#184 Best of 2023: Conversations of the Year
01:32:00 Share

Welcome to The Knowledge Project, a podcast about mastering the best of what other people have already figured out so you can apply their insights to your life. I'm your host, Shane Parish.

Every Sunday, I send out the Brain Food newsletter to over 600,000 people. It's considered noise-canceling headphones for the internet and is full of timeless wisdom that you can apply to life and work. Sign up for free at fs.blog.com.

If you're listening to this, you're missing out. If you'd like access to the podcast before public release, special episodes that don't appear anywhere else, hand edited transcripts, or you just want to support the show you love, you can join at fs.blog.com. Check out the show notes for a link.

The final episode of The Knowledge Project in 2023 is a collection of some of the best insights from the show this year. Not only can these serve as a reminder of some of the episodes and lessons you listened to this year, but they can set you up for an incredible 2024. You'll hear from Jack Kornfield as he discusses the power of intention. Carolyn Coughlin will teach you the strategies for becoming a better listener.

Aaron Dignan will discuss the power of feedback and how it can affect your job. And Jim Dethmer will explore the four pillars of integrity. Ravi Gupta will explain how to face the realities of life. Kevin Kelly will teach you why the best strategy for success is not to be the best, but to be the only success.

and the importance of having deadlines, Julie Gurner will give you a unique strategy for taking responsibility and focus on the next steps when things go wrong. Frank Slootman will explain what it takes to build trust in a large organization. And finally, Gio Valiente will dive deep into something I've been thinking a lot about since we recorded the conversation a few months ago. And I know a lot of people ask, when do I quit and when do I double down?

Thank you for listening and learning with us this past year. Together, we're going to make 2024 even better. Let's start with episode 156, Jack Kornfield. It's time to listen and learn. ♪

The IKEA Business Network is now open for small businesses and entrepreneurs. Join for free today to get access to interior design services to help you make the most of your workspace, employee well-being benefits to help you and your people grow, and amazing discounts on travel, insurance, and IKEA purchases, deliveries, and more. Take your small business to the next level when you sign up for the IKEA Business Network for free today by searching IKEA Business Network.

Intention is incredibly powerful for us. And it's said in the Buddhist teachings that intention is also the basis of karma or cause and effect, that the state behind your action matters as well as the action itself. So I'll give an example. Suppose you pull out of your driveway

And you drive through the fence of the house next door, crash through it and, you know, into their living room.

Now, suppose it happened that that was the neighbor who cut down all the trees you loved on the property line, you know, and shot at your dog and did a whole bunch of horrible things. And you just were so enraged that one morning they did one more thing and you couldn't take it and you just crashed your car through. That will make a certain karma and the blue lights will come and you'll have to deal with all of the consequences of what you did.

Suppose instead your accelerator pedal stuck. So the exact same thing happens. You get in your car and you pull out and then it crashes through the fence into the house. So the outside, no one could see anything different, right? But your intention was entirely different. It was an accident. You know, when the person comes out furious and you say, my accelerator pedal stuck and they might still be furious and you have to deal with insurance and things.

But there will be entirely different consequences because the intention was different. So it becomes really powerful to start to pay attention to our intentions and setting our intentions deliberately. And also, of course, it's important then to notice the impact or the consequences because you could have good intentions and still out of them there could be a bad impact. So you need to notice that.

But one of the beautiful things that mindfulness training invites is the setting of deliberate intention. And it can be inwardly or it can be outwardly, whether it's before an athletic game, as you were talking about, or whether it's a business meeting or it's, you know, in education or whatever it happens to be. What's our intention? And setting intention starts to steer everything.

There's something that's quite traditional in the kind of training that I did in which you set these long-term vows. Sometimes they're called bodhisattva vows. A bodhisattva is simply somebody who's committed to the well-being of everyone. The Dalai Lama wakes up in the morning and says this prayer, may I be food for the hungry and medicine for the sick.

May I be a resting place for the weary and a lamp for those in darkness. May I be a boat, a bridge, a raft for those to cross the flood. And may I do so to benefit all beings for as long as time and space exists. Some little pesky little intention like that, right? Actually kind of magnificent. You're invited to quiet your mind and to set your own best intention. It's like setting the compass of the heart.

If you were to set an intention of what really matters to you most, this is called long-term intention, almost like a vow. This is what matters and this is how I want to live. It becomes a touchstone for you. I mean, it can be as simple as I vow to be kind or I vow to live with more wakefulness and attentiveness to myself and others or with more respect. It can be that simple. And then when you get to a place of struggle, things are confusing again.

You take a pause and you say, what's my best intention? What was that? And it shines a light and it gives you a new direction. Or if you're in conflict in a conversation, there you are talking with your spouse. I'm here with my beloved Trudy, who is my wife and partner and amazing, wonderful woman. But it could happen on occasion that we have a little conflict and

And if I take a pause, a breath like that mindful pause, I can also ask myself, what's my best intention or my highest intention? And then consciousness changes. And instead of proving how right I was, which I certainly enjoy doing in certain moments, you know,

I remember what's my best intention. Well, my intention fundamentally is an intention to connect, to be kind, that we live with love, respect. And I feel that. What's my best intention? And my whole tone of voice changes because I could say, what did you mean? And it fuels an argument.

Or I could say, what did you mean? I want to understand in that same phrase, but it shifts from blame to interest and care. Is that what it means to set an intention? This is what matters and this is the way that I want to live. And then how often should we consciously evoke those intentions and

when we're not in it in a moment like should we just wake up and think these should we

How do you think about that? I don't want to make people even think that there's some kind of cookie cutter spiritual, okay, you should do your yoga and eat tofu and set good intention every hour and stuff. It's not like that. You point to it quite beautifully. In moments of difficulty or conflict, taking a pause and asking what's my best or highest intention shifts your state of consciousness.

Periodically, whether it's the start of the day or a week or some new venture or some new adventure, it can be helpful to reflect on what's your best intention. But it's really organic. In a way, what I want to say is, what works for you? We're sort of part of this always on go, go, go culture. We're busy. Our minds are busy.

There's always something we're thinking about that is sort of not the present moment, right? The grocery list, the kids seem to be picked up. There's a million projects at work. I have to text this person back. I need to email this person. And we're striving, right? We're striving for...

Either if we're conscious, we're striving for things that we want to pursue. And if we're unconscious, I feel like we're striving for things that other people want us to pursue. So we're playing life by somebody else's scorecards. But this striving individually might...

be detrimental to us, but it also pushes us forward as a society. So I see sort of like pros and cons to it. What ways does this striving sort of help us and in what ways does it hurt us? So let me ask you again, now we're back on the basketball court, you know, where you want to win the game or now we're in the terrain of running a business or teaching a class or something like that.

Have you had the experience of being quite engaged so that you're devoted to something and putting your best energy in it without the energy of tension, of grasping and striving as much as being engaged in the present for its own sake? And if you have, what did that feel like? I mean, it feels great, right? Because it feels like this feels like this conversation, right? One of the reasons that we book three hours is

is because then there's no time pressure. There's no, you're not thinking about, oh, I only have an hour. I got to fit all this in. And so it's just, I am here in this moment for this length of time. And it all, it never goes three hours or very rarely, but I find that that frees me to be more focused in the moment where if it's an hour, it actually is detrimental to me being in that moment and being present. All right. So here you are in the supermarket. You got your list.

And not only is it your list, but there's other people that you're close to that put their shit on the list too, right? And if you get the right kind of laundry soap and the right kind of ice cream or whatever for the kids or whatever, I don't know who makes your list. But there you are. You have a time constraint because you have to get back. There's something, you know. How are you going to do it? You could do it like...

careening through the aisles like a good New Yorker, grabbing things pretty quickly, trying to get through, you know, and at the same time, think about all the other stuff that you have to get done when you get home and all of that. That's one way you could do it. The other, you could actually enjoy. I personally like shopping. It's a great thing in my marriage because my wife doesn't. So I'm glad to do it. Grocery shopping or other kind. Um,

But you could do it and have fun. You could do it, and I bet you have at certain points, and say, you know, now I'm shopping, let me enjoy this. And it doesn't mean you're going to be much slower. You're not going to be the speed freak, you know. But, you know, let me feel my steps and enjoy and be present and...

not try to work everything else out in my life. I'll just, there's one Zen saying that says, you know, when you sit, just sit. And when you eat, just eat, you know, to just be where you are. And you can practice this. And you start to pay attention to what it's like when you do it in a gracious way. And it doesn't mean you can't set a goal.

And it doesn't mean you can't give it your very best and that there are certain moments you need to really throw yourself into something. But even that, you can do it with a good spirit and with fun rather than being afraid of how it's going to turn out. So this Zen teacher, Seung San San, a Korean Roshi or a Zen master that I studied with. And so he was sitting in his Zen center in Providence one morning, eating his breakfast and reading the morning paper.

And one of the students, as we are up at Eastudents, said, hey, wait a second. Didn't you say when you sit, just sit? And when you eat, just eat? What is this thing about eating and reading the paper? And he looked up and he said, when you eat and read, just eat and read.

But the idea of it is still an invitation to bring this quality of mindful presence to actually be where you are more fully. Because 90% of your thoughts are repeats. Maybe more than that when you sit in meditation and you kind of notice what's going on in your mind. It's a little bit like

being stuck in Motel 6 at night with the shopping channel on or whatever, or some other channel. It could be whatever your favorite channel is. But they're not new. And it's the brain and the mind reciting certain things. You can say, thank you. I appreciate it. That's what minds do. And then you can tune into a deeper quality of being present. There you are in the supermarket.

Say, all right, let me be here. I'm not going to try and solve the problems of my life right now. I'll take my time to do it. And then, of course, once in a while, as you don't pay attention to your thinking, some good new intuition comes. I don't want to put it down. Thought is a great servant. It's just not a good master. You don't want to let it run your life. You want the quality of presence and compassion to run your life and thoughts to serve that.

From episode 157, Carolyn Coughlin. Listening is something a few people have told me that you're extraordinarily good at. I suspect that's because you listen below the surface and to the meaning and not just the words. How would you teach...

your kids to become better listeners? How do you teach adults to become better listeners? I've never had anybody ask me exactly that question before, Shane. I guess the first thing I would say is that listening tends to be contagious. So how each of us listens does tend to wear off on other people. So I noticed that

again with my children that when I listen what we call I often call listening to win which is to just make them wrong or like when I say well that's not true you look great or don't worry about that you know you'll be fine it might feel good to me in the moment but it's not kind of

they don't feel heard. I find that when people feel really, really truly seen and heard, it's one of the most extraordinary experiences that a person can have. And so just being around that and having the experience of being on the receiving end of that sort of deep listening where you feel truly seen and fully seen is itself a condition for a

for learning to listen well. On the other end of the spectrum, there are very particular techniques that help people listen well. For me, the most important one has been really the training and understanding of adult development theory, particularly the one that my colleagues and I

have most depth in, which is the subject-object theory that was developed by Bob Keegan and others. And in the subject-object theory, what you're listening for, the stage of development is

defined by what is subject and what is object. And when I say subject, what I mean is like what you're fused with. It's like the water you're swimming in, the lens through which you see things, but you don't actually even know you have a lens. And what is object is what can be held out and examined and talked about. Like a value is object if you can see how it's shaping what you do and don't do. A value is subject

subject if it's invisibly shaping what you do and don't do, for example. So in the subject, this growth edge coach training that several of my colleagues and I run, what we're teaching coaches to do is to listen for what is subject and what is object.

In listening in that way, you have to be listening below the surface of the story. And every time you hear a word or a phrase wondering, hmm, I wonder what that person means by that. And so it's amping up curiosity. It's really, really foregrounding the fact that

Each of us never really knows what another person means. And so we can only be curious to find out. I like the word curiosity. When I think of listening, I think of seeing the world through the other person's eyes. I don't have to agree with it. I want to see what they see and I want to understand what they understand.

One thing you said there that I want to come back to in part because I have a child that does this is listening to win. How as a parent do I coach, intervene, get this out of their system? How old is your child? 13. I ask that because it really does make a difference at their developmental stage how you might go about this. And I'm struck by

by your phrase i think you said um how do we how do we coach this out of them yeah maybe that's the wrong phrase but it like drives me crazy and he's super smart which is like it amplifies it even more because often he's right so what is the hardest thing for you about that uh just the social nature of it right and how alienating it can be to um always be the person who um

is listening to win, right? So from his perspective, it's, I listened to what you said there. I'm literal, right? And so it's, it's incorrect. And I'm going to do you, he doesn't do it maliciously. He's like, I'm going to do you a favor and point out why you're incorrect. And as a parent, I don't know what to do with this because on one hand, on a literal sense, he's right on a social sense. He's wrong. He's,

And on a, is this going to get you what you want in life perspective? It's learning when to use that and when to not use that. And I'm struggling with him in terms of how I go about this. So you're worried about,

That he will alienate people? Or is he alienating you? Oh, he's not alienating me. I think I'm worried that it makes it harder for him to fit in or be accepted by his people. Yeah. So I can hear that really, that sort of deep desire for him to not have... Yeah, for life not to be harder for him because...

Because he is like... He's playing on hard mode. Yeah, playing on hard mode. Yeah, he's playing on hard mode and he's already exceptionally bright, which in another way puts it on hard mode again, right? In certain ways. Yeah, I hear so deeply this, I mean, geez, the wanting for, to wanting to help somebody change something that is making, in your view, making their life unnecessarily hard.

And, and then worrying that maybe tell me if this is right, but worrying that, that if you don't help them change this, it might just become a more and more and more ingrained habit that continues to make their life hard. Yeah. Well, I think that as, as he gets older, I mean, my role changes too, right? And it changes to you're getting feedback. Are you seeing the feedback that you're getting? Are you, instead of a direct response,

intervention, like don't do this, do this, you know, it changes to when you did this, did it help you get what you wanted in that moment? Right? Or is doing this going to get you what you want? And that coaching after the fact is usually very helpful for him because he's like, oh, I didn't mean it that way, or I shouldn't have done that. Or I wasn't thinking when I said something. And so it prompts at least a little bit of reflection around it.

which we all have as adults too, right? Like we all say stupid things on occasion or make a comment that we didn't intend to make and it has an impact on another person. And then we reflect on it and we sort of, that reflection codifies the learning a little bit. So it takes that experience and it translates that experience into a little bit of learning. And with enough reflection and enough experience and enough iteration, enough feedback, we sort of self-correct as adults most of the time. And-

I think you may have a part of your answer already. So it sounds like what you're doing is you're creating the conditions for him to reflect on what the impact of the way he's listening or not listening is having.

Well, trying to, when you said the phrase listening to win, and you were talking with your kids about not listening to win, I was like, well, is there a way that I can put a term around it or a label around it? When I can just say you're listening to win.

And in that moment, that means this whole deeper conversation to him, which is like an instant prompt to correct or not correct, to nudge behavior towards a better that he's choosing. Right. Because I don't want to make his behavior choices for him. But can I say something like that? And when you were saying it, that's what I thought you were doing. So this is where the question I didn't I didn't intend for this to be like a longer question. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So your question is, is language, giving language to something, can that be a help in shifting the pattern? Well, it's sort of a broader question. If we take it out of the context of me and my son, it's sort of, can we learn to listen to ourselves better? Or does it take an outside person to sort of intervene and point out our blind spots?

And with my son, I'm trying to intervene or sort of point out a blind spot. You're blind to this. It's happening. I'm pointing out that it's happening. It sounded like that's what you were doing with your kids. Or maybe I'm misinterpreting when you said listening to win, which I love that phrase, by the way. Yes. It's so accurate. Yeah. I guess my point is there are many things that you can do to help somebody, you know,

to notice what they're doing in this case in terms of how they're listening. One is reflecting back to them what you're seeing and the impact of that. One is the invitation to invite them to reflect on it, the connection between what they're doing and

what they want. Another is giving it language. I love hearing that listening to Wynn is such a powerful, it is because you can just say that. It's like having some sort of a reminder every time you do something, like a light goes off, something flashes, and it helps to create the connection between this thing that you're, a really instant connection, a reminder of what you're doing. So the idea of listening to Wynn

absolutely can be super helpful in shifting a pattern because it helps you to notice the pattern instantly each time it's coming up. The other thing I noticed just about feedback, the importance of feedback, right? We often cannot see what we're doing and this is why we need company. And we need company with whom we have trust who will tell us things that we can't see in ourselves. This is one of the

core conditions for being able to shift and change. From episode 158, Aaron Dignan.

I mean, feedback is feedback essentially is tension. It's it's dynamism in the system. And you can quite literally make the argument that life being alive is about needing feedback. Like everything you touch as you walk, as you listen, as you feel the air on your skin, as you communicate with others, as you run, there are millions of points of feedback entering and leaving your brain. And that is that is essential. If you take away your senses, I've taken away your feedback.

And so you can't really operate in the world. And the same thing is true of a business. And he used to use a bike as a metaphor. So he'd say, you know, if I put you on a bike and I say, lock the handlebars and go, how far can you go with the handlebars locked? And the answer is like, not very far at all. If you ever try this, you fall over within like 10 or 15 feet.

But instead, if you can have the feedback from the road and the resistance and the gravity and then slightly turn left and right as you go, that's what you're actually doing when you go straight. You're kind of in a dance with the information that you have. And as you move from point A to point B, you're going to do some steering. And so I think for organizations and for people in teams and for people in relationships,

That's what we're trying to do at our best is steer dynamically based on the feedback we're getting based on what we value. So based whatever your principles, whatever your values are, whatever you care about, whatever winning means to you, you're going to steer in the direction of that based on the input that you get.

But if you live in a system that's far removed from feedback, then it's problematic or even worse if the feedback you're getting is actually disconnected from reality. Because you were talking about that part of being disconnected from reality. And it can happen a different way where the only feedback I get is from a boss.

The boss is telling me what they think is important. That is not what the customer cares about. It's not what the market cares about. And so I'm actually serving the wrong master, so to speak, and end up getting stuck in a feedback loop that's inaccurate and inauthentic. That's so fascinating. So in response, I mean, it's...

It's almost an argument for private businesses over public ones where you can take a longer term time horizon. It's very hard in a public company to do that. And the examples that all seem to come to mind all have a large inside shareholder or founder still in charge of the organization. Yeah, they really do. It's a common pattern across. I mean, we looked at 68 for the original book, Brave New Work. And yeah, it's a strong pattern. So with that said, what are the ways that...

organizations sabotage themselves from the inside. Essentially, what tends to happen is that you have a few things that go on. The first thing is that we tend to do what Jason Fried calls scarring on the first cut. So when something doesn't work or goes wrong or there's an issue or somebody steals a laptop, the organization freaks out and it immediately reacts with a policy or a procedure or a new security protocol or something. Just fire the person.

Exactly. Right. Like just let it go and then move on. They don't wait for patterns. Right. We don't wait for patterns. Generally, we just overreact and try to systematize everything. So that tends to that tends to sabotage us quite a bit. The other thing that we do is that we we really get stuck thinking.

focusing on metrics that become incentives that become ways to drive mismanagement. And so there are many different names for this law. But when a metric becomes a goal, it ceases to become a good metric.

And the idea is that we're optimizing for something that is a proxy for reality instead of reality itself. And again, we're putting our judgment down and just focusing on like click-through rate. Like I just have to hit this click-through rate and I'll do whatever it takes to get it.

And so that sort of over optimization on proxies or abstract goals rather than absolute principle driven goals is really problematic. And then I guess the last one is that we and I talk about this a ton, but we confuse the context that we're operating in. So I talk a lot in my work about the difference between complicated and complex.

And you've had some people on your show talk about complexity before as well. But the complicated context is like the engine of a car or a watch. It is predictable. There's cause and effect inside it. The parts fit in a way that if you're an expert, you kind of know how to take it apart and put it back together again. And so if there's a problem, it can be solved and it can be delivered and it can be working again. No problem. There's very high confidence in solutioning in those areas.

but in a complex system which would be like weather or traffic or gardens or six-year-olds

They are dispositional, so they have an attitude, a way they're trending, but you can't fundamentally predict them. You can't be sure what will happen if you try something. And if you bring that complicated approach, the checklist, the Gantt chart, the quarterly goals, the objectives, the management to that context, you tend to really struggle and fail. And what we see is that organizations tend to just over index on everything must be complicated. And so we're going to treat everything that way.

I routinely get brought into boardrooms with executives and teams that are like, "Look, we changed our company values and behaviors last year. We put them on coffee mugs and posters all over the world, all over the office, and nobody's behaving differently. Why?" It's like, "Well, because you're yelling at the weather, right? You're yelling at the garden. That's not how these sorts of systems work. If you have a manufacturing problem where you don't have a tolerance,

Get that checklist out. If you have a broken engine, take it into the dealership. But if you're trying to raise a human being or build a successful team or create a culture of trust,

That playbook doesn't work. And so we sabotage ourselves by constantly bringing it to the table and being like the culture change initiative will be done in June of 2024. And we will achieve these five metrics along the way. And that's our you know, those are our pillars. That's just all complicated talk brought to a complex party. I have a heuristic and you can you can correct this because you've worked with more companies than I have. But the heuristic is the more a company exposes their values, the less they actually value.

Yeah, that is funny. Because it's sort of like, yeah, when you protest too much, right? That would be the Shakespeare of it, right? Thou doth protest too much. When you're speaking constantly about these are our values and they're so important, integrity, integrity, integrity, that's a clue that something is going on that's not healthy. When in fact...

good change and good patterns in culture are quite fluid. And so it should be moving effortlessly and behaviorally through the culture, through modeling and through storytelling, not through, you know, the poster with the five pillars. It also works for people right on the outside where the people who expose happiness the most on social media are probably, uh, an early, the most unhappy. Yeah. Yeah. Anyone who says, let me be honest with you. Right. Just take, take a beat. Yes.

So one of the things you said there was sort of like we put procedures in place to lower variation, to reduce mistakes, because we're trying to avoid mistakes at some level.

One thing I noticed is that procedures eventually circumvent judgment. And so what happens is if you follow the procedure, you never get in trouble. Even if what you're doing is absolutely the wrong outcome and you should know it's going to lead to the wrong outcome, you can just throw your hands up and be like, well, I followed the procedure. So therefore I'm absolved of all accountability for exercising judgment. Yeah. I mean, that is 100%.

what happens. And in fact, I believe there's a German word for that, that you are essentially saying it's, I'm compliant. So it's the bureaucracy's fault. It's the system's fault. And that's because you've given away your right to think or your right to be accountable, your right to be responsible in the ecosystem. And it's a lovely trade for most people because they're like, here, I just have to be compliant. And then when things don't work, it's not my fault.

And it's, you know, we have the term CYA, cover your ass in business for a reason. People do a lot of things to CYA and it doesn't tend to lead to good outcomes. So we have a lot of models that we use to explain this to people and to try to get them thinking about different ways of accomplishing the same goal. But yeah, it's as soon as you get into process and compliance theater, everything goes downhill pretty quickly. Yeah.

from episode 161 jim dothmer the four pillars of integrity i got from uh katie hendricks dr katie hendricks it's been a cornerstone of my life for 30 years or so so let's begin by just differentiating the way i want to speak about integrity from the way it normally gets talked about

You know, when integrity shows up as a value inside of a company, for example, and then you ask people, what does the value mean? The normal thing that people say is do the right thing, which is beautiful. I get that. Great. Integrity then tends to have more of a like a moral or an ethical kind of orientation. And the way I play with integrity is none of that.

But again, let's just do a little etymology here. So integrity from the root, same root as integer. So think of whole number. Think of wholeness. So that's where I like to go. Think of wholeness. So to me, integrity is energetic wholeness. Now, what that translates to very quickly for me is full aliveness.

So when I am in integrity, I am energetically whole.

I am fully alive. We illustrate it sometimes with, it doesn't work so much anymore because I think they fixed this problem. But when I was a kid and you put holiday lights on a Christmas tree, kind of the deal was that if one of the lights went out, the whole strand went out, you know, first it might blink a little bit and then it all went out. And if you think about the circuitry of those Christmas lights being a circuit of wholeness,

And then if one little light goes out, then they start to dim and dim and dim until they all go out. So what I work with in my own life for many, many years is, am I fully alive? I also love the question, what am I willing to risk for full aliveness? We'll come back to that because that's a fun question.

And then when I am not feeling fully alive, alive in my head, alive in my heart, alive in my gut, alive in my balls, if I can say it, alive in my spirit, if I'm not feeling alive, then I want to go check these four pillars because what reliably has been true for me is they are like the light on the strand. And if they get loose,

my aliveness tends to diminish. It doesn't go out all of a sudden, but it diminishes. So what Katie Hendricks articulated as the four pillars of integrity, the first pillar is radical responsibility. It's really the decision to move out of blaming and criticizing, out of being at the effect of the world,

and move into claiming responsibility or agency. A sure way for me to blunt my aliveness, my day-to-day experience of my vitality is to live in victimhood, blame the weather, blame the traffic. What I notice is if I stop blaming and I choose to move the locus of control back over here and I choose to have agency,

To be responsible for my experience, not the external world, but to be responsible for my experience, there's a surge of energy that comes back in the body. So that's the first pillar, radical responsibility. The second pillar is, am I willing to feel my feelings? I was a non-feeler.

much of my life. Now I came into the world, like I think everybody does, as a full feeler. So as an infant, I was a full feeler. I had access to my anger, to my rage, to my fear, to my sadness, to my joy, to my sexual energy. And then like most people, I got a little bit socialized out of that. But then I had some trauma in my life.

in my family of origin that came meaningfully to a head on my 17th birthday. This is really relevant to me and feelings. On my 17th birthday, I woke up about five in the morning to the experience of my dad having a massive heart attack. He happened to be sleeping in the single bed next to me. We'd gone to bed the night before watching a Chicago White Sox game. And I woke up with him having a fatal heart attack.

And I was a 17-year-old young man, kid, and I was all of a sudden introduced to the death process, which I'd never been introduced to before. And that was traumatic in and of itself. But then we followed the ambulance to the hospital and we walked into the hospital, into the emergency room. And my dad had been wheeled into one of the bays there. And then the nurse walked out.

The nurse walked out and handed me his watch and his ring, handed it to me, not to my mom who was there, and said, he's gone. He died. I walked away from my mom and I walked into a bathroom. And again, this was early in the morning. The hospital wasn't crowded. And I held my dad's ring and his watch in my hands. And I remember just melting down the wall, disintegrating into nothing.

grief and heartbreak and loss and complete unknowing. And then I, I love the phrase, I pulled myself together. I stood up. I walked out to my mother. My mom at that point was a functional, but a meaningful alcoholic and didn't have a lot. She hadn't matured to develop a lot of adult coping skills. So I was in a role of caretaker and helping her.

I picked her up. I held her. I helped her. Went home. I called my older brother, told him that my dad had died, called my sister. Neither of them were in the home. And it's like I made a contract with myself in that moment, Shane, which is it hurts too bad to feel these feelings. And I consciously, unconsciously, some dance there, locked them away until my late 20s, at least, probably early 30s. Here's what I didn't know is

is the amount of energy it takes to repress and suppress emotion. I tell people now, it's like your emotions are like a beach ball, you know? And you take them and you try to hold them under the water. And the more inflated the ball is, the harder it is to hold under the water. And if, you know, one beach ball is sadness and one beach ball is anger and one beach ball is fear. And after a while, you're holding these things together

Under the water, you get exhausted. And I got exhausted. I was actually, I think, mildly depressed. And a reason was that I was depressing my feelings. So now this second pillar of integrity is I just ask myself every day as part of my morning rituals daily.

Is there a feeling here that wants to be felt? And I've learned that these feelings can be felt very simply and efficiently and beautifully. And the thing that I was terrified of was being overwhelmed by the feelings doesn't occur at all. They become a natural enlivening part of life. They actually allow life to appear in technicolor and not black and white. They allow life force to come back into my body. So that's the second pillar. The third pillar is candor.

So if I want to be out of integrity, if I want to dampen my aliveness, all I have to do is start accumulating withholds. Things that I'm not saying, thoughts that I'm having, wants that I have, judgments and opinions that I have, beliefs that I have. All I have to do is start holding back

being authentic, being revealed, I will immediately feel less alive. When people reveal, when they become more authentic, they immediately feel more alive. Now, I just want to put a little asterisk by this. They also usually immediately experience chaos. Right?

Because I and we have been withholding for good reason. I put air quotes around that because it made sense to withhold. So I'm not questioning whether there's a reason to withhold. What I'm questioning is its effect on integrity and its effect on aliveness. And when we talk about integrity in relationships,

And does the relationship have integrity, whether it's a personal relationship or a public relationship, a professional relationship? One of the questions we want to explore is how revealed are we? We say we use this little formula when you withhold, then you withdraw and then you project, which means you disconnect from relationship. So when we look at high performing teams, one of the things we see is they don't have many withholds.

Everything is transparent to the decision process. Okay. And then the fourth pillar of integrity is, am I impeccable with my agreements? So an agreement is just anything I've said I would do or anything I've said I wouldn't do. Real simple. It's just who's going to do what by when.

And I find that one of the ways people bleed off life energy is they don't make clear agreements. When they make clear agreements, they break their agreements, which creates a life force diminishment. It also creates drama in relationships. They rationalize, justify, and explain why they didn't keep their agreements rather than just taking responsibility for it. And they don't get back into integrity.

I just find it so beautifully simple and enlivening to go, we agreed we'd meet at the top of the hour. Let's just meet at the top of the hour. There's no, yeah, but you're not wondering, you're not having to email or text me. So those are the four pillars of integrity. Take responsibility, feel your feelings, speak candidly, authentically, reveal, and be impeccable with your agreements. Now, in my experience, when I live like that,

I feel incredibly alive. Now we could also talk about, you know, do you eat well? Do you get a good night's sleep? Are you exercising? All of that, of course, would be part of feeling fully alive. But it seems everybody knows that. We might not be doing it, but we know it. But not everybody is playing the game of let's be fully alive and play with integrity. From episode 164, Ravi Gupta.

So I have a couple of things that I say a lot at home. I say a lot at work and I say a lot, you know, in any setting where someone will listen to me. But two things. One, reality is undefeated, right? Reality is undefeated. And the second is embrace reality. The sooner you figure out what reality is and you embrace it, then you can do something about it. Right. And I have a friend who's a founder and he was he was down like six months ago.

And he asked, he said, can we have dinner together? I'm not feeling great. And we went and we had dinner and, um, you know, it's not like the dinner ended and all of a sudden he was feeling great. But then three weeks later, he sounded like a different person. So I asked him, I said, what happened? Why? You sound so much better. What happened? And he said, you know, instead of just thinking about the problem in the last few weeks, we've just started working on it. He's like, and we've only made like 1% progress.

But he's like, it's so much better now that we're just working on it. Now we're just working on a problem. Whereas before we were just thinking about it. And I think that that comes from the embracing of, okay, this is where we are. This is what we got to go do about it. And I, uh, I think your point of effectively trying to avoid reality and kind of kick the can down the road and have somebody else have to deal with it.

that's a real disservice to someone you care about or someone you love. It's the same point, the reason that feedback is valuable. It's the, you know, I, I think it's the reason that sports teams are a good analogy when they're at the, at a very high level, because the feedback happens every minute. If you're not good enough to be on the floor, if you're not good enough to be on the field, the ball goes by you, your team might give up a goal. You know, it is quite obvious and the feedback and that mechanisms are quick. And so I think that, um,

One of the things that I think about is sort of the speed of reality. How quickly does reality hit you? And what is the impact of reality? And so there's that saying that every morning in Africa, I saw this on Twitter recently, but every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up and knows that if he doesn't outrun the fastest lion, he's going to die. Okay, cool. So he wakes up running.

Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up and knows if he doesn't outrun the slowest gazelle, he's going to starve. So he wakes up running. Well, for those folks, for the gazelle and the lion in that case, reality hits very fast every minute of every day. And the cost of not facing reality is death.

Obviously, that's not quite the same for any of us sitting in our offices or whatever. But I do think understanding that reality does hit you every moment and that not embracing it does have a cost. I think that's really important and valuable. Well, let's dive into that a little more because you work with founders who live and operate in a reality-based world.

They can't create their own reality. They have to deal with reality. They're in the truth business, if you will. How do you help them see reality instead of misinformation or erroneous information or getting caught up in their own beliefs or their own ideas that may or may not be true? I think the first thing is a lot of founders, they're different. Some of them are amazing at that to begin with, right? That's their wiring. That's the way they are. And so

Frankly, with those folks, a lot of it is just making sure that you're helping get the right signals to them because by nature they are such where, you know, they do that. There are some who I think I'm sure you've heard about this Steve Jobs reality distortion field, right? I think that's actually been pretty negative overall to the like startup ecosystem, because I think that people have heard that as Steve Jobs didn't embrace reality and Steve Jobs didn't

I actually think that his was quite different. That was a representation of ambition. That was a representation of we need to be great. And I think that that was a representation of I'm not going to be constrained by what someone tells me can or can't happen. He still was embracing reality as to whether or not people love the product. Right. He still was embracing reality as to whether or not it was selling.

and things like that. And so I think one aspect is sort of reminding people that the Steve Jobs example, which is incredible in so many ways, you kind of have to dig underneath that. The reality distortion field wasn't that he wasn't listening to market signals, right? It was that he was ambitious for his team of we can do better, we can do more. When I think of jobs, what I think about when that happens, this reality distortion field, which I think we've mislabeled in a way,

I think that his standard was just so much higher. The better example to me of Jobs is, have you ever heard the anecdote about him when he looked at a cabinet? No. It's an amazing anecdote. So there was this beautiful cabinet that he saw, and he loved it, and he thought it was gorgeous. And then he looked around the back of it, and in the back of it was plywood, and it was ugly.

And he was so offended by this notion that the front of it was beautiful and the back of it was ugly because someone's like, no one's ever going to see the back. And he's like, no, I see the back. The back should be beautiful too. If you want to try to make something beautiful, it should be beautiful from every angle, right? If the purpose of this is it's supposed to represent craftsmanship and beauty, don't go halfway and make the back ugly.

To me, the things that are interesting are like if you tear apart the iPhone, even the switch, even the board underneath is, you know, clean and gorgeous and thoughtful. And I think that even the words on the back of the iPhone where it says, you know, designed in California, assembled in China, like it doesn't say made in China.

And so every choice that they made, I think represents those are cool stories about jobs and the standard that he had and the sort of willingness to be disliked in the name of going to get excellence. There's a story about Alexa with Bezos that's similar, where they came back and said, look, the latency is going to be this.

And I don't know what the unit was, but Bezos effectively said, well, I want it to be one fifth of that. And they said, that's impossible. We can't do that. He said, well, then we're not going to ship it.

but that was the magic. And then they ultimately ended up doing it. So I think that consistent raising of the standard, that's the lesson from these folks. And so I think going back to your point on reality of talking to founders, I think it's helping them see the right signals because sometimes, especially in the environment and look, investors, all of us, we sent many of the wrong signals for a couple of years where people were rewarded. And so they could look at something of like, what are you talking about? My business keeps on getting valued higher and higher and higher.

I'm doing the right stuff. But I think the duration of their perspective was not necessarily correct in that ultimately, your business is going to be measured on the financial performance of it. And the financial performance is a representation of how much customer love there is and how much what you've actually created. But I think the point Shane, for me on getting people to embrace reality is, okay, cool. That signal that you're looking at is supportive of the point that we're doing great. What about all these other signals?

And I think that, you know, you have to earn the trust of somebody, like you said, to be able to share that perspective. But I think that idea is one that I think is really important to make sure that people have. From episode 166, Kevin Kelly. There's a lot of concern about artists and even writers about training in AI to produce products.

to generate work, to creative work. And the concern is, well, my material that I've worked really hard for has been used to train this AI and people can use it to imitate me. And sometimes those imitations are quite amazing. Really, what you want to be able to do is to have a style, so to speak, to have something that's unpredictable, that's imitable, that you can't be imitated.

And this, again, goes back to my other piece of advice about don't aim to be the best, aim to be the only. So if you are in this category that it's hard to imitate you, that's a

That's a really good place to be in the human world and also a really good place to be in the AI world because AIs will have difficulty in imitating you. I think I'm in trouble. My kids went into chat GPT the other day and they drafted this email and they should get more video game time, but they did it in the style of Shane Parrish. Yeah. So they basically like it was an email from myself to me. Yeah.

And I was like, this sounds awfully familiar. I was like, what was your query here? And they were like...

uh, draft an email to dad about, uh, in the style of Shane Parrish. I was like, Oh my God, this is, I'm in trouble. Yes. Yes. So, so yeah. So you, you, you, if you were, if that was hard to do, then you have an advantage because your, your job is not going to be taken by an AI. And so the idea is, is to not be so predictable in the sense of particularly again, if you have, if, if,

your views on the environment can be

deduced from your views on religion or something, that means that you're kind of not really that much of an independent thinker. And that's going to become more valuable because AI, at least at first, is going to give away standard thinking for free. So it'll raise the bar for some people, but it'll be so conventional for independent and original thinkers. Right, exactly. Right now, the best way to think of these AI is the trajectory

training, the LLMs, is that they're the epitome of wisdom of the crowd. Okay, they're wisdom of the crowd thinking. That's what it is. It's the collective, all the average people in the world and all their average foibles and all the average genius. And it's going to get a very kind of average thing that is often very correct.

But oftentimes not because it's the average. And so it's the wisdom of the crowd AI, which is really good if that's where you want to be. I've been trying to figure out the practical use of these things and how people are actually using them. I have a friend who runs a very, very popular blog site, and he uses them to help them write headlines, to write a punchline at the end.

And he said it's often very generic and he has to kind of push them to be snarky. He'll say, no, no, no, make it more snarky or pretend you're a snarky editor or pretend that you're a conspirator. You have to kind of push them to not be that standard average. Deliberately say, no, you need to be a little bit on a little fringier. You've got to be a little bit angrier. You've got to be something. And then the role play.

If you don't do that, you won't get the kind of, as you said, the standard average. I want to come back to AI a little later because I think we'll have a broader conversation on it. I want to go to the next piece of advice that sort of stood out as I was reading these, which is always demand a deadline because it weeds out the extraneous and the ordinary. A deadline prevents you from trying to make it perfect. So you have to make it different. Different is better. It is, right? Different is better. So deadlines...

this again took me a long time to kind of figure out that i needed deadlines and deadlines were the difference between you know a dream and a something that you complete and um what happens with deadlines for me anyways you've got a ship you're you're you have to abandon the project and it's not perfect oh my gosh it's not perfect but because it's not perfect you kind of have to be ingenious about

making it a little different. And I find that deadlines force me to make decisions that you don't have enough time, you never have enough time. And so you think of something to, I wouldn't say it's a shortcut, you think of a way to finish it. And those little decisions are what make it a little different. One of the shocks to me about working at Wired on a monthly magazine was

Every single issue after years and years and years was a miracle that it got done on time. It was like you would think it would come down to some formula and you'd be done on Friday afternoon. But no, it was this last second getting it out the door every single time. And part of that was because we kind of kept upping the...

the goal, the quality. We're trying to make it better than last time. And so you come down to the same thing where you are being driven by the deadline to try to excel, but not making it perfect by doing something a little differently than you did before. Because without a deadline, you can convince yourself that you can always make it a little bit better, but then you never ship. Right. How do you find that balance between...

In a world of leverage, right, like where an internet article can go viral and reach 100 million people or it can reach 10 people, how do you find that point at which I've done enough, I'm comfortable with this versus the trade-off of do I raise the bar, do I make this better?

What is the advantage to doing that? So there's a couple of things, a couple of bits of advice buried in a book about that. One is this rule, which was actually based on some research in various different fields of life, that when you're trying to optimize something versus trying to explore, where you have something that works and you just want to make it kind of better and go and optimize it versus...

doing the inefficient thing of going out to try and try something new. And it comes down to something like when you go out to eat at a restaurant, do you get your favorite thing that you know works or do you try something that is a new dish that may not work? And so the ratio is actually one to three, two to three, one to three. So you actually want to spend two thirds of your time trying to optimize things that you

want to go deeper and better, and then a third trying new things. And that's been shown in many, many ways to be roughly true. So that's one answer is yes, lots of times you're going to just try and make it really, really better or not thing. But a third of the time you want to be taking a chance. The second thing is this idea that I learned from doing art. There was actually a book called Writer's Time about how to write a book.

And it said that basically, look, the amount of work to write a book is infinite. It just could go on and on. And that's true of almost any project in terms of perfecting. It's bottomless. So really, the only thing you control is your time. You say, I have this much time to give to it. I'm going to do the very, very best in this amount of time.

And that's sort of what a deadline is about. It's saying like, yeah, I mean, it could go on forever, but I have a deadline. So I'm going to do the best. I'm going to write the best book I can in a year or a year and a half, whatever it is, or I'm going to do the best podcast I can make in a week. And so that is a deadline. And what it's doing is it's giving you some way to control because you can't control the amount of work, which is infinite because you always can find some way to perfect it.

So this is the idea that you control things by controlling the time. I wonder if part of us is hiding behind fear too. We don't want the deadline because we actually don't want to put the work out there. We can convince ourself that making it better, hiding behind this perfection is in and of itself work and that we're accomplishing something.

We don't have to put it out in the world and get feedback. Right, right, right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, that's true because it's not good enough yet. One of the things I have become a really big proponent of, which is doing things on a regular basis.

So the advantage of someone like you doing a podcast on a regular basis, like if this one is a complete flop, that's okay. Tomorrow you have another one. We'll try again. And you just do it over and over again and you put out whatever it is that you do. You know, you're trying your very best, but you know that there's more from where that's come from. And that gives you some kind of freedom to

in a certain sense because I'm going to do it again. And that's true of making art, which I do every day. I make a piece of art every day. So I'm going to put it out no matter what. And if it isn't up to the best standards, it's okay because tomorrow I'm going to do it again. And that's true about writing or anything else is this idea that you –

want to do things on a regular basis because that is the source of great stuff, but also gives you that confidence and liberty to put out something that's not quite the best and not get really hung up on it because we're going to do it again. You get another up out, you get another crack at it. Right. From episode 169, Julie Gurner.

How do you shift that mindset where circumstances sort of like when you feel you're a victim, I mean, effectively, you're a victim to circumstance, you feel like you have no control and you're powerless, and there's nothing you can do? What would you say to somebody like that? That's a really great question. I think that there are two ways of looking at victim things that have happened to you. You know, you can be a victim or you can be a survivor.

And those are two very different cognitive positions. You know, you can't control what happens to you in either circumstance. But one is very powerful. You have overcome. One is, you know, you have had something happen to you and you are under that thing for quite some period of time.

So for me, if I hear someone and I hear that kind of helplessness, one is that I want to reframe that experience. I want to tell a different story. I want them to tell a different narrative to themselves. I want them to rewrite that. And in some ways, you want them to rewrite that narrative to survivorship and overcoming and what it took. And you ask the right questions to get them to see that their own through way

in that case is based on their strength and ability. And you want them to see those things rather than seeing the kind of helplessness and powerlessness. It's the reason why oftentimes, you know, like people engage with me and they think we're going to go back in time and talk about their, I don't know, inner child or something. But I am someone who's going to start with who you are today. Because going back to the past,

is not really useful unless it informs who you are standing in this moment. We can't change it. We can't, you know, go back. And going back to times of powerlessness also, it puts you in a bad mindset. It sets you up in a negative way. So I oftentimes will go back and restructure some things around powerlessness

you know, risk, for example, is a really good area where we'll do some discussion when people are hesitant to take risk. I want people to go back and say, hey, tell me about times you took risk and it really paid off. Like,

Let's talk about that. I want people to understand what they're capable of and sometimes to see what they're capable of in ways that they quickly forget, right? I mean, negative things sometimes shadow our entire mindset and how we think about things. And we end up tossing aside some of the good things, right? Like you'll have

you know, 20 compliments on your haircut. And one person says, oh, what'd you do to your hair? And that's the person who gets all the attention. So you think about, I don't want them shoving aside those 20 compliments or those 20 times they took the chance. So the 20 times that they overcame something really incredible that they kind of, you know, kind of shove off to the side. I want them to see those things very clearly and to see the minority of

Yeah, you know, things happen periodically that aren't great for us and don't make us feel well and we make that some bad decisions but so what everyone does. I think that that's really important I mean we all make bad decisions is what you do next that sort of matters I want to go back to something you said about childhood though which is, I hear this a lot and I've always sort of wondered about it which is like.

When people are in therapy and they're talking about their childhood and then they do this sort of like destructive behavior and then it's or self-sabotaging behavior. And then they explain it away with, well, that's because of this when I was a child. And, you know, I'm always listening to this and I never comment. But in my head, I'm going, but you're an adult now. Right. Like at some point you take control over your response and awareness of it is not the same as doing something about it.

So this is really fascinating to me too. And I love hearing things like that when they come up because they're such clear flags and clearly they are for you as well. You hear that and you're like, oh, this is a problem, right? I mean, immediately. So I think about it like this. You could be sitting, and this is the example that I always think about because it pulls people away from some of the more emotional stuff, but you could be sitting in traffic and we've all sat in traffic, right? I mean, traffic as long as the eye can see, right?

And there will be some people you'll look out and they'll be like beeping and dodging and, you know, like they're all over the place. And you can surmise how that person must be thinking, right? I mean, it's just like never going to get there. I can't believe this is happening. Like,

We could anticipate that these are coming from strong thought patterns and emotional places. But if you look to your right, I mean, there's probably also some guy or girl listening to a podcast, texting someone, windows are down, look as relaxed as could be.

And so some people are going to say, you know, when you get home, like, why are you so upset? Oh, it's the traffic. The traffic makes me nuts. Right. But if the traffic really makes people nuts, it would make everyone nuts. And so it can't be that. It's how we're thinking about the traffic that really makes people be relaxed and productive or it makes them be just absolutely enraged and out of control.

So when people are telling me that, like, you know, I'm doing this because of my childhood, I'm doing this because of this, I think, you know, you're giving up some amount of power. You're giving up a lot of power to something outside of yourself. And you're also, how you're interpreting that event is not useful to you. You know, it may be, there may be a lot of truth to the terrible things that have happened,

But, you know, those those terrible things you have to shut the door at some point and say, you know, I am my own man or woman and I move forward. And, you know, working on those traumas is important if you go to a therapist. And I think that that's really valuable stuff and it's worthwhile because it can change the course of your life. But if you are somebody who uses other events as a reason to self-destruct, then.

You're ceding power. And we see that even with, you know, in companies, right? Like, I'm doing this because so and so made me angry. I'm doing this because, you know, and you end up making some poor decisions and ceding power because of someone else. You know, you're willing to make a poor decision. You're willing to give up. You know, sometimes people are willing to give up, you know, their entire future dreams because, you know,

of X, Y, and Z. And it's a tragedy. So you want people to really understand the power they have to create their own lives at some point. And that creation is not given to anyone else but you. I love what you said there. I think it's these ordinary moments that really dictate the outcome of our life. For a lot of our big decisions, we know we're making a decision. We're well aware of it. But in these ordinary moments, when things like this happen, we sort of tend to react without reasoning.

And when we do that, we put ourselves in an increasingly bad position, right? You go home, you yell at your spouse. Well, now your whole weekend's wrecked. Your marriage might be wrecked. Like all of these things sort of like compound. And then you can't be present at work because you're solving something at home. And we just don't realize how these innocent little moments can derail us and put us in a worse position.

I agree. I think that like we let life happen to us, right? And we don't decide that we are going to control the trajectory of it. And I think that that's true, whether it's in the small moments and sometimes even in the large ones, like people will stay unhappy at a job or stay unhappy in their role. And they'll just stay unhappy instead of just saying, hey, you know, like eventually they'll reach a point. And this is true for everyone, right? Like

They're unhappy, they're unhappy, they're unhappy. And then finally, I've had enough. And all of those excuses they've used, there will come a point when none of them matter and they're going to take that leap. But why does it have to get to that point? And why can't we kind of flag things earlier on? And I think early intervention, you know, I talk about that notion of like fighting up front. Early intervention in almost every case is worth fighting.

It's worth the attention, the hassle, the time that it takes, because those are the moments that allow you to really gain ground and to have a much more productive future, to have much more productive relationships, to be more productive at work, is to really intervene early. And I think intentionality is really the key. Thinking about, you know,

how you want your life to look and what you're willing to put up with. What kind of standards are you holding for yourself and how do you value yourself? And a lot of those are around when you take action and how much you give and what you're waiting for and how much you're willing to take. From episode 173, Frank Slootman.

So I understand there's no repeatable framework that you can just apply, but I would imagine there's sort of repeatable principles and methods of thinking that you use. What are the ones that you find the most helpful? Well, I look very hard at what's working, what's not working. And in other words, some things are not working at all. Some things seem to be working reasonably well. And then there are sort of the stuff that you're sort of humming and hawing on.

So obviously you prioritize the, I mean, I've sort of separated with people very, very quickly because I think the functions that they were responsible for were barely breathing. And at that point, you know, I don't hesitate. You know, I move on quickly, immediately. You know, I go after cultural issues. You know, people that are just, you know, egregious violators of just culture.

Things that we all generally find normal and acceptable. We very quickly separate on behavior. Performance is something that we will give more time. Behavior, we won't. And that's because behavior is a choice, not a skill set.

You know, when you come in as a new leader, everybody's watching, not just what you're doing or what you're not doing. So if you're not moving on things that people, that everybody is seeing, your leadership brand is already in question because, you know, apparently you're blind and apparently you're hesitating or you're tolerant of behavior that you shouldn't be tolerant of. So, yeah, there's pressure because, you know, it's not just what you want to do. It's the whole world's watching.

You said behavior is a choice, not a skill set. I've never heard it quite framed that way. I think that's a very, that's a really interesting way to look at it. But you also said that you sort of, you'll give time for performance, but not for behavior. How much time? How do you learn? Like, when do you pull the plug? When do you reinvest? And how do you think about that?

Well, look, you know, behavior is, it'll smack you in the face usually. But I've also seen things happen underground where, you know, I wasn't aware of it and I wasn't seeing it, but it was happening because of what happened on calls that I wasn't on. You know, one time I got tipped off by an employee of my former company that said, look, you know, that office over there is a complete mess.

you know, disaster and because they knew people there and you know how salespeople are, right? Everybody talks, doesn't matter what company you're in. And then, you know, we started, you know, basically peeling away the layers and all of a sudden, you know, you come across, you know, really bad situations, abusive situations.

harassment, all these kinds of things because sometimes it's just not visible. It's happening. People don't like to talk about it. They're worried that they're ratting on people and they don't want to go to their manager because they don't trust their manager. They don't trust HR, which is usually your second choice or maybe your first choice to go when you have real behavioral cultural problems.

And then it just keeps going on. So I've been surprised before about how much, you know, wasn't visible to us, not just to me, but also the people that I had brought in that were close to me, they were not seeing it either. Eventually, you know, believe me, we will find it and we will get to it. And then we will move at lightning speed forward.

Because you want to get bad behavior out of an organization fast. That is your leadership brand. You start tolerating that, there's no end in sight to what you're going to have. Trust is key to moving quickly, I would imagine, with velocity in organizations. How do you go to establishing trust in a performance-based culture? Well, people need to believe that you're fair, that it's not just personal preference, right? That you're not doing things because, oh, I don't like your haircut or whatever, because

It has nothing to do with that. It has to do with, you know, how do we come together? How do we behave as a group? And, you know, if you have, you know, people behaving in huge conflict with that, then it's like, yeah, we are going to move on it. Sometimes, you know, I've had situations, especially with young people where, you

Hey, we need to do a reboot, reset, come back tomorrow. I'm sure your parents didn't teach you to behave this way and you can do better. And I've seen people come back literally over the weekend and be a different person because for whatever reason, they were led astray by managers that just were inspiring that kind of behavior. That happens, right? People learn behaviors from what they see around them with the behavior that gets encouraged.

And they don't realize that they are just getting adrift from their own upbringing and their own personal principles because that's sort of the environment starts to really, it's a slippery slope that they get on. And all of a sudden they're in a place where they don't even recognize themselves anymore. And that's where a reset can really work, because basically you're regrounding them to normal behaviors and then things can work out really nicely again.

from there on. But most of the time, unfortunately, it's like, look, you know, you're not a fit here. You know, this is not who we are, who we want to be. You know, it's choosing. You know, it's just, look, we want you to be this way, not that way. And, you know, for some people, it's like, hey, they learn behaviors in other companies. It's part of who they are. It's their culture. This is not for you, man.

Alan Mulally put it to me this way. He said, when you're choosing a behavior that's not the organizational behavior that's desired, you're choosing not to be a part of the organization. I thought that was a powerful way to think about it. Yeah. You're separating and you're in violation of the code. Driving culture is really important because if you don't, other people will fill that void, right? And you get subcultures in a city or a division.

Because strong personalities can do that. So unless you are filling that void, right, it will get filled by something or somebody else. And before you know it, you're just a grab bag of stuff. And it's just a bunch of fiends running a company. Well, you don't want that. The company needs to stand for something. This is who we are. It seems like there's a lot of organizations that...

are more family-based. I mean, they take a very similar approach to a family and they don't necessarily think in terms of performance. What are your thoughts on that? Well, we've talked about this quite a bit in recent years. I don't think of business as a family. Unfortunately, in a family, you can't fire your family, even though you sometimes want to.

You have to tolerate them and deal with them. And sometimes in the most egregious way, that is just the nature of families. I mean, all the dysfunction that comes with it. But in business, it's more like being a professional sports franchise, right? You're assembling the best players. And, you know, we may be friends, but we don't have to be friends because we're not coming together on the basis of friendship. We're coming together on the basis of mission. You know, in other words, shared purpose, right?

You know, we're very demanding of each other. And it's really about, you know, our respective contributions to the mission. That's the basis of our relationship. So it is much more akin to professional sports. I think that's the correct analogy. Now, some companies don't want to be that way. Companies like Salesforce and even Google come to mind. But, you know, in the end, they're laying people off, too, by the thousands. OK, so I guess it's not family after all.

From episode 179, Gio Valianti. One thing that the best seem to be able to do, and I think we hit on this in that answer, is two things stood out there. They know when to walk away. They know when to fold it. They know when to, you know, just, okay, it's over. Move on. Next one. They're able to move on.

but they also know when to push their advantage. And I'm thinking Tom Brady, right? He was the ultimate sort of quarterback who would take the check down, but he also knew when to push it down the field. How do we learn to cultivate those skills in ourselves? How do we know when to push? And how do we know when, you know what, this just isn't going to get us the outcome that we want? Best question I've been asked by an interviewer in my lifetime.

Like that's an awesome question that nobody ever asks. It's the question for anyone who's trying to be successful, sustainably successful. When do you press? How do you know when to press? Both in golf and the markets, the paradox is there. Sometimes you got to let it happen. And sometimes you got to make it happen. When people try to force something,

force a result when they shouldn't like that's when when you get stopped out and the opposite is also true so how do you know when to oppress an advantage number one i'll say about brady don't forget a lot of failure early and so what happens is when you fail your fail early you start to recognize what a real opportunity looks like and then oh by the way when that opportunity um presents itself there's a lot of fuel to make it happen you're like oh like you should you know it's mark walberg and acting it's like you're letting me into this club okay i'm

There ain't no way I'm giving up my advantage. So it becomes this relentless, you know, one of the things about Tiger Woods that's so remarkable is he's the only golfer, and I mean this, in the history of the game, who's ever played better with a lead.

So even Jack Nicklaus, who's arguably the best of all time, Jack said, I was better if I was trailing because what happens is when you're, when you're chasing, you know, you play with nothing to lose. You're able to be fearless. So, so that's a real advantage is being the underdog. Tiger Woods is the only one who is the favorite every week and would start with a lead and then extend that lead blew the world away. And to this day, it blows out because how do you do that?

How do you like, that's why greyhounds in dog racing are always chasing a rabbit. The psychological mechanism, even in running, you have somebody who's pacing you, right? Because we know the brain works in ways where having something to chase is the way to get the best out of yourself. Well, how did Tiger Woods do that when he was in the lead, the one being chased? Well, he was playing against history. So even when he was leaving the tournament, he was still trailing Jack Nicklaus. So he benchmarked, he would index his thinking to the fact that he hadn't,

caught Jack Nicklaus. So he was in his mind, always chasing. So it begs the question when you talk about judgment is knowing when to, what an advantage looks like and when and how to press your advantage and when patients, when the situation calls to do nothing. And here's one way to assess it. Evaluate your why. Because what happens is when people press an advantage incorrectly, it's usually out of impatience.

it's usually out of frustration. It's happening right now in the markets. There's not a lot of volatility in the marketplace right now. And you're on your mandate as an investor is to return 10%, right? Let's say that's your number. And you're only up 5%. And there's no way to make money in your strategy. All of a sudden, it's like, well, I'm going to press whatever advantage I have. What's a low probability advantage? But you're going to force a little advantage. You're going to make a mistake, and then you're going to lose your job. So number one is you have to question yourself.

What's underneath the desire? So let's talk about desire for a minute, which we haven't talked about, which we need to talk about. If you look at the human condition, look at all the major religious traditions. One of the universalities of the human condition is desire.

And every school of thought has found a way to try to deal with it. So, for example, you look at Catholicism. How does Catholicism deal with desire? Well, too much desire leads to you'll wreck your life and everyone else's. It can lead to real problems, desire. So Catholics punish it with guilt. What do the hedonists say? Hedonists say, well, if you want it, it's a good thing you satiate that desire. If you have an itch, scratch it.

And we know that that leads to overindulgence, to sloppy life, you know, typically a drug habit. And one way or the other, you know, you have sex, you're going to have an addiction, you're going to blow your life up if you're a hedonist. Buddhists and Hindus say desire is the key thing that leads to suffering, right? So if I want this pen, the moment that I want the thing that I can't have,

I feel a state of suffering. So all human suffering comes from desire. And so the way to happiness is to remove all desire, to get rid of all your worldly possessions and to sit in observation of yourself. And so happiness is to want nothing. So the universality of the human condition is desire. But what we know is that that desire is the thing that leads to all the cognitive biases.

That almost all of the mistakes people make in life is a function that they want a particular outcome. They want a particular thing. The good of it is desire, as Ayn Rand articulates, right, as Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations when he talks about free markets says,

He says that the desire leads to innovation. Innovation leads to competition, which eventually leads to the best product in the market, which is what elevates the human condition. And that's why proponents of capitalism and free markets, you can just see it in modern day, like the world moves because individuals innovate and evolve, whether it's Bill Gates, Steve Jobs,

Jeff Bezos has created $800 billion of wealth for other people. You see the way free markets work. They're a function of desire, and that's what Freud called sublimation. If you sublimate and channel desire into evolution, it's what creates great works of art, architecture. Andrian writes about this in Fountainhead.

So desire channeled properly can lead to some of the highest highs and the best expression of the human condition. The problem is the downside of desire. Left unchecked leads to the kinds of behaviors that are duplicitous, that desire run amok. We all become a worse version of ourselves. This happened to Tiger Woods. Like, don't forget the same desire that fueled arguably the greatest body of work in the history of sports is

The fuel that burned inside him, you saw it come out in his celebrations. There's a lot of want in there. But that's the same desire that when it got channeled the wrong way that led to the bad decisions that blew up his marriage, that led to him getting these injuries and harming himself.

And he wouldn't stop practicing, so he'd get injured. He played the US Open on a broken leg and won. And so you have to go back to the first order variable, which in his case is desire. To answer the question, and if you look at the causal chain, the way the dominoes fall in decision making, which is a cognitive act,

not an emotional one. You have to understand what are the variables that have led to you wanting to push your advantage. And so essentially in modern day analytics, you're running probabilities. If you have a trading strategy and the numbers say that you have an advantage, the old saying that if you don't know who the sucker at the table is, you're the sucker. And that's true in all games in the achievement domains where there's a scoreboard and there's competition.

And so you have to find a way to map your advantages and know in the moment whether you have an advantage. And if you do, how much risk are you willing to take and what losses are you willing to tolerate? And then the psychological component under that is, can you handle losses well? And if you can't, if you're the sort of person who's going to say, you know, if I lose this much money on this trade, it's going to meaningfully affect what I do in the future. That's your tell.

So one of the things we do, even though we try to are about the human condition from decision making, you know, as Antonio DiMaggio writes in in in in searching for Spinoza, you know, he says, like, when you look at people with localized brain damage who have no ability to feel emotions, their decision making is not good. When human beings get localized brain damage where they can't feel emotion, their decision making is not better. It's worse, in fact.

So if you look at someone like, you know, I guess an enlightened individual, they are not without emotion.

They have refined their emotional reactions in a way that elevates their senses. So, you know, you want to push the advantage. You have to evolve to a level where you're some version of a complete human being, where you know yourself, right? The Socratic dictum of Nadi Sutra, know yourself and know others. Complicated games require complexity of thought.

You know, life at the tail end of the curve does not lend itself to simplistic thinking. You have to have complexity of thought, though the decision is final. You know, the decision, yes or no, is binary. And sometimes, you know, you engage is what I call caveman golf, like seaball, hitball. You know, don't overcomplicate it and be decisive in your decisions.

That's a great answer. I want to thank you so much for one of the most amazing interviews I think I've ever been a part of. Hey man, you set the table to, to, to invite the best ideas out of people. And I think that's why we all love you so much. So thanks for the great questions and for your insight. I really appreciate it. I'm a fan. You know, I, I really did enjoy this. Thank you so much for having me. You know, we've circled around each other quite a few times and, um,

And you're a really thoughtful, wonderful man. So thank you for engaging with me today. Thank you so much for taking the time today, Frank. That was an amazing conversation. Yeah, you bet. Anytime. Thank you. And mutual thanks, Shane. Take care. Bye. I love co-creating with you. It's really fun. You know, it's a one plus one equals four experience for me. I just love it. So thank you. Thank you so much for taking the time today. Thank you, Shane. Perfect. Thank you.

I'm very proud that you said that you'd want to do this again because I really love the show. I love the way you think and I was very happy when you emailed me to ask me if I could be on it and I also would love to do it again. Thanks for listening and learning with us. For a complete list of episodes, show notes, transcripts, and more, go to fs.blog/podcast or just google The Knowledge Project.

The Farnham Street blog is also where you can learn more about my new book, Clear Thinking, turning ordinary moments into extraordinary results. It's a transformative guide that hands you the tools to master your fate, sharpen your decision-making, and set yourself up for unparalleled success. Learn more at fs.blog.com. Until next time.