Principles of Managing Reality

Hey, welcome to another great day. Since I'm in California, that means we have electricity and nothing is on fire near me. It's amazing. What could make this day truly unique for you are some tactics that we're about to explore about managing reality. And who knows, this could be the most important podcast you've ever listened to.

Greetings folks and welcome to episode 396 of Business Brain, the entrepreneurs podcast here for Wednesday, September 7, 2022, where we are small businessing with our business brains and living life with our business brains every week and really every moment of every week. Sponsors for this episode include shopify.comsbs where you can go to get your 14 day trial and full access to their entire suite of features. And bambi.com b a m b e e.com where you can have Bambi help with your dedicated HR manager. It's great. 99 bucks a month is where their prices start. We'll talk more about each of those shortly here. For now, here in Durham, NH on Apple event Day, I'm Dave Hamilton and here in Lafayette.

God, I used to watch those Apple events so much. I'm Shannon Jean. Happy to be here and kind of happy that I'm not so connected to those events anymore. Sure, I still find them very interest, but my livelihood doesn't depend on them anymore. And for a long time I could not imagine my world without that type of thing. Yeah, you know, and it's kind of those things where you do it for so long, you start to get so focused and you know, we're going to talk about managing reality today. And that was for me, one of the hardest things about letting go and taking on something new and realizing that with that particular business that I had outlived my own usefulness and it was time to sell it to somebody else. It was very difficult for me to realize that I wouldn't wake up every day, look at Mac surfer, go to Mac observer, you know, get all those things going, follow every single event. But now, a few years after that ended, I'm, I'm happy to not be beholden to it, I should say.

Yeah, it's interesting because I, I never. Well, there was a time where I really obsessed over Apple news. Right. But even.

Well, you were in the business.

Well, even then, like I was always a fan of Apple's computers. Right. Like it started with the Apple to the Apple II series. Then, then it, you know, went to the Mac and obviously it spilled over into the iPhone and the Apple Watch and all of that stuff. But I was, I never, I never really cared much. Certainly not on a day to day basis. This might come as a surprise to a lot of people. I never really cared about Apple News. It was more about the products and the software, which is also a product. And my life before and now after Mac observer has been helping people get the most out of their computers. Generally troubleshooting, but not always teaching people about things they didn't know they could do with their technology and all that, that stuff. So for me, like the, the daily grind part of Mac observer, the daily grind of focusing on Apple's comings and goings was never truly captured me. Like, I like watching their events. I loved watching Steve Jobs on stage and I actually love Apple's new style of events where it is a produced event or a produced show. Right. Because they don't have, they don't have Steve Jobs anymore. They don't have anyone like him and they know that. Right. But what they do have is a fantastic creative team to build these productions that quite frankly I don't think they had back when Steve was doing the dog and pony shows and they didn't.

Yeah. And I like it too. And I like how they broadened out the presenters. It's people from all different walks of the company. So you get this kind of. I know this word is overused, but it's diverse and you hear from different people at Apple, which I actually like. I think it's pretty cool.

No, it's great. They've embraced who they currently are, not who they were. Yeah, right. And, and, and maybe that is who they were back then, but it just like Steve overshadowed it all or just the style of the, the event. But. So I always enjoyed the events mostly like there was, there were a few, even Steve, There were a couple of Steve Jobs keynotes that just went on too long. The 10 great things about OS10 or something at Mac World was. It was a notable flop in my opinion. And I don't think I'm alone there. But yeah, I never like the daily obsession with Apple News. For me it's interesting you mentioned Mac Surfer and Mac Observer. Thank you for saying that. That's great. But Max Surfer was where you'd go for the news. For me it was Mac Fix it and Macintosh. Right. But those were the trouble. Those were the troubleshooting sites. Yeah. We employed Ted Landau for a long time at Mac Observer.

Yeah, Rick Ford.

And Rick Ford. Yeah. But, but that was more about the, the, the nitty gritty. Right. The, the technical details because that was, that Helped me in my life, informed me in a way that helped me in my career of troubleshooting and helping other people. Right. So it was always about what can the tech do for my life? Not, I mean I, I was into the nitty gritty, but mostly just to, to, to sort of as to serve a greater need. So these Apple events are interesting. A lot of it. I have to go like starting a couple of weeks ago, I've been running the betas on my iPhone or whatever because I like to experience the new features, I like to have some working knowledge of them so that when our listeners of macgeekab start sending in questions, I've got some guidance for them. Right, yeah, makes sense. But I had to go start actively intentionally reading the rumor sites a couple of weeks ago so that I could go into today's event knowing what the industry thinks is going to happen, but it would not have been on my radar otherwise. Like even, even a year ago, running Mac observer, it just, it was like, oh yeah, I got to pay attention to the rumors. Okay, what are they saying now? It's like, wait, what do you mean they're not going to have an iPhone mini in the 14 size? I love the iPhone mini. Am I the only one that bought it? Evidently, yes.

So a couple more people, but not very many.

No, evidently not. So there we go.

Yeah, yeah, it's good. And you know, today we're going to talk about the principles of managing reality. Kind of a Ray Dalio thing. If you don't know Ray, I think that's how you pronounce. Pronounces. Yeah, his last name. Anyway, he's got super successful and clearly Apple even you know, with, with Steve Job who is, you know, the famous reality distortion field. But clearly a company that is famous for managing reality is, is Apple and I to your point. I really respect how they've shifted into managing things based on what their strengths are now versus relying on one rock star personality. And now they've let the production values step in to make it the wow factor maybe a little bit more. And they've introduced more people, which is I would imagine healthier for the business in the long run.

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Or Alex Shannon or Alex Banks.

Alex who? Yeah, that's great. The first one I love and we're talking, well, think of life as a game. And I'll read what? What Alex? I'll read our thoughts on this and then we can talk about our thoughts on this. No, Alex wrote each problem and failure you face is a puzzle you need to solve. When you solve the puzzle, you get a gem in the form of a principle. This helps you avoid similar problems and failures in the future. What have we been saying for seven and a half years? We love mistakes. We wrote a book called we love mistakes A lot about. Here it is. Right. Like you have to treat it as a game. You have to.

Well, yeah. And I met a guy, I'm a hunter. I hunt waterfowl in the winter. And I met this farmer. He was taking me out to show me this place to see If I wanted to lease it. And he made this. He. This is kind of this grizzly old guy, an old pickup truck, but obviously very successful. And he made a comment to me, he goes, you know, I was about 40 years old before I decided to get in the game. And I said, well. And I just kind of didn't say anything. You know, I just waited for him to keep going. And, you know, he talked about working for other people and doing all this kind of stuff. And he finally realized that to be successful, I had to get in the game and start experiencing these things, successes, failures, solving these problems, trying to figure out the puzzle.

Yeah.

And, you know, I think this encompasses it really well is you have to.

Or you.

I would encourage you to, you know, get involved, figure out these things. And getting out there on your own is obviously has worked for Dave and I, and I highly recommend it. And you know, it is a puzzle and it does need to be solved. But you're going to solve new things every single day.

Yes.

And just when you figure out, you think you're going to get. Oh, I got it figured out. You're going to get slammed with a bunch of them. You know, I woke up real early this morning and I've just got a ton of stuff in my head I've got to figure out. Solve these problems and everything. And it's all how you frame it. And so I really like this, that this concept, if you think about it as a puzzle to solve, you kind of put these things in order. They can help you find success.

Yeah. And you got to play with different orders. You said it's all about how you frame it. I would add a clause to that. It's all about how you frame it to yourself. And that brings us to point number two, which is pain plus reflection equals progress. The failures you encounter allow you to build a better system of principles. This makes your path to success smoother and smoother. And it's exactly what you were just saying, that you have to. It's about how you look at these things, not how you convince others. I mean, part of it.

Oh, yeah.

After the. After the fact, the secondary thing is how you convince others to look at them. And that's how you lead a team. But you have to do it for yourself first. Because if. If you're not looking at it the right way, you're not going to be able to convince other people to. So, you know.

Yeah. I look at this whole. These, these 10 things that we're going to go over today. It's almost like you're building a factory in your brain.

Yeah.

And you know, you've got to stack this stuff together. You're going to build this good foundation and you have to work on yourself first before you go out and start talking to other people and, or getting your team. And so much of this is self analysis, you know, these. Understanding that mistakes are going to happen, understanding that this is, you know, it is like a game and it is this puzzle you're putting together, you know, and so it's, you know, it's important that understand it's okay. We're going to build this thing in our head and then we're going to expand it out from there. I think that's, that'll help make it easy for sure.

Anyway, number three is. Oh, go ahead. Yeah, no, go ahead.

Well, yeah, I mean, number three, be radically open minded. You know, this is great. It's very difficult speaking from my own experience. You know, he says, seek the truth regardless of how hard it is to hear. What am I missing? What's wrong with this work? Do I know enough about this topic to have an opinion? You know? And he ends it. Subdue the ego and use feedback to grow. It's. That's difficult. It's for me speaking to myself, knowing that, you know, I'm weak in so many areas and I often overlook them. I have a hard time giving up. I have a hard time delegating. We've talked about this on the show before. I often think I'm hard to replace, you know, and that's. Those are not good things.

Yeah, that's. That's our ego talking. And yeah, it is like the ego has a place. I love what you've said before and I think you got this, or at least intuited it from listening to Scott Adams. But, but maybe not. I'll credit you and you can, you can credit somebody else. Yeah, but it was, you know, use the ego as a tool. And I mean, these things are super easy to say. Right. Like we can sit here and proselytize this stuff. It's super difficult to use your ego as a tool, meaning the moments where it's actually going to help you. And this requires a massive amount of self awareness that I certainly don't have. Right. But I strive for and you know, when it's really going to help me, using my ego as a tool is like. And letting my ego out is great, but other times you got to just suppress it and use humility and shut the ego down. Yeah, well, I don't. I Mean, honestly, I found. I find both of these things hard because there's moments, you know, where we were talking about this on we had that crossover episode with Gig Gab, and on the most recent episode, we were talking about a thing where I think it was Todd Zuckerman, who's the drummer from Styx, put out a thing that said, as a drummer, you need to play with confidence. And he's right. In a rock band setting or any kind of chamber music setting, that you have to play with confidence. Because if your bandmates feel that you are not confident, then they like, that shakes everything, right?

Yeah, it makes sense.

But where that gets really difficult is, let's say I'm subbing on a gig and we're playing a song I've never played before. Right. I still have to play with confidence. I remember one. We were literally on stage. We were doing this cabaret thing at a theater, which was a bunch of kids were coming on and singing. Each kid sang one song. We had one rehearsal, and then we played this show. And at set break for this thing, or whatever you're supposed to call it in a theater intermission or something, I had this. Somebody mentioned Kelly Clarkson. I was like, oh, God, why is that sticking in my brain? Was I supposed to prepare something? I don't think so. And so we get on stage, we're three songs into the second act, second set, whatever, and the music director plays the piano. He looks at me, he's like, yeah, it's whatever. That Kelly Clarkson tune. I'm like, great. There's no drums on this, right? And he looks at me and he's like, you're kidding, right? And I'm like, no. And he's like, no, no. This is like. It's like a punk song. It's like the drums drive this. And I'm like, crap. I did not. I don't know this song at all. And I'm like, are there? So I asked him the important questions. Are there breaks in it. Okay, great. Do you know the drum part? Yes. Okay. And he and I had worked together a ton, so we had a bit of a, you know, a mind meld ability. And I said, all right, you guide me here. But I had to play as though I knew the part. I had to play as though I wrote it, even though I had no freaking idea what was happening next. In that sense, using my ego to pretend like I was confident was really good. But in the same moment, also using humility with that one human that was going to guide me through this. It's Two things. And this happens in business all the time, and I screw it up all the time. I'm often reflecting back to use the pain plus reflection equals progress. And saying, okay, how would I have handled that differently? And in that moment, actually, I did the right thing. In reflecting back, it's like, well, I mean, really, what I should have done is prep the stupid song the day before. But in light of or in lieu of that, I think I did the right thing. But I don't always do that thing.

Yeah. Learning to ramp your ego up and down is what Scott Adams says.

Yeah. Okay.

I also call it like reading the room. If you're in a group or working with people or in some situation that calls for you to stand up and be confident and to take on some role to help move things forward, you should do that if it calls for you to kind of lay back. And I always say, hey, I think I'm a pretty good leader, but I think I'm also a very good follower. You know, if someone else steps up and you're like, hey, you know, tell me what to do, and I'll just go grind it out, I think those are really good skills to work on. And you always have to keep working on it.

Yes. Yeah. Right. It's a constant learning experience. And the next one feeds into this, too. Number four is use root cause analysis. All problems are manifestations of their root causes. Do you lose track of time? Are you late for meetings, calls, or appointments? Learn principles of scheduling reminders to avoid the pain of being late. And this is, quite frankly, I. I think this is one of the places where I project the most, Shannon, because I get really frustrated really fast with people who, like, this is a great example, who are late for things or whatever it's like. Or don't get their tasks done. And it's like, why haven't you solved this problem yet? And I know that. What I'm saying is I'm trying to solve this. Like, I'm perpetually trying to solve this problem for myself and trying all different kinds of things. And I've got a couple of good systems in place that keep me from being destitute and, you know, all of that stuff. But I know that I could be better at all of these things. In fact, we were talking about my scheduling this morning where I was trying to mold reality around time and especially when someone else is involved, AKA you. My. You know, we're co hosts here. Yes. My. My. My reality of time needs to match yours. And especially it needs to match the Time that we've scheduled, and I made it. But it was. It was. It was tight because I. I. Yeah, I was. I overbooked myself, in a sense, but you know this. But I get super frustrated when people. When. When. Especially for this stuff. Yeah.

Yeah, I do, too. And I do, you know, like this. It's. I think it's a great idea to lay out the symptoms of what's going on, but then really look deeper for what the systemic problem is and see if you can figure it out regarding yourself. And then looking at, okay, what ways can I, you know, address those systemic issues? And for me, I always. If I'm having the same systemic issue over and over again, then I really have to work on it. And I'll write it on my quartet board in front of me, take care of these things. And it's just something you got to keep reminding yourself at.

It is. Yeah, absolutely. Number five is find your weaknesses. We're kind of. Now that we're off to the races, we're getting ahead of ourselves here. We're saying all these things. Finding a weakness is like finding a leaky pipe in your house. Like, I'm always happy. I. I'm not happy when I see the results of a leaky pipe. I am very happy when I find which pipe is leaking, right? Because then I can get to solving. I'm not. I'm not trying to hunt for the problem. I know the symptom now. I know where the problem is. Then it's, you know, you can find a workaround. So now you get. Well, the first thing you do is you get a bucket to collect the water wherever it's coming. You can run away. You could sell the house. You could build a principle. Right. You could learn how to fix the pipe, develop principles to deal with weaknesses. And I think he presented these three things. The find a workaround, the runaway, or build a principle as three alternatives. I think they can be mixed and matched, Although I'm not convinced there are times when running away is the right answer, even in retrospect. But I think his point is figure out how to fix the pipe. Figure out how to fix yourself. Yeah.

Even if you can't fix it. Correct. That principle could be, I need to bring in talent when I don't have those skills. Right. So, yes, it could be a weakness. But a principle we talk about on the show frequently is once you've identified, like, I suck at accounting and things. So I've always. Either have a very good accountant. I have a great accountant that I work with. But when I start new businesses, I'm often looking for a financial partner that can help offset that weakness. And then I can go talk and lead from the top line and sales and marketing and all that kind of stuff while some, well, I know someone else is going to help me with the finance part.

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Well, that's. It's very reactive, Right?

Yes. Right.

And sometimes you do. I mean, you do have to grind things out daily. There's lots of people that have tried to design their entire life and never get anything done. And I know some of those folks, great people. But taking action is, I. I think maybe a better way to say. Well, it's just a different way to say it. You're going to create these systems which we love and embrace on this show over goals. I think it's better to, you know, build the systems that you can adapt over time, and then you're going to take action to implement those systems. And both of them are, you know, I mean, Alex says, you know, better design, better outcome. I don't know. I think they're equally weighted and it depends on maybe timing when it's important that you're, you know, doing this designing of systems versus when it's important that you just have to get the work done. It varies and you can't get. Right.

I mean, I think what you're saying is right. I don't. I didn't interpret what Alex was saying as in disagreement with that. The way I interpreted this was if you have a good system, if you implement on a good system, if you take action on a good system, you're gonna have a better outcome than you would if you're just taking action with no system. That's.

Agree.

That's. That's how I interpreted this. The. The better the design, AKA the better the system you've created, the better the outcome you're going to wind up with in most cases. I mean, sometimes we gotta fly by the seat of our pants. Right. It's an emergency.

Yeah.

You've never done this before. You need to be solving while you're planning. Right. Like, it's. Sometimes it's just how it is.

That's a system, too.

That.

That's a system too.

It's a system you've developed. Yeah. In creation at the time. Right. You know, but. But then you can. You can refine that after the fact when you kind of postmortem an emergency or something. So. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's good.

That's great.

He.

Number seven.

Yeah.

Oh, go ahead.

No, no, you take it.

Okay. Yeah, yeah. Number seven is, you know, write down your principles for me. This is. I like this. It's almost like my TO did list that we've talked about on the show Record every encounter you have in, you know, loss of a Job, personal disagreement when you're late for a meeting. So those are all negatives. I think you should do positives as well as well write how you did and how you should handle each one. Update this as you get more data to form your list of principles. Yeah, and they've got. Like I said, he focused on things that went wrong, but I think you can also do things that went right and create those principles as well.

Yeah, I think I agree with you. And my guess is that Alex and even Ray Dalio would agree with you. In the context of this thread, everything is about finding out, being more aware of the things you've done wrong, and fixing them. And so that's where this principles comes idea makes sense. The definition of principles in this thread is things you learned from your mistakes. Right. Like that's. But so in this, in this sense, yeah, but I, I do agree with you. It's important to celebrate the wins as much as the failures. Like, you don't want to give greater weight to either one of those things because you can learn from the failures and the wins fuel you. So when you're in the middle of one of those failures, you're like, okay, yep, I f this one up. Okay.

If you build that. Yeah. If you build the factory in your head with garbage material like substandard construction equipment, it's going to fall apart. It's the same, you know, if your, your thought process is always focused on what you got wrong, you have to mix in. That's how you build a foundation that you can have strength no matter how small it is. That's the whole concept of the to did list is to remind you that, you know, you probably got more done today than you think. And so you take the time to recognize those things and go, you know, that that was important. Yesterday I had to go buy a generator. And I felt during it, as I was sweating in the 115 degree heat out here, I was like, this is a waste of time. But it's really not a waste of time because when the power goes out here and I need my house to work so I can get on WI fi and get some work done, you know, that's a success and that's a good thing to do.

Yeah, you're talking to a guy who not only owns a portable generator that can plug into his house, but now owns a whole house generator that will kick in whenever it needs it.

So yeah, never thought I'd need that in California, but.

Right. Yeah, exactly. We shouldn't need it here either. The Main issue. And I know you have very different issues there, but the main issue we have here is that. Well, we, we about 100 years ago we reforested most of New England. It was all just fields and stuff where the sheep would graze. And then I didn't know that. Yeah, that that became a not as profitable business. So we reforest. Forested it with, which was great because we needed more trees and we could become a logging thing. But we reforested it with pine trees and that's a great idea for about the first 80 to 90 years. And then those trees start falling down because guess what? It turns out pine is kind of soft. And when we ran our electrical grid here, especially in New Hampshire, we ran it all above ground next to guess what? Pine trees.

So we do the same out here.

Yeah. Well guess what? When those pine trees start to fall, Shannon, and trust me, they will fall, then your power goes out. And our neighborhood was like when we moved in here, it took about three years for them to call our, our neighborhood tree Mageddon because we would just have like twice a year we'd have these like three to seven day power outages. So yeah, yeah, it's fun stuff, really fun. My favorite was coming home from vacation two days into a seven day power outage. So you know, you get home from vacation, you just want to chill, you want to do some laundry, you got to like get your like rekindle your life and all that. No, that wasn't part of the, wasn't part of the plan.

Crazy.

Yeah. The next one is, remember the 8020 rule? 80% of your outputs come from 20% of your inputs. This will save you from getting bogged down with unnecessary details. Once you've gotten most of the learning, you need to make a good decision, move on. This is easier for some of us than others, but super powerful. Yeah. Don't obsess over the last 20%. It took me a long time to even begin to learn this lesson well enough to actually implement it. And as soon as I did, that's where things began to take off for me. Where it was like, wait a minute, I really don't need to obsess over this last bit of minutiae because I don't know if you folks have noticed over the last seven and a half years, but I can become a very particular person. But there are times when it's like you just got to let it go and move on. And I routinely need reminders to let it go. But when I hear that it's like, ah, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Where's my ego? I need to push it down a little bit right now. Gotta move on.

Well, and one thing I think, think you say that I like is, you know, perfection is the enemy of production. I think that's how you say it.

Something like that.

Something like that. But it, you know, it's true. You. You have to have this, you know, minimal, minimally viable product, you know, and that goes for your decisions as well. Once you have enough, you, you know, you gotta go. You got to move forward. You got to not be worried about making that mistake.

Yeah, Yeah, I like this number.

Nine is. Yeah. One plus one equal three. If you collaborate with another person, you'll be three times more effective than if you're operating independently. One will see what the other might miss. Absolutely. And you could hold each other to higher standards. Absolutely. This is why I'm on this podcast with Dave.

Same. Literally, this show would have started late if it weren't for you today. If it were just up to me, it would have been like, oh, I got back from my bike ride and I have five minutes before I got to record. I'm literally sitting here shirtless. Like, you know, that's just how it happens. Yeah, it's totally fine.

It's the concept I've shared before. You know, two guys go to the gym, and when they leave the gym, they hand each other their gym bag and they say, I'll see you tomorrow. And it changes the whole dynamic because the other person's like, wow, this. This person is. Is relying on me to be back here. I have to be back. I can't. I can't make an excuse and not go back to the gym.

And you're. You can. And if you don't have a partner, you can hire someone to whom you need to be accountable. In fact, I will tell you this. If you've never hired someone, as soon as you do, you are now accountable to that person. Like, I know you're paying them, but they are relying on you a. To pay them. But more than that, they're relying on you to help tell them what you expect out of them. And guess what? There's going to be some things they get done faster than you think, and then they're sitting there twiddling their thumbs. You are now accountable for that.

So it's really powerful. There's. I think there's a phrase, you know, hire an assistant and double your income. And it really works because it forces you, to today's point. It forces you to Think constantly about, okay, what can I offload to this person? What new things can they do for me? And it changes the whole framework. So having someone, you know work with you, whether it's a partner, whether it's an employee, an assistant that you hired, it's. It's incredibly powerful.

Last one. I love this, as I do all of them. The last one really kind of pulls it all together, push through. You can make great things happen, but you must make great things happen. Times will come when the choice will be to plot along normally or to push through to achieve the goal. The choice should be obvious. I love this. It's the first time he gets a little snarky in this, but it's. But I like this level of snark. It's like, yeah, and you always. I like the way you phrase this even better when you're faced with this choice. I'll say the easy path or the one path or the more difficult path. I don't want to say one path is easy. Pick what story you want to tell in the end, and then the path is obvious.

Yeah. I love to talk about things I've achieved, things that I've gotten done that may be different than other people. Maybe I'm a braggart at heart, but I try to do it with a little humility. But I find that people like listening to stories like that, and they like listening to stories where you really screwed up as well. I always talk about my $100,000 television because I thought it would be great to get into that business. And I kept one TV just to remind myself that is when flat panels were first coming out, and people are like, oh, look at that thing. You've had that for a long time. And it's in a spare room. And I say, oh, yeah, that's my $100,000 television set. And so those. Those stories are just as powerful. Yeah. I made the decision. It seemed really obvious to me at the time that we should be in the TV business, but it still served a great purpose, and I learned a lot from it. And. And the story analogy really works well for me because I like to share those stories. And like I said, people seem to react to them pretty well when I'm sitting around the fire or over a beer. But it doesn't make it easier.

This.

This. These few sentences are. It does seem very obvious, but that doesn't make it easy to. To make that decision. No, I'm finding myself kind of right now, I'm at that. One of those points, and it's Difficult to take the leap and to go out and do something new versus doing the same thing over and over again that, you know, works, but, you know, it's not. It does. I've already milked the story of this specific scenario, and it's time to go do something different, to create something new.

Yeah, well, I mean, that's. The change is scary. Of course it is, right? Like, it's just how it works. We're. We are wired to find shortcuts, right? It's what our brain does. If you stop and actually think about all the sensory input you get, even just in this moment, you think, at least I'll make a presumption. You think what you're doing is listening to this podcast, but at the same time that you're listening to this podcast, you are ignoring lots of things around you, right? Your brain has learned how to take shortcuts, to be productive and to not drive you crazy. Compare that to a baby, right? Every little thing is distracting that human because it hasn't learned these shortcuts yet. And these shortcuts become. We learn to rely on them because we have to, right? We need to make most of our lives happen on autopilot, but we also need to be aware of the things that are happening on autopilot in our lives so that we can choose to change the ones we want to change. And that's the hard, scary part right there, is telling our brains, no, no, we're not going to do this the same way we always have. We're going to change. It's super scary and again, you know, scarier for. For some more than others. And as we're learning more about the various mental illnesses that kind of all lump into that obsession category, those tend to be the ones that resist change the most because it's part of the symptoms of that. So it's tough. Yeah, it's tough.

So great tips. There's a whole course and a bunch of different stuff@instrispects.com where Ray Dalio talks about the book. He's got a new version of the book out, of course, but there's a lot of interesting things up there that you can do. There's personality assessments that I thought were pretty cool for individuals and to help you get through this stuff. And, you know, I love this. This quote, you know, about halfway down the page. Principles are ways of successfully dealing with reality to get what you want out of life. And, you know, we always talked. We talk on the show about being able to live a charmed life that we, I think, both of us would agree. We've been able to do and, and it's using these concepts and, you know, being fortunate, taking advantage of opportunities when they came along, but also looking at these, these 10 steps that we just went over. So we'd love to hear about, you know, what you use, what principles you've come up with that have made you successful, or even the mistakes you've made, especially those.

Feed.

Yeah, those are awesome. Feedback at BusinessBrain show come talk to us. We'd love to hear from you.

Yeah, absolutely. I. I want to hear your mistakes. We don't have to put your name on it, but we're happy to if you want us to keep living that charmed Life. Feedback at BusinessBrain show we'll see you next.