Dr. Chris Stout | The Importance of Mental Health for Success in Life and Work

This is the let's Grab Coffee podcast

and I'm your host, George Khalifa.

Hey, what's going on? Hope you had a great week. I know it's Friday morning. Hopefully you have that coffee right next to you. Ready to go, Ready to tackle the day? I'm super excited to bring you this episode specifically because I know you're absolutely going to love it.

I got a lot of value from it. So here we go.

I sit down with Dr. Chris Stout, whose career includes business, government, and nonprofits. He's traveled the world, and by world, I mean 100 countries, published 38 books, won a wide range of accolades. In fact, Purdue named a scholarship in his honor. He's founded a kindergarten in Tanzania, was interviewed on Oprah, cnbc, cnn, npr. He's a licensed clinical psychologist and founding director of the center for Global Initiatives, a top rated healthcare nonprofit. He's even in the entrepreneurial space, both as a advisor and an angel Investor. He is Dr. Chris Stout, what was

your knack to sort of get in this field? Like, what was the passion behind it, the motivation?

Well, thank you, George. It's good to be on it. That's a great, great starter question. It was a little bit like how I've gotten into a variety of other things sort of inadvertently or accidentally. I started off actually in undergrad as a math major. I just was really kind of a proverbial math geek and really enjoyed that. And back in the day, this was when dinosaurs walked the earth. So it was kind of pre computer science. So you basically started off as a math undergrad in the school of science and then took programming classes and whatnot. So you had to take some liberal arts classes. I took a psychology class. I'd never taken Indian high school or anything and then just really fell in love with it. So the, the nice thing was that the psychology department was also in the school of science. A lot of the credits I had already taken would transfer in. And then I just really kind of went to town with it. Psychology is so vast and diverse with so many different kinds of areas. I actually wound up, if memory serves, I think with my undergrad degree, I had like 52 credits just in psychology. I think I took about every psychology class they had. I became a TA for abnormal psych, et cetera, and the whole abnormal psych kind of with some research projects we did for summer work study too. Kind of said, you know, I really want to go to graduate school to really do anything that the old joke with, what do you do with an undergrad degree in Psychology while you apply to graduate school. So that's exactly what I did and really wanted to get involved in a program that had a very clinical orientation. The one that I was involved in was specifically connected to a hospital system. That hospital system was connected to residential treatment, outpatient, therapeutic day schools. So long story short, that was kind of my starter and just because I was always a little interested in a variety of other kinds of things simultaneously. Once I was finished my degree and got licensed and got into practice, I had a small private practice where I worked with families and children, but then also got involved in administrative things within the hospital and within the day schools and always liked to teach. So I would teach a class here and there adjunctively at other graduate school programs in clinical psych and then got administratively involved with in that hospital system, like I said, but then also with helping out with other startups. The professional school teaching kind of evolved into being involved with a couple of the medical schools in the Chicago area. I was on faculty in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences for a while at Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine and then probably really spent my most time at University of Illinois at Chicago and their College of Medicine in Department of Psychiatry. And again, kind of being a little bit Mr. Magoo with this. During that time I had done some work with actually the Department of Emergency Medicine, which is a story for another day. But that led to a great relationship with a fellow named Tim Erickson, who is the residency director of that he got tapped to become the first director of their center for Global Health, which was an interest that I had as well. And that then was sort of got me more into the field and trajectory of public health and global health.

Kind of wanted to ask, like I know your. Your entrance into psychology, a lot of it is around mental health and I know a lot of the stuff you do on the side, you know, whether it's endurance training or exercise or just living a fit life. I know that's super important to you, but for a lot of people kind of in entrepreneurship and business, the vision for mental health kind of always gets put on the side. For most of it, it's not something typically focus on. And coming from the Middle East, Chris, I think there's a weird negative connotation towards it. Like if you say, you know, I'm focusing on my mental health, you you get these weird raised eyebrows. Like people just don't take that seriously, you know, what was that like? I guess for one, why is it so important to you? And two, what would you say for People listening that they could do even just kind of today as a head start to start really thinking about their mental health and taking it seriously.

A great question, George. Thank you. I guess maybe to start off to kind of unpack that, because there's a lot of parts to that question, to the what I would think for hopefully a helpful answer, I think, you know, stigma, it doesn't matter kind of where anybody's from. I think there still is sort of a. Just levels of degree perhaps of stigma with mental health issues. For some reason, there's always kind of like this classic blaming the victim. If someone gets pancreatic cancer, no one blames them that they got pancreatic cancer, and they treat them with typically great sympathy and empathy and how can I be of help? But if someone else says, I feel like I can't get out of bed in the morning because I'm so depressed. And people maybe don't have a context to understand that, for example, someone might have greater empathy and sympathy towards someone to say, well, you just lost a loved one, you know, your parent just died, or you know, there's been some kind of, you know, tragic event in your life. And then people have a context to understand that. But without that context, oftentimes people have a very difficult time having that same level of humane empathy back towards the person that might be suffering with something that might be more psychologically or behaviorally based. Sometimes those kinds of problems also manifest in ways that upset people. Sometimes people will self medicate for anxiety and depression with drugs or alcohol. And then people, it gets into a blaming the victim paradigm where people then say, well, you know, then, you know, I'm mad at you because you, you know, drink too much or because you use substances, you know, too often, or, you know, you're a bad parent because you're doing that, or a bad partner or what have you. So all of those things, I think sort of add up to that. It's, it's sort of ironic to me, and I guess, you know, you're asking a psychologist this question. But most all of the kinds issues that people deal with, again, are a matter of degree when it comes to behavioral health. Pardon me, we all feel anxious at some point. There's that. There's no human being that I know of that's never experienced some degree of anxiety at some point in time in their life. Maybe it was before they got married, or maybe it was before a final or maybe some big event or whatever. So people can understand what that feeling is like. I think people sometimes also have likely experienced a sad time or a down mood or the blues, or varying levels of depression based again upon certain kinds of circumstances in their lives. But we, for some odd reason, tend to disconnect that even when it's with our friends or our loved ones who are doing that in a situation that we don't think justifies feeling anxious or depressed. So having, having said that, I think for ourselves, you know, some people just are naturally anxious, some people are naturally pessimistic, some people are naturally optimistic, some people are naturally happy and upbeat. So when we're different from whatever it is that we might be, and that difference is something that feels uncomfortable or alien in a negative kind of way for us, that perhaps is the first thing, regardless of stigma or regardless of whatever else we might think or believe about mental health kinds of issues becomes an opportunity to say, whoa, this is happening to me, what can I do about that? There's a variety of things and advice is kind of difficult to give because one size fits few. But basically, depending upon what the person's problem is, there can be just sometimes creating a change in your life of self care, of tweaking your diet, of maybe getting more exercise or better quality sleep, or going back to a favorite hobby that maybe someone has stopped doing because they've gotten so busy with their startup or because their job has become so demanding that oftentimes those are the self care kinds of things, the things that we might misinterpret as trivial or unimportant go by the wayside. Sometimes family becomes that way too. People say, well, the most important thing to my life is my children or my partner, my spouse, my family, etc. My parents. And when people get busy, it's oftentimes ironically, those are the first things that kind of, you know, are left on their own to take care of themselves. So oftentimes it's recognizing that there is some difference that's unwanted. Thinking about what's different today than at a time when things I wasn't feeling this way and then taking some proactive action to get back to those areas and times and places where things were a better time and to see if that might be helpful. Sometimes that does the trick, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes trying something new and different can be helpful. Sometimes people find meditation helpful if they've never meditated before. Sometimes bringing more exercise into their life can be helpful if they've been more, you know, sedentary, etc. And sometimes going and seeing a healthcare professional in particular. My bias would be a psychologist to get counsel on, pardon me, what can I do different? Getting an assessment done and then getting a very proactive approach to dealing with whatever the problems are. Oftentimes those problem solving kinds of approaches can scale to different, bigger problems in the future, which will inevitably happen to all of us and can be very helpful in terms of getting through whatever, you know, that difficulty or that bump in the road is at that point in time. But being able to have better tools. Pardon me, I've got a bad voice today. Having better tools in our toolkit that we can, you know, use and in other times to be able to make life better for ourselves and those that we care about.

Yeah, 100%. I mean, I think what I love most about your answer, and it's not sort of the traditional one, is like typically you'll ask this and an answer may be around kind of medication, right? I mean, hopefully not, but unless it's really warranted. But what I love about your answer, it's really about picking a hobby, making sure you're exercising, watching what you eat, getting enough sleep. And I think I've seen this even within myself. And I think everybody obviously goes through a funk. Right. I mean, I've definitely felt days where I think I did feel depressed for different reasons. Right. It might be working on something that doesn't give me energy. It might be, you know, realizing that I'm not exercising to the point where I should be, and it's kind of draining me. And I think just kind of realizing those points in life is super important. Another one recently that I kind of wanted to ask you about because I've been seeing it surfaced a bit more is meditation. I'm not sure if you personally meditate, but I've been seeing meditation as a linkage to more positive mental health a bit more recently and kind of wanted to get your take on it.

Yeah, I. I have attempted with meditation in a variety of different kinds of ways. I will periodically, when I'm really kind of, you know, at a high stress point, the kinds of things that I'll do. I've used the probably five meditation apps on my phone, but the one that I use the most and it's. And that's still sadly episodic. I mean, I really do want to try and embed that as more of a routine thing rather than a, you know, break glass in case of emergency kind of thing, which is how I use it now, is calm. I really like calm. I like the person's voice in it. I like the ability to, for some reason, for me, just the audio stuff is really nice and I really enjoy the one of like raindrops on leaves in the forest. For some reason, I've listened to storms.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? I've listened to waves, you know, all these other things. But for some reason, and maybe it's just I've conditioned that myself now as well too, kind of behaviorally that when I start to hear that I immediately, you know, probably, you know, sort of feel better and feel like my blood pressure's, you know, probably gone down a few points as well too. But I've also done what's called progressive muscle relaxation, which isn't probably necessarily meditation, but, you know, it can be certainly used that way. I found that very helpful and probably something I've been most consistently incorporating because you can kind of really do it anywhere. You can do it 30 seconds before getting up to the dais to give a talk. You can do it. I did it yesterday before I had a meeting driving in my car is, you know, different kinds of breathing techniques. And there's like someone referred to a menu of breathing techniques which I really liked because I thought, you know, well, sometimes you need the hardcore ones. You're really hungry and you need it. Sometimes you just need a little light snack of a little, you know, tweak and tune up. But the whole. There's a budding already existing, but I think it's growing science around the whole physiology of how our bodies react when we've changed our breathing patterns. And I've also, with a little bit of a jaundiced eye, perhaps looked into the Wim Hof breathing styles and things like that. There's no way I get even close to anything like the stuff that he does. And I've never really taken the training. I've downloaded one of his manuals, but again, it's one of those things I'm like to do list. But I find that very, very helpful. And I know people that really find benefit from that. There's meditation retreats, there's no talking meditation retreats. There's all these other kinds of things. So my best advice is when you find something that works, keep with it. Don't expect that it will always work at the same strength all the time under all situations. Nothing does. I people take ibuprofen because aspirin doesn't work, you know, et cetera. So nothing is always kind of the magic silver bullet for every ill. But I think that maybe the lesson from that is to iterate to pivot, to try something Different. See if it works this time. If it doesn't, you know, keep looking and keep trying to find something and problem solve, solve around it. But probably the episodic thing that I've done has been more like transcendental meditation where there's a repetitive nonsense mantra kind of thing and that I found very valuable. But I still find my mind drifting off and whatnot. So I'm a work in progress on that. So how about you? Do you have a practice or is this something you're interested in personally?

Yeah. Well, funny, you bring up a couple points. So I've never done the silent meditation, although I have a close friend of mine in Toronto who has done that. He really recommended it. I mean, I think for a lot of extroverts that would probably seem like the scariest thing to ever do in life. But like myself, you know, someone social and stuff, I'd want to like befriend everybody in this retreat

as a podcast host. That would be tough.

I don't know, I just need to put out a story. But so he told obviously he had really good things to say about that. Kind of a different experience. I've been doing Wim Hof's method in terms of cold showers recently. So not necessarily meditation, but for me personally I think, and what I've tried to do is kind of embed breathing to your point, in different ways. I had a friend of mine in Ottawa who's Indian and one time his dad invited me over to his house at like 6am it was one of those like monk stories that you often hear in movies. Oh my God, this is so cool. You know, I'm going to a buddy who's like a first generation Indian and teaching me a method called Kapalbhati. And they're like different breathing techniques. And I was like intently listening and trying to do this. And so I think what I really try to do is more apply the breathing techniques when I feel anxious. To your point, like let's say I have a big presentation. I think we all, you know, feel the tightness of breathing, right? You start basically not breathing anymore or that it's like shallow breaths, like your stress starts building up. So I think that's super important. And last thing I'll say on that is yoga. Like yoga has really helped me breathe a bit more. And the reason is like you're doing all these tough exercises, you know, like a downward dog for example, and the instructor tells you to hold it for like five minutes and then tells you to breathe and you're Just looking like I'm about to die in this, in this hot. This is not so anyway, these are some things I do.

That's a good point because one of the things that's sort of been on my ever growing list and needing to get to is to insinuate more yoga into actually kind of my health routine, so to speak. So I find, you know, as my miles increase on running or as you know, I'm you know, rotating some kind of set of, you know, lifting exercises or whatever, I just become so much more tight and stiff. So. Yeah, so one of the things I've tried to do because I like to work out in the mornings is, is then like in what I've told myself and I won't tell you how consistent or inconsistent I've been with this, but is that like it like three evenings a week with the day's done, you know, I haven't had dinner yet or anything to do. I have like a half hour yoga from a. I don't know if you're familiar with Tony Horton. He had like P90X and well, he's got a P90X3 that's been out for a number of years now. So it's like a 30 minute. One of them is yoga and it's a 30 minute yoga that's, you know, you can, the nice thing about their stuff is that you can kind of tweak it. So if there's certain exercises that you're, you can rock at, you can do the hard one and if there are certain things that you're still kind of, you know, a newbie and a beginner at or just, it's just hard for you for whatever reason you can, you know, make an accommodation. You can use a yoga block or you can, you know, do something different. And I found that is very helpful. So, so that's kind of my game plan is just to really kind of make that not a substitute for a workout but an augmentation to. If it's a running day, then that's one of the days that, that evening I need to really make sure I get that yoga in.

Yeah, it's super helpful. I mean, last thing I'll say on this, to your point, especially if you're running like let's say you're training for a marathon. I know for me I had a sort of inflamed IT band and just kind of integrating yoga or at least some progressive stretching in there really, really helps.

Yeah.

So definitely recommend it. I did want to ask. So I came across something really interesting. And one of the things I was reading about you, and it's basically titled, like, Battling Mediocrity, which I found really interesting, and I kind of assumed why. And given your sort of personality and the things you love to do, it makes a lot of sense. But I kind of wanted to get your take. Like, what do you define, first of all as mediocrity, and what do you do personally to overcome that?

Well, again, it's probably, you know, different variations and different. Different shades for different people, but I feel like just kind of same old, same old, just kind of doing the same thing, being in a rut. You know, there's the old cliche joke of, you know, the difference between. The only difference between a grave and a rut is the length and the depth. So. So that's kind of what I think is mediocrity. I mean, I feel like, you know, there's certain things that I am definitely mediocre on and will always be mediocre on because they don't really matter a whole lot to me. So I think that's fine. I give myself the pass on that, you know, that that's okay. But the stuff that's truly important, you know, for anybody, whatever that might be, I mean, it. No matter what a person's. Whatever position or status or relationships or job or whatever, whatever it is you want to look at someone, whatever lens you want to look at them through something you care about, you know, then. Then you should really rock it, you know, you should really, you know, and again, I can't. I will always be a mediocre runner, you know, I will never, you know, win anything or whatever, but. But I enjoy running. But, you know, so that's. That's fine, and I am. I am at peace with that. But, you know, when it comes to my career or when it comes to time with my family, or when it comes to, you know, certain kinds of things, you know, I feel like, you know, I. At some levels, you know, maybe, like, you want to be a craftsman with it, so to speak, like you really want to, you know, like, I might spend an inordinate amount of time on a couple of paragraphs on some paper that I'm writing because I really want to have. Get the message across. I want it to be clear. I want it to be clever. I want it to be engaging, you know, and I want to have an economy of words. I don't want to be too wordy. I want it to be taught. So, you know, and it's for lots of Folks, it's just, you know, really, you know, my emails are not that way. I'm fine to have mediocre emails, but, you know, when it's stuff that's important to a person, whatever those things are, and they vary again, probably from time to time and phase of life and circumstance, but that they're probably for all of us. There are things people might call it their passion or their passion project or whatever, and that's, I totally get that and that's fine, but I feel like that's almost kind of been overused somewhat. So my thinking of it is just that there's certain things that we want to be rock stars on that really, we dig, we enjoy, we go into flow. Those are the places to battle your own personal mediocrity. And then if there's opportunities where there might be visibility for that, which is definitely an option, not a requirement, then maybe you can inspire other people around those same kinds of things. It may not be the task at hand, but it may be the process at hand, how you go about deconstructing something to then go do whatever it is that you love doing, like a, like a Tim Ferriss might, you know, deconstruct something. So that's kind of that, that's my, my general point of, you know, what I think about that and trying to be championing, you know, people, you know, hey, let's go. Whatever your thing is, you know, rock your thing, make that, make that really exciting and, you know, we'll make it even more, you know, that person, I suspect, will feel even better about it themselves.

Yeah, well, even like linking this back to mental health, when we were talking about that, like it's so important just to, to actually set, set a goal that somewhat makes you uncomfortable psychologically and that, you know, when you, when you look back on to your point, talking about the process that's so enjoyable, you know, like running your first marathon might seem crazy, even if it's just 5km, but you set that date four months out. You know, you do a couple runs a week and you see yourself progressing. And every run you feel better, you're breathing better, you know, you, and you look in the mirror and you just feel good, you look good, you're not self conscious about taking off your shirt anymore. I think those small, tiny improvements and courses of action just lead to such tremendous results, I think psychologically. And that, I think, trickles in different parts of your life, wouldn't you say?

Yeah, I totally agree and I really like how you said it because I think One of the other benefits to that process is that, okay, using your example. Spot on. Of wanting to, you know, go run a marathon or 5K or whatever you want to run. That. That process does a variety of things. That process probably makes you focus on your eating a little differently than if you didn't have a race coming up. That process may get you out socially with some other folks, with some other runners. So you've got some, you know, some friends to, you know, you're having a social time as well as an exercise time. If you've told other people about it, then you've got, you've got, you know, maybe inadvertently created an accountability group that says, you know, hey, George, how's that running going? You go, oh. Or I know they're going to ask me about that at work, so I better, you know, I better not, you know, slough off on Sunday because they're going to ask me, you know, to do my long run, you know, on Monday when I show up at work kind of a thing. So I have found that those kinds of things, and to your point, you know, feeling good about how you, you know, when you look at yourself in the mirror, those are all, you know, there's, there's, you know, you probably sleep better, you probably drink less or, you know, don't drink at all, or, you know, whatever. All these kinds of things kind of go part and parcel within. What you might say in your head is, I have this one goal to run this race. Well, but then you have maybe 10 other things that you've tweaked in your life. Those little, what might seem little, you know, all start to add up. And they can add up negatively too, you know, in the opposite direction. Well, I'm going to sit on the couch, I'm going to binge on Netflix. I'm going to eat a cake. I'm going to not work out. I'm going to do whatever. So all those little things, well, what's the big deal if I. There's probably no big deal if you do it just every so often. But if you do it all the time, those little things all the time can add up to positive things if they're healthy or not. So positive things if they're problematic. That's why I really encourage people. I feel like there's a lot of things that people can do, you know, that might be look like by outward appearance, like you're moving in one goal direction and it probably, and it is that it's not, it's not untrue. But you then, as the person doing whatever that is, start to see all these other kind of little interstitial benefits and things that you go, huh, I'm gonna. I'm gonna keep this up. This is. You know, eating this way is really great. I. Or doing this. Having this kind of exercise, you know, really helps me have a solid night's sleep, et cetera. These are kind of cool habits. Nice side effects, if you will. And to your point about, you know, mental health and stuff, generally people. You know, exercise is one of the key things that people often prescribe in the behavioral health field because it's so beneficial and so in these ways that you've just described, as well as emotionally and as well as cognitively, we think more clearly, we're more oxygenated. For me, it's like a time for me. We've talked about meditation here, but not that I meditate when I run, but my mind gets kind of clear after about the first half mile to mile. And I take a little mini recorder. I don't run with a phone. I run with this little mini recorder. Because I find that by the second half of my run, there's like five things that I've thought about that I want to add to my to do list or some solution to a problem that I want to try out, and I don't want to lose those by the time I get home. So I come home and I'll joke with my wife. She'll say, how was your run? I said, well, I have eight new things that I thought about that I didn't think about before my run. So, you know, mutual benefit from all these things. Sorry.

Yeah. No, I was just saying, like, that it's almost like that runner is higher or that mental clarity you get from running, you know, especially when it's nice out. Like, I went for a run on Sunday, and it was, I think, 2 degrees. And the first thing I did, it was sunny in Chicago. And I'm like, oh, my God, I'm gonna go run by the lake. And it was the first run I do outside, so I was super stoked about that.

That's great. Yeah.

Why do you think psychologically, people tend to lean more towards comfort? Like, say, for example, you set your alarm at 5:00am Right? You want to join the 5:00am Club? Oh, yeah. January 2nd, and you're pumped, man. I'm about to hit the gym. And then 505 rolls by, and you're, like, still hitting the snooze button. You know, the mattress is super comfortable, and you're cozy duck. Like why, why, why does that happen? Or when you come from work, you know, you're supposed to be doing your side hustle. Maybe it's a podcast, but oh man, that couch looks so good. You know, there's a new documentary on Netflix. I mean, yeah, just, just an hour and then an hour becomes five hours. Like why does that happen?

Right?

Well,

you know, it's like discipline sort of becomes this, this bad four letter word and it's hard. You know, there's a number of books out there, I think, is it Adam Grant that talks about like atomic habits or the power of habits and things like that? And I think, you know, it's kind of human nature. We tend to habituate and maybe we tend to regress to the mean, you know, and if something is more comfortable, then, you know, that that feels good. And what feels good is, you know, I don't mean to say addictive, like, like a substance is addictive. But in the scale of things, it can be very similar that we do what gives us pleasure at some level. Most all folks have a certain, you know, hedonistic, you know, kind of proclivity. There's certain things that, you know, like I, I'm just lately, maybe, I don't know. This is a good example of a comfortable thing, but I've just really been. One of my things for 2020 was to focus on spending more time in the sauna. And I've kind of conditioned the first little bit of it. It was like, okay, let's just get in there, you know, think about other stuff, you know, you know, get your head someplace else. And within a relatively short period, and I don't do it every day, but within a relatively short period of time, I've been able to increase it because I'm geeky and wonky. I've got like this watch that measures my pulse and I track if I can get my pulse rate up and I screw around with breathing while I'm in the sauna to see what effect that has. I sort of create all these other kinds of distractions that are pleasurable for me and that I know, move me towards a goal. And if you know, and you also sometimes have to take a very sober thing to say, okay, I'm going to try this out. Okay, this is dumb or this is not for me, or I hurt myself every try, every time I try and do this, maybe this isn't the time for me to keep, you know, trying, you know, to do parkour running or, you know, whatever thing it might Be. So it is so much easier, the amount of effort to hit that snooze button at five o' clock when your bed's all warm and it's, you know, zero degrees outside or, you know, or to turn the water, you know, from that nice warm shower to, you know, ice water for, you know, know however long that you can stand it kind of a thing. So. But I feel like for me, when I've had those circumstances and I still, you know, I deal with that all the time when I have things that I haven't been able to kind of push through, then I, you know, I revert back to my cognitive little checklist to say, okay, why, you know, why am I doing this? Here's four good reasons. Okay, are those legit reasons? Are those baloney reasons? They're legit. Okay, well, then, you know, I need to kind of push through it. And then it becomes, you know, an odds kind of thing or a numbers kind of thing to say, okay, maybe I have a cheat day. Maybe there's one day where I can sleep in, you know, and that's okay, and I allow myself that and I don't beat myself up. And that sometimes has this paradoxical effect that I know if I can have that one, like, okay, Chris, you can sleep in not on Thursday, but on Saturday. And on Saturday you can sleep in an hour and a half, not just, you know, 10 minutes. So let's, you know, let's bank that, you know, sleep in thing and that can help bolster, you know, my own self discipline around that as an example or those kinds of things for us. So I think to get back to your kernel of the question for this is that, you know, what defining for ourselves what is important and then structuring ways to go about doing that can be then the way that we have to have that very tough talk with ourselves to say, yes, get out, get out on the road, put on your shoes, go get your miles in. If you've got a race coming up, you can't hit the snooze alarm for your training. Otherwise you're really going to be mad at yourself because you're going to suffer through a race that you don't have to suffer through, but you got slack on your consistency with your training kind of a thing. And some kind of, you know, people have temptations in their relationships to do dumb things and, you know, you just need to kind of have that, you know, like the, again, the old joke of like, you know, the little devil on one shoulder and the angel on the other, you know, telling you to do the right thing or to not do the right thing. So you just really sometimes have to, you know, think back about that and think about your end goal, your end game, and we'll. I'm at this fork of the road. If I choose this, will it get me closer towards what I want to be, or will it set me back or will it keep me in neutral? Is this a big deal or a little deal? Can I use it as part of my cheat day? I can have a pizza today, but no, I can't have a pizza every day. Those kinds of things. Yeah.

And it also feels so much better when you actually deserve a reward. I've been doing intermittent fasting as of late, and I fast 16 hours. I'm actually going to eat right after podcast. So thank you for keeping me a little bit distracted in a very good way.

Same thing, man. I. I haven't eaten yet today either.

So we're partners in crime here.

That's right. Well, hold each other accountable.

And it feels so good, like when you. When you have that first meal. And I've been using an app called Zero. I don't know if you ever use that, but it's a great app. Yeah, it's a great app to track your fasting. And just to your point, I just feel like when you actually deserve a cheat day, like, let's say Saturday, you know, it's your day where you can have a donut, let's say, or you can. You can binge watch a series, you don't feel as bad about it, like, mentally, whereas if you do it for five days during the week and you just know that it's bad, you. It's almost progressive and, like, it makes you feel even worse every. And your point? I love that, the checklist thing, because I listen to Jocko Willinek's podcast a lot, and he says discipline equals freedom, and that's love, you know, and it sucks. You know, a lot of things we don't like to do. It's not that I enjoy going to the gym or you enjoy running a marathon or training, for one, for that matter, but I think it's. Sometimes doing these things actually creates much more of a freedom than you realize. I wanted to ask. So on this point, I know you mentioned Adam Grant. Funny, I was actually listening to him this morning. He talks about procrastination a lot in a weirdly positive way. Right. Like, he brings up, like, anecdotal things like, you know, Vinci used to procrastinate A shit ton. Like it took him 16 years to work on a, on a project. So could that be a good thing for people in a creative lens?

Yeah, you're asking a very biased person about that. So, you know, I joke that I'm very obsessive compulsive and perfectionistic about things. And again, everything's all kind of probabilistic. It's sort of like 90% of the time or, you know, whatever. There's a. You might have heard of this too or your listeners might have like the old joke about the writer and the white shoe and it's sort of like the person who. Well, there's this proverbial writer and they're, you know, kind of, you know, sitting there in front of their keyboard or their typewriter or their pad of paper and they're just sitting there not getting anything down and they look over and they see their shoes, their. Which happened to be white, and there's a spot on one of the shoes. So they then spend like the next two hours, you know, delicately craftsmanlike, getting that spot off their shoe as opposed to sitting down and writing whatever their goal was to be able to produce that day. And for me, I think it goes back to, I mean, I have struggled throughout my life with anxiety. And for me, I think there might be certain tasks that, that are probably more external kinds of deliverables. You know, I need to review something on a, for a startup or I need to get something done for a class I'm teaching or I have, you know, there's some other, there's some external kind of something and there's probably a deadline to it and it's very important. Like, you know, like very important Capital V. Very. And I know I've got to get it done, but maybe I just don't feel like my head is in that smart spot that I need to be able to answer these questions or that I still need to do some other research before I can help these guys with their pitch deck. And doing that research is going to take a lot of time and a lot of effort and I've got, it's going to be a three hour job and I've got only a gap of 45 minutes before my next meeting or whatever. So in that sense, because I want to do a good job, it probably disproportionately becomes even a bigger deal than the big deal that it already was. And I get nervous about it. So I never just sit and do nothing. I probably, you know, I cleaned my shoe, but it wouldn't take me two hours. But I try to then say, okay, Chris, you got all these other things that you got to do. Look at this. Like I'm literally, I have a paper to do list that I tweak all the time and it's like, okay, well here's four other things you could probably get done. They're not, you know, this is going to like fly in the face of all the, you know, is it urgent? Is it important? You know, whatever that matrix was, you know, of getting productivity. And it's like, well, these things aren't urgent and they're not important, super important, but I could probably get them done in this 45 minute gap that I have done. And then my to do list will feel less full. I will feel like I got something four things accomplished. There are four things that they're important enough for me to write down to put onto a to do list. So they do have some, you know, valence and importance. It doesn't get me in some sense, I guess it does actually gets me closer to that bigger goal that I need to carve out the larger amount of time for. But it doesn't make me feel bad about myself. It doesn't make me feel like I've wasted 45 minutes of my day and if anything, it has kind of cleared the deck where I can then really sit down and spend the deep work kind of time that I need to spend on whatever the larger project is. So I guess that has overlap with our earlier points about discipline and things like that. So I think those kinds of things are kind of my take, my bit of a spin on trying to have what I call productive procrastination, which sounds like a wonderful oxymoron. But I'm not so drawn to the siren song of flipping on Netflix or hopping on YouTube or something like that for whatever reasons. I don't know. I mean, I enjoy my documentary and docu series and binging just as much as the next person, but those aren't. When I'm sitting at my desk or wherever in an airport or whatever, those aren't my go to things. My go to things tend to be looking at my email list. I kind of have a hierarchical organization of it. When certain things are clear, then I finally get down to the big area that isn't clear. And then, you know, it's sort of like, okay, you got X amount of minutes. How many minutes do you need to clear out? You know, two emails that are going to be maybe a little complicated to answer, or you need to put some research or thought into. And, and that, that probably honestly has been something that's evolved over the last year and a half or two and it tends to work for me. So again, the weakness of advice is that that one size fits few. But you know, I think the point is, is to see what in your own psychology, psychology of getting things done and your own productivity weaknesses and strengths, can you adapt yourself to, you know, getting done what needs to get done when it needs to get done in a nice quality wave, to not to battle mediocrity, to not be mediocre and getting it done. And that's. Those are, you know, that's the hero's journey, so to speak, with getting stuff done for all of us.

Yeah, and I think it's even more important because as I look at your profile and you mentioned this just now, you know, you're an advisor to a lot of startups. You invest in a couple of them as an angel investor. You're also a humanitarian, you know, doing a lot of projects internationally. You have the psychology work and a bunch of things. I mean, you've published 38 books. That's a lot of stuff. And I think if you, you know, if you look across the spectrum, some might look at the profile and say, well, you know, you're more of a generalist. And I'm kind of, I'm wondering kind of your take, because it's always a battlefield and I've always had this challenge within myself, you know, like, should I be really, really good at this specific thing or should I be more of a generalist, which I think I am. And to that point, how do you. Because I think you answered the first part, you know, how do you overcome mediocrity? But then as a generalist, how do you become really good at doing several things that sometimes don't necessarily over overlap?

Yeah, well, thank, thank you for saying that. I'm not so sure that that's as accurate as I would like it to be, but thank you. It reminds me, your question reminds me of a show I heard with Scott Williams, who is famous for doing his Dilbert cartoon, you know, which is sort of a great treatise on corporations, I guess, worldwide. I was going to say North American, but everywhere, really. And he talks about sort of identifying, being identified. Like everybody can be, pardon me, not everybody can be the world's best writer or novelist or mathematician or physicist or house painter or chef or, you know, pick. Pick anything. A few people can. And those few people probably have, you know, in their areas, you know, greater passion than the general public, probably greater innate skill than the general public, et cetera, et cetera. So what Scott Adams advises is that if you can take maybe two or three different areas that maybe don't necessarily always overlap or neatly connect with one another, then oftentimes you can have a, you know, whatever, a profession or a career or your job, create your job or be an entrepreneur into those areas where those overlaps are. So for me personally, I very much started out once I, you know, got into graduate school. The psychology was it. I mean, I lived it, breathed it. You know, I had, you know, my teaching assistantships were in psychology. My, I worked full time and part time in psychiatric hospitals to make money to pay for tuition. You know, every single thing I did was very like most all my hobbies, you know, would be reading psychology journals, you know, sort of a thing. I mean, everything was just really, really, really tweaked to focus on that because that was the most important thing I had, you know, student loans I needed to pay off once I got out, I needed to, you know, get a, you know, good job or two or three or four when I got out, et cetera, et cetera. Once I felt like I had some kind of a, in a sense, a base of that established, then the other interests naturally, organically started to kind of make themselves known. And I think I was lucky because choosing the professional psychology, there are so many different parts and components. Like I mentioned, you know, 50 some odd credits as an undergrad. That's because there's comparative psychology and social psychology and industrial organizational psychology and clinical psychology and psychopathology and blah blah, blah, blah, blah. So in being exposed to all those and in different kinds of ways, it was sort of like a sampling, an opportunity for me to sample things and I could start to see other areas that I became much less interested in having a clinical practice after having been in clinical practice for 10 years that coincided with probably a causal aspect of my wife and I had our first child. So being a child and family psychologist, I only could see, see children and families in the evenings when the kids aren't in school and the parents aren't at work and on weekends. Well, my choice was do I see those people and their children or do you see my people and my children? So, so I became much like became zero of a practicing clinical psychologist. I kept my license up because of other things that I was doing, but I was no longer in private practice. I closed that down and, and then focused on other kinds of things, those other kinds of things working in medical schools gave me exposure to global health and to psychiatry and to other branches and flavors of medicine. So that also then pulled me more into the public health side of things. At University of Illinois Chicago, a lot of the faculty that are part of the center for Global Health come from a variety of different other kinds of areas. They come from nursing, they come from emergency medicine, and maybe most specifically public health. A lot of them are MD MPHs. Well, to me, psychology and public health are hugely interconnected and interrelated. So I guess with that long and windy answer to your very specific question, to maybe summarize it, is that I think people need to have a focus and a direction. Just like going for the run in that process of going in that direction to be open enough to say, hmm, maybe this really isn't for me or to say, yes, this is. But look, look at all these other kinds of things. Maybe I'll take a little scenic route and a little detour over here for a few years and I'll work in this other kind of area or maybe that working in that other kind of area will be at for then coming back full force into my one specific kind of career. Let's use career as an example. A career path and direction, having these other kinds of skills maybe to make this up. Like maybe, you know, I'll take a coding course on a MOOC and then bring that into my clinical research side of things so that I can do more sophisticated analyses of my data. So I'm not going to become a computer scientist, I'm not going to become a data scientist, I'm not going to become a subspecialty statistician, but I'm going to learn enough of those tools to augment and be additive to my day in, day out work. That, that's important to me. So, and then maybe I learn that and then I let that go, I stop looking at it sort of a thing. So I think people, my bias is that it's most helpful that again, we all differ to have a focus, to have a direction. So you're not just, you know, a rudderless, you know, boat with a lot of wind in its sails kind of going, you know, every which direction, sometimes backwards. But to be able to have a direction that you think is good for you today, for me to shift from being a math major to being actually in between, I was an architecture major and then to psychology as a major. But to have direction in those areas to learn with whatever you're doing in a non mediocre kind of way, in that process and then to be able to take all those things. You know, I feel like today in my position as a faculty member in an international psychology PhD program, that I can bring my NGO experience, I can bring my global health experience, I can bring my clinical psychology experience, my treating patients experience, my working with families experience my going on medical missions experience my humanitarian work with my nonprofit. All those different kinds of things which you could, you know, kind of compartmentalize as separate, you know, from psychology in some way, shape or form. But to me, I prefer to have sort of that, that combination of them and that mix of them. Sometimes some come more to the forefront, sometimes they go further to the background. But all of those things together I feel have made a much better, made me a much better psychologist, a much better faculty member, a much better person, a much better friend, much more helpful to startups, maybe more successful in the nonprofit that I founded. All those kinds of things. You can't just sort of just be one shade. You need to be variety of different kinds of skill sets that can come and go.

I love that. I love that. Well, I think there's so much really, really concrete advice in that statement. And just one thing I add there is funny if you ever look at the CEO of Goldman Sachs, David Solomon, he's actually a part time DJ, right? Yes.

Who would have thought?

You know, his DJ name is DJ D Soul. So from CEOs of the largest investment bank in America. That was a crazy one. But also kind of encouraging, right? Like if he can do it, why the hell can I? Like I'm not, you know, he has a much more scrutiny on, on him as a lens and much more regulations. So. Yeah, it's just a. Yeah, I think, I mean, unless it's quite interesting to see that.

Unless somebody has something that's like going to get them in trouble, you know, like people do have bad habits and bad hobbies, but I mean otherwise, you know, those kinds of things can be very additive. And even back to our initial part of this conversation of being helpful, you know, with a person's stress relief and mental health, you know, I mean, there's no way that that guy is depressed when he's spinning, you know, there's no way that the stress of his day is bogging him down, you know, when he's in, you know, in front of an audience. So, you know, those. That's a very healthy, healthy and probably very creative outlet. So, you know, more power to women. It's also just darn cool if you

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