Clear Thinking with Shane Parrish

Shane Parrish is the founder of Farnam Street, a treasure trove of practical insights for life and work. He joined me to discuss lessons from his new book, Clear Thinking, a simple guide to making smarter decisions each day. Let's begin with a story about a person we both admire, the Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman. One day he got a phone call from a hotel. Mister, Are you Richard Feynman? We have a radio that doesn't work and would like it repaired. We understand you might be able to do something about it. But I'm only a little boy. He said, yes, we know that, but we'd like you to come over anyway. So Feynman went over there with a big screwdriver in his back pocket. He didn't know anything about radios, but noticed that it wasn't plugged in right. It was the time of the Great Depression, and Feynman got more repair jobs because people didn't have money to fix their radios. His skills improved as he encountered problems with ever increasing difficulty. One time he meets a guy who is obviously poor. His car is a complete wreck and his house is in a cheap part of town. What's the trouble with the radio? Feynman asks. When I turn it on, it makes a noise, he says. And after a while, the noise stops and everything's all right. But I don't like the noise at the beginning. What the hell? Feynman thinks to himself. If he hasn't got any money, you'd think he could stand a little noise for a while. But when he went over to the radio and turned it on, it began to roar and wobble, wobble, wobble, wobble, wobble, wobble. So he started to think, how can that happen? Feynman was pacing around the room. So the guy says, what are you doing? You came to fix the radio, but you're only walking back and forth. I'm thinking, he shouts back. He realized that maybe the tubes are heating up in the wrong order. He takes them out and completely reverses the order in the set. When he turns the radio on this time, everything's all right. It plays perfectly. No noise. The guy was shocked. The whole idea of thinking to fix a radio. A little boy that stops and thinks and figures out how to do it. He never thought that was possible. He kept telling everybody what a tremendous genius the little boy was. He fixes radios by thinking. Shane, you are now an authority on clear thinking and decision making. What are you trying to fix?

That's a big question to start off with. I think you know, I'M trying to help the world become a better place and for everybody to become a better, the best version of themselves that's possible. And I think, you know, when as I was listening to that story, the thing that struck me was that we often don't consider thinking as work, in part because it's invisible. And a lot of what we consider to be work is visible.

You know, in 1944, T.S. eliot posed this question. Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where's the knowledge we have lost in information? In our age, men seem more than ever prone to confuse wisdom with knowledge and knowledge with information. No, you've made a life out of mastering the best of what other people have figured out. What is the most important thing you have learned?

I think the most important thing I've learned from other people is to go positive and go first. And if you sit back and you wait for the opposite, and you wait for somebody to come to you and tap you on your shoulder and say, hey, I recognize you have all this potential and I'm going to give you an opportunity. And if you wait for that, you're going to be waiting your whole life for most people. And so you got to make it happen. And the best way to make it happen, the only way that you can make it happen that sets off a chain of compounding, is to go positive and go first. And the reason that compounding is important is that we know that all the advantages from compounding come at the end, not the beginning. And if you enter into any relationship with anybody, be it your partner, your customers, your subscribers, it doesn't matter. That's not win win, then it can't survive across time. And if it can't survive across time, it can't compound. And I only want to be involved in things that have a chance at compounding. I think that allows for a lot of speed later, a lot of trust, a lot of velocity. And I think that that's a good start to making the world a better place.

It touches upon one of the most important insights from your new book, which is that the most overlooked aspect of making good decisions is positioning. You write one reason the best in the world make consistently good decisions is that they rarely find themselves forced into a decision by circumstances. You don't need to be smarter than others to outperform them. If you can't out position them, if you can out position them, anyone looks like a genius when they're in a good position. And even the smartest person looks like an idiot when they're In a bad one. Each moment puts you in a better or worse position to handle the future. It's that positioning that eventually makes life easier or harder. Can you explain this concept?

Yeah. Positioning is the biggest aid to judgment that I know of. And perhaps I'll explain it with a story from my own life. One of my. One of my children came home, and he's a, you know, 13. So he's early teens, and he got a, you know, a mark that was. Wasn't up to his standards. On an exam that he did, he sort of, like, passed it to me, shrugged his shoulders, and he said, I did my best. Now, I know from playing sports that the moment to have a conversation with him is not in that particular moment. Everybody's too emotional. You're not really in charge of what's happening. He's definitely not in charge. He's 13. He's got a lot of emotions about this. He probably feels embarrassed by it. You know, he feels all these things. So I wait for things to calm down, and, you know, before bed, we're like. We're lying down, we're cuddling. And I was like, I want you to walk through. You said you did your best. I want you to walk through that in detail. What does it mean to do your best? And he looked at me funny, and I said, no, like, humor me here. He's like, okay, well, you know, I went to school, and my test started at 10, and I read all the questions and I looked at all the points, and I allocated my time accordingly, and I answered the questions to the best of my ability. And I said, that's really interesting. A lot of adults think about life that way. They encounter a circumstance and they do their best from that moment forward. Now, I want to just humor me for a second. Let's rewind. 72 hours before your test, did you study effectively? No. Why not? I was playing video games. Okay, so you didn't study. Did you get a good night's sleep the night before a test? No. Why not? Because I was cramming. I started studying at, like, 10:30, so I was up till midnight. Okay, so you were cramming. And then what happened in the morning? Did you eat a healthy breakfast? No, because I got up late, so I didn't have time to make a healthy breakfast. Did you get into a fight with your brother right before school? Yeah, I got into a fight. Why'd you get into a fight? Because I was late. So we were both using the bathroom at the same time. I was angry because I didn't get enough sleep. You know, we started yelling at each other. I'm like, okay, so were you playing on easy mode or hard mode when you sat down to do that test? Hard mode. Okay. But you control all of these things. So all of these things that we just talked about, that's your position that you're in at the moment. Circumstances come now, sometimes you know what circumstances are coming. So you can prepare. And preparation is sort of a subset of positioning. So preparation happens when you know the future. I can prepare for this test. Positioning is a broader concept that relates to. I don't necessarily know what's going to happen or when it's going to happen, but I want to be positioned to survive and thrive no matter what happens. Now, you can think of financial crisis for investing as something that we know is going to happen again. What we don't know is the timing. So we know that it probably pays to be positioned at all times for these things. We don't get a warning. There's no, you know, hey, you get two weeks, Go home, get ready, batten down the hatches. It's coming. It just happens. And we have to meet life where it is. And so when I think of positioning, I think it's the biggest aid to judgment, because what happens if you're forced to sell your house? You know, if Warren Buffett levered up and, you know he was forced to sell something, he's not going to make good decisions in those moments. Part of the reason that he doesn't put himself in that situation is that he's never forced by circumstances into making a decision he doesn't want to make. And if you think about a lot of your worst decisions, the ones that really bite you, you feel like you have no alternative or you have like one shot, but it's like a Hail Mary, and the odds are low. You don't get to take base hits or doubles or triples or home runs. You just. You're just really, really trying to survive in that moment. And while you're trying to survive, somebody else is thriving.

You know, Carl Jung said, until you make the unconscious conscious, it'll direct your life and you will call it fate. You refer to these as our defaults. I quote, the defaults narrow our perspective. They narrow our view of the world and tempt us to see things as we wish them to be, not as they are. When the defaults conspire, we react without thinking. People who master their defaults get the best real world results. So how do we make our defaults obvious? And how can we manage them?

Well, so the four defaults you're talking about are sort of emotion, ego, social, and inertia. And those are the four I talk about in the book. And emotion, you know, just to give people an understanding of how we're approaching this. You know, think of anger, think of embarrassment, think of being sad in those moments you're, you're not really thinking clearly. You're. You're more prone to letting circumstances think for you. Ego is another one when you want to be right. When you think you're right, you ignore evidence to the contrary. You know, frequently confused with hubris. Social happens in two ways, but mostly it's, it goes back to biology and our self preserving biological instinct. We want to please other people and part of that is an unconscious desire to fit in with the group. So we don't want to be the one that rocks the boat. And that makes us say yes to things that we don't want to say yes to. I mean, who hasn't said yes to somebody in person to something that they really don't want to say yes to? And inertia is sort of like we just keep doing the things that we've always been doing. And so when you think about these things, what they have in common is that these are situations or circumstances that tend to think for you. So if you're in, you're emotional and you're sort of like having a bad day, you're not thinking as clearly if you're thinking at all in those moments. And so what happens is you tend to make really poor choices because you're reacting without reasoning. Now this relates to positioning because these are the three sort of concepts of the book. There's positioning, there's defaults, and then there's thinking independently. Those are the three sort of like thrusts. And if you are in a good position, and a good position means you got a good night's sleep, you weren't out late drinking, you invested in time with your partner, all of these things, well, you are still going to get emotional, but it's a lot easier to manage that emotion in those moments. And if you look at most books that talk about getting control of your emotions, I don't understand the approach they take because it's like, okay, recognize that you have anger, hold your breath. Okay, no, choose not to be angry. And it's like, whoa, what? That might work like 10 or 15% of the time, but in the real world, that doesn't really help anybody. I mean, it feels good to read and you sort of. It's a bit of mess. Mental masturbation going on there, but it doesn't actually change behavior. And so what does change behavior is if you're in a better position when you encounter those things. And another thing that changes behaviors is sort of like, well, how do I make it harder to get upset, right? So, like, what things in my life constantly upset me? Can I avoid them? Can I create rules around them? We talk about automatic rules, same as social. Like, a great example of an automatic rule around social is when I was talking to Daniel Kahnman at his penthouse in New York. He's on the phone, and he's talking to somebody, and towards the end of his call, he said, you know, my rule is I don't say yes on the phone. And then he hangs up. And I'm like, what is this? What is this rule you speak of? What is this? Help me understand this. And he said, you know, like, I like to please people. I tend to please people. So I found that I was saying yes to things that I didn't want to say yes to. And so what I wanted to do is create an automatic behavior in my head that circumvented my own automatic behavior so I don't have to think about it. It's an unconscious behavior. And that unconscious behavior changes his default or his desired behavior into his default behavior. And I think that that's a really powerful concept. And I remember joking with him, and I was like, I know you have a nobel prize, and you've studied cognitive biases for 65 years, but, dude, this might be the most powerful thing you've sort of ever come up with because you figured out how to rewire your brain. And the interesting rules is, people don't argue with rules. You don't argue with your own rules, even if you create them. And you don't argue with other people's rules. You might not like the rules, but you don't argue with them. You might not like the speed limit on your highway, but how many of you have written into the local office and petitioned to have it changed? So you don't argue with it. You just sort of look at the rule. You've been taught your whole life to follow them, and that's what we do as well. So came up with this rule, and I was like, what other rules do you have? And he's like, none. And I was like, what? This is crazy. And so I remember walking away from that and going, you know, I'm really struggling to work out every day. Like, I'm struggling to go to the gym three days a week. And what was happening when I, when I explored this was I was supposed to go Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. And I would have these conversations with myself, much like everybody probably does, that little voice inside my head, you know, it's Monday at 2 o'. Clock. It's like, oh, you've had a long day. You got a lot to do tonight. You know, you know what, let's just skip the gym. It'll be easier, and we'll go tomorrow and we'll do extra tomorrow. And then, you know, you sort of lie to yourself. You start negotiating with yourself. So I went to the gym and I asked them. I was like, hey, can you tell me how many times I've been here in the last 365 days? Because in my mind it should be about 150. And so they, they pull it up and they're like, oh, it's about 82. And it was like, what the heck? Okay. So, like, I'm not doing what I, what I want to be doing. And so I created a rule which is, I sweat every day. And that rule has been in place for, I think, two and a half years now. And maybe I've missed five or six days. And so what happens is I do exercise every day. Some days I go to the gym, some days you go for a run. You know, it can be whatever. And the duration or scope of the exercise can change. But the fact that I sweat every day doesn't change. And what that does is it changes the conversation with me. I know I work out every day. That's my rule. So when I get up, the question I'm asking myself is, where does this fit in? What can I fit in? What's the duration or scope that makes sense today? And then how do we get it done?

Another key insight from your book is that decisions are different from choices. You write, if you casually select an option from a range of alternatives, you've made a choice. If you react without thinking, you made an unconscious choice. But neither of these is the same as a decision. A decision is a choice that involves conscious thought. It is a judgment that certain option is the best one. Often, what seems like poor judgment in hindsight doesn't even register as a decision in the moment. Could you elaborate with some examples?

Yeah, so a great example is, you know, sort of like, let's go back to the defaults and how we. We get caught up in this. You're at home and, you know, it's Friday night, you've had a long week. So I'm setting the position that you're in when this happen. And you know, you've got a lot of emails, you get a lot of things. You got a busy weekend, you just pick the kids up from school, the house is a mess, and you start loading the dishwasher. And then, you know, before you know it, your partner makes, you know, a slightly passive aggressive comment and all of a sudden you're arguing and you don't intend to be arguing. You're, you're sort of like, you're not making a decision to argue. Now if I tap you on the shoulder and I say, do you want to pour water or gasoline on this situation? All of a sudden you're going to be like, water. This is pointless. I don't want to be arguing with my partner. And so often these are the ordinary moments that get us into trouble. Now you can play that out in two ways. If we imagine a fork in the road, on one hand, we continue down this. Passive aggressive goes to aggressive aggressive goes to probably shouting goes to not talking to each other, goes to a ruined weekend whereby you have to spend a lot of time just getting back to where you were Friday morning, a lot of time investing in that relationship. And if you take the alternative path, which is, hey, you know, I'm gonna put water on this and just walk away and let it go, it doesn't mean anything. And that's more of a decision. In that case, then what happens is all the time that you would have spent repairing your relationship, getting you back to baseline, can now be invested in your relationship, in your family, into work, into anything. And we don't think about it like that. So we sort of like these moments where we just react without reasoning. They often just become these minor choices. But what we really want is to consider alternatives and think about things. And for the most part, the best way to do that is just to insert a little pause between action and stimuli or stimulus and response. And that's what we're trying to do with some of these tricks. Now if you can do that, that's great, and that's one way to solve this problem. Another way is to have all of these rules around. Like, okay, you know, we, we catch ourselves doing passive aggressive behavior and we call each other out on it. And our rule is we stop. Our rule is we go for a walk. Our rule is, you know, whatever you, you come up with a rule that works for you guys and that's that. And then the alternative that I really recommend for people is okay. When you go to like couples therapy and you start talking about these little domestic arguments, if you will, what the therapist is going to tell you to do is how to have that conversation better, how to communicate with each other better and give you tools in that moment to, to handle that situation better. What they don't talk about is, well, wait, if you watered the grass between you and your partner every day, this would never even be an issue. Because if you imagine a patch of grass between you and your partner and you water that patch of grass daily, well then that's wet grass. And what happens if a spark goes on wet grass? It just goes out. And if you don't water it, eventually it becomes dry, really dry. And then the smallest spark will light the forest on fire. And so it's, what position are you in? Is a key component to thinking about how do we get out of this? And I find it interesting that very few people ever talk about it. But if you look at what people do, if you look at what the best in the world do and not what they say, because I don't even know if they recognize the fact that they're positioning. In some cases, they're just always positioned. If you go look at Carnegie or Rockefeller or even Berkshire Hathaway today, I think there's, you know, $160 billion on the balance sheet. Now think about that for a second. They don't have much debt. If the stock market goes up, he wins. If the stock market goes down, he wins. If the stock market stays the same, he wins. If there's a massive panic and he needs to, you know, the 2008 were to happen all over again, he wins. Like there, there, there's not a real scenario out there where he loses other than, you know, should he unfortunately pass away.

One of my favorite investing quotes comes from George Soares, who said, once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition, there's no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes. How can we get better at this? Because investors often stumble at the very first step. Accepting responsibility.

Yeah, that's sort of your ego in the way. Right. And what I found really effective for this is, is often when we try to handle a mistake or we try to work through a situation where we might have made a mistake, we don't want to admit we've made a mistake because we feel that reflects poorly on us. So we're protecting ourselves again, self preserving. What we're protecting though, is our identity, our version of ourselves, how we want other People to see ourselves. We are territorial, man. We will protect that to the end of the earth. What's a really effective way to do this is sort of, you can't correct it unless you accept it. And what I find the best approach is to ask yourself what your contribution to the situation is. And it can't be nothing. And that just opens the door a crack. And then what I recommend people do is they write about it and not talk about it with somebody else. Just write it down on a piece of paper, not write it on a computer. You have to do pen and paper. There's a reason for this, but I recommend you write it in pen and paper. And what that does is it cues you into reflection, because you can't learn without reflection. We think that we learn from experience, but we don't. We really learn that learning gets cemented when we have a reflect on the experience. And so if you think of a clock, and at the 12 hand you have experience, and at the 3 hand you have reflection. And at the 6 hand you have a compression. And at the 9 hand you have an action. This creates what I call the learning loop. So experience, reflection, compression, or abstraction, action. And this is how we learn. And often we try to skip this whole reflection step, but the reflection is basically distilling all of this complex information into a compression. The compression is what we take away and what we use next time. And often we consume other people's compressions, which I'll come back to in a second, which gives us the illusion of knowledge. But if you skip the reflection stage, you're not actually learning. It's the act of reflecting that helps us learn. Now people are like, well, I don't know how to reflect. And, you know, I haven't done that in a long time. And. And that's fine. There's no judgment. There's no right or wrong way to reflect. But I find it really helpful if you take out a pen and a pad of paper and you write. And writing is by itself an act of reflection. It forces you to reflect. You can write about what the circumstance was, what your contribution was, and your contribution can't be zero. And I sort of learned this with my kids. Again, I would ask them, you know, what's going on? And they're like, he said this, and he said this. And, you know, it's like the blame game. Nobody's accepting any responsibility for the situation. They're just pointing finger. Well, this is what adults do all the time, right? I see this in the workplace. I see it with the. The companies that we're invested in, I see it with the people we work with on occasion. And so how do we get out of this? And I'm like, okay, well, you each have to go to your room for 30 seconds, write down on a piece of paper what your contribution to this is, and come back, and your contribution can't be nothing. And so, you know, they go to the room, they'd write down their contribution. And that opened the door to a conversation. And that was all it took to sort of, like, actually have some learning. And so there's no hope if you can't sort of reflect on it. And then the third step that I talk about in the book is commit to doing better. I mean, you have to. That's the compression angle to learning, which is like, in this situation, next time I will do something different. And then you need to repair your relationship or repair the situation the best you can. So it's not about just moving on and making it better. There's an act of actual sort of repairing, depending on what the mistake is that you need to accomplish. Now, I want to come back to something I said earlier about the learning loop and compressions. And often when we consume information, we're overwhelmed. And so what we're consuming is other people's compressions. We're not consuming detailed, close, firsthand experience anymore. We're not reading biographies, we're reading tweets about biographies, for example. And so we're getting information, but we're not getting a lot of detail in the information. And so we're getting somebody else's reflections or somebody else's sort of compressions. Sorry. So we're getting somebody else's compressions, and that's the illusion of knowledge. And if you think about. A good way to think about this is, you know, if I follow a recipe at home and everything goes perfect, it probably tastes like the chef's version. But if there's something slightly off, I have no idea what went wrong. I'm following the recipe. I mean, was the heat too high? I don't know. But the minute the chef who created that recipe tastes it, they're like, oh, the heat was too high, the salt isn't right, you stirred it the wrong way, you baked it too long, they instantly know what went wrong because they've done the reflection, they've had the experience, they've done the reflection hundreds of times. And that's the difference between the illusion of knowledge and actual knowledge.

Whenever Albert Einstein was stuck on a problem, he would often take Refuge in music. And that would usually resolve his difficulties. He was a gifted musician and attributed some of his greatest scientific breakthroughs to his violin playing breaks. If I were not a physicist, he once said, I would be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music. I get most joy in life out of music. Einstein believed that there comes a point in everyone's life where only intuition can make the leap ahead without ever knowing precisely how. He admitted that the theory of relativity occurred to him by intuition and that music was the driving force behind this intuition. Einstein said the intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors a servant and has forgotten the gift. How should we think about intuition and those times when we feel certain we are right without ever knowing the reason?

Intuition has a huge role to play in life. And I don't think that eliminating intuition is the key to living a happy life or the key to even making better decisions are the key to getting better results. I think you need to know where you are on the spectrum between intuitive and rational. And then you also sort of like need to know where your intuition is at in that particular thing. We all have better intuition about certain things than other things do. You have an edge in this intuition? And if you listen to sort of the repeatable research around intuition, what seems to matter for intuition as we know it and as we understand it today is a constant, a lot of reps, quick feedback and a constant environment. So three things. Time between action and feedback is low. Environment does not change, and you get a lot of reps at it. In a lot of the things where we actually have an intuitive idea and an intuitive sense, we don't have that definition of intuition. The environment's always changing. The time between feedback and response is quite large and we don't get a lot of reps in these things. And I think the key is to just being conscious about whether you're following your intuition with a bit of rationality involved or you're just blindly following it. And those things lead to very different paths. Einstein's approach, as you were talking about that, I don't think he was blindly following it, but I do think that the intuition was his idea. But I think his rational brain, his intuition lined up with everything else he knew about the world and he just took a different perspective into things. And I think that type of intuition is super powerful. I think the intuition about making split second decisions the way that we hold up leaders to be decisive and judgmental and powerful and to know what they're doing. I think that's the intuition that gets us in trouble and that's the intuition where we need to check it a little bit. And the way to check it is really just to insert a pause most times between again stimulus and response. But the pause between to let your conscious brain sort of like have a go at it. Not just your unconscious brain, but your unconscious brain is way more powerful than your conscious brain. So it probably has a lot of knowledge that we haven't even begin to learn how to talk about.

What about the heart? I mean, where's the heart in all of this? I mean, we often denigrate the emotional heart for the logical, rational brain. But as Milan Kundera put it, when the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In a well known Hadith Sikhudsi, God reveals, I who cannot fit into all the heavens and earth, fit into the heart of the sincere believer. We cannot think our way to God. In his poetry, Rumi implores God to open his heart in the way that he causes the rose to expand in full blown beauty, not his brain. Confucius says, wherever you go, go with all your heart. The timeless wisdom of the great prophets, saints and the poets all point to spiritual intelligence which rides in the heart. How do you think about that?

Definitely? Well, I think of heart sort of as intuition in a lot of ways. It's not something that you can reason your way into and it's not really something you can reason your way out of. In a lot of ways. I think it's a powerful force that we want to be aligned with. Ideally, you want your head and your heart and you're, you know, you want everything aligned together and then, you know, it's really good. Sometimes we do just have to follow our heart though, and that's part of growing up and it's sort of part of life. And it's part of the beautiful aspects of life and it's part of the sad aspects of life. Sometimes when you get your heart broken.

When do you feel most in tune with yourself? When do you have most clarity?

When I'm alone in the sauna with no devices, nobody trying to get a hold of me. No, you know, just in nature, in the sauna, when I'm alone, you know.

One of the rules I've adopted for myself for the last few years is I'm not gonna lie, you know, and for me that's important because I like the idea of alignment. And for me, I have most clarity when my mind, my head, my heart, and my tongue are saying the exact same thing. And I feel conflict when they're misaligned. And so I make it a point to always live from that space. And if I can't say something or things are not clear, I'll just be quiet and be patient.

What do you do when they don't align there? How do you get them into alignment?

It's usually patience. I feel sometimes it's requiring more information. And that typically works. Well, you know, there's this common wisdom, right? Know yourself. But the. The problem is which version? Because there's a version of you and I sitting here together having this conversation. There could be one with you later, picking up your kids from school. It could be you talking to your employees. And sometimes you're all these different sort of personalities and natures. And so for me, I realized, you know, I want to compose all of those different versions of myself into one being. And the only way to do that is to always speak from a place where your heart, mind, tongue are aligned. And the only way to make sure you don't cheat is to have the rule, like you said, where I'm not going to lie anymore. So even the littlest of things you're very conscious of, and that makes a huge different. It carries you forward with a very different energy, and it just requires more courage to speak the truth. Whether it's like your wife asking you where you want to go for dinner, and she suggests, you know, Italian, you don't feel like Italian. And before, I would have just been quiet and go with the flow, but now I'll actually express myself, you know, so the smallest things to the biggest of things.

Has that brought your relationship closer together?

Yeah, a hundred percent.

Were you worried at the start that it would push you away?

No, because I feel like this is the wisdom of, you know, like all the prophets, prophet Jesus says, you know, don't lie. There must be some wisdom behind that lesson. It's only made me be clearer. I find more clarity through this. And I feel. I feel like it allows people to expect me to be a certain way, and I'll show up in that certain way. Like they're all different, you know, I'm not putting on masks, for example, so if anything, it allows you to release a lot of negative energy, you know, like, because I'm not trying to pretend to be different versions of myself. It's also something interesting that Richard Feynman said. He said the first principle is that you must not fool yourself. And you're the easiest person to fool. So I'd like to ask you, like, what is the lie you tell yourself most often?

I think I lied at myself a lot about money. Like, I hide bank accounts for myself. I, you know, I, I engage in deceptive behavior about that. I think that, that that would be the lie that is probably most pervasive. But some lies are helpful, right? I mean, during COVID I lied to myself. When I woke up every morning, I told myself that I could get through another day. And it was a lie based on how I felt. You know, that was a really trying time for a lot of people, myself included. And, you know, I felt like waking up and walking over a floor of glass every day and then crawling back to bed at the end of the day. And you do that day after day, month after month. And as you know, we lived in Canada, it was fairly one of the lockdown countries in the world. And I would just wake up and I would lie to myself and tell myself I could do it. And I know it's just a lie, it's just words. But at the end of the day, that lie helped power me through to, to the end. And by the end of it, I was like, I could do this every day for the rest of my life if I had to, but I'd be lying to myself every day. But it seemed like an effective use of, of lying to ourselves. So maybe it can be good. Maybe it that. I think there's multiple sides to that.

You're right. The quality of what you pursue determines the quality of your life. We think things like money, status, and power will make us happy, but they won't. Knowing what to want is the most important thing. What are you pursuing?

Oh, like, I just play by my own scoreboard. I'm super lucky to be able to do that. I want to. Like I said earlier, I want to leave the world a better place. I want to help people become the best version of themselves. I want to be an amazing father to my, my kids. And I, I think that I. Those things are important to me, and it has nothing to do with money or status or fame. I, I think, you know, I don't think it's pursuing those things, per se, that get us into trouble, because that's, that's implying that they're wrong to pursue that. And I don't believe that people are wrong to pursue that. I think what gets us into trouble is blindly or unconsciously pursuing what other people tell us to pursue. And so if you want to pursue money, power, fame, I mean, go for it. Like go all in and be conscious about it and know the trade offs that you're making and fast forward to the end of your life and play it out. And if you want to make that, then, man, you got to go all in and do it. And I think too often we go after these things and they're not the things that make us happy, they're not the things that make us individually happy. And that is sort of the lesson from the people that are nearest to death. I read about Carl Pilmer's book a little bit towards the end of Clear Thinking. And the biggest lesson is that people regretted playing by other people's scoreboards and other people told them what to pursue and they just blindly pursued it and they woke up one day. And usually it happens sometime between 50 and 80 and you've recognized you've been chasing somebody else's path for a long time and it feels hollow. And it's an interesting sort of feeling when that happens. And I think that we get caught up in that. So just be conscious about it. And there's a great story about Ebenezer Scrooge, right? Who did we know that got everything that he wanted, but the way that he went about getting those things was equally important to going after them. So he went after what he wanted. And in his case, the difference was he went after that in a way that was mutually exclusive from living a life of meaning. And that's what caused the problems for him, and that's why he wanted to do over. So if you're going to go after money, power and fame and all these things or whatever you decide to go after, go after it in a way that is sustainable and in a way that is going to win in the long term, not just the short term. And I think that if you change your approach, thinking long term eliminates a lot of poor behavior. Whether you're talking to an employee or whether you're talking to your partner or you're talking to the person at the coffee shop. If you just go into every conversation with the mindset like this person is going to be in my life in 10 years, it'll change your tone, it'll change your approach, it'll change the kindness which you have in the conversation, it'll change the whole feeling of that conversation. And I think we also have to be careful about how we accomplish our goals.

Your website, Farnham street, is a treasure trove for practical insights. One thing that I'm truly Grateful to you for is introducing me to the concept of entropy. It has radically changed the way I see the world. Entropy is this idea that everything tends toward disorder and chaos. 1 Study rooms become cluttered and dusty. Strong relationships grow fractured and end. Formerly youthful faces wrinkled and hair turns gray. Complex skills are forgotten. We start out hungry and ambitious, but as we age we become comfortable and complacent. Businesses stop growing and reach the point of maximum entropy bankruptcy. Entropy is always increasing. Stated in another way, the availability of energy is always decreasing. This is why life seems to always get more difficult and complicated. Energy flows through into all areas of our life. If we feel lethargic and depleted, we can't do a great job with our children because they have far more energy than we do. Maintaining our health, relationships, careers, skills, knowledge, societies needs a never ending effort. And this requires more and more energy. You put it best. Disorder is not a mistake. It is our default order is always artificial and temporary. The existence of entropy is what keeps us on our toes. How do you fight back the tide of entropy?

It's interesting because I've been thinking about this a lot in a context that I haven't written about yet. So my thoughts aren't fully formed. And I've been thinking about it in terms of simple to complex. There's the, the. There's a huge advantage in life to keeping things simple. But the default over time is that things get more complex and you have to expend a lot of energy to reduce the complexity and get back to simplicity. And that energy often comes in the form of not buying things, not doing things, eliminating things, reducing things, focusing on what's important at the cost of other things, choosing what's important. And I find it really powerful to think about this. Which is the default state that we want to be in is simple. We know simple is good. It's good for our brain, it's good for our lives, it's good for speed, it's good for happiness. And yet there's a natural sort of complexity that creeps in over time. And yeah, how do you think about this? Because I mean, I've only been playing this around in my head for a couple of days, but I've been thinking a lot about that in terms of I'm looking at 20, 24 and I'm like, what? How do I reduce the complexity in my life? How do I reduce the touch points? The surface area? Not the surface area in terms of online and people finding us, but the surface area that I have to be involved in and what does that look like to reduce that? And where do I get the biggest bang for the buck? And how do I do better at the things that I'm doing and not take on more work and just do higher quality? Because we live in a world where online, if you're 1% better, it's not a linear sort of outcome in that that 1% better can turn into hundreds and hundreds of thousands of more followers or audience or influence or whatever your, your sort of, your weight is or the ability to affect people's lives. And so I, I think about that a lot and I've been playing around with this a lot this year, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

And the way I think about entropy is more in terms of one, energy levels, right? I'm not pouring energy into this relationship, into this business, and also catching my own tendency of active versus passive, right? Where am I just passively expecting things to happen and how can I solve for that? Right. So my coaching relationship is very important to me because that forces me to really challenge myself and not be complacent or passive in my, you know, time with my children. Am I just passively expecting us to, you know, grow into a good relationship where I'm actively doing things together and just being with them, if I'm shouting, it's not because of something they did, it's just because I have less energy than them, right? They're doing something, they're noisy and I can't get myself off the couch to meet them at their eye level. So I just raise my voice because I can't raise my energy, right? So it's really just an energy game. And how do you feel enough energy, get enough rest and renewal? And I think same thing with my, with my wife, as our kids are growing older, different ages, it's, it's challenging. You know, we're at the 11 year mark and I'm finding a lot of my friends are getting divorced or having difficulty in their marriages. So how do we keep this going? And because you want to have a long fulfilling relationship and I think it just is that mindset shift from not allowing things to just happen passively, but to actually actively see the part you play and taking control of what you can be responsible for. That's made a huge difference for me, at least. Interesting to me though is a pivotal realization in my journey as a parent has been that what matters in how our children turn out is how we turn out as parents, you know, And I've come to realize that my three daughters are Here to usher in my spiritual development. You know, while I anticipated imparting life lessons and fostering their growth. It's astonishing how in reality, they're the ones forcing me to evolve into a better person. They are raising me into the parent I need to become. How has it been with your boys?

Oh, the same thing. I mean, like, the kids are the most amazing gift in the world in so many ways, right? They, they keep you young, they keep you curious, they show you things through a completely different perspective. Things that weren't meaningful or important to you are. Things that were meaningful and important to you before. Kids are no longer important to you. I think it sort of grounds you and I love every moment of it. And yeah, it's the, It's, Yeah, it's amazing.

What have you. How have they changed you or what have you learned the most from them?

Well, I mean, changed me. They changed me every day. I, I don't work as much. You know, I'm, I'm home every morning with them and there every day after they get off, they get home from school. They're my priority in terms of spending as much time with them as I can. I don't want to regret, you know, I, I. When I worked for the intelligence agency, I worked with a lot of people who unfortunately, due to circumstance or choice in some cases, couldn't watch their kids grow up. And I saw the impact that had on them when the kids moved out and had the sadness that they, they sort of wish they could have a do over. And I sort of decided in that moment, even though I didn' kids, that I would try to do it differently. And that meant spending as much time with them as I could. And, you know, they're teenagers now, so they also need their own freedom and their own independence. And there's a balance to be had there. But it's definitely amazing to be around them. And yeah, they continue to help me refine ideas and put a lot of the thinking that I do for adults into practical use. You know, they're the reason that I say gas or water. They're the reason that the positioning concept sort of dawned on me in the first place. You know, it sort of clicked, right? I was studying all these people and I could see it, but I couldn't really articulate it until my own kids and talking to them about it. And that was the powerful sort of moment. And then that's where we came up with the idea of easy mode or hard mode. And so, you know, positioning is a big concept for kids and you know, it's a big concept for adults, but if we think of it as like, how do I, how do I put the game on easy mode tomorrow? Or how do I move it towards easy mode from hard mode? And you think about the things that you can do and, you know, a lot of them are just common sense. We just convince ourselves that we're, we're smarter than we are or that we can change. You know, we can make an outcome happen faster than it otherwise naturally would. But the best things that you can do for positioning that apply to almost everybody is sort of like sleep, eating well, saving money, you know, not having as much debt as you're probably prone to having, investing in your closest relationships. All of these things sound, you know, pretty boring when you talk about them, but they're such a key critical component to success, no matter how you define success. And it makes everything else tomorrow a lot easier if you do that today.

What is your definition of success?

I think that if I pass away and people think that I help make the world a better place, and the people closest to me loved me and said that I was always there for them and I wasn't always nice, but I was always kind and I challenged them and I sort of wanted the best for them and I was their biggest fan, I think that all of those things would be amazing. But I don't know, it changes, right? When you're 20, you have one idea of what success is, and when you're 30, you have a different one. And in five years I might have a completely different idea of success. And if I can raise independent kids, I think that who are happy and healthy, I think that that is, that's a success too, in a different way, right? I don't know. I tend not to think about these big questions, but isn't it important?

Like you said, if you want to have a long term vision for your life like you, you need to, to challenge yourself with these questions.

Sort of like I ask them right on the podcast all the time. I ask every guest, how do you define success and what is success for you? And I think in part it's because I don't have a good answer for me. And so I'm like searching for bits of wisdom in other people's answer that I can amalgamate into mine. And, you know, I have a shadow of what I think it is, but I don't have the crispness around the image. It's like it's not a 4K image. It's like an abstract sort of Silhouette, if you will.

As I listen to your answer, it reminded me of Peter Drucker, who often liked to ask this question, what do you want to be remembered for? And I sat with that question for a very long time, and I couldn't answer it because I was thinking. And I would think about it from, like, my child's perspective, like, what would I want them to remember about me? What would I want my wife to remember me? My parents, my family? And I really struggled with that question. And I realized, actually, maybe that's not the right question for my. For me. And the more interesting question that I find for myself, how do you think about success? Was like, imagine standing in God's court. What would my record show? That to me, was the more pertinent question for the way I wanted to live my life and how I would think about ultimate success. You know, what would my record show? As a final question, Shane, to you, imagine if there was one sentence you had to read and repeat 10 times every morning, first thing out loud, just to yourself, for the rest of your life. What would it be?

Go positive and go first.

Right back to where we started. Thank you, Shane. I appreciate your time with us.

Thank you so much.