S5E7 Tim Ash
[00:00:00] Tim Ash:
Being an entrepreneur is its own kind of sickness. We should all be hustling and pivoting and being unicorns and scrumming our way to success. Well, no! That's actually a sickness! You're completely out of balance! A really good question to ask yourself if you're a lonely entrepreneur what am I running from?
[00:02:04] Michael Bauman:
Welcome back to Success Engineering! I'm your host, Michael Bauman. I have the pleasure of having Tim Ash on. He's an authority on evolutionary psychology and digital marketing.
Sought after international keynote speaker best-selling author of Unleash your Primal Brain and Landing Page Optimization, which has sold over 50,000 copies. He has been mentioned by Forbes as a Top 10 Online Marketing Expert and Entrepreneur magazine as an online marketing influencer to watch. And then 19 years, he was the co-founder and CEO of Site Tuners, a digital optimization agency.
Has helped his clients create over $1.2 billion in value in companies like Google, Expedia, eHarmony; the list just goes on and on. Really excited for this conversation! Has a wealth of knowledge, both as an entrepreneur and also just in terms of the brain and how behavior works and how people work.
Welcome to the show, Tim! It's a pleasure to have you!
[00:02:54] Tim Ash:
Great to be with you, Michael.
[00:02:56] Michael Bauman:
Absolutely. So I want to start off, and we'll use this to trace the conversation throughout your life. But I'm curious to hear; I usually ask this question at the end; I’m just curious to hear, how would you define success?
You've been incredibly successful, both in terms of business, but also there's a lot of other areas of your life that you dabble in and do, hobbies and stuff in. So I'm really curious to hear how you define success?
[00:03:19] Tim Ash:
Wow. That's a pretty profound and great question. Let's start by saying that's changed a lot over the course of my life. I'd say early on, I was focused on my intellect, and so success was being smarter than other people and didn't want me a lot of friends, but it was being able to filet someone in an argument and that kind of thing.
[00:03:37] Tim Ash:
So I'd say that right up to about 25, that was my definition. Also applied when I was in graduate school at UC San Diego; I almost finished my Ph.D. So success was academic achievement. That was the other one. And during that stage, and then at 29, I switched, and that's when my entrepreneurial career started.
[00:03:56] Tim Ash:
And then success was having a successful company, and now in middle age here or late middle age it's very different. It has nothing to do with finances. It has to do with a degree of self-knowledge with how little I screw up my kids and the remaining time they have under this roof. It's about the quality of connections and also whether I'm living on purpose as I've had mission statements and purpose statements at various points in my life. The last one I came up with was a result of an initiation retreat I did with the mankind project. And that's the one that's currently operative. And so my definition is, "I co-create a world of peace and safety and love through joyous expression and service."
[00:04:42] Tim Ash:
And if I'm, if that's the direction I'm going in, that's my north star. I can measure whether I'm on purpose or I'm not. And being on purpose more of the time would be my current definition of success.
[00:04:53] Michael Bauman:
Yeah. I want to break that down into those two areas—so joyous expression and then service. I'm curious to hear how you go about just maintaining your joy, and then you could potentially get into the underlying neuroscience and stuff surrounding happiness and what that looks like as well.
[00:05:08] Michael Bauman:
And then I'm also curious what's the service that you're doing? What impact are you wanting to leave on the world?
[00:05:13] Tim Ash:
Well, it's not some grand plan feed, hungry children, or, I don't know, peace on earth. It's not; it’s nothing like that. I'd say it's like I said, this is more directional. One of the things had a. There's new year's resolutions recently. And we were talking about them, and everybody else in the group was saying specific goals they had.
[00:05:32] Tim Ash:
And I said, mine is more intentional. It's about the direction I'm going. It's not about some end state. Like you can never be absolutely open and vulnerable in your communication, but that's what I'm striving for. Right. So as long as I'm more of that every day, that's directionally the right way to go.
[00:05:50] Tim Ash:
I don't have fixed goals. Again it's a question of, are you on your values maybe is a better way to put it. I don't know if you've read Mark Manson's book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. Basically, what he says is, and I agree with this, that you should care more and more about less and less. So there are a lot of things that don't matter to me at all, but spending my time focusing on things that are in alignment with my values again, is my main measure of it.
[00:06:15] Michael Bauman: Yeah, absolutely. I call them like the lie detectors of what you truly value, like where your money is going, where your time's going, and then your energy and where you turn your focus. You can get a really clear idea of where people are coming from and what they value by those things.
[00:06:30] Michael Bauman: They might say one thing on this hand; on the other hand, it's like, yeah, let's just look at the numbers.
[00:06:34] Tim Ash: Yeah. And also, I think it's a life stage thing. I guess you could, we can call it middle age or whatever, but I couldn't, I'd call it more realistically, the last third, and this is typically in any spiritual system or philosophical system when you start preparing. The next generation, when it's no longer about your own achievement and warrior energy, it's more about the kind of king or sovereign energy enabling others making sure things are done in the direction of justice and blessing people, not necessarily a religious sense, but just seeing the gold in them.
[00:07:03] Tim Ash: So that's really what I'm transitioning into.
[00:07:06] Michael Bauman: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:07:07] Tim Ash: A concrete way to do that January 1st, I started mentoring a group of disadvantaged or troubled kids at the high school level. So I meet with them once a week and try to give them a perspective that might give them some other ways to consider being in the world.
[00:07:23] Michael Bauman: Yeah, so let's dive into the happiness side of it and the neuroscience as well. So you just had a book come out called Unleash the Primal Brain, and it's all about the neuroscience behind so many different aspects of our behavior and how we interact. And that's been your life at marketing for a very long time, but happiness is something that we all say we want, but we often get it wrong. So can you dive into what actually makes us happy, both in the short term and kind of the long-term, and even some of the chemicals involved in some of the things that we can do to help us be fulfilled and have happiness in our lives?
[00:07:57] Tim Ash: Sure. There are so many things to unpack there, so let me just start. Yeah. So the book is called Unleash your Primal Brain: Demystifying How we think and Why we act. It's really just a non-technical fast paced overview of evolutionary psychology.
[00:08:11] Tim Ash: So to understand our brain, you have to go back to the very earliest life on earth because we still have inheritances that we share with fruit flies and with lizards and with monkeys, but, and then there's some distinctly human stuff that is bizarre from an evolutionary perspective that was tacked on at the end in recent times. You have to chart that whole arc of evolution to understand which part of it's operating in you right now.
[00:08:37] Tim Ash: So that's one answer. It's really a complicated overlay of tricks that worked for our ancestors in the past and by our ancestors. Bacteria and viruses and single-cell organisms and insects, not just, we're so special among other animals, and we're unique.
[00:08:53] Tim Ash: We're basically the whole history of life on earth in one creature. So as far as happiness goes, I think the founding fathers in the US were smart, and they wrote into the declaration of independence, the pursuit of happiness. That's fine. You can chase it all you want. It's not an end state.
[00:09:09] Tim Ash: That's one thing I want people to understand. Many people have this illusion that as long as I do X, Y, and Z, then I'm happy. And then I can just sit there, their Buddha, like under the Bodhi tree, and contemplate my navel. No! That's not how life works! It turns out that the happiness drugs or hormones, or substances in your body are only released for very short periods of time.
[00:09:33] Tim Ash: We're talking on the scale of seconds or minutes, whereas stress chemicals like cortisol circulate in your body for days. Happiness is the propulsion; it’s the fuel it's to move you along. It's not a permanent state. If you're truly happy and blissed out, and we've seen that it happens in opium dens, you just tune out, and then you die because you stop even caring about taking care of your body's needs. So permanent happiness isn't a thing. Let's just start there.
[00:10:00] Michael Bauman: Yeah. Permanent happiness, as you said, is a different thing and very fundamental to us. We want to move towards pleasure, and we want to move away from pain. Can you dive into that a little bit and talk about how that determines our behavior?
[00:10:13] Tim Ash: Yeah, absolutely. Well, there are several kinds of happiness chemicals if you want to call them that. One of them is dopamine, and people misunderstand that one. They think it's about the cuddle hormone or making us feel good. And it's not. Dopamine is essentially metering out energy.
[00:10:30] Tim Ash: So the best way to think of it is, is it worth chasing a survival goal that will improve our chances of survival? And I'll give you a little squirt of it if you're going in the right direction. Now we think of it as, those three little blinking dots on our direct messaging app, someone's writing a response, oh boy, the excitement, or what are they going to do?
[00:10:47] Tim Ash: And yeah, that triggers dopamine, but there's nothing human about that. And then we share that with fruit fly. So this stuff goes back hundreds of millions of years, and it's basically an energy metering system. You get a little squirt of it. You take another step towards your goal.
[00:11:03] Tim Ash: Here's the other important part about dopamine is it says, if you don't get your goal, it sets off this, "Oh shit!" circuit in your brain and makes you adjust your mental model of reality, to match what happened. So it's responsible for metering energy and updating your mental model of the world. So next time, it's a little more accurate. So that's really what dopamine does.
[00:11:26] Tim Ash: There's another one called endorphins. You're probably familiar with those. Endorphins are actually there... you talk about runner's high; you’ve probably heard that phrase. Endorphins are there in extreme survival situations to make you ignore the pain and still survive. So, for example, a bear comes up behind you and claws you. You have a choice, you can bandage up your arm, or you can just run while ignoring your arm pain. That's the right decision. Not the bandaging your arm part. So it helps you overcome pain to survive the encounter. And so runner's high is actually used stressing your body to the point where you're creating pain and it has to compensate for that. That's not a good place to be.
[00:12:07] Tim Ash: Serotonin, it comes to our mammalian inheritance. And that's about the safety of feeling taken care of in your herd. That's really important too. It's your wellbeing. It's your status in the herd.
[00:12:18] Tim Ash: And then finally oxytocin is the other one that's important, and that's about mother-child bonding. Normally, if I told you, "Hey! There's another creature and it's really loud and demanding and scary, and you have to take your life force and take care of it." You'd say, "Screw that! I'm not going to do that!" Yet, mothers and fathers, and parents in general, step into that voluntarily. What it does is it shifts our, the boundary between, aversion and affinity. And it says, "Okay, I'm willing to put up with this because it's my child." So it's the mother son bond. And that's a good part of it.
[00:12:54] Tim Ash: But it's also the mama bear, which is going to kill anybody that comes near its cubs. So it's this knife edge of in-group versus out-group. Oxytocin will make you bond with people in your tribe, probably your genetic relatives and be aggressive towards strangers. Those are the two phases.
[00:13:12] Michael Bauman: I want to dive into those two in particular, serotonin and oxytocin. Partially because a lot of what I talk about with entrepreneurs is just loneliness. And I would be really curious to hear you talk about that aspect of social, you have your herd, and then when you're separated from the herd essentially means that you're going to die.
[00:13:30] Michael Bauman: And the the role of some of those hormones that play around loneliness and how it actually affects us.
[00:13:37] Tim Ash: Isolation is horrible. We're the most hyper social of creatures. For all mammals it's bad. We're weaker individually compared to say a crocodile or a snake but we're stronger as a group. If we're not surrounded by our group, our chances of survival, aren't that good. As far as oxytocin goes, actually, if you can't see other members of your tribe, your oxytocin levels go down. And as soon as you can see them again, they go up. It's that important to be in sight of your in-group. Visually, that is.
[00:14:07] Tim Ash: Touch is another thing that triggers it. Give people nice long hugs! 20 seconds of skin to skin contact releases oxytocin. You want happiness? It's an instant happiness. Just don't be so constipated and hug people more.
[00:14:21] Michael Bauman: Yeah. It's really interesting, like you talked about, sometimes we just write off that loneliness, especially as entrepreneurs. Entrepreneur journeys can be pretty lonely, and we write off that feeling. But it's actually going, like this is affecting everything, from your productivity to decision-making and...
[00:14:36] Tim Ash: Yeah. And there's a really famous longitudinal study that was done with a Harvard undergraduates and their Southy cohorts, the poor kids from south Boston. And they've tracked them now, I believe for 70 plus years. Several study directors, and they've gotten better at their interviewing techniques and what they track, but the bottom line is what makes people happy in life or have long successful lives, if you want to call it that, is your degree of social support. And your degree of social participation. And if you don't have that's essentially the health equivalent of being a two pack a day smoker. In terms of the life outcomes. So, loneliness kills in a very literal sense.
[00:15:18] Tim Ash: We're seeing that during the pandemic. I think the hardest hit group are 12 to 25 year olds. I have a couple of teens in the house. They've suffered with depression and anxiety and a bunch of bad things. And I think that's the stage in life where you get hit the hardest. But loneliness literally kills.
[00:15:35] Michael Bauman: Yeah. Yeah. Can you talk about, shifting a little bit more to your entrepreneurial journey, I'm curious to hear, periods where loneliness potentially showed up for you, and how did you work through that as an entrepreneur or surround yourself with a group, with a tribe?
[00:15:49] Tim Ash: Well, that's a good question. If you're doing anything extreme, And I'll put, like being a soldier in that category or being a parent. Unless somebody's done it, they have no clue what it's like. And I think similarly for entrepreneurs, if your spouse works a nine to five job or your friends work nine to five jobs, they're civilians, you can't explain combat to them.
[00:16:11] Tim Ash: Right. And by the way, I've never been in combat. So I'm sure I don't understand combat, but whatever. Teddy Roosevelt, a version of go in the arena and put out your best efforts and all of that. Like, they don't know what that is. They're just like, where's my paycheck, it arrives in my bank account every two weeks. I don't have to do anything other than warm up this chair at work with my butt, and that is a very different approach to risk.
[00:16:35] Tim Ash: So entrepreneurs are very self-selecting group and I think, for a while where I tried to get that support was from other entrepreneurs. I was a member of the entrepreneurs organization, EO it's a worldwide organization for people that have companies of a certain size. There's other ones like Vistage used to be called TEC back in the day. And there's YPO () Young Presidents Organization.) There's a lot of them, but for different circumstances and company sizes. At least there, I felt I could get support for, what's it like when a business partner screws you and tries to take your business, things that had employees never have to deal with. Or what's it like when you have to mortgage your house to make payroll or borrow money from your mom, who's on a pension, to make payroll. I've done that. What's it like when somebody sues you. Some contractual thing, right? And all the bitterness that goes into that. So having a tribe of other entrepreneurs I found was helpful.
[00:17:33] Michael Bauman: Yeah, absolutely. And there's different kind of levels of how we define ourselves and also how we relate to other people. So we have our intimate kind of connections. We have a relational connections, and then we have like the organizations and stuff that we're part of. And so there's different ways that you can address that aspect of loneliness.
[00:17:50] Tim Ash: Yeah. And I would say though that... and maybe this is going to be contrary or piss off some of your listeners, but that's okay. I don't care. I think that being an entrepreneur is its own kind of sickness. And I don't mean that in a kind way. We're bought into the cultural matrix, like in the movie, the Matrix, and we should all be hustling and pivoting and being unicorns and, scrumming our way to success. Well, no! That's actually a sickness! You're completely out of balance! And it's my question again, at this stage in life, having seen where that road leads is, what am I running from that's a really good question to ask yourself if you're a lonely entrepreneur, what are you trying to fill with that activity?
[00:18:31] Tim Ash: Or assuming you're going to be a "success" financially, what are you giving up instead? In my case, it was stepping out too much of my family. It was a lot of travel, a lot of long work days and. many years of that while my kids are growing up. And my wife had to be a solo mom a lot of the time or a military wife, same thing.
[00:18:53] Tim Ash: Like you go on deployment, you'll be back eventually, but it's a high price to pay. Nothing is for nothing. We have a finite amount of time on this planet, and if you choose to put in one direction, then you're going to inevitably suffer in other areas.
[00:19:09] Michael Bauman: Yeah, no, I really appreciate you bringing that up because that's something that I talk about a lot. Like there's a cost to success, we think about the rewards of it so much, but you have to think about what are all the areas that I'm sacrificing to get to this point? And really when I get to that point, will it feel like a success?
[00:19:30] Tim Ash: There is an effect to being independently wealthy on happiness. They've done statistical studies on this. You know what it is? 3%. It is. It's real and it's a 3% increase in happiness. Basically you can struggle, from a Maslow's need hierarchy. You can struggle to, to feed yourself, have a roof over your head, or you have to work the rest of your life, that's another stage, or a you're independently wealthy; some number of millions of dollars probably. Well, that makes you 3% happier. You still have a spouse, that may not like you, kids that you may not get along with, social comparisons to people that have 10 X, the amount of money you have. And you're really not much happier.
[00:20:09] Tim Ash: So focusing on things that are more durable working on your insides instead of the outside world, I think is a higher payoff deal.
[00:20:20] Michael Bauman: Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to hear what that looks like for you. What does working on your insides look like? Because essentially what we're talking about is, especially as entrepreneurs, they try to fill this problem, this hole, this emptiness, with external solutions and it doesn't do it. It's not the solution to the problem. So what does working on the inside, what does the internal work look like for you?
[00:20:42] Tim Ash: For me, it, at this point, it has a lot to do with self care, because the stress in our heads is self-imposed. We're choosing to drive ourselves. And most entrepreneurs are drivers. On DISC I'm high D and high I, high dominance and high influence. I'm right in the middle of those. That's probably pretty typical, except some entrepreneurs are more on the driver's side and not so much on the influence side.
[00:21:04] Tim Ash: So if you have that personality again you have this, this drive. And so, the financial stress, the cortisol that drips into you like battery acid every day and destroys your health, all of that stuff shortchanging your sleep, which is, pardon me, fricking idiotic because it's daily life support.
[00:21:21] Tim Ash: I have a whole chapter on sleep in my book and the importance of it. And all of these things they're choices ultimately. We choose to live under stress.
[00:21:30] Tim Ash: I talk about the difference between surviving versus thriving. And so if you want to thrive, then you have to do a lot more self care stuff. So in my case, that's walking, it's electrical grounding which is how we're designed to be in contact with the earth. And unfortunately we've disconnected from it. So I sleep grounded, have a grounding pad under my desk right now with my barefoot on it. So I'm grounded during my Workday.
[00:21:54] Tim Ash: Sleep. I'm religious about sleep, seven to nine hours a day. Any time you're burning the midnight oil, you're also shortening your life, and the quality of your relationships, and your creativity, and your ability to learn things, I could go on. But sleep is sacred.
[00:22:09] Tim Ash: Tai Chi as a practice. I studied it with a master from Hong Kong for five years. And I am one of two people he certified to teach part of the art in the U S. I also do energy work combined with kind of talk therapy with an amazing healer here in town. I also recently went through a course of Rolfing , which is adjusting the whole fascia layer in your whole body, which exists from head to toe.
[00:22:35] Tim Ash: Most people are completely clueless about how they store their body trauma and pass bad habits in their fascia layer. So adjusting that and taking the kinks out. That's another important thing. And then I have my men's group. The mankind project. I went through an initiation retreat about three years ago. It's an international organization.
[00:22:55] Tim Ash: And a healthy initiation into full, authentic manhood. And they sit in weekly circle with other men that have done that. So a lot of stuff goes into taking me from surviving to thriving.
[00:23:09] Michael Bauman: Yeah. And all those things you mentioned they're super important. I had the NFL performance director on my show and when he was first starting his performance facility, he just put up on the wall. He says, work plus rest equals success. And we, especially as entrepreneurs, we focus on the work side and we don't focus on what do I need to do to actually recover from all of these outputs and all of these stresses. I'm putting on my body to actually like you talk about to thrive. And it's really important.
[00:23:38] Tim Ash: And sleep is foundational. A lot of people talk about diet and exercise. Those are distant second and third. Sleep is daily life support. Here's a couple of things that you should you might want to know. There is no creature that lives more than a few days on this planet that doesn't have some form of sleep.
[00:23:55] Tim Ash: It's really not optional. Two nights in a row of sleeping six hours or less, is the same as missing a full night of sleep! That's how bad it is. So short changing, even that final hour, when most of your biggest amount of REM sleep happens, its tail weighted into that last hour and a half. You're really robbing yourself of creativity, of the ability to read people's emotions. It makes you basically paranoid and think that the world is aggressive and against you. It prevents physical and mental learning. As well, if you don't sleep on it so cramming for something and staying up for four hours is not going to improve your performance better to get the night's sleep. So there's a lot of payoffs from sleep. And I recommend everybody prioritize that ahead of everything else.
[00:24:41] Michael Bauman: Yeah. So let's talk about that. I'm curious. Did you discover that during your entrepreneurial journey or is it something that you've come across afterwards?
[00:24:48] Tim Ash: Well directly and indirectly, I was diagnosed about eight years ago with sleep apnea. Now, most people think of it as like, oh, your partner snores. Usually it's the woman complaining about the man, right. But it turns out that about 80% of sleep apnea is undiagnosed and it's a really dangerous condition.
[00:25:05] Tim Ash: Basically, your body stops breathing and then adrenaline jolts you awake and makes you start breathing again. So it's like this stoplight grand Prix or. Going 60 miles an hour and stopping at the next stop sign, then doing that all night long. Now mine happened to be fairly mild when it started.
[00:25:23] Tim Ash: And so I was able to get this mouth guard which moved my lower jaw forward and opened up my airway so I could breathe. And then just recently I was just feeling really depressed for about six months. And I go, well, it's the pandemic, it's a state of the world. It's family stress, it's all of this. And then I realized, because my mouth guard broke and I did another sleep study that I actually now have severe sleep apnea. So instead of five to 10 events per hour, 38 times per hour, I'm waking up. So I'm never hitting deep sleep and that daily life support wasn't happening. And it basically, screws up everything. So I got the breathing machine that pushes pressurized air. into me, I sleep with that now. And within three months, my depression cleared. So one thing to check out if you're feeling tired or brain fog is, or if anyone's ever told you, you snore is to get a sleep study done and see if you have sleep apnea because the heart attack risk goes up 14 X all kinds of stroke, all kinds of bad things happen.
[00:26:27] Tim Ash: It's not just snoring.
[00:26:29] Michael Bauman: Yeah, absolutely. And there is a really cool thing called an Oura ring that, you could just basically put on your finger and it does a quite good job of tracking sleep as well. So that's something I can put in. In the show notes. What tips would you have for entrepreneurs around sleep?
[00:26:45] Michael Bauman: Because it is typically the first thing to go, right? Like if you have extra work, sleep is like, I don't really need that right now. So what tips do you have to be like? No, this is a priority. Make sure that we arrange our life around it.
[00:26:58] Tim Ash: Yeah, well, of course blue light filters on your computer. These I use a PC and, you can set it to be more yellow once the past a certain time. Definitely do that. We're keyed to the natural circadian rhythms.
[00:27:10] Tim Ash: One thing I've already mentioned, which is electrical grounding. I have this, like I said, two pads on my bed, one under my desk that are plugged into the electrical ground. And that actually synchronizes you as the circadian cycle and day night cycles really effectively without the need for trying to cram extra melatonin into your body or other stuff like that, that's not a good idea.
[00:27:32] Tim Ash: The other thing I would say is keep your phone out of your bed. And people are gonna say, wow, did he really say that? Yeah. I mean it, so. It's the last thing before you go to sleep that blue lights hitting you, you're also have really crappy distraction habits. So you probably are actually taking an extra half hour to scroll through social media instead of going to sleep. Right. We all have really bad self control.
[00:27:57] Tim Ash: So my buddy. BJ Fogg, who keynoted at my conference many years ago. He's the head of the Stanford persuasive technology lab and he was saying. If you make the trigger harder, fewer people will do it. So keeping it out of your bedroom and having to get up out of bed and go to the living room to get it, is that harder trigger. And so you won't be tempted to do it.
[00:28:16] Tim Ash: So you can wake up. Open a book, no lay there. We'll look at the room, whatever you want to do, but don't grab that phone. First thing you have to get out of bed to get it. So that's another little tactical if I can share.
[00:28:29] Michael Bauman: Yeah, absolutely. I love everything by BJ. Fogg is book tiny habits is probably my favorite book, pretty much ever.
[00:28:36] Tim Ash: yeah. And he's researched it. And not only is it, he's a great guy, a super smart guy with his behavioral models and habit formation stuff is really solid.
[00:28:44] Michael Bauman: Yeah, it's pretty extraordinary. No I really appreciate you, you talking about that. So the other thing that I wanted to explore is, you touched on it briefly in the entrepreneurial journey, some of the times where it's like the fear is involved, like overcoming the fear, overcoming the doubts. You borrowed money from your grandma's pension...
[00:29:02] Tim Ash: Yeah. Yeah. So one thing I want to say about that is again, from an evolutionary perspective, We're about 2-2 1/2 times as keyed to threats versus opportunities. I might be able to eat that nice juicy mango, but not if the bear kills me. So I have to prioritize the bear ahead of the mango, right?
[00:29:19] Tim Ash: If I say, Hey, Michael, what's your favorite ice cream flavor, by the way, what is it?
[00:29:23] Michael Bauman: Probably something to do with like Reese's peanut butter, chocolate.
[00:29:26] Tim Ash: All right. Reese's ice cream. Here's a bowl of it. Here you go. You can have some now, but first as you reach for it, I'm going to whack you on the hand with a hammer. Okay. But just the one time. Okay. And then you can have your ice cream. What do you say?
[00:29:38] Michael Bauman: You're like I'd rather not!
[00:29:40] Tim Ash: Yeah, exactly. So I know it's going to motivate you. It's going to be pain and not pleasure, right? Which one you're going to prioritize. To realize that we have this built in survival bias about 2:1 for negative information.
[00:29:53] Tim Ash: One of the things that I think entrepreneurs, why they're successful. Is they actually compensate for that negativity bias. Very few things in this world, whether you're going to get funded or whether you're going to land a big client, have life and death consequences. So our nervous system is wired for that. But the consequences in the "civilized" world, aren't deadly.
[00:30:17] Tim Ash: So you have to counteract this 2:1 negativity bias. Instead of focusing on the negative stuff, you do conscious inventories, especially before important decisions. What would happen if this went right? That's a good visualization. Okay. And spend extra time on the good stuff, as opposed to trying to plan your way out of trouble happening.
[00:30:40] Tim Ash: So that's one tip, but then there's a balance. The way that I think about it is on the one hand as an entrepreneur, you have to say, screw you, I'm going to do it anyway. How many businesses got launched for that very reason? And you have to ignore the naysayers and you have to have a vision and all that.
[00:30:57] Tim Ash: But on the other hand, how much, it's throwing good money after bad, good years of your life after, things that aren't gonna work. My wife has this saying, which is, "Hang on tightly. Let go lightly."
[00:31:09] Tim Ash: While you're doing it, be committed. But then if you have to cut and turn and walk away then don't be ashamed about it. Don't regret it. Don't wallow in the past. Don't do post action report, like the Navy seals. Just walk away and forget it because your attachment to the past is actually creating more negative.
[00:31:29] Michael Bauman: Yeah. That's really good. I think all of those things are really good. You need to focus on the positive, but where we have the negativity bias, so are more often focusing on the negative. So putting extra things on that, but like you said, or like your wife said, letting go of it lightly to cause all that stuff, we can just hold on to it and beat ourselves up for years!.
[00:31:47] Tim Ash: When I go on a important podcasts or about to do keynotes, one of the tricks I learned was, this from this PR training that my buddy Chris Winfield runs, is put together a bad-ass list! Okay. I have one in a Google doc and it's like all the amazing things I've done in my life! Started an international conference series, wrote three books built a house from scratch, whatever, the athlete of the month that you CSD scholarships, blah, blah, blah. And if you the read through that and you go, whoa, I'm pretty amazing. Like, look at all the stuff I've done in my life. And that's a good way to counteract the negativity bias, remind yourself of all the good things and the amazing things about yourself.
[00:32:28] Michael Bauman: Yeah. And then, like you mentioned too, just the service aspect as well. So reframing it around, helping other people as well. A lot of takes that nervousness and slips it into anticipation sometimes as well.
[00:32:39] Tim Ash: Yeah. Although I read an interesting book by this Jesuit psychologist who's based in India. I have a lot of respect for Jesuits because in the Catholic church, they are kind of the shock troopers and the keepers of the faith. I They've done some crappy stuff in Brazil and other places, I won't go into their historical stuff, but they're very ecumenical. They read a lot of philosophy, different belief systems, they explore it all and kind of battle test Catholicism against it to make sure that it stands up. Right. And so he has this book, it's a guy named Anthony de Mello and the book is called Awareness. And one of the things he talks about is that. Instead of saying we're not selfish or we do things for other people, actually recognize that you are selfish. In fact you're selfish all the time.
[00:33:25] Tim Ash: There are two kinds of selfishness. There's the self-absorbed selfishness. And then there's the service or social selfishness, I'm volunteering, I'm helping and like I'm mentoring these high school kids. Aren't I great?
[00:33:38] Tim Ash: Well, that's another form of selfishness. I get the payoff of feeling good about myself from that activity. It's just something that the rest of society perceives to be a social good. So you also get pats on the back from it. But don't kid yourself. It's all selfishness. Service is just a more subtle form of it.
[00:33:57] Michael Bauman: The Dalai Lama has a very similar quote. He says, there's a good way and bad way, very similar, a good way, a bad way to be selfish. And it's the same kind of thing. It's like, you're giving, but you're receiving from it as well. And so it's an act that you're doing, you're receiving the pleasure hormones and all of that kind
[00:34:12] Tim Ash: Yeah. And then I talk about that in the culture chapters of my book. One of the cool things about human beings in particular is that we not only are highly social, but we are actually bred to transmit culture. In other words, unlike other animals that take up wide ecological ranges, we actually learn culturally from the tribe around us.
[00:34:32] Tim Ash: So for example, you take an Eskimo and you put them in the Australian Outback. He's going to die. You take an Aboriginal from Australia and put them in the Arctic they're going to die. So the only reason you can survive is really deep cultural knowledge of the tribe around you. And so we're as much of a blank slate as any mammal can be. And we're designed to download the knowledge of our cultural tribe around us.
[00:34:57] Tim Ash: Now that has good and bad sides as well. So you have to be conscious of what you're drinking in, what social soup you're swimming in. And part of that legacy is that we want to conform to our tribe and we want to do the right things.
[00:35:15] Tim Ash: We want to be a good team player because if we're not, we're going to get ostracized and thrown out of the tribe. So that's super important to human psychology. Even if you think I'm not gregarious or I'm not social, you still, probably in high school, hung out with the nerds and you are the king of the nerd tribe. Maybe. I don't know. But we all need to belong to some sort of tribe.
[00:35:38] Michael Bauman: Yeah. Can you talk about, I'm really curious around leadership and culture, in terms of creating that in your company, that sense of tribe, that sense of belonging and how.
[00:35:48] Tim Ash: Ooh, I have some bad things to say about that. Okay. So first all in, in today's world, tell me if it's just me, Michael, every post I see on LinkedIn is how to be a better leader. Everybody wants to be a leader. Really? Then who's following you, if everybody's a leader? Be the leader in your organization! Why? It doesn't fit most people's psychology. There's very subtle markers of what makes a leader or maintains leadership positions in a mammal herd. So first thing I have to question is striving to be a leader. There's all kinds of advice out there for how to be one. I don't know. I think it's really overblown.
[00:36:28] Tim Ash: I think what you can do is model for people. And they internalize a lot of your behavior is the same in parenting. If I told my kids what to do, they're teenagers now, they go, Screw you. But hopefully I'm modeling consistently enough. So a few years from now I go, oh yeah, that's why dad did that stuff.
[00:36:46] Tim Ash: So I think it's the same with leaders. It's not like some holding the torch and running ahead it's more of what values are you transmitting by your behavior and being a little more conscious about that.
[00:36:56] Tim Ash: As far as culture goes, we're designed to fit in with our cultural tribes. So, I think consciously thinking about it is important. A lot of times it happens automatically and not in a good way, again. For example, a lot of high-tech companies are built on 25 to 35 year olds. You might be in that category right? In terms of age. Yeah. All right.
[00:37:20] Tim Ash: So these are gross generalizations about millennials. Okay. If there was concierge service and sushi in the cafeteria and two flavors of kombucha on tap, for example, like our former agency. Shutterstock had that in their empire state building offices, two flavors of kombucha on tap. Then that's a good place, maybe a yoga nap room as well.
[00:37:40] Tim Ash: So what are you going to attract? You're going to attract other 25 to 35 year olds that are single, that don't have a life that are happy to stay in the office and keep yeah. And keep chugging that kombucha. Right. So you're creating a culture of who would want those extra HR benefits. And you're selecting people based on that. Whereas you might not be attracting the gen X mom. Who's coming back into the workforce wants flexible hours and she doesn't value playing corn hole or doing a pub crawl.
[00:38:10] Tim Ash: So I think you have to be conscious of what kind of people you need in your organization and create an environment in which they're happy, but not ropes courses and not, this is transcendental meaning and Uber is just another fricking way to call a taxi. Let's face it.
[00:38:25] Michael Bauman: Yeah, you bring up the incredible importance of the environment and how much that can shape our behavior. And we can use it in a good and a bad way. Like you, if you're trying to change a behavior, you can look at the environment and go, oh, what in this environment is triggering me to do the behavior.
[00:38:41] Tim Ash: Yeah, and I basically yeah. So, there are a lot of things about framing the offer and choice architecture that the behavioral economists study. People like Richard Taylor in his book Nudge, I'm sure you've run across that. He won a Nobel prize for all that stuff. Basically saying people aren't rational and their behaviors can be manipulated based on some of these evolutionary psychology learnings that we're getting. And it's true.
[00:39:03] Tim Ash: So if you want less of a behavior, you make it harder to do. If you want more of a behavior, we make it easier to do. It's basically that simple. So instead of, slapping someone on the hand and saying bad dog, you should actually just change the environment to change the behavior. That's a lot simpler than social injunctions or peer pressure or anything else.
[00:39:22] Michael Bauman: Yeah, absolutely. No. I really appreciate your perspectives and stuff on all these different issues there's, rubbing it on some areas going like, I don't necessarily...
[00:39:31] Tim Ash: you don't want to hear that. :)
[00:39:32] Michael Bauman: No, I love it. I love it. Cause it's like, we can get in that rut of just going this is all the things that I'm consuming and obviously social media is catered to too, that it's hardwired to just give you the things that align exactly with what you think. Right? So I like having the different perspectives and having it rooted in the science of what's going on in your brain as well.
[00:39:51] Michael Bauman: Before we wrap up here. I'd love to ask, is there anything else that you'd want to talk about or think that the audience would benefit from before we wrap up?
[00:40:00] Tim Ash: For those of us that are interacting with different people, the most important foundational skill you could have is understanding human behavior. It cuts across, like you said, Leadership, corporate culture, sales, marketing, product design, all of the things that many of us in the information economy are involved with. So go to the most foundational level, which is the evolutionary psychology bust the myths. Don't go for that the rational mind is in charge of stuff, understand how people really make decisions and what influences them. And then you're going to have a long and successful career.
[00:40:34] Michael Bauman: Yeah. To go along with it, as far as what you offer as well, if people are interested, they can get a free chapter from your book, Unleash your Primal Brain: Demystifying how we think and why we act, at www.primalbrain.com/book and I'll put the links to that in the show notes.
[00:40:50] Tim Ash: Yeah, absolutely. Primal brain.com/book. And if you want to know more about my public speaking an international keynote speaker. I also do marketing consulting and executive advisory about marketing. That's at Timash.com.
[00:41:03] Michael Bauman: What are some of the other recommendations, either for books on human behavior and psychology, we mentioned, BJ Fogg's but I'm curious, some of the other things are just some of top...
[00:41:12] Tim Ash: Well, I'll tell you one of the reasons I wrote my book was because there were a lot of popular science books or behavioral economics books that are horrible books. They're "important" books again, I'm using air quotes, but these researchers are often really horrible at explaining things. I really would say my book, unleash your Primal Brain, is foundational and it's also accessible. There's no fluff in it and I don't dumb it down. But I just saved you the trouble of reading 30 to 50 books with the pretty accurate, updated, popular science about how the brain and evolution got it to be what it is.
[00:41:48] Tim Ash: So you, I wouldn't go into the deep stuff... I have actually a list of the books I recommend, or rather that I read, I don't recommend all of them, at the end of the book. So feel free to do that. But I'd say start with a good overview of evolutionary psychology. And that was one of the reasons I wrote mine because I thought it was a hole out there.
[00:42:06] Michael Bauman: Yeah, absolutely. I think you're absolutely right. You have the stuff that doesn't have the science, then you have this stuff that has all the science and nobody can read it.
[00:42:14] Tim Ash: Right. So there's no footnotes, there's no tables or charts in my book. And it's also available as an audio book. If you're dyslexic, go listen to it.
[00:42:23] Michael Bauman: Perfect. Thank you. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the conversation and, just a wealth of knowledge and insight and stuff you have and practical experience on using this as well. So I really appreciate it.
[00:42:35] Tim Ash: Absolutely. It's been a lot of fun. Thanks, Michael.
[00:42:38] Michael Bauman: You're welcome.