:15:43 to not bring it up, you’re going to lose your security clearances, people weren’t going
0:15:50 to respect you, this PTSD that everyone keeps talking about doesn’t really exist, et cetera.
0:15:55 And so all this stuff from earlier in my life, I had buried deep down.
0:16:00 And when these two incidents happened in that short period of time, not only did it
0:16:06 on Earth, I guess the emotions from those two circumstances, but it brought up everything
0:16:07 in my past.
0:16:13 So as I looked at becoming this mission angler in my life, I realized that there was this
0:16:15 gap that I had to cross.
0:16:19 And Dr. Benjamin Hardy writes about this in his book, “The Gap vs. the Gain.”
0:16:27 And so much in our life, we think about ourselves and we compare ourselves to other people.
0:16:33 And when we’re constantly comparing ourselves to others, we actually find ourselves in the
0:16:34 gap.
0:16:39 It would be like you or I trying to compare ourselves as podcasters to the success of
0:16:41 Joe Rogan.
0:16:45 If we do that, we’re constantly going to be in the gap.
0:16:50 Whereas the gain is where we’re looking at where we are in our life compared to where
0:16:54 we were in the past and the incremental gains that we’re making.
0:17:01 And so for me to cross this chasm of where I had been, which was living out, if you look
0:17:08 at self discrepancy theory, my “ought self,” which is who I thought I should be, I wanted
0:17:11 to get to who I could be, which was my ideal self.
0:17:16 And the starting point for that was dealing with unresolved trauma.
0:17:24 And so after I experienced those two things, I then went through two years of just intense
0:17:32 cognitive processing therapy, EMDR, prolonged exposure therapy, and a number of other modalities
0:17:36 to start working on getting rid of those stuck points that were holding me back.
0:17:41 And one thing that I like to tell people is that we have to have a fixed point that we
0:17:42 start from.
0:17:49 And when we start mastering it, that’s when it opens up opportunities for us to pursue
0:17:54 other areas in our lives where we can also change the course of our lives, whether it’s
0:17:59 our health, our relationships, our career, our finances, et cetera.
0:18:01 I love that you brought up Benjamin Hardy.
0:18:06 He is one of my favorite guests who’s been on the show three times, and you brought up
0:18:07 the gap in the game.
0:18:10 It’s so true when we’re living to these ideals.
0:18:14 For example, I want to become as successful as Joe Rogan.
0:18:18 And every time you reach another level in your career, that target just keeps moving,
0:18:20 moving, moving, moving.
0:18:22 And you never actually reach that target.
0:18:27 And so if you’re always comparing yourself to the future version that you want to be
0:18:32 or the person that you want to be like a competitor, like you were saying, you’re really just in
0:18:37 that gap rather than being in the game, which is measuring yourself against your past.
0:18:41 The other thing that Benjamin Hardy talks about is becoming your future you and the
0:18:44 fact that you’re not even your past self anymore.
0:18:49 You’re not the same person that you were last week, let alone last year, let alone 10 years
0:18:50 ago.
0:18:57 So you have permission to forgive your past self, to reinvent your past story, and your
0:19:02 memory is, and your narrative of your past is constantly changing.
0:19:05 So he applies the 80/20 rule, the Pareto principle, to your past.
0:19:08 80% of your past probably doesn’t serve you.
0:19:10 So what is holding you back?
0:19:15 How can you reframe your past so that you can move forward and attract more of what you
0:19:19 want to be in the future and be more like the future self that you want to be?
0:19:21 So I love that you brought up Benjamin Hardy.
0:19:22 He’s great.
0:19:26 He’s been on my show as well and that whole mission angler and what I was talking about
0:19:31 with self discrepancy theory is really what he talks about in future self.
0:19:37 It’s really how do you rebuild this image of yourself, this ideal self that you want
0:19:43 to create as your future self and do it in a way where you’re not looking back on your
0:19:50 past and the mistakes that you’ve made, rather you’re looking at yourself anew at the opportunities
0:19:53 you have to pursue becoming who you would like to be.
0:19:54 Okay.
0:19:56 So let’s move on to your new book, Passionstrike.
0:20:00 You quote Henry David Thoreau at the start of your book and argue that most people today
0:20:03 lead lives of quiet desperation.
0:20:08 So why do you think most people are hesitant to pursue their own dreams and passions?
0:20:12 Well, I think it’s we get stuck in becoming our odd self.
0:20:22 We get stuck in this life oftentimes where we pursue what we should do for a career versus
0:20:26 what’s really driving the passion inside of us.
0:20:30 And the farther we get into these careers, I call them portfolio careers, the harder
0:20:36 it is to change because all of a sudden now we have the car we drive, the house we live
0:20:43 in, the financial commodities that we’ve built up, the social standing, the family we’re
0:20:44 supporting.
0:20:49 And we start seeing that gap between where we are and where we want to be and it keeps
0:20:50 growing.
0:20:55 And we’re so comfortable in the life that we’re in that it just compounds itself.
0:21:01 And what ends up happening over time though is we start realizing that the things that
0:21:05 we thought were bringing us joy bring us anything but.
0:21:11 And we wind up feeling more and more like we wake up in the morning and that the actions
0:21:14 we’re taking, they just don’t matter.
0:21:18 We don’t matter and our lives don’t hold significance.
0:21:25 And I think that’s exactly what Henry David Thoreau was talking about when we chase these
0:21:31 extrinsic things that life teases us with, that we think are going to bring us joy,
0:21:36 the titles, the money, the possessions, whatever have you.
0:21:42 And we realize when we get there that none of that amassive wealth that we’ve had is
0:21:46 bringing us fulfillment or happiness, et cetera.
0:21:52 And then we’re left with this profound sense of emptiness or as he calls it, quiet desperation.
0:21:56 And if you look at Gallup, it’s a clear indication that this is going on.
0:22:03 Their surveys evaluated 1.3 billion people across the world and they found that 900 million
0:22:07 people in 142 countries feel unfulfilled in what they do.
0:22:13 And another thing I’d like to cite here is research from Tom Gillovich, who’s a psychologist
0:22:17 at Cornell who’s been studying people and what causes their regrets.
0:22:24 And what he found was an astounding 76% of people that he surveyed in their third trimester
0:22:29 of life all cited that their biggest regrets stem from the same thing.
0:22:32 It’s not the mistakes that they made in life.
0:22:40 It was not pursuing the what-ifs, the should-haves, not going after becoming their ideal self.
0:22:45 And it mirrors what Gallup found and it mirrors what David Thoreau says.
0:22:49 So then passion struck is really about how do you close that gap?
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0:24:36 Young Improviders, chances are, if you’re listening to this show, you’ve got an expertise
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0:26:19 Yeah, fam, if you’re anything like me, you didn’t start your business to spend all your
0:26:24 time managing finances, budgeting, invoicing and tax prep.
0:26:27 Not exactly the fun part of entrepreneurship.
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0:27:53 I love that, and thank you for sharing all that data.
0:27:58 I’m curious to understand how you feel about the state of the American dream.
0:28:03 I know you mentioned it in your book, and I had Dean Graziozian and people like Harley
0:28:09 Finkelstein from Shopify, and they all believe that American dream is live and well.
0:28:11 It’s no better time to be an entrepreneur.
0:28:15 Lots of people are able to explore their passions because of the internet and the abundance
0:28:17 of the internet and things like that.
0:28:22 I’m curious to understand how you feel about entrepreneurship and the American dream and
0:28:24 the state of everything right now.
0:28:28 Well, I respect all the people that you just said very much.
0:28:34 However, I completed and wholeheartedly disagree on the state of affairs.
0:28:36 Dean’s got a couple of younger kids.
0:28:40 I happen to have a couple of kids who are 20 and 26.
0:28:45 We’re a little bit further ahead of them and are experiencing the world right now head
0:28:46 on.
0:28:53 I have to tell you, if you look at the data and you look at what I put in my book, entrepreneurship,
0:28:59 the pursuit of small business, has been on a three-decade decline, not only in the United
0:29:02 States but in most of Western civilization.
0:29:08 There’s almost this inverse ratio of people going into large companies instead of pursuing
0:29:13 the entrepreneurial path that really took the United States coming out of World War
0:29:16 II to the precipice of greatness.
0:29:21 Fewer and fewer people are going down the path of entrepreneurship or taking the risk
0:29:23 of doing something on their own.
0:29:29 It’s easy to see why because you come out of an MBA at Harvard and you’re offered the
0:29:36 opportunity to go into a hedge fund or into a management consulting fund, private equity,
0:29:39 and they give you all this money.
0:29:45 So many people see that and they don’t want to make that riskier choice of going down
0:29:46 the entrepreneurial path.
0:29:48 They take the safe path.
0:29:51 This has been going on and compounding.
0:29:57 What you see is the bigger companies have more and more people flocking to them and the smaller
0:30:03 companies and entrepreneurs keep on dwindling and the gap has only gotten worse.
0:30:12 What that creates now is an environment where fewer and fewer people of my son’s age, 26,
0:30:14 I talk to all his friends.
0:30:21 None of them see how they can go right now unless they’re in a select few, how they’re
0:30:24 going to make the American dream a reality.
0:30:28 What’s happening is we have outsourced so much to other countries.
0:30:34 So many of the fundamental middle class jobs that made America what it was, that we’re
0:30:41 collapsing that and now we’re getting more and more into a growing upper class and a
0:30:49 growing lower class with a completely shortened or eliminated middle class that was really
0:30:51 driving the country before.
0:30:57 Now, I believe that we are also on the cusp of a major change.
0:31:01 I think history repeats itself.
0:31:07 Just as you had people who had individual professions, whether it was a blacksmith back
0:31:13 in the day, a printer, something like that, I think we are going to have in the future
0:31:17 more people being solo entrepreneurs.
0:31:24 This is something I do agree with Dean on that because of technology, because of where
0:31:31 digital is going, et cetera, we have the opportunity to retrain people to be their own bosses.
0:31:35 I think more and more people can be solo entrepreneurs.
0:31:41 I really think that that’s where things could go and will go, especially as we’re faced
0:31:47 with more automation, AI, robotics, et cetera, displacing what is going to become hundreds
0:31:51 of millions of people over the next five to 10 years.
0:31:56 How does your concept of passion really relate to the fact that it seems like you’re trying
0:31:57 to create more entrepreneurs?
0:31:58 Yes.
0:32:06 I am trying to really say that what I found for my career, and I chose that path that
0:32:13 I’m describing, where I joined the big companies, I went for more of the comfort and the security
0:32:18 of having the check, of having the stability, that that is going to be harder and harder
0:32:25 to do for people in the future, because unless we change the way that companies are evaluating
0:32:29 how they’re viewed by shareholders and the boards that are running them, it’s really
0:32:35 driven by creating shareholder value, which you do by top line growth and eliminating
0:32:41 or impacting your bottom line and trying to take expenses out.
0:32:45 All the companies that I’ve ever been in, if we could eliminate headcount, which is the
0:32:53 biggest cost burden that you have in a company, you’re going to do it 99 times out of 100.
0:32:59 There are some companies, Accenture is a great example, where as they’re bringing AI into
0:33:07 Accenture, they’re trying to take the jobs that can be automated through AI and retrain
0:33:15 those positions that they’re really using the AI to make decisions and to really expand
0:33:17 the role of their jobs.
0:33:23 I think far and wide, more companies are going to use it just to take cost out of the businesses,
0:33:28 which means more people’s livelihoods are going to be at threat.
0:33:34 This is why I’m pushing people to wake up and realize that the one thing that we have
0:33:39 as being human beings that differentiates us from all the other species is that we are
0:33:43 really the ultimate learning machines.
0:33:49 We need to get into the habit of becoming constant learners to stay ahead of the digital
0:33:55 trends which are only going to grow faster and to reposition ourselves, as I was alluding
0:34:02 to earlier, in a way that instead of being at the mercy of a large company that we’re
0:34:08 working for, being a solo entrepreneur and really choosing our clientele that we want
0:34:15 to serve, so that if one would fire us for whatever reason, we have safety nets in place
0:34:18 that can protect us and our livelihood.
0:34:22 This reminds me about a chapter in your book about comfort.
0:34:25 You say that comfort is the enemy of adaptability.
0:34:30 Can you talk to us about this, why we need to be adaptable as entrepreneurs, and also
0:34:34 maybe some examples of people who have been adaptable and who have thrived?
0:34:38 The person I really speak about in this whole chapter is Jeff Bezos.
0:34:44 It’s interesting because when I started out this chapter, I originally wrote it about
0:34:46 originality.
0:34:52 Adaptability wasn’t part of it, but as I read the chapter and really thought about it and
0:34:58 what causes the people that we see who are passion-struck to excel, it’s really this
0:35:02 combination of originality with adaptability.
0:35:09 In this chapter, I really talk about Jeff’s journey through where he was himself being
0:35:13 an investor to wanting to start Amazon.
0:35:16 A lot of people think when you hear about Amazon, it doesn’t sound like an original
0:35:18 idea to me.
0:35:24 The original idea behind Amazon wasn’t being an online bookstore.
0:35:31 Amazon has already existed with Borders and Barnes & Noble to some point.
0:35:36 What Bezos really wanted to create was the everything store, but he was smart enough to
0:35:41 realize that if that is what his longer-term goal was, he had to have a starting point
0:35:47 that would allow him to enter the market at some point where consumers were used to doing
0:35:52 something, books, that he could do more efficiently on the internet.
0:35:56 By doing so, he could start perfecting his supply chain, et cetera.
0:36:01 I think the other original thing that people don’t really consider when they think about
0:36:07 Amazon is Amazon is really a data company, more than it is a retailer.
0:36:13 First, he started to grab data on individuals who, using the platform, he then created the
0:36:15 prime platform.
0:36:21 At the same time, they created AWS, which is now housing everyone’s data.
0:36:26 He was using that power of data to really power all the algorithms that were deciding
0:36:33 what products were being put in front of people and to really customize each person’s view.
0:36:40 Along this path of originality, he also had to adapt to competitors coming after him,
0:36:46 the biggest being Walmart earlier in his history, obviously the bookstores.
0:36:53 He had to adapt to regulators coming after him, people wanting to try to disrupt his
0:36:56 business model.
0:37:02 I think the way he ran the company, and it’s still being run this way, was phenomenal in
0:37:07 that he really started to create entrepreneurs within Amazon.
0:37:14 It’s a great case study of entrepreneurs in the way that he would have a need that he
0:37:20 saw and would farm it out to three or four different groups who didn’t know that they
0:37:24 were getting the same assignment and then have all of them come to him to give him the
0:37:32 most original idea with the most adaptable way to undertake it that Amazon could then
0:37:35 take, implement, and grow from.
0:37:41 I think Jeff Bezos is a great example of combining this originality with the adaptability that
0:37:47 you’re going to have to have in your life or your business, especially in the future.
0:37:53 The adaptability really harkens back to what I was talking about when I was describing
0:37:55 the need to reinvent yourself.
0:38:01 That reinvention and adapting to the way that the market and technology are unfolding is
0:38:06 going to be paramount to everyone who’s listening to this podcast.
0:38:10 This reminds me of a really famous quote by another awesome entrepreneur, Elon Musk.
0:38:15 He says, “Running a startup is like chewing glass and staring into the abyss.
0:38:19 After a while, you stop staring, but the glass chewing never ends.”
0:38:23 Really, what he means by this glass chewing is that as an entrepreneur, you always think
0:38:24 you got to be innovative.
0:38:25 You got to be creative.
0:38:26 You got to do new stuff.
0:38:30 You want the sexy thing, the exciting thing, but a lot of running your company is chewing
0:38:35 glass or doing the things that you know you have to do, the problem solving, adapting,
0:38:39 adaptability, having your nose to the ground, understanding what’s actually good for your
0:38:43 business, not just what’s new and exciting.
0:38:48 The other part, staring into the abyss, is really all about your facing extermination.
0:38:50 90% of startups fail.
0:38:51 You’re scared of failure.
0:38:56 Eventually, that goes away once you have more stability, but you’re always having to combat
0:38:57 the problems and chew glass.
0:39:03 Do you have any advice in terms of as entrepreneurs, how can we get better at chewing glass and
0:39:07 doing the things that we don’t necessarily want to do but have to do to run our business?
0:39:13 In the book, I highlight the story of Jim McKelvie.
0:39:19 For those who don’t know who Jim McKelvie is, people know his more famous other half
0:39:25 of Square, who started Twitter, Jack Dorsey, very well, but the two of them really started
0:39:32 Square off the back of Jim McKelvie’s journey of being a glassblower and having an expensive
0:39:38 piece of art that he wasn’t able to sell because he wasn’t able to accept the payment at the
0:39:41 time that the person wanted to buy it.
0:39:48 We started to think, “How could I disrupt the payment industry with a device?”
0:39:56 It’s a great story if you haven’t studied it of doing what you have exactly described.
0:40:00 Which you find a problem that’s worth solving.
0:40:07 When I talk to Jim and he describes all the people he’s tried to mentor into entrepreneurs,
0:40:13 one of the biggest reasons he says that they fail is because, as you describe, hardships
0:40:15 are going to come about.
0:40:19 You’re going to be in a state where you’re chewing more and more glass.
0:40:25 He says, “It’s during these times where people get distracted from solving the main thing
0:40:28 that was the whole genesis for them starting their journey.”
0:40:36 The further they waver from their focus on that main thing, the more times those companies
0:40:43 don’t achieve profitability or don’t achieve the outcome that they came into existence
0:40:45 trying to solve.
0:40:51 What I learned from that is really this whole thing that Stephen Covey talks about, that
0:40:55 the main thing is keeping the main thing the main thing.
0:41:02 It really becomes an art of balancing what is important versus what is the most urgent
0:41:09 thing, and staying on top of that so that you’re not in a point where what becomes urgent
0:41:13 to you are the things that aren’t important, which makes you drift farther and farther
0:41:18 from the problem that you’re trying to solve to begin with.
0:41:25 In all these problems that entrepreneurs have to solve, it leads to a lot of stress, anxiety,
0:41:29 burnout, and you say the antidote to this is really perspective.
0:41:34 Can you talk to us about some of your guidance when it comes to having more perspective and
0:41:37 how that can reduce our anxiety and stress?
0:41:43 We live in a world since most of us are brought up in Western culture of looking at things
0:41:50 as black and white either/or, and so what this is causing is so many of us to live on
0:41:52 the extremes.
0:41:53 Is it left?
0:41:54 Is it right?
0:41:55 Are we right?
0:41:56 Are we wrong?
0:42:03 What this chapter in my book is really about is exploring more Eastern philosophy of both
0:42:07 and thinking, of paradoxical thinking.
0:42:12 The person I highlight in this chapter is a dear friend of mine, Chris Cassidy.
0:42:14 Chris Backstory.
0:42:17 We graduated together from the Naval Academy.
0:42:24 He became an Navy SEAL and then was selected into NASA and was eventually the chief astronaut
0:42:26 for NASA.
0:42:31 But I remember interviewing Chris for the book and we were talking about his time at
0:42:37 basic underwater demolition school, BUDS, when he was learning to become and training
0:42:38 to become a SEAL.
0:42:44 He was talking about at the Naval Academy it was difficult enough to get from one activity
0:42:53 to a next, but when you’re in BUDS, especially during Hell Week, it becomes almost unthinkable
0:42:55 how you’re going to get through it.
0:43:03 He said he started to learn that instead of looking at the boundaries, meaning can I get
0:43:09 through this or can’t I get through this, he started to look at the both and in it.
0:43:16 He started to see that life could very much resemble a rubber band and time could be expanded
0:43:20 or extracted depending upon what you were going through.
0:43:26 He said during periods of hardships, he started to get the perspective that all I need to
0:43:33 do is hold on for five more minutes, or all I need to do is hold on for another 45 minutes
0:43:35 and we’re going to break for lunch.
0:43:40 All I need to do then is to get through the next evolution so that I can make it to dinner
0:43:42 and go home.
0:43:50 Then there were times when it could expand when he was experiencing flow state and time
0:43:56 could be a weapon in your arsenal where you could use it to really take on a different
0:43:58 meaning in what you were doing.
0:44:04 He described to me as he was sitting there during Hell Week and they were freezing and
0:44:10 just wanting to give up that there was an exchange officer who happened to be from Thailand
0:44:17 who was there who, even though everyone else was in a difficult situation, this person
0:44:25 had virtually no body fat and he just saw the person just buckling and just using every
0:44:31 ounce that they had to stay in the moment and to use their mind to battle through it.
0:44:38 He said that’s where this whole concept of this rubber band and expandability or extraction
0:44:44 really came into being because he thought if that Thai officer has the brain power and
0:44:50 willingness and mindset to get through this, then I can too and so can the men who are
0:44:52 with me.
0:44:58 It’s really just a different way of looking at our circumstances and thinking about it
0:45:04 in a different paradoxical way, which becomes a different perspective for how we get through
0:45:10 challenges or struggles that we encounter or how we use the good times as a glide path
0:45:13 to do more with.
0:45:21 It reminds me a lot about Ethan Cross’ self-distancing guidance, the fact that if you have anxiety,
0:45:26 if you’re struggling, thinking of yourself in the third person can help, talking to yourself
0:45:31 in the third person and then also something he talks about called the Batman effect, which
0:45:36 is basically having some alter ego where you think of yourself as a superhero who has all
0:45:40 the strengths, where you’re weak and what would they do in that situation.
0:45:45 So that reminds me of what you were just explaining with the rubber band because in the moments
0:45:50 of being expansive, you might be just trying to figure out what would your greater self
0:45:52 do in this situation to get out of it.
0:45:53 Is that right?
0:45:54 If I understand that correctly?
0:45:55 Yeah, it is.
0:45:59 And I’m glad you brought up Ethan because he’s a good friend of mine and his book chatter
0:46:00 is great.
0:46:04 But yes, I mean, that’s exactly what I’m talking about.
0:46:09 And it also leads into another thing that I often talk about is what ends up happening
0:46:19 to us is we become our own visionary arsonist, we end up arsoning the very goals and ambitions
0:46:26 that we want to have in life because of our own self image that we have of ourselves that
0:46:27 we cannot do it.
0:46:33 So we put roadblocks in the way almost unintentionally at times or they seem unintentionally, but
0:46:38 they’re all intentional and we vision the very things that we want to accomplish.
0:46:40 That’s another way of looking at that.
0:46:43 We’ll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors.
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0:50:54 Okay, so I want to get into some leadership stuff, because you have some really great
0:50:57 leadership advice in the book.
0:51:01 One of the things that I really liked is this phrase you have, “Think with your feet.”
0:51:06 I can’t wait to use this moving forward, because I lead a team of like 60 people, and I just
0:51:08 feel like I’ll always remember it, think with my feet.
0:51:10 Can you talk to us about what that means?
0:51:16 The origin of this is I had a great mentor, Jay Skabinski, who was my CIO when I was at
0:51:24 Lenlice, and Jay was really trying to take on a lot of projects that were going to change
0:51:25 the company.
0:51:31 But many of these things were initiatives that the people who had been there for a while
0:51:33 didn’t want to undertake.
0:51:38 But what happens, and I think we see this all the time, is you go into these meetings,
0:51:43 and he was good about getting everyone globally, because Lenlice was a global company together
0:51:50 into a room to discuss what we were going to do, and then have everyone go out there
0:51:53 after they’re nodding in unison and accomplish it.
0:51:59 He said to me, after one of these offsite meetings that we had where we had flown everyone
0:52:04 in, he goes, “I want you to watch people over the next couple of weeks.”
0:52:09 He goes, “Because you’re going to see pretty clearly who is speaking with their mouth and
0:52:12 who is speaking with their feet.”
0:52:13 He was so right.
0:52:18 There were so many of them who came into that meeting and were just nodding approval.
0:52:22 And then the second that they left, they were doing everything in their power to thwart
0:52:24 the success of the project.
0:52:29 And then you had people who were speaking in their feet in the opposite direction, who
0:52:33 were coming out of the meeting and doing everything that they could to move the project
0:52:34 forward.
0:52:41 And it is such an interesting way that people live their lives, whether it’s in a business
0:52:51 setting or even doing a self-help exercise where you see someone like Tony Robbins talk
0:52:55 about something on the screen, and you say you’re going to do it, but then your actions
0:52:59 go in the exact opposite of doing them.
0:53:05 And so you were actually speaking with your feet by not pursuing that thing that you signed
0:53:07 up in your mind to do.
0:53:11 So that’s really what speaking with your feet is all about.
0:53:15 I love that, “think with your feet, lead with your feet, speak with your feet.”
0:53:16 It’s so true.
0:53:18 You’ve got to actually lead by example.
0:53:23 You also talk about the need to practice eyes on, hands off in leadership.
0:53:24 Can you talk about that?
0:53:31 Yeah, where this really came from was I was having a discussion with General Stan McChrystal
0:53:35 and also Keith Crotch, who I referenced earlier.
0:53:40 And I realized that what I was trained to be throughout most of my career was a servant
0:53:41 leader.
0:53:45 And there’s nothing wrong with servant leadership that served me extremely well.
0:53:53 However, when I think of servant leadership, it really does revolve around being more hands
0:53:55 on with our employees.
0:54:00 And I think with the way that companies are operating, more and more people are working
0:54:02 outside of the office.
0:54:07 We have more people in other countries who are part of the teams, et cetera.
0:54:13 And so as I was thinking about this, I thought that we needed a new leadership paradigm that
0:54:18 I call Gardner Leadership, which is really leading with intention.
0:54:24 Because just as a gardener nurtures their crops, a gardener leader intentionally nurtures
0:54:26 their team’s growth.
0:54:33 And it’s really doing so in this eyes on, hands off approach, where the leader becomes
0:54:40 informed without micromanaging, which is so critical in today’s innovation driven workplaces.
0:54:46 So this eyes on, hands off to put this into perspective.
0:54:51 And just since I brought up General McChrystal, I’ll use a military example of this.
0:54:56 So imagine him as the leader who’s in charge of all forces in Afghanistan.
0:55:03 And he’s got a team of rangers who’s trying to take an al-Qaeda position or a Taliban
0:55:08 position on a mountainside that’s 1,500 miles away from him.
0:55:15 There is no way that he is going to be able to micromanage what is happening on that operation
0:55:18 because he’s not there, he’s not a part of it.
0:55:25 So what he can do is he can be eyes on from the standpoint of observing what they’re doing,
0:55:30 giving them the best training that he possibly could, making sure that they understand the
0:55:35 rules of engagement, the parameters of the mission, what their expectations are.
0:55:41 But then he needs to be hands off, realizing that he’s given them all that information
0:55:43 and training.
0:55:50 And in the moment where they’re experiencing what the enemy is doing, letting them make
0:55:57 split-moment decisions on the battlefield and being eyes on but hands off in dictating
0:56:04 what their behaviors are, it’s the same thing that happens on the workplace where you have
0:56:10 a gifted software developer, oftentimes we want to micromanage the results that we get
0:56:17 out of the developer and what I’m saying is, in the same way, we need to give him or her
0:56:23 the parameters of what we want accomplished but be hands off and letting them use their
0:56:29 creativity and innovation to develop the best way to approach it and to create the results
0:56:31 that we’re looking for.
0:56:32 Such good advice.
0:56:38 And I want to go back to chewing glass a bit because as leaders, as entrepreneurs, we’re
0:56:44 always competing with long-term vision and what we want to do in the future as well as
0:56:49 all the short-term needs and all the problems, you give a really good framework called the
0:56:51 turtle and bee effect.
0:56:55 Can you talk to us about that and how that can help us plan and be more effective leaders?
0:57:00 Yeah, well, I’m glad you brought this up because you used Elon Musk’s quote to describe this
0:57:04 in this chapter is really about Elon Musk.
0:57:10 So something that I found out about him from a long-term mentor of mine, astronaut Wendy
0:57:17 Lawrence, was that when the space shuttle was going away and President Bush put out the
0:57:23 elective through NASA that companies could bid on this, not only was SpaceX at the time
0:57:30 a startup, but they were the only one who bid both on crew delivery and supply delivery,
0:57:37 meaning they decided that if they could attack both with the same rocket, the same capsule
0:57:44 parameters, that they might start out a little bit behind the competition.
0:57:50 But over time, they would position themselves to be so far in the forefront, which is exactly
0:57:52 what we’re seeing today.
0:57:56 But at the time it happened, it was an extremely risky move.
0:58:03 But Musk used the same thing in how he angled for this that he’s used to pursue everything
0:58:09 that he’s done, and you’ve got to think about what he is really trying to do if you ask
0:58:11 him is to save humanity from itself.
0:58:16 He thinks that eventually we’re going to have to get off a planet Earth, and in order to
0:58:21 do that and survive on another planet, you’re going to have to perfect different things.
0:58:25 You’re going to have to have a way to get there, of course, but you’re also going to
0:58:30 need to learn how to harness electricity in a different way and to store it differently.
0:58:37 You’re going to have to learn how to go under Earth in order to create civilizations because
0:58:42 we can’t survive on top of the planet, which is his boring company.
0:58:48 And so the way that he does all these different things, whether it’s creating the solar cells,
0:58:57 the cars, SpaceX, is he looks at the long-term strategy of saving humanity from itself,
0:59:05 which is akin to the tortoise who takes very slow logical steps on its path to achieving
0:59:06 its ultimate goal.
0:59:13 But then in the day-to-day moments, in operating these different ventures, he’s acting more
0:59:19 like the bee, where the bee’s purpose is to serve the queen and the hive, and they are
0:59:26 very much about doing whatever they have to do in the present moment to achieve what needs
0:59:27 to be done.
0:59:34 So the real art here becomes how do you combine the best virtues of a bee with the best virtues
0:59:40 of the tortoise so that your actions that you’re doing in the micro moments that make
0:59:47 up your day are leading you towards where you want to go to fulfill your long-term aspirations,
0:59:54 but you’re doing it in the daily repetition or daily movements of meeting your midterm
0:59:56 ambitions.
0:59:59 And so that’s what the bee internal effect is really about.
1:00:04 It’s how do you use deliberate action, whether you’re in a business setting or a personal
1:00:11 setting, to take the actions that you want to align your values and your workload to
1:00:16 your shorter-term ambitions while pursuing your long-term aspirations.
1:00:18 I love everything that you just broke down there.
1:00:19 I love the story with Elon Musk.
1:00:23 So we’ve mentioned a lot of entrepreneurs in this episode.
1:00:26 I feel like we name dropped like 50 people.
1:00:29 One person we didn’t talk about was Steve Jobs.
1:00:34 And you draw a really cool story of him in your book where you talk about his ability
1:00:37 to overcome the fear of being wrong.
1:00:40 And as entrepreneurs, we’re risk takers.
1:00:42 We have to be creating new things.
1:00:46 There’s a lot of failure involved and a fear of being wrong.
1:00:51 So can you talk to us about how we can get better at this fear of failure?
1:00:57 Yeah, I picked Steve Jobs because he’s a very recognizable name.
1:01:04 And people often see the output of what he created at Apple without really analyzing
1:01:11 the backstory of all the things that he had to overcome to have that success.
1:01:17 And one thing I have found, and this is really about being a boundary magnifier, is sometimes
1:01:20 being right means being alone.
1:01:29 And in the case of Jobs, he felt so passionate that the right path for Apple was the path
1:01:36 that he was advocating for, that he was willing to give up his role there as CEO because he
1:01:38 was so passionate about it.
1:01:43 And it’s something that I found in my own career in multiple circumstances.
1:01:48 And I’m sure it’s something that many of the listeners have found themselves in too.
1:01:55 Sometimes we’re asked to do things in our jobs that go against who we are, what our
1:01:59 values are, what we think is the right thing to do.
1:02:06 And so often we lean into what the popular thing is to do or what’s going to bring job
1:02:09 safety instead of doing the right thing.
1:02:14 And this chapter is really that on your entrepreneurial journey or your business journey, you’re
1:02:21 going to be encountered with many circumstances, we’re doing the right thing, and embodying
1:02:26 your values means that sometimes you’re going to be standing alone in your convictions to
1:02:27 do it.
1:02:30 And that’s exactly what we saw with Steve Jobs.
1:02:35 And not only did he leave the company with those convictions, but he doubled down on
1:02:37 that vision.
1:02:41 And that’s what eventually brought him back and led him to creating the Apple that we
1:02:45 see today and the legacy that he left behind.
1:02:48 Well, John, this was such an amazing conversation.
1:02:49 I’d love to have you on the show.
1:02:52 I end my show with two questions that I ask all my guests.
1:02:57 So the first one, and you can answer this however you’d like, can be about today’s topic.
1:03:00 It could just be whatever comes to your mind.
1:03:05 What is one actionable thing our young and profitors can do today to become more profitable
1:03:06 tomorrow?
1:03:10 So one thing I love to tell people is that when you get up in the morning, you should
1:03:17 look at yourself and the image that is shining back at you and realize that that person is
1:03:21 the most incredible person on earth that you are ever going to meet.
1:03:26 Now, you also have to come to the realization as you’re looking at that person that they’re
1:03:31 also the most self-critical person you’re ever going to meet.
1:03:38 And so really, your battle to greatness is really the battle between those two dimensions
1:03:39 of yourself.
1:03:46 And it’s really mastering wearing the true you, the true authentic you that realizes
1:03:53 the capabilities and the gifts that you have and that you were put here to do something
1:03:55 that only you can do on earth.
1:04:00 And your goal should be finding out what that is, the problem you’re called to solve, and
1:04:03 then doing it to better humanity.
1:04:04 So good.
1:04:06 And what is your secret to profiting in life?
1:04:12 And this can, of course, be on just financial profiting in all the different ways of life.
1:04:19 When I was at that tail end of Lowe’s going into Dell, I happened to come out of that
1:04:26 time and met with a psychologist who had me analyze my life by picturing myself sitting
1:04:28 on a kitchen bar stool.
1:04:34 And what I realized is that although I was on that stool, the supports underneath it
1:04:36 weren’t in balance.
1:04:42 For me, the constant grind had become overwhelmingly a greater support than every other one in
1:04:44 my life.
1:04:48 And whether it’s the constant grind or something else, I think we need to ask ourselves are
1:04:51 our lives truly in balance.
1:04:56 And going back to Benjamin Hardy, what he got me to do is to picture myself sitting on
1:05:02 the stool that my future self would want to sit on if I could become my ideal self.
1:05:06 And if I did so, what would those supports look like?
1:05:11 And what would I need to do to go from the way it looked today to the way that I wanted
1:05:13 to look in the future?
1:05:18 And I think that that’s an exercise that all the listeners should go through.
1:05:23 And a great way to think about this, if it seems like it’s too difficult to go from point
1:05:28 A to point B, is to do a reverse bucket list.
1:05:29 And that is look at your life.
1:05:34 And instead of examining all the things that you want to accomplish, look at all the things
1:05:39 that you have already accomplished that you never thought would have been possible.
1:05:44 And to use those to gain the confidence to understand that you can change the parameters
1:05:49 of what’s underneath your stool to whatever you want it to be in the future.
1:05:50 Such good advice.
1:05:52 I really, really love that analogy.
1:05:56 John, where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do?
1:06:04 If you want to learn more about me personally, you can go to my website, johnrmiddleinitialmiles.com.
1:06:08 If you want to learn more about Passionstruck, the podcast, the book, what the company is
1:06:11 doing, you can go to passionstruck.com.
1:06:12 Awesome, John.
1:06:16 Thank you so much for joining Young and Profiting Podcast.
1:06:17 Thank you so much.
1:06:28 And it’s such an honor to be here.
1:06:30 [Music]
1:06:40 [MUSIC]

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0:01:21 Yeah, fam, welcome back to the show.
0:01:26 Today we’re pulling one of my interviews with Benjamin Hardy from The Archives.
0:01:27 I love learning from Benjamin Hardy.
0:01:30 I’ve interviewed him on the podcast three times.
0:01:32 Benjamin Hardy is amazing.
0:01:37 He’s an organizational psychologist and the world’s leading expert on psychology and
0:01:39 entrepreneurial leadership and exponential growth.
0:01:41 He’s a productivity guru.
0:01:47 He was once the most popular blogger on Medium.com and his blogs have been read by over 100 million
0:01:48 people.
0:01:52 He’s got several books under his belt, including “Will Power Doesn’t Work” and “Ten X Is
0:01:54 Easier Than 2X.”
0:01:58 So Benjamin first came on the show in 2018 when I first started podcasting.
0:02:00 That was episode number seven.
0:02:07 I remember I was obsessed with Benjamin Hardy at the time and me and our team were so excited
0:02:08 he was coming on the podcast.
0:02:11 It was a star-struck moment for me.
0:02:17 And then we had him on again for episode 206 in January 2023 and then 260 last December.
0:02:22 So today we’re actually going to play episode 206 where we unpack two of his concepts to
0:02:25 help us foster greater achievement and happiness.
0:02:29 I’m talking about the power of embracing our future selves and getting familiar with a
0:02:32 new system for measuring our progress.
0:02:37 Something Ben and his co-author Dan Sullivan calls “the gap and the gain.”
0:02:39 I loved learning about the gap and the gain.
0:02:43 I remember when I had this episode, I thought about it over and over and over again.
0:02:45 It was really impactful for me.
0:02:46 I think you guys are going to love it.
0:02:52 There’s so much to learn here, let’s get right into it.
0:02:57 So Ben, I thought a really relatable place that we could start would be killing two birds
0:03:01 with one stone, so to speak, by unpacking a story that I heard you tell.
0:03:05 So I listened to a lot of podcasts when I’m researching for the show and preparing for
0:03:06 my guests.
0:03:11 And I heard you say on another podcast that when you released that book in 2018 that you
0:03:14 came on my podcast to talk about willpower doesn’t work.
0:03:19 You actually considered it a failure because it didn’t reach New York Times bestseller’s
0:03:20 list.
0:03:21 And that’s like every author’s dream.
0:03:25 But nonetheless, when you came on my podcast, I remember thinking it was such a big deal.
0:03:27 You were such a big blogger.
0:03:33 We had scored Benjamin Hardy episode number seven, and so you were a big deal to us and
0:03:37 to the outside world, but inside you felt like a failure.
0:03:38 So I want to talk about that.
0:03:43 I think it will give us some color on your journey and help us understand the gap and
0:03:44 again concept as well.
0:03:45 Absolutely.
0:03:49 I think it’s a beautiful, interesting place to start.
0:03:55 So I guess for a little context, I would say in 2000, ever so I served a church mission
0:03:58 from 2008 to 2010.
0:04:01 And like going on that experience was very transformational for me.
0:04:03 I grew up in a really intense environment.
0:04:05 We probably even talked about it four years ago.
0:04:10 But ever since I came home from that experience in 2010, I wanted to be a professional author.
0:04:14 Like that was a dream of mine, but I didn’t know what form it would take.
0:04:18 And I didn’t really start approaching that goal until 2015.
0:04:25 So from 2010 to 2015, I went to school, studied psychology, got into a PhD program for organizational
0:04:26 psychology.
0:04:29 And then once I was in my first year of my program, that’s when it really hit me.
0:04:34 And I got really committed, I guess you could say, to my future self of becoming a professional
0:04:35 author.
0:04:37 So this was early 2015.
0:04:42 And I was very, already very excited, very motivated.
0:04:45 And I had already learned a lot of success principles, I guess you could say.
0:04:47 And so I actually grew very fast as a blogger.
0:04:50 And that’s what took me to themedium.com and I grew.
0:04:57 And so essentially, from 2015 to 2017, I grew enormously as a blogger and was able to get
0:05:00 a book deal and be able to start providing for my family.
0:05:04 I mean, that was essentially my dream was to become a professional author and to be
0:05:06 able to provide for my family.
0:05:08 At the time, my wife and I had three foster kids.
0:05:11 We’ve adopted them since and et cetera.
0:05:14 So essentially, I got a multi six-figure book deal to write a book.
0:05:15 I’m living my dreams.
0:05:17 It all happens way faster than I thought.
0:05:23 And anyways, in early 2018, honestly, it was March of 2018, the book comes out.
0:05:28 And I did have way in my head, like I’d built everything up in my head that it needed to
0:05:29 be a certain level.
0:05:33 It needed to be a New York Times bestseller and I admittedly as well, threw so much money
0:05:34 at it.
0:05:39 Early 2018 was the first year I started to make like pretty dang good money.
0:05:42 And I threw a lot of it at that book.
0:05:45 And I was just throwing everything, kitchen sink at it.
0:05:50 And yeah, it just didn’t end up launching and exploding the way I thought it would.
0:05:55 Like I just expected it would go a certain way because most everything to that point
0:06:00 in terms of like my writing and my growth, just it was all going very, very well.
0:06:03 And so, yeah, it didn’t hit the goal.
0:06:07 And for probably four or five months, I was in a very deep depression, very deep slump
0:06:10 and kind of back to the idea of the gap in the game now.
0:06:14 It’s kind of funny that I launch a book.
0:06:15 I mean, I’m a professional author.
0:06:19 I released my first book, like I’ve never written a full book before I released this
0:06:20 book.
0:06:22 And to my publisher, they were very happy with the results.
0:06:26 But for me in my head, I just totally felt like a loser.
0:06:29 And yeah, I mean, I guess from there, I mean, if you want me to, I mean, I could explain the
0:06:30 gap in the game.
0:06:32 But yeah, I mean, that’s basically where I was at.
0:06:35 I guess I’ve learned to measure my own self differently.
0:06:38 So the gap in the game is something I learned from Dan Sullivan.
0:06:42 I read his little book on the subject, maybe actually it was in 2018.
0:06:46 I read his little book and I was still blogging back then.
0:06:47 And it was just an idea I loved.
0:06:51 If I ever get a chance to write books with Dan Sullivan, I’m going to make this a major
0:06:52 book.
0:06:54 And the idea is very simple.
0:06:59 It’s basically the idea that as a person, you’re, we all feel happy or sad based on
0:07:02 how we measure ourselves and how we measure our experiences.
0:07:07 The reason I went into a deep depression after I had made a monumental achievement, I mean,
0:07:09 I had never done that before.
0:07:10 It was totally new.
0:07:12 And yet I felt like a loser because I was in the gap.
0:07:16 I was measuring what was against what I thought it should be, which is an ideal.
0:07:20 When you’re in the gap, you’re measuring yourself against your ideals, which are always changing,
0:07:21 always moving.
0:07:22 Whereas the gain is the opposite.
0:07:25 You measure yourself backward against where you were before.
0:07:27 Truth was as I was way further than I’d ever been.
0:07:31 And if I was just measuring myself backward against my past self, competing only against
0:07:36 my past self, I was radically further than I ever was and I just did something huge.
0:07:40 I’m learning and I’ve learned over the years to be more in the game.
0:07:44 And it’s a far more enjoyable, far happier experience.
0:07:45 Yeah.
0:07:48 And I’d love to kind of dig deeper on this.
0:07:53 If you can help us understand the difference between ideals and goals and why that matters
0:07:55 with all of this.
0:08:01 So ideals are very, they’re very ephemeral, like they’re not actually tangible.
0:08:07 And so like how I learned it from Dan is ideals are like the horizon in the desert.
0:08:09 You can see them out there.
0:08:14 But every time you take a few steps forward, the horizon keeps going.
0:08:18 And in America, we’re actually trained to always be pursuing happiness.
0:08:21 And it’s even in the Declaration of Independence, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
0:08:24 And so we’re very big on ideals in America, which is good.
0:08:26 Like it’s good to have ideals.
0:08:27 It’s good to be idealistic.
0:08:28 There’s nothing wrong with ideals.
0:08:31 The problem is, is that they’re immaterial.
0:08:35 I think a definition of ideal is whatever you, whatever you believe is perfection.
0:08:39 So when you’re in the gap, you’re literally measuring yourself against your view of perfection.
0:08:44 But back to the idea of the horizon, that view is never endingly changing.
0:08:48 My former self would have felt like it was perfection just to get a book deal.
0:08:52 But then once I got there, the ideal changed, the horizon moved.
0:08:56 And so if you’re always measuring yourself against a moving target, and also a moving
0:09:02 target that by definition is unreachable, you can’t actually reach an ideal.
0:09:03 It’s an ideal.
0:09:06 But if you’re always measuring yourself against it, then you never feel like you’ve moved
0:09:07 anywhere.
0:09:10 That’s actually why we wrote the book is because high achievers by nature have huge ideals,
0:09:13 but they also usually measure themselves against them.
0:09:15 And our culture is trained that way.
0:09:19 Social media trains us to have ideals and to always be comparing ourselves externally.
0:09:21 And sometimes ideals are other people.
0:09:24 But if you’re always measuring yourself against something that’s way up ahead and also something
0:09:28 that you can never actually reach, then what that does for you internally is it feels like
0:09:30 you’ve never made any progress at all.
0:09:33 It also devalues everything you’ve done to that point.
0:09:36 And so whenever you’re in the gap, it does not matter how much you’ve achieved.
0:09:40 It doesn’t matter if you’re living way, way, way beyond the dreams of anything you ever
0:09:44 thought you would do, you actually feel like you’ve made no progress at all.
0:09:48 And you feel like a loser and you’ve devalued not only your current self, you’ve devalued
0:09:49 everything that got you here.
0:09:51 And so ideals are beautiful.
0:09:54 They’re just not useful as a measurement tool.
0:09:56 They’re useful as a direction tool.
0:09:58 Goals are far more concrete.
0:10:03 Obviously, you can have goals that you set that move you toward your ideals.
0:10:05 And so goals are specific.
0:10:06 They’re concrete.
0:10:08 They’re mile markers on a journey.
0:10:13 And then the useful thing to do with your goals is to obviously become increasingly
0:10:17 intrinsically motivated towards the goals you set and even the standards you set for
0:10:21 yourself that they’re less about what anyone else thinks, what anyone else wants.
0:10:24 And you actually get better at doing that when you just start measuring your progress
0:10:25 backwards.
0:10:26 So like I’ll set a goal for myself.
0:10:29 I’ve got huge goals for 2023.
0:10:33 But in terms of where I’m, where I’m measuring myself and in terms of my benchmark, like
0:10:36 my benchmark for 2023 is what I accomplished in 2022.
0:10:41 Like I accomplished some cool things, but I’m using that since it’s tangible.
0:10:42 Ideals are not tangible.
0:10:47 Like I have concrete evidence of what I did in 2022, and I can use that not only to propel
0:10:50 me forward, but I can also use that to say, what do I want to do that’s even going to
0:10:52 be bigger and more exciting.
0:10:53 Yeah.
0:10:56 So you can just measure yourself backwards and use that as the baseline for what you
0:10:57 can do.
0:10:58 Yeah.
0:11:00 So I hear you saying a couple big ideas here.
0:11:04 The first one is ideals are a moving target.
0:11:06 You’re never going to get there.
0:11:10 So you’re never going to be happy trying to go towards those ideals, because you’re never
0:11:11 going to actually achieve that.
0:11:13 You can’t actually achieve your ideal.
0:11:16 And it’s always moving further and further as you become more successful.
0:11:21 Second is comparing yourselves to other people that never helps in terms of our mindset or
0:11:23 happiness.
0:11:27 And then I hear you saying that goals can be tangible and you can have mile markers and
0:11:33 it’s okay to have goals, but you need to make sure that you’re judging your progress on those
0:11:40 goals based on your past, not necessarily how far you are from your ideal place.
0:11:43 I know I probably didn’t say it as good as you, but that’s basically what I’m gathering
0:11:44 from.
0:11:46 Now you broke it down beautifully.
0:11:49 I think that this is one of the main problems with the narratives.
0:11:52 Like there, you know, there’s a lot of narratives about how you shouldn’t have goals.
0:11:55 Obviously I think it’s impossible to not have goals.
0:11:58 I think human beings, we can’t not have a goal.
0:12:02 That’s part of being intentional, but the problem is the measurement.
0:12:06 I mean, even if I had hit my goal, I would have gone into the gap.
0:12:08 I would have moved the target.
0:12:13 So even if I had hit the New York times bestseller list from a gap perspective, I still would
0:12:16 have felt terrible about myself because I would have moved the target.
0:12:19 The target would have been, well, why wasn’t I on it for four weeks?
0:12:22 And why wasn’t I number one New York times bestseller?
0:12:23 Yeah.
0:12:24 Yeah.
0:12:25 Or why didn’t I hit number one?
0:12:27 So it doesn’t even, whether you hit the goal or not doesn’t even matter.
0:12:30 If you’re in the gap, it will never have been enough because the target will keep changing
0:12:35 and you’re measuring yourself against something that’s immeasurable and something that’s external
0:12:37 and always changing.
0:12:40 And so, yeah, whether it’s other people that you’re measuring yourself against or whether
0:12:45 it’s just your inflated ideals, that’s the point is, is that you won’t be happy hitting
0:12:48 or not hitting your goals if you stay in the gap.
0:12:49 That’s just the key.
0:12:50 Yeah.
0:12:52 So then on the flip side, let’s talk about gain thinking.
0:12:57 What does it look like to have gain thinking or to practice gain thinking?
0:12:59 So I look at gain thinking two ways.
0:13:03 One is, it’s a way of measuring your progress and measuring your experiences.
0:13:08 So for me, for example, like I’ve had a number of experiences already today, like even just
0:13:12 to this point, and some of them went to plans and some of them didn’t go to plans.
0:13:16 But if I’m in the game, I’m measuring what actually did happen and I’m measuring myself
0:13:17 backwards.
0:13:19 I’m only measuring myself against where I was before.
0:13:25 And the truth is, I’m always ahead of my past self, even if things go backwards seemingly,
0:13:28 like even if I lose my leg in a car accident, right?
0:13:33 Like a lot of bad things can seemingly happen, but if you’re in the game, you’re finding
0:13:36 the gains and you’re creating gains from your experiences.
0:13:40 I consider it your squeezing as much juice out of your experiences as possible.
0:13:44 You’re also always choosing to become better as a result.
0:13:47 No matter what happens to you, you’re in the game.
0:13:49 So everything ultimately happens for you.
0:13:51 So I guess it’s really two big ideas.
0:13:55 One is, is it’s measuring yourself backward against where you were before and always realizing
0:13:57 that you’re further than you were before.
0:14:01 And that the only thing I’m actually measuring myself against is myself, which is where I
0:14:02 was before.
0:14:04 So that’s number one is just measuring yourself backwards.
0:14:08 The second one is literally turning everything that happens to you into something that happens
0:14:09 for you.
0:14:14 So anything, no matter what it was, you can actually gain and grow from it.
0:14:17 And if you do, then you’re always getting better.
0:14:19 You’re always learning from every experience.
0:14:23 Whereas if you’re in the gap, then your past becomes a problem.
0:14:27 Using like a psychology standpoint, what you need to be happy in the present is you need
0:14:29 a happy past and an exciting future.
0:14:32 And the past is literally a meaning.
0:14:38 And so the gain is just a lens of using your, of transforming your past into more gains,
0:14:41 more learning, even from your most extreme traumas.
0:14:45 You can learn to turn those into gains so that you’re constantly better and even grateful
0:14:49 for them, which is what psychologists would call post-traumatic growth.
0:14:50 So it’s really just those two things.
0:14:53 I’m only measuring myself against myself backward and I’m literally turning every experience
0:14:55 into my gain.
0:14:58 So in your book, you say it’s not about becoming our future selves.
0:15:00 It’s actually about being our future selves.
0:15:05 Now, I think we just got a good foundation of gap thinking, gain thinking.
0:15:10 Here you are telling us basically, let’s not compare our progress to our ideals, but you’re
0:15:17 also not opposed to the fact of thinking in a futuristic way or thinking about our future.
0:15:19 It’s not like you’re saying, don’t think about your future at all.
0:15:22 It’s just that you’ve got to be your future self.
0:15:26 It’s not about becoming your future self in the gap between where you are and where you
0:15:27 want to be.
0:15:34 So tell us about how future self is sort of related to this gap and gain thinking.
0:15:37 This is a really interesting concept in psychology.
0:15:42 So like when, typically the way we look at time is we look at it as past, present and
0:15:43 future.
0:15:45 And we kind of look at it sequentially.
0:15:48 And we also look at it chronologically, like my past is behind me.
0:15:50 There’s no way I can get back there.
0:15:53 My present is now and the future is up ahead of me.
0:15:54 I’ll never actually be able to go into the future.
0:15:56 All there is is really now.
0:15:59 From a psychology standpoint, that’s not how psychologists view time.
0:16:01 Psychologists don’t view time sequentially.
0:16:03 We actually view it holistically.
0:16:07 So what I mean by that is that the past is currently existing in my life.
0:16:12 Who I’m being right now is a complete amalgamation of my views of my past, my experiences of
0:16:13 my past.
0:16:17 We, even today, we’re talking about us having a conversation four years ago.
0:16:22 And so like my past is of course influencing me right now and my narration of the past,
0:16:27 my story of the past, the feelings I have toward my past, the anchors I may have in
0:16:30 my past that are unresolved, call it trauma or whatever.
0:16:33 But also my goals are heavily influencing me.
0:16:36 Anyone who’s listening to this is listening to it for a reason.
0:16:38 They’re listening to it because they feel like this is going to help them contribute
0:16:40 to their goals or help them move forward in their lives.
0:16:46 And so everything about my life right now is a combination of my feelings and my perspectives
0:16:50 of my past and also my excitements or my feelings towards the future.
0:16:54 And so they’re certainly not mutually exclusive in terms of being in the game, but also having
0:16:56 a future-oriented mindset.
0:17:01 Most people who read the gap in the game are very future-oriented people.
0:17:03 The game doesn’t stop you, I guess, from having a future.
0:17:08 Actually in my perspective, whenever I’m living in the game, it actually helps me to be more,
0:17:13 it helps me to have a future that’s more genuinely coming from my own self rather than something
0:17:15 that’s coming from the outside.
0:17:19 Especially people’s goals and their standards or their ideals actually were fed to them
0:17:21 by culture, by society.
0:17:27 They don’t even, the future that they want actually isn’t genuinely intrinsically motivated.
0:17:31 And so for me, tapping into the game just helps me to stop worrying about the outside
0:17:34 world as much, stop competing with other people.
0:17:39 And so in terms of future self, I guess I would say in simple terms, we all have a future
0:17:40 self.
0:17:45 What the research shows is that most people, especially the older they get, they stop thinking
0:17:47 about their future self very much.
0:17:54 Most people probably 30 and above assume that even their future self, 10, 20, or 30 years
0:17:57 from now, is mostly going to be the same person they are today.
0:18:01 So most people don’t have huge imagination towards their future self.
0:18:04 What the research does show is that your future self is going to be a wildly different person
0:18:05 than you think.
0:18:08 Even in five or 10 years from now, it’s going to be hard to fully predict who your future
0:18:13 self will be, but if you start imagining it, start thinking about it, and importantly
0:18:17 getting really connected to your future self, who you want to be in the future.
0:18:21 You can then start using, obviously, your vision of your future self to guide and direct
0:18:24 who you’re going to be today, and you can be extremely intentional about it.
0:18:28 And so from my standpoint, the best thing to do is get really clear and connected to
0:18:33 your future self, who you want to be, get very specific about that, and then use that,
0:18:37 I guess you could say the North Star for directing everything you’re doing here and now, and
0:18:40 each and every day as you’re moving forward, you’re measuring yourself against where you
0:18:41 were before.
0:18:46 You’re measuring yourself backwards and you’re always seeing that by increasingly living
0:18:50 intentionally as your future self, you’re always outgrowing your past self.
0:18:51 I do this daily.
0:18:58 I mean, if I even look at where I was a week ago, I am not the same person I was last week.
0:18:59 I’ve changed a lot.
0:19:00 I’ve grown a lot.
0:19:05 I know a ton of things my past self didn’t know, and so I’m never my past self, and I’m
0:19:09 always growing into my future self, and that’s kind of how I see it.
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0:24:03 Something that I thought was really interesting when I was reading your work is this concept
0:24:08 of you actually thinking of your future self as a completely different person.
0:24:13 And I thought that was really eye-opening, because for one, I feel like you give yourself
0:24:17 some more grace when you think of your past and your future self as a different person.
0:24:22 It’s like you start to feel empathy for yourself, and you’re not so hard on yourself, depending
0:24:24 on what outcomes end up happening.
0:24:29 So I’d love to understand the importance of actually thinking of yourself as different
0:24:32 present self, future self, even past self.
0:24:37 So as an example, I would say this year in 2022, I’ve had some of my biggest wins, and
0:24:39 I’ve had also some of my biggest mistakes.
0:24:42 But I know that I’m not the same person I was.
0:24:46 Again, like I said, even a few weeks ago, I’m not mad at my past self, though.
0:24:49 My past self was coming from a different place.
0:24:53 And so I think it’s always good to have compassion and empathy towards your former self, because
0:24:55 you now know so many things that they didn’t know.
0:24:57 You know, you’re in a different place.
0:24:59 You see things differently.
0:25:03 And so, one, I think it’s very beautiful to recognize you’re not the same person as you
0:25:07 were in the past, and to have only empathy towards your past.
0:25:11 There’s no upsides to having bad or negative emotions towards your past.
0:25:13 It does nothing for your future.
0:25:14 It does nothing for your present.
0:25:21 And so always transforming your past into gains and greater perspective, learning.
0:25:25 That is, again, back to post-traumatic growth, it’s that you are grateful.
0:25:30 Like the idea of trauma is really that something happened to your past, and you feel like you’re
0:25:34 now in some way inferior.
0:25:35 You’ve gone backwards.
0:25:38 You’re also crippled in some way because of what happened, whereas the opposite is that
0:25:41 now you’re empowered because of what happened.
0:25:42 So I guess that’s one.
0:25:46 In terms of always seeing your future self as a different person, to me what that does
0:25:49 is it propels a growth mindset.
0:25:55 Like the definition of a fixed mindset is that you’ve purely defined who you are based
0:26:00 on your past, and then you assume that who you are now is who you’re always going to
0:26:01 be.
0:26:02 So you have a fixed mindset.
0:26:03 You don’t think you’re going to change.
0:26:07 You’ve already kind of painted your future self into a box, that your future self is the
0:26:08 exact person you are today.
0:26:12 And so that, I mean, what the research shows is that leads to kind of having a fragile
0:26:15 or a brittle approach to life where you’re too afraid to fail because you’re trying to
0:26:16 prove yourself.
0:26:20 Because if I know that my future self a week from now is going to be different, they’re
0:26:23 going to be way more knowledgeable, they’re going to be less ignorant, then that gives
0:26:26 me right now a lot of grace.
0:26:29 Like you said, like I don’t have to have all the answers right now.
0:26:33 Like one of my favorite kind of models for this, it comes from Bernadette Brown’s book,
0:26:36 The Atlas of the Heart, where she said you’re either trying to be right or you’re trying
0:26:37 to get it right.
0:26:41 And if you’re trying to be right, that’s the definition of a fixed mindset.
0:26:44 Like you’re trying to prove your current self because your future self isn’t going to
0:26:45 be any different.
0:26:46 Like you’ve already, you’re kind of stuck.
0:26:50 Whereas if you’re just trying to get it right, I know I’m going to make a lot of mistakes.
0:26:52 I know I don’t have all the answers now and I know my future self is going to have better
0:26:53 perspectives.
0:26:56 And once I get there, they’re going to be blown away at how different they are from who
0:26:57 I am today.
0:26:59 But also they’re always going to be trying to figure it out.
0:27:02 Like you’re always trying to get it right and you’re always growing and changing.
0:27:05 And so it just leads you to not needing to have it all figured out.
0:27:09 Instead you’re just in a state of learning, which is a growth mindset.
0:27:10 Yeah.
0:27:15 And something that I think is really interesting is that it’s actually hard to imagine a
0:27:16 person ourselves as a future self.
0:27:20 I think some people are better than others, but a lot of people have trouble imagining
0:27:22 who they are in the future.
0:27:24 Can you talk to us about why that is?
0:27:29 The main reason that people have a hard time, and this is something that Daniel Gilbert
0:27:33 said, he’s a Harvard psychologist who’s been studying this concept for 20 years.
0:27:37 And he actually gave a main stage Ted talk called the psychology of your future self
0:27:39 back in 2014.
0:27:43 But he said that the reason people have a hard time imagining their future self is because
0:27:44 they don’t do it.
0:27:46 Like they literally don’t take the time.
0:27:52 If anyone here was sitting listening, I would ask in the last seven days, how much time
0:27:54 have you spent imagining your future self?
0:27:57 How much time have you spent journaling and thinking about it?
0:28:01 My guess is, is that the average listener, and maybe this group would be different because
0:28:05 this is, these are young people who are actually, you know, have big visions, but I’d say the
0:28:09 average person who struggles to think about this, the main reason is just because they’re
0:28:12 not taking the time to think about it.
0:28:13 Imagination is very much a skill.
0:28:15 It’s a skill that you can get better and better at.
0:28:18 There’s kind of levels to seeing your future self.
0:28:23 The first one is honestly just connecting with your future self and having empathy for them.
0:28:27 Just like you would want to have empathy for your past self, a crucial first step to connecting
0:28:32 to your future self is having empathy that your future self is a real person.
0:28:36 They’re coming from a certain place and they’re being impacted by what you do.
0:28:41 And so like, if just a guy would have empathy for another person, if I was more emotionally
0:28:44 intelligent, I would realize that they’re coming from a different place than me.
0:28:47 They’ve got different perspectives, different values, different goals, they’re in a different
0:28:48 situation.
0:28:52 I would want to start by understanding, but then you go from connecting to getting really
0:28:57 vivid where it’s like, you now start to kind of see the context of your future self.
0:29:01 And obviously you get to create that like your future self is going to be different
0:29:06 from mine and I get to choose in large part what I want my future self to look like.
0:29:10 And so I think you just take the time to think, who do I want my future self to be in five
0:29:11 or 10 years?
0:29:13 What do I want that to look like?
0:29:15 What’s going to be really important to my future self?
0:29:18 What’s going to be really important to them that I should be paying attention to now?
0:29:22 I think it’s just taking the time to really think about it and putting yourself in a situation
0:29:24 like just as one simple example.
0:29:29 Let me just put myself into my future self shoes, call it in 2030.
0:29:32 So I know that it’s a little crazy for a lot of people, but I have six kids and the oldest
0:29:34 one is going to be 23.
0:29:37 So that’s one thing is like, okay, I’m going to have a 23 year old son.
0:29:40 My youngest is going to be 10.
0:29:43 And so I’m just starting to like actually start to think about that.
0:29:45 I’ll be 10 years older.
0:29:46 What do I want that to look like?
0:29:47 Where do I want to be?
0:29:48 What do I want to be focused on?
0:29:49 What’s going to be really important to me then?
0:29:52 Like literally starting to put yourself in the shoes and start to think about it.
0:29:55 And then starting to think, what are the most important things that I could do now that
0:29:56 would set that future self up?
0:30:01 I know that and you can do it in shorter timeframes, but it’s literally just actually putting concrete
0:30:05 around it and context to really start thinking about it.
0:30:06 Yeah.
0:30:11 The related to this in your book, you say that your identity is what you’re most committed
0:30:15 to and it’s your identity that actually drives your behaviors or your future identity.
0:30:17 Can you talk to us about that?
0:30:18 Yeah.
0:30:21 So identity is such an interesting concept and I really do think it’s, it’s kind of
0:30:26 the driver of everything, but then the question is, well, what drives identity and identity
0:30:31 is really actually driven by what your goals are, what you’re most committed to.
0:30:34 When I say it’s what you’re most committed to, it’s really two things.
0:30:38 It’s the story that you’re most committed to in terms of your past, present and future.
0:30:42 Like we all have a story about our past and who we were and what led us to this point.
0:30:45 We have a story about who we are now and we also have a story for our future.
0:30:49 And so that’s one commitment is the story or the narrative you have.
0:30:52 The second one is actually your standards.
0:30:56 So your standards as a person or what you’re committed to, like we all have standards.
0:30:57 Like I’ll give an example.
0:31:02 Like I was recently back home visiting and I have a cousin who’s been living at my dad’s
0:31:05 house for, call it five years.
0:31:07 He’s a cousin that lives at my dad’s house now and he’s one of those people who plays
0:31:12 World of Warcraft literally like all day unless he’s at work or sleeping.
0:31:14 And actually, honestly, that’s how I used to be.
0:31:19 I used to be that way where I played video games like 16 hours a day, but it was interesting
0:31:23 because I was talking to him and I was just catching up with him and I was just asking
0:31:26 him what was going on in the game because that’s kind of the main thing he does.
0:31:30 And he said, well, I recently left my group, my guild, it’s a guild in this online game.
0:31:31 And I said, well, why did you leave the guild?
0:31:34 And he said, because they’re just not up to my standard.
0:31:37 I have bigger goals that I want to achieve in the game and there’s, there’s things I
0:31:39 want to do and I just can’t do in this group.
0:31:42 And he’s one of those people who’s like at the top of the top of the top in this game.
0:31:47 And I said that was interesting that his standard for himself is really high in the game.
0:31:51 Like I have zero standards for myself in that game because it’s not valuable to me.
0:31:52 Like it’s not what I value.
0:31:57 So I have no standards there, but the question is, well, where are my standards?
0:32:00 Where do I actually care and how high are my standards in those areas?
0:32:03 And your standard does reflect what you’re committed to.
0:32:07 So like he showed that he was committed to something more, which is why he left that
0:32:09 group, because the standards were higher.
0:32:13 So as you elevate your standards and your story, you change your identity.
0:32:18 And so your standards are just whatever you hold yourself to that could be in your finances,
0:32:19 it could be in your health.
0:32:23 And when you raise the standards and it’s a true commitment, you don’t go back below
0:32:24 those standards.
0:32:28 You’re just saying no to everything that’s below those and it stops resonating with
0:32:33 your identity because your standards and your identity are pretty much the same thing.
0:32:38 So as you elevate your standards, you no longer can go back to doing what you were doing before
0:32:41 because it just doesn’t resonate with your identity anymore.
0:32:46 There’s things that I was even saying yes to call it a few months ago, which would be
0:32:48 unfathomable to me now.
0:32:53 Like it just doesn’t fit with what’s acceptable or even with what’s relevant to me anymore
0:32:55 because it no longer fits the standard.
0:32:56 Yeah.
0:33:00 So basically it’s having this very clear, vivid picture of your future self.
0:33:05 And then whenever you have decisions in terms of how you act or the things that you do,
0:33:08 you’re always being true to your future self.
0:33:13 And it helps you basically be able to say no more often and make the decisions that will
0:33:17 be good to your future self or what is aligned to your future self.
0:33:18 Yeah.
0:33:22 When you start to make your future self the standard, then it becomes a massive filtering
0:33:25 tool where it’s like, what would my future self do?
0:33:29 Or if I was my future self now, how would they approach this?
0:33:31 And how would my future self want me to do this?
0:33:36 And so that’s just using your future self as the standard, as the way for operating.
0:33:42 Like I know that my future self wants the best for me and also wants me to be my best.
0:33:47 And so if I start to make my future self the standard, then all of a sudden I’m going to
0:33:51 start making a lot better decisions in the present because not only am I thinking about
0:33:56 what’s best for me in my future, but I’m now using that as the tool for making the best
0:34:01 decisions now, whether that’s call it I’m at home and I could be engaging with my kids
0:34:04 on a really high level, which is what my future self would probably want me to do.
0:34:07 But instead I’m just kind of spacing out, like sitting on my phone.
0:34:14 Like if I’m using my future self as the standard and my future self being what would be ultimately
0:34:19 best for me and what I value most, it becomes a lot easier to make the decision here and
0:34:23 now to do what’s best for the present and the future.
0:34:29 I could imagine that if you don’t have a clear goal or vision of your future, your life is
0:34:30 just willy nilly.
0:34:31 Right.
0:34:32 You’re just doing things to do them.
0:34:33 You don’t have a clear goal.
0:34:34 It’s chaotic.
0:34:38 So what’s the downside of not even having a future self vision?
0:34:39 Yeah.
0:34:45 So if you don’t know who your future self is in any degree, or if you’re absolutely not
0:34:51 connected to your future self at all, the extreme end of that and like you can see this, the
0:34:56 extreme end of being disconnected to your future self is someone who has zero perspective
0:34:58 of consequences.
0:34:59 They’re so out of touch.
0:35:04 And I’ve seen this even with my kids where it’s like they’re acting so poorly like right
0:35:09 before bed, sometimes as a family, like if they do certain things like our night routine
0:35:13 really well, sometimes we’ll like watch like half a movie or something like that before
0:35:14 bed.
0:35:19 Like we will tell them sometimes like if you do the routine really well, we’ll like have
0:35:22 ice cream and watch a movie, you know, for like 40 minutes.
0:35:26 And then that, you know, sometimes if they’re not connected to that future self, even 45
0:35:33 minutes into the future, like they will do absolute terrible things that then lead us
0:35:35 to saying, nope, can’t do it.
0:35:36 And then they throw a fit.
0:35:40 They’re like, they can’t even believe that they lost what they did, but they were so disconnected
0:35:43 to what they were doing and the consequences.
0:35:48 And like this is what happens for extreme addicts where like you do something and you’re so
0:35:53 disconnected from the consequences that you’re shocked when all of a sudden like everything’s
0:35:54 falling apart.
0:36:01 And so like one degree of looking at this is like, if you are so disconnected from your
0:36:07 behavior and reality being consequences, which is what my kids were like, they’re acting
0:36:12 so opposite to the results that they want or think that they want, but they don’t even
0:36:13 know it.
0:36:18 It’s like, are you aware that what you’re doing right now is literally sabotaging you
0:36:22 in 10 minutes from now and you’re about to throw a fit and they don’t see it.
0:36:24 Like that is utter blindness.
0:36:28 But the other angle, which is kind of more the direction you were going was, it’s kind
0:36:34 of like the Alice in Wonderland thing where Alice meets the cat and the cat says, well,
0:36:36 Alice says, which way should I go?
0:36:39 Cause there’s two different paths and the cat says, well, that depends on where you
0:36:40 want to go.
0:36:41 And she says, well, I don’t know where I’m going in.
0:36:44 So he says, then you can literally go any direction you want.
0:36:47 Cause if you don’t know where you want to go, if you don’t have a destination in mind,
0:36:50 then it literally doesn’t matter what you do today.
0:36:53 That’s part of, I guess, what you would say is being connected to your future self is once
0:36:58 you get specific about where you want to go, about what you want, then you can start to
0:37:00 formulate pathways of getting there.
0:37:05 But if you have absolutely no direction, no destination, then it does not matter what
0:37:07 you do here and now.
0:37:09 You’re essentially rudderless.
0:37:13 Your future self becomes the anchor and it becomes the compass to like the decisions
0:37:14 you make here and now.
0:37:17 And that’s, that’s actually literally what all the research shows now.
0:37:22 And by the way, the Psychology Today magazine that just came out in September and October
0:37:26 was all about future self and about the person you’re going to be in the future because this
0:37:31 topic is becoming so, so big in psychology and even in therapy.
0:37:36 Like therapists are finding that there’s really no way we can help someone change long term
0:37:38 without getting them connected to their future self.
0:37:42 Because if they’re not, if they’re not thinking about who they want to be, it’s very hard
0:37:45 to change without a goal or without a why.
0:37:50 That then just becomes behavior change, which is kind of willpower focused.
0:37:52 And you can’t really sustain that without a direction.
0:37:57 And so I would say it’s very difficult to be intentional if you don’t have a future
0:37:59 self you’re working towards.
0:38:00 Yeah.
0:38:04 I interview really successful people all the time like yourself.
0:38:08 I had Alex Hermose on the show who’s like everybody’s new favorite sales and marketing
0:38:10 entrepreneur.
0:38:15 And we were talking about focus and this idea of focus is becoming such a big theme lately.
0:38:18 I’ve been doing podcasting for almost five years now.
0:38:22 And more and more, it just sounds like people saying you need to get focused.
0:38:27 If you’re unfocused, if you’re unprioritized, you’re not going to really achieve extraordinary
0:38:28 success.
0:38:32 Like you can be successful, of course, but to really, you know, become that 1%, Scott
0:38:35 Galloway was on and said the same thing.
0:38:39 And so what you’re saying is aligned to that understanding your future self is having this
0:38:42 extreme focus of who you want to be, right?
0:38:45 And the steps you’re going to take to get there because you understand who you want
0:38:46 to be.
0:38:50 And that targets always moving, but you’re always taking the actions that’s going to
0:38:52 help your future self, right?
0:38:55 So let’s tie this all together with an example.
0:38:57 You talk about Mr. Beast in your book, I believe.
0:39:03 And so I’d love to understand how Mr. Beast used this concept to be a 17-year-old kid,
0:39:06 no money, no skills, to one of the most famous people in the world.
0:39:08 So this was really interesting to me.
0:39:14 I was shocked when it happened because I was writing Be Your Future Self Now.
0:39:17 So I wrote a book called Personality Isn’t Permanent.
0:39:22 And I did not know about the future self research, even though like I had already done a PhD.
0:39:28 It was still kind of a growing, they call it like a branch or a vein of research, like
0:39:32 it was a topic I’d never really heard of, and it was kind of small, but it was burgeoning,
0:39:33 meaning it was growing.
0:39:39 And anyways, while I was writing that book, call it End of 2019, Early 2020, I fell upon
0:39:40 the research on future self.
0:39:44 And I was like, oh my goodness, why have I never heard of this before?
0:39:45 Like why have I never even seen this?
0:39:49 Why have I never heard people talking about this, whether it’s in psychology or in self-development
0:39:50 or anything?
0:39:52 Like why is this a new idea?
0:39:57 It seems like this is like the grounding of all self development ideas and also like psychology.
0:40:00 But anyways, I knew I wanted to write a book on it.
0:40:03 And so I was doing all sorts of research on it while writing other books.
0:40:07 And then all of a sudden in 2020, and I had known who Mr. Beast was just because I mean
0:40:11 I like YouTube, I was watching it, and he’s this interesting figure, right, doing these
0:40:14 huge outlandish videos.
0:40:18 And I was mostly watching them with my kids and just blown away by what he was doing.
0:40:22 And then all of a sudden in October, so it’s an October of 2020, a video comes up and it’s
0:40:25 called “High Me in Five Years.”
0:40:29 And it’s got a picture of like a younger version of Mr. Beast, Jimmy Donaldson, right?
0:40:30 And it’s sketchy.
0:40:37 Like I turn, I click the video and it’s Tim Talking as a 17-year-old kid in 2015.
0:40:41 It’s filmed in 2015 and he’s saying, “Hi, you know, whenever you see this video, I just
0:40:44 want to let you know like it’s 2015.
0:40:46 I’m filming this video for my room.
0:40:48 I should be studying for my history test.
0:40:52 But I just wanted to take this minute and have a conversation with myself in five years
0:40:53 from now.”
0:40:54 And he basically just starts talking to his future self.
0:40:56 It’s like two minutes long.
0:40:59 It’s really rough, filmed from a really bad camera.
0:41:01 He shows where he’s at with his YouTube channel.
0:41:03 I think he’s got like 8,000 subscribers.
0:41:05 And basically he just talks about his future self.
0:41:07 He’s like, “Where do I want to be in five years?
0:41:09 Like who do I think I’m going to be in five years?”
0:41:14 And he’s just kind of having this intimate, personal conversation with his future self
0:41:15 in public.
0:41:21 So basically what happened, you know, as you scroll way back in time through his channel,
0:41:24 you actually see that he did this multiple times, but he did it all the same night.
0:41:26 So it was in October.
0:41:32 It was, well, you know, if you use the exact date, it was October 4th of 2015.
0:41:37 And he was 17 years old and what he ended up doing, I don’t know where he got the idea,
0:41:41 but he filmed four different future self videos.
0:41:42 Each of them were like two minutes long.
0:41:46 So the first one was where do I want to be in, he said hi me in six months or something
0:41:47 like that.
0:41:51 And so he was talking to his future self six months into the future and just saying mostly
0:41:56 because his obsession, which as you can see, whatever you focus on expands, he got very
0:42:01 good at YouTube, but most of his future self was related to like himself as a YouTuber.
0:42:04 You know, he wanted to be a famous YouTuber, he wanted to be the biggest YouTuber in the
0:42:05 world.
0:42:08 And so like, as he’s talking to his future self six months into the future, he’s like,
0:42:11 “You know, if I have 20,000 subscribers, it’s going to be absolutely amazing and stuff
0:42:12 like that.
0:42:13 If I don’t, it’s going to be embarrassing.”
0:42:16 So he did one for six months out, one for a year out.
0:42:20 I think he did one for five years out and then he did a 10 year all that night.
0:42:24 And so obviously none of us even will see, it’ll be really ridiculous to see where he’s
0:42:26 at in 2025.
0:42:29 I guess that’s only three years away now that we think about it.
0:42:34 But basically all of those videos were only two minutes long and what he did is he filmed
0:42:38 them all in one place, one time he probably took 10 or 15 minutes to film the four videos.
0:42:43 You know, he set them to go publish on his YouTube channel, but he set them to go into
0:42:44 their corresponding times.
0:42:48 And so he set the six month one to go live, six months into the future, the one year one
0:42:51 to go live a year into the future, the five year one.
0:42:56 And so on October 4th of 2020, when the video just automatically went live because he had
0:43:01 said it to go live five years into the future, he actually had forgotten that he had made
0:43:02 that video.
0:43:04 Like it was a shock to him.
0:43:08 But in that video, he said he wanted to have a million YouTube subscribers and he wouldn’t
0:43:12 have even been able to fathom what it would have been like to have a million subscribers.
0:43:17 Well, when the video actually went live in 2020, his channel had like 45 million subscribers.
0:43:20 By that point, he was incomparably a different person.
0:43:21 He had a huge business.
0:43:22 He was like had a big team.
0:43:26 He was all of his videos were getting like tens of millions, sometimes hundreds of millions
0:43:27 of views.
0:43:30 And even since then now, you know, he’s got multiple channels and he’s doing so many
0:43:31 things.
0:43:32 It’s even ridiculous.
0:43:36 But I mean, he’s just an interesting example of someone who was very public about his future
0:43:41 self, not afraid of admitting his future self and you can actually see when you watch his
0:43:47 old videos before that day, October 4th of 2015, you can see that obviously he got really
0:43:51 clear and committed to his future self because the videos started changing after that time
0:43:54 and his growth started to like really like accelerate.
0:43:57 And so he’s just someone who is obviously connected to commit to his future self.
0:44:01 He used his future self as the basis for what he did.
0:44:05 He was talking to his future self in public and that was obviously his identity that drove
0:44:06 him forward.
0:44:08 And he continued to raise his standard for who he became and what he did.
0:44:13 So he’s just a brilliant example of it with no apology, like no embarrassment, like he
0:44:14 doesn’t care.
0:44:17 And I think that’s a huge thing is to not be ashamed of your future self.
0:44:19 So many people are afraid to admit what they want.
0:44:23 We’ll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors.
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0:49:25 How about in terms of like the timeline of your future self?
0:49:28 Should we think about ourselves five years from now, 10 years from now?
0:49:30 Do we want to think of like a range?
0:49:32 Like what’s your suggestion there?
0:49:36 So this is the beautiful part about time psychologically is that you can use it however
0:49:38 you want.
0:49:41 One of the areas and we don’t have to go too deep into this in the book, but like obviously
0:49:43 a lot of people believe in God.
0:49:46 And so a lot of people believe in their future self after this life.
0:49:50 And so like obviously a lot of people are thinking about the afterlife and they’re using their
0:49:53 views of that to dictate their decisions now.
0:49:56 So like you can go as far into the future as you want.
0:49:59 You can go beyond this life if you want and you can think about your future self there
0:50:01 and learn about that, which a lot of people do.
0:50:04 And that influences a lot of their decisions and the meaning in their life.
0:50:09 You know, Stephen Covey had the old concept of imagining your 80th birthday party and
0:50:12 like what you want your life to be like on your 80th birthday party.
0:50:13 Who do you want to be there?
0:50:15 What do you want people to talk about your life about?
0:50:20 So like you can think way ahead and think big picture, you know, and expand that out
0:50:24 and really start to think like what will really have mattered at the end of my life?
0:50:26 Like what matters?
0:50:30 And ideally you spend most of your time on the things which matter, not on the things
0:50:31 which don’t.
0:50:34 But in terms of hyper practicality.
0:50:39 I think it’s good to build your future self around various timelines, like various important
0:50:40 anchor moments.
0:50:42 And so like I gave you 2030 on purpose.
0:50:44 That wasn’t an accident.
0:50:50 The reason I gave you 2030 is because the youngest one that we adopted in 2030, he will
0:50:51 turn 18.
0:50:56 And so the older two will be gone, he will be leaving in 2030.
0:51:00 And that is going to be a big moment for me, my wife and our younger three kids because
0:51:03 chances are we’re going to move from Florida, like when he moves.
0:51:04 We live in Florida.
0:51:08 We might not, you know, our future selves might have different plans, but that’s kind
0:51:13 of a huge anchor moment for my future self, for my family’s future self is like our older
0:51:14 three kids are going to leave.
0:51:16 Our younger ones are much younger than the ones we adopted.
0:51:20 So like me and my wife have spent some time thinking about like what’s going to happen
0:51:21 when Logan leaves?
0:51:25 Like where are we going to go become nomadic and like travel the world, live in different
0:51:26 countries?
0:51:30 And so like we’re starting to think about our future self on that timeline because there’s
0:51:33 a key moment there, like there’s a key anchor to that.
0:51:38 And so like it’s good to think about your future self in terms of key anchor anchoring
0:51:41 times because then you can really start to map out like what do I want to see happen
0:51:42 in the next eight years?
0:51:44 And like where would I like to be when Logan leaves?
0:51:47 Like I can really think big on an eight year scale.
0:51:52 Like I can do a lot of things between now and 2030 when he leaves.
0:51:59 In terms of super practicality, I think three years in terms of tangible goals, three years
0:52:04 is a really good timeline for really achieving big specific things.
0:52:08 Like you and I over the last three years, you know, it’s been a little over three years
0:52:12 now, but like in terms of you three years ago, if you’re thinking about like how big
0:52:13 do you want to see your podcast go?
0:52:19 Like over three years, you can grow enormously toward a very specific goal.
0:52:24 And so thinking in terms of like if I want to grow really big in a very specific direction,
0:52:28 call it me as an author, you as a podcast, someone in their finances, someone towards
0:52:37 skills, three years, you can get really specific and you can still grow like 10x, 100x, 1000x
0:52:38 big in a certain direction.
0:52:45 So I think three years or less in terms of really big sprints towards big goals.
0:52:46 I love that.
0:52:47 I think that’s super, super helpful.
0:52:48 Okay.
0:52:55 So I want to move into purpose and understanding how purpose is related to all of this.
0:52:59 And so I think a good place to start would be understanding the levels of every behavior.
0:53:02 You say it’s the what, the why, and the how.
0:53:07 Can you talk to us about how your why really drives the what and the how?
0:53:08 Yeah.
0:53:11 So the why is the reason for doing it.
0:53:13 This is where you start to become intentional.
0:53:17 So as an example, if someone’s listening to this podcast, my question would be, well,
0:53:19 why are you listening to it?
0:53:24 And the why would then highlight what you’re ultimately trying to do and what you ultimately
0:53:25 value.
0:53:28 Like everyone’s going to have a different why for why we’re doing this.
0:53:34 You have a different why for interviewing me as I have for being interviewed, right?
0:53:41 And so it’s important to clarify and understand what the why is that’s driving everything
0:53:42 you’re doing.
0:53:45 And I’m of the belief that you do choose the why.
0:53:51 Like you do choose it, you clarify it, but you can scrape away levels of understanding
0:53:52 it.
0:53:53 But the why is just the purpose.
0:53:54 The purpose is the goal.
0:53:58 What is the ultimate reason you’re doing this Aristotle would call that final cause, which
0:54:00 is basically the end.
0:54:05 So as an example, like if, if I’m hungry, like if I get up and go to the, to the kitchen
0:54:09 and start eating, well, it’s like, well, why did I get up and go to the kitchen?
0:54:12 It might have been because I’m hungry, but it also might have been cause I was triggered
0:54:15 and I’m just trying to avoid trying to avoid working.
0:54:21 Like, and so it’s just understanding the why and the purpose starts to help you realize
0:54:23 what’s driving your behavior.
0:54:27 You know, when you’re younger, the why might have been just to impress your friends.
0:54:33 And so there’s always a why behind every action and how psychologists frame it is, is every
0:54:37 goal is either an approach oriented goal where you’re trying to approach what you want or
0:54:39 you’re trying to avoid what you don’t want.
0:54:44 And so the why is always going to either be approaching something you want or avoiding
0:54:45 something you don’t want.
0:54:49 And so it’s helpful when the why is more approach oriented.
0:54:52 Sure you want to avoid bad things from happening, but if, if everything you’re doing is just
0:54:57 to avoid negative things from happening, that kind of probably shows it.
0:55:00 There’s a lot of trauma that’s unresolved in the past and so you’re trying to avoid
0:55:01 a lot of pain.
0:55:02 Yeah.
0:55:05 So I’d love if we could like just dig on this a little bit.
0:55:09 So we’re talking about the difference between approach motivations and avoid motivations.
0:55:14 When we approach motivation, we’re basically creating our future rather avoid motivation
0:55:19 is just avoiding a future we don’t want and it’s better to proactively create one is what
0:55:20 you’re saying.
0:55:22 I just want to understand what you’re trying to say.
0:55:24 I mean, it’s good to avoid things you don’t want.
0:55:29 Like it’s good to be strategic about avoiding, call it bad decisions, avoiding bad people.
0:55:34 But if you’re always just avoiding, then basically every action you’re taking is a reaction against
0:55:35 something else.
0:55:39 Like I’m trying to not, but even avoiding things is based on the future.
0:55:42 Like I’m, so I’m like, I’m trying to avoid being out of shape.
0:55:44 I don’t want to like be obese in the future.
0:55:45 So I’m going to avoid that.
0:55:51 Like that’s one way of approaching your future, but it’s far more powerful and more proactive
0:55:53 to say, well, what do, what is it?
0:55:55 I truly want to approach.
0:55:56 Like what is it?
0:55:59 I want to like direct my attention towards and focus on and create.
0:56:03 And yeah, I can avoid landfalls along the way and I can learn from experiences and avoid
0:56:06 those kinds of people or I can avoid those kinds of dumb mistakes.
0:56:11 Like certainly you can avoid things, but it is very powerful to be proactive and kind
0:56:14 of consciously creating like this is what I want.
0:56:16 And then to watch yourself go and get it.
0:56:22 And so both are useful, both are incredibly useful both their motivations.
0:56:26 And I think it’s helpful when you’re trying to observe yourself, like why am I doing this?
0:56:30 It’s either going to be to approach something you want or to avoid something you don’t.
0:56:32 And that can start to highlight kind of the why.
0:56:37 And one of the reasons why avoid motivations can have downsides is because if you’re always
0:56:41 just trying to avoid something, then that means that one of the things you’re avoiding
0:56:42 is fear.
0:56:46 Like you’re avoiding going through the emotions of getting what you want.
0:56:51 Like if you’re always avoiding, then you’re also avoiding the hard truths.
0:56:52 You’re avoiding the fear.
0:56:55 You’re avoiding hard conversations.
0:56:58 And so when you’re approaching something, you’re willing to face what you would typically
0:57:00 want to avoid.
0:57:08 I recently am an end in process of ending a really what’s been a great business collaboration.
0:57:15 But for a while, I had avoided the conversation and avoided kind of thinking about what it
0:57:16 would take if that happened.
0:57:21 If you’re always avoiding, then what that means is that you’re not passing through the
0:57:24 emotions and the fear that are going to get you where you want to go.
0:57:26 When you’re operating with commitment and courage, you’re not avoiding.
0:57:29 You’re going right through it and you’re transforming through it.
0:57:30 I love that.
0:57:35 So just to round this out, I thought a good story that kind of ties into a lot that we
0:57:36 were talking about.
0:57:40 And I know that he’s a big inspiration for you is Victor Frankel’s life.
0:57:45 Can you tell us the story about Victor Frankel and how he used his purpose of protecting
0:57:50 his book to survive while he was in the concentration camps in the Holocaust?
0:57:54 And what you learned from his story about hope and purpose, and then we’ll close out
0:57:56 the conversation.
0:58:01 So the reason Frankel is so important, and again, man search for meaning one of the most
0:58:07 important books in the world, he was a Jewish person who in 1942 was taken into the Holocaust,
0:58:08 right?
0:58:10 German Nazi concentration camps.
0:58:15 And what he found with people who are living in such dire situations, we really, I mean,
0:58:18 unless you actually study the Holocaust, you don’t even understand what I’m saying.
0:58:20 It’s gibberish right now.
0:58:23 It was almost unfathomable how bad it was.
0:58:27 Like the people were starved, they were thrown in gas chambers, people were shot in the head
0:58:28 right next to you.
0:58:34 Like you’re sitting doing grunt work for months, months, months, years and years and years.
0:58:35 Everything’s been taken from you.
0:58:36 Even the clothes off your back.
0:58:41 You’re standing there naked, deprived of everything, deprived of your dreams, deprived
0:58:42 of everything.
0:58:46 And what Frankel noticed when he was in those situations, because he was a psychologist
0:58:50 and so like he was paying attention to this stuff, he was very in tune with what was going
0:58:55 on in people’s heads and like why some people could be resilient and even be happy in these
0:59:00 crazy conditions and why some people would get desperate, lose their minds.
0:59:06 And he started to draw an interesting correlation, which was in those dire situations when you’re
0:59:08 kind of deprived of everything and you’re also starved physically.
0:59:13 I mean, they were only given like a small piece of bread every day is he saw an immediate
0:59:19 correlation that like when someone lost hope toward their future, within days they died
0:59:23 in those situations, like their body didn’t have enough to sustain them.
0:59:26 If you and I lost hope in our future, we’d start to fall apart physically.
0:59:30 Like we’d probably lose our health, you know, and hope from a psychology standpoint is like
0:59:33 air to your physical body, like food and air.
0:59:37 Like you need hope because your who you are right now is largely dictated by your views
0:59:38 of the future.
0:59:44 So basically what Frankel found was is that unless you had a specific goal, which is a
0:59:50 huge aspect of hope, without a specific goal that gave your life meaning and substance,
0:59:54 you couldn’t handle the present, especially when it was that bad.
0:59:57 And so that’s why he always quoted Nietzsche, which is when you have a why to live for you
0:59:59 can bear almost any how.
1:00:03 And so everything he did, and he literally he layers it, and I share the best quotes
1:00:07 of it in future self, but he says, you know, when you lose, when you lose hope in your
1:00:08 future, you know, you’re doomed.
1:00:12 But he also said that everything we did in the concentration camps to give people hope
1:00:17 or to even help them to be able to manage their mind or manage their emotions was we
1:00:22 had to give to them a goal in their future, which they could work towards.
1:00:28 And he himself, he literally stated the goal that gave him purpose and gave him meaning
1:00:30 and allowed him to endure the trials.
1:00:34 And for him, it was he wanted to be reconnected with his wife, Tilly, who was taken to another
1:00:35 camp.
1:00:38 He didn’t know that she’d already been killed when she was pregnant with their baby, but
1:00:40 he didn’t know that he wanted to be reconnected with her.
1:00:45 But also he wanted to rewrite his book, which was almost done being written when they got
1:00:50 basically taken by the Nazis and they took the manuscript and tore it apart.
1:00:52 He literally states this in man search for meaning.
1:00:57 He said, my deep desire to rewrite that book anew and publish it allowed me to overcome
1:00:59 the rigors and the pain of the camps.
1:01:03 So when you have a way to live for, you can bear almost anyhow.
1:01:07 If you don’t have a way to live for, if you don’t have hope and commitment in your future,
1:01:08 then you’re not going to be very productive.
1:01:12 I mean, little things in your day can throw you way off, but for him, in those situations,
1:01:14 it was life or death.
1:01:15 It’s literally life or death.
1:01:16 Yeah.
1:01:17 So, so fascinating.
1:01:20 I think this is a great way to close out the interview.
1:01:24 So I always end the interview with a couple last questions and then we do something fun
1:01:26 at the end of the year and recap them.
1:01:30 So the first one is what is one actionable thing our young and profiteers can do today
1:01:33 to become more profitable tomorrow?
1:01:39 It goes back to the Alex Hermosi comment for me right now, which is, I love the quote,
1:01:43 it’s better to be a meaningful specific than a wandering generality.
1:01:49 And so the more clear you get on your future self and the more specific that obviously
1:01:51 takes you down a specific direction.
1:01:53 You’re not trying to be everything for every one.
1:01:57 Like some of the recent decisions I’ve made in my career and in the books I’m writing
1:02:03 have to do with becoming even more focused, even more specific in a narrow range.
1:02:07 It’s kind of like the 80/20 principle, like 80% of what you’re doing is kind of a distraction,
1:02:10 whereas it’s just the core 20 that makes sense.
1:02:13 And so you want to go deeper and deeper into that, like let go of everything else, like
1:02:18 actually commit and go deep and get 10 times better in something specific.
1:02:23 Like if you get really, really good in something specific, it kind of reminds me of that quote,
1:02:25 “Become so good you can’t be ignored.”
1:02:28 But it’s really about qualitative, not quantitative.
1:02:32 It’s not about the quantity of what you do, it’s about the quality of how you do it.
1:02:36 And that requires focus, commitment, and purpose.
1:02:42 And so just commit to something and commit to getting really, really good and unique
1:02:43 in that thing.
1:02:44 That’s actually what mastery is.
1:02:48 It’s not about doing something well, it’s about doing something uniquely well, incomparably
1:02:49 well.
1:02:52 And that takes commitment and depth, not broadness.
1:02:53 Love that.
1:02:54 Mic drop.
1:02:55 All right.
1:02:58 And what is your secret to profiting in life?
1:02:59 Defining what profit means to me.
1:03:01 Not everything is profitable.
1:03:02 Not everything is worth my time.
1:03:03 Not everything is useful.
1:03:07 And so defining what I value, what I care about, what matters most, and then going all
1:03:20 in on those few things and letting go of everything else.
1:03:23 (upbeat music)
1:03:33 [BLANK_AUDIO]