the single best podcast episode i've ever listened to in my life

ZLeverage, the internet's number one small business operations podcast, downloaded 4.638 billion times last month. I'm joined by my property management slangin', offsite hostin', sweater wearin', Claude Code, jamming heterosexual life partner Peter Lohmann. How are you, Peter?

I'm doing well. How are you, John?

Good, man. What are we, uh, what are we getting into today?

Ah, well, I'm always looking for new ways to be lazy.

Okay, good.

Uh, hence the name of the show. And despite all reports to the contrary, I remain lazy. No one believes it.

As do I. As do I. It is an aspiration.

Yeah. Today we're talking about Uh, we're talking about one of our favorite books, which is called The Inner Game of Tennis, but it has nothing to do with tennis. I mean, it kind of does, but I've actually, when I, uh, read this book originally, I was turned on to it by a podcast, which we'll talk more about later. But when I first read this book, I liked it so much. I ordered like 25 copies and I just hand it out to anyone who comes around. So like all my team, my leadership team, anyone who visits me in the office, like it's one of those books that I'm just like, you should read this. Everyone should read it. So I don't know where you want to start with this book, but it's, uh, it's definitely one of those things where you read it and you can't get it out of your head. And I'm in the middle of rereading it right now. What stands out to you? And I know you've like shared, you've done some training on this internally at Sagan. What stood out to you that you're like, I want to do training on this? It's so good.

What stood out to me was I don't know what your experience is like with this, but my background as an athlete at, I would say, a moderately high level, um, not professional or anything like that, but played in college.

Moderately high level? I think that might be a stretch. Refresh me on the specifics here.

I played, I played Division I baseball in college.

I don't know what that means. It's Division I. Is it one because it's high or one because it's low? One because it's high, ranked 1 through 5, and 5 stars is good.

Yes, one is the best, not five or 30.

Okay.

So somewhat whatever. And athletics have always been a part of my life, whatever. And revisiting this book, I realize how much of a fundamental part of mastery in business, either as a leader, as an individual contributor, rhymes with athletic mastery. And I'm realizing how much I need to let that part of my past inform how I'm thinking about being a business athlete to try to stretch the— and so it's not this separate methodology. It's all the same stuff. And I need to kind of basically reintegrate as much as I can some of those habits that I used to have in the world, in the sport of business. So that's how I've— that's what really— I was like, oh, I know all this stuff. I'm just not necessarily doing it.

Interesting. It's very different from my— the way I relate to the book and the sort of framework that it discusses, because I don't have a real athletic background. I mean, I did a little bit of soccer and ran some track, but I was never any good at all and didn't enjoy it all that much. But I do enjoy learning about how my brain works and why it does certain things. Where this comes up for me most often in terms of physical activity is I like to play pickleball, and we have a pickleball court set up in our warehouse here at the office. So I get to play like almost every business day, like a couple games. Awesome. Even, you know, rain or shine, it's indoor, which is so cool. And what I noticed about playing pickleball is that once in a while, if I, if I'm in a weird headspace, I just start sucking like horribly. And nothing has changed about my physical capability of hitting the ball with a racket. But something's gone on in my brain that's caused me to relate to the game differently. And it makes me miss and shots go wild and I hit them too far. And then I just spiral, right? And it gets worse and worse. And I'm, I'm a type of person who I think of myself as someone who has control over my brain and insights into the way my brain works. And I think of myself as like a very calm and rational thinker and the way I move through the world. Like I, when other people are freaking out, like I pride myself on like, no, like we'll figure this out. Like I'm calm, but when I'm playing pickleball, like that's all out the window. For some reason I like lose, I lose that. And so I, I like to know more about why and how that is. And there's a lot of crossovers with business too, as well, which we'll talk about. But that was sort of how I was relating to the book.

Interesting. That's how you experienced it. Yeah. And connecting it, you know, the line that I think that is like the most powerful one that I really identify with that I think is thematically, which is, it's not that I don't know what to do, it's that I don't do what I know. Hmm. It's not that I don't know what I'm supposed to do. Like, of course I know what I'm supposed to do. But because of these other conflating factors, I'm not doing what I know. I know I'm I know I'm supposed to run a sales call like this. I know I'm supposed to do these different things. It's just that I don't kind of, I don't perform when the kind of the call is going on or the meeting's on or the customer interaction's happening. So that's where I think this is really powerful. Did you ever read Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman?

Yeah.

This is a lot of mind. We're going to talk a lot about Mind 1 and Mind 2 stuff. This is obviously lays very well kind of against that. Um, and I think that, you know, I was talking to my team about this and I was saying, guys, this is not like D player to B player stuff. This is B player to A player stuff. Meaning this is not like checklist, SOP, I'm an administrator stuff. This is, I'm in a high performance environment and I'm meeting with a big customer or I'm working on a tricky issue and I need to be playing at the top of my game. That's what this, this, that's what this tool set enables. This is not like basic, you know, this is advanced. This is really sharpening the point here as a high performer, right? Not everybody who works for me is a high performer, but for the ones that do, they absolutely love it because they've never heard kind of work talked about this way.

Yeah. This also really resonated for me back when I was playing Rocket League a lot. So I played Rocket League a lot, like hours a day for several years, got as high as grand champion. And then just fell off and stopped playing. But Rocket League is a very simple game, right? It's car soccer in a very controlled environment, and there's very— there's a very limited number of things you can do in the game. You can drive your car around and jump, and you can shoot in the air for a little bit. That's it. It's just you, some other players, and the ball and the goals. And so you very quickly sort of master the, like, controller settings, like the controls And once you understand how to do the basic maneuvers in the game, everything that's left is what they call like the mental game, which is how to essentially not get tilted and angry when you lose or when you, when you know, the opponent scores a few goals on you. And the way I think about that in business is like this, the hard skills of business, like how to do marketing, how to do sales, how to do operations. How to do accounting, like all of that stuff. It kind of like what you're saying about like you get to be a B player by mastering those skills. Like it can take you as far as being a B player if you get really good at all those things. But in order to get good, become an A player, there's a whole other set of domains that you need to master that have nothing to do with technical ability or technical skills. It's not about how good you run your one-on-ones. It's not about how effective your marketing campaigns are. It has to do with the way you relate to what's going on and the way you handle setbacks. And a lot of like, that's where the crossover with sports is and what the book is all about is that voice inside your head. What is it saying? And how are you handling that?

The other way that I, that this also jumps out to me before we get into some of the kind of subject matter expert is I've really done a full loop on sports. Which was the first 20-something years of my life were dominated by sports. Like, it's the only reason I made it through high school, just 'cause like I was so energetic and whatever. And then I basically took 15 or 20 years completely away. Like, I couldn't name 5 players in baseball. 5— Ohtani, that's basically all I've got. Like, I couldn't name 5 football players. I couldn't name 5 basketball players. But as I'm getting older, maybe it's because I'm also like a dad, but I'm realizing that sports is a wonderful playground for exploring really interesting concepts. Like what we're about to talk about, like you want to learn about peak performance. I don't have this kind of like idealized version of professional athletes where I wear men's shirts on my back with their names on it. Like I don't do that, but it's a wonderful forum about Andre Agassi who went through this journey of high performance and then he broke down and then he re— I can learn so much from the forum of sports about living better and leading better and—

Are we talking about watching sports or being active and playing sports?

I would say both. I think sports is a wonderful forum for learning about life and leadership, both as a participant and as a student of athletes. But I had a 15 or 20-year period where I just was like, why am I wearing a man's name on my back? Like, I still don't identify with that type of sports. Like, we won last night. It's like, oh, you're on the team? Like, I always have reacted to that. Like, so, so, so I'm starting to really see sports as a— same as art— as a wonderful forum to explore some interesting life questions. And what we're talking about today, I think, also fits into that category.

Yeah.

So just very quickly, because, you know, I have some notes here. I'm just going to give two kind of subject things from the book that I think are worth unpacking a little bit, just like some actual material that's in the book. Is that cool?

Yeah, let's do it.

Okay. The first is the difference between the outer game and the inner game. The outer game is played against an external opponent to overcome obstacles, to reach an external goal. That's taught through manuals, mechanics, instruction. There's also the inner game. And the inner game is played within the mind against lapses in concentration, anxiety, nervousness, self-doubt, self-condemnation, self-talk.

This is what I was talking about with Rocket League, right? The technical skills is the outer game. The mental game, the inner game, is what your, what your brain is doing.

Correct. And that is conquered through relaxed concentration, mental stillness, presence, all noting, which we're all going to talk about. But That's the first kind of overviewing this, the difference between the outer game and the inner game. The second thing that I really like is the peak performance equation. Performance equals potential, which is oftentimes skills and skill of communication minus interference. And so much of the time as business owners, as professionals, we just think about maximizing potential, more skills, more tech, more tools, more SOPs, and we're not addressing the interference, which nets out performance. Because if you have the skills, but you're so anxious, you can't deliver on that potential, your performance is lower. And so a lot of what we're going to be talking about today, a lot about the roles of a leader and stuff like that, is managing that interference. So those are two concepts from the book. We can talk about what the actual solutions are, but like frameworks, the difference between the outer game and the inner game, and the idea that interference subtracts from potential, which degrades overall performance. So those are two concepts. How do you interact with this?

Yeah, I mean, the outer game, inner game, as discussed, is huge for me. It's most obvious when I'm playing Rocket League or when I'm playing pickleball. But it's always present, even in a business context, right? When you go up on, you'll feel it most acutely, like if you give a talk, if you're doing a really important sales pitch. Like the other day I got on, like, I got on a Zoom with some AppFolio executives. It was a meeting that had been on the books for many weeks. And it was like my one chance to make a pitch that was really important to me and really important to the future of a couple of my businesses. Like their CMO was on. And that was a moment where, you know, you're talking about potential minus interference. Like what, what were the interferences that were going to show up for me on that call and prevent me from walking away with a win? So in a business context, it's more— it's quieter. It's a quieter set of interferences. But it's very present. So a lot of ways this shows up, I think, for people is things like imposter syndrome, anxiety.

That's how my team most experienced it, especially the women.

Yes.

In particular around, I don't belong here. And that's their inner voice going into meetings. And that's— they really liked some of this stuff we were talking about because they're like, you know, I visualize the worst things that happen, right? Like, that's the kind of stuff that they were talking about, and that's how they were experiencing the material.

Yeah, imposter syndrome, um, the sense that everyone else is doing better than you and is succeeding more bigly, right? Yeah, um, there's a lot of That's a Trump thing. There's, you know, everyone else has a perfect family and incredibly successful business, a beautiful spouse, an amazing home, personal jet, like, and just, you know, that's, that really gets in your head. And you're like, oh my gosh, what am I even doing here? I turned 40 and I don't have X, Y, or Z yet, right? That is all inner game stuff that has nothing to do with your technical skills or ability to be successful. It's, it's a conversation you're having with yourself. I also, I have a rule with people who are close to me, which is I don't allow negative self-talk. Yeah, I don't allow it even in a joking way. So my immediate family members, my executive team, any business partners of mine, I always call them out. And I just, I don't allow it around me because I think that stuff really matters, what you tell yourself.

It does.

Oh, yeah.

Oh yeah. The other one I'll give you from a business context that other people will recognize, I'll give two, one as a business owner and one as an individual, is have you ever heard the phrase sales breath?

Yeah. Commission breath. That's inner.

So you've had a tough week and you really need this deal. And all of a sudden your sales breath comes out and business sophisticated buyers could spot that from a mile away and it's off-putting. And that has nothing to do with your skills as a salesperson. It's your inner game and attachment to outcomes. And you sell worse, you perform worse, you're worse.

Desperate. Yeah.

Desperate. Right? The one for me where I think about this a little bit, that's, you know, we've tapped on these themes before, but that kind of, that what we call it, the combine, the feeling in business of things always going to chew you up right behind you.

The combine's like right behind you. Yeah.

Correct. And I'll give a specific example. When I'm feeling anxious, And that is an inner game topic. I am a worse leader because I'm doing things like getting involved in levels of the organization that I shouldn't be. I'm sending Slack saying, hey, why didn't we respond to that email quickly? And I'm basically eviscerating about 4 leaders between me and the person. But my anxiety, what's going on between my ears, I know by the book I shouldn't be involved at that level because I'm disempowering my management team. But my anxiety, my inner game is stopping me. From actually being beneficial. And so that's another example to me of where at the leadership or ownership level, you have all sorts of habits that I have all the time done things where I'm like, well, my brain knows that I'm not supposed to do that, but my heart, you know, my rational self understands that I shouldn't be nervous about this, blah, blah, blah. But between the ears, I'm a train wreck.

Is there a specific set of events that you've identified or noticed that when it happens, your brain stops working correctly for a period of time? Oh yeah. Business.

Oh, I have a very, I have a very specific one.

I'll give you mine and then I want to hear yours.

Yeah.

So I've just noticed over 10+ years of being in property management now, there's a, there's a very few number of things that when they happen, my ability to think stops.

Yep.

And I've learned to not stress about it that much and to come back to the problem after about 24 hours. The main one is an owner threatening a lawsuit. Yeah. Now, we've been in lawsuits.

Buzz out.

Yeah. You know, I'm not scared of lawsuits, but for whatever reason, when we get an owner threatening a lawsuit, my ability to think clearly stops. Yeah, it's unbelievable. And, and I can't think of a solution. I don't know what to do. I start, you know, getting nervous and getting hot, right? When you get that email, like, I've engaged legal counsel, you're gonna— you know. But when I come back 24, 48 hours later, I, I'm so cool. I, I was like, oh yeah, we run the process, like, we have a whole thing for this. I forgot about this, you know, this already happened last year. I had forgot.

It's in our contract, no big deal.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just you handle it the way you would a tenant complaining about a late fee. Um, but for some reason, that— and there's like one or two other things where when it happens, I just like seize up. Yeah. So I think the first thing is if you can identify those things, it's very helpful because then you, you know, when you see it. Yeah.

Um, I'm going to say this and then I have to use the restroom really quickly and then I'll come right back. Um, and you can, you know, go on a monologue if you want. The one that I've just— the one that I've learned that totally freaks me out is, uh, and it's so irrational, is whenever I see a low amount of cash in a bank account. Even if we have 7 bank accounts, like literally Thomas Kopelman, our mutual financial advisor, we got on the other week and he showed me some stuff and I was like, are those totaled? And he's like, yeah. And I'm like, oh, I thought I didn't have any money. He's like, no, we moved it out of your checking account. What? You still have the money. But for me, when I just open up my Chase account and there's 10 grand in there. I, I guess because I lived, I lived the calm of my checking account for so long. Literally, I signed up a coaching client because I was so nervous because I was like, oh, I guess we're out of money. I didn't even ask anybody. And then eventually I got on with Thomas and I talked to our CFO and he's like, what do you— I was like, oh, okay.

Right.

So that's for me. I have a visceral reaction to a low balance in a checking account that short circuits my entire brain. Yeah, totally irrationally.

You take a break and I'll— okay, I got a few things to mention. So for me, when this happens, the most effective antidote I've found is to just talk with a friend or somebody else at the business and just talk through it a little bit. And I'm one of these people who I sort of have this external processing where if I'm facing a challenging situation or a novel problem, just talking to somebody else about it helps me unlock new solutions that would have been very difficult or impossible for me to just sit down and think through it by myself. The very act of literally talking out loud and having a dialogue with somebody for some reason unlocks and unhooks new ways of thinking. I tell people this all the time, they can't even believe it, but I frequently start sentences with no idea how I'm going to finish those sentences. I think there's like a quote from The Office about this, but it's real for me, and I'm often surprised myself at what comes out of my mouth when I start a sentence about a difficult problem that I don't have a solution for, and suddenly I have ideas about how to solve it. So, um, try that if you run into the situation where you sort of panic and freeze up about an email or some situation. All right, so I want to read this quote from The Inner Game of Tennis. Uh, it's about your mind getting in a judgmental state. So if you make a mistake with an email, on a phone call, in a sales call, in the way you're handling a team member or strategy— um, now the example I'm going to give here is about tennis, but the analogy works for business too. So here's, here's the quote: It is interesting to see how the judgmental mind extends its self. It may begin by complaining, "What a lousy serve," and then extend to, "I'm serving badly today." After a few more bad serves, the judgment may be further extended to, "I have a terrible serve," then, "I'm a lousy tennis player," and finally, "I'm no good." First, the mind judges the event, then groups events, then identifies with the combined event and finally judges itself. So this happens in business as much as it does in sport. And it's just something you really need to look out for. The brain is a grouping machine. Your brain wants to, whenever something happens, it wants to plug it into something it already understands and say, oh, it's another one of those. Remember that phrase, it's another one of those. That's all your brain is trying to do with everything you see and hear in your whole life is categorize it. So that it can understand what's happening. And so when you make a bad serve, your brain goes, oh, it's another one of those. And if you have a couple of those in a row, suddenly your brain's like, oh, you must be bad at serving. And then I'm a lousy player. And then I'm a bad person. You can obviously swap in the examples in business, but it's something to look out for because there's no objective truth in it. It's all made up. Your brain invents it. And if you can disassociate with the, with those judgments, and you can instead make observations, you will find that solutions present themselves. But if you, if you can't unhook from that and you're stuck in that judgmental state, the solutions are very hard to find and implement because you're getting blocked.

There are two additions that I want to make to that to build on what you were just saying. The phrase that I like is non-judgmental awareness.

Yes.

It's to maintain awareness, but for it to be non-judgmental. The place where I first experienced this was in mindfulness meditation.

Totally. It's amazing the overlaps, isn't it?

It's called noting. It's called noting where you're sitting there and it says, just note if you're feeling any particular way. Don't try to change it. Don't react to it. Just say, I'm feeling a little bit restless. And just put it on a shelf and look at it and don't try to change it and just note the way you feel. And that nonjudgmental awareness was my first, that noting really helped me. It's like I can see it, I can feel it, but I can basically just comment on it from a third-party perspective. That mindfulness, the practice of noting and mindfulness meditation was, was like really how I started to try to practice as much as I could nonjudgmental awareness of essentially anything.

Yes.

You know, like I'm feeling— I got a huge spike of anxiety when I heard you say that, Peter. Not I'm feeling anxious, not it's so— I'm so dumb, I shouldn't be feeling anxious. Just like, whoo, I just felt a big spike of anxiety.

Yeah.

And you're just noting it.

A lot of overlaps with like Zen Buddhism. In— yeah, very useful, actually, even though it's not really mentioned. But, and this is also very useful, by the way, in, in, um, like conflict resolution. So this touches on a lot of the themes from the book Nonviolent Communication, which I love, which is—

which you've mentioned before. Yep.

Yeah. When you're trying to work through something with somebody else, the language that you use shouldn't be judgmental in nature. It should just be factual in nature, like non- You know, like, you were late to pick up the kids, not, what, you're always like, you're so horrible, like, you can never rely on you, right? Like, that's not going to get anywhere. But like, when you start with just facts, then all of a sudden solutions start to present themselves. But if you start with like, whether you're talking about yourself or somebody else, judgments, where do you go with that? Like, there's no, there's nowhere to go. You kind of put yourself in a corner.

In my previous career, I was tasked with getting along with people very, very differently than me. And there are a couple kind of like golden rules, but one of them is nonjudgmental empathetic acknowledgement. So the minute you judge someone, it shuts down kind of the deeper experiment, including yourself, by the way, or an employee. And so nonjudgmental saying, wow, I get it, man. Al-Qaeda was the only people paying in this part of Iraq. And you're just trying to put food on the table for little Fatima. Like not— how could you ever? Right? Just like, I get it, man. There's no work here. And those guys are paying $50 an IED. I get it, man. Like there's almost nothing I wouldn't do for my family. Right? The minute you do that, it unlocks the space to continue the conversation. But if you say, how could you? You should be disgusted with yourself. What happens? The wall goes up. And that includes in your own self-talk, you know? Yeah. The, the second piece, and I really struggle this with this one because I, there's parts of it, like I really struggle with this one, which is the exact same thing applies to positive talk.

Oh, I was just gonna mention that.

And, and I really struggle with this one. This one is tough for me.

So basically what the book talks about, what John's articulating, is everything we just said about the distorting effects of judgments apply just as much to positive judgments as negative.

Non-judgmental is both positive and negative.

So if your kid, you know, hits the ball, you know, in a little T-ball game, and you say, great job, you're amazing, that's— you're so, so good at this game, right? That's actually not ideal if your goal is peak performance. What you should say instead is you were squarely across the plate, you followed through, and the ball went way over the pitcher.

Yeah.

Right.

You seemed so excited when you, you know, when you made like, like just observation, right? Like I struggle with that. And I will tell you, like, I struggle with that because it happened. We talked about it in our Emerging Leaders. We had this, talent advisor at Mimo who had a great trusted advisor meeting. She pushed back on a member. She got them to a solution. They were excited, like just artful. And Kayvon and I both saw the transcript and we made a big deal about it, whatever. And I found out that I think she had an onboarding or something with a member that didn't go as well. And she, because she was so anxious, she's like, well, I'm good at this. John and Kayvon, the co-founders, called me and it freaked her out. It freaked her out because we made such a big deal about it. And I was like, ah, damn it, you know, because I like catching people doing something right. I really like that as a leadership style. But I can also see how I could get in somebody's head by saying, oh, you're always, you know, just give it to Bincy. Bincy can always take care of it. Is that really going to get the best out of Bincy?

Right.

Hard, hard, right? Like, I struggle— honestly, I struggle with that one. I don't know how I feel about it. I mean, I get it, but I struggle with actually, like, executing on it, you know?

Yeah. A few episodes ago, we talked about whether it's better to focus on outcomes or whether it's better to focus on the process. Like, if your goal is to win games, do you just tell the coach, I don't care what you do, You got to win the Super Bowl. Or if you're the coach, you tell players, I don't care what you do, we're going to win the Super Bowl. Or do you tell players, focus on the plays and the score takes care of itself, or whatever that quote is? Right. We talked, we had that discussion. How do you think this book would answer that question?

Of course, it's, I mean, that's stunningly obvious. Don't you dare think about the outcome.

Yeah.

I'm offended by you thinking about the outcome. Right? Like, that is a distraction. The inner game and that quiet calm and trusting the body and trusting, you know, all that stuff is the name of the game. I told my team this too, because those kinds of skills and that, that's important. Like, on your first day of work, you're not like, I just need to trust my body. It's like, no, dude, you don't know what you're talking about. Right? Like, you have to understand what product we sell. Like, you have to have some technical, but At a certain level, it becomes counterproductive. And the, the thing I told our team was, I heard this great phrase from a football player, uh, on game days. And I remember I used to say before rugby games to our team, which is the hay's in the barn, which means by the time you're having that meeting with AppFolio, you've already done all the work. The hay's in the barn. Now it's just, now this is the fun part. You just get to relax and be yourself. And this is not the time when you have ChatGPT generate you an agenda and it's up on your screen and you're reading bullet points cuz you're, and you're asking, right? Like, Dude, the hay's in the barn. You've already done all the work to get that meeting, to know property management, to build Crane. The hay's in the barn. This is the fun part, guys.

Yeah.

And, and talking about that in the context of like sales or in the context of our member relationships and stuff like that, which is, guys, when you're talking, the hay's in the barn. If you're not an expert at that point, you're not going to be able to figure it out the night before.

Yeah.

You know, so I really like that. Anything more on this? I got a couple other small ones.

No, let's keep going.

Kind of non-judgment. Okay. The second, the second one we'll skip for now because, you know, I think, which is kind of trusting the innate intelligence of the body. I mean, there's some applications to that. Obviously, it's more pronounced in a physical context, but there is a little bit of kind of like relax the muscle stuff. The third one that I want to talk about a lot though, and I actually showed a video. Have you ever seen the video of the Blue Angels rehearsing in a conference room? It is one of the coolest things you've ever seen.

Yeah.

So to describe it, and we can, you know, put— since we have a podcast producer now, we can put it in the show notes. There's a video.

Oh, I want to see a little clip in the show, right?

Oh, you want to see a clip in the show?

Yeah, I want to see a clip interspersed with—

yeah, yeah. Um, but, uh, where the Blue Angels are high-performance Navy, uh, display team.

Saw them last summer, amazing. They came to Columbus. I brought Eleanor, she loved it.

Yeah, one of the things they do is they fly in very close proximity to each other.

And when you say close, by the way, this isn't like, oh, they're 50 feet apart, but it looks close when you're far away. They're literally like 18 inches apart.

It's crazy.

Unbelievable.

It's stunning as they're doing loops and crazy taking off, the whole thing. And you see this video of them rehearsing in a conference room beforehand, and every single one of them has their eyes closed and they're going through the motions of what their routine and high performance looks like. And it's going move. And literally you see the guy who's on the left side and it says, okay, we're taking— and he looks to his right. The guy on the other side of the conference room looks to his left because they're literally inside the cockpit. And this idea of knowing that this part of your mind is programmed visually and kinesthetically, I think was also a huge unlock for me. Which is what's it feel like when that meeting is successful? And, and what does it look like? And what's it smell like? And how's my body feel? And putting work in at that level was something that when I was younger, I kind of, I think, dismissed a little bit. And as I've upped my game, I'm like, oh no, man, I've, I've run this meeting through in my head, not ChatGPT bullet points, but from a feel and whatever. And I've seen that that really steps up my game.

There's a lot of evidence that your brain can't tell the difference between the actual situation and a careful visualization in your mind of the situation. Like, and you, you, you know this is true because if you visualize your most embarrassing moment, right, and you think through it in detail, you'll get red, you'll start sweating. Like, your brain thinks it's real, it thinks you're there, right? And same thing for like a thrilling moment that you had where you won a championship or you got a huge deal. If you think through that moment again in your, in your mind, you get the same sensations that you experience. And it works for just like you said, you can imagine the situation. You don't have to rely on your memory. You can make it up, or you can run through a routine that you've done a bunch, and it's as if you're practicing it in the real world. There's been a ton of studies on this. It's very powerful.

The The last piece before we kind of bring it home, and then I'll do a quick summary. The last kind of technique thing, and I'm interested how you experience this, that he talks a lot about is kind of like the overcoaching. Hey, you know, when I used to coach Olympic weightlifting, very common because it's a very complex motion. Running a sales call is very complex. Well, all this stuff, right? And essentially, one of the inner game of tennis thing is instead of saying like shoulder down and topspin and low to high and footwork and stay low, it's like when the ball bounces, say bounce. And when it hits your racket, say hit. And that's the coaching cue. Bounce, hit, bounce, hit. Not okay, stay slow. Okay, slow, slice. Remember the slice, right? And I have absolutely found in high, you know, whether it's sales stuff or business stuff or athletic stuff or shooting, right? Shooting, it's all like slow is smooth and smooth is fast, right? And so what you're saying to yourself as you're shooting is just smooth, smooth, smooth, smooth. You're not saying, okay, and grip and I'm pulling shots down on the left. That means I need to loosen my left hand. Right. And in a sales context, it's just like, you know, build rapport, find pain, build rapport, find pain. It's not okay. And now I, okay, I've read this thing on Twitter that said I need to—

The book talks a lot about like your brain knows what to do, whether it's how to hit a tennis ball or how to close a deal. There's a part of your brain that knows how to do that and has seen it a million times and has done it a million times. And all you really need to do is let that part of your brain do its thing. But you can mess that up by becoming preoccupied with weird specifics, like you were saying, like, oh, I need to stand up when I shake his hand, or, or, you know, I gotta get the bill, he's gonna take the bill. Like, you get, you get all weirded out, like being on a first date or something, like, what do I do with my hands? I, uh, but But so the System 1 and System 2 is all about how can you get yourself in the frame of mind to let the part of your brain that knows what to do here do its thing and stop being preoccupied and getting distracted with all the other things.

Yeah, yeah, that looseness, that kind of like snappy looseness I always like. So before bringing it home, I guess the last question I have for you is And I'm thinking about this. I'm on this journey, which is how do I, as a leader, help cultivate this mindset in the people that I work with? And there are some classic ways, which is, you know, coach based on questions and awareness, not on judgment. It looks, you know, hey, I saw Peter, and when you told him the pricing, I saw him really become more interested, or I saw him totally disengage, right? More observational-based mentorship and coaching. How do you think about kind of like advocating for this within your organizations? Not just yourself, not just self-mastery?

Yeah, a couple of things. I mean, I mentioned the no negative self-talk. So that's the first thing. Yep. Is just have that as a cultural norm at your, at your company. Another big part of this is the value of coaching. The book is written by a tennis coach, and there's been, you know, an explosion of coaching in every area of life is now available and seems to be really effective. So, you know, to bring it home to your sports thing, all top athletes have coaches. I mean, I think that's just universal, right? Any sport, any top player has a coach. Um, and there's no reason— and those coaches, by the way, are not the best at that sport, right? Like, the best football coach is not the best football player. They're a coach, not a player. Now, they may have played before, but sure, there's a distinction there. And I think in business, we can also benefit from coaches. And it could be informal, it could be formal, it could be paid, could be mentorship, could be a buddy of yours or whatever. But the value of somebody on the outside that you can banter back and forth with and they can start to help explore how you're approaching a problem or mindset and things like that is extremely valuable. And so that's a big part of, you know, I occasionally will pay for pretty high-end coaching for members of my leadership team depending on what they're trying to work on. And I've seen a lot of value there for them and for myself.

Yeah.

Another one is when you're working with somebody and you're kind of coaching them, and like in this example, you're talking about like, how do we, how do we bring this into our leadership teams? You want to focus on telling them what to do, not what not to do. So if you're giving feedback to somebody, articulate what they should do, not what they shouldn't do. 'Hey, when you get on with that client, don't— make sure you don't touch your nose. He's really offended by that.' Like, that's how you get locked in that wrong frame of mind where you forget everything you know, even though you already know how to do it. You want to tell people, focus on positive actions, not negative actions. If that makes sense. Not, not positive as in good and bad, but just like things to do, not things to not do.

Yeah, smart. Very smart. The The— I'll tie this into something Sagan's doing. I wrote a newsletter about this, which is Brian Wilson, who now runs our— I think we call it our capabilities development department or something. It's all training, right? Both external and internal. He's bringing on, um, for, you know, $20, $30 an hour, uh, a bunch of actors who is going to do role-playing with our team to drill specific scenarios with repetition, because that's how you move move something from the conscious mind to the unconscious mind is you drill. And then when you're actually in with a member, the drills take over. But he's like, you and I can't do it. We, it's, we need 100 hours a month with the size of our team.

What's the quote? We don't rise to the occasion, we fall to what level of our training?

We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training. Yeah, I've used that many, many times. And so we're actually bringing on actors and we're giving them scripts and it's like You're a customer who keeps going through executive assistants, but they're actually the problem because they're a bad leader. How do you say this without offending them and ruining the relationship? Go. And we give that to the actor. We give them a bunch of talking points and then our team drills it. So we're taking training really seriously and kind of drills are a great way to do that. So I just want to get that little quote in for our training. So, um, cool, man. Final thoughts? I'll let you have last word.

Well, I want to give a shout out to the podcast that turned me on to this book, which is, um, there's this great podcast by Michael Lewis. He's the, the Moneyball guy. He's written a million amazing books. Um, he's got a podcast called Against the Rules, and there's an episode from several years ago called The Coach in Your Head. We'll link to it. This is the single most listened to podcast of my life. I've listened to this podcast episode at least 10 or 12 times. I come back to it every year, if not more. It's such a great piece of audio content. It's so compelling, it's so interesting. It explores what we've been exploring from a lot of different angles. They do an interview with the author of The Inner Game of Tennis, Tim Gallwey. Yeah. And I'm sure once you start listening to it, John, you'd be like, oh yeah, Peter, maybe listen to this already. You'll recognize it because I'm sure I've sent it to you like 3 times. Uh, it is just—

I don't recall listening to it, but I'm excited to.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's really good. So just make sure if you do nothing else, listen to that episode and I think you'll love it. Um, I thought I was going to say something else, but maybe not. Oh, uh, no, I think that was it.

Okay, um, quotes, thoughts, uh, technology you're messing around with.

Um, so I want to give a shout out to an article I recently read, and I'm getting the title of it not quite right because it's not coming up in Google, but I'll find the link, we'll get it in the show notes. I think it was called Why You've Never Been in a Plane Crash.

Oh, you sent it to me. It's in our Slack, so look in our Slack conversation if you can't find it.

Yeah, yeah, it's so good. Yeah, and it's basically about— it actually relates a lot to what we're talking about here because the article discusses, essentially you get it from the name, like why are plane crashes so rare. Um, at any given time, I think I heard a stat that at any given moment there's essentially like 1 million people airborne across the world.

Crazy.

It's, it's bonkers. And so Like, why are they so infrequent? And it all has to do with the way the culture of aviation handled, back when they were more common, crashes. And what they didn't do— and in fact, if you read NTSB reports to this day, they don't assign blame. Hmm. They do not blame people in the NTSB report. That's not the purpose of the report, and it's not written that way. It's written to explain what happened and why, which is a subtle but important distinction. And the article just really explores this history of aviation culture and the NTSB and sort of checklists. And yeah, and yeah, like, so what happens if a plane crashes and you blame the pilot or you blame the mechanic? What's the next thing that happens? Pilot gets fired. And the airline stock goes down for a while. Yeah, the airline stock gets— it doesn't get— yeah. And what happens 6 months later? There's another plane crash, that guy gets fired. There's another plane crash, that guy gets fired. That's not productive. So instead, the, the reports look at what were the systems in play that led to the outcome. There's nothing specific about Joe Smith who crashed the plane. That could have been any pilot in that situation. But because he was on 12-hour consecutive flights, and because the way the union rules are, and like all these— everything down to like the, the way the bolts are tightened in the manual that gives instructions, the mechanic, all the system and cultural things that led up to that outcome happening. It's like a— it's like the people who came up with this read the book Outcoming before it was written, because it's the same thing. It's like the specifics don't matter. What was the probabilistic situation that led to this outcome? That's what we need to address. And it's the same thing when you're— whether you're playing tennis or you're trying to win big deals, it's not the specifics of any individual serve or any individual call. It's like, what are the larger systems at play that lead to the outcomes that we're getting at the rate that we're getting them? So I, I just love that stuff. It's something about the engineering background.

Oh yeah, dude, I'm obsessed with it too. Yeah, I mean, just you know, how checklists let them fly more complex planes, like all of it. All of it I love. There's so much you can learn from aviation. That's why one of my really close buddies was an F-16 pilot, and I used to sit down with him and make him teach me how they do post-mission debriefs because they're obsessive about it, about who holds the marker and how quickly it's done. Like talking about debriefs with aviators in particular because they're learning organizations, I'll say one thing to build on yours, which is I wrote a newsletter about this about a year ago, which was my least favorite phrase in the world is, uh, I'll be more careful next time. Because it's like a mistake happens and you're like, hey, why'd you send this to an owner investor? And it's like, oh, sorry, I'll be more careful next time. And it's like, that is not what system allowed you to send that, right? Were you not trained? Were you not equipped? Were you not all that stuff to me is like, My version of what you just said. Okay. I'll do quick. I'll do a quick tech one and then I'll do a quick, um, quote. Uh, the tech one is I am officially off of Apple Notes and in Obsidian.

What?

Uh, which is huge. I know for anybody who knows me, that's insane. Crazy. That is. Yeah.

You've been an Apple Notes maximalist for like the whole time I've known you.

10 years. And it's because Obsidian is built on a basis of essentially nested Markdown files, which—

you know who was always talking about Obsidian? Hmm. The guy who was like, tried to open his laptop at a conference and show me his Obsidian setup like 5 years ago. You know who that was? Who? Josh Schultz.

Schultz, fucking Schultz, man.

He was onto Obsidian so long ago.

It's cuz he's smarter than us and he's still out ahead.

He's probably loving this AI future right now.

Yeah, he is.

He's like, finally.

Yeah, but it's because it's— Obsidian is just a series of nested Markdown files. It's got a command line interface that can interact with a ton of different tools, and it just plays really nice with LLMs.

This is the weirdest future, man. Command line interfaces, Markdown, like pushing, pushing changes to get— yeah, like it's just like, it's such a strange like interlacing of old and new technologies and ideas. Yeah, like Markdown was like a huge thing like 12 years ago.

No, but dude, I'm building my life off a series of folders and Markdowns now, moving everything.

So wild.

Because it's so much easier, like, you know what I mean? Like LLMs are so much happier with it.

Can you explain in like 2 sentences why AIs work so well with command line interfaces as opposed to like even APIs or Anything else?

It's funny. You know what's so funny about this? I literally, we're spending a lot of time on AI as a company and teaching our executives, and I'm going to have a lot of stuff. When we do our pickleball and AI event, I think essentially creating— we're experimenting right now internally, but we're learning a ton about building an AI culture and the policies. Who do you give Claude code to? Who do you only give Claude you let co-work to? Who do you let build stuff versus who's a consumer? Like, all of the— because instead of just being like, everybody can code anything at RL, like, that's not the answer. But you also want a lot of experimentation. So we're learning a ton internally because we're doing it. But yesterday, I had Sajjad, our Bangladeshi developer, actually answer this question. Because I was all excited. I was like, command line interface. And essentially, the way to think about it is that with a command line interface, you have more granular capability with any particular software than even something like an MCP server or an API call. A command line interface is like you're at the ones and zeros level. And so with a— like, the least sophisticated is a Zap, then a little bit more sophisticated is an API, a little bit more sophisticated is an MCP server, but most is command line. So with the Zap—

let's get a fancy graphic up.

Yeah, with that.

Yeah.

But like a Zap can create a, uh, a Zap can create a Google Doc in your Drive, but it, it can paste text in it, but it can't format it that well. An API can create it, manage the access, but can format it well. An MCP can create it, share it with a specific person and format it. And a command line interface can like create it, put graphics in it, integrate a different AI tool into the output and index it.

Like, it's funny you use that example because I think Google just released—

I know, that's why—

command line. Oh, because CLI for the Google Suite, right?

I wrote in all caps, oh my God, this is incredible, because now you can do things like manipulate specific cells in Google Sheets, whereas with these other ones, you, you know. So I'm like, Google's command line, woo! So I made everybody—

so I just need to train my, um, I need to train my OpenClaw to use that, right?

Uh, yeah, I mean, yeah. Yes. For your personal use.

Yeah.

I'm focused mostly on AI for the team, not my personal use, but yeah.

We should do an episode by the way, on like AI versus for personal use versus AI for business use. Cause I'm getting a little bit wrapped up in that distinction.

Yeah. OpenClaw is just to ruin the surprise. It is not designed for team use and I would not use it as such. It is a personal tool from a security, from a data, from an architecture standpoint. That is not the move. Please do not do that.

Yeah.

Okay.

Got it.

Like you should use it, use it like crazy, but you know, so, all right, Peter, that's all I got, man.

Great. That was a good episode.

Godspeed. So in summary, mind one, mind two.

Wait, what was your thing?

Trust the body. Oh, it was, I moved. Well, I was going to say I'm moving to Obsidian. If you want me to read it.

Oh yeah. Well, you off. So, so say a little bit more about why you're doing that, how it's set up.

Okay. Um, I, I went to AI and I said, I've been in Apple Notes forever. Please move everything into Obsidian. And it said, okay. And an hour and a half later, everything was moved into Obsidian.

Uh, what the hell even is Obsidian? Is it like, is it like Apple Notes?

Uh, yeah, it's, it's just think of it as a bunch of nested folders and notes within those folders. And you can sync between devices or you can run it locally. It's free. And if you want to sync, you pay $10 or $20, nothing. It can deal with all sorts of files. It can have associations between notes. So you can do like visualizations and stuff like that. The only reason— I'm sure I'm using a fraction of Obsidian's capability. The literally the only reason I'm doing it is I can plug certain AI tools into it and it can do things like create files, find other files. I can say, run me through my, uh, run me through my, um, clean out my inbox one note at a time and make a suggestion as to where I should file it. And because it's so LLM friendly, the LLM knows to go to my inbox, looks in an unprocessed note, looks in my files and says, this is a leadership tip. I think we should file it in leadership. And I say, okay. And it moves that raw unprocessed note into my leadership filing system. And then in a year when I say, show me all my notes about leadership, it's like, wham.

Okay. And there's no good AI hookup to Apple Notes.

No, there's an Apple CLI, I think with OpenClaw, and it can kind of plug in. I've just— Apple does not want you like moving in and out of its systems. Like it's just not designed for that. Whereas Obsidian is perfectly designed for it.

Got it. Okay, cool.

Yeah. So that's, that's my, my tip for the day is Obsidian is LLM friendly.

You're like always 9 months ahead of me, so I'm sure 9 months from now I'll be like, great news, I've moved to Obsidian.

Like, dude, you're— oh, ask your OpenClaw, should I be using Obsidian? It— I actually think there's a killer app. I know we're, we're going long or whatever. I think that there's— I, I, I'm not finding a lot of value out of OpenClaw. Uh, Like, I think there are other tools and we can talk about them offline that I'm liking way more. But the one killer app that I am, I'm basically factory reset my Open Claw and it is now essentially my GTD interface. It has, it does one thing, which is inbox, projects, project reference files. And it is my interface into Obsidian so that I can just send a text and it immediately gets it into my ecosystem. And I'm not like filing things or whatever. I actually think it's a killer use case for Open Claw, which is as the way I interact with my GTD practice.

Interesting.

Okay, you know, so cool, man. Alright, we'll talk.

See you next time.