Mastering Clear Thinking w/ Shane Parrish

called Clear Thinking, Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results. Throughout this conversation, Shane convinced me more than ever of the importance of clear thinking. He argues that in order to be a clear thinker, we must first create the space to reason in our thoughts, feelings and actions, and then we must deliberately use that space to think clearly. He makes the convincing case that if you can master that skill, you will have an unstoppable advantage in life. I learned

a lot from Shane's book and this conversation. I particularly love how clearly he explains the main enemies of queer thinking, such as are out of control emotions and there you go, and also love his practical tips for building strength and resiliency and living a life full of things that matter. I think you'll really enjoy this episode as well. So, without further ado, I bring you, Shane Parish. Nice to finally meet you, Shane.

but it's like years away from actually happening. And then the other thing I was thinking about the other day was, you know, it's kind of like getting naked on stage in front of a thousand people and having them all judge you. Like, reading the reviews and the comment it's by real people. It's like, you know, there's a little bit of excitement inside me, and then there's also like, oh god, what are they going to say? What do

they think? How did this come across to people who weren't me because they can only see the words on the page and not all the things in my head. And so it's been really interesting in that in that respect too. I mean, everything has been almost overwhelmingly positive. Yeah, I was just gonna share of that, but yeah, it's a little nervous. I check every day. I'm like, oh, is there a new review?

You know, why has he been such a strong and why has he had such a strong influence on your own thinking.

an example of him living that. And then we struck up a conversation. I being a Canadian, I'm like, I can't even accept this, right, Like, I'll sleep in my car, It's okay. And you know, he basically convinced me to accept his generous gift and it was one of the nicest things anybody's ever done for me, Just totally blund and we struck up a conversation. He said, hey, fly out to California, will grab dinner sometime. I got home and took him up on his offer, and then we

sort of became friends. And through those conversations, it's interesting to meet somebody who thinks in a very different way than I had been accustomed to or exposed to. And you know, he has these little pithy saying it's like go positive and go first, and you know, when you start talking about that with him, it you know, there's a lot of information behind it. And we've had many conversations over the years and he's been one of the

biggest influences on my life. And he's friends with another one of the biggest influences on my life, which is Charlie Munger, who recently passed away, and those two together have just had a profound impact on my thinking and living to the type of person I want to be. You know, they say, show me your heroes and I'll show you where you're going to go. And I feel like those two our giants in that field, and they hold me forward in a lot of wods.

they have better assets than you, and you can't opt out. You still have to play. So that was always like a really fun sort of thing to think about it. And then when it came to living a brown two thousand and eight, that's when I started thinking about, like, what is it I really wanted up life because I had worked about seven years straight, sixteen hours a day, six days a week, because I started two weeks before

September eleventh. September eleventh happened, the world changes forever. I have no idea what's going on, but like all of a sudden, I'm working every day, and you know, I developed a lot of close friendships, worked with some really incredible people. But those six years really flew by, and

you didn't really have a choice. And then I remember I went with my acts at the time and we went to Italy for a vaca and it was three weeks, and it was really the first vacation I had had since I don't know, I didn't even know because I started working when I was fourteen, so it'd be basically the first adult vacation I ever really took. And she was so annoyed with me because I slept sixteen hours

a day every day. She would like, go get gelato and come back, and I'm like passed out on the like on the water fountain and you know, anywhere I could sleep. I was just sleeping, and I was like, oh, let me lie down for a nap and then you know, we can go out later, and thinking it'd be like forty five minutes, but it's like five hours later. I wake up and She's like and my body was just recovering from all of this stress, this work, this environment

that I was in. And then I started thinking about, Okay, what is it. Like let's think a little bit backwards here, Let's take Muger's approach and like invert this a little and what if I want to avoid and I want to avoid this for the next like fifty years. And so it gave me pause and made me start thinking a little bit about what do I want the end of my life to look like? And am I doing the things right now that I need to be doing to make it look like that.

your shoulders, and you didn't want to opt out. You wanted to be a part of part of this. I mean, that's sort of why you signed up to work there, right. You want to you want to help, and you want to find solutions. The thing is, you know, I sort of got thrust in these roles and responsibilities that I really wasn't prepared for and I didn't really know what to do. So I started going around the organization and like,

how do I learn how to make decisions? Like twenty three, twenty four, twenty five, twenty six, what nobody's ever taught me how to make decisions? There was like no class in university on decision making. And now all of a sudden, you're making a decision that affects your team, your organization, other countries, troops in theater, people's lives, and how does that work? And how do you think through these problems

in a rapid environment of an operational pace? And that was that was the impetus for sort of like learning how do we do this? And can we learn right? Or is it just sort of like you're born with it? Or do you get lucky? How do you think about this? And This led me to sort of like go around the organization. I was that guy who showed up at meetings and I'd just sit there in the back and you know, be quiet. But I was never invited, and sometimes I get kicked out and sometimes they let me stay.

And I was like, I want to learn how, you know, our senior people make decisions. And then I went back to school and I wanted to do an MBA because I thought that that would be the answer to learning how to make decisions, and it wasn't. But the NBA was sort of the connection to Monger, who you know, I had come across before, maybe late in high school.

I read the Making of an American Capitalist by Roger Lowenstein on Warren Buffett, and that was my first exposure to them, and I hadn't really given it much thought. But then it sort of dawned on me during my MBA that I was like, here are these two guys in the real world who seemed to consistently make better decisions than everybody else. Have they learned something that I can use and pull into the organization and apply to make us better, to make me better, to give us

a better chance at success. And that was the start of Farnham Street Blog, which is fs dop blog, but it originally started as six ' eight one three one dash fourteen forty dot blogger dot com, and it started as that because it was my reflections on what I was reading. I was reading all the Berkshire Hathaway letters,

I was reading all the Westcoat shareholder letters. I was deep diving into these guys trying to figure out, like, how is it they've taken you know, Daniel Kahman's work and Michael Porter's work and they put it into practice, and what is it that we can learn from that? And it was a scratch pad for me. I don't I don't quite still don't quite understand how other people found it because I was allowed to have an online persona like I wasn't allowed to be a person. It

was an anonymous website. It was a series of digits because I thought nobody would want to type in all those digits to get to the way website. And that's no longer the website. The significance of those digits are that was the zip code for Birksure Hathaway and the unit number for Berkshire Hathaway. So it was an homage to those two in terms of what I was learning from them, And I think that that that was a

really good way for me to reflect. Right when we think about learning so often, we just consume information and we don't chew on it, we don't digest it, we don't make it our own. But I was trying to take these ideas from outside the organization and apply them inside. So I'm taking them from one ecosystem effectively where they exist and saying like, well does this work in our ecosystem? And like where would it break and what would need

to change and how do I think about that? So I was reflecting a lot on them, And this is what I think people miss today with the information that we consume. So if you think about learning as a loop, as I think of it, and this isn't super scientific, but it's sort of my practical real world experience, is you have an experience, you reflect on that experience, you create a compression based on that reflection. The compression is like the distillation of that experience into something like go

positive and go first, and that becomes an action. So you have this loop you go experience, reflection, compression, action, and this is our continuous look, and when you cut out reflection, you don't really learn. You go from experience to abstraction. And if you think about it, most of what we consume these days is other people's abstractions. We consume the gist, we consume this SoundBite. We don't want

the details. Those details are irrelevant. And in a lot of cases that makes sense, because you don't want to be an expert in everything, and you can't we don't have enough time. But in the areas where you do want to be an expert, you actually need the details. You need the reflection you need because that's the process by which you learn to understand where does this work, where it doesn't it work, what are the edge cases? Does this apply in a different ecosystem? Why is it

likely to fail? And anybody can sort of like, do this experiment at home or in your mind. You pull out a recipe and you make the rest be at home. And if you make the recipe perfectly and everything goes really well, it's going to taste the same as the

chef who created it. It's almost indiscernible. But if something goes wrong, there's a huge difference between you who's taken this compression and used it as knowledge in this case, but unearned knowledge, because the chef will taste it and be like, Oh, there's too much salt, the heat was too high, the oven isn't calibrated. They instantly know what went wrong, and they know what went wrong because they

did all the work of reflecting. And so I think in very specific domains, we as people actually need to consume large quantities of high quality, detailed information. And that was what I was trying to do from the outside and pull that in, and the blog was my process of reflecting on that in a way that I mean.

I wasn't talking about intelligence agencies or anything. I was just talking about these ideas and trying to compress them in a way that made sense for me and synthesize them and connect them to other ideas that I was learning. Does that make sense?

These are decisions where you know you're making a decision, and so generally speaking, you're able to pause and think you might not know you might be you might get an advantage to learning how to think better in those moments, But generally speaking, we sort of get them directionally correct because we know we're making a decision. The ordinary moments, the moments when we don't know we're making a decision, those are the moments that really can multiply all of

that by zero. So if you pick the right partner but you don't invest in your relationship with them, what happens to that relationship? It goes to zero. If you pick the right partner, and you take them for granted. What happens same thing you wake up to divorce papers. And so these ordinary moments actually matter because those ordinary moments make life easier, harder, and they can multiply all

of your progress by zero in these cases. And so I think it's important to think about these ordinary moments, and I think of them in the concept of positioning, which is how do we use these ordinary moments to put ourselves in a good position. So what I learned from studying other people from decision making is that the best in the world, the people that we would consider above average at making decisions or getting really good results, they're almost never, if you go back in history, forced

into making a decision they don't want to do. And that's really interesting insight, and I think people really underappreciate this type of insight. So if you took on too much debt and you're being forced to sell your house, you can't make a good decision in that moment. You're being forced by circumstances into doing something you don't want to do or doing something that's bad, and quickly things

go from bad to worse in those cases. And so one of the things that I learned from studying Buffett, Hoffman and sort of Rockefeller and Carnegie is that they're never in a position where they were forced to do something that they didn't want to do. And how did they do that. They set themselves up through positioning so that they could always take advantage the environment's going to change.

If you look at Berkshire Hathaway today, I think they have one hundred and sixty billion dollars on their balance sheet in treasure bills. And think about that for a second. So if the stock market goes up, they win. If the stock market stays the same, they win, And if the economy goes through another financial crisis like it did in two thousand and eight, they win. So they're passively stable. There's nothing that's really going to They're not predicting the future,

and I think that that's an important distinction. So prediction you can prepare for something if you know what's coming. Positioning is a broader subset of that idea, which is, I don't know what's coming, how do I be prepared for a wide range of scenarios that will come. And we know there's going to financial curses. What we don't know is when they're going to happen, but it's virtual guarantee for you and I that there will be another one in our lifetime. It could be tomorrow and it

could be in ten years. We don't know, but we can almost guarantee that it's going to happen. So what happens when that happens. Can we be in a position where we can take advantage of that, or we're going to be in a position where we're fighting for our survival and we're just trying to stay afloid? Wow?

through us in the real world. And an example of that is, you know, if I slight you in a meeting, you're going to respond, and if you catch yourself, you're going to stop it. If you don't catch yourself, you're going to respond without reasoning. You're just going to react because you're an animal. And what I'm doing is I'm infringing on your territory. But our territory isn't necessarily physical. Our territory doesn't have to be you know, a dog

walking around peeing on trees. Our territory is how we see ourselves. Our territory is our identity. And so what does that mean, Well, that means that there's a situation where we're not going to think right, where we're less likely to think than we otherwise would be. So the four defaults that I lay out in the book are ego, emotion, social, and inertia, and all of these things create a situation whereby we are less likely to think than we otherwise would.

So if you think of emotion. That's a pretty simple one, right, which is you're angry. Are you thinking clearly when you're angry? Probably not. You're going to do things that you later regret. And then you think of ego. We just sort of talked about ego and identity. You're not thinking in those moments. Social A great one is have you ever been on the phone and said yes to somebody? You don't want to say us too, because you don't want to disappoint them.

You want them to like you, right, So you're not thinking, right, so you end up agreeing to these things you don't want to do because you want the other person to like you. Well, what is that? That's self preserving? Right? We've been brought up for ten thousand years. We have to fit in with the tribe because if we don't fit in the tribe, we get kicked out, and if we get kicked out, die, And so we have this

ingrained in our biologies and are unconscious. We're not consciously thinking about it, but we want to be liked by other people, so we say yes to things we don't want to do, and then inertia, we stay in relationships that we've been in that are no longer serve us, same as jobs. Right, we just keep doing what we've always done, even though we're not necessarily getting the results

that we want. And what happens in those moments is we tend to think, oh, you know what, if the world just recognize my potential, all of a sudden, things would change. And we're passive. So we just sit there waiting for something to change instead of being proactive and going out there and making that change. Why are we passive? It's because we're not thinking. We're not thinking about what we need to do today to put ourselves in a better position for tomorrow. And these are the scenarios that

I came up with. I think they're fairly broad categories, but there's real world examples behind all of them where we're not doing the things that we want to be doing. Now. If we tie this back to positioning, just for one second, so all of these things are going to happen. You have an ego, you are emotional, You're going to be in social situations. Inertia happens every day. If you're in a good position, those things are easier to deal with, and if you're in a bad position, those things are

harder to deal with. And the language that I use with my kids is easy mode or hard mode? Are you playing on easy moode or hard mode? And so an example, like one of my children came home. He gave me one of his tests, and he didn't do as well as he he wanted on it, nor as well as I would have hoped that he did. He gives it to me, shrugs his shoulders and says, I

did my best, and I know from playing sports. We'll talk about this later, like I you know, most kids quit on the car right on the way home, not for their performance on the field. And so like we let the emotions simmer down a bit, and then later that night, I'm like, talk to me, what does it mean to do your best? He said, Well, you know, I sat down at ten am. I read all the questions, I looked at all the points. I followed every everything the school told me to do to succeed on tests.

I was like, oh, that's really interesting. Let's like rewind seventy two hours here, and did you study?

in the bathroom the same time as him? Normally we're different times. I'm irritated I didn't sleep well. I was like, okay, so you chose to play on hard mode. Because everything we just talked about is within your control. That's the position that you're going now. In this case, it's preparation because we know the test is coming. It's not positioning. But this is a great example of how you can think about that. Right, So it's not the moment forward.

It's all also like what goes into that moment and if you want to think about how we can position ourselves in our relationship. An example is like if you invest in your relationship with your partner. If you imagine that there's a patch of grass between you and your partner, and you water that grass, you go out on dates, you hold hands, you connect, you talk about your day,

you do all these things. Well, now, all of a sudden, if something happens, this little spark is going to go on this patch of wet grass, and what happens, It goes out. But if you don't water that gross, if you're in a bad position, you don't water the grass, all of a sudden, what happens That little spark lights this big inferno, and all of a sudden, you're like yelling at each other over how you stack the dishwasher.

Which if I tap you on the shoulder in that moment and I say, hey, Scott, do you want to put water or gas on this situation, You're going to be like water, right, You're instantly going to start thinking, but you're not thinking. And because you're not thinking, you're not thinking clearly at all. And your whole weekend can to rail by this, Your whole relationship can be derailed by this an ordinary moment and otherwise ordinary moment can

destroy if you have too many of these. And so it's like, okay, well, how can we think about this differently? Can we position ourselves to be stronger in these moments? Can we position ourselves so that we're better off. And if you think about it, like if you get a really bad night sleep, you're out drinking, you're with your buddies, you're you know you, and then you come to work and there's traffic on the way to work, and all of a sudden, you're angry. You're angry at the world.

You don't even know. You're probably angry at yourself deep down, but you're not feeling that. It's really hard in that moment. For most I would say self help books or like most people's advice is recognize you're angry, take a deep breath like step away from the situation. Well you're not you're playing on hard mode. So if you can do that on your best day, and maybe you do it like thirty to fifty percent of the time, well now all of a sudden, you're going to do it ten

percent of the time. And so if you're in a good position, you didn't go out late, you know, sort of the traffic doesn't bother you as much because you got a really good night's sleep. You might still be in a rush, but you're not super angry about it. So you've already improved the outcome here and you're more likely to recognize what's happening sort of dissipate this situation than otherwise. But there's also no sorry, go ahead, no

I go on. I thought you well, I was going to say, like, so, so those are things like you can recognize or avoid the situations, but you can also come up with rules and sort of turn them automatic rules for success in the book, which is, well, how can I actually reprogram my brain so that I don't have to consciously think? But I turned my desired behavior into my default behavior, and I got this idea. I

was so freaking lucky. I was sitting with Daniel Kahman and his penthouse in New York and were chatting away and his phone rings, and so he picks up his phone, and you know, at the end of it, he's like, my rule is I don't say yes on the phone. And then he hangs up and I'm like, Danny, tell me about this. I've never heard you say rule before, Like I've read almost everything you've ever written, and I've listened to all your talks, and I've never heard this.

And he says, well, you know, I tend to say yes to people I don't want to say y. S two for things that I don't want to do. So he's like, I found myself. You know, I was saying yes ninety percent of the time, and I wanted to be saying yes ten percent of the time. And he's like, so I created this little rule, and the rule is I never say yes on the phone. Is something I'll get back to you tomorrow. And he's like, I realized a couple things through this once. After I did it

a couple times. I didn't have to think about it. It just automatically came out of my mouth. Because we've been programmed our whole life to follow rules. So once we establish that we have a rule, even if we've created that rule for ourselves, we follow it. And then he's like, the other thing that really I didn't appreciate or he didn't appreciate, is that people don't push back

on rules. So if you tell me your rule is we always stay on five minutes after the podcast to chit chat, I'm not gonna say, oh, like it doesn't you know. It's just like okay, because you told me that's your role, and so it's just naturally accepted by me.

And I looked at him, and I remember this I was like, Danny, I know you have a Nobel prize, but this might be the most powerful thing that you've done, because this, like, cognitive biases are great at determining why we made a mental mistake in hindsight looking backwards, but they're really poor at preventing us from making one in

the future. But what you just came up with this idea is like you've figured out a way to reprogram your brain so that you don't have to call you don't have to be in system to thinking to get the result that you want in that moment. And so I've played around with this idea so many times since then with so many people, and we've tested this on thousands of people. And you know, a great example from my life is I was trying to work out three

days a week Monday, Wednesday, Friday. I would go to the gym, and I would try to go to the gym, but I would wake up. You know, I'm that guy. I'm like, I don't like going to the gym. I just want to be healthy, so I go because I want to live a long life and I want to be healthy. I don't actually enjoy it. Some people there, they're like running on the treadmill. They're not even like breaking a sweat. I'm like dying after three minutes. And I hate all those people who are just like chugging

all off. So I go to the gym and I'm like, I want to see my stats here because I remember waking up one day and I was like, I'm super tired today. And then I start negotiating with myself and I negotiate with myself over you know, I didn't sleep super well, it's been a really long day. I'll do extra tomorrow. And that's what I would tell myself. And so I went to the gym and I said, hey, this is a strange regress, but can you give me

a print out? Like, tell me how many times I've been here in the last three hundred and sixty five days? And I sort of mapped it to my calendar, my travel schedule, so I knew approximately how many times that I should have been at the gym if I want three days a week. I was nowhere close to that. I was like half of that. And so what was how I wasn't doing what I wanted to do, And so I was like, well, let's try this rule thing.

So I created an automatic rule for myself, which is I sweat every day, so I do workout every day, if you want to think of it that way. The duration or scope of that workout changes. Some days is ninety minutes, some days is twenty. But I do something every day, and since then, I think I've only missed four days and it's been life changing. I don't argue with myself when I wake up. My negotiation isn't whether I go to the gym or not. My negotiation is

what do I fit in today? What duration? What scope do I have? Where does it fit in with my calendar? And if it doesn't fit, I just do like sit ups and push ups, like one hundred of each. You know, I was in a hotel the other day, I didn't have access to a gym, and I'm like, okay, what's my workout today. It's twenty minutes. It's like sit ups, push ups. I'm like doing squats on the floor. It doesn't take long and you can always sort of like fit it in. But I don't argue with myself. The

better it anymore, which is really interesting. There's no negotiation.

is think about you at work. There is somebody at work right now who knows what's holding you back, and they're not going to tell you. They're not going to hold you accountable for that one thing getting in your way. You have to hold yourself accountable. And one of the ways that we can hold ourselves accountable is to raise our standards. So if you think about it and the fact that we're born into a situation which is pure chance our parents are socioeconomic status, our country, the behaviors

of our parents, the standards of our parents. These are all chances, but these become unwritten rules that go into our head. They get ingrained into us over eighteen years about what normal looks like, so when we come out, we think we're normal. One of the big lessons I learned from Peter is that you know, if you do what everybody else is doing, you're going to get the

same results that everybody else gets. And so if you take those standards that you adopt it as a kid and you put them into practice, you're likely to get very similar results to your parents, maybe slightly better, maybe slightly worse, going to probably be within one standard deviation.

Because those habits and that mindset gets you here. But if you want to hold yourself accountable and you want to do something different, you have to have different standards, different levels of execution for where you want to get to. And if you look at sort of you look at athletics, right, what was that last dance? Did you watch that with Michael Jordan? Yeah?

we do. We just tell ourselves excuses. And so when you have somebody like this, and there's a story in the book about you know, one of my best friends who basically, you know, five days into working with me, tells me, he's like, look, if you can't do your job, I don't want to work with you. And I'm like, well, here's all the other things that I did this week,

and your your mind is so defensive. It's like I got called into this the bus was late, blah blah blah, Like I had this list of things, like, Man, I'm working sixteen hours a day, here's all the shit that I did. I'll get this done. Don't worry about it. And he's just like, I don't care. I don't care about your excuses. Nobody cares about your excuses, but you if you can't do it, I don't want to work with you. Ps like buy a car. Stop talking about

the bus being late. And that becomes the self accountability. Right, you can take that and you can, man, this guy works at a different level than I do. Am I going to raise my game to their level? And if I'm not, then I'm not going to be able to work with him? And I was super fortunate because I was able to work with, you know, the Michael Jordan of my industry or the Kobe Bryant of like what I did. I literally got to work with the best person in the world at one particular thing cool with

this for seven years, Matthew Holland. He runs a company now called field Effect Cybersecurity. He's the most brilliant person at this in the entire world. And I was lucky because that made me better than I otherwise would have been because I didn't know these standards were possible. And if you're lucky, you get to work with somebody like that. But if you're not lucky, well, now what can you

do well that? Now you can create a personal board of directors, which is one of the ideas in the book, and you can report to them, right because they can have higher standards than you. You don't need their permission to put them on the Warren Buffetts on my board, I mean, hen't I didn't ask him for permission, But I'm like, what would Warren do in this situation? How

do you think about this? And I think ultimately, at the end of the day, if you're getting the results that you want to be getting, getting the results you think you deserve, then maybe this isn't an area where you need to look into very hard. But if you're not getting the things that you want to be getting it alive. You are the pilot of your life. You are the architect, you are the captain, and so ultimately you are in control. And that's where that accountability comes into.

It might not be your fault the situation that you're in, but it is your responsibility for what happens from here forward.

play a victim, and we always do right. There's a natural sort of tendency for us in certain situations to be the victim. But at the end of the day, we are in charge of our own lives and there is always something, no matter what situation we're in, and that we can do to make tomorrow a little bit easier. And if you focus on being a victim, then nothing happens, nothing changes, nothing, you don't get better, your position tomorrow

doesn't get better. You're surrounded by people who empathize with you, which is great, and you feel good in that moment, but nothing changes. And so you have to ask yourself, like do I want the feeling of people understanding me and do I want the excuse of not doing anything about it? Or do I want to change and get different results and do something different than other people? And I recognize that this isn't for everybody, so please don't

like email me if this isn't your thing. This is just my way of thinking, and the same thing that I do with my kids right, which is like, you know, they come home and they get a bad test and they're like, well, it wasn't my fault. I had, you know, practice last night, I couldn't study, and I'm like, I don't care, Like it doesn't the real world, It doesn't matter what happened. You need to take charge of your life.

You need to design a satity schedule that works. You need to figure out that you shouldn't go to practice tonight because you have a big exam tomorrow. These things are not on me to figure out. And this is where you fail. I want them to fail. I want them to fall down because I want them to build up this resiliency. I want them to get bad grades. Like I'm not like cheering for them when they get backgrades. But what I am happy about in my head is

this builds mental toughness. This is they're going to recover. How do they respond to failure? Do they throw their hands up and walk away or they dive in? Like? How do I fix this? What can I do different? Let's talk about all the things in your control that you can do so that this doesn't repeat. How do we put ourselves in a better position? So that the odds are lower that this happens again. And some days you do everything you can and the world just kicks

your butt. That's what it's like being an entrepreneur. That's what it's like being an adult. You do your best. Some days it's just a mouthful of glass and you got to go to bed and you got to get up and you got to do it again, and that's okay,

and you need to be able to handle that. And how do we develop those skills if we never give people the opportunity to fail, If we never give people the opportunity to sort of, most schools don't give tests anymore here, if you I don't know if the standardized test scores came out in the US yesterday, they came out in Canada. They're like plummeting over the last thirty years. Here. We're so soft on kids. We don't expect much of them.

And I expect a lot from my kids, and I expect them to expect a lot from themselves.

into space. That requires insanity, a crazy degree of hubris, or a lot of things that most of us don't have. But if the next step, I call it next step confidence, it's like, can I have the confidence to take the next step? Well, the next step is to try to buy a rocket? Okay, Well that's what he did. He went to Russia. He tried to buy a rocket. They wouldn't sell him. One next step was like how can I build a rocket? Like why do these rockets cost

so much? And so if you have the confidence to take the next step, it's hugely empowering because I don't have to have the end goal. Cigarette often those end goals even change. If I can shrink the distance between where I am and what I need confidence for I massively increase my ability to take action. I massively increase the ability to get momentum. And if you think about it, like if you're out running, or you talk to any professional marathon or and they're not starting the race going

like I need to get to the finish line. When they hit the wall, they're like, can I make it to the next stop sign? Okay, well I made it to the stop sign? Can I make it around the next corner? And they shorten the distance that they're looking at and we can all do that too, and it'll dramatically improve your confidence because it's like I have I can do that, and when I get to there, I'll take a look and I'll see what the next step is and then you can figure it out. And I

sort of got this. I was cliff jumping with my son, and the situation I talk about in the book is it's sort of like a one way door, right, you climb up this mountain and we jump off, and he wanted to do it, and I was like, oh, that's great, Like are you sure though, because we can't come down because it's way too dangerous to climb down one slip and like you're gonna hit your head on rocks. So like if we go up, like you you're up and you got to jump in, and he's like yeah, yeah.

He gets up and he's like, I don't want to jump in. I'm gonna climb down. I'm like, you can't climb down, like you're jumping in or I'm throwing you in. And that's the reality of the situation. But before we get to that, like, let's talk about this, like what's going on, Like what do you recognize in your body? And he's having this like physiological response right like he's looking down and he's hanting, he's breathing, and I'm like, okay, well step away from the edge here, right, Like let's

go talk. You walk back five or six steps and I'm like, hey, get control of your breathing, depress. What's the voice in your head saying right now, well, I can't do this, I can't you know this is too big, I'm scared. Okay, Well, that voice is determining how you feel about the situation. So like, let's change this inner monologue that you're having. What are all the things you did for the first time that you were scared of? Right,

Like you went snowboarding, you want wakeboarding. You've done a whole bunch of things that you we're really scared of doing that you had never done before. It seemed really scary in those moments. So now all of a sudden, it's like, Okay, I can do hard things. And to put this in context, he's like eight or nine at a time, so like you're talking about things that are relevant and age appropriate for him. But you've done hard things, so we know that you have an ability to do

hard things. We've got control of your breathing. And now I'm like, you're looking at the bottom, You're looking twenty five feet down at the water, and you're like, do I have the confidence? Let's change where you're looking visually instead of looking down, let's look out. Do you have the confidence to take one step off the edge? Do you have the confidence to walk out and take one step off? Sure enough? You know he's got that little voice going and I'm like, don't make it inside, like

make it outside. I want to hear what that voice is telling you. And he's like, I can do this. I can do this, like I've done hard things, and you know it's that It's literally like that inner modelogue you're having, And sure enough he goes and he doesn't look down, and he takes one step off the edge and he pencils down, and then forty five seconds he's back up there like jumping off basically like doing backflips.

And you know, it's so interesting to me that when we look, you know, that water seemed twenty five feet away. That gap between where he is and that water was so huge to him. That's huge to me too, right, Like, there was definitely a little bit of fear in me the first time I did it. But when we have that, we become paralyzed and so shrink the distance between where you're looking. Don't look at the water, look at the next step, don't look at the end of the marathon.

How do I get around the next corner? Can I do that?

oh my god, right, like this is crazy. You know, I was mad for a good a good chuck a time there, and I'm churning it right Like I I don't want to suppress my feelings. I need to let them out because if I suppress them, They're going to come back when I least expect them. I need to think through the problem. I need to get my anger out and it's okay to be angry. I'm not hurting anybody. I'm not doing anything to anybody else. I put my headphones on I run often. I don't even listen to music.

I just put them in. It's comforting. People don't chat with you have them in. They don't do the high thing when you're running by well, I jog. I don't run so like. Some people are very serious about this, And so that was my way of coping, and now I have other ways of coping. That is definitely one of them. Another one is the sauna. I find high heat really good. I find physical stress really good for

emotional stress. For some reason, I want to stress my body out a little bit, and I feel like that allows me to feel these things a little quicker than I otherwise would. I try not to make decisions in those moments if I know what's going on, and often what I'll do is like if I'm having a bad day, can you normally know you're having a bad day, But like ten am, I'll change the day around, right like, I'll just and I'm fortunate where I can do that.

Not a lot of people can. But I'll like cancel meetings. I'll be like, oh, I can't do that today, because you know what, I want to be at my best. You want me at my best. We're not going to be at our best in these moments. Sometimes I'll take a nap if I'm super tired, but I'll also look backwards, right, like, so I want to go back to the positioning angle to it was there something that I did that was within my control? It made this harder than it otherwise

would have been. What was that thing? Because I really want to start to get at the root cause of like what's happening? And can I avoid these in the future instead of just dealing with it in the moment. And I want to deal with it and I want to deal with it effectively. Can I rewind? Can I do the same exercise I did with my son? Let's rewind seventy two hours? Right, like how do we get here?

And then that's often illuminating, Right, I'm too busy. Well, when I'm too busy, I go back in my calendar and I look, I was too busy, right, So when I'm too busy, I don't get enough downtime. And if I don't get enough downtime, I can't do all these things,

or I'm more likely to be irritable. But recognizing those patterns is sort of the key to solving them because now it's like, well, I'll I want to avoid that so I can go to my assistant and be like, hey, no more than X hours of meetings a day, Like that's just the rule, and that's the rule because that puts me in the best position possible course success.

other things. And yeah, I think that these little rules and you'll have to come up with your own rules. But the other thing is you have to evaluate your rules. Right, going back to that self accountability. Are are these rules getting me what I want? Are they getting me the outcomes I want? Are they getting me the relationships I want? You know, one of the things that I always try to do is win, win on everything. I want everybody to win. I don't want to take advantage of anybody.

I don't want to be in business with people I can't trust. I want to associate with people that I like. I feel like that that's the best way to live life, and that means I say no to a lot of things. I say no to a lot of sponsors. I say no to a lot of people that I just don't want to be dealing with.

those goals? So if you look in history, you know one thing that everybody's probably familiar with it's Christmas time, is Ebenezer Scrooge. What in Scrooge want? Well, Scrooge wanted to be the wealthiest, most well known person in his community. And he got those things. He became the wealthiest, and he became Ubanezer Scrooge that we know of what we

call people Scrooge, That's what we're saying. So he accomplished his goals, but what he discovered in the process was that the way that he went about achieving those goals was mutually exclusive from what actually mattered to him. And I don't want to end up in that situation where I have these and and this is the important thing. If those are your goals, be conscious about them, right, because often society is trying to tell you what your

goals are. Go after this, go after this, go after this, and if you go after that that you're going to acquire those things and you might get them, and it's so unfulfilling. You have to be conscious about what you want to and if you want to go after money and power and fame, own it, go after it. There's no judgment on my part. Just be conscious about what you're choosing and go all in to get it. And

think about the end of my life. Am I trying to achieve those goals in a way that's going to get me what I want in the end of my life? I want to be friends with people. Well, I can't stab them in the back on the way to my goals. Now, okay, well now we're starting to get somewhere, right, So now I'm coming up with a code of behavior for how I'm going to go after my goals. And if you want to be ruthless and go all out and try

to get those things, then then do it. I mean, I'm all for people making their own judgment calls about how to live. I think my way of approaching things is more likely to result in happiness. But I mean to each their own. There's no judgment about that. Just be conscious about what you're doing, own it and go after it. And I think too often we're not thinking

about that. And you can't just think about it once, right, what you want at twenty is not what you want at thirty, not what you want at forty, not what you want at fifty. You have to keep thinking about this. You can't just close the book and be like, I'm going to go after this one thing. You have to reevaluate. Am I still is that the thing I still want to go after? And if it is, go for it.

this happens to a lot of people, right. You get people like Elon who are wired differently and they achieve all this money, this fame, and then they go all in on something else, where a lot of us would want to protect what we've established or what we've acquired or what we have, and we wouldn't want to lose it because we have this loss of version to how do I protect this safety net I've just worked so hard to get and I've been lucky and I've been portunate,

Whereas you have other people who put all the chips on the table and they go all in and they just keep doing it again and again. And as long as you're conscious about those things, like hallelujah, and you might even want to pause. Right, you might. I'm just going to do that, you know, I'm just gonna I'm just going to sit in this for the next five years, and then you might change your mind and be more ambitious again.

then thinking independently. And thinking independently means that you're going to do something different than other people. You're going to create positive deviation, and that's what you're trying to do, right, And that positive deviation, the most important positive deviation you can create is in your own life, where society is telling you one thing, go after these things because that's

what you should be wanting. Well, you know, maybe I don't want those things, or maybe I do and I'm going to go all in and I'm going to bust my bet to get them. And all of those things are cool, but you just have to think about I don't want other people establishing that for me. It's the same as you think of COVID. All these rules came out right and the government's sending you. You know, in Canada, we were locked down forever. And I was trying to teach my kids who were much younger at the time,

because this was like three years ago. They were like ten and nine, and I think, and you know, here's all the rules. Well, we're going to violate some of these rules, right, so and we're making a choice, a conscious choice. I know what the rule is. I'm choosing not to follow this rule because I think it's in our family's best interests not to follow this. And what are we doing. We're thinking for ourselves, we're not letting somebody else tell us what to think. And they have

our best interests at heart. They're doing the best they can, but they don't know what we know. They don't know about our family, they don't know about our situation, they don't know about our environment, they don't know what we need neat and so we have to opt out. And that when we opt out, it doesn't hurt anybody else, uh, you know, has no impact on other people. It's but we're not going to follow this rule. We're going to

do something different. And I have to talk to them about that because they know we're going to be breaking their pool. So if I don't talk to them about it, it looks like, well, we're.

new things. And I can tell you I've read that I've had to work four hundred interviews of the Psychology podcast and the ten years that I've been doing this every week with no break for the last ten years, and I can honestly say you have taught me a lot of new ways of thinking about myself and the world, even the language you create. You know, like I'm going to really think a lot now about like things coming up in me thinking I've going to opt out of that.

Like that's that's got the Shane uniqueness to it. So I just want to I want to kind of bolster you hope a little bit there, because I think you're more than just mastering the best of what other people have already figured out. Thank you so much for me being on my podcast, and I just really appreciate what you're putting into this world.