Overcoming Procrastination And Achieving Your Goals With Benjamin Hardy And Sam Qurashi - Genius Network #64

Overcoming procrastination and achieving your goals with Benjamin Hardy and Sam Qurachi. Listen in as Joe, a brilliant psychologist and medium.com's number one author, discussed the desire for perfection, thought leaders controlling your emotions and more. Captured live before the 2017 annual event. If you would like access to the full presentation, the show notes and the special resources for this episode, please visit geniusnetwork.com that's geniusnetwork.com 64.

Hello, this is Joe Polish and what you're about to hear is an interview with Benjamin Hardy and Sam Qurashi. Ben Hardy is the number one writer in the world at medium.com and Sam Qurashi is a brilliant psychiatrist. Both of them are Genius Network members. This conversation took place after they had stayed in town after one of our Genius Network annual events. The most recent one we did, which was super powerful. And what we discuss is what stops people from moving forward and achieving their goals. How to overcome procrastination, feelings of uncertainty and the desire for perfection. Education over medication, which is something that Sam says, which is the problem with medication and what we can do about it. How to make connections no one else makes and solve problems no one else can solve. The rarely talked about difference between thought leaders and result leaders, which I actually think is a much better term if you're going to describe smart, brilliant people.

People.

And a samurai technique you can use to better direct and control your mind and emotions. So this was a totally off the cuff thing that we decided to do at my place in Arizona. So I hope you enjoy it and prepare yourself. Here we go. We are live. This is Sam, he's the psychiatrist of the group. This is Ben Hardy who is soon.

To be a PhD in psychology.

In psychology.

We're surrounded by therapists.

We're here because I need some help. Okay. So my lizard brain, which has negatively impacted some parts of my life and maybe, who knows. But anyway, we're here today because we wanted to talk. What are we going to talk about?

Alright, so we're going to talk about. We just barely had lunch and we were talking about what it actually takes to be an entrepreneur and that you always need to have a beginner's mind. You always need to be creating and that you have to face the lizard brain always.

Right, right. And by the way, and so Sam, I'll ask you in a moment. We just had this lunch. We just got done with the three day Genius Network meeting which was phenomenal. Ben was actually the second speaker because he is the number one writer in the world on medium.com which is amazing. And Sam has interviewed and has spent time with some of the most interesting, unique people on the planet. And you actually are one of the most interesting, unique, very, very brilliant, very awesome, wonderful human.

That's very kind of you.

Thank you.

So, real quickly, this kind of actually had to do with. We were talking about some of our projects and our ambitions. We can all pick focuses of what we would all like to work on, because it's a lot easier to deal with someone else's marketing problem than dealing with your own, or someone else's psychological problem than dealing with your own, or someone else's business problem than dealing with your own. And we're just all talking about all of our individual projects and stuff with a heavy emphasis on something that Sam has been cooking up. And my own selfish interest is I want him to put this shit out into the world because it's fascinating and it will be awesome and it will help humans. And so talk a little bit about kind of what you have discovered over the last few years of this crazy research you've been doing. Because I know you're getting ready to release a podcast. And I kind of want to give people a sneak peek because I want to interview you. I'm going to interview both of these guys for my podcast, which will be put out there, but I want to. I want you to kind of give a sneak peek of what's going on, and then we're going to talk about the lizard brain.

Yeah. I would try to distill it, if you can, in a minute, what it is you're trying to tackle and conquer with your upcoming podcast books, your quest.

Okay, well, one of the things. One of the main things that I'm tackling is the idea of how to make the intangible tangible. I'm tackling the mind in a very different way. Every person that is an expert on the mind is tackling it from a different perspective. And so I'm trying to tackle it from all of their perspectives so you can see something very unique and kind of look at it. I'll just quickly choose a quick metaphor to establish what I'm doing with the mind. Okay. If you were a physicist and you see a tree, and you're in front of a tree and a leaf starts falling, how would you look at that leaf? You'd look at it from a physicist standpoint. You'd look at acceleration, you'd look at the gravity, look at the airflow resistance. If you were a chemist, you'd look at the leaf from a chemist's Standpoint, you look at biochemical reactions that led to the breaking of the leaf, the degradation, the interaction with the soil when it touches it. If you were an artist, you would look at color, the dynamic, the elegant dance of that texture. So my question is, how would you look at that leaf if you were a chemist and a physicist and an artist at the same time? You're going to see something no one else can see, because you're seeing it from three different perspectives simultaneously because you tackled all three, you know, all three. So you'll see something no one else can see, make a connection no one else can make, and maybe even solve a problem no one else can solve. So I'm trying to tackle different perspectives. So I met the top cold reader in the world who can convince anybody he's psychic, even though he isn't. I interviewed Monty Roberts, who's the horse whisperer, who can communicate and control horses through eye contact and body language.

Here's a question for you. Can I tackle it?

Absolutely, Please.

When your podcast readers read your podcast.

Listeners, when the podcast readers read your podcast, can we figure out how to do that? How can people start reading your podcast?

Well, we're talking about different perspectives.

You know what I mean?

That's what the chemist would do. When your podcast listeners listen, when your readers read, how's it going to transform their perspective? In other words, how is it going to change their life?

Well, it would change their life by, first of all, the idea is to write a book. And then someone once told me, I mean, you should share this. And then it hit me in one of the interviews, and I thought, why don't I share this with people? So the idea of the podcast emerged because the topics that are mentioned, these people are living on, they think on a different level because they behave very, very differently. A pickpocket, the top pickpocket in the uk, he's amazing in what he does physically because of the way he thinks. So I'm trying to basically extract lessons from these experts that can do something different in order to create a new, different solution for how to tackle the mind, how to tame the mind, how to control emotions.

Oh, and by the way, you have this great line. Education over.

Yeah, the reason why I want to.

Get to even the core reason of what you're. Even what you want to do.

One of the reasons why I left my practice as a psychiatrist is because I believe in education over medication and I believe in prevention over treatment. And I think we over medicate. And the problem with medication, especially in psychiatry, Is it acts as a biochemical crutch that prevents the brain from adapting to stress. It prevents people from evolving from neuroplasticity to take place. And so I embarked on this journey to try to tackle things in a different perspective and from a different angle. If you look at the frame, if you look at psychology as a frame, I'm basically interviewing people outside that frame. You need to go somewhere different to find something new.

Do you care if I pause one more time?

Sure, what?

Do you care if we jump into lizard brain?

Yeah, go ahead, go for it. By the way, we've been bantering during the lunch, and so this is just par for the course. And we figured, let's Facebook live this.

Right now so people can kind of.

See what actually goes on after a three day genius network meeting with a.

Bunch of people, just brains. Well, not a bunch of people, but.

Very smart, intelligent, good looking people.

Yeah, I think that's where I was going with it.

So I don't want to keep throwing him on the spot, but so we can all talk about the lizard brain, how it's impacted us and how we tackle the lizard brain. And really what the lizard brain is, is it's pretty much what Stephen Pressfield calls resistance. It's the thing that stops you from creating. It's you trying to be a perfectionist and stuff like that. And so, you know, I want to throw Sam on the spot, you know, not say that he's been over dealing with perfectionism. But what has stopped you to this point in getting out there and transforming education versus medication, you know? You know, just what stopped you so far from like busting it?

Well, I think the research is not over to share. And I, you know, I really take this seriously and it's a very. I take responsibility for the information I share. So it's very important for it to actually be effective and be, I guess, simplified in a way that, you know, it can reach the masses very easily. And that's why I'm taking so much time connecting the dots with all the different, all the information I learned from all the different experts.

Right.

And I created, I wrote something called the universal laws of mind, which is.

No, keep going.

Okay. Yeah. So I'm seeing a lot of common themes among all these different experts. You wouldn't imagine that a pickup artist and a pickpocket and a social engineer, human hacker and a horse whisperer would have something in common, but they do. And so I'm constantly creating these different universal laws of mine that I'm writing right Now I want to flesh it out. There's a lot of content that can be fleshed out and I want to start rolling out content as well in addition to the podcast. But to answer your question. Sorry, what was your question?

What stops me? What stopped you? And what stops other people?

Yeah.

To me it's over analysis. And I'm trying to, again, trying to make sure that the information is proper and right and simplified. Because you don't want to release something that is mediocre. You don't want to release something that is not going to impact people.

Oh, by the way, not you. I don't want to release anything.

Right.

No, no, I don't.

Okay.

I don't want to release something mediocre. I want to release something that is properly polished and that is ready polished.

Like gel polish, Electric polish.

Exactly, exactly. So it has the cake has to be properly.

No, no. This is really interesting too because, like, I mean, me and Ben, for selfish purposes, want you to package and document what you talk about. Because every time I talk to you, you say really smart shit. I mean, over the last month, I've spent several days with you because you've been, you know, you don't live in the United States, but you've been out here for an extended period of time. You just went to the three day event. You've been staying at one of my palatial estates that I own, that sort of stuff. And basically we've had some really, I mean, you have a lot of profound thinking and insight and things that you've learned that would be very, you know, very useful, which, you know, we kind of, truth be told, here we are on Facebook Live. We kind of bullied Sam into doing this. We're like, we're just gonna do a Facebook Live video. We didn't even really give him any prep and like throwing him sword on.

He's freaking awesome for being here, dude. So this is basically him making a public commitment to create.

Yes, exactly. But we wanted to do it in a way so it would be useful for anyone that is out there. Kind of like, I have a dream, I have a book inside of me. I have a goal. There's someone I want to ask out. There's something I want to do. I'm not being congruent with my aspirations. I'm not doing the behaviors to do it. And what the hell stops people from doing that? And not just a puffy motivational speech and say, go out there and kick ass and take names. Certainly, you know, you can be very reckless if you don't know what the hell you're doing. If you have a foundation and if you have some sort of, you know, desire to make a change, and you have some skills, which, you know, you have tremendous ones. And you have interviewed people that have tremendous skills. And what is it that when is the time? Right? It's that whole saying, I interviewed Tony Robbins during the Genius Network meeting. He has this great line which, the road to someday leads to the town of nowhere. And so everybody out there has some, someday I'm going to do this, someday I'm going to do that, when the time is going to be right. And then. I love quotes, I love metaphors because they very quickly make sense of things. But it's like you miss 100% of the shots. You don't take the Wayne Gretzky thing. So from your standpoint, what causes. We can talk about you as your own thing. We can talk about me own thing. I mean, we all have our own things, right? For people that are out there watching this right now, all of the things you've learned, all the people that you've interviewed, if they're sitting there not making the move because they're not ready or. But maybe they are ready, but they don't feel like they're ready or there has to be, you know, I just can't do it until, you know. And I'm not talking about going out and, you know, doing reckless things that will hurt you or others. What I'm talking about is, like, at what point do you just make the step forward in just.

Well, I guess at what point are you going to feel adequate enough to create something polished enough to be up to your standards?

Yeah. You or others.

I reached the point that I realized that there is this level that you reach. You hit that threshold and, you know, you got enough content and you can put it together in a way, but now you just want to make it even a bit better. And that's when you kind of get into, you know, personally greedy in terms of really wanting it to come out perfect when it's actually good enough.

So do you think it's gonna be perfect?

Well, that's the thing. When I. When I hit that and I kept on going, I stopped myself and I started thinking about it. And it's amazing how we had this conversation over lunch, because I've been having this thought in the last. For over a week, actually, before the Genius Network, that you never. It's never gonna be perfect. It's never gonna be. You're never gonna be Ready. And you're never gonna know the reaction until you release. And that's when you can optimize, and that's when you can actually make it better than it is. And it's not like an end all, be all. It's not like what you're gonna release cannot be enhanced. People think that you'd release something and that's it. People are stuck with it in your stuff. But you can always enhance, you can always upgrade, you can always tweak. And.

Well, so. So let's talk about. Let's talk about for cheers. Because it's not just you. We all have projects we want to do. I'm just gonna quote something because Joe reminded me of it. This is. Well, it says Professor Harold Hill, but this is a character in a play. But it says if you pile up enough tomorrows, you'll find you're left with an. Sorry. If you pile up enough tomorrows, you'll find you are left with nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays. You know what I mean? And so, like, the only reason I bring this up is because I'm confident when you finally do launch your first perfect podcast or your very first perfect book, that you're gonna be dissatisfied with it. You're gonna realize that it could have been better after it's launched, no matter.

How long I waited.

Yeah, it's never gonna be perfect. You know, I already can tell you I'm done with my book and I already am unsatisfied with it, and I'm excited for the next one, you know, and so.

And I'm gonna go get a copy of your unsatisfied book that you're. Can you do that, Rachel? It should be sitting out there on the table.

But I'm just saying, you know, job, you've created so many. I mean, just. I mean, and I've created so many articles. I'm just saying eventually when you reach this threshold of perfection and you've already said it, you keep getting there. And then you say, I'm just gonna make it a little bit better. It's like once you launch it, you're gonna realize how imperfect it was. You're move on and build the next thing. I don't know. I mean, just what are your thoughts? I mean, it's never gonna be perfect after you launch it, Joe. I mean, you move on to the next one. Right?

Right. One thing we talked about during lunch is that if you look at every professional athlete, if you look at every high level entrepreneur, any singer, I don't even Know if this is true, but I heard that Johnny Carson, who was talk show people that are young may not even know who the hell Johnny Carson is, but he was the Tonight show for many, many years and probably one of the best in the world. And I heard that once a week he would throw up at least once a week before he'd go on stage. He never got over it. And what's that?

Charlie's thanking her for getting the book.

Oh, yes. He was thanking our unseen person who's.

Here with us on the other side of this thing.

Any professional athlete has probably had to play hurt one time or many times, meaning there's never a perfect situation. And although we're talking about Sam, and although we're talking about this, this really is a message for you, the person that's out there, because there is something that you want, something you want to do, and something that would be really good for another human, five humans, ten humans, hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of people. But you're never going to be able to do that if you don't, metaphorically speaking, get off your ass and do what needs to be done. There's a huge difference between effort and accomplishment. People confuse activity with accomplishment. You could be very busy. You could be a very good person. You could be working very hard and not accomplishing stuff based on where your time is being spent. I mean, you could be digging really, with as much blood, sweat and tears as you could possibly pour out of your being. But if you're digging in the wrong location of where the treasure chest is. But the thing is, there's a guaranteed way to make sure you never get the treasure chest is you don't do any digging at all. You sit and think about digging. You fantasize about digging, you journal about digging, you interview everybody about digging, but you yourself never do any digging.

Well, Joe, one thing you said is just this is a recommendation you gave to Sam, and I think it's a recommendation for all of us, is you will learn just as much about your craft trying to sell something as you will researching to create something. Like, you know, we've all. Well, some of us have literally launched products that never existed. And once we sold them, we realized we now had to create something. But selling the product and then building it for clients and getting immediate feedback forced us to create something and learn how to iterate it and build it. Whereas if you're building something without having it already sold or learning how to sell it, you're always going to be building something to perfection, right?

Absolutely. I mean, Nothing happens until a sale is made. And if you think you have a really good idea, and you know, there's this term that's out there right now where people use a lot called thought leaders. A lot of thought. Well, any idiot could come up with a thought. I mean, seriously, like, I know some of the stupidest people that have come up with some great thoughts, and most of their thoughts are stupid. That's why I say stupid people. And I've come up with a lot of great thoughts, and I've come up with a lot of idiotic thoughts, but until I actually produce a result from that thought, who cares? It's just a thought. Results leaders are important. If you want to test ideas, test them on check writers is something our good friend Dan Sullivan says. Because how do you really know if the marketplace will tell you if they want what it is that you're offering? The marketplace will tell you if they will give you a lead to get on your list, if you want to build a subscriber list, or if they will contribute for a nonprofit, or if they will buy a product or service or experience, if they will subscribe to your podcast. You know, I mean, it all depends on your motives. Like, a lot of people would rather be well known than well paid. I mean, there are people out there. I mean, look at the people that I interview. I interview some of the most famous people on the planet that are entrepreneurs. I know a lot of people and I know people that are way more well known than me that don't make anywhere near the type of revenue that my company makes because I, you know, that's not the goal. The goal is not just to have people know you. Like, I have friends that have millions of followers on Instagram and Facebook and YouTube videos and all kinds of stuff that don't know how to even do anything with that. Okay, that doesn't mean it's a real business, you know. So the point is, for one, what is your, what is your goal and your objective now, in this particular case, bringing it back to Sam, I would like you, in the short time that we have, available to actually share some advice, some, be it things that someone can do to how they think about the world, how they do rituals, anything of all of this research that you've done that ties into what your podcast is going to be. I'd love to hear a couple of elegant ideas from you of the things that you've learned that the people listening here right now could take that and they could apply it into their life or into you Know someone within their world, that would be helpful. So. And I know this is putting you.

On the spot, but now, he's a brilliant mind.

You've got this.

Okay, well, this is something that I can use that I've been mentioning. One of the things I learned in pickup artistry is that when you, for example, take a woman out, you don't. You take her, like, say, for three hours or four hours, you don't take her to one place. You take her to five, six different locations. And what ends up happening is when you walk away from her, she's thinking of six dates. Because it's six memories, because it's six locations. That accelerates the rapport that you have with her the next time you see her. So that has. I've used this technique actually in coaching and therapy for different scenarios. Because everything, whenever I interview, I ask myself, okay, this is what I just learned. This is what I know. How do I connect them? Or this is what I learned. How can I use this for coaching and therapy? I always look for cross fertilization of ideas. How can this technique. How can pickpocketing help change someone's life? How can the interview with the samurai and I spent two days actually credible. In Japan, I did sword fighting. And there's a lot of principles that were just amazing for the mind, how to use that in other. In someone else's life.

So it's like one or two more of those principles.

So.

Yeah, no, keep going.

Sorry. I'll just close that. So, for example, there was someone that I helped. He had a problem with his daughter. He only saw her once a week, and there was a problem in the relationship. And he used to spend six hours a week with her on a weekend. And so I basically used that same technique. And I told him, take her to five, six different locations. Don't take her to one location for six hours. That's a great way to bond with her because at the end of this, she's gonna go back to her mom, and her mom's gonna say, where did your dad take you? And she's gonna say, my dad took me here. My dad took me here. My dad took me here. I guess what the common denominator is my dad. And therefore, it's really implanting the importance of the father. And so when she goes, let's say. Let's say because I live in London, let's say she. She went with her friends or her mom or someone else to the Hyde park, and her father took her to the Green Park. She's Gonna link the park and she. That's gonna remind her. And whether she talks about, oh, this, oh, this reminds me when my dad took me there. Or just think about it, that it's creating these nested loops that keeps her thinking of her father. And the more you focus on something, this ties into something else. When you focus on something, it becomes more important. This is how the mind works. I can say that I. For example, I could say that something is important for me, but if my whole body is focused on something in front of me, that thing that I said is important isn't really that important. If you want your mind to believe what you're doing, you need to be congruent. The mind doesn't believe what you know. It believes what you feel. And at the same time, in this situation, the mind needs the congruency. You need to prove to the mind that you mean what you say. So if I'm saying that is important to me, but my whole body is directed to this activity or this product or this service, that's not important. So if I want to get a task done, one of the most important things I need to do is I need to have. I need to think about it, but I need to keep it in front of me. My whole body's going to be directed towards. And that's something that I learned from the samurai. I was trying to push the samurai, and he was teaching me aikijitsu. He's a grandmaster in aikijitsu, which is where aikido and jujutsu were born out of. And after the sword fighting, I was like, I'm not leaving until you teach me some techniques. So we talked about certain things and pushing in which my left foot was actually directed. It was basically directed there. And I was trying to push him. And he said, the knee follows the foot. Just move the foot towards where you want all your force to go, and you will be able to push me. And there's nothing I would be able to do. And all I had to do was just shift my foot, because that's where. Because my body was fighting itself, part of my body was aiming in one direction and the other part was aiming in another direction. So there was a physical incongruency. So if I needed to be congruent in order for me to achieve a goal, everything needed to be aligned in one direction. And that can be applied as a metaphor for life, for the mind. The way you think about things, you might have conflicting beliefs. They're going in opposite directions in your mind. That's A different thing. But I. Yeah. Does that answer. Does that.

No, that's good. That's good. And so here's what I was gonna say. We're gonna wrap up. So when are you gonna have your podcast up?

Wow. On the spot.

Yeah. Dude.

It's okay. First episode. The first episode. The first episode is gonna be early January.

Early January.

Early January.

We're gonna actually make sure he gets it before that, but we'll. It'll be before Christmas, actually. Before the end of November. Yeah, it should be the end of November.

It could be one of us. I mean, it could be anyone. Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

All right.

So you're good to think about that. And, you know, there's been a lot of comments here. Can you do me a favor with both of you guys, go back and look at some of the. The comments if you have an opportunity and if anyone has a particular question. Because we didn't have the ability to respond to comments because, frankly, Ben has to hop on a plane because he's been here, you know, for a few days now because of the Genius Network. What did you think of the Genius Network meeting?

I loved it, dude.

It was amazing.

Yeah, it was absolutely amazing.

One thing that you did, Joe, and I admittedly have never been in person to one, but I've listened to almost all of them, is this time you were very vulnerable with your stuff on addiction, but you were just very open about stuff you're dealing with. And I think you create an environment where there was a lot more authenticity. But also, obviously, there was a bunch of strategy on webinars and all sorts of stuff. Tony Robin was there. So it was good.

Yeah, it was good. We had Randy Zuckerberg, who created Facebook Live, which we are doing right now. So you can watch that on my Joe Polish fan page. If you've not seen it, just scroll down below. This is Ben's new book, Willpower Doesn't Work. Hopefully it might be in reverse because of this thing.

I'm not sure.

But when does this actually officially come out?

March.

March comes out in March. This is the first release copy only to us ingenious network members. And he's got a testimonial. Change youe Environment, Change youe Life. Ben Hardy's book is a Prescription for Excellence by Ryan Holiday. People can follow you. They can read your articles. You are a great writer. Where's the best place for people to find you?

Pretty much just Google Benjamin Hardy. But all my stuff's on medium dot com. Just go to benjaminhardy.com I have a list of my top 20 best articles there if you want to read them.

Yeah, which would be great and they will help you. And it's been a pleasure. Like I said, I'm going to do fuller length podcasts with both these guys because they're both incredibly smart and really have things that would be so helpful related to rituals about human happiness, about getting what you want in life, producing results, eliminating things that are just not useful to you in your life and any famous last words?

Well, if people love quotes, I can. One place to find me is on Instagram.

Yeah, give out your Instagram. Sure.

It's Sam Qurashiquotes S A M Q U R A S H I Quotes. That's my Instagram handle. And it's just basically quotes on a daily basis and it's influenced by everything I'm learning from everybody. Everybody, including the interviewers and then the famous, popular, incredible, awesome Joe. Yes, yes.

I like what I'm hearing and I endorse this message. So have a wonderful day everyone and we will talk to you next time.

Take care.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Genius Network. If you'd like to learn more about the Genius Network annual event, please visit geniusnetworkevents.com that's geniusnetworkevents dot com if you would like access to the full presentation, the show notes and the special resources for this episode, please visit geniusnetwork.com 64 that's geniusnetwork.com 64.