Authenticity over Improvement — Master Class Series #7

I will watch people, and they, if they're just following their intuition, man, they will just pick the next thing. And this is what we do when we're, when we're just following our nature. My nature, my authenticity improved me in ways that I didn't even know were happening.

Welcome to The Art of Accomplishment, where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease. I'm Brett Kistler, here today with my co-host Joe Hudson.

When we consider how we want life to be in the future, we often create a list of things that we have to improve about ourselves. Yet we rarely consider that we could succeed in improving every aspect of our lives and by doing so completely lose touch with who we are and what we want. What if learning who we are creates a future far better than what we think we want? What if it creates a future better than what we could imagine? Today's episode is about valuing authenticity over improvement. So Joe, let's talk about authenticity. What is authenticity?

Authenticity is a—

it's an endless spiral in, in one way, in the fact that it's like, it is evolutionary by nature. We think that there's an authentic self and it is the solid thing, but it's not. It's like, it's as we discover ourselves, there's always more to discover. And as we discover ourselves, we transform. So authenticity is really a path more than a destination. And the way that you can identify when you're on that path of authenticity is it's always about the process. It's never about the reward. And it's never like a means to an end. It's like a river. It's very much like a river in the fact that there's a way that a river wants to run. That's the natural flow of the river. And next year you'll come back and that river will run a different way. So authenticity is constantly changing, but there's just this natural flow to it. You know, in Taoism, they call it the way. It's just this very, it's the very natural course. And they call it self-discovery. They don't call it like self, like building. You know, we're not building ourselves, we're discovering ourselves. And that's why ultimately the path of authenticity is a path of self-realization. It is finding out the truth of who you are. And somehow, for some reason, the more we discover who we are, the more that we evolve, the more that we change, the more that we show up in a way that is far more gentle or loving and competent and capable and strong.

Can you talk a little bit more about self-realization?

Yeah, self-realization. There's, there's a story of, um, there's this— I think it's in like the Umpashads, I think. Um, I can't remember which tradition. So many times traditions have really similar parables. There's a another parable very much like this about a tiger, but this one's about a musk deer. And this musk deer is like moving along one day and they— and it smells, it smells, and there's a smell and it's like, what is that smell? And it just feels like a memory. It feels like a calling. It's like something gets opened up in this musk deer and this impulse is like, I need to follow this thing. I need to follow it. And it goes searching for the place where the scent emerges. It wants to find the— that scent and the origin of that scent. And so it looks and looks and looks and looks, and it's like almost upon its death, still looking for the scent, and falls off of a cliff and punctures its stomach. And it realizes at that moment of death that, oh, the thing that I've been searching for comes from me. That scent emanates from me. And that is the movement of self-realization, is that the thing that we're looking for in all the self-improvement, what we're actually looking for is ourselves.

So how can you relate the story of the deer following its own scent to our path of self-realization?

The search of the deer looking for the scent is the self-improvement. It's like, once I eat the right diet, then I'll be good enough, or I'll be awake, or then I'll be loved. Or once I look pretty, then I'll be good enough. Then I'll be loved, once I lose enough weight, once I meditate enough, once I have no more negative thoughts, whatever the hell, once I stop thinking, whatever it is that you think you have to do, become rich enough, and then you'll have it, and you'll find the scent that you're looking for. But the scent you're actually looking for is you. It is to understand yourself. And it's the only thing that really solves the issue. And it's why you see so many executives, and I've worked with so many executives who are at the top of their game, they've made the successful billion-dollar company, and they're miserable. And they, they did everything that they thought they needed to do to improve themselves so that they will be loved or that they would accept themselves, and nothing's really changed. And as soon as they start on that path of self realization, as soon as they are looking for their own authenticity and they no longer are willing to sell that authenticity or bargain that authenticity for a result. When it stops becoming a means to an end and it just is like, this is my authentic expression, then their life starts unfolding in happiness and joy.

Right. So let's talk a little bit more about that, that scent trail then. What— how would you define improvement?

Yeah, improvement is basically if this, then this, right?

Like, it's in, in terms of the self.

So it's like, if I get sexy enough, then I will have the lover that I want. If I lose enough weight, then people will like me. If I have enough money, then I'll feel secure. It's anything that is— the improvement is like thinking that you're gonna get a result from it.

And authenticity is the opposite.

So it's, this is what I'm gonna do despite the consequences, 'cause it's my authentic truth. So that's basically what improvement comes in. And it comes from the idea of ways that we don't wanna be who we are, right? It's the other way to look at all the ways we think we need to improve is all the ways that we don't love ourselves just as we are. And any point where you can't unconditionally love yourself, whether that is, because you yell, because you don't work hard enough, because you're lazy, because you're a pessimist, whatever it is that you are telling yourself that you have to change, it— they're just ways that you're not loving yourself. And they don't typically change. And we just keep on telling ourselves that we don't love that about ourselves, and we keep on telling ourselves that we have to improve it. Um, but when we actually accept our authenticity, those things just naturally move. They just shift.

It reminds me of a quote that I've heard before where like a kid's asking, or like speaking to somebody as though we're a child and it's like, well, there's a big, there's a question, what do you wanna be when you grow up? And instead thinking to ask that like, how do you wanna be when you grow up?

Yeah, I have never heard that.

That's beautiful. Yeah, how do you wanna be when you grow up? That's beautiful. The other way to think about self-realization is, I think it's a Pema Chödrön quote, and she, it's basically constantly offer yourself up to annihilation so you can find out what's the part of you that can't be annihilated.

And what are we annihilating? These, these, uh, like built-up ideas of who we are?

Exactly, that's exactly it. The things that we think we are that we have to defend. You can tell them because you're defending them. It's like when someone's like, well, you didn't do that very well, and you go, uh, then you are defining yourself as somebody who's competent, and you're not able to love the incompetent part of yourself. And authenticity is, you know, this is what's— this is how I'm competent, this is how I'm incompetent, and being able to own that. And then in the owning of the lack of competence becomes more competence. You know, it's like this thing where oftentimes with executives, helplessness is this big thing where they feel it authentically, they feel helpless, but to allow themselves to feel helpless is incredibly difficult because the fear is if I allow myself to feel helpless, then I will become more helpless. But if they authentically own their helplessness, then they become less helpless.

I think there's also a fear of being seen as helpless then too.

Yes, that's right.

Fearing that there will be consequences to that.

That's how you know also that part of yourself that needs, wants to be destroyed. It's the part of yourself that doesn't wanna be seen in that way, whatever that way is. I don't wanna be seen as blank, a hypocrite. I don't wanna be seen as helpless. I don't wanna be seen as greedy. Whatever it is that you don't wanna be seen. I don't wanna be seen as weak.

So how would you separate improvement from growth? 'Cause even this process of finding our authenticity, you can get better at it. What is that if not improvement? And don't we kind of need some form of improvement, like whether we're tracking our growth in some way to see what the trajectory is going?

Yeah, the question is like, what would make you need it? Like, what will happen if you don't have it? I think that's where the key is.

The key is, you know, does growth happen? Absolutely. Like, if I look at— I always use this metaphor of an oak tree because when I look out my window, there's an oak tree. And it's like, the oak tree grows, the growth happens. Does it need to?

No.

Is it looking to improve itself? No, it's just, it's nature. Our authenticity. Another way to think of our authenticity is our nature, and our nature is to grow. Our nature is to improve. Our nature is to learn. If you take a little kid, when they're like just really— when they're babies, they can't even walk— one of the things that they smile most at is when a face comes at them sideways, not when a face comes at them straight up and down. Straight up and down face is the face that they see right before they feed, and that doesn't make them smile as much as a sideways face, which means, oh, we're here to play. And play for a kid is learning. And we have this natural desire to learn. It is authentic in us. We have a natural desire to grow. It's authentic in us. And it's— so it just all happens very, very naturally. But it's when you think you have to improve to be good enough for— when it's not just the nature of your life. And you look at a 6-year-old kid, they're constantly wanting to learn and grow, like, and it doesn't stop. It doesn't stop unless someone has kicked the love of learning out of us. It just keeps going. So I don't think we have a need to do it. I think the thing is, is that improvement is just happening naturally, and that's authenticity. But if you are looking to improve yourself, then you are, you know, putting the brakes on the process, and you're often going in the opposite direction of the river.

How do we address that fear of becoming stagnant if we don't improve?

Yeah.

Or just to be measuring, you know, measuring where we're at and then, you know, measuring that according to some scale of value that we've created.

Yeah, that's a great question. Well, first of all, question your scale. That's the ultimate thing is like, it's easy to play a game when you have a measurement. And it's hard to play a game when you don't. So if your measurement is for life is how much money I have in the bank, well, then you can play. And if the measurement is how kind I am to people, then you can play, and then you have something to measure to. But if you start really questioning those measurements, what do you mean by kind? Do you mean having the most positive impact? How do you measure positive impact? What's the difference between kind and nice? And what if I was deeply truthful, but I wasn't kind? And why is kind more important than truth? So these questions, as soon as you start really looking at the end, if you really deeply look at the end, then it gets really scary. That's when the stagnation fear really shows up. It really shows up when you're like, oh, all the progress that I thought I was making might not have been to the right end, or maybe there's no end. And this fear sets in, like, and it's almost like this fear, like, it's going to be nihilistic or something like that. But even the idea that it's nihilistic is just another, um, it's like just another way of trying to create meaning out of a situation. But the nature of life doesn't really require meaning. There's no other part of life that requires meaning except for humans. So life wants to evolve, it wants to grow, it wants to improve. And it seems, as it turns out, most humans, when they understand themselves more and more, there's a deeper and deeper compassion that shows up. There's a deeper, deeper amount of empowerment that shows up. And what you find is the things that you think are opposite, such as love and, and and being empowered, they turn out to be the same thing. At the pinnacle of loving is empowerment. At the pinnacle of empowerment is loving. And so, and you can feel this, like if you just stop for a second and close your eyes and you feel what it would be like to unconditionally love the world, and you just let that settle in your body for a moment, and your love is so big and so great that it expands everywhere. And it's not weak love. It's not love like, I'm gonna let people abuse me. It is the kind of love that a mother has that's a great mother. They have boundaries. And then you let that go for a second and then feel what it's like to be completely empowered. Feel what it would be like to not have to worry at all about the future, to not to not have to prepare, to not have to plan, to just know that you are capable of handling any situation. It'd be like Superman on a mountaintop with no kryptonite in the world, or Superwoman on a mountaintop with no kryptonite in the world. Nothing can touch you. That feeling of empowerment.

Hmm.

And then just feel the two next to each other. Like, how are they different, if at all? This full empowerment and this full love. So that's how it moves.

And so the stagnation, the fear of stagnation, the fear of like, oh, there's no meaning, or there's no—

like, there's no place to go, and therefore I'll stop moving. It's— it hits the human psyche for sure.

It's—

it's definitely part of this human psyche, at least in the modern world. But life doesn't require any of that stuff. Life can't stop moving. See, I mean, just try, just try to like, um, try to not improve for a week. Do you take 2 weeks and do your best to not improve? Don't learn anything, don't grow, don't have any realizations, don't have any recognitions. Like, try that for 2 weeks. Like, I told someone to do that once and they were like, oh my God, so many recognitions, so much realization, because they stopped trying.

And we feel this all the time when we're on holiday.

You have 2 weeks off and then you come back and you're just, you perform better, it's smoother, the whole thing works better. Like you make better calls because you didn't improve for 2 weeks, you know, because you weren't actively trying to improve for 2 weeks. It's just the nature of life. We, by our nature, learn and want to grow.

Yeah, something that came up for me in the exercise that we just did was that both in the, like unconditionally loving the world state and the feeling fully empowered state, there wasn't any fear, but the concern of stagnating is just fear. And the fear of stagnating is the thing that, you know, I know for me in my life, I've spent a lot of time in the fear of stagnation. And that has constricted me in those times and led to—

Stagnation.

Yeah, stagnation.

Exactly, that's how it works.

Yeah, we invite the things that we're scared of.

Like, that's our nature. Our nature is to invite. If we have a fear of something, we're inviting it in because we want to, we want to learn and grow from that experience. We want to face that fear. So the fear of stagnation invites stagnation. The fear of loss invites loss. The fear of abandonment invites abandonment.

So let's, let's try to bring this back into more concrete examples to make this real?

Yeah, yeah, let's— I'll do a couple of them. Um, let's take like one, one way to look at it is like kids and their learning. So kids, like we were just talking about, their nature is to learn.

They're curious.

That's what they're like genetically programmed to do. All humans are. And somehow or another, we can put them into a school system, tell them that they have to improve and get A's, and then they stop wanting to learn. And then, yeah, exactly. It actually happens to some like 47% of like highly intelligent kids. They fail high school.

Yeah, I did like really great in school up until I got an IQ test that told me I was smart. And then I got my first B+. And this was like 4th grade. And then it was just like—

Yeah, you stopped trying.

To hell with this whole thing.

Yeah, there's some great psychological tests on this that basically if you tell a kid they're smart, and then they try and they don't succeed, they'll stop trying because then they will prove that they're not smart. So they'll just stop trying so they can maintain the identity of smart. It's some fascinating work, but yeah, that's an example of it. But now if you take kids who've been unschooled, I think it's called non-schooling or unschooling or something like that, where the kids have been somewhat traumatized in their school situation. So their parents pull them out and they say, you can't watch television. You can't, you know, do things that are destructive, but you can not do any work until you're ready. They oftentimes don't do any work for 3 months or 6 months, and then all of a sudden they're like, okay, I want to work. And those kids, when they want to learn math, they can learn basically fractions to calculus. And it's something insane, like 3 months or like 5 months or something like that. You can read the studies on it because they want to learn. Because it is their desire to learn in that direction, and they want to do it, and they will do it. So it's, it's like one is moving with the authenticity of the situation, and one is telling the kids that they have to improve to be good enough, and, and it's like a punishment and reward situation.

So that's one aspect.

Another, another way is like a personal story from my life to think about it is I was in high school and I started smoking cigarettes and I was kind of socially awkward at the time.

And, you know, I had issues, you know, my upbringing was, had some turmoil in it.

And so I was constantly telling myself I should improve by not smoking. I was constantly telling myself that was something that I needed to improve in.

And then just by nature, you know, I got drawn into hacky-sacking and I just started to hacky-sack all the time.

And I just really enjoyed hacky-sacking and it just, kind of became this thing. And then about, I don't know, it was 10 years ago, I was with one of my daughters. My daughter's having some problems in schools, and this occupational therapist came to us and they said like, oh, your daughter has something called like sensory processing disorder. And it just basically means that the neurology isn't really melding the way it, it would with other kids, and it makes you very sensitive to stimulus through your senses. And I said, oh, how do we solve this thing? And she was like, oh, the way you solve it is through doing exercises across the midline that require coordination, et cetera, et cetera. And hacky-sacking would have been a perfect example of that. And if you look at me before hacky-sacking and after hacky-sacking, I became socially more fluid, I became less sensitive. You know, when you have sensory processing, it's kind of like a bit of like a nerd's disease, is like, you know, more likely to wear glasses, you know, you're kind of awkward and clumsy, you don't do as well socially, it's like that kind of stuff. And all that changed with me hacky-sacking. So my nature knew what I needed, knew what was needed next, and did it without anybody telling me to, without anything happening. And I watch this happen all the time with clients. I watch clients all the time. Like, I know basically the dance steps of transformation, and everybody does them a little bit differently. And, you know, sometimes chapter 3 comes before chapter 1 or whatever, but I will watch people, and if they're following, if they're just following their intuition, man, they will just pick the next thing. And it'll be like, oh my God, they picked it perfectly again. And this is what we do when we're just following our nature.

And then, you know, smoking for me, on the other hand, lasted until I was like 30s, you know, so, you know, as a perpetual habit into my 30s. So, and that was all the ways I was supposed to improve, but my nature, my authenticity improved me in ways that I didn't even know were happening.

Yeah, it's fascinating. I can think of a lot of experiences in my life that are, a lot like that. You know, one of them being joining your 18-month course where I just kind of felt like an intuition. It was a, you know, felt like a lot of money at the time. In retrospect, it was very little. But it was just like, man, I don't know, like this kind of seems like my kind of thing. I don't even know what it is. And I didn't. When I got there, I was like, wait, this isn't really all that business-y, is it?

Yeah.

And yet it transformed your business too, right? Which is the insane part.

Yeah.

That's the other thing.

Yeah, but more than that, my life. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, that's the insane part.

Like, that's a great example of it as well, which is like people come because they often come to me because they want to transform their business and we transform their life by them taking their natural steps and their business naturally transforms. If they would've just focused on their improvement, their business may or may not have transformed. And in this way, the reason I use this methodology of working on the personal stuff is because that always transforms the business. It has 100% success rate.

As the person transforms, their attitude towards their business will transform, and so will their business.

So let's relate all this back into that, uh, the concept you were talking earlier about self-realization and self-discovery.

Yeah, that's okay.

All right, so back to my journey. Let's, let's hear from my journey for a second. So for the early part, I got really deeply into awakening, enlightenment, in the non-dual sense of the word, not like woke culture, but I'm talking about like the Christ consciousness or enlightenment, how whatever religious tradition you have has a word for it. And at the beginning of that journey, it was, I thought it was improvement that would get me there. You know, once I ate the right diet or once I, you know, did the right exercises or once I meditated hard enough or blah, blah, blah, I would become enlightened. And so that was the improvement side of things. And that is, it's a slow, arduous, painful process.

And it luckily moved enough for me to realize that it wasn't about improvement.

It was just about the recognition of who I am.

And when that happened, this question appeared to me is, what am I?

Was the question. I asked that question for 10 years, maybe 10 times a day, I would ask that question. And that is really what transformed everything for me. That just being in that question for that long with that level of wonder transformed everything.

And it was funny, it was a—

I was seeing a guy at the time, one of the—

I was like reading every non-dual teacher I could find, but the only guy that I had met personally who I thought, wow, this is a person I would want to learn from, was a guy named Adyashanti.

And I got up and asked him a question once in front of this big auditorium of people.

And I said, I keep on asking this question, what am I? And all I get is silence. And some dude in the back just started laughing. And I was like, what?

Why would that?

That's not funny.

And Adya smiled and can't remember what else happened.

But I remember about like 3 years later, I was at a meditation retreat when that question, what am I? Faded away. And like, the question never gets answered, it just expires.

And then it expires in a, like, like a firecracker, but it expires.

And I was in the back and somebody got up on the front and said, you know, I asked that question, what am I?

And nothing. And I just started laughing hysterically as if the nothing wasn't the answer, you know? And that's what it turns into. That recognition of self is, is something that just unfolds into nothingness.

And that nothingness is incredibly free and incredibly potent and capable.

So who are you now?

Yeah, yeah. That question has expired.

Yeah, that's a— there's a— there'll be an exercise. There's an exercise on this just to, like, go back and forth and ask somebody, "What are you?" over and over again. "What are you? What are you? What are you?" And see what happens as all your answers expire, all your answers, you know.

But if I had to put "What am I?" in words right now, which is exciting, an exciting thought process, I would say, "What am I? I am infinitely you." I am everything and nothing in the silent vastness that everything arises in. And so are you.

Hmm. Okay, so then, then what happens once that question expires? It sounds like there could be a trap here in thinking that this question of who I am has expired and now I don't have to improve myself and there's just nothing to do. What am I going to do? Just sit in a cave and meditate until Yeah, yeah, there's a thought that says that that might be the case.

You know, and in fact, some people go through that for a while. I think it's because they're like those kids who, you know, needed to be unschooled for a while when they have that recognition of their essential self in that way, that there is this need to just sit there for a while and do nothing. But it becomes a bit dissociative and And eventually it's no longer satisfying.

And, and so it just turns out to be we just become more and more human.

We like to play, we like to learn, we like to grow. It's our nature, it's our authenticity. And so once we have been let out of school, we realize there's nothing that we have to do to improve ourselves because our essence is unbelievably beautiful. Miraculous, a dream that we never thought even possible coming true, that we couldn't even have thought of coming true, then yeah, there's, there's this natural desire to rest for a while, potentially.

Um, but eventually you just, you know, you want to move, you want to dance, you want to play, you want to be alive.

And then the journey turns into, how do I be alive? How does my authenticity really want to be alive?

How fully can I embrace life. How, you know, there's a book called The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I don't even know what it's about, but the title is amazing. And that's what it is. Life becomes, how do I allow myself to be more and more vulnerable to the unbearable lightness of being?

I love that both of us are the kind of person who would recommend a book or reference a book that we haven't read just because of its title.

Yeah, I highly recommend that title.

The title, yeah. So it seems like there could be another trap here where like we have these, we have somewhere where we want to go and we're like, oh, okay, so maybe like improving myself along the, you know, the particular metrics that I have in mind right now, maybe that's not the best way to get there because authenticity is the best way to get there. So if I just get more authentic, then I'll become this thing that I wanna be. And get to where I wanna go.

Yeah, that's right. That is a real trap, right? So it's like, you'll see this happen oftentimes in tools.

You know, you get this tool that you start working with in the realm of self-discovery and you get this tool and it works really well for a while and then it stops working. And some of the times it stops working because you are using the tool to change yourself instead of love yourself.

So it stops working.

And some of the time the tool stops working because you've co-opted it into improvement instead of recognition. And it's really the same thing.

To improve yourself isn't to love yourself as you are.

And to find the authentic expression of you is to love yourself as you are and to know that that authentic expression will naturally change you, just like it— the natural flow of a river changes the river.

And that could mean your goals will shift.

Will shift, yeah.

I've never— I've seen a lot of things not change as people go through this journey, and I've seen a lot of things change, but I've never seen the goals of a person not change through the journey. That always changes. And what's often interesting is the goals that they used to have just get met naturally without any even effort or thought process because they become just a step in what's necessary for them to evolve into their authenticity. I had a goal for years of having enough money to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, somewhere along the line that I just didn't care at all about money. And then money just started rushing in. And that's a really typical story, not always, but it's a very, very typical story.

So, you know, we've talked about how having goals is wanting something is good. We just had a whole episode on how, what you want, how wanting itself is critical. But then we're just talking now about how wanting something from ourselves or wanting something in our future can lead towards this constant improvement process and away from our authenticity. What do you have to say about that?

Yeah. So wanting is critical. What you want is really inconsequential. You know, what you want is like directionally correct, but it is not the end-all be-all of anything. So it's like that wanting is the— is what pulls you. That wanting is the natural pull of evolution, of authenticity. That's what it is. What you want is a strategy to get there, and there's 10 or 20 strategies. So the what you want is inconsequential, and there's no reason to attach to it, but it is to follow your wanting and then to watch how your wanting changes and watch how what you want changes.

What happens if you're going through this process and the things that you want just change so rapidly that your life starts to feel disconnected or disorienting?

You're very fortunate.

You're gonna, you might feel disturbed depending on your personality type.

You know, some folks will find that to be a beautiful free ride and some people will feel like, you know, there's that quote on the song, sometimes falling feels like flying for a little while. And so people will be like, Oh, I'm flying, which means I must be falling. But in actuality, there's the, as they say, the good, the bad news is you're falling. The good news is there's no bottom.

So yeah, that is part of it.

Or Rumi called it, a Sufi poet, he calls it like a holy confusion. That not knowing, it's called the mystery for a reason. And so it's absolutely what happens and the goals, shift and then the goals disappear and then there's like no goals for a while. And then after there's no goals for a while, there's very specific goals. And then there's just like this movement that's like, how do I describe it? It's like the goal is to live principled because you know that living principled will make you happier than any goal that you could ever achieve.

And that's something that's entirely within your power too.

Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, it becomes choiceless at a point. It becomes outside of your power at some point. It's like, I just can't not live principally 'cause it's too damn painful.

Give us another concrete example of how that works when, you know, what you want is inconsequential, but the wanting itself is important.

Yeah, I can give you a funny one.

So I'm sitting with, my godson and his father. And father's been a friend for like since high school. And this story is gonna be one of those stories that lets you know, like maybe you don't wanna have me as a friend. And so we're sitting there and we're having lunch together at this restaurant. And my friend tells me about how his son stole $50 from him, bought a vape pen and was vaping. In the classroom. And I'm just listening, and sons, you know, in those teenage years, and then all of a sudden, you know, 5 minutes later, he says how he's like, the problem, you know, with my son is that he just doesn't have, you know, ambition. He just doesn't want to do anything.

And I was like, what?

Of course he wants to do something. Do you know how hard it is to do what he did? I mean, stealing $50, like, you were like, he planned that stuff out. That's ambition. Then he went and did it, and then like with the knowledge that he could have gotten caught, which is total ambition. And then he figured out a way to go buy the vape pen, and then he had so much ambition to do it that he did it in a classroom and got caught. Like, you know, that is like some CEO-level ambition. That's not that— like, what are you talking about? Like, the, the, you know, you know, at this point my friend's looking at me like, shut up, Joe, shut up. And his son's looking at me like, smile, like, oh wow, I didn't know I should have visited my godfather more often. And And then I was just saying, yeah, there's, I mean, there's clearly ambition. It's just that you want him to be ambitious in one way, but he's ambitious in another. Let's look at how he's ambitious. And so started talking to him and, well, what is it that you wanna do? And he wants to play this particular kind of sport that requires some money. And then you gotta like get these guns or whatever. It's like a laser tag type thing, the next version of a laser tag. He's telling me about it, and I'm getting into it with him. And then I'm like, well, how are you going to afford this? And he's like, you know, well, maybe I have to get a job. All right, well, what kind of job do you want to get? Well, this kind. Well, you don't make a lot of money. And like, huh? And then how are you going to get there? And we just went through this whole thing, and he was like clearly eager to do all this stuff so that he could— so that he could do the thing that he wanted to do. And I was like, well, how can your dad help? And then he is telling his father what his father can do to help him be ambitious and get things done. And that's the difference. That's the difference between you should improve to what is the authentic expression. And, and the thing is that we do that, we do that internally as well as externally, meaning we're usually like the father in that story rather than the godfather in that story to ourselves, right? We're telling ourselves what we— how to improve, what we need to do, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, instead of just paying attention to what the natural thing is. And if we follow that thread far enough down, it has far better results. It moves much quicker.

Yeah, it's fascinating. By that measure, I was extremely ambitious in barely passing any of my primary school.

Exactly, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's because they couldn't hook onto the authentic— most schooling doesn't hook onto a child's authentic desire to learn.

No, in my case, they presented a lot of different tracks and opportunities that all of which just didn't quite hook.

Yeah, well, it's really hard to hook when you're telling somebody when you're grading people and say you need to improve. That's not hook-worthy.

It's like a culture of constant improvement.

We don't listen to songs that tell us that we need to improve. We know, you know, wow, triple platinum song by Jay-Z called "Boy You Better Work Out More." It doesn't happen, you know? Yeah.

Right. Right, so let's talk a little bit more about how this works in companies and, you know, in more general sense, in cultures of self-improvement or just not even self-improvement, just cultures of everybody needs to improve and do better.

Yeah, the constant improvement culture. Or we're gonna fail. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, it's again, it's not assuming that people want to improve by nature is what happens here. So a great example of this is in that book, "Reinventing Organizations," nursing company in there called Hertzog. I'm bad at pronouncing these things. And basically what had happened, it was in Holland, and what's happened is there's these community nurses and they got privatized and, and it just became all about efficiency. It all became improve, improve, improve, improve. And it was like, this is how long it should take you to get there, this is how long it should take you to administer the shot, this is how long it should take you to get back, that's how much time you have, that's how much payment you're going to get. And everybody was going for the improved nursing efficiency. And this company came along and it did a lot of really cool things. But one of the things it did is it said, you know what, our job isn't to be as quick as possible. What our job— it's not to improve our process in that way. It's to make it so that we help people become self-reliant. And through figuring out how to get to that home and make the person self-reliant instead of administer the shot, they became 60% more efficient than their competition or something like that. Maybe it was 40%, like, I don't remember the numbers exactly, but it was a tremendous amount more efficient. And so one had that natural hook, 'cause what we naturally want, we naturally want to help people. That is part of our nature. All mammals that are community-based mammals have altruism as part of us. And so they hooked onto that natural thing, and then that led to natural improvement. They weren't trying to improve in some unnatural way. And the interesting thing is what, you know, as soon as I say it's our nature to be altruistic, somebody will say something like, well, it's our nature to be self-interested. And I say, I agree, it is. It's our nature to be altruistic, and it's our nature to be self-interested, and it's our nature to wanna be rewarded, and it's our nature to, want our team to win, and it's in our nature for us to win. And companies that are really becoming the most efficient companies are hooking on to all of that, right? And if you think about that nursing company, their team won. They had individual reward for the performance. They— as it turned out, people got to decide their own reward. And also, they got to help. So they're hooking on to all of these natural things in us.

And if you look at the great products of our day, and the great nonprofits of our day, they hook into a natural authentic desire in people.

And sometimes it's drug-like, like a Facebook or a Ko-fi, and sometimes it is not drug-like, right? Sometimes it is just our nature to want to communicate. So, so that's, that's what it means. And so it's not only does your product, but your culture needs to—

if you want to be highly efficient, it needs to hook into that nature.

Of people, our authenticity.

Another one of our ESF group was recently telling me about a company that they're applying for. It's a debt collections agency that operates on transparency. And like, instead of trying to be as efficient as they can and milking the most money from people as possible and buying the debt for the cheapest as possible, whatever, they're optimizing for really being in connection with people. So they purchase debt, and then they, they're transparent. They're like, hey, so we bought your debt for this much. We have this much of it. We expect to get, you know, a certain percentage of it paid back from various places. And, you know, what can we do to get this paid off? And they end up getting with that transparency and working closer to, to their, I guess, their customers, their debtors. They actually get across this sense of actually caring. And they're able to come up with much more creative solutions, which actually results in, I mean, this is a new company, but it seems like it's resulting in getting much better results for them. And also they're getting just swaths of testimonials from customers that are like, "Wow, I wish all of my debt had been bought by this company. This is amazing. They're actually people and they talk to me." Right, yeah. Like a human.

Yeah, I mean, we see this all that you can see this in sales processes are more effective when there's a real relationship, real connection going on. And that authenticity is there. People think they have to compartmentalize themselves to do business, and that compartmentalization, that inauthenticity, it absolutely makes you less efficient. It might make things easier to do in the short term, but absolutely harder to do in the long term, and it makes you less efficient because you're basically asking anybody you interact with to compartmentalize themselves that same way. So a debt collector compartmentalizes their heart and they go in hard, then their customer compartmentalizes their heart and they respond hard, or they respond like a victim or whatever it is, but they're gonna match that more on average.

So if we focus on finding the authentic movement, then—

Yeah, how do I collect debt in a way that feels good in my system? How do I nurse in a way that feels good in my system? How do I produce a social media app that feels good in my system? All of those will be a more efficient product.

And then with that continual asking, what am I? Like, what am I? Am I an efficient debt collector?

Yes.

Or am I a human?

That's right. Right? Yeah. If I am them and they are me, then how do I wanna behave here? If I feel my natural authenticity and my desire to learn and my desire to be of service to people, how do I collect debt in a way that's of service to people? And, you know, it feels horrible to not pay your debt. So to help people feel like that they are standing on their own two feet and have achieved paying off debt, I mean, that can be a real deep service for humans.

Yeah, I wonder how many other industries can be rethought that way.

Every one of them. It's endless. It's just like there's always more money to be made.

Way to become more authentic.

And each one is an efficiency.

Sounds like there's a lot of faith in this process because with each layer of authenticity you find, you really have to let go of what you valued or what you thought was important entirely for it to find what's beneath it.

Yeah, that's true. Yeah, you know, it feels like faith. It's like, it feels like faith until you get used to like reading the river in some way. It's the same kind of faith that maybe a basketball player would have that's going into a game is like, you can't plan out the whole game, you can't plan out everything. And so you're basically choosing, I am gonna plan out my entire basketball game, or I am going to learn how to read a river and learn how to read the field, learn how to read my opponents. And so that I am competent in every situation where I'm in that basketball game. And then you start having faith in your capacity to handle situations and you become excited where you can't handle them because it means you've you're getting to learn something and it makes you more capable next time. And so it's the same thing. It's like, if you've learned to read a river, to go down that river and get to the mouth of the river is, it's not an act of faith anymore. It's just what you do. And you're watching other people like build canals. So, and that makes them feel secure. Like I will just take a canal the whole way, but I have to build the whole canal. It's a lot more effort. So it's, it's very much like that. Once you start realizing that your authenticity naturally brings you to the next level over and over again, and that improving yourself is like building a canal, it's like this idea of safety that takes a tremendous amount of effort and is really not that safe because lots of people die building canals. That's how it works. And so it feels constantly like you're taking faith or that you're taking a risk. And then at some point you're like, "Oh no, it's more risky to do the other thing.

It's more risky to be 60 years old and have, you know, all my dreams have come true and I am miserable," which is where that typically leads.

Yeah, I think we often over-index on the cost, the perceived cost of stopping doing things the way that we're doing them. But forget about the opportunity cost of continuing to do the same thing.

Yeah, that's, yeah, that's what's interesting is that's also part of our nature, right? It's also part of our nature to stay with something that feels safe.

So—

And predictable is safe.

Yes, that's right. That's right.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And luckily, as authenticity matures us, as we evolve, being authentic, we become more and more sensitive. And that stuff becomes more and more painful where we're naturally kicked out of those cycles because we just can't handle them anymore because they're just too painful.

Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe and rate us in your podcast app. We'd love your feedback. So feel free to send us questions or comments. You can reach out to us, join our newsletter, or check out our courses at artofaccomplishment.com.

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