Chris Brogan

what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us today. Our guest on this episode is Chris Brogan, publisher and

CEO of Owner Magazine, a great new business publication. He is also a sought after keynote speaker who has addressed crowds of thousands. Chris is a New York Times bestselling author and his upcoming book is called The Freaks Shall Inherit The Earth entrepreneurship for weirdos, misfits and world dominators, which we think is a great description of our podcast. Hey Chris, welcome to the show. Thanks so happy to

be here. As you know, our show is called The One You Feed, and it's based on the old parable where there is a grandfather who's talking with his grandson and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us who are always at battle. One is a good wolf who represents bravery and kindness and love, and the other is a bad wolf who represents greed and hate, fear, Name your poison. And the grandson stops and thinks and he says, well, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the

grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start the interview off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in your work. Well, it's funny because in preparation for this show, I was thinking about it, of course, as I was instructed to do. And um, my girlfriend Jaqueline and I were just having this conversation where in which I was explaining how I'm nervous about this upcoming event that we're both going to be participating in where it's sort of her Bailey Wick.

But I'm a lot out of my league there. And as I'm explaining it all, then I started thinking about the wolf I feed, and I was like, oh, well, I'm obviously feeding the wolf that has fear and you know, envy and all those other things and ego and all that. I was like, oh crap, I just like fell right into Eric show and um my thoughts on the on the parable. So, first off, I guess this is probably because of my conversion to Buddhism, but I never think of them as good or evil. I just think of

them as a set of choices. And so when I think of when I feed the envy and ego one, what I really end up thinking is that sometimes you just that's all you can do. Sometimes you just can't help it. That's the one you're gonna feed right now. But what I try to think is, but every time I do that, that out of those two wolves, one of them leaves smellier, worse poop, And it's that it's

that darker one. And so, uh, if I feed the supposedly good wolf, if I feed the wolf that you know gives you better results, one would say, um, I know that the poop is easier to clean, but that other wolf, you know there is gonna be you know, dog diarrhea. I have a bad case of diarrhea if I feed that bad wolf, yeah, exactly, And that that idea of good versus bad is it doesn't resonate with me exactly. But you start talking about a skillful or unskillful wolf, and it sort of lose the teeth of

the analogy, right. I'd like to talk to you a little bit. I've I really, um, you know, I've taken one of your online courses, mastering the Digital Channel, and and that's really what you're known for, is your online marketing and that sort of thing. But I'd like to spend more time talking about your book, It's Not About the Tights, which is a book on bravery and courage, and I think there's a lot of great stuff in there that really um relates to what we're talking about.

So I'd like to start off, because you spend some time in there talking about confidence. Could you elaborate on what confidence is and how you get more of it? Well, I mean, in a lot of ways, confidence is one of the sexiest of all the drugs, you know, because confidence, once you have it, and once you feel it, you're suddenly a lot taller than you used to be. You're somehow slender too, you're very uh good of color, of

your of your healthy skin tone, and all that. Everything to do with confidence comes with this incredible plus sign to everything else that goes on in your life. What else is need about confidence is once you feel it, you're obviously a lot better at everything you set out to do. You are suddenly a much better a singer and a much better performer of uh stage in theater. When you're confident, you tend to be much more successful

at surgery and landing planes. So it's amazing to me that we don't really work on improving that set of skills that gets us there, and that we don't learn about how to take simple, small jump risks so that we can keep building on that confidence, and that we don't remember to take bigger ones every now and again so we can keep expanding it. It's a lot like

going to the gym. Really, uh, if you don't go to the gym for nine weeks, you really aren't likely gonna you know, pick up the weights and just do what you did last time. You're gonna lose something out of that. But confidences like that too. If you don't work at every single day, if you don't really kind of keep stretching those muscles, you're you're going to be doomed. So to me, there's just a lot of opportunity in figuring out what you can get out of. Confidence is

going to grow every other opportunity in your life. You talk about the way to get confidence is by taking you sort of to it their small risks and practice. Can you share a little bit more about that, well, sure, I mean anything you can apply to that too is a daily kind of experience. So for instance, maybe you want to maybe you're having trouble meeting somebody that you

want to have a romantic experience with. And so the way most people deal with that is that they stay at home and play more Halo and just sit around going that's strange. I still haven't met a girl, uh in my house playing my Xbox and you know, it's really weird. I keep looking behind the couch and there's still not one there, which, by the way, they should be grateful. But the other way you can work on that is you could, you know, go to the bookstore and just talk to one person and just say all

I'm gonna do. All I need for today's wind is I'm just gonna go up to that girl and say, oh, you're reading a book on Jeffrey Dahmer. I think that's a fascinating subject. And then what No matter what they say back, just call that the wind that you open your mouth and said something to somebody else. The more we practice that, then we're like, we find we could start a conversation with anyone and then suddenly, oh, now

I can do something. So to me, the practice is always going after something that's small on the way to the big thing. And then the other thing is to to sometimes go and risk risk a few fewer chips on the way, meaning do something a little less vital before you have to do something vital. The other thing a lot of times we do crazy with confidence is you know, we're waiting to ask our boss for a raise, and we think that's the only way we can practice that.

But no, you can go to a restaurant and you can order really oddly on the menu, and the more you do that, the more confident you get, because you have no problem telling the wait staff you're going to change the whole process of how the food is prepared, and you know that that lets you warm up to asking the boss and saying, I think I'm totally worth the rays, let's get this done. So that's that's how

I see it. That ability to sort of step out of your comfort zone in anything sort of translates then to the other areas. You begin to get practice in being uncomfortable briefly while you through it. Oh yeah, and and we humans loathe discomfort. We want to be comfortable all the time. If someone could say to you, you know you want a really big significant change in your life, don't work. It'll be smooth and comfortable the whole way. That's what we want to hear. But that nothing good

in life comes without discomfort. I mean, birth is supposedly one of the most painful things in the world, and yet it keeps happening every single day, it turns out. So I think that we have to really look at what we're willing to sacrifice to earn that confidence and to earn any other thing that we really want. Yeah, that seems to come up over and over again on the show as we talk with people about improving their lives. Is that if we just settle for comfort, we really aren't.

We may be comfortable, but we're not going to be happy. Another area that I wanted to talk about. You say that a lot of our efforts to change fail because we're missing two important systems, feedback and reward systems. What what does that mean? Well, so in everything in our life, we need some sense of feedback and or some sense of reward to know how we're doing. It's so evident in video games, like when we play a game, you know if you I'll use Halo because that's a good

easy example. If I hide behind things that don't shoot at anything, I don't get any points, and at the end of the adventure, you know I have the lowest score out of all the other players. Uh So I learned that I have to go out into the world if I want to get anything. But that comes from the feedback of knowing that if I don't get any points, then I see myself at the bottom, and it comes from the rewards of once I get points, it tells me what actions that the world wants me to take.

Everything is set up this way, but sometimes it's not as explicit, especially if it's a change we want to make. So for instance, you know, when anyone says I'm starting to work on my health and my fitness, someone will say, great,

how many how many pounds have you lost? But that's only one possible method of measuring, and sometimes it's the worst method because if if you're gaining strength and building muscle, muscle weighs more than at so you could be losing size off your waist and still be you know, you could be adding pounds on the scale. So you have to find, you know, a better feedback system and and

then a better set of rewards. I have this other strange thing that people tell me, I'm on this great diet, I really can't wait until I have a big piece of cake, and I feel like, well, that's strikes me is that the reward you're saving up for here is the opposite of the choices that you're making in your diet. Don't go together to me. Maybe your reward would be, you know, the next fifteen pounds I lose, I'm gonna

end up needing some new clothes. Anyway, I might as well planned to buy a nice outfit every such and such a marker or something, so um, when we are trying to make changes, we forget that we need some kind of measurement system and it needs to be a lot more incremental than we think it has to be. That's the other thing. People say to me, Oh, I'm a horrendous public speaker, And I'll say how often do you practice? How often you go out and speak? And

they'll be like, never, that's I'm so scared. I don't ever want to do it. I'm like, well, you're batting perfectly then, because if you've never gone out to speak, then you must be an insanely successful speaker, because you know, you've never been booed off a stage. And so it turns out that you know, we need to come up with ways to increment and build our reward systems. Another

key thing to making change seems to be accountability. If you get if you get the right feedback and reward system, and you tied that to some sort of accountability with other people, always seems to be to be very successful. And I think you're you seem to be doing a

fair amount of that these days. I know you're very focused on on fitness and you're you're posting a lot of different pictures and things that I'm assuming that's really from an accountability perspective to try and bring your support system into the loop on that. Yes, and no, um, I try hard not to. I mean it's I think it's important to have a group of support, but if it depends how you use it. So I find that I'm trying mostly to telegraph the work that I'm doing.

But most of those pictures I take and stick online are or for me, so I do it for myself to say I'm still at it. And um, and you know, also my girlfriend is on and spends time, and when she says nice things to me, I always get an extra boost. So that's I try to limit the amount of people I care what they think. And you know it's down there about like one and a half. So, but I think that when accountability is really important, I

think to having some sense of a system. The other thing is sometimes we do need to support really badly, and sometimes we have such negative feedback going on in our closest relationships that you know, it would be really important to have some kind of a system somewhere in the space. So, for instance, Jacqueline is working on this coaching program and one of the things we were building into it. When we're talking about it was just the

whole notion of Uh. You know, sometimes your significant other doesn't want you to get healthier or more fit for some reasons, you know, related to their own psychology. Sometimes you know your parents. You know, there's a lot of there's a lot of cultures where food is very important, the consumption of the food, and if you don't need mom's cooking, you must be bad or you must you know,

not love her, etcetera, etcetera. So there's a lot of times when our local, closest support system doesn't help us. The other is if somebody has, you know, really ambitious goals and it's surrounded by the you know, the cubical farmers of their world. You know, if you have aspirations of being something that's outside the norm, you're the freak. Uh. No one's going to really know how to quickly you know,

support you. You Know, if a kid says nowadays in school, I think I'd like to grow up to be an entrepreneur, I mean they're gonna end up with the guidance counselor's office. So, you know, I think that there's a lot to finding your freaks, and I think that if anything, sometimes those kinds of things, like putting those pictures online is sort of like the bat signal, and I'm saying, Hey, other

crazy people doing their own thing, unite. Yep. The Internet is so amazing in that way that it does allow you to expand beyond your sort of geographical limitations with people. The in the book, you also talk about about mind reading, this sense that I do something and then I'm watching the people around me for their reaction, and how often

we get that wrong. It's a it's pretty astounding once you clue to that, once you realize that you can't read other people's minds, and once you realize that when you're waiting for this absolutely unreliable mirror, uh, and how silly that is to take that kind of feedback. It changes a lot, Like once you really cue to that and say, oh, I really shouldn't wait for someone else to say what I think. And and by the way, I fall into it all the time, and I'm and

I'm very conscious of it. So it's not the easiest thing to shake. But uh, Ever, since we're little, tiny kids, all we really want in life is feedback, right, I mean when we're a little baby and we start running away from our parents. We look over the shoulder, like, do you see me leaving? Because I'd like you to acknowledge that I'm trying to leave right now. And when we're you know, five or six, we w look what I can do. When we're nine, look what I can do.

I'll tell you, every single day in my inbox is stuffed with people telling me look what I could do. All day long. They just want me to say, good, you're a good person. I would like to praise you because you are such a good kid. Um, we're starved for it. All humans are. Human kind's greatest need is the need to feel wanted, and so part of that

is when we sort of use these mirrors. When we when we use other people to give us feedback and whatnot, we're we're really throwing a lot of our psychic you know, psychic energy into somebody else's hands to to accidentally use as a devastating weapon. All the time. You know, it's amazing the things that you could feel but heard about that the other person has no idea because they're not mind reading you either. So as much as you think that, oh well, she must really not care enough about me.

If she's not running over and liking my Instagram photos within five minutes of me posting them, you know, that's crazy. That's you know, quoting one of the most philosophical movies of all time three hundred, this is madness, right. I think we we tend to only see it from our perspective and totally and you talk about this in the book, totally miss that they've got a world going on inside

of themselves, that that is what's real to them. So I may be may be in a meeting with somebody and they're reacting poorly, and it's it has nothing to do with what I'm saying. It has to do with that had a fight with their wife that morning and their mom's sick, or they feel you know, they they ate something bad for lunch. And I'm reading all this into it, and like you said, it is it's madness because there's no there's no reality to it. And yet I think for a lot of us, it is one

of the most real realities if we're not careful. Absolutely, and that whole point about, you know, trying to remember how everyone else's day is in any way tied to yours, is so vital, and it's easier to try to give strangers that benefit. We always forget that the people closest

to us also deserved the same benefit. It turns out the ally, the person who might even be in your bed every night, actually has a life outside of you know, your greater well being, and they may or may not have other problems or challenges on their mind or whatever. So sometimes even they can't give you exactly what you're looking for. Yep, what's permission in regards to bravery? What's that you use that term? What? What do you mean

by that? So? Permission is important because what I've come to learn is that so many people are waiting for someone else to tap them on the shoulder and say you are now knighted. You may now go free and do these things that you're supposed to do a lot of I mean, there's this I met this young guy at an event a little while ago, and like a few weeks ago, and he says, I really want to start doing entrepreneurial things. I can't wait till I get

that opportunity. And I said, I'm sorry, but who's coming to give you that permission? Who's waiting to say to you. You go forth and be entrepreneurial. Now, I said, little kids take that permission away all on their own. They start lemonade stands, whether or not Mom and dad, I think it's a great day to do a lemonade stand. So who are you waiting for? And so to me, it's almost that scene where Napoleon takes the crown right out of the priest's hands and says, I'll king myself,

thank you. Uh you basically have to do that because the amount of people who say to me, uh, yeah, well I'm not Chris Brogan. I say, well, I'm not Chris Brogan. You know, no one came to me and said, hey, it's your turn. Time to go be awesome. You know, I just started doing stupid things that had nothing to do with my day job, and that's my entire career

is based on that. So, uh, to me, permission is one of the one of the hardest ones because we're all just sitting around waiting for someone to tap us and say, okay, get in the game. But we are all that really important part of the universe that needs to be expressed. We just a lot of us are still waiting for that that phone call yeah, And I think that that ties to another another idea that you talked about, which is you are where you are, you want to be over here, build a bridge. And I

think that exactly what you said. You weren't always the Chris Brogan we know now. I mean, you didn't always have what you had. You started from the same place everybody would start, and I think people tend to lose sight of that and and get very easily discouraged by where they are. You know, I can still walk into pretty much any restaurant, or any grocery store or any mall and scre amount do you know who I am?

And most times no one will say yes. You know, you're pretty safe to realize that, you know sometimes, you know, I thought about this the other day. Somebody rather famous was asking me, how do you think I can get in front of such and such a person? And I was thinking, I consider you far ahead of the scale on me on this one. But evidently you know you think you still need some help. And that's true of everybody. Sir Richard Branson, when I interviewed him, this man owns

an island. He is knighted, he has four plus companies and a lot more dough than me, still has things he's not so secure about. UM. We all have these opportunities to realize this, and you know, to me, it's just it's interesting. It's that that famous ancient song that him uh sang by seal and a sky full of people and only someone to fly? Isn't that crazy? Yep? And that idea of sort of starting where you are?

Uh is you use that phrase? And I think I don't know how you and I originally started talking about it, but we that's a book by Pemma Children. Do you want to share a little bit about your experience with um? The Shambala lineage? So it all comes in a really strange way. One day, Julian Smith, co author of a couple of books with Me and Friends, says to me, Seth Golden said, I should read Pemma Children if you

ever read her? And I was like, no, So I download a bunch of kindle books or whatever, and I think I bought a paper book or something. So that was kind of neat. And then Jacqueline and I were talking about it. I think she had already download or read some of her books before and was kind of into her too. But we kind of both rediscovered her a little bit together. And then a few weeks later, Jack says, Hey, Pemma is going to be at this event,

this Shambala event up in Halifax, Nova Scotia. We should go. And I was like, yeah, sure, you know, in my mind sort of like yeah, definitely we should go to that. That'll be great and uh and she said, oh good, I booked the tickets and I was like, oh, all right, so we're going. Yeah, and uh. So we went and it was the It was the funniest thing in the world.

So it's in this very big space and lots of people are going to be there, and they're all very Shambala Buddhists, and there's hardly a newbie in the crowd, it seems, and they all seem to know what they're doing, and we're just there as fans of Pemma, like we don't even know this the sack young, we don't know

anything about this faith per se. Uh. And we go there and we choose a seat somewhere near the back in case we have to leave, and Pema children ends up sitting diagonally behind us, like twelve feet away, and like Rite and I vision contact or whatever, and Jack says, I'm gonna go over and say hi. I was like, what, you can't go over that. You can't just go over and say off? She goes. Next thing, you know, they're hugging.

They're like kissing and crying and like signing books and stuff like that, and they're like little BFFs and none. Like eight minutes into the day, it seemed we end up spending a lot of time that we have a

great time. Um. We at the very end, they sort of very not not to not too pushy, say hey, if you want to convert the Shambala Buddhism, you know, getting this line and you could do that, and really that it's like the sack Young wax you on the shoulders with a pencil and you get a stupid piece of thread and you're now a Buddhist and that's about all that you do. You do right, Like there's there's no written tester and I didn't have to pee in a cup. Um. But then after that, I mean, it's

just weird how it kept going. A year or so later, I end up getting the opportunity to interview the Shock Young and we do a skype video together and all that, and just I don't I never go to the Shambala temples. You know. We went to the Boston one and it was nice, but it just kind of couldn't compare with hanging out with the shock Young and hanging out with

Pemma Scholdren. So I just breathe and sit and do all that meditation and stuff and work on that, and I read Pemma's books and I try to, you know, be mindful every day, and that's all I really do. Um. But what I liked about the Shambala lineage was I liked that it wasn't especially complex, and that there wasn't a great deal of theology that you had to know. You could just kind of read into it a little bit.

And it's a pretty low barrier to entry, I guess, as religions go, or or philosophies go, it's a pretty easy one to say, Okay, yeah it is. It's very it's very straightforward, and and uh, Pema Children was enormously helpful to me when she's got a book called When Things Fall Apart, and when my first marriage fell apart, that book, you know, it was sort of a lifeline to some degree. So I think we're getting near the

end of time. I want to end with asking you to to talk a little bit about a quote of yours that's one of my favorites, which is that a setback is not permission to abandon your plans. And I want to ask that in general. And also I want to ask it because it was a couple of months ago you were talking. You were very excited about something that didn't happen, um, and i'd like to I'd like to hear you say sort of how you applied that to yourself. Well, I get to apply it a lot.

I mean, it's it's so funny if you look at this the sphere of the sphere of a like a an egg or something like that. You look at the outside of an egg, it looks nice and smooth, but of course as you zoom in, it's very porous and there's giant, huge fissures in it and all that kind of thing. I mean, all life was like that or the other way. I look at it as a duck swimming. You know, ducks look look great on top. You look

under the water and it's a big crazy mass. Um. Life is full of setbacks, But it's really how we approached them. It's how we you know, observe an orient and decide what we're gonna do with them that makes the whole world of difference. So, for instance, this big thing I was thinking I was going to take to go into, you know, I had sort of a couple of toes out of that water. I had every part of me into that water except for a few toes because something just wasn't right and I was really pursuing

it with with some some wrong intentions. Uh, even though it would have probably been a neat project and having said no in the end or having you know, it all not worked. Just so you know again, I have plans, I have things I need to do, and what they allowed me to do is really double down on all the other work I want to do. And I think a lot of times, you know, it's funny. I was on a different interview just a little earlier in the day and I said to somebody that, you know, we're

addicted to distraction. We don't have we don't have a d D. We just love distraction because it's so much easier than focus. And I'm ridiculously guilty of that. And so as far as which Wolf I'm going to feed. I'm gonna try really hard to feed the one that's all about focus, and that's all about really sticking to, you know, my set of core values and my goals and not allowing the shiny things to sparkle and maintan run away um. But with setbacks, I mean anything including fitness.

For instance, people will say, oh, you know, I totally fell off the wagon. I ate a know, I had a cake and a pie on top of it, and I accidentally tripped on a bag of M and M s and eight those two. So I'm not going to go to the gym for a month because I feel so guilty. Well that seems a pretty you know, tumultuous and and by the way, you know, it's so funny that it feels like that's over an exaggeration, of course, but it's not that far from how certain people behavior act.

And I hear the strangest stories like that. You know, well, you know, I missed a date at the gym, and then I felt bad about that, so I missed a month. You're sort of giving yourself compound interest on your own choices of sins. So I guess if I were you, I maybe would you revisit your plan and jump back

on it. I think it's this idea of all or nothing your perfection, Like, if I don't do it exactly right, then I'm just not going to do it um, which is, as you said, a fairly ineffective way to to get anywhere, because you are going to have setbacks in anything we do. So yeah, I haven't really seen perfection. Doesn't seem to exist a lot of my life except for the love of my life. You know, there's not a whole lot of perfection in this universe. Yep. Well, Chris, thank you

very much for for joining us. I enjoyed the interview and I've enjoyed getting to know you over the last period of time online, my honor pleasure. Thanks so much for having me and for such a refreshing and interesting conversation. Thank goodness, we didn't even want to talk about sweating or anything. We did not. We did not, we avoided all that. Well, thank you very much, and we'll talk to you soon. Bye bye. You can learn more about Chris Broken and this podcast at one you Feed dot

net slash Chris Broken. Oh hey, listeners, this is Chris from the One you Feed and you know, Eric just left the room. Um. You know, I can tell that a lot of people listen to this just because we get thousands of downloads every week. But Eric's a little bit more of a stats junkie, and I thought, you know, just to make him feel better, I'd edit this end to the end of the podcast. Um, we'd really like to hear from you if you could just email him

at Eric at one you feed dot net. Just make him feel better, Just say something nice you don't really even have to mean. And if you don't want to, thanks, Oh, by the way, why you're out there emailing Eric since you're already on the internet. Uh, we also kind of want you to go on the iTunes store and just you know, give us a great review. If you would, thanks, I'll let you go out by