Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. It is the end of 2024, and to celebrate, I thought I would run you through some of the best lessons that I've picked up over the last 12 months. This year has had over 10,000 minutes of episodes produced, so there was...
Quite a lot to choose from, but I ended up settling on 16 insights from some of my favorite conversations, both inside and outside of the podcast. So I expect to learn what the insecure overachiever mindset is, whether success has to be painful, why men... aren't seen as having problems, how come so many people in shape have an issue with people using Ozempic, whether you can be good if you can't be evil, Elon Musk's reflections on being a CEO, what to do if you don't believe in yourself, and...
Much more. Coming up on Christmas, we've got Christmas special arriving very soon with the boys this week. No episode on Boxing Day because it is the holidays and you should be spending time doing other things than being on the internet. But I just wanted to wish you a very festive period. Hope everything's going well.
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to upgrade your selling today. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the wise and very wonderful me. What's happening, people? Welcome back to the show. It is an end of 2024 lessons.
episode i like to do these toward the end of the year recapping some of the best lessons i've learned from the podcast and from my reading and from my newsletter and everything else and i kind of bundle them all together uh so there'll be some greatest hits that you're familiar with and maybe a lot of stuff that you
apparently 66% of you only started listening to the show this year which is pretty wild Spotify wrapped told me that so lots of new things and I love doing these I'm so fired up for today fucking love doing these episodes that's so good so uh yeah let's get into it first one is the insecure overachiever mindset when faced with a challenge your nature might be to worry and obsess and grip
tightly the sort of classic insecure overachiever mindset and because worrying is so common in every pursuit that you attempt your successes are seen as proof that worrying is a performance enhancer and your failures are seen as proof that you should have worried all along. So you end up with unfalsifiable negativity, kind of a walking anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity, like Andrew Wilkinson says. You build this link between worry...
and performance. Belief that your performance would have been markedly worse if you hadn't worried so much and that the worrying is precisely what motivated and enabled the outcomes that you wanted. Even when you reach black belt status and you've got confidence in your capacities, there's a lack of enthused energy. I think it seems like maybe the worry's left you, but it's not been replaced with excitable enthusiasm.
higher expectations. And I have been thinking about this an awful lot this year and kind of want to propose a radical new approach, which is assuming that things will actually go well. Basically, after a while, I don't think that the fear... is aiding your performance you're primarily running on habit and skill and experience and maybe the fear was needed in the beginning to narrow your focus and create the obsession but now you've reached escape velocity
and you're drifting in space. So why are you holding the controls just as tightly as you were when you're on the launch pad instead of actually enjoying the view? It's a realization that we all need to come to that this is all going to be over pretty soon. And I need to remind myself to realize that, that this thing isn't going to last forever. This is...
One day you will do your final sports match or your final trip to give a presentation or a concluding project at work or whatever. And you can look back on a great run of miserable successes. or actually try to embrace some enjoyment, perhaps even try to prioritize it. One thing that a lot of high achievers do, especially people that care a lot about their pursuit, is they confuse relentless, dour severity with seriousness and sophistication. I don't think
It's more noble to treat your pursuits so sternly that the only positive element is the end result and absolutely none of the experience. TLDR, I think things will go well. you will figure it out just like you always have. So actually go and seek some joy. And this was a reflection, I guess I kind of realized when doing the live show in Australia and then the one in London and realizing that we...
everything had gone well and that the live shows, especially in Australia, were fantastic. And I'd been so focused on not messing up and on gripping the experience and on controlling everything that I didn't actually... When I look back, sure, we did it. The outcome was the outcome, which was really great.
But there wasn't a massive amount of enjoyment during it because so much of it was swimming in this sea of concern and vigilance and, you know, ambient anxiety. So I tried to split test it with London and see, okay, what happens if I just try and enjoy it? And it went even better. And I wasn't terrified every single moment. So maybe assuming that things aren't always going to go badly is a strategy that we can all use, basically. It's similar to...
this insight from Rich Roll, which is actually from 2023, but resurfaced. And I fucking love this quote. He said, I still find myself with this sense that success has to be earned. And the only way to earn it is to inflict pain on yourself. And if you're not in pain, you didn't try hard enough. And it would have been better if you'd suffered more. And I think that's a lie. And I want to find out if it's a lie or if it's true. And I think...
that it's a lie as well. One of the most common questions that we got asked in Australia and in London at the live shows was, how do I give myself credit for my accomplishments in life? why do I never feel satisfied or finished when the job has been well done and this as far as I can see is another curse of competence if you're good at things and have high standards you assume that
You should always do well, which means that success isn't a cause for celebration, but it's the minimum level of reasonable performance. Anything less than victory would be a failure, and victory itself becomes nothing more than acceptable. Congratulations. You might be very successful. You also might be very miserable. And I shouldn't say congratulations because that makes it sound as if you chose it and you didn't.
So a few things to keep in mind. And again, this is largely me screaming at myself to remember these. First off, you're wired this way for a reason. because your ancestors are made up of the most gold-driven, insecure overachievers from history. So you couldn't have been any other way. Your brain doesn't care.
about you feeling good it only cares about you being successful in the past success meant accumulating food and resources and now it means accumulating money and accomplishments and the number of ways that you're success seeking system can be hijacked is greater than ever so it's not really your fault another realization there are no solutions only trade-offs this outrageous lesson from Thomas Sowell
You don't get to live the comfortable life with recognition and progress and all of the personal development that you really care about. And also be able to switch off from that stuff whenever you want. It's like you think that you could be obsessive and driven in one area of your life, but be able to create a hard boundary where it doesn't bleed over into everything else. That's...
That's just not the way that it works. Your brain doesn't know, oh, these are the pursuits that I'm supposed to really, really be obsessive about. But when it comes to my relationships or when it comes to how I feel about my progress in the gym or whatever, I want you to...
leave that bit apart, compartmentalize it. It's like, no, this is a nature that you're building inside of yourself or in many ways has been sort of bestowed on you genetically. You can't have these weird bits of territory where you want it over here, but you don't want it over there.
there are no solutions, only trade-offs, okay, would you sacrifice all of the things that you care about yourself, your depth of thought, the development that you make, if it meant that you got to have a little bit more peace? For the most part, I don't think you would. With that in mind, just accept it as the cost of doing business. Some stuff that you're not super happy about will maybe come along for the ride. Another one is you complain about not being grateful.
and you give yourself no time for gratitude. And I don't mean a daily journal, which becomes a chore. I mean, dwelling at the end of a successful experience for 60 seconds. Like really sitting in it and considering the details and thinking about how good and satisfied you feel to have completed it.
Rick Hansen in this great book called Hardwiring Happiness, he says, absorb the experience. Imagine it sinking down into you and becoming a part of you. And that's the type of... sort of micro habit thing you give a presentation you were nervous before it goes well afterward 60 seconds of just sitting and thinking about it like really allowing yourself to sort of
revel in that as opposed to, right, get my phone out with them. There's got to be emails to do. There must be some slacks that I've got to answer. Or, you know, you have a difficult conversation with a partner. and instead of immediately moving on to distraction or cuddling or whatever it's like hey sit with that feeling wow that was a scary conversation that we were supposed to have and it went well and both of us regulated how phenomenal like you can sit and
allow that to become more of a part of you. And yeah, ultimately you were born into a world that you didn't choose. You were maladapted for the mind that you have. which you also didn't choose. You're in an environment that's replete with games designed to hijack your drive and your attention 24 hours a day. So basically, I'm impressed that you even made it to breakfast.
We all need to give ourselves a little bit of a break, I think. Another lesson, one of my favorite ones, this was from Richard Reeves. great author, wrote the book of Boys and Men and came back on the show for the second time this year. We ended up going for three hours. He...
He's just such an interesting researcher when it comes to sort of the masculinity question, men's roles, boys' roles in the modern world. He said men aren't seen as having problems, but as being the problem. Suicide rates among men under 30 have risen by 40%. since 2010 and are four times higher than among young women. Male suicide accounts for as many deaths as breast cancer. Male suicide accounts for as many deaths as breast cancer.
Men are less likely than women to go to college or buy a home. They are more likely to be lonely and are more vulnerable to addiction. Young white men from lower income homes are worse off than their fathers on almost every economic and social indicator. There is a bigger gender gap on campuses today.
than in 1972 when the government passed Title IX to prevent sex-based discrimination in education, but today the disparities in college enrollment and performance are the other way round. There is no strong evidence that young men are turning against gender equality, but they have turned The problems of young men are not the confections of reactionaries. This is the story of elite neglect, not voter chauvinism.
The Democrats have failed to address these issues. Under the Biden administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has refused to acknowledge the gender disparity in suicide rates. The White House Gender Policy Council has not tackled a single issue
facing primarily boys and men. There have been initiatives to promote women in STEM and construction, but nothing about encouraging men into teaching on mental health. There are women's health research initiatives, but no office on men's health. The Democrats and progressive institutions have a massive blind spot when it comes to male issues and this was exposed in the election. At worst, men are seen as not having problems but as being the problem.
Remembering that Richard is the most gentle, researched, sort of lefty policy wonk type guy, DC type person that you could have saying this, and that sounds like a fucking hammer blow. that will have been dampened down an awful lot and the language will have been dialed back it's not good uh and you know a lot of the conversations that i've had this year have been around trying to effectively navigate the conversation to do with men
And boys, how much do we need to caveat? How much do we need to say, well, it's not to say that women don't have problems, but now that I've gone through this weird laundry list of like. a fucking land acknowledgement for sex and gender, I can now talk about the problems that I'm here to face. That doesn't happen in the reverse. If someone's talking about the problems faced by girls and women,
That doesn't occur. Well, we must remember that men kill themselves at five times the rate that women do. And if men had killed themselves at the rate that women had, we would have half a million more men from 1999 to 2020. That doesn't happen. But I'd had... I guess another insight was I'd had a bunch of conversations about the challenges that men and women face in the modern world. And I realized how rarely.
pro-male and pro-female activists are prepared to genuinely accept that the other sex may encounter difficulties without measuring it against their own suffering. There is an assumption that any attention paid toward men takes it away from women or some other minority group who is more deserving and vice versa. It's a zero-sum view of empathy. And obviously, this is not how empathy works.
Rather, it indicates just how broken the conversation around men and women is that care for people who are struggling in life is seen as a fucking finite resource. Women can point to how men don't need to fear sexual assault as much. And men can point to how women don't need to fear Me Too allegations. But men hold more CEO positions. But women are graduating college at higher rates. But there's more male homelessness. But there's more women in sex work.
It's like both sides are trying to balance some bizarre simultaneous social justice equation. But how many false allegations are worth a sexual assault? How many female graduates are worth a male CEO? the entire conversation is basically saying, my privilege is more oppressed than your privilege. It's like victimhood masquerading as arithmetic. And it's entirely based on a flawed premise because...
The complexity of the truth is inconvenient for both sides. There is no equating the suffering of one group to another and perceiving... the discussion in this way causes everyone to enter the framing correctly as adversaries.
accepting the challenges of one group does not disable attention from being paid to another. And similarly, it shouldn't be the case that a discussion about men's troubles should first be hedged with fucking groveling caveats about how we know that women face a myriad of problems too.
lest the position be seen as myopic misogyny. Zero some empathy is one of the most boring and narcissistic things that keeps on happening. And it's... done over and over again and it achieves nothing except for pushing both groups apart from each other and I can't do much for women but I've got some I think pretty reasonable and influential friends that could propel a better conversation around men and working quite hard to make that happen in whatever way I can.
It's an uphill battle in many ways. Richard taught me this really interesting thing about how when people don't listen to your point, if you've been sort of campaigning for something for a while, you turn up the volume. and the intensity evermore, especially if they say, no, it's not, or you don't feel like it's being welcomed, not only not being heard, but is actively being pushed back. And I can definitely see that.
temptation, that dynamic going on, that gravitational pull for you to become ever more a firebrand when talking about this sort of stuff. There's definitely days when I feel a bit more fiery than others. Those are the days I try and stay off Twitter. But I think I'm happy with the job that's been done this year. I think the conversations I've had have been really great and I hope that they've helped a lot.
But still more to be done. Speaking of which, another conversation I've been having a lot, another lesson that I took away was trying to work out why... Lots of people have a big problem with Ozempic use, widespread Ozempic use. Unsurprisingly, there's been a lot of... pushback from the body positivity movement uh headlines that say anorectics anorectics by the way is the technical class of drugs like uh ozempic but ozempic is going to move or the class of drugs of ozempic
are going to move beyond GLP-1 agonists. So you need to learn the word anorectics because that's what they will be at scale. Anyway, headlines say that these drugs confirm society's anti-fat bias and they claim that a future without fat is a danger.
idea basically that appetite suppressing drugs are a removal of fat people's identity and a denial of their right to exist so all the usual stuff but much more of the pushback online at least from what I've seen seems to come from people who aren't fat but ones that are in shape which got me thinking about why that might be the case so why would someone who isn't going to be
using a drug be so critical about its introduction. So I came up with a bro science theory using some evolutionary psychology underpinnings. People who have managed to get in shape and stay in shape without pharmaceutical assistance have used some amount of effort and willpower and discipline. And because there are limited, easy ways to lose weight, anyone who's in shape
has got status associated with having achieved it. It's a reliable, costly signal. It's a behavior that's so expensive for the sender that it can be used to communicate honest information about them. And now, the introduction of easy ways to get in shape. derogates the prestige of this signal. It basically lowers the status of being in shape. It also makes it harder to work out the underlying fitness signals that someone's outer appearance usually indicates. You ask yourself the question
Is this person hardworking and reliable and trustworthy and able to master their impulses by using their willpower to not overeat? Or did they just get a prescription for a Zempick? TLDR. Fat people should not be worried about a Zenpig denying their right to exist, but thin people may be worried about it hiding their fitness signals. And I understand that...
losing weight doesn't necessarily mean that you're in shape. There's a lot more to having a good looking body than just not being fat, but it's a big fucking first step, right? To go from being 300 pounds. and living on processed food all the time to being 130 pounds and still maybe living on processed food all the time, visually the way that you're going to look is wildly different. And I think that there is more threat to people who are in shape.
from people who shouldn't be able to get in shape without this external assistance, being able to access that same level of body type or similar level of body type. just by taking a drug. And I think that that is one of the reasons that people are, I mean, there's lots of reasons, right? People have got, was it called Fen-Fen? This drug from the nineties I learned about when I spoke to Johan Hari earlier this year.
Sometimes I think it's coming from a good place, which is there isn't a free lunch and there has to be some sort of side effects to these and so on and so forth. I'm... cautiously optimistic about the lack of side effects, apart from the immediate ones that come through, the nausea, other bits and pieces. For the most part, it seems like quite reliable as a drug and quite safe. That being said.
I understand why people are cautious. I understand that there's always, this is something new, no, no, don't worry, this one's without the side effects. And then something comes along and smashes you in the face a few years later or smashes you in the liver or the...
metabolism or whatever so i guess we'll wait and see on that but yeah i i just thought that was an interesting piece of framing to think what is it that's causing people who are in shape to have such distaste about people thinking about using a zempic and i think that The fact that it derogates how valuable other people's in shapeness is explains quite a lot. I had a conversation with...
Chris Bumstead this year while training two and a half weeks, three weeks before he stepped on stage for his final ever Olympia. And I was telling him this story about when me and a friend had had a like a polite. debate, I guess, or disagreement, not quite a disagreement, but we'd had a discussion about something and I rang them.
once I'd finished up and the dust had settled a couple of days later to make sure that they were okay. And he said, yeah, of course they were. Like, you know, I really enjoyed the conversation. I really appreciated the conversation. And then very quickly, I started talking about... how i wanted to stop being stop having this compulsion right this
people pleasing nature, this sort of overbearing need to ensure that everyone else is okay ahead of myself. And my friend sort of stepped in on the phone and said, be careful getting rid of that because the fact that you rang to check on me is exactly one of the reasons that I love you as a friend. So he warned me against pathologizing the kindest and best parts of my nature. And I started explaining this to Chris Bumstead.
The difference between choosing to do a virtuous act and being compelled to do it by your nature. And in some ways, him saying... don't pathologize the kindest parts of your nature. I didn't choose to check in on this guy. I had to. And it asks the question, is it virtuous to do a thing, a good thing? if you didn't have any other choice other than to do the good thing well the impact was good and positive so kind of but
There's something about it being compelled and less effortful or conscious that seems to sort of derogate the virtuosity. So next question, is it more virtuous to do a good thing if it took more effort? If it was harder to do something kind than it was to do something mean, does that mean that it's more virtuous? And that creates a really interesting situation. If your nature compels you to do something good, is it more virtuous?
to purposefully deprogram that compulsion and make you objectively a worse friend for a while and then to reintroduce the same act but consciously But that seems like an unnecessarily effortful way to finally feel good about doing something kind for other people, given that you were already doing something kind for other people. And this is just like an interesting. debate about where actions come from and how much pride we should take and how much praise we should receive from doing things.
even if it largely came out of a compulsion. That being said... what did I say on last year's end of your lessons review, which was focus on outcomes, not on inputs. And this is turning the entire barstool upside down and saying, you did a good thing, but the place that it came from wasn't as effortful or as...
good or as chosen as it could have been, which means that the good thing you did is less good. Anyway, there's this LaRouche Foucauld quote that says, no one deserves to be praised for kindness if he does not have the strength to be bad. Similar to Joe Hudson this year saying, if I can't trust your no, I can't trust your yes. That setting boundaries and creating a kind of rigidity and structure to yourself is important because only within that.
container can you actually sort of lean forward? It's the same as a guy being vulnerable after he's shown a ton of strength. is attractive. A guy being vulnerable because he doesn't have the ability to show strength is not. So yeah, I don't even know where I'm going with that question, but I do think it's an interesting one about us derogating things that come to us easily.
and naturally and uh sometimes pedestalizing stuff that would be more effortful and um yeah as of yet i haven't made myself purposefully a worse friend but we'll see all right next one uh don't be ashamed of your effort Midwits hate earnestness and sincere conviction because they can't stand being reminded of the thing they're capable of but resist actually trying.
And Mark Manson's got a quote that's similar that says, people will try to put the same limitations on you that they put on themselves. Don't mistake their insecurities for your ceiling. And yeah, I think... especially on the internet, especially if you're British, fuck, you will know this very well. There is something kind of uncool about being too keen, about being too sort of excitable. It's not exactly...
in our country's DNA to be super excitable. And being accused of being a keynote is not something that many people want, but it really does derogate you. the one thing that you should do, which is effort and paying attention and trying. And that seems to kind of exist on the internet at the moment. A lot of people refusing to go out, a lot of people refusing to try things, the system's rigged against me, et cetera. And I don't know, man, like, how's that working out for you?
maybe it's working out great or whatever but if you don't feel like that message speaks to you and you are someone that wants to try and make things happen in the world When you brush up against that kind of energy... it really should be a reflex to just sort of disregard it kind of the same way as you disregard somebody that's speaking a different language. And you think, oh, well, they're just speaking a different way to me. So that must be fine for them. And I'm sure that that works for them.
I kind of don't need that over here. And as far as I can see, motivation and willpower and drive are so rare and fucking tenuous and on a knife edge. that you should be very, very careful about how much you allow that to be insulted by stuff from the outer world. And yeah, Mark Manson's thing, people will try to put the same limitations on you that they put on themselves.
Don't mistake their insecurities for your ceiling is lovely. Something else that I've seen, which is happened to a bunch of people around me recently. is a very real sign of success, how you can know when you've fully made it, which is people start to accuse you of having wealthy parents. The real sign of success is when someone says, I bet you had wealthy parents. I've kind of wondered where...
this. That's satirical for the people on Instagram that didn't get that that was satirical. I wasn't saying that it was an actual marker of success. I was saying that it is the sort of thing that appears to come along for the ride as a side order when you achieve something that some people would say of as being success. And I kind of know I've tried to work out where this.
motivation comes from. I wonder whether it's that if somebody has achieved something that other people are envious of or would desire in one way or another and if they're not that different than they were the reason that the other person observing them hasn't achieved the same thing is put more on them. It's more to do with their efforts, their agency, the way that they've shown up in life. But if it's because of an unfair head start that that person had because they had wealthy parents,
You don't need to do the same level of self-reflection to work out why you're not necessarily in the same place. Another lesson from Tim Ferriss this year. Wow. Stray Vista video wall shoot thing that we did in March around about Easter time was fucking fire and he had this great insight which was don't aim for mediocre 99 of people in the world are convinced that they're incapable of achieving great things so they aim for the mediocre
The level of competition is thus fiercest for realistic goals, paradoxically making them the most time and energy consuming. If you are insecure, guess what? The rest of the world is too. Do not overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think. I love that. Do not overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself. I think if you're the sort of person who is regularly surprised by how well things go, that's...
maybe a good indication that that could be about you. And basically, I think I'm certain that most capable people don't believe in themselves enough. And a lack of confidence killed more dreams than a lack of competence ever did. Self-doubt often seems to sort of be bundled into a package deal alongside potential.
And I'm not too sure why. It might be that capable people are paralyzed by high expectations or that competence is correlated somehow with rumination and an introspective mind or maybe that the greater your capacity. the less accurately you can see your true potential. And as the end goal is simply much further away, it's harder for you to work out. I'm unsure on the cause, but I'm pretty certain on the symptom. More people.
are held back by their self-belief than are propelled by it. You can kind of think of confidence as a speed limiter that's on your system. You have capacity for more but your self-doubt limits your ability to chase it. and it causes you to avoid taking risks which means that you move more slowly than your competition and it encourages you to criticize your performance even when you do well which derogates your motivation and it makes you compare yourself
to other people's achievements, making you feel inferior by comparison, basically your mind is not helping you here. Placing insatiable demands on your performance doesn't drive more. It doesn't help you to get there. It just makes you despondent at never feeling satisfied, even with a job well done. And George Mack, who has been on the show eight times. i think maybe more he said there is a guy out there with half your talent but 10 times your self-belief making five times the money
There is a guy out there with half your talent, but 10 times your self-belief making five times the money. And it's so true. People that just swing for the fences. And I don't mean to stick a middle finger up or... castigate the self-doubting competent person that sort of quietly cracks on in the corner this is really me trying to give a bit of hope that Again, if you are regularly surprised by how well things go, something's up. You're not seeing your capacity in the world accurately.
What if things were going to go better than you assumed? What if things weren't always going to be a catastrophe? What if you didn't need to grip and concern and worry and coy and desperate and needy? What if you didn't need to do that? What if it was going to go well because you're talented and fundamentally the world ends up giving people what they deserve over a long enough time horizon?
The confidence thing, the speed limiter on the system is a big deal. And you should view it like an enemy. You should view it like something that is fighting against you to stop you from achieving the things that you want. And treat it with the requisite. respect uh another one from
Jimmy Carr that I just fucking fell in love with last year. And I talked to Holmosi about the start of it. Everyone is jealous of what you've got. No one is jealous of how you got it. And Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said, no man wants to become something. Every man wants to be something already.
And I know that sometimes I get a little bit of stick for, quote, pawning. Instagram makes it seem like I do it more than I do, but I don't know, maybe you listen to a lot of the episodes and you still think that I do. That being said, I want you to explain.
at least a little bit about why I'm such a massive fan of maxims and quotes and sort of pithy aphorisms and stuff. And the main reason is for me, it's kind of like a... you know winzip remember when you used to zip files or whatever to make them smaller or you get a bunch of different folders together and they're all zipped up into one in order to be able to remember a concept you need something you need a little gateway
into this and then maybe it opens out into a broader concept. But it's kind of hard to remember the entire thing, or at least to have some trigger that is the entire thing. That's not really the way that it works. The way that it works is... an entry point, a very easy to remember entry point that from there, the rest of this idea sort of spreads out. And that's why mantras are so good because it's a very short.
pithy thing that you say to yourself that keeps everything going and i found a quote this is the most fucking me thing that you can do finding a quote that justifies why you should use quotes um but a nobel prize winner andre guide said Everything that needs to be said has already been said, but since no one was listening, everything must be said again. So that's my elevator pitch for two reasons, I suppose, why relying on...
maxims and aphorisms are a good approach. First one, it makes things very easy to remember and is a gateway drug. It's a thin end of the wedge to get people into these ideas. And secondly, Not everybody knows everything that you know, guy. And 66% of people found this show this year, even though at the start of the year, I was like, oh my God, the show's really big. So yeah, we need to say it again.
I'm going to say it again. Next one. This is from Elon Musk on Instagram. Actually, he got clipped doing an interview and talking about what it feels like to. found a startup and to be a CEO. And I then got a quote from Mark Andreessen talking about Sean Parker. Sean Parker says, running a startup is like eating glass. You just start to like the taste of your own blood.
Running a startup is like eating glass. You just start to like the taste of your own blood. So hardcore. And Elon said a lot of times people think that creating a company is going to be fun. I would say it's really not that fun. I mean, there are periods of fun and there are periods where it's just awful.
And particularly if you're the CEO of a company, you actually have a distillation of all the worst problems in a company. There's no point in spending your time on things that are going right. So you only spend your time on things that are going wrong. And there are things that are going wrong that other people can't take care of. So you have the worst filter for the crappiest problems in the company, the most pernicious and painful problems. So I wouldn't say it's fun.
You have to feel quite compelled to do it and have a fairly high pain threshold. And there's a friend of mine who says staring companies, starting companies is like staring into the abyss and eating glass. And there's some truth to that.
The staring into the abyss part is that you're going to be constantly facing the extermination of the company because most startups fail. Like 90%, arguably 99% of startups, that's the staring part. You're constantly saying, okay, if I don't get this right, the company will die.
quite stressful. And then the eating glass part is you've got to work on the problems that the company needs you to work on, not the problems you want to work on. So you end up working on that. You really wish you weren't working on it. That's the eating glass part. And that goes on. for a long time. I think I did this 10 reasons not to work for yourself post toward the start of the year and this is one of the reasons that I've never fully
got on board or even partly got on board with the doing a nine to five is for fucking midway NPCs. You should just Lone Ranger your way through startup world and go work for yourself. I think it's really not that fun a lot of the time. Yeah, you get to capture a lot of the upside and it's kind of adventurous, but there is a lot of pain.
big amount of pain threshold and you know there are circles of hell significantly lower than the ones that i've had to go through uh some of my friends that have been part of different companies that have got you know um investors breathing down their neck They're liable for much more difficulty, under much more scrutiny. Maybe they're publicly traded now and they've got this press obligations that they need to do. It's really not that fun for a lot of the time.
but it's very meaningful. So if you're the sort of person that prioritizes meaning over joy, this may be a good path for you to go down. But I'm always hesitant around telling someone, oh yeah, sack your nine to five off and go just Lone Ranger it because...
yeah sure you're going to have a lot of freedom in the way that you don't right now but you're going to have a lot of pain in the way that you don't right now too and that's a decision that not enough people remind those still doing a more typical sort of setup of jobs that they're going to have to pay on the back end. You're going to be your own taskmaster. You're going to be your own boss.
So not only are you the person who has to do the job, you're the person who has to work out what job needs to be done. And then you need to tell the guy, you, what job it is that needs to be done and then check in on how it's done. And then you never know if you're finished. And it just goes on. It goes on and on and on.
um well another homozy ism that was related to this one of my favorites that i kind of missed when we spoke and uh someone clipped it and put it on instagram and i re-noticed it and just thought how great it was he said The world belongs to optimists because if you're going to do anything big, you have to believe that it can happen. Otherwise, it never will. Sean Puri says the cynics get to be right and the optimists get to be rich. 99% right and 100% wrong.
They're right 99% of the time, but they're wrong 100% because the only thing that matters is the big one at the end. Your family and friends will say that every girl you ever date is not good enough, except for the one time you find the girl that you're actually going to marry. Or that this business idea won't work. And you might have nine failures. My first nine businesses didn't really amount to anything. Nine.
As in the first one, I spent time on it, it failed. Second one, this one will be different. Spent time on it, failed. And then the third one, this one, failed. And then six more after that. And it's painful as shit because the whole time everyone is telling you, I told you so. And they're right. Today. But not forever. I just, that resilience piece. you know regularly going through failure moving from failure to failure with no discernible loss of enthusiasm i think is uh
Not only something that we should obviously look to cultivate in ourselves, but something that we should remind ourselves of when we do overcome failure. I think the fear of failure is way greater than the way that you feel when it actually happens. When failure occurs...
Yeah, sure. You're already onto the next thing. You're already moving. There's momentum. There's inertia. You're trying to find a solution. But when you're thinking about how failure is going to feel, that's when it's really, really scary. And that's why the...
family or friends that tell you that the girl or the guy isn't good enough for you or the people that derogate your idea of trying to start something or improve your life or make changes or whatever. That's why I've got like a real... fucking distaste for those people because again like I say drive and and tenacity is so gossamer thin and easily broken a lot of the time you
should have a lot of support. And if somebody comes along and you've managed to finally create this thing, you've got a tiny little ember burning and someone comes along and starts fucking blowing on it. No, that's not an energy that I like. And yeah, Bezos said in a shareholder letter that I really...
He said, we are working to build something important, something that matters to our customers, something that we can tell all of our grandchildren about. Such things aren't meant to be easy. That shareholder letter was in 1997. So he's in the eating glass staring into the abyss period right then. And we are working to build something important, something that matters to our customers, something that we can tell all our children about such things.
aren't meant to be easy. So I think accepting the pain, accepting the difficulty that's going to come along with whatever it is that you're trying to do is probably the first.
one of the the most important things it's something I wish that I'd done previously again going back to that there are no solutions only trade-offs idea but railing against how hard something is or how much time it's taking up or the difficulty or the inefficiency or the fact that you don't know how to do it or the fact that you don't have a high that can sort it or
The fact that people around you don't believe you or that no one's giving you the support that you want or that you thought it wouldn't take this long. The fact that that is happening is. par for the course it is the price of doing business it's the cost of entry for whatever the thing is that you're going about because if it wasn't it wouldn't be happening and so much of the pain as far as i can see
is you railing against the fact that there are difficulties. Great insight from Rangan Chatterjee was... the more that somebody complains, the less accurate their perspective of the world is. So a complaint is you saying, why is the world not behaving in the way that I expected it to? Which.
essentially identifies that you don't have an accurate model of the way that the world works. There are going to be problems continuously for the rest of time, and there will never be a day when you don't wake up. and have to mediate or negotiate or cajole your way through something. Okay? So given the fact that these things are fucking unavoidable, why are you complaining about them? And why are you so surprised when they happen?
So yes, I think such things aren't meant to be easy is a nice little reminder. And you might remember if you watched one of the Rogan episodes I did, I talked about this region beta paradox thing, this sort of...
comfortably numb area where things aren't so bad that they're really bad and they cause you to change, but they're not so good that you're actually satisfied with life and you get stuck in the middle. I realized that there is an inverse of this, the reverse region beta paradox, which is being...
in an aggressively terrible working cadence or environment but having such a tolerance for discomfort that you can endure it for a lifetime lower resilience less stubborn people would snap out and have to find a way to change things, but not you. You're basically the David Goggins of working hard. Like who's going to carry the workload? You are forever. And that's kind of a double-edged sword.
in some ways you know there's a bit of me that thinks that's really romantic uh you're able to do something that not many people are congratulations but on the other side it allows you to stay in a situation that any normal sane person would have pulled themselves out of in some situations that's great and that's resilience and you're doing fantastic but in others it
It causes you to stick about when you should have already moved on or pivoted or changed your approach or something. But because your tolerance for working hard is there, you just continue to press your nose against the grindstone. Anyway, next one. An ode to people who don't believe in themselves. What comes first? Belief or action. Do you need to believe that you can do a thing before you can do it?
Fake it until you make it is one option, but incredibly hard if you're introspective and have low self-belief and high standards. So what about make it until you believe it? Here are some lessons that I've learned. You can believe you're not worthy of a thing and still attain it.
You can be adamant that your efforts are going to go badly and still succeed. You can grip and grasp and fear and ruin the enjoyment and be totally unwarranted and things still go well. You can have no self-belief and show up anyway. You can want more for yourself without knowing exactly what that looks like.
you can doubt the process question your talent be uncertain that you're making progress disparage your accomplishments permanently feel like you're not working hard enough no matter how hard you work never give yourself a break fail to fully feel gratitude be terrified of never reaching your goals
and still end up in a place that your 20-year-old self could not imagine you'd ever get to. Self-belief is overrated, generate evidence, says Ryan Holiday. And this... resilience of doing good things in spite of you not believing in them or believing that they're going to happen is pretty miraculous.
For all that I can say you need to, I'm questioning whether or not it's virtuous to do something virtuous if you don't feel like you had any other choice. Ultimately, you can get to a place that you'd be very surprised by regardless of how. motivated you feel to get there. The world really only knows the actions that you take. It doesn't know about the internal state until that then shows up in the way that you actually perform. So yeah, some things to keep in mind.
Number one, don't grip life so tightly. Being too serious creates a kind of brittle fragility, which a playful attitude insulates you against. Your goal is dynamic persistence. over the long term and taking things seriously gives you a huge advantage in bursts but chronic seriousness makes you rigid and at risk of blow up Question from Joe Hudson from the start of the year was, what would this be like if it was 10% more enjoyable? When you're sat in a meeting,
when you're having a conversation with your partner, when you're playing sport, when you're doing something that you love or something that you hate or something that's in between, what would this be like if it was 10% more enjoyable? Matthew McConaughey said, make a sense of humor your default emotion. Number two.
Don't be so worried about winning that you forget what winning is supposed to feel like. Is your presiding feeling when things go well one of happiness and satisfaction or one of relief? Is it joy or simply the abatement of fear? After a while of winning, you realize that how you win is more important than if you win. How you feel during the event is more important than the outcome of the event.
How the people who read your work are impacted is more important than how many people are impacted. You can't be so terrified of failing that even the act of winning is made miserable. Number three. It's all vibes. Ultimately, you are doing things not to say that you've done them, but for the experience of having done them. When you look back, it's the experience itself and not just the outcome that matters.
Outcomes are more important than inputs, but vibes are more important than all of that still, because that's what you're going to remember, your felt experience of it. And one of the big determining factors in how you feel will be the outcome. I'm not saying that you need to forget about winning, forget about your desires and your goals and just like enjoy the moment under a tree on fucking psilocybin. You still need to go and do the things, but.
do not derogate how important the actual process and making sure that you enjoy it is. And oddly enough, optimizing for how you feel detaches you from caring about the outcomes, but is the very thing that will drive outcomes the most. And if it doesn't, what do you care because you're enjoying it? And number four, emotional pain is a hell of a teacher, but it won't kill you. Would life be easier if you didn't feel everything so very deeply?
Perhaps, but the only reason you're getting the outcomes that you want is because of your depth of thought. And as bad as it feels, this that you're going through right now is the breadth of human experience and you're alive. And your inner landscape is a fascinating world to explore. So act with curiosity. And what you are doing right now, your goals, the desire for attainment.
Your attachments to this world, they're hypotheses to be tested, not ideologies to be proved. And number five, is your goal to survive or thrive or flourish? Because you have probably dealt with everything that life has thrown at you so far. Do you think that it's because of the way that you grasped and controlled and feared and ruminated? Or could it be because...
You're a capable, competent, gifted person. And the world is fundamentally fair. And over a long enough time horizon, most people get what they deserve. Number six, you're doing this for you. And this is something I've only realized relatively recently, but after a certain level of material comfort, the only person that you need to do this thing for is you. Your conscience knows when you're being honest and when you're not.
I think optimizing to make that person happy, that conscience happy, is a really good idea. You should basically be the person that your mum thinks you are or the person that your younger self wanted as a role model. brave courageous earnest honest virtuous like on fire there's this quote from the ancient greeks that says live as though all your ancestors were living again through you
I really love that. We judge people based on how much life they can tolerate, how much feeling they can deal with and carry and enjoy. That's something that we should all try and have more of in ourselves. Being that person that your younger self wanted as a role model, being the person that your mom thinks you are, I think is a good rubric.
Another person that I've fallen in love with, another lesson that's just great from Oliver Berkman. Question, how much should you care about things? Answer, I'm not exactly sure. But I know that it's not the absolute maximum amount all the time for everything. That, again, the classic insecure overachiever who struggles to distinguish correctly between the small number of areas in life which require
every ounce of your vigilance and attention bringing to bear on them, and the ones that don't. Not every situation is life and death. And you don't need to optimize or win or perfect every area. You can pour your finite time and energy into something infinitely more absorbing than trying to keep life under control. And that thing is actually living it. I was reminded of this.
uh the start of the year when i made myself pass out during a breathwork class uh because i figured that if two minute holds are good then three minute holds must be even better so i'll do that and then i'll win like when what and all that I won was a concerned look from the breathwork teacher as she was coming over me like this upside down rubbing the side of my neck trying to bring me back around I think a lot of us have this sense this worry this concern about doing everything perfectly
especially things that you're supposed to be doing to relax like meditation or hobbies and in the process of trying to be perfect you manage to thoroughly ruin the enjoyment of whatever you're supposed to be doing by turning leisure
into labor. You don't go for a walk because you want to enjoy your time in nature. You go for a walk because Andrew Huberman once said that it improves your dopaminergic response so you can focus better when you get back to the office. You're not spending time playing an instrument. so that you can chill out and enjoy yourself it's so that you can learn some new chords and maybe you can make a new record maybe that record like you have to remember that you're not fixing a problem there is no
problem to be fixed. There is no doing this wrong in many areas of life. There are a small number of pursuits that you should bring to bear all of your effort and attention and detail and rumination. But that's not everything, right? Question, how much should you care about things? Answer, I'm unsure exactly, but I know it's not the absolute maximum amount all the time for everything. Learning again, like.
what we were talking about earlier on this helping to delineate the territory of where should I apply all of my effort and where can I learn to try and let it go a little bit more and that momentum that you've got the habits that you have, the way that your mind and body operate are going to be very difficult to turn off. But they're going to be even more difficult to turn off if you don't fucking know that you're supposed to switch them off. If you're like, hey, dude.
It's pickleball, right? You don't need to... I told this story as well. At the start of the year, I was playing doubles. uh co-ed doubles and I was playing with a girl that I never played with before and she was like young 21 years old or something and super bubbly and it's two games two games apiece we're going into the final game
And we're walking back toward the baseline. I'm like, right, okay. So it seems like when we drive, we need to move up to the net a little bit more quickly. And that guy's really good on his backhand, but you'd be surprised. I think that we can, if we switch them over, we're actually going to, and she says, yeah, yeah, yeah, all that's good. Let's not forget to have fun.
I thought, ah, yeah, very good, fun. But I had to be broken out of it because I'd just taken the same level of seriousness that I apply to lots of areas of life, to an area where it really shouldn't have been. Yeah, loosening our grip, I think, is a good insight. Carl Benjamin, used to be called Sargon of a Cat, now does love to see this podcast. A surprising insight from him that I learned this year. Being mean.
doesn't change people's minds. The problem is that so many people spend so much time online that they fail to remember that people are all human at the end of the day. and treating someone else with a modicum of respect is actually a far better way to get them to see your position than flinging at them with fire and vitriol. Another one from Gwynda Bogle, rude people are stupid people.
A useful thing Twitter taught me is that rude people are almost always stupid. In virtually every case, when someone viciously insults me for something I said, they also misunderstood what I said. This makes sense because rudeness and stupidity share a root cause, carelessness. And this is, I had this idea of the soft signal of effectiveness, basically what Carl said, that if you really care about changing minds, you'll dial back the level of aggression in your...
discussion in the way that you put your debates forward. You'll do that because you're more concerned about having the correct level of impact and getting somebody on your side than you are about looking cool or making them look silly. And yeah, being mean doesn't change people's minds is, it's just such an obvious, when have you ever been patronized or passive aggressed or mocked?
into changing your opinion like it just causes you to dig your heels in more and what it shows when somebody uses that kind of rude stupid tactic it it shows that they're more bothered about looking good than actually having a positive impact. And that, I mean, you know, fucking who am I to say that you should be more bothered about changing minds than you are about like bolstering your shallow self-esteem. But it does tell you a lot about the person.
One of the big things it tells you about them is that they don't care that much about the cause. They care significantly more about themselves. Let's do two more. Let's do a few more, actually. I got some cool ones here. So not too dissimilar to what I was talking about previously. This vulnerability coming from a place of strength as opposed to from a place of weakness.
I talked about this at the live show and I think people really love this. Men need to accumulate sufficient man points before they can open up about their feelings. Basically feels like men have to earn the right to talk about their emotions. Chris Bumstead, as an example, can talk about crying and fear and insecurities but only because he's the greatest bodybuilder of his era and a six-time champion.
Only men who have achieved some degree of success in typical masculine pursuits like status, resources, attractiveness, muscularity, and strength can open up about emotions with credibility. once they've accumulated sufficient man points some unspoken video game level unlock happens where emotions are allowed but opening up before having the requisite man points is interpreted as feeble and weak
I think the world still has many icks around men showing their emotions, but far fewer if it comes from a place of prestige than one of poverty. And it's a vicious sort of... scenario for men to be in because the very men who probably could do with the most sympathy um perhaps the ones who have got the lowest number of man points and um they're the ones that are going to be
derogated the most by women and also maybe even not raised up that much by men so yeah that's I think I'm right on this and you know maybe it is just the case that uh somebody who can't choose to do anything else doesn't really get as much prestige for uh doing the only thing they can like weakness when you can't be strong is nowhere near as uh interesting or seductive as weakness when you have the choice to be
strong but yeah there was a another interesting insight that i learned about the the duality of warning men about bad behavior the problem with giving men advice like don't be pushy is that the men who really need to hear it won't listen, and the men who'd benefit from being more assertive will take it straight to heart. This was backed up by David Buss's book, Bad Men, Men Behaving Badly in the US.
that despite the fact that fucking like hashtag kill all men or hashtag like not all men but it's always a man which basically like is the same as all men it is all men uh The problem with having any blanket coverage broad group push like that is that at least when it comes to these kinds of behaviors from men.
It seems like it's one man doing a thousand horrible things, not a thousand men doing one horrible thing. And this seems to be borne out in the data, at least based on Busse's research. But... giving men advice across the board men giving all men advice like don't be pushy uh
The guys that are most likely to not be pushy are precisely the ones that are going to listen the most and the ones that already think that they're fine or disregarding any negative feedback from the people that they're doing it to.
they're just going to plow straight on. And then I guess another interesting insight that I learned about divorce and marriage uh this episode i did with visa about a month and a half ago he's got two fucking outstanding articles one of them said why do so many people divorce someone they thought was their favorite person
It's not really a mystery. It's mostly because good times are a poor predictor of how you'll handle bad times. And handling bad times is much more important to the success of a marriage. But as a species, as a culture, we have not truly internalized this. It's the lows, not the highs that make or break a relationship. A painful lesson of the past 20 years of relationships.
In the medium run, it's exciting to feel hype about people who seem to relate strongly in specific ways. But in the long run, it's really how you handle misunderstandings, conflict, confusion, disagreement that go the distance. I think that's so right as well that...
you know, you see couples together and you think, oh my God, how did they ever break up? They were so great. Can you not remember when we went to the theme park and they're having all this thing? It's like, yeah, they cannot regulate at all. as soon as some perturbment happens soon as some disagreement occurs
They're at each other's throats. One of them runs away. One of them can't stop bringing it up. One of them holds grudges. One of them can't communicate without being passive aggressive. One is unable to talk about their emotions. Like that's an existential threat. to a relationship and um it changes i think where relationships should apply their focus
It shouldn't be on increasing peak experiences, although that's fun and obviously way more sexy. I think it should be on how do we avoid catastrophe as opposed to expedite success. Because sure, maybe a long-term marriage or relationship over time might break up because...
there are insufficient peak moments, but it's way more likely to break up because there are too many very low moments that you haven't been able to regulate properly. So I just think that's a fucking, like a gorgeous, gorgeous insight. And I was reminded... when thinking about this charles darwin you know uh somebody who you might have thought given all of his research on animals would have had a
a very clear idea about whether or not he wanted to get married and the world of mating and dating but he was unsure about whether he should get married so he made a list and Russ Roberts covered this list so this is just so good This document has two columns, one labeled marry, one labeled not marry, and above them circled are the words, this is the question. On the pro-marriage side of the equation were children.
if it please God, constant companion and friend in old age who will feel interested in one, object to be beloved and played with. After a reflection of an unknown length, he modified the foregoing sentence with better than a dog anyhow. He continued, home and someone to take care of house, charms of music and female chit chat, these things good for one's health, but terrible loss of time.
Without warning, Darwin had from the pro-marriage column swerved uncontrollably into a major anti-marriage factor, so major that he underlined it. This issue, the infringement of marriage on his time, especially his work time, was addressed at greater length in the appropriate Not Marry column.
Not marrying, he wrote, would preserve freedom to go where one likes, choice of society and little of it, conversation of clever men at clubs, not forced to visit relatives and bend in every trifle, to have the expense and anxiety of children, perhaps quarreling, loss of time. cannot read in the evening fatness and idleness, anxiety and responsibility, less money for books, and, if many children, forced to gain one's bread. Even experts in mating and evolution struggle with big decisions.
And look, if it's tough for Darwin, then it's okay for it to be tough for you. Look, I'm going to love you and leave you. That was awesome. This year has been just so phenomenal. And the conversations are not stopping the lineup of guests for Q1 for next year. I can't believe it. It's people that I've wanted on the show for forever. Some of them are already recorded. Some of them are coming.
I love you all to bits. I really, really do. All of the likes, the support, the shares, the messages, the emails. It really means a lot. And I hope you have a fantastic Christmas, a very happy new year. I'll see you soon.