Everyday Habits Sabotaging You - Fix This To Take Back Control Of Your Life! | Shane Parrish

when I think about everything that is good in life health happiness relationships all of those things require clear thinking and the ability to make good decisions now one of the concepts you outline early in your book is that often we are unaware that circumstances are thinking for us what do you mean by that well if you think about the big decisions we make in life like where to live or or who to work for or who to marry we know we're making a choice in those moments and so we're generally we think I wouldn't say clearly about them but we're generally thinking but if you think about your relationship with your partner you can pick the best partner but if you don't invest in that relationship and you don't put in the work and the effort in the ordinary moments it can multiply all of our progress by zero yeah let's think about relationships for example we make the big decision by choosing our life partner but I guess we don't think do we about the row over the dishwasher or who's doing the washing up and how those things compound over time is that where you're getting at yeah so if I were to tap you on the shoulder during one of your domestic arguments about the dishwasher the laundry the chores who does what picking up the kids anything it doesn't matter if I tap you on the shoulder and say hey you're about to pour gasoline or water onto this situation what do you want to do well you would instantly go water why would I pour gasoline on this this isn't important this doesn't matter but in the moment you both start slowly escalating and you start slowly escalating and then what happens your whole night is gone your weekend's gone and you have to spend all this time sort of just getting back to where you were all this investment instead of that time going to meaningfully increasing your relationship instead of that time going to connecting with your partner instead of that time going to something more productive now all of it's wasted and we we don't think of those moments as choices but they are choices in a way and they impact the quality of the relationship that we have guess one of the problems in that moment when let's say a couple is having a disagreement over something that with hindsight will appear very trivial but in the moment feels the most important thing in the world yeah is they don't have self awareness so often it's ego or proving that someone is right that comes to the Forefront and I guess a huge theme in your book is the importance of self-awareness the importance to take a pause and just I guess regulate your emotions and make sure that the action or that the words you're saying are aligned with what you want to actually happen and I don't know this is a good time to talk about these four Behavior or tendencies that you write about at the start that that often get in the way I think one of them is ego right yeah let's rewind just a little bit so so we're animals uh and we share these biological instincts with animals we're self-preserving we're territorial we're hierarchical we're ritualistic all animals are all of these things the difference between humans and most other animals is that we have the ability to reason before we react it you know if you infringe on our territory we have the abil ility to pause before we respond to that and our territory isn't physical it's not like we're a wolf and we're walking around peeing on trees and somebody comes into our territory and we attack them our territory is our identity it's how we see ourselves how we want to be seen to others I want to be seen as a loving caring partner so if you do something that infringes on that I'm more likely not uh it's not for certain but I'm more likely to respond without reasoning than otherwise and so I've sort of Amalgamated these into humans in terms of ego emotion um social bias where we just do what everybody else has done the social default and also inertia we keep doing what we've always done so we stay in uh a bad relationship or a bad job because it's comfortable it's sort of too good to leave and too bad to stay and then we just we get complacent in that we don't do anything about it we're not conscious about it and so what those four defaults have in common is that they just tend to reduce our ability to think in the moment and then if you think even before this which is what most people miss about decision- making we think about decisions at the point of the decision we never think about what came before the decision and what comes before the decision is your positioning and your positioning determines whether you're playing on easy mode or hard mode and this is the language I use with my kids but it's so relevant I'll give you an example so one of my kids came home he sort of did his exam uh at school and my kids get exams very early in school and he comes home and is you know shrugs his shoulder he's 12 years old uh and he passes me this test and he gets a really terrible mark on this test and it's unlike him right like it's not like him to get a bad Mark and you know he's just like I did my best and this is what we tell ourselves too right like I did my best and then we shrug it off and we absolve oursel of responsibility so we're not accountable to ourselves uh and then I was like okay well we're not going to talk about this in the moment because I realize what happens is most kids quit Sports in the moment right they don't quit on the field they don't quit if they suck they don't quit if they had a bad game they quit in the car ride home because they're emotional they're feeling things and the parents just like start up a conversation not the right time for that right so I wait wait you know the emotions dissipate a little bit because we're emotional we're not going to be thinking and so later on that night I was like walk me through this I really want to know when you told me you did your best I want to know what that means and he's like well I sat down at 10: a.m. and I looked at my questions and I looked at all the points and I allocated my time and I answered them to the best of my ability and I was like that's really interesting so you think about that the same way that a lot of people think about decisionmaking now I was like let's rewind 72 hours did you study no did you sleep well no did you eat a healthy breakfast no did you get into a fight with your brother yes all of those things that I just mentioned entirely within his control so I was like you chose to play on hard mode you chose to play Life on hard mode you could have done these things that are within your control and that's what doing your best is what are the things that I can do to position myself so that I'm in the best position when the test happens and how this is relevant to us is we're going to get angry we're going to have an ego we're going to have all these things it's a lot easier for us to manage that to U Better design ourselves around it if we're playing on easy mode versus hard mode yeah it's a great example when you were talking about what you were saying to your son you said to him you chose to play on hard modes MH now the word choice is interesting did he know in the moment that he was making a choice or so an ordinary moment yeah right and he just falls into his environment falls into a default pattern not thinking about what he's doing just going along doing the easy path which may or may not make sense I don't I don't give my kids judgments about what to do I just point out what they're doing so when I'm like you chose to play that's your choice you put yourself in that position but you didn't think of it as a choice and we don't think of life as that either when you're working for an organization and a promotion comes up and you don't get it because you're not prepared for it you don't think about all of the 6 months before that promotion came came up all the things you could have done all the skills you could have acquired all the relationships you could have developed all the anticipation all the proactiveness that you could have put into that yeah it reminds me of a conversation I had with my brother a couple of years ago when he was doing his 5K park run on a Saturday morning and he said to me afterward man I'm really frustrated I I I just couldn't run fast today I couldn't get where I wanted to to get I don't understand what it is I'm doing the same thing as always and and then I said hey okay tell me a bit about your week and it turned out that actually it' been an incredibly stressful week at work finishing work late not eating as well as usual not getting as much sleep as usual so of course naturally there's going to be on Saturday morning the potential for that to negatively impact your race yeah but I guess in the moment he's trying his best in the 5K race like your son was trying his best during the actual test or the exam but we don't think about the position we were in before actually that took place and if you look at sort of what I did was look at the titans of industry and the people who consistant get better results than everybody else and the one commonality they had that I've never heard anybody really talk about is they're never in a bad position they're almost never forced by circumstances into doing something they're almost never in a bad position where even though they get angry just like us even though all these things the the life happens to them the same way that it happens to us they're always playing on easy mode and so it seems easy for them but they're always doing the things in advance they need to to be playing on easy mode the fact that you know your brother didn't sleep well doesn't change the fact that he's going to get up and do a race but had he slept well had he ate well had he sort of concentrated on what are the things that I can do within my control that put me in the best possible position for this race would have made the race maybe a different outcome maybe it wouldn't have made the race a different outcome but it sounds like it would have what are the things that you do in your life regularly that help you play Life in Easy Mode yeah so there's a couple of things and I look at this in different domains right and and in the domain of life one of the things I do is like I have a regular bedtime and it sounds so weird but I have a rule around my bedtime and we can get into rules later about why they're successful and why they work but I I know that if I don't get sleep I'm just more heightened about things you know everything uh little slights and little comments get to me a lot more if I haven't slept so I sleep well I eat well I invest in my relationships with my kids and with my partner and with everybody else and what does that mean well that means that when something happens that it's inevitably easier to overcome and investing in your relationship my friend Peter Kaufman gave me this great sort of analogy which is imagine a patch of grass between you and everybody else in your life and that grass if you water it is going to be wet and if you don't water it it's going to be dry well what happens to dry grass if there's a problem we get a spark and that spark starts a fire but if the grass is wet the spark just dies and so I think it's important to do all of these little basic things and then if you look at other domains of life CU those are sort of in one particular domain it's like I invest every every month into an index fund why do I do that well that sort of puts me in a position for the future where do I want to be in the future how do I accomplish that it's like I want to be financially independent so what does that mean if I'm patient about being financially independent well it means I have to save more money than I spend and then invest the difference in an index fund well so that puts me in that position another thing that I do is I work out every day I sweat every day uh and that's my rule another rule that I have is that I sweat every day well let's get to rules actually because I think it's it's really interesting how you talk about rules before we do that Shane you mentioned the Sleep example which I think is a really great example sleep is one of those Keystone behaviors or good quality sleep that if we are able to get it right automatically makes so many other aspects of our life better our performance our relationships our creativity our productivity our abity to resist temptation whatever it might be is better when we have slept well so you have a rule in place that helps you to sleep well consistently great for when you do sleep well what happens though when despite the rule because of circumstances that you can't control you don't sleep well so that's where most people stop they wake up and they they acknowledge the fact they haven't slept and they acknowledge the fact that they might be on guard today and then they don't do anything about it right so the question then becomes is that knowledge enough to get you through the day in the way that you want to get through the day and so for me personally what I do is I look at my schedule and I try to find these little moments oh I can bump this meeting till tomorrow without a consequence without disappointing somebody without having um an effect and I can use that time to sleep so I'll be better in the afternoon I can have a quick nap and so I start looking at day with that knowledge what do I do with that I have to do something with it what can I what are the things that I can do that are within my control that'll put me in the best position possible I know if I have underslept and we all do this you know you wake up some days at 3:00 a.m. you don't go back to bed well I probably don't want to be making decisions in the afternoon so can I move the afternoon decisions up to the morning when I'm still energy and I'm still perky right uh I can do these things that are within my control but you have to it's not enough to just know know that you're tired you have to do something about it and what that looks like for different people will depend on your job your circumstances your so it's hard to give a prescriptive answer when I worked for an organization I would move meetings around when I work for myself I often cancel meetings and I'm like you know what we have to postpone this till next week I'm sorry uh and you know I don't do that uh lightly so it's only when I feel like I'm going to be impeded in this particular meeting yeah I I really like that and if you have the luxury being able to move things around that's fantastic for people who don't let's say they're they work for a boss and you know they don't have any choice over their schedule what would you recommend they do well there's a couple things one you can have a rule for a day like going back to rules because it's so hard to catch yourself in the moment about these behaviors and um we'll talk about rules more in a second but the rule can be before I respond to anybody I'm going to take two breaths bre uh before I respond to any email I'm going to take two breaths uh I'm not going to respond to an email past 5:00 p.m. I'm not going to you know you can come up with these little things you can delay sending stuff so you can even type your email you can give it a couple minutes and then go back and read it you can have somebody else proof read your emails just to make sure there's no tone in them because these are little things the ordinary moments where you're not thinking gets you in trouble right and if you're tired and a colleague SLS you what are you going to do in a meeting well you're G to go you're going to hit back that's the animal inside of us and what we try to do is we try to eliminate these things we can't eliminate them but we can manage them and managing them in that day in that moment might mean I'm going to take a breath before I respond and I'm going to ask myself in that moment is this going to get me closer or further away from the thing that I'm trying to accomplish here do I want to throw gasoline or water onto this situation and I'm not judging what people do sometimes you know gasoline is maybe the best option uh but being conscious about what you're doing is very different than letting that situation determine what happens for you yeah I think if people take nothing else from your book apart from that gasoline V water analogy I still think it would improve the quality of their life immeasurably if they can learn a pause in the moment and actually go is this pouring gasoline is it pouring water even that pause just breaks the kind of pattern you're in right so you can choose actively a different choice you literally need milliseconds right to to give your brain time to catch up to your automatic reactive response and then your brain can circumvent that I like that idea about a rule for the day what I tend to do in this situation is I have a a little morning routine that I do um and I've spoken about it many times on the show before but essentially I've realized I'm a better human being when I have a bit of time to myself each morning and if I haven't slept well at the end of my medit ation or journaling I'll often ask myself the question what quality do you want to showcase to the world today and it's a reminder to me every day it's something a little bit different but on some days when I'm underslept I will say to myself I want to showcase the quality of patience and it's reminded to me that I'm going to be reactive I'm likely to misinterpret things just be mindful rongan throughout the day that your patient that you don't fall into the Trap that is being set for you now that's I think effective but I'm only doing that once in the morning and I'm trying to remember throughout the day to apply that so I think you then making a rule or a series of rules for that day actually is probably a step up because it actually gives you something to consciously keep going back to say no you don't do this today you're not going to reply to an email after 5:00 p.m. and your rules you you can literally write them on a Post-It note and stick it on your monitor so you're reminded of them so you don't have to be conscious but rules are so fascinating because we've been taught our whole life to follow rules uh and you know we're taught the speed limit the tax code all of this nobody reminds us every day to follow the speed limit we're taught once to follow the speed limit that's what we do because we're taught to follow rules instinctively this is bred into us since we're children in school but we've never thought about how we can use rules to our advantage and I was with Daniel conman on the he at his Penthouse in New York and I remember he was on the phone and this is how this idea came to me and he he was talking to this person who was asking him to do something and he was he just said in passing like my rule is I never say yes on the phone I'll get back to you tomorrow and then he hung up and I was like tell me about this what is this Rule and he's like well I found myself not wanting to disappoint other people so going back to the defaults we talk about social default part of that you don't want to disappoint other people I didn't want to say no to other people because I feel bad about saying no and so I devised this rule where I would just dissipate the situation and then I would go back the next day and he's like I went from saying yes 80% of the time to saying yes like 10% of the time and I feel much better I'm much more in control of my schedule and it works out for everybody because now I'm not saying no to their face I can have an assistant do it I can have somebody else do it or I can reply over email and just say sorry that doesn't work with my schedule uh but when I tell them it's my rule he's like they don't argue with me if I tell them oh let me check my calendar they'll be like hold on a sec yeah no problem I'll wait if I tell them I'm not available that day then they'll start arguing about another day and so he's like I'm in this conversation I don't want to be a part of but if I say my rule is I never say yes on the phone I'll get back to you nobody pushes back on rules we don't push back on our own rules and we just automatically they circumvent our Behavior so he's like he's not conscious about saying yes or no in that moment he's just following his Rule and his rule is I'm not going to say yes on the phone now let's take that afterwards he I was like what other the rules do you have he's like none I was like this might be the most powerful thing you've done and and I don't think you quite understand that right because this circumvents choice and it can allow us in these ordinary moments to turn our desired Behavior into our default Behavior without conscious processing and if it can do that then we can do all of these things where you can wake up and you can set a rule for the day and have your rule be that you know you're going to take two breaths before responding or your rule can be you're not going to send an email uh that's longer than two sentences or you're not going to send an email after five whatever that rule is that works for you and you pick one or two for the day and then you can throw it out in the morning but the fact that you have that rule you won't even think about it during the day you just won't do it it's so surprising try it like I encourage everybody to try it yeah there's something about the word rule isn't there that's very black and white there's no Shades of Gray there you know let me have a think about this let me check my calendar it's like that then you're you're using willpower right conscious Choice and then all of a sudden but now you've circumvented it so when you think about how people want to handle anger or ego or social situations most books tell you you have to recognize that you're in the moment and then you have to make a conscious choice and that works maybe 20% of the time and so that's great if you do that brilliant but if you can't do that well can you create a rule so that you don't even have to recognize that you're angry you just don't do the thing that you would do when you're angry and that might be the rule is I take two breaths before I respond and that allows you the time for your conscious brain to catch up to your unconscious brain and now you're reasoning before you respond if I think about that through the lens of health and as a medical doctor of course how this impacts people's ability to make good decisions about their health is of huge interest to me let's take diet for example there so many debates about the best diet which I think is the wrong debate to be having anyway I believe it's more the question should be what is the right diet for me in the context of my life and my lifestyle but one of the reasons I think that rules work like I'm following a low carb diet or a low fat diet or a vegan diet or a whole food plant-based diets one of the reasons I believe that they can work for an individual person is because in a world where there is an overabundance of food available to many of us at all times it forces an element of restriction and for some people simply saying I'm on a low carb diet that eliminates a whole host of foods that they would otherwise be tempted by when they're out and about and you could apply the same reasoning to other diets do you think that that is one of the reasons why so many different diets appear to work for different people because they've applied a rule yeah you're not making a choice when you go to a restaurant and you're you're I'm not a medical doctor but if you're following a particular diet plan and you go to a restaurant it's eliminated a whole bunch of choices for you and narrow down the options available to you and so you're not consciously eliminating all these options one by one you're just blanket eliminating them so the rule is super powerful now I don't um I don't think that way in my life I don't think in terms of diet but I've applied rules to eating with hundreds of people because I've tested this idea over the years and it's so effective in social situations in all these different types of situations we were talking earlier about one of my friends who's a salesperson and you know we were working cuz he was trying to lose weight and I was like well why don't you just create a rule an automatic rule I call them automatic rules for Success why don't you create an automatic rule for Success that you just choose the healthiest thing on the menu every time you're out at a restaurant and you never eat dessert and he was skeptical and six weeks later I get an email from him he's like I've lost weight I'm healthier I got more energy than ever this is the best thing to ever happen to me and I was like how are you you know what are you doing and he's like I'm doing exactly what you said because he was like I was eating you know generally pretty good in the morning in the afternoon but he's always out with clients and always out in these situations and for the client that's like a great night out right that's wine that's a lot of food it's it's dessert it's all these things and he's like I just said to the clients like my rule is I don't do this and he's like I'd have a drink or two with with dinner but I wouldn't eat dessert and I'd order the healthiest thing on the menu and he's like that's it those two simple things he's like they never push back he's like when I used to be like like I don't feel like dessert tonight it's not just the people around you pushing back though is it it's also something it does to yourself internally because I don't know let's say for example um people are trying to eat well and they're tempted by desert if they're out the rule principle what I like about it is it signals to the people around you that this is black and white I don't do desserts for example but it also sends yourself that signal as well that I I don't have to choose here I'm just going to follow my rule totally so so you're not consciously thinking in that moment you're just following a rule you're not making a willpower Choice you're not doing anything people will not push back against you so they won't argue with you in that moment especially the first time they might sort of push back just gently uh but the second time they won't push back at all and so then it's so powerful right because not only are you signaling to yourself you're the type of person who doesn't you dessert so part of your identity part of your ego in a positive way uh but you're sort of not getting the social pressure that you normally get when you're like I don't feel like dessert tonight well what happens when you're out with a group of your friends and you're like I don't feel like it and they're like oh come on you can have a piece or if you say you know I just started this diet I'm not doing this thing and they're like oh you can start tomorrow right and so the social pressure is really gets you to do these things that you don't want to do and because you're a good person because you're a social you know we've been brought up to be social creatures to to get along with the tribe because if we couldn't get along with the tribe we didn't survive and so this is EMB breed in you over thousands of years these defaults right emotion ego inertia and social these are the defaults that may be working against you in your current environment yeah and so you can turn them into a positive thing right which is the rules allow you not to think it doesn't you don't have to recognize that you're tired and you don't have to use willpower and the reason why we want to try to avoid using willpower is just that eventually everybody loses the battle with willpower so if we can get out of situations where we have to recognize and use our willpower or you know if you consider that sort of like a battery and it runs down during the day the further along in the day you get the worse choices you're going to make the more social situations you you get into you know the worst choices you're going to make because you're going to feel pressured in doing these things but if I don't have to use that willpower battery and I just say that's my rule I don't do that also something I talk to patients a lot about is that every choice you make is using up some of your cognitive Reserve which I guess speaks to what you just said which is if you're constantly making choices throughout the day you're not going to have that much energy to make reasoned rational choices at 400 p.m. 5:00 p.m. 6 p.m. so one of the reasons I'm a fan of morning routines that stay the same every day is because of the consist so I know every morning when I get up what I'm doing for my morning routine I don't have to decide well what am I going to do today am I going to do a strength workout I'm going to do flexibility yoga No I'm going to do a five minute strength workout whilst my coffee is brewing that's what I do it's not a choice so I'm not using up any load on my brain first thing in the morning and you're not negotiating with yourself and so I used to uh I know people like working out I'm not one of those people who love working out right I don't I'm not a static to go to the gym I'm not like you know there's people running on treadmills and they're they're running at like twice the speed that I'm running out they're not even sweating and like I'm dying right like just chugging along here and so I don't look forward to going to the gym but I want to be healthy and so how does this sort of tie in is I had this rule I was going to go to the gym three days a week uh and so I was going you know sort of Monday Wednesday Friday Loosely and I would wake up and I'd be like I'm tired today I'm really behind on work and I would start negotiating with myself and then I would I would have a conversation where I'm like oh I will you know I will do extra tomorrow you know and then so I get out of doing it today and then tomorrow comes and what do I do tomorrow well tomorrow I'm like I'm even more tired I'm even more behind and you know this spiral so I was like in practice I went and pulled my report from the gym I was like how often am I actually going to the gym and it was not 2 or 3 days a week it was more like 1.5 days a week and I was like this isn't working because it's not getting me where I want to go how can I change this applied a rule right this was right after I met with Daniel conman I was like okay I'm going to have a rule where I sweat every day I go to the gym every day and so it doesn't mean that my workouts are 60 Minutes every day it doesn't mean they're 90 minutes the duration or scope of my workout can change but the fact that I sweat every day does not change and I think that that's really important because now the negotiation with myself like you isn't am I going to work out today it's what does my workout look like today yeah it's so so powerful that idea it's really interesting that I've been talking about this five minute strength workout for many years on this show because I've used it successfully with many of my patients I've used it successfully with myself and I often use the analogy of toothbrushing which I think really speaks to what you just said which is you know you don't debate with yourself each day am I going to brush my teeth yeah you know today's busy I I'll skip it today you don't even make choices each day where you think what am I going to do I'm going to brush my teeth am I going to floss you know what am I going to do to stay for my dental hygiene no you know you've got a routine you brush your teeth for 2 minutes in the morning 2 minutes in the evening seven days a week we never think we're too busy so at the weekends we'll go for a 1 hour deep clean we know that a little bit each day keeps our teeth healthy for Life yeah that's how I see my five minute strength workout sure I can do extra I can go to the gym I can do other things but just like toothbrushing I know it means that I'm doing five minutes of resistance training every day without fail pretty much every day of the year yeah to make sure you're taking action after watching this video I've created a free guide to help you build healthy habits we can all make short-term change but can those changes become a fundamental part of our life often they don't and that's why in this free guide I share with you the six crucial steps you need to take they're really really effective if you want to get hold of that free guide right now all you have to do is click the link in the description box below what interesting over the last few years I've tried to get into endurance running and I've had a few injuries and I'm working with this wonderful uh coach called Helen and just last week we were looking at things and looking at the log of how much I actually run just not very much and so we've completely changed the approach and just a few days ago she said wrong and right I think what we need to do with you is you need to commit because you want to do a marathon I'm hopefully going to do the lond the marathon in April next year you need to do an hour a day yeah so what every day set an hour a day it doesn't mean you're running the whole time some days it will be 9 minutes walking one minute running 9 minutes walking one minute running it will in the log will come up with different things you can do on different days but I love it because instead of me now looking at my going I can't fit a 1 hour run in because then you know I'm going to be tired I'll have to shower I've got that going on it's like no it simplified the thought process which is no I am going out for an hour each day no questions and so we're only a few days into it so I have done it every day for the last few days but I can already feel how that will transform my relationship with running well after a while it just becomes uh a ritual for you a habit if you will and once it does that that then it won't even require conscious processing on your part you'll just wake up and know you have to run that day and the question will be what does it look like that day and if you think about it so often we say our priority is something that it isn't and I have this saying which is don't tell me your priori show me your calendar so if it's important to you then it shouldn't have a problem fitting into your calendar and if health is important to you then that should be a component is just built into your day like brushing your teeth and it shouldn't be something you have to find time for shouldn't be something you struggle to find time for if it really is important to you then it should just have time every day dedicated to that whether you block it off in your calendar or it's the same sort of time every day and you don't need to book a meeting for it it doesn't matter yeah and then if you think about like a goal like in this case right so let's work backwards everybody has a goal everybody listening has a goal whether it's a marathon whether it's just being healthier whether it's uh improving their relationship with their partner whatever that goal is well what are the rules that I can put in place to get me closer to that and what are the rules that put me in a position where that's going to happen and the positioning is really important right because I want to play this on easy mode so if my rule is that I'm going to work out every day for an hour or I'm going to run every day for an hour well now I also need a rule where you know what's going to make that easier that running easier is if I go to bed on time so I can create a rule where I go to bed at 10: and doesn't mean I'm going to sleep the whole night but my rule is I go to bed 10:00 it's consistent uh across the board I'm doing it every day it's not a choice because that's going to put me in a better position the next day to do that run yeah in the section on making decisions you write that decisions are different from choices what does that mean well decisions are we're consciously processing something whereas choices were sort of like it's quick it's easy and so if you think about it that way um it's like if you're in the what do they call it here Pharmacy and you're buying toothpaste and your toothpaste isn't available well you'll make a choice for another toothpaste but you're not going to stand there and consciously evaluate all the options and all of the different data points with it uh so you tend to make choices when the stakes are lower when you think the stakes are low and you tend to make decisions when the stakes are high so it's a decision a conscious wellth thought out Choice yeah I think you you want to reserve most of your decisionmaking power in terms of like evaluating options defining problems uh doing all of that you you don't want to use that for everyday sort of things where the cost of failure is really low you Jeff Bezos has this concept of oneway door two-way doors and you know a one-way door is you sort of make this decision and it's really hard to go back he says you can't go back but most decisions you can undo it's just the cost to undo them is really high but a two-way door you can sort of walk out and be like I don't like this and come back trying new brand of toothpaste would be a great example of a two-way door right so you don't need to spend ages deciding on a two-way door but you do need a bit more conscious s when it's a one-way door yeah so if it's a one-way door you want to make those decisions a laap and if it's a two-way door you want to make them ASAP so ASAP is as soon as possible and AAP is as late as possible why do you want to make two-way door decisions as late as possible unless there's a real need to make it today you want to gather more information you want to Define the problem really well you want to know what the criteria is and you want to wait until you're basically forced to make a decision and then when are you forced to make a decision we use stop Flo or no in the book which is you stop Gathering useful information flop is your first lost opportunity or you know what to do and I think that those are they get you out of analysis paralysis they allow you to keep moving uh and they allow you to park these decisions so often what we do is we just keep all these decisions in our head and our head can only keep keep so many things going at once and so when we treat every choice or decision the same way we're using the same kind of process to to make those decisions or choices then all of a sudden we have this backlog in our head and we start getting emotional we start getting tired we start getting mentally drained and then we make rapid fire decisions about what we're doing and when we do that we end up not thinking clearly about what we're trying to achieve how to achieve it are we evaluating based on the criteria that we think is relevant are we confusing decisions and choices and are we getting to the destination that we want to get to that's a really nice bit where you write about the importance of defining the problem and exploring the solution you describe that these things need to be done separately first of all I wonder if you could explain why that is and then I thought it would be fun to go through some common health scenarios that I see yeah where we can start applying these principles so so let's do that one second so why are we talking about automatic rules why are we talking about defining the problem because your environment determines your behavior and so your environment can be virtual it can be artificial it doesn't have to be your physical environment it can be the information you consume and it can be the structure by which you make decisions but what you're trying to do in all of these cases is turn your desired Behavior into default Behavior so if you think about making a decision well what's the desired Behavior the desired behavior is we make the best decision possible well what kind of artificial environment can I create where I'm more likely to make the best decision possible and having worked with thousands of people uh across decades who make decisions including myself and putting this into practice one thing that people do all the time is they solve the wrong problem well that's not making a very effective decision so how can we reduce the odds that we're going to solve the wrong wrong problem well we can separate problem definition from problem solution and if you work with really smart people at work what tends to happen is you have this one-hour meeting and you go in and there's maybe eight people in the room and you say like here's what the problem is and somebody else says here's what I think the problem is and the first person that sort of hits on something that sounds really reasonable you start solving that problem because you're type A people and you are knowledge workers and you get paid for Solutions and this is what you do and you start the social signaling that you're contributing to this and you're a part of this and you want to solve the problem and all of those things are super positive but they all also increase the odds that you solve the wrong problem so artificial environment let's create a firewall between the problem definition and the problem solution and that firewall is just two separate meetings and I used to have them you know we I worked in an operational environment at a three-letter agency I would have one pro one meeting in the morning morning one in the afternoon they don't even have to be on two separate days they work much better if they're two you know a day apart and you have one on Monday and you have the other on Tuesday uh but you can do them on the same day and what you're doing is you're spending the first 30 minutes so you're still spending the same chunk of time but the first 30 minutes is we're not here to solve anything we're here to get clarity on what the problem is and the person who's making the decision has to be the one to define the problem so everybody can provide input into that but it's only the person who makes the decision like it's they're the one who's responsible they're the one who's accountable so it has to be them who decides what the problem is to be solved once that happens you sort of go away and you're allow this is what happens your rational brain kicks in too right you get out of the emotional response that you're in in the meeting get out of the signaling uh introverts are uh can contribute afterwards because often people process things differently and they think about things differently and what you're getting is a different perspective on the problem from everybody else and then you decide what the problem is is and then the next meeting is okay how do we solve this is the problem how do we solve it yeah it's putting in a pause isn't it exactly like we were saying before when you haven't slept well how can you create a rule that means that you're going to take a deep breath before you reply to an email it's the same logic that you're using yeah so you're basically taking advantage of creating an artificial environment I consider rules part of an artificial environment where you're structuring things in a way that makes it more likely you're structuring it when you're at your best not in the moment so you structure it when you sort of are not under pressure you're not sort of tired you're not emotional you create the structure for what's most likely to get us to the best decisions and then you just follow that when you have the process when you have a decision when you have something come up let's apply that then through the lens of health so let me think of I don't know Common scenarios right a common scenario would be someone for example would say I want to meditate but I can never stick to it right that's very very common that I hear that you know I I know all the benefits of meditation but I just can't make it work that's one scenario another scenario might be I know that stimulating my mind or being on my devices last thing at night doesn't help me sleep well but I just can't help it yeah do those seem like reasonable examples to try and unpick a little bit totally let's take the second one first right so if you're on your devices late at night and you don't want to be on your devices late at night and that that is a choice that you're making um and you're relying on Willpower to make it you're never going to make it m right so you have to change things and what can that change look like well the first level of change can be I'm just going to leave my phone outside of my bedroom right I'm not physically going to have my phone in my bedroom okay well now does my behavior follow do I use it on my couch now instead of in my bed okay well if that's happening the second thing you could do is take apple and just be like I can't use these apps past 8:00 p.m. get your partner or your spouse to set the password so you don't even know the password to override it so you can create these rules these little constraints this artificial environment which is really what we're doing we're using the environment to dictate our Behavior one is a software environment one is a physical environment but that we're using that to change Behavior so that we're not consciously using willpower to make a choice or I guess if you have iPads or tablets in your bedroom again this idea that the environment is influencing our behavior all the time whether we think it is or not again coming back to your four defaults um you know these things that are constantly going on around us if you have have an iPad in your bedroom it's just going to be a lot harder to exercise the restraint yeah you're playing on hard mode you're playing on hard mode and I think that's it isn't it and I know although I don't follow it all the time I try to but when I leave my phone in my kitchen downstairs to charge it is transformative what that impact has I sleep better I'm more rested in the morning of course I'm not going to go on Instagram just before I'm in bed because I have to go out of my bedroom downstairs into the kitchen and just that little bit of friction means you are infinitely less likely to engage in that behavior totally and it's so powerful right and you know with my own kids uh I have a no devices in your bedroom policy so 9:00 everything goes downstairs there's no laptop in your room there's no iPad in your room there's no watches in your room there's no phones in your room there's nothing and the reason is I don't want them in that habit I don't want them relying on Willpower to turn those devices off because I know that's nearly impossible it's nearly impossible for us as adults of course it's impossible for teenagers this is a really interesting point because I know that many parents say that the biggest source of their arguments or disagreements with their kids are to do with devices um now I'm only thankfully that hasn't become an issue yet for me my kids are 13 and 10 but I know some of my friends who've got slightly older kids they're saying there's constant battles and I guess this is where a rule can come in right a rule that maybe the parents follow as well right so if you have a household rule that may change the whole idea of whether we're even negotiating here like there is no negotiation there's a rule in this house that at this time we're not on devices yeah and and if if you have it that way where everybody's following the same rule it's very hard to have a surface area to argue with if you have it in a way where it's um you're following a different set of rules then you've created a large surface area to argue with I'm in the same boat as you I mean my kids are 13 and 14 I haven't had any problems with this yet uh but I see other kids having problems and also like I every parent makes the best choice possible for their kids for sure and you know I so when I speak about what I do with my kids that's me at my house and this works for me right now might not work next week you know what it's like with teenagers but it works right now and so my kids don't even have phones yet and our rule has been you don't get a phone until grade nine or grade 10 depending on how responsible you are with technology and how responsible you are at doing your schoolwork and you need to show me that you can handle this responsibility and you'll have opportunities to show me you can handle that responsibility through a watch that allows you to text but doesn't allow social media right so I've created a constraint so the kids want to text they need to text I need to know where they are and they need to be able to call me well I can get a watch with a Cellular Connection and that enables all of that but it doesn't bring the the downside now the downside has already started my kids are in grade eight and n and what happens is starting in grade seven actually starting in grade six their friends basically started getting cell phones they have Snapchat they have Instagram they have all these things that my kids don't have and the conversation becomes uh you know with the kids which is all my friends have this and I'm like I don't care what your friends have and I sound like my parents right like this is what my parents told me but I was like our rule is we don't do that until we can handle it responsibly and that's just what we do in our house and that's how we we try to live by just as you have family Rules right our rule is we're kind to people our rule is we have a responsibility and obligation to give back to other people you know you have all these Family Values well why haven't we included technology into that well I think we're sort of fast learning that we need to introduce some rules and some principles about how we use technology it's it's exploded so quickly you know fast than many of us have been able to put in rules we we also have particular rules in our family again that work for us yeah but it's it is a tricky one that I think more and more people are going to be struggling with is how do you manage this and I think the uncomfortable Truth for many people is also that kids often will do what they see us do as their parents so sometimes we want our children to change their behavior without changing our own behavior if you're on your phone at dinner it's very hard for you to tell your kids not to be on their phone at dinner I mean that that is a recipe for disaster or resentment at best yeah and so you have to live by the behaviors that you want your kids to live by just the same as you have to live the type of life that you want them to live but you're also explaining to your kids why which I think is really lovely so it's not just this is a rule with no explanation it's like this is the reason why and once you show me that you can handle this responsibility I will give you more responsibility I like that I also like what you said before about you don't really tell your kids what to do you're teaching them that when you behave like this this is the consequence when you behave in this other way this is the consequence and allow them that autonomy to actually learn that for themselves so the two questions I ask my kids the most are water or gasoline or is this going to get you what you want is what you're doing right now going to get you to the outcome that you want to get to and often when they make mistakes we have this idea in the book right making the invisible visible so when they make mistakes so I want my kids to fail I'm Pro them failing I'm Pro them struggling I'm Pro all of that um when they make a mistake and it's a conscious choice on their part I'll give you a great example about this in a second I get them to write out three questions what I did what was the outcome what will I do differently next time and I get them to write it out on their in their handwriting yeah uh we call it a learning journal and that allows them to reflect on their experience yeah so why is this important because if we think of how we learn and we don't really understand how we learn we think we learn from experience we don't we don't really learn from experience so I have an idea called The Learning Loop which is we have an experience we reflect on the experience from the reflection we compress the experience and then we from that compression we have an action so you have these four steps right you have experience reflection compression or abstraction however you want to think of that then you have an action and this Loop feeds itself so often we skip the reflection part and the reflection part is where learning happens so the reflection is I made a choice in this case with my my son I had an experience uh what was the result of that experience did I get what I wanted out of that experience what will I do differently next time and then we periodically just go through this book and it's really effective it's much more effective than me telling them what to do and it's much more Ive than them trying to figure it out without consciously processing the reflection yeah I love it two questions I have encouraged my patients to ask themselves each night for a number of years now which is what went well today what can I do differently tomorrow yeah and again you know similar themes I think which is just in a very compassionate way just bit by bit encouraging them to self-reflect and go you know simple things like what went well today well you know despite being Mega busy and super stressed uh I still found time to cook my family a homecook meal for example uh what can I do differently tomorrow oh well the reason I was super stressed today is because I stayed up late watching Netflix till midnight so I was cranky I couldn't get my work done I had too much caffeine tonight and tomorrow I can go to bed on time which is going to mean I'm calmer and less stress the following day and they sound deceptively simple these exercises but when you practice them regularly I think they transform how you see the world well they're simple but not simplistic yeah and we tend to Discount things that are simple because we assume they're simplistic but simple is very effective what are you going for you're going for Effective these are effective and if you find yourself saying the same thing over and over again I stayed up late I did this thing well now I can use a rule to avoid that whole problem to begin with right like and if you reflect out in a journal like a writing then you can see these patterns emerge whereas if you rely just on your brain and your memory you're probably more likely to distort things but when you see these patterns that you don't want in your life again no judgment on my part you want to stay up all night playing video games go ahead exactly uh I have no problem with that but if you're choosing you know that's happening and it's causing you trouble it's causing you uh to wish you were doing something different and wishing is not enough to change that behavior well you can create a rule what can I do in my environment we'll be back to the conversation in just a moment now many of us struggle to find time to eat all of these incredible Whole Foods that's why I'm a big fan of good quality Whole Food supplements like this one that's been in my own life for over 3 years now it contains over 75 Whole Food Source ingredients vitamins minerals pre and probiotics and can help us support our energy focused digestion and our immune system ag1 are giving my audience a fantastic offer onee supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first order you can see all details at drink a1.com slore or just click on the link below and now back to the conversation maybe I get rid of my PlayStation maybe I you know I cancel my Netflix subscription Maybe I create a rule where I'm in bed at 10:00 maybe I create a rule there's no devices in my bed try that from just because you create a rule doesn't mean you have to follow it for life but try it for a month try it for a week see what happens does it change your behavior I well I know it'll change your behavior and is that effective to the things that you want to accomplish what would you say to someone who says okay Shane I'm with you and they they apply a rule they say right I'm going to follow this rule I'm going to go to bed every night or I'm going to be in my bedroom by 10: p.m. every evening without a device let's say what happens if they follow that for the first four days of the week fifth day for whatever reason they don't follow it a human tendency is to beat ourselves up and go wow that did that rule didn't work for me I did it for four days but it didn't work on the fifth day so it's the wrong rule for me what would you say to that person well two things James Clear has this idea which is never missed twice yes brilliant so I love that idea right which is you know don't miss the next thing so don't do two in a row uh you can get back on track that's fine that's easy the second thing is this voice in our head this Loop and we all have this inner monologue I think what we don't appreciate is that the most powerful story in the world is the one that we tell ourselves and so if that Loop starts to become I can't do this this doesn't work for me all of these things you need to hit pause on that Loop and be like not this time I'm not going to listen to that Loop this time because I've listened to that Loop my whole life and that Loop hasn't gotten me what I want that Loop is not getting me where I want to go that Loop is not getting me the things in life that I want to get I need new music I need new song I need new Loop not this time yeah and when you say not this time you can start replacing it with a different Loop and that Loop becomes not this time yeah that in a voice gets in the way a lot doesn't it well it it's it's repeat it's the song you have on repeat right we start beating ourselves up and and that voice is not productive that voice doesn't help us that it doesn't help us do hard things it doesn't help us reflect on our mistakes it just becomes this Loop that keeps us in place and so you have to recog when it's happening and it's easy to recognize CU you're like oh I'm saying the same things to myself over and over again and then all you have to say is not this time three words not this time to recognize these things though as we've already mentioned requires self-awareness it requires an ability to step out of the moment and reflect to take yourself almost out of your life to look down onto your life clearly there are practices which are going to help us do that you've just mentioned how important writing or journaling can be to make the invisible visible is that something you do each day I write every day um and sometimes I burn it I don't even show it to anybody I'll just write out like especially if I'm really emotional I'm really angry I'm really upset about something I have two ways to deal with that one way that I deal with that is I just run until I'm not upset and then I turn around and come home it's really effective it's surprisingly I can ruminate on whatever I'm angry about and I just run and as soon as I'm no longer angry about the issue I just turn around and come home the other way that I found really effective because what we tend to do is suppress these feelings and it's that suppression that leads to them coming out in unexpected ways later on you want to feel these feelings when you feel them they don't really last that long um you so writing about one these feelings writing about when you're angry why am I angry what happened you don't have to show that to anybody you don't have to keep the paper write it throw it in the fireplace yeah it doesn't matter but you're getting it out of you you're reflecting on that and then there's other ways that we can find out about ourselves because it's really hard for us to see the system that we're in because we think that what we see is all there is to see and if we remember grade nine physics we're all sort of taught that you know if you're traveling on a train with a ball and you're holding the ball and the ball the train is moving at 60 km an hour how fast is the ball moving well you're looking down you're saying the ball is not moving at all but relative to somebody standing outside the train yeah the ball's moving at 60 km an hour so how can we reduce our blind spots and get a different perspective into our life and so this self-accountability self-awareness starts to kick in and so we can do that in many ways right we can have our friends who call us on it who point out what we're missing we can create a personal board of directors to sort of adapt different personas and these different personas will allow us a different lens into the situation so now all of a sudden we're stepping outside of ourselves like you said we're looking at a different level top down sometimes it's easier for us to Pretend We're somebody else looking into our life than it is to just abstract ourselves like I used to call this director mode and so I would do this when I was having a really tough conversation with an employee and it was really hard for me but what I would imagine is I'm an actor in a movie and I'm looking at this camera in the top corner of the room and I'm looking at this person who's me playing a part and that person is an actor in this movie and this is their sort of like conversation they're having with somebody and that allowed me to see things that I couldn't see before yeah and I think that if you can't do that you can say what does my life look like from my best friend's perspective what does this look like from and you can they don't have to be alive you can be like what would Marcus aurelus say about my life and with chat GPT you can have a lot of fun with this now right because you can sort of play around with it a little bit and you can be like adopt the Persona of Marcus aurelus I have this problem how would he think about it or this other person and then what you're doing is you're really just stepping outside yourself and you're getting a different lens into your life and you're reducing your blind spots because the source of all bad decisions is blind spots if we had perfect information we would make perfect decisions now that doesn't mean we would get perfect outcomes cuz if like think about playing poker right if I knew everybody's hand I would play perfectly every time doesn't mean I would win every time and it's the same thing in life we want to reduce blind spots but we can't eliminate them yeah how can we get more perspective on our life there's a number of ways you've suggested there the first one you suggested was if you have friends who can maybe not call you out but offer a different perspective then as you say in the book grab hold of them they're the ones you want right they're not going to keep you in victim mode they're going to help you uh make positive changes but some people push back against any form of feedback and I think this is where you know out of those four defaults you mentioned at the start this is possible where ego comes in whereby some people and I guess I was probably one of these people 10 years ago I found criticism really hard so you take it as a personal insult on you rather than seeing it for what it is is this a problem you've seen in your work and how do you help your clients navigate that so the three words in the book that I use around this are outcome over ego and I think that you have to keep in mind if I'm not getting the you have to recognize this yourself I can't get you to listen I'm never going to be able to I might tell you the one thing holding you back at work or the one thing getting in the way of your life or the one thing that's preventing you from having the best relationship of your life that doesn't mean you're going to listen to it and if I say it three or four different ways you're not going to hear it because you're not ready to hear it because your ego is blocking that information from coming into you and that's fine there's no like that's just the way life is you have to ask yourself periodically am I getting the results I want am I in the relationship I want am I doing the things that I want to be doing am I and if I'm not getting the results I want well now I have to like hey maybe that person is right maybe there's something that's not quite working here yeah and so so often we think that right and we spend all of our time and effort trying to prove that we're right and we spend and because we're we're focused so much on proving that we're right we miss all of this signal from The Real World coming into us that says you know what you're not quite right you need to change this one thing and if we become open to that and the way that I remembered this is outcome over ego I don't care who gets the credit I just want the best outcome yeah and that best outcome can be for me myself so if you come to me and you tell me something I don't instinctively say no on the spot I don't argue with you I say thank you and then I digest it and I reflect on it and I'm like is there some truth to that I read all the Amazon reviews right I read all of the the comments on all the articles about me uh and maybe that's not healthy and maybe it is but I'm like there's pieces of wisdom in this right oh I could have explained that better I could have done this better and if you just throw all criticism out or you throw everything that people say out you're not going to get the most effective results that you want to get yeah I think whether one reads Amazon reviews or not I don't think we can say good or bad it depends on the impact it's having on us and yeah for what purpose are we reading it if we're allowing negative reviews to affect how we feel about ourselves affect our relationship with our partner and our kids and affects our sleep yeah we could argue that it's read them not the best thing to do but if we have I guess done the emotional Works be to look at things rationally and go yeah you know what that's a good point yeah you know I I possibly if I was rewriting that chapter I could have made that a bit clearer next time I talk about that idea I'll make it a little bit clearer we can use criticism actually as a way of making us better oh totally and you can use negative reviews as a way of making you better too and you know Josh Wolf has this saying which is chips on shoulders put chips in pockets and I tend to be motivated that way right I tend to you know there was this I made the New York Times bestseller list that congratulations and well it's really interesting right because the first one of the first thoughts that went through my head was in 2018 the New York Times wrote a profile on me and one comment from Portland Oregon from some random person said I am confident Mr parish is enjoying his 15 minutes of fame I remembered that comment in that moment and I remember that comment because somebody had framed the New York Times profile and given it to me and I had put a piece of tape on that comment and stuck it right under that profile so I hung it on the wall because somebody gave it to me and I felt obligated social right to to hang it up because somebody gave it to me thought it was a bit pretentious uh so I stuck this comment on it and every day I saw that comment for years until I took this picture off the wall and that comment kept me going again not today yeah right I'm motivated by this this is a fuel and it's a positive fuel because it gets me through some dark periods it gets me through some struggles and it just helps me persevere now that's an anonymous person in Portland Oregon who commented on this article and it was also one of my first thoughts so you can turn people's SLS against you into fuel for success but you've created a you created there an empowering story right so you said before that the most powerful story is a story tell yourself and I'm totally on board I think a lot of us don't realize that we have the power to choose our story in any situation and so you could look at that comment where someone's taking a dig at you and you could choose a self-defeating story of yeah they could be right um yeah I'm an impostor I mean what what the hell's going on with the New York Times writing an article on me you know um I you know I knew this would never happen that person's correct or whatever it might be that's a disempowering story or you could flip that and go wow that's what that guy thinks well I'm going to show that guy that I've got plenty more where this came from I've got all kinds of ideas that I'm going to go and share with the world right so the same situation but you are creating a powerful story that helps you rather than a story that harms you your mindset is going to determine everything that happens to you in life and how you take criticism how you take positive news how you understand all of this depends on your mindset so you need to change your mindset right you can turn everything into fuel that fires you if you want to you just have to look at it in a different way than you're looking at it my grade n teacher wrote in my report card that Shane would be lucky to graduate from high school and she was 100% right but had I taken that and been like oh I'm just going to give up then I would never have got through high school you have to interpret that in the way that fuels you you you decide how you interpret that this is back when teacher I don't know what they do here but this is back in when teachers were allowed to write their actual comments and not pick from this like pre predescribed list about approved comments for kids this is when they said what they thought that was her only comment in my report card and she was 100% right how I interpreted that in that moment was going to determine whether I gave up at school which then it becomes the self-fulfilling then she then she's guaranteed to be right yeah well no I want a Fighting Chance right you don't get to tell me the ceiling on what I can and can't do you don't get to you don't know anything about me you know what I look like in social studies class right like you don't know my life you don't know my situation who are you to tell me this so I can choose how I interpret that and it can be a positive thing like often when we receive these comments these negative comments and everybody gets them right you go one of two ways right on the extreme end you of like paralyze yourself you don't do anything and on the positive end you turn it into fuel that never really runs out because you remember it it gets etched into your brain but not in a way that you don't like the person the comment could even be correct it doesn't matter right it can still fuel you you need emotional maturity though for a lot of this and and as I read through the book and as I I said to you when you you came to the house I think it's going to help so many people there's so much wisdom in there [Music] as I read it I think this is a book about knowing yourself better this is a book about intentional choices this is a book about better emotional regulation yes it's through the lens of clear thinking but actually if you can apply these principles you're going to be calmer you're going to be more rational and yes you're going to think better and execute better decisions it's in many ways for me it's a book on happiness and philosophy and how to live a contented life really I don't know how that lands with you no that I mean that sounds brilliant I wish you were on the you were doing the jacket design for the book I genuinely mean that honestly I think I think the principles are really really powerful and um even that section there on ego in the start when you talk about these four defaults I think ego gets in the way of so much ego could make make criticism flaw you and turn you into a victim or Empower you and train yourself to get better and there is in that section on ego you do talk a lot about the victim mindsets it's something I'm really passionate about because it's something I feel I've changed in my own life over the past few years hugely influenced by a conversation with the asht Survivor Edith eager who taught me that you can reframe anything in life yeah with your mind and I thought wow she can do it in alitz I sure as hell can do it in my life mindset mindset yeah so maybe talk a little bit about that victim mindset and how we turn that into a more empowering mindset well a couple things I I'll say about this one if you're surrounded by people who are victims of circumstance you will inevitably adopt that behavior and so that's one thing to watch out for is who in my immediate circle like if I'm hanging the four people I hang out with are all victims uh and victims being you know I'm powerless I don't have any control over this situation bad things always seem to happen to me I can't do anything about them and you're not like that you will become like that so warning number one well let's just pause there Shane if you don't mind because the word victim gets quite triggering for people and let's explain what we both mean by that or perhaps what you mean by that and then also make sure we speak to that person who is listening now and does think that yeah but you don't know my life this is how I was brought up this is how my boss treats me yeah you don't get my life so it's easy for you to say this so when I say victim what I mean is that your circumstances are mastering you and you are not mastering your circumstances and so you always feel like you have no control over the situation and you are never at fault for the outcomes of your life and so we grow up and we start when we're kids and we go into a household and we have no choice over that household it's luck pure luck where we live who our parents are what our socioeconomic statuses but at some point you know that puts us on a trajectory and at some point we take control of that trajectory ourselves whether it's 18 26 30 whatever at some point you become an adult and when you become an adult you take over your own life and you're responsible for that trajectory and you might be starting lower on the grid than somebody else and that's all luck but that doesn't mean that you can't change your trajectory positively and it doesn't mean you can't maximize your potential and your outcomes yeah and so what you have to do is what are the things within my control that I can do to put myself in a better position to be successful and there is always something you can do to position yourself to win there's always something you can do to set yourself up up to better master your circumstances rather than be Mastered by them yeah I'm a firm believer in that and and that accounts for everybody it doesn't matter where you are on the grid it doesn't matter where you start a lot of people who are you know born really lucky start go negative on their trajectory but you take control of your life and you you are responsible for these decisions and you're an adult so you know that this isn't serving you because you're not getting the outcomes that you want yeah that ability that inner knowledge that you have the power to influence your life is critical for a well-lived life 100% so to go back to your comment about I don't know your life I don't know your situation it doesn't matter I don't need to I don't need to know that to know that there's something you can do today to improve your position Tomorrow there's something that you can do today to help you master your circumstances and change your trajectory I don't need to know anything about your life to know that because that applies to everybody there's always something that you can do and when you're focused on all the things that you don't control you're focused on all of the wrong things and you're a victim in the sense that I'm talking about being a victim what you're doing is you're spending all this energy staying in place and all the energy you're spending staying in place and complaining and getting feedback from people in your life that energy can be better spent changing your trajectory yeah how do you think about about stress and its impacts on decision making I think stress is a good thing right like I don't I don't have a proon thing about stress it's you know it can be debilitating and it can be terrible and it can be positive again your mindset will determine a lot of how you handle stress and so if you think stress is bad and then any stress is automatically going to cause you anxiety uh and you're less likely to make good decisions you're less likely to sleep but a little bit of stress can be a really good thing and I think that we don't think about it that way and so you probably want to avoid making certain types of decisions when you're really stressful uh and if you're really stressful all the time that's a moment to pause and reflect like wait what's going on in my life just the same as if you go to work on Monday and you don't want to go to work well that's fine but if you go Monday after Monday for year after year well now all of a sudden it's like well this is not changing is this really serving me is this getting me what I want same thing with stress right little bit of stress is good it should sort of like either be a lowlevel or uh it should sort of e and flow positively and then no stress and then positively and no stress and then you teach yourself that you can handle stress as well right so there's positive angles to all of this but life is full of stress there's no warning telling you there's going to be a financial crisis or brexit or anything that's major that's going to go on in life there's no warning you're going to get cancer there's no warning that this stuff is going to happen and so you have to be in a position again coming back to positioning being a key element to how we think clearly you always have to be positioned to withstand a wide variety of future outcomes and that future outcome could be a crisis hits tomorrow how am I positioned if it happens what can I do to position myself better if it does happen yeah that that that whole section on position is so good and I think he used the example of an investor and it was basically like anyone can look bad if the position poor essentially so when you're in a good position everybody looks like a genius and when you're in a bad position even the smartest person in the world looks like an idiot if you look at the people who tend to get really positive outcomes all the time consistently that we often think of as lucky or brilliant they're really not much smarter than we are they're not much luckier than we are what happens is they're never forced into a bad decision by circumstances and so talking about what we talked about earlier they're playing on easy mode you look at Warren Buffett today Berkshire haway perfect example right he's got a $150 billion on the balance sheet in cash stock market goes up he wins stock market stays the same he wins stock market craters he wins now he's created an environment where that's likely to happen what do I mean by that he owns 36% of the company you know he used to own more of it he's given so much away to charity but because he owns so much of the company he can dictate what happens to it and it doesn't matter what other people say he controls his circumstances he'll never be forced by somebody outside of the company into making a bad decision and so when we think about positioning an environment these are things we have to think about how does that apply to someone who goes okay that example's great but I'm not Warren Buffett right I don't have 150 million in cash or 150 billion or whatever some astronomical number I'm just trying to get through my week okay uh my finances are tight um I'm worried about my job and whether I'm going to be keeping it in six months or so how does positioning impact that person oh this is like such a fun question right because like let's think about this through different lenses so if you think about it through a financial lens maybe I should be saving a little bit more money now in case I do lose my job okay right and if I'm not not worried about losing my job maybe I'm saving money now because I want Financial Freedom in the future and we know the path to Financial Freedom is to save a little bit of money uh dollar cost average it into index funds and wait a long period of Time problem is we don't want to wait a long period of time right so a lack of patience in this case can change the outcome but we know the path to Financial Freedom for nearly everybody the second thing is I'm going to lose my job that fear can paralyze me and it can prevent me from being the best person I can can be at work but it also motivate me to be like oh what are the skills I need to learn right now what can I do while I'm working to make myself more marketable for the next job for the next promotion for the next sort of thing that comes in my life what are the things within my control right again it all comes down to what can I do about this so this might or might not happen I don't control whether that's going to happen but what I do control is what am I doing at work to make myself invaluable what am I doing at work to learn the skills that I know they need what am I doing at work to make sure that they see the ideas and the contributions that I have what am I doing at work to put myself in a position to leave that job and LeapFrog the next one these are all things that you can take control of this very minute today yeah it's changing your mindset isn't it what can I do in this situation I guess really zooming out and thinking about position and I guess my bias here is someone who believes that Health massively impacts happiness and our productivity and our decisions and all those things well if you are able to pay attention to your sleep and your food intake and your movement you are naturally going to be in a better position than anything that happens in life because your body is working better your brain is working better that's positioning as well right 100 % they're lead dominoes right they affect everything down the line yeah and they're small simple but not simplistic things that we can do today to put ourselves in a better position again think of positioning as easy mode or hard mode you don't do those things you're choosing to play on hard mode doesn't mean you're not going to get through it doesn't mean you're not going to get the results but you're going to spend a lot more time and effort getting them than you otherwise need to so I would prefer to play Life on easy mode if I can doesn't mean I always do but if I have the choice there's no points for difficulty yeah I love that easy mode hard mode it's something I may borrow and use on my children if that's okay of course it's um it's funny that my my son has had a few late nights recently and we we went to France to do a swim run event which was wonderful but there was a bit of travel and a bit of fatigue and you know I would say he wasn't as calm as often he can be and what I tried to do as a dad was not tell him off was more to say hey look you know this is what happens when we don't sleep right we misinterpret things we you know we get a bit emotional and it for me it was again I think similar to the approach you take up was just trying to help him draw the link between fatigue and sleep deprivation yeah and mood 100% so when you what happens uh with a lot of parents in that situation is you shouldn't be angry you shouldn't be you shouldn't be you shouldn't be and that just causes a fight right because that just you react one way then there's an escalation and now all of a sudden you're like blowing up in the car at each other I like your approach where it's like hey when you do this this is what happens you're drawing a causal link and you can also turn that into an easy mode hard hard mode which is like do you feel like you're playing on hard mode today why do you feel like you're playing on hard modon what are the things that you did that would contribute to what's your contribution to this it's never zero right and no matter what the problem is no matter what the situation is I need to you know as a parent I want my kids to identify their contribution to it when my kids are fighting and it's obviously more one kid's fault than the other kids that doesn't mean there's no contribution from each of them so I try to say what's your contribution to this problem each of them has to identify their contribution to it again like in this case it's like what's my contribution to playing on hard mode today I didn't sleep well last night okay was that within my control yeah and if it wasn't okay there's nothing I can do about it but if it was now I draw a link or even if it wasn't like how do I put myself in a position where I don't let that happen again you're talking a lot about honesty and accountability right this idea that you know two people are fighting it's never 100% just down to one person we can apply that with our spouses with our partners and anything in life we always contribute in some way but it's easier and I guess maybe this comes down to the ego default again to believe it's the other person but we are always contributing in some way and I think what your book is going to help people do more and more is develop that ability to be honest with themselves and go yeah you know what yeah I didn't like that behavior from the other party but I also you know maybe put a bit of gasoline on the fire rather than water right at the start I didn't need to say that for example the F the first thing to recognize is that we're not perfect I mean like we're the hero of Our Own Story uh but we're all far from perfect I don't make perfect decisions one of my objections to titling the book clear thinking was I don't want to be held up as somebody who always thinks clearly I'm human right and we're all human and what does that mean it means we make mistakes but we get better and we become the best version of ourselves when we identify what our contribution is what is within our control how we're interpreting situation us our mindset to get us to a better place and those are things we all control those are I'm not asking to change outcomes they will change outcomes those are the lead dominoes to changing your outcomes that'll happen inevitably there's a book written by a famous coach called the score will take care of itself don't focus on the score focus on the things within your control that you can do on this particular play to put yourself in a winning position yeah there was a a section in the book where you talked about these rituals that Sports people may have um to prevent them allowing I think these defaults to get in the way so perhaps you could talk about that because I found that really really helpful and I think it will help people think about you know rituals they can put into practice in their own life anywhere where temperament is involved in sort of outcomes of uh what you're doing you will find hidden rituals they're hiding in plain sight whether it's the CEO who takes a breath before responding or the tennis player who bounces the ball the same number of times before a serve or the basketball player who bounces the ball the same number of times before a free throw or the basketball player who starts the routine the exact same way or the baseball player takes the same number of practice swings what you're seeing is a ritual and what does that ritual do for you that ritual allows the pause between stimulus and response and that ritual centers you on the here and now and in this moment to make sure you're taking action after watching this video I have created a free breathing guide that's going to help you reduce stress calm your mind and boost your energy in this guide I share with you six really simple breathing practices that work immediately even just one minute a day will start to make a big difference to receive your free guides all you have to do is click on the link in the description box below and so if you think of tennis player it doesn't matter if you just made the best play of your career or the worst play of your career you're bouncing the ball the same number of times and what are you doing in that moment you're centering yourself you're catching your breath you're orienting to right now you're forgetting about what just happened what just happened doesn't matter doesn't matter if it was the best play doesn't matter if it was the worst play what matters is the next play think of the CEO is taking a breath it doesn't matter what somebody just said to them it doesn't matter anything what matters is is what comes out of my mouth next basketball players same thing doesn't matter what the circumstances are doesn't matter if it was the best play worst play doesn't matter if it was unfair if the ref made a bad call none of it matters what matters is you can focus on your next move you can focus on your next surf you can focus on your next shot you can focus on the next thing out of your mouth and you can always take a step to bettering your position to bettering your trajectory to mastering your circumstances in those moments this is where rules come in of course so instead of Daniel Carman saying yes on the phone because he felt a social obligation to do so yeah he has a rule yeah it brings in the pause it allows him to reflect it allows the next day to come and go yeah you know what we don't want to do that or whatever it might be so anywhere where you're using discipline or willpower to do something you can use rules and rituals to effectively change your behavior a great example with my kids is homework I don't know uh what it's like here but I mean my kids get a lot of homework and they have since grade seven they get about 90 minutes a night and it was always this battle they would come home and they' be like I don't feel like do my homework and then you know it's like 8:00 all of a sudden and I'm like you have 90 minutes of homework to do what are you doing and you know this lasted a bit a week and I was like this is not going to work how do we figure this out right how do we ritualize this Behavior so that you're just automatically doing the things that you need to do I can't make it a rule because I think that wouldn't have been effective with that but what I was like was like okay you get home you get off the bus you go upstairs you shower you come downstairs and you start your homework and I'll give you a snack and I had to force this for about a week and then all of a sudden like it started I was there but it started like taking over by itself by the end of a month I left the house just to see what would happen and they just followed the ritual and this is what we do right so if you think of an ntia right we talk about inertia in the book being one of the defaults well inertia by itself is not not positive or negative it's just reinforcing the status quo so if I can use a ritual to create a status quo or use a rule to create a status quo well now all of a sudden I have positive inertia instead of negative inertia I don't have to overcome it I just have to let it do its thing and it's so powerful that we're not thinking in those moments my kids weren't coming home and making a conscious choice about whether to do homework or not they were just following the inertia of what they've done yeah momentum momentum yeah they're building momentum and I think that's speaks to what we were saying before about I guess my 5 minute workout each day there's a momentum there it's easier for me now to do it than not do it I'd actually feel a little bit odd if I didn't do that in the morning and at the moment trying to get this one hour running each day yes at the moment there's going to be a little bit of inertia because I haven't quite ritualized it but hopefully in four weeks or so it will be yeah I just do that well I used to wear an Apple Watch okay and you know how it gives you that feedback you checked off all three of your your goals today once you've done that a few days in a row you want it the next day once you've done it like 20 or 30 days in a row you can't miss it right it becomes this thing where you've created this inertia that you just need you actually have a loss now instead of it's not like whether I want to do it or not it's like I have to do it because I want to keep this streak alive and so at some point you just create this positive inertia that just takes over for itself and then instead of like forcing yourself to do this thing or even just finding time to fit it in you actually would feel a loss if you didn't do it let's go back to meditation and that example um or that hypothetical scenario we mentioned earlier on about the person who hears all the benefits of meditation but says I can't stick to it I think there's multiple ways we can look at that but I really liked this whole idea of decision making where you need to actually Define the problem properly clearly concisely and then pause before exploring a solution so I guess what I'm getting at Shane is someone who says I want to meditate we don't necessarily know that they actually want to meditate maybe they've not even defined a problem maybe they just heard something on the radio or on this podcast or whatever and thought yeah I need to meditate and then you know a week later go can't do it I knew I couldn't do it whereas maybe the problem is okay I've got too much stress in my life some of I can't eliminate from work so can I do something in my life that helps me to manage that so it could be that the problem is I want to find a daily practice that can help me manage stress do you see what I'm getting at it's like well maybe that's the process they need to go through maybe meditation is one of five options so so what you just did was spend time defining what the problem is once you've identified what the problem is now we can go into solution space what you do when you're like I don't quite understand this but I need to meditate is you're in solution space yeah you haven't defined the problem so you don't know if you're solving the right problem and you're likely not and if you are solving the right problem there there's multiple options available to solving that problem of which meditation might just be one of them yeah so let's say they've defined the problem let's say it is stress reduction for for argument sake and they go okay and they make a list of the four or five practices that they could do meditation journaling breath work mindfulness what whatever it might be that appeals to them you've obviously got this four-step process in the book of defining problem exploring Solutions evaluating options and then executing the best option MH how do they know if they're executing the best option or not well use the criteria to figure out and the criteria in this case could be do I have time to do it is it going to be something I can stick with uh is it biggest bang for the buck right like exercise might be the biggest bang for the buck even though it's the thing that I least like so you can weigh these different criteria for how long it's going to take what the likely impact is that it's going to have on you uh and you could try them and then you execute and you have to give it a chance though right how you give it a chance is make it a rule uh and then use reflection to gather your feedback on the situation and see that it's working for you nothing is going to manage your stress for you uh if you're stressed about it right so you have to like go into the process and be like I'm going to do something about this my goal is now to pick the best thing to do about it and I have to think about the different scenarios right so often we just grab something and we run with it and it doesn't work for us well maybe it doesn't fit in with our lifestyle maybe it doesn't fit in with other objectives we have and now all of a sudden we feel overwhelmed well maybe working out is the answer because that solves two or three different things that I'm trying to solve at the same time and I can dedicate actually less time to these things than I would individually uh and you know biggest bang for the buck is also important right like out of these things which is most likely to help the most number of people that doesn't mean it's going to work for me uh but let's start maybe with the thing that is likely to impact people the most and then the other thing is like if I'm not sticking with it and is it because I'm not getting the benefits out of it right and if I'm not getting the benefits out of it then why am I doing it and so at some point you have to cut a line off maybe that line is like 30 days if I'm not seeing the I'm going to make it a rule I'm going to do this for 30 days and if I'm not seeing the benefits by the end of 30 days I'm going to switch to option number two yeah and I'm going to do that for 30 days until something sticks and I get some traction yeah I love it really systematizing the process you know instead of it just being how do we feel say oh it's not working you know that's not clear thinking well consistency dictates a lot of this too right is we are in most areas of our life that we have problems we're inconsistent with our Behavior Uh if we have trust issues we're inconsistent with our trust you know we don't do the things if we're unreliable you know we're playing on hard mode if we are consistently not doing what we say we're going to do when we're say we're going to do it we're not going to get the opportunities that we feel we deserve at work and so how do we become more consistent in the things that are most important to us so if this is important to you then the automatic rule makes it consistent most of us tend to be consistent you know dual lingo is a perfect example I have lots of friends who've used this they log on for six or seven days uh and then they you know stop going and then all of a sudden it's like three weeks later and they've gone maybe like 10 or 12 times and they're not learning as fast as they thought they were going to learn well of course you're not learning as fast as you thought you were going to learn you're not being consistent about it it if it's it's important to you you make the time for it if it's not important to you and it's just this casual thing don't beat yourself up about not being where you want to be how does intuition fit into decision making well I think it fits in uh you know I don't dismiss intuition I I think that you can think of intuition in a couple ways one is if you think of emotion on one end of the spectrum and intuition being part of emotion and you think of reason on the other end of the spectrum you never want to be 100% rational in all of your decisions you never want to be 100% intuitive in all of your decisions question is what type of decision am I making and where should I be on that Spectrum maybe it's 7030 maybe it's 9010 if you're making a financial decision you probably want to be more rational and less intuitive if you're making a relationship decision maybe you want a balance between rational and intuitive not all decisions are the same the second thing about intuition is most of us overestimate our intuition I what for an intuition to develop into a really good intuition you need a constant environment a lot of reps and Rapid feedback and if you think of business and the workplace we get that in very few domains of that so what do we develop instead of a real solid intuition is we develop pattern matching associative pattern matching this looks like this and then that can give us an Insight but we want to create a pause between that insight and actually following through on it that pause doesn't need to be long that pause can be short or that pause can be a cue to follow the process right and so we want to we just want to make sure that we have a pause where we're checking our intuition and the best way to check that is just to create that space between stimulus and response yeah personal board of directors you mentioned that earlier about how that can help give us perspective take us out of our life zoom out a little bit so we can see things differently or from a from a different angle what is it exactly and how can people start you know creating their own so before we get to the personal board of directors let's just rewind a little bit here right so we talked earlier about being born into a household you adopt these uh World Views and rules these hidden rules that you get growing up from your parents some of us are lucky some of us are less lucky uh that doesn't change the fact that you can't take take control of that and so the standards that we grow up with are sort of the standards that we have if we grew up in say an average standards household then we're going to have average standards for ourselves so what do we want to get out of a personal board of directors we want to reduce our blind spots we want to gain insight into the situation and we want to hold ourselves accountable and we want to hold ourselves to a higher standard than we otherwise would hold ourselves so there's three aspects to that personal board of directors and the cool thing about the board of directors is they can be real people that you talk to and you could actually have like a quarterly meeting with some of your friends or your mentors or your colleagues or they can be dead people or they can be people that are alive that you'll never actually talk to like Elon Musk and they don't have to be people that you like everything about them you can use them for one specific trait you don't have to like everything about Elon Musk but if you like the way that he thinks big he could be on your board of directors and he could be the person asking you how do you do this faster how do you do this bigger yeah right you don't have to adapt his lifestyle you don't have to adapt his controversy none of that stuff that doesn't matter we throw away the orange because of a blemish on the peel it doesn't make sense you can take specific aspects of people put them on your director so how do you use these people to get better results in life use them to look into a situation I'm faced with a decision well I can visualize this table of my board of directors and I'm going to walk through the problem from every one of their points of view and what does that do it reduces my blind spots I see different insights into the situation that I wouldn't have otherwise seen second thing I'm going to do is I'm faced with a moral dilemma I'm faced with this sort of thing well I'm not you know I'm going to use a subset a special committee on my board of directors for that I'm not maybe elon's not on that right and somebody else is who who maybe has a better compass for that stuff and I'm going to be like how would they handle this situation again what am I doing reducing my blind spots holding myself to a higher standard and then if I imagine reporting what I'm doing to these people and I go to them and I say hey I'm not getting the results I want but by the way I'm on Tik Tok from 9: till 10:00 p.m. every night uh well all of a sudden my board can be like we're not doing that are you sure that's what you want to be doing and so you can raise your own standards just by reporting to these people and nobody has to see this reporting this can all happen in your head it can all happen at a coffee shop when you're just sort of walking through these things it could be as simple as someone enjoys what you're saying on this podcast and they have a difficult decision in a few days to make they could have you on their board of directors go well what would Shane say here how would Shane advise me here yeah simple as that you don't need my permission yeah you don't even need your permission or your email address or your mobile number yeah you can use you can almost get into the head you know as you said before about actors and imagine you're playing a different role or you can you can literally imagine I guess people who others respect or they've heard their podcast lots of times or whatever they feel that they know that person what would he say here what would she say here how would they behave here so it's one of the first times in history where you can get direct from The Source thinking yeah we've almost never had this before right you would always have this middle person this journalist or sort of a biographer or something like that but what you can now is like if Toby luk is one of your Heroes you can follow him on Twitter you can read his letters you can sort of get direct information from him about how he thinks about different things uh and so you can curate your board of directors based on this right and so how do I adapt the Persona of these people well I have to learn about these people and I have to learn how they handle different situations and how they think and the better I get at learning that the more effective they're going to be as members of my personal board of directors and that speaks to what you said before about environment right your environment influences your behavior not just your physical environment but your mental environment right so if you're surrounding yourself and exposing yourself online to great thinkers people who inspire you as opposed to negativity and gossiping or whatever it might be then that almost becomes how you start to think so what you let into your head will determine what you think in the future yeah if you do not curate to the point where you're getting high quality High Fidelity information into your head and you're consuming the mental equivalent of junk food well how are you going to think differently than that in the future you're not if you're consuming sound bites if you're consuming uh sort of opinion pieces if you're consuming rage pieces if you're consuming all of this stuff then you have to think about how that's affecting how I interpret everything else going on in my life if I'm consuming information like news and I'm emotional every day and I'm sad and you know I have despair maybe it's time to stop reading the news yeah right because that's getting into my head it's affecting what I think about everything else and so often we're not conscious about curating the people that we these people have a direct line into your brain you need to pick and curate these people and the inertia default comes in here again because if we're used to doing things a certain way watching the news in the evening um just accumulating people that we're following online more and more you have to break the pattern of inertia to actually make a change here what's your rule for Twitter so I have a rule that I can't follow more than 250 people and so if I'm if I'm at 250 and I want to follow somebody I have to remove somebody yeah so you're fighting inertia because inertia would be well I just keep accumulating people I'm following and then in a year that'll be 500 in two years it'll be a thousand but you have a rule that again again speaking to one of your core principles which is you know how you turn your desired Behavior into the default behavior that rule means that you are always having a highly curates of twist of feed yeah you should spend a lot of time curating your inputs nobody does and this is like so weird when you think about it the quality of those inputs are going to determine the quality of your thoughts the quality of your thoughts are going to determine the quality of your choices and your decisions and they're going to shape how you see the world they're going to shape your mindset they're going to shape everything and so where do we focus well we focus on mindset and we focus on the downstream thing but you know we also have to put some effort and thought into the Upstream thing which is wait all of this stuff is seeping into my head and I'm relying on myself to catch it the last minute that doesn't make sense what if I backtrack a couple steps here can I change my environment and again your environment is not physical your artificial your online environment these dictate your behaviors you can use them to strengthen your behaviors and you can use them to curate who's got voice in my head and the way that I would advise everybody to do this is unfollow everybody yeah that's the simplest way is it don't try to remove people just remove everybody and start your list over and if you want to do it do it every year and if you want to do it quarterly or you don't want to have a limit of 250 people because for whatever reason you think that that doesn't work for you then every year you just delete everybody and you start from scretch yeah you you've just hit such a key point because as I've been trying to do this you you can be looking at it for ages shall I follow shall I unfollow yeah why did I start following them in the first place you you you're using up all this energy and you're right it would be much easier to call start from zero unfortunately these these apps don't make it that easy for you to do that or Instagram certainly doesn't well no they they want you to to do it but if you're following 800 people on Instagram you're not seeing everybody's feed anyway so why are you are you following them for a different reason which could be strategic right it could be like we do business together so I want to signal that you know we're doing but I don't really want to see their feed so like but then but you can follow and mute for that which I have also done sometimes where you think you know again the social default how will it appear if I'm not following this person yeah so you can keep following them and press and have have it muted so you don't actually see their feeds which again I'm not saying it's perfect but it's it's super super interesting I mean we get this on Instagram right I get this all the time which is why why aren't you following me on Instagram and the best response is I only follow two people and they're both Company accounts right so uh that's the rule yeah that that's a wonderful rule right so but it prevents it prevents the social oh I followed this friend but not this brand right so it just gets out of that whole thing I love it I love it it applies everywhere Shane big picture on your book again is that clear thinking and better decisions is going to improve the quality of your life and I really like the final section in the book where we talk about I guess what it means to live a quality life you know what is happiness what does death teach us all these things I've heard you say in a recent interview that you pretty recently suffered with lime disease you were really sick I thought I was going to die wow like legitimately so just to put this in context I uh had lime I didn't know I had lime I had Belle's paly on the left side of my face so f full half face paralysis so like on the camera you can see my you know the indents in my forehead well I have pictures of myself that are perfectly symmetrical where this side of my face is moving and this side of my face is not moving at all when I smile there's nothing on this side of the face when I raise my eyebrows nothing on this side of the face when I blink I see my eyeball go up but my eyelid doesn't move at all because I when was this two years ago no control over my face and you know so I go to the uh long story short go to the hospital they're like here's some pregnant zone uh go home you'll be fine and I'm like well wait why does a healthy 42-year old male at this point in time ever get this this doesn't make sense like why is nobody looking into the back end of this in terms of and so a week later what was the next symptom I couldn't stand and so there was so much pain in the back of my legs so if I moved I was fine but if I Stood Still for more than 10 seconds I was literally on the floor crying in pain the most pain I've ever had in my life it's like somebody took two knives in the back of my knee and was like stabbing them and then a couple days later I couldn't open my mouth and so I like booked a flight to the states and luckily one of my friends came and like saved the day who's an amazing doctor uh and sort of um got me a lime test cuz I couldn't even get a requisition in Canada for a lime test which was ridiculous um and so I actually thought towards the end of that that like this is the end like can't stand I can't open my jaw I can't eat food uh you know I'm sleeping 18 hours a day I have facial paralysis that's not getting any better and so you know I think I was like oh if this is the end like what do I think about that and so how has that experience changed what you do on a daily weekly basis how has that experience changed or updated your your perception of what life is all about and I guess what happiness is well for the most part it was actually reaffirming of what I was doing cuz I was like if this is sort of the path that I'm on what would I have done differently in the last year and I mean there's little tidbits here and there but the last year was sort of Co it was all about kids and family and it was uh the most time I had ever spent with the kids um because they're home they're not in school all of this stuff's going on and so you know I'm like I think I think I did okay on this and I think that what it really caused me to think about is what does society want us to want and what do we actually want at the end of the day and the thought experiment that I sort of use in the book is like you can imagine you're sort of on your deathbed you're you're lying in a hospital and maybe you're unconscious and everybody's around you and they don't know that you're awake but you can hear everything they're saying about you and what is it you want them to be saying about you and are you doing the things today that are encouraging them to say those things uh or you can ask what would they honestly say about you today and is that what you want them to say about you in the future and I think that so often Society has nudged us into wanting power money and fame and those are the things that we're taught to go after and we're taught to go after them in a way that is no holds bar in a way that's not win-win for other people in a way that puts me first and I think that who do we know that did that right we know ebener Scrooge did that right the fictional character but we all know this person in real life and what did they want at the end of their life they wanted a do over Ebenezer Scrooge wanted to go back and do it all again why because the way that he accomplished these things the way that he pursued them even if they're the things he wanted to pursue it was the means by which he went about pursuing them that was mutually exclusive from living a life of meaning living a life of relationships win-win relationships with everybody and so we can start thinking about our own life like you can think of a good decision as getting what you want but a great decision as wanting what's worth wanting and so it's not enough to get what you think you want you have to make sure what you want is worth wanting in the first place and I think so often we're just unconscious about this until later on in life I talk about Carl pilmer book lessons for the living he went around interviewed people close to death uh you know all over 80 what advice would you have to people living today and they gave their advice which is play by your own scorecard be yourself spend more time with family these are the things that you will determine matter but you will determine it too late one of the ideas that I have in life mastering the best of what other people have figured out why do I want to do that because I want to take their hindsight and make it my foresight I can learn from them and avoid mistakes why wouldn't I do that well if people near death are telling me these things matter and they're doing it consistently and it doesn't matter what culture they're in and it doesn't matter what socioeconomic status they're in and they're saying the exact same things that sounds like it's something worth listening to yeah so inspirational the book is honestly fantastic clear thinking turning ordinary moments into extraordinary results Shan I really appreciate you making the journey up coming to the studio and thank you for writing such a wonderful book oh thank you for having me this been a wonderful conversation if that conversation resonated with you here is another incredibly powerful one that I really think you're going to enjoy so many people get stopped by procrastination you know what you need to do the issue is how do you make yourself take actions

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 41,649

Keywords: the4pillarplan, thestresssolution, feelbetterin5, wellness, drchatterjee, feelbetterlivemore, ranganchatterjee, 4pillars, drchatterjee podcast, health tips, nutrition tips, health hacks, live longer, age in reverse, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, motivation, inspiration, health interview

Id: f_8BayC-6Gc

Length: 113min 46sec (6826 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 15 2023