Mastering Clear Thinking w/ Shane Parrish

If you get a really bad night's sleep, you're out drinking, you're with your buddies, you're, you know, you. And then you come to work and there's traffic on the way to work and all of a sudden you're angry. You're angry at the world, you're, you don't even know. You're probably angry at yourself deep down, but you're not feeling that. You're playing on hard mode.

It's a great pleasure to welcome queer thinker and author Shane Parish to the show. Shane first came on my radar when I discovered his hugely popular blog, Farnam Street. Farnam street offers timeless lessons and insights to help you think better, learn faster and make smart decisions. Today's conversation focuses on the topic of his new book, which is called Clear Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results. Throughout this conversation, Shane convinced me more than ever of the importance of clear thinking. He argues that in order to be a clear thinker, we, we must first create the space to reason in our thoughts, feelings and actions and then we must deliberately use that space to think clearly. He makes the convincing case that if you can master that skill, you will have an unstoppable advantage in life. I learned a lot from Shane's book and this conversation. I particularly love how clearly he explains the main enemies of queer thinking, such as our out of control emotions and our ego. I also love his practical tips for building strength and resiliency and living a life full of things that matter. I think you'll really enjoy this episode as well. So without further ado, I bring you Shane Parish. Nice to finally meet you, Shane.

It's nice to meet you too. I'm a big fan from far away.

Well, likewise longtime reader of Farnum street and just admirer of your, well, shall I say clear thinking, which is certainly the topic of our conversation today. Really enjoyed reading your new book. Congratulations on. On it. It's a really big accomplishment. It's hard writing a book, isn't it?

Thank you. You would know.

Yeah, well, it's hard. It's hard writing a book and it takes a lot of fortitude and overcoming self doubt and it's like running a marathon where no one cares about any progress you're making on the marathon unless you actually cross that finish line.

It, you know, I've learned a couple things through the process. One, I, I don't know if I would tell many people I was writing another book because everybody's like, how's it going? Like a week later and it's like, it's not going anywhere. It's sort of like, you know, your doctorate or something. It's like this goal. I'm telling you, I'm doing this thing, but it's like years away from actually happening. And then the other thing I was thinking about the other day was, you know, it's kind of like getting naked on stage in front of a thousand people and having them all judge you, like, reading the reviews and the comments by real people. It's like, you know, there's. There's a little bit of excitement inside me. And then there's also like, oh, God, what are they going to say? What do they think? How did this come across to people who weren't me? Because they can only see the words on the page and not all the things in my head. And so it's been really interesting in that. In that respect, too. I mean, everything has been almost overwhelmingly positive. Yeah, I was appreciative of that. But, yeah, it's a little nervous. I check every day. I'm like, oh, is there a new review?

And, well, look, even that's better than no review. Like, my book Transcend, came out April 2020 and got wholly ignored because of April 2020.

Yeah, that would be such a hard time to have a book come out.

Yeah, it was a crazy time. I mean, I had so many emotions in so many different directions in April 2020.

Were you even focused on the book, though? Like, you know, it'd sort of be an afterthought as I'm thinking about it, it's sort of not really actually much of COVID at that point.

Yeah, I was stranded wherever I was, and I was more just focused on survival. Yeah, yeah, but then. Yeah, but then they're like, people are like, oh, don't you have a book coming out? I'm like, oh, yeah, it came out last week. But anyway, this is about you and about your terrific new book, and how can we create the best space for clear thinking today? That's what I've been trying to think through. Because in these kind of interviews, it's so hard to really narrow down the best questions. But I actually have a way. I want to start this. Can you tell me a little bit about why Peter D. Kaufman, by the way, love his last name. Why has he been such a strong. Why has he had such a strong influence on your own thinking?

So I met Peter, gosh, I'm going to say eight, nine years ago in Omaha at the Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting. And I was there, and I was sleeping in my car. And I was in the lobby and I was trying to get a room, and they had given it away. And he overheard this and he came and he gave me one of his rooms. And this is how we met. This incredible act of generosity and kindness. And for people who know Peter, one of his sayings is, go positive and go first. And this was like an example of him living that. And then we struck up a conversation. I being a Canadian, I'm like, I can't even accept this, right? Like, I'll sleep in my car. It's okay. And, you know, he basically convinced me to accept his. His generous gift. And it was one of the nicest things anybody's ever done for me. Just totally blind. And we struck up a conversation. He said, hey, fly out to California. We'll grab dinner sometimes. I got home and took him up on his offer. And then we sort of became friends. And through those conversations, it's interesting to meet somebody who thinks in a very different way than I had been accustomed to or exposed to. And he has these little pithy sayings like, go positive and go first. And when you start talking about that with him, there's a lot of information behind it. And we've had many conversations over the years, and he's been one of the biggest influences on my life. And he's friends with another one of the biggest influences on my life, which is Charlie Munger, who recently passed away. And those two together have. Have just had a profound impact on my thinking and living, too, the type of person I want to be. You know, they say, show me your heroes and I'll show you where you're going to go. And I feel like those two are giants in that field, and they hold me forward in a lot of ways.

Yeah, they really are. How long have you been so interested in the connection between mind thinking and way of living?

I've been interested in it for a long time for different angles, though. Right. So I've been interested in thinking since probably 2001, 2002, about how we can think better because I worked for an intelligence agency. And, you know, one of the primary things you have to do there is, in a way, you're competing with other intelligence agencies, and you don't have the resources that other agencies have. And they have people that are just as smart as you, and they have better assets than you, and you. You can't opt out. You still have to play. So that was always like, a really fun sort of thing to think about. And then when it came to living, uh, around 2008, that's when I started thinking about, like, what is it I really wanted of life? Because I had worked about seven years straight, 16 hours a day, six days a week. Because I started two weeks before September 11th. September 11th happened. The world changes forever. I have no idea what's going on, but, like, all of a sudden, I'm working every day. And, you know, I developed a lot of close friendships, worked with some really incredible people. But those six years really flew by, and you didn't really have a choice. And then I remember I went with my. My ex at the time, and we went to Italy for a vacation, and it was three weeks, and it was really the first vacation I had had since. I don't. I didn't even know because I started working when I was 14. So it would be basically the first adult vacation I ever really took. And she was so annoyed with me because I slept 16 hours a day, every day. She would go get gelato and come back, and I'm passed out on the water fountain. And anywhere I could sleep, I was just sleeping, and I was like, oh, let me lie down for a nap, and then we can go out later. And thinking it'd be 45 minutes, but it's five hours later, I wake up, and she's like. And my body was just recovering from all of this stress, this work, this environment that I was in. And then I started thinking about, okay, what is it? Like, let's think a little bit backwards here. Let's take Munger's approach and, like, invert this a little. And what do I want to avoid? I want to avoid this for the next, like, 50 years. And so it gave me pause and made me start thinking a little bit about what do I want the end of my life to look like? And am I doing the things right now that I need to be doing to make it look like that?

Yeah, that's a great approach. Both the opposite approach from living in the moment spontaneously or impulsively. Uh, you know, you. You worked in an. At an intelligence agency. Like, you started a month before the attacks on September 11th, is that correct?

It started two weeks before. Yeah. Two weeks before.

Wow. Wow. So that. That really got you kicking up high gear in terms of the need for queer thinking.

It really thrust a lot of people into roles and responsibilities that they didn't get hired for and they probably weren't ready for at the time. But again, you don't have a choice. You just do the best you can, and a lot of people are counting on you. And it's not just people in the organization and your team. It's our country, our government, other countries, troops in theater are counting on us. And that's why you couldn't really opt out, because there's so much sort of riding on your shoulders. And you didn't want to opt out. You wanted to be a part of. Part of this. I mean, that's sort of why you signed up to work there, right? You want to help and you want to find solutions. The thing is, I sort of got thrust in these roles and responsibilities that I really wasn't prepared for, and I didn't really know what to do. So I started going around the organization. I'm like, how do I learn how to make decisions? I'm like, 23, 24, 25, 26. Nobody's ever taught me how to make decisions. There was no class in university on decision making. And now all of a sudden, you're making a decision that affects your team, your organization, other countries, troops in theater, people's lives. And how does that work? And how do you think through these problems in a rapid environment of an operational pace? And that was. That was the impetus for sort of like learning, how do we do this, and can we learn right? Or is it just sort of like you're born with it or do you get lucky? How do you think about this? And this led me to sort of like, go around the organization. I was that guy who showed up at meetings, and I'd just sit there in the back and be quiet, but I was never invited. And sometimes I get kicked out, sometimes they'd let me stay. And I was like, I want to learn how our senior people make decisions. And then I went back to school and I wanted to do an MBA because I thought that that would be the answer to learning how to make decisions. And it wasn't. But the MBA was sort of the connection to Munger, who I had come across before. Maybe late in high school, I read the Making of an American Capitalist by Roger Lowenstein on Warren Buffett, and that was my first exposure to them. And I hadn't really given it much thought. But then it sort of dawned on me during my MBA that I was like, here are these two guys in the real world who seem to consistently make better decisions than everybody else have. They learned something that I can use and pull into the organization and apply to make us better, to make me better, to give us a better chance at success. And that was the start of Frontam street blog, which is FS Blog, but it originally started as 681-311-40.blogger.com and it started as that because it was my reflections on what I was reading. I was reading all the Berkshire Hathaway letters, I was reading all the Wesco shareholder letters. I was deep diving into these guys trying to figure out how is it they've taken Daniel Kahneman's work and Michael Porter's work and they put it into practice and what is it that we can learn from that? And it was a scratch pad for me. I don't quite, still don't quite understand how other people found it because I wasn't allowed to have an online Persona. I wasn't allowed to be a person. It was an anonymous website. It was a series of digits because I thought nobody would want to type in all those digits to get to the website. And that's no longer the website. But the significance of those digits are that was the zip code for Berkshire Hathaway and the unit number for Berkshire Hathaway. So it was an homage to those two in terms of what I was learning from them. And I think that was a really good way for me to reflect. When we think about learning so often, we just consume information and we don't chew on it, we don't digest it, we don't make it our own. But I was trying to take these ideas from outside the organization and apply them inside. So I'm taking them from one ecosystem effectively where they exist and saying, well, does this work in our ecosystem and where would it break and what would need to change and how do I think about that? So I was reflecting a lot on them and this is what I think people miss today with the information that we consume. So if you think about learning as a loop, as I think of it, and this isn't super scientific, but it's sort of my practical, real world experience is you have an experience, you reflect on that experience, you create a compression based on that reflection. The compression is like the distillation of that experience into something. Like go positive and go first and that becomes an action. So you have this loop, you go experience reflection, compression, action. And this is our continuous loop. And when you cut out reflection, you don't really learn. You go from experience to abstraction. And if you think about it, most of what we consume these days is other people's abstractions. We consume the gist, we consume the sound bite. We don't want the details. Those details are irrelevant. And in a lot of cases that makes sense because you don't want to be an expert in everything. And you can't. We don't have enough time. But in the areas where you do want to be an expert, you actually need the details, you need the reflection. You need. Because that's the process by which you learn to understand where does this work? Where doesn't it work? What are the edge cases? Does this apply in a different ecosystem? Why is it likely to fail? And anybody can sort of like do this experiment at home or in your mind, you pull out a recipe and you make the recipe at home. And if you make the recipe perfectly and everything goes really well, it's going to taste the same as the chef who created it. It's almost indiscernible. But if something goes wrong, there's a huge difference between you who's taken this compression and used it as knowledge in this case, but unearned knowledge, because the chef will taste it and be like, oh, there's too much salt, the heat was too high, the oven isn't calibrated. They instantly know what went wrong. And they know what went wrong because they did all the work of reflecting. And so I think in very specific domains, we as people actually need to consume large quantities of high quality, detailed information. And that was what I was trying to do from the outside and pull that in. And the blog was my process of reflecting on that in a way that, I mean, I wasn't talking about intelligence agencies or anything. I was just talking about these ideas and trying to compress them in a way that made sense for me and synthesize them and connect them to other ideas that I was learning. Does that make sense?

Cool. Yeah, for the most part. For the most part, I am interested in why you focus on ordinary moments. When you talk about a lot of this stuff, I think that you, you seem like a first principles kind of guy to me. I mean, I could be wrong. But do you tell me a little bit why you think ordinary moments determine your position?

I think for the most part, the big choices in life, we know we're making a decision. When you know you're making a decision, you're more likely to be rational about that decision. The problems are not that you don't have the tools to be rational in most cases. The problem is that you don't know you should be rational in some cases. And so when you have this moment about, like, what career to pick or who to interview on the podcast or what you're, you know, who to marry, these are decisions where you know you're making a decision. And so generally Speaking, you're able to pause and think you might not know. You might be. You might get an advantage to learning how to think better in those moments. But generally speaking, we sort of get them directionally correct because we know we're making a decision. The ordinary moment, the moments when we don't know we're making a decision, those are the moments that really can multiply all of that by zero. So if you pick the right partner, but you don't invest in your relationship with them, what happens to that relationship? It goes to zero. If you pick the right partner and you take them for granted, what happens? Same thing. You wake up to divorce papers. And so these ordinary moments actually matter, because those ordinary moments make life easier, harder. And they can multiply all of your progress by zero in these cases. And so I think it's important to think about these ordinary moments, and I think of them in the concept of positioning, which is, how do we use these ordinary moments to put ourselves in a good position? So what I learned from studying other people from decision making is that the best in the world, the people that we would consider above average at making decisions or getting really good results, they're almost never, if you go back in history, forced into making a decision they don't want to do. And that's a really interesting insight. And I think people really underappreciate this type of insight. So if you took on too much debt and you're being forced to sell your house, you can't make a good decision in that moment. You're being forced by circumstances and into doing something you don't want to do or doing something that's bad. And quickly things go from bad to worse in those cases. And so one of the things that I learned from studying Buffett and Hoffman and sort of Rockefeller and Carnegie is that they're never in a position where they were forced to do something that they didn't want to do. And how did they do that? They set themselves up through positioning so that they could always take advantage of. The environment's going to change. If you look at Berkshire Hathaway today, I think they have $160 billion on their balance sheet in treasury bills. And think about that for a second. So if the stock market goes up, they win. If the stock market stays the same, they win. And if the economy goes through another financial crisis like it did in 2008, they win. So they're passively stable. There's nothing that's really going to. They're not predicting the future. And I think that, that's an important distinction. So prediction, you can prepare for something if you know it's coming. Positioning is a broader subset of that idea, which is I don't know what's coming. How do I be prepared for a wide range of scenarios that will come? And we know there's going to be financial crisis. What we don't know is when they're going to happen. But it's virtual guarantee for you and I that there will be another one in our lifetime. It could be tomorrow and it could be in 10 years. We don't know. But we can almost guarantee that it's going to happen. So what happens when that happens? Can we be in a position where we can take advantage of that or are we going to be in a position where we're fighting for our survival and we're just trying to stay afloat? Wow. Wow.

Yeah. You believe that every moment you can make your future easier or harder. That's a really fascinating concept. And you think that the kind of the mediating variable there is clear thinking. So what are some of the enemies of queer thinking? My glasses keep fogging up, making it harder for me to think clearly. But what are some of the main enemies of queer thinking as you see it?

Well, so I wanted to come up with what are the scenarios where we tend not to think? The scenarios are situations where it's common for that we just react, we respond, and we're animals. So if we go back to our biology, you can think that we're territorial, we're self preserving, we're hierarchical. These are sort of like ingrained in all animals or biological instincts and they manifest themselves through us in the real world. And an example of that is, you know, if I slight you in a meeting, you're going to respond and if you catch yourself, you're going to stop it. But if you don't catch yourself, you're going to respond without reasoning. You're just going to react because you're an animal. And what I'm doing is I'm infringing on your territory. But our territory isn't necessarily physical. Our territory doesn't have to be, you know, a dog walking around peeing on trees. Our territory is how we see ourselves. Our territory is our identity. And so what does that mean? Well, that means that there's a situation where we're not going to think right, where we're less likely to think than we otherwise would be. So the four defaults that I lay out in the book are ego, emotion, social and inertia. And all of these things create a situation whereby we are less likely to think than we otherwise would. So if you think of emotion, it's. That's a pretty simple one, right? Which is you're angry. Are you thinking clearly when you're angry? Probably not. You're going to do things that you later regret and then you think of ego. We just sort of talked about ego and identity. You're not thinking in those moments. Social. A great one is, have you ever been on the phone and said yes to somebody you don't want to say yes to because you don't want to disappoint them. You want them to like you. Right. So you're not thinking. Right. So you end up agreeing to these things you don't want to do because you want the other person to like you. Well, what is that? That's self preserving, right? We, we've been brought up for 10,000 years to be. We have to fit in with the tribe because if we don't fit in the tribe, we get kicked out. And if we get kicked out, we die. And so we have this ingrained in our biology. It's in our unconscious. We're not consciously thinking about it, but we want to be liked by other people. So we say yes to things we don't want to do. And then inertia. We stay in relationships that we've been in that no longer serve us. Same as jobs, right? We just keep doing what we've always done even though we're not necessarily getting the results that we want. And what happens in those moments is we tend to think, oh, you know what if the world just recognized my potential, all of a sudden things would change. And we're passive. So we just sit there waiting for something to change instead of being proactive and going out there and making that change. Why are we passive? It's because we're not thinking. We're not thinking about what we need to do today to put ourselves in a better position for tomorrow. And these are the scenarios that I came up with. I think they're fairly broad categories, but there's real world examples behind all of them where we're not doing the things that we, we want to be doing. Now if we tie this back to positioning just for one second. So all of these things are going to happen. You have an ego, you are emotional, you're going to be in social situations. Inertia happens every day. If you're in a good position, those things are easier to deal with. And if you're in a bad position Those things are harder to deal with. And the language that I use with my kids is easy mode or hard mode. Are you playing on easy mode or hard mode? And so an example, like, one of my children came home, he gave me one of his tests, and he didn't do as well as he wanted on it, nor as well as I would have hoped that he did. He gives it to me, shrugs his shoulders and says, I did my best. And I know from playing sports. We'll talk about this later. Most kids quit on the car ride on the way home, not for their performance on the field. And so, like, we let the emotions simmer down a bit. And then later that night, I'm like, talk to me. What does it mean to do your best? He's like, well, you know, I sat down at 10am I read all the questions, I looked at all the points, I followed. Everything the school told me to do to succeed on tests was like, oh, that's really interesting. Let's like rewind 72 hours here. And did you study? Not really. Were you up late the night before the test? Yes. Well, why were you up late? Well, I realized I should have been studying, but it was like 10 o', clock, so I started studying at 10. I was like, okay. Did you eat a healthy breakfast? No. Why didn't you eat a healthy breakfast? Because I slept in. Why did you sleep in? Because I was up late studying. Did you get in a fight with your brother that morning? Yes. Well, why'd you get into a fight? Because I was in the bathroom the same time as him. Normally we're different times. I'm irritated, I didn't sleep well. I was like, okay, so you chose to play on hard mode because everything we just talked about is within your control. That's the position that you're going now. In this case, it's preparation because we know the test is coming. It's not positioning, but this is a great example of how you can think about that, right? So it's not the moment forward. It's also like what goes into that moment. And if you want to think about how we can position ourselves in our relationship, an example is like, if you invest in your relationship with your partner, if you imagine that there's a patch of grass between you and your partner, and you water that grass, you go out on dates, you hold hands, you connect, you talk about your day, you do all these things. Well, now all of a sudden, if something happens, this little spark is going to go on this patch of wet grass. And what happens it goes out. But if you don't water that grass, if you're in a bad position, you don't water the grass, all of a sudden what happens? That little spark lights this big inferno. And all of a sudden you're like yelling at each other over how you stack the dishwasher, which if I tap you on the shoulder in that moment and I say, hey, Scott, all right, do you want to put water or gas on this situation? You're going to be like water, right? You're instantly going to start thinking, but you're not thinking. And because you're not thinking, you're not thinking clearly at all. And your whole weekend can be derailed by this. Your whole relationship can be derailed by this. And, or ordinary moment and otherwise ordinary moment can destroy if you have too many of these. And so it's like, okay, well, how can we think about this differently? Can we position ourselves to be stronger in these moments? Can we position ourselves so that we're better off? And if you think about it like if you get a really bad night's sleep, you're out drinking, you're with your buddies, and then you come to work and there's traffic on the way to work, and all of a sudden you're angry, you're angry at the world you don't even know. You're probably angry at yourself deep down, but you're not feeling that. It's really hard in that moment. For most, I would say self help books or most people's advice is recognize you're angry, take a deep breath, step away from the situation. Well, you're playing on hard mode. So if you can do that on your best day, and maybe you do it like 30 to 50% of the time, well, now all of a sudden you're going to do it 10% of the time. And so if you're in a good position, you didn't go out late, you, you know, sort of the traffic doesn't bother you as much because you get a really good night's sleep. You might still be in a rush, but you're not super angry about it. So you've already improved the outcome here. And you're more likely to recognize what's happening, sort of dissipate the situation than otherwise. But there's also no, sorry, go ahead.

No, go on.

I thought you say like, so, so those are things like you can recognize or avoid the situations, but you can also come up with rules, and I sort of term them automatic rules for success in the book, which is, well, how Can I actually reprogram my brain so that I don't have to consciously think, but I turned my desired behavior into my default behavior? And I got this idea. I was so freaking lucky. I was sitting with Daniel Kahneman in his penthouse in New York, and we're chatting away, and his phone rings. And so he picks up his phone. At the end of it, he's like, my rule is I don't say yes on the phone. And then he hangs up. And I'm like, danny, tell me about this. I've never heard you say rule before. I've read almost everything you've ever written, and I've listened to all your talks, and I've never heard this. And he says, well, I tend to say yes to people I don't want to say yes to for things that I don't want to do. So he's like, I found myself. I was saying yes 90% of the time, and I wanted to be saying yes 10% of the time. And he's like, so I created this little rule, and the rule is I never say yes on the phone to something. I'll get back to you tomorrow. And he's like, I realized a couple things through this. Once after I did it a couple times, I didn't have to think about it. It just automatically came out of my mouth. Because we've been programmed our whole life to follow rules. So once we establish that we have a rule, even if we've created that rule for ourselves, we follow it. And then he's like, the other thing that really I didn't appreciate or he didn't appreciate is that people don't push back on rules. So if you tell me your rule is we always stay on five minutes after the podcast to chit chat, I'm not going to say, oh, like, it doesn't. You know, it's just like, okay, because you told me that's your role. And so it's just naturally accepted by me. And I looked at him, and I remember this. I was like, danny, I know you have a Nobel Prize, but this might be the most powerful thing that you've done. Because this, like, cognitive biases are great at determining why we made a mental mistake in hindsight looking backwards, but they're really poor at preventing us from making one in the future. But what you just came up with, what this idea is like, you've figured out a way to reprogram your brain so that you don't have to. You don't have to be in system two thinking to get the result that you want in that moment. And so I've played around with this idea so many times since then with so many people. And we've tested this on thousands of people. And you know, a great example from my life is I was trying to work out three days a week. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I would go to the gym and I would try to go to the gym, but I'd wake up, you know, I'm that guy. I'm like, I don't like going to the gym. I just want to be healthy. So I go because I want to live a long life and I want to be healthy. I don't actually enjoy it. Some people there, they're like running on the treadmill, they're not even like breaking a sweat. I'm like dying after three minutes. And I hate all those people who are just like chugging a lot. So I go to the gym and I'm like, I want to see my stats here. Because I remember waking up one day and I was like, I'm super tired today. And then I start negotiating with myself and I negotiate with myself over, you know, I didn't sleep super well. It's been a really long day, I'll do extra tomorrow. And that's what I would tell myself. And so I went to the gym and I said, hey, this is strange regress, but can you give me a printout? Like, tell me how many times I've been here in the last 365 days? And I sort of mapped it to my, my calendar, my travel schedule. So I knew approximately how many times that I should have been at the gym if I went three days a week. I was nowhere close to that. I was like half of that. And so what was ha. I wasn't doing what I wanted to do. And so I was like, well, let's try this rule thing. So I created an automatic rule for myself, which is I sweat every day. So I do workout every day. If you want to think of it that way, the duration or scope of that workout changes. Some days it's 90 minutes, some days it's 20. But I do something every day. And since then I think I've only missed four days and it's been life changing. I don't argue with myself when I wake up. My negotiation isn't whether I go to the gym or not. My negotiation is what do I fit in today, what duration, what scope do I have, where does it fit in with my calendar? And if it doesn't fit, I just do like sit ups and push Ups, like a hundred of each. You know, I was in a hotel the other day, I didn't have access to a gym, and I was like, okay, what's my workout today? It's 20 minutes. It's like sit ups, push ups. I'm like doing squats on the floor. It doesn't take long. And so you can always sort of like fit it in. But I don't argue with myself about it anymore, which is really interesting. There's no negotiation.

Really cool. Really cool. That's a great way of hacking the system there. Or as you would put it, building strength. You have all sorts of goodies in this book to help you build strength in things that we really all really do and want to build strength, like self confidence, self control, self knowledge, self accountability. What is. What is self accountability?

Well, you have to be accountable to yourself, right? Nobody is going to hold you accountable. And this is how we wiggle out of things. And so, you know, one way to hold yourself accountable is to have a personal board of directors that you report to. It's like this little kids game, almost like an imagination, right? It's like, here's what I did, here's the results I'm getting. But at the end of the day, and what I mean by this is, think about you at work. There is somebody at work right now who knows what's holding you back. And they're not going to tell you. They're not going to hold you accountable for that one thing getting in your way. You have to hold yourself accountable. And one of the ways that we can hold ourselves accountable is to raise our standards. So if you think about it, and the fact that we're born into a situation which is pure chance. Our parents, our socioeconomic status, our country, the behaviors of our parents, the standards of our parents, these are all chance. But these become unwritten rules that go into our head. They get ingrained into us over 18 years about what normal looks like. So when we come out, we think we're normal. One of the big lessons I learned from Peter is that if you do what everybody else is doing, you're going to get the same results that everybody else gets. And so if you take those standards that you adopted as a kid and you put them into practice, you're likely to get very similar results to your parents. Maybe slightly better, maybe slightly worse, but you're going to probably be within one standard deviation because those habits and that mindset gets you here. But if you want to hold yourself accountable and you want to do something different, you have to have different standards, different levels of execution for where you want to get to. And if you look at sort of, you look at athletics, right? What was that last dance? Did you watch that with Michael Jordan?

I loved it. Yeah. I loved everything about it.

People hated him and they loved him. Why did they hate him? Because he held them to a higher standard than they held themselves. So when you play on a team, you can have somebody like that who's just really good and they, they, they raise the bar and they make you a better person. They make you a better. And what do we do? We just tell ourselves excuses. And so when you have somebody like this, and there's a story in the book about, you know, one of my best friends who basically, you know, five days into working with me, tells me, he's like, look, if you can't do your job, I don't want to work with you. And I'm like, well, here's all the other things that I did this week. And your, your mind is so defensive. It's like, I got called into this, the bus was late, blah, blah, blah. Like I had this list of things like, man, I'm working 16 hours a day. Here's all the shit that I did. I'll get this done, don't worry about it. And he's just like, I don't care, I don't care about your excuses. Nobody cares about your excuses but you. If you can't do it, I don't want to work with you. P.S. buy a car, stop talking about the bus being late. And that becomes a self accountability, right? You can take that and you can, man, this guy works at a different level than I do. Am I going to raise my game to their level? And if I'm not, then I'm not going to be able to work with him. And I was super fortunate because I was able to work with, you know, the Michael Jordan of my industry or the Kobe Bryant of like what I did. I literally got to work with the best person in the world at one particular thing.

Who was that?

For seven years, Matthew Holland. He runs a company now called Field Effect Cybersecurity. He is the most brilliant person at this in the entire world. And I was lucky because that made me better than I otherwise would have been because I didn't know these standards were possible. And if you're lucky, you get to work with somebody like that. But if you're not lucky, well, now what can you do? Well, now you can create a personal board of directors which is one of the ideas in the book, and you can report to them. Right, because they can have higher standards than you. You don't need their permission to put them on the. But Warren Buffett's on my board. I mean, he didn't. I didn't ask him for permission, but I'm like, what would Warren do in this situation? How would he think about this? And I think ultimately, at the end of the day, if you're getting the results that you want to be getting, getting the results you think you deserve, then maybe this isn't an area where you need to look into very hard. But if you're not getting the things that you want to be getting in a life, you are the pilot of your life. You are the architect. You are the captain. And so ultimately, you are in control. And that's where that accountability comes into. It might not be your fault, the situation that you're in, but it is your responsibility for what happens from here forward. Damn.

What are your thoughts on our culture? That's so. Where a victim mentality is so pervasive.

In our culture right now, I just opt out of that whole way of thinking. Like, I send my kids to a really tough school, and, you know, they get homework and they get tests, and, you know, they get their butt kicked some days and they don't. I get a lot of flack for talking about this on the Tim Ferriss podcast, but, you know, I'm a big believer that we need resilience, we need to learn how to fail. And there's certain excuses that I just don't resonate with me. Right. We can always play a victim, and we always do. Right. There's a natural sort of tendency for us in certain situations to be the victim. But at the end of the day, we are in charge of our own lives. And there is always something, no matter what situation we're in, that we can do to make tomorrow a little bit easier. And if you focus on being a victim, then nothing happens. Nothing changes, nothing. You don't get better. Your position tomorrow doesn't get better. You're surrounded by people who empathize with you, which is great, and you feel good in that moment, but nothing changes. And so you have to ask yourself, do I want the feeling of people understanding me and do I want the excuse of not doing anything about it, or do I want to change and get different results and do something different than other people? And I recognize that this isn't for everybody, so please don't email me if this isn't your thing. This is Just my way of thinking. And the same thing that I do with my kids, which is like, they come home and they get a bad test and they're like, well, it wasn't my fault. I had practice last night and I couldn't study. And I'm like, I don't care. It doesn't. The real world, it doesn't matter what happened. You need to take charge of your life. You need to design a study schedule that works. You need to figure out that you shouldn't go to practice tonight because you have a big exam tomorrow. These things turn on me to figure out. And this is where you fail. I want them to fail. I want them to fall down because I want them to build up this resiliency. I want them to get bad grades. I'm not cheering for them when they get bad grades. But what I am happy about in my head is this builds mental toughness. This is, they're going to recover. How do they respond to failure? Do they. They throw their hands up and walk away? Or do they dive in? Like, how do I fix this? What can I do different? Let's talk about all the things in your control that you can do so that this doesn't repeat. How do we put ourselves in a better position so that the odds are lower that this happens again? And some days you do everything you can and the world just kicks your butt. That's what it's like being an entrepreneur. That's what it's like being an adult. You do your best. Some days it's just a mouthful of glass and you got to go to bed and you got to get up and you got to do it again and that's okay. And you need to be able to handle that. And how do we develop those skills if we never give people the opportunity to fail? If we never give people the opportunity to sort of. Most schools don't give tests anymore here, if you. I don't know if the standardized test scores came out in the US Yesterday, they came out in Canada. They're like plummeting over the last 30 years. Here we're so soft on kids, we don't expect much of them. And I expect a lot from my kids and I expect them to expect a lot from themselves. More importantly.

I do want to talk about self confidence. I found that chapter really personally relevant. But can you. Can you talk tell our audience a little bit about some ways that we can solve self confidence?

So there's a couple ways to think about this. I think the one that is most important is we sort of convince ourselves that we need the confidence to get to the destination we want to get to. And the bigger the gap between where we are and that destination, the harder that confidence is to have. If Elon is like, I need the confidence to start Tesla or SpaceX and get rockets into space, that requires insanity, a crazy degree of hubris, or a lot of things that most of us don't have. But if the next step, I call it next step confidence, it's like, can I have the confidence to take the next step? Well, the next step is to try to buy a rocket. Okay, well, that's what he did. He went to Russia, he tried to buy a rocket. They wouldn't sell him one. Next step was like, how can I build a rocket? Like, why do these rockets cost so much? And so if you have the confidence to take the next step, it's hugely empowering. Because I don't have to have the end goal figured out. Often those end goals even change. So if I can shrink the distance between where I am and what I need confidence for, I massively increase my ability to take action. I massively increase the ability to get momentum. And if you think about it like, if you're out running or you talk to any professional marathoner and they're not starting the race going like, I need to get to the finish line when they hit the wall, they're like, can I make it to the next stop sign? Okay, well, I made it to the stop sign. Can I make it around the next corner? And they shorten the distance that they're looking at. And we can all do that too. And it'll dramatically improve your confidence because it's like, I can do that. And when I get to there, I'll take a look and I'll see what the next step is and then you can figure it out. And I sort of got this. I was cliff jumping with my son. And the situation I talk about in the book is it's sort of like a one way door, right? You climb up this mountain and we jump off. And he wanted to do it. I was like, oh, that's great. Like, are you sure though? Because we can't come down because it's way too dangerous to climb down. One slip and like you're going to hit your head on rocks. So like, if we go up, like you, you're up and you gotta jump in. He's like, yeah, yeah. And he gets up and he's like, I don't want to jump in. I'm gonna climb down I'm like, you can't climb down. Like, you're jumping in, or I'm throwing you in. And that's the reality of the situation. But before we get to that, like, let's talk about this. Like, what's going on? Like, what do you recognize in your body? And he's having this, like, physiological response, right? Like, he's looking down, and he's panting and he's breathing, and I'm like, okay, well, step away from the edge here, right? Like, let's go talk. We walk back five or six steps, and I'm like, hey, get control of your breathing. Deep breaths. What's the voice in your head saying right now? Well, I can't do this. I can't. You know, this is too big. I'm scared. Okay, well, that. That voice is determining how you feel about the situation. So, like, let's change this inner monologue that you're having. What are all the things you did for the first time that you were scared of? Right? Like, you went snowboarding, you went wakeboarding. You've done a whole bunch of things that you were really scared of doing that you had never done before that seemed really scary in those moments. So now, all of a sudden, it's like, okay, I can do hard things. And to put this in context, he's like, eight or nine at a time. So, like, you're talking about things that are relevant and age appropriate for him. But you've done hard things, so we know that you have an ability to do hard things. We've got control of your breathing. And now I'm like, you're looking at the bottom. You're looking 25ft down at the water, and you're like, do I have the confidence? Let's change where you're looking visually. Instead of looking down, let's look out. Do you have the confidence to take one step off the edge? Do you have the confidence to walk out and take one step off? Sure enough, you know, he's got that little voice going, and I'm like, don't make it inside. Like, make it outside. I want to hear what that voice is telling you. And he's like, I can do this. I can do this. Like, I've done hard things. And, you know, it's that. It's literally like that inner monologue you're having. And sure enough, he goes. And he doesn't look down, and he takes one step off the edge, and he pencils down, and within 45 seconds, he's back up there, like, jumping off, basically, like doing backflips. And, you know, it's so interesting to me that when we look, you know, that water seemed 25ft away. That gap between where he is and that water was so huge to him. That's huge to me, too. Right. Like, there was definitely a little bit of fear in me the first time I did it. But when we have that, we become paralyzed. And so shrink the distance between where you're looking. Don't look at the water. Look at the next step. Don't look at the end of the marathon. How do I get around the next corner? Can I do that? Well, I got around the next. And then that action actually creates confidence in and of itself, and it creates momentum so that the next time you're like, oh, how do I get to this corner? It becomes easier to do each time.

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. It's brilliant because it's so logical. I'm wondering what happens when you feel very strong emotions that cloud that queer thinking. Do you ever have panic attacks? Do you ever have high anxiety?

I don't know if I have panic attacks. I definitely feel emotions pretty strongly.

You're human.

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, we all are. I think if I recognize what's happening, I kind of think about it two ways. One, if I can. I usually do physical activity. I used to have this thing where I would run until I wasn't angry. So if I caught myself being angry, I would run and I would only turn around when I stopped being angry. I love that. I love that. You know, one day I did a half marathon because I was really upset.

It took a while.

Oh, it's time to turn around. And I'm like, oh, my God. Right? Like, this is crazy. You know, I was mad for a good. A good chunk of time there, and I'm. I'm churning it, right? Like, I. I don't want to suppress my feelings. I need to let them out. Because if I suppress them, they're going to come back when I least expect them. I need to think through the problem. I need to get my anger out. And it's okay to be angry. I'm not hurting anybody. I'm not doing anything to anybody. El. I put my headphones on. I run often. I don't even listen to music. I just put them in. It's comforting. People don't chat with you if you have them in. They don't do the high thing when you're running by. Well, I jog. I don't run. So, like, some people are very serious about this. And so that was my way of coping. And now I have other ways of coping. That is definitely one of them. Another one is the sauna. I find high heat really good for. I find physical stress really good for emotional stress. For some reason, I. I want to stress my body out a little bit, and I feel like that allows me to feel these things a little quicker than I otherwise would. I try not to make decisions in those moments if I know what's going on. And often what I'll do is, like, if I'm having a bad day, you can. You normally know you're having a bad day, but like 10am I'll. I'll change the day around, right? Like, I'll. I'll just. And I'm fortunate where I can do that. Not a lot of people can. But I'll, like, cancel meetings. I'll be like, oh, I can't do that today, because you know what? I want to be at my best. You want me at my best? We're not going to be at our best in these moments. Sometimes I'll take a nap if I'm super tired, but I'll also look backwards, right? Like, what? So I want to go back to the positioning angle to it. Was there something that I did that was within my control that made this harder than it otherwise would have been? What was that thing? Because I really want to start to get at the root cause of, like, what's happening and can I avoid these in the future instead of just dealing with it in the moment? And I want to deal with it, and I want to deal with it effectively. Can I rewind? Can I do the same exercise I did with my son? Let's rewind 72 hours, right? Like, how did we get here? And then that. That's often illuminating, right? I'm too busy. Well, when I'm too busy, I go back in my calendar and I look, I was too busy, right? So when I'm too busy, I don't get enough downtime. And if I don't get enough downtime, I can't do all these things or I'm more likely to be irritable. But recognizing those patterns is sort of the key to solving them. Because now it's like, well, I'll just. I want to avoid that so I can go to my assistant and be like, hey, no more than X hours of meetings a day. Like, that's just the rule. And that's the rule. Because that puts me in the best position possible for success.

Do you have a rule that, like, if someone stands, you up for more than three minutes. You. You're done with them for that day?

No, it's like five minutes. I just assume something comes up. Yeah.

Was that a rule? I'm curious if that's a rule.

Yeah, yeah, it's pretty much a rule. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, I mean, I love.

It's just like having been on, you know, all sides of this, it's like my default is never to assume anything malicious though. My default is of course, of course, you know, just to send an email to give it a few minutes and then something came up and that's okay. But I'm not going to sit here like waiting for this to resolve itself when I can be doing all these other things. And yeah, I think that these little rules and you all have to come up with your own rules, but the other thing is you have to evaluate your rules. Right. Going back to that self accountability. Are these rules getting me what I want? Are they getting me the outcomes I want? Are they getting me the relationships I want? You know, one of the things that I always try to do is win, win on everything. I want everybody to win. I, I don't want to take advantage of anybody. I don't want to be in business with people I can't trust. I want to associate with people that I like. I feel like that that's the best way to live life. And that means I say no to a lot of things. I say no to a lot of sponsors. I say no to a lot of people that I just don't want to be dealing with.

Yeah, no, it's a great way to live one's life. You know, there are so many different goals that we can choose during the course of our day. How do you know what goals are the ones you should be choosing?

Yeah, so the last chapter of the book sort of talks about getting what you want and wanting what's worth getting. The last two things are very different. And I think, you know, for me, it's important to me to think about what is it that I'm trying to do here, what is it I'm trying to create? What is it I want people to say about me when I'm on my deathbed? What type of life do I want to lose in the sense of am I trying to achieve my goals in a way that is consistent with getting those goals? So if you look in history, you know, one thing that everybody's probably familiar with, it's Christmas time, is Ebenezer Scrooge. What did Scrooge want? Well, Scrooge wanted to be the wealthiest, most well known person in his community. And he got those things. He became the wealthiest and he became Ebenezer Scrooge that we know of when we call people Scrooge. That's what we're saying. So he accomplished his goals, but what he, he discovered in the process was that the way that he went about achieving those goals was mutually exclusive from what actually mattered to him. And I don't want to end up in that situation where I have these. And, and this is the important thing. If those are your goals, be conscious about them, right? Because often society is trying to tell you what your goals are. Go after this, go after this, go after this. And if you go after that, that you're going to acquire those things and you might get them. And it's so unfulfilling. You have to be conscious about what you want to. And if you want to go after money and power and fame, own it, go after it. There's no judgment on my part. Just be conscious about what you're choosing and go all in to get it. And think about the end of my life. Am I trying to achieve those goals in a way that's going to get me what I want in the end of my life? I want to be friends with people. Well, I can't stab them in the back on the way to my goals now. Okay, well, now we're starting to get somewhere, right? So now I'm coming up with a code of behavior for how I'm going to go after my goals. And if you want to be ruthless and go all out and try to get those things, then, then do it. I mean, I'm all for people making their own judgment calls about how to live. I think my way of approaching things is more likely to result in happiness. But I mean, to each their own. There's no judgment about that. Just be conscious about what you're doing, own it and go after it. And I think too often we're not, we're not thinking about that. And you can't just think about it once, right? What you want at 20 is not what you want at 30. What, not what you want at 40, not what you want at 50. You have to keep thinking about this. You can't just close the book and be like, I'm going to go after this one thing. You have to reevaluate. Am I still, is that the thing I still want to go after? And if it is, go for it.

I mean, that's a great point and that's what make it all the more difficult when you have that thought experiment about what you want at the end of your life. Because yeah, what we want changes quite, quite frequently.

But it's fun actually. Like if you journal it, right? If you were to journal it every two or three years, you can actually see the changes happening, which is great, right? We should be smarter than we were last year. We should be wanting different things. That's only natural to go about approaching things that way.

A lot of this and a lot of these kinds of discussions, it's always about like more and more and more. I mean, what, what if what you want is just to be finally content already? Like, what if you, let's say you become 43 years old and you have reached all the things that you're content with and then, so then your goal is to maintain it, you know, and that's okay, right?

Totally. Yeah. Like I said, there's no judgment on, on me. I just want people to be conscious about what they're going after. And this happens to a lot of people, right? You, you get people like Elon who are wired differently and they achieve all this money, this fame and then they go all in on something else. Where a lot of us would want to protect what we've established or what we've acquired or what we have and we wouldn't want to lose it because we have this loss aversion to how do I protect this safety net I've just worked so hard to get and I've been lucky and I've been fortunate. Whereas you have other people who put all the chips on the table and they go all in and they just keep doing it again and again. And as long as you're conscious about those things like hallelujah. And you might even want to pause, right? You might want to. I'm just going to do, you know, I'm just going to, just going to sit in this for the next five years and then you might change your mind and be more ambitious again. Right. You know, I don't even think Walmart started. What was Sam Walton like 38, 39 when he started Walmart? Like, we tend to, these are like some of the rules, right? We think that young people do these things and it's like, no, we can do anything we want, we just have to want it.

That's pretty profound. We can do anything we want. We just have to want it. We have to. Okay, so let's, let's just think that through. We have to want it. We have to set intentions about it. We have to own that. That's what we want.

Yeah. It doesn't mean you're going to accomplish every. Like, you can't, you know, bend the laws of physics with your mind. But it does mean that, like, we're. We get these rules and these norms that are established by society, and we let those dictate often what we do and how we act and how we behave. And part of thinking clearly is thinking independently. So if you want to break the book down into sort of like three main categories, it's positioning, managing the urges that get other people in trouble. And then thinking independently. And thinking independently means that you're going to do something different than other people. You're going to create positive deviation, and that's what you're trying to do. Right. And that positive deviation, the most important positive deviation you can create is in your own life, where society is telling you one thing. Go after these things because that's what you should be wanting. Well, you know, maybe I don't want those things, or maybe I do, and I'm going to go all in and I'm going to bust my butt to get them. And all of those things are cool. But you just have to think about. I don't want other people establishing that. For me, it's the same as you think of COVID All these rules came out. Right. And the government's sending you. You know, in Canada, we were locked down forever. And I was trying to teach my kids who. Who were much younger at the time, because this was like three years ago. They were like 10 and nine, I think. And, you know, here's all the rules. Well, we're going to violate some of these rules. Right. So. And we're making a choice, a conscious choice. I know what the rule is. I'm choosing not to follow this rule because I think it's in our family's best interest not to follow this. What are we doing? We're thinking for ourselves. We're not letting somebody else tell us what to think. And they have our best interests at heart. They're doing the best they can, but they don't know what we know. They don't know about our family. They don't know about our situation. They don't know about our environment. They don't know what we need. And so we have to opt out. And that when we opt out, it doesn't hurt anybody else. You know, it has no impact on other people. It's. But we're not going to follow this rule. We're going to do something different. And I have to talk to them about that because they know we're going to be breaking their pool. So if I don't talk to them about it, it looks like we're just, like, flaunting the rules. But I think that the nuance I was trying to get there is like they're telling us one thing, and I'm viewing these more as guidelines than sort of rules. And we're going to opt out of certain ones of those, and we're going to think independently because we think we can come up with a better solution for our family.

Wow.

I'm going to end that now, I think.

Yeah, unfortunately. It's really, really great to talk to you, Shane. You have this tagline of your life that is, quote, mastering the best of what other people have already figured out. But look, I don't really think that's fair. You bring a lot of insight, and you've taught me a lot of new things. And I can tell you I've had over 400 interviews of the psychology podcast in the 10 years that I've been doing this every week with no break for the last 10 years. And I can honestly say you have taught me a lot of new ways of thinking about myself and the world, even the language you create. I'm going to really think a lot now about things coming up in me thinking I'm going to opt out of that. That's got the Shane uniqueness to it. So I want to kind of bolster you up a little bit there, because I think you're more than just mastering the best of what other people have already figured out. Thank you so much for being on my podcast, and I just really appreciate what you're putting into this world.

Oh, thanks so much for having me, Scott. I really appreciate it.