1:54:00Chris Williamson · Interview
Something Is Very Wrong With Modern Life
Arthur Brooks on why meaning can't be simulated, why ambitious people are especially at risk, and what it actually takes to feel alive again.
June 11thThe argument in one line.
Hard decisions are hard because you are avoiding an emotional consequence to your identity, so feeling that consequence in advance and deciding by fixed principles turns agonizing decisions into easy choices.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You have been stuck on the same job, relationship, or move decision for months and keep running the pros-and-cons list again.
- You call yourself a perfectionist, were praised for getting things right as a kid, and freeze when there is no obviously correct answer.
- You run a team or company and want a repeatable way to make faster calls without re-litigating every one.
- You notice you ask friends whether a decision is okay before you will act on it.
- You create content and feel pulled toward what you think your audience wants instead of what you actually want to make.
SKIP IF…
- You want a decision matrix, spreadsheet model, or probability framework. This is almost entirely about emotion and identity.
- You dislike long-form therapy-adjacent conversation. Much of the value sits inside personal stories rather than steps.
The full version, fast.
Every decision is made by the emotional center of the brain, so indecision is an emotional problem, not an information problem. Fear does three things: it collapses options into black-and-white, it invents a false end where life stops after this one choice, and it hides that the real threat is to your identity. The fix has two parts. First, get comfortable feeling anger, grief, fear and rejection, often by imagining the dreaded outcome all the way through until it loses its charge. Second, write five to seven principles that solve most of your problems and decide by them. Treat choices as a portfolio of iterations, prefer making many decisions over getting each one right, and read resentment or reassurance-seeking as signs you are abandoning yourself.
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Create a free account →Who's talking.
00:00hostChris Williamson
00:00guestJoe Hudson
Where the time goes.
00:00 – 04:30
01 · Choices vs decisions
Decisions and relationships are the whole of a business and a life. Choices happen without thought; decisions are what we agonize over. Decisiveness is trainable through recognition, and perfectionists and people criticized as kids struggle most.
04:30 – 11:03
02 · Decisions are 100% emotional
Patients with a damaged emotional center can't choose a pen. Logic only forecasts how each option will feel. Any feeling you won't tolerate removes options, illustrated by the guy at the bar, a 1-in-50 sales rate, and a barber paid to collect 50 rejections.
11:03 – 16:52
03 · What fear does to the brain
Fear forces binary thinking and a false end, hiding that decisions are a portfolio. The antidote is to feel the dreaded consequence fully, as Hudson and his wife do when they mourn their marriage, an old practice shared by stoics and samurai.
16:52 – 25:43
04 · Identity and principles
Fear points to where identity is at stake. Hudson decides 80% of things by five to seven principles, like building the least-known part first and treating everything as an iteration. His company requires three to five experiments per person per quarter. Includes a Function Health sponsor read.
25:43 – 32:36
05 · GPS brain and courage
A surgeon-dog-trainer uses a clicker instead of praise or scolding and speeds up learning. Principles like connection solve problems from new angles. Courage gets easier because principles keep proving themselves and acting on them is rewarding regardless of outcome.
32:36 – 39:31
06 · Audience capture and criticism capture
Williamson explains how creators get conditioned into serving a projection of their audience, losing their taste, plus Ethan Strauss's idea that criticism is more deranging than praise. Hudson extends it to bosses, businesses and the pornification of content.
39:31 – 44:04
07 · The two component skills
Audit the principles you actually lived by last year. The two core skills are becoming comfortable with every emotion and choosing principles that solve most problems. A daughter unlocks her college essay by getting angry. Includes a Momentous sponsor read.
44:04 – 53:27
08 · Anger, fear, grief and the identity break
Stuck decisions usually hide anger, fear, grief or helplessness over a breaking identity. In the moment it feels like honesty rather than bravery. Fear is an inch deep and a mile wide. Examples include Alex Hormozi telling his father, Sam Harris, and paying a high price for positions.
53:27 – 1:03:43
09 · Making unconscious choices conscious
Habits are choices driven by feelings you avoid. Slow down and feel what comes before the coffee or the phone. Coping habits outlive their cause like emotional bureaucracy. Hudson describes learning to welcome emotional abandonment. Includes an LMNT sponsor read.
1:03:43 – 1:12:47
10 · The biggest decisions and fear of change
A barista chat and moving countries are hard for the same reason: identity is at stake. We rarely know which decisions are big. Ask what you essentially are. Fear of change is really fear that you won't be okay.
1:12:47 – 1:20:46
11 · Bad decisions, resentment and reassurance
A bad decision is one where you compromise yourself, not one where you miss what you wanted. Retrain the atrophied inner voice by tracing resentment. Seeking reassurance is self-abandonment, though seeking wisdom is not. Includes a Shopify sponsor read.
1:20:46 – 1:29:47
12 · Decisiveness, regret and the cost of indecision
A stable identity breeds decisiveness, and making decisions beats getting them right. High conviction and high openness coexist. The regret you fear is often what you already feel while undecided, and indecision is quiet self-abuse.
1:29:47 – 1:37:05
13 · Agency vs assertiveness
Agency and assertiveness are uncorrelated: in the Berlin bombings it was quiet men who pulled people out. A tangent on George Mack's agency book, Michelangelo's David, and seeing the best in someone as the core of coaching.
1:37:05 – 1:43:15
14 · Intuition, the retreat, and where to find Joe
Telling intuition from fear depends on how clearly you see yourself. Hudson describes an intense silent panchakarma retreat, then points to the Great Decisions course and the Art of Accomplishment podcast.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- Decision-making is 100% an emotional problem: people with damage to the brain's emotional center keep their IQ but cannot pick a pen color.
- Every logical analysis is just an attempt to predict which option will make you feel the way you want to feel.
- Any emotion you refuse to feel quietly removes a whole set of options from your decision before you even start.
- Fear makes you think in binaries, so you ask stay or leave instead of seeing the ten other moves in between.
- Fear invents a false end, as if nothing happens after this decision, when you will get to make another one tomorrow.
- Treat decisions like a hedge fund treats positions: a portfolio where most need to work out, not a single bet that must be right.
- Paying someone to collect 50 rejections in 60 days reframes rejection as winning, and the reps produce acceptances anyway.
- Mourning an outcome in advance, all the way past the moment of loss, removes the fear that was distorting the decision.
- Five to seven personal principles that get you where you want 80% of the time can make most of your decisions for you.
- Build the part you understand least first, so you do not have to rebuild everything around it later.
- Requiring every employee to run three to five experiments a quarter on how they do their job makes failure ordinary.
- Forward progress beats getting it right, because each decision is an experiment that teaches you something.
- Creators who chase what they think the audience wants slowly lose their own taste, and the audience stops loving the work.
- Fear is an inch deep and a mile wide: the dread is enormous, the actual experience is a small splash.
- A bad decision is not one where you fail to get what you wanted; it is one where you compromise yourself to get it.
- Resentment is a reliable signal that you said yes to something you did not want to do and abandoned yourself.
- Every time you need someone else to tell you a decision is okay, you are handing them responsibility for your happiness.
- Making 100 decisions a day beats making 10 perfect ones, because only a made decision gets tested against reality.
- The consequence you fear from deciding is often exactly what you are already suffering while you stay undecided.
- Prolonged indecision is a form of self-abuse whose subtext is that you can never recover from being wrong.
Feel the consequence, then decide by principle
WHAT TO LEARN
When a decision feels impossible, you are usually avoiding a feeling about who you are, and the fix is to feel it and let a few principles choose.
01Choices vs decisions
- If you have deliberated on the same decision for months, assume the obstacle is a feeling you are avoiding, not missing information.
- Aim to convert decisions into choices: the more settled your identity, the fewer things require agonizing at all.
02Decisions are 100% emotional
- List the feelings you refuse to have, such as rejection or looking foolish, because each one silently removes options from your decision.
- Reframe repeated rejection as the scoreboard: at a 1-in-50 hit rate, 98 rejections is what hitting your target looks like.
03What fear does to the brain
- When you only see two options, treat it as a fear signal and force yourself to list at least three middle paths.
- Look past the moment of the decision: you get to make another one tomorrow, so judge your portfolio of decisions, not one bet.
- For a decision driven by fear of loss, imagine the loss fully and past it until the fear stops steering you.
04Identity and principles
- Write five to seven principles that would get you where you want 80% of the time, and check big decisions against them first.
- Tackle the part of a project you understand least before anything else so you do not rebuild the rest around it.
- Treat outcomes as iterations: after a setback ask what the next experiment is rather than whether you failed.
05GPS brain and courage
- Give feedback without praise or blame, like a navigation app rerouting, because emotional charge slows learning.
- Look at a stuck problem through one principle at a time, such as connection, to surface solutions you were not seeing.
- Acting on your principles when you do not want to gets easier each time because they keep proving themselves.
06Audience capture and criticism capture
- Notice when you are making things for the reaction you predict rather than what you want, because the audience eventually feels the difference.
- Watch for criticism capture too: hedging every statement or picking fights are both ways of letting critics steer you.
07The two component skills
- Audit the decisions you made over the last year and name the principles they reveal, then ask if you are proud of them.
- Build two skills together: tolerating every emotion so all options stay open, and choosing principles that solve most problems.
- When someone is frozen, try helping them feel the emotion under it, often anger, rather than giving them more advice.
08Anger, fear, grief and the identity break
- Expect anger, fear, grief or helplessness under a stuck decision, usually tied to an identity you are being asked to let go of.
- Remember the dread is far bigger than the event: the first hard conversation usually unlocks a run of others.
- Choosing what is true to you over time builds a life organized around who you are, even when a compromise would win today.
09Making unconscious choices conscious
- Before a habitual reach for coffee or your phone, pause and name the emotion you are trying to avoid or create.
- Clear out coping habits that outlived the problem they solved; like bureaucracy, they never remove themselves.
- Practice welcoming a feeling you have always run from, and old patterns built around avoiding it start to collapse.
10The biggest decisions and fear of change
- Small and big decisions feel hard for the same reason, so ask what you are afraid it would mean about you.
- When fear of change shows up, ask what you think you are at your core and how you could be proud of yourself either way.
- Treat major life transitions as growth opportunities, since they are when people change most or decline most.
11Bad decisions, resentment and reassurance
- Judge a decision by whether you compromised yourself, not by whether you got the thing you wanted.
- Use resentment as a map: it points to every place you said yes when you meant no.
- Seek advice for wisdom, not permission; if you cannot act without someone's approval, you are abandoning yourself.
12Decisiveness, regret and the cost of indecision
- Favor making many decisions quickly over a few perfect ones, because only a made decision gets tested by reality.
- Hold high conviction and high openness together: commit enough to act, stay open enough to update when wrong.
- Ask whether the regret you fear is the same thing you are already enduring while you stay undecided.
- Name prolonged indecision for what it is, a demand that you be perfect, and make the decision you would be proud of.
13Agency vs assertiveness
- Separate agency from assertiveness: you can live entirely on your own terms without being loud or aggressive.
- To help someone grow, see who they are at their best and speak to that part rather than to their mistakes.
Terms worth knowing.
- Choice vs decision
- In this framing, a choice is something you do without deliberating, like how you sit or which turn you take. A decision is anything you consciously agonize over. The goal is to turn more decisions into easy choices.
- False end
- The fear-driven illusion that a decision is final and nothing follows it, which blinds you to the fact that you can correct course with the next decision.
- Reversible decision
- A decision you can undo cheaply, often called a two-way door. These should be made fast; only irreversible ones deserve slow deliberation.
- Habenula
- A small brain structure involved in processing failure and disappointment, which discourages you from trying again soon after losing.
- GPS brain
- Responding to a mistake the way a navigation app does: no judgment, just a recalculated route. Removing the emotional charge from feedback speeds up learning.
- Audience capture
- When a creator gradually stops making what they want and makes what they believe their audience rewards, conditioned by views and positive feedback.
- Criticism capture
- The negative twin of audience capture: shaping your output to avoid criticism, either by becoming more combative or by hedging and staying small.
- Self-abandonment
- Acting against what you know is right for you in order to please someone, avoid conflict, or get approval. Resentment and reassurance-seeking are its usual symptoms.
- Paradox axes
- A talent assessment that plots traits people assume are opposites, such as conviction and openness, on separate axes, showing someone can be high in both.
- Agency vs assertiveness
- Agency is living by your own choices and not compromising who you are. Assertiveness is outward forcefulness. The two are not correlated; quiet people can be highly agentic.
- Panchakarma
- An Ayurvedic detox and reset program built around a strict diet and hours of daily treatments, often done at a residential retreat.
Things they pointed at.
04:48bookDescartes' Error (Antonio Damasio)
03:50bookThinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman)
35:13linkEthan Strauss, "Criticism Capture Is More Dangerous Than Audience Capture"
55:12channelJames Clear
28:39channelAli Abdaal coaching session
28:14productConnection Course (Art of Accomplishment)
1:42:45channelArt of Accomplishment podcast
Lines you could clip.
04:35
“100% an emotional problem. So that's not me. That is neurology.”
10:16
“I'll give you $2,000 if you can get 50 rejections in the next 60 days.”
15:10
“So I'm just going to assume I've lost her. I'm going to feel all that stuff. And then in feeling all that stuff, I'm not scared of it anymore.”
23:40
“Everybody who works for us has to run three to five experiments on how to do their job differently every quarter.”
32:31
“I would rather have been true to myself and fail than been fake and succeed.”
46:22
“Fear is an inch deep and a mile wide.”
57:45
“Bureaucracy does not destroy itself. You have to actively go in and destroy bureaucracy, and what you're describing is a kind of emotional bureaucracy.”
1:14:32
“If a person is compromising themselves to do the thing, then they're making a horrible decision.”
1:18:20
“Every single one of those moments of needing reassurance from others is a self-abandonment.”
1:21:26
“Making decisions is better than getting decisions right.”
1:23:34
“I'd rather be high conviction and wrong than low conviction and right.”
1:26:55
“The consequence that we're scared of in the decision is the thing that we're actually currently suffering.”
1:29:09
“This decision isn't going to define you for who you are, and you're worthy of love no matter what decision you make here. So make the one you're proud of.”
Where the conversation goes.
00:00 – 11:03denseDecisions are emotional, not informational
11:03 – 32:36denseFear, false ends and principles
32:36 – 39:31steadyAudience and criticism capture
39:31 – 1:03:43denseFeeling emotions and the identity break
1:03:43 – 1:20:46denseBig decisions, bad decisions, self-abandonment
1:20:46 – 1:37:05steadyDecisiveness, regret, agency
1:37:05 – 1:43:15sparseIntuition, retreat, wrap-up
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metaphoranalogystory
I want to talk about decision -making. Great. There's a line from Alex Hormozy that says, the life that you want is on the other side of a few hard decisions.
And the reason that you're unhappy is because you're not making them. In your experience, how important is the skill of decision -making in guiding someone's life? It's everything.
Like if you look at, let's say like the, one of the things I talk about when I'm working with leaders who are like, growing billion dollar companies is that your business is only two things. It's the relationships that are held in the business and the decisions that you make.
Everything else goes to those two things. There's some capital, there's potentially some IP, but those came from decisions that people made. So for a business, it's the critical thing.
And if you look at, I think it was founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, who said, for my next company, I want it to be the best decision -making company in the world. So after somebody grew the biggest company in the world, he then said, my next company is going to be just really great at making decisions.
That's how important it is for a company. But if you look at your life, well, what doesn't happen from a decision, right? If you're smoking cigarettes, if you are building a company, if you are getting married, who you're getting married to, how you stay married, how you fight, all these things are decisions that we make.
I think for the framework purposes, I think it's really important to separate. And this is the way I think about it. So there's choices and there's decisions.
So choices are just the things that you don't think about. Like right now you're sitting like this. You never thought about it.
You just, right. And, or the first question, maybe you thought this is a great first question. Maybe you're like, is that the right first question?
Or is that the other, is that the right first question? If you are just making choices, it means that you're not sitting there really spending time on it. And so I call that a choice and decisions is where you're really making spending time on it.
So knowing how to make. great choices and great decisions is all of life. Like everything that you're going to end when you're at your grave, it's going to be a series of decisions that you made.
So I'd say super hypercritical. And if you can learn how to make great decisions, then you're going to make decisions that are going to make a great life. Can you train decisiveness or is it largely a personality trait?
You can absolutely train decisiveness. I don't think it's a training, but it's a. a recognition.
There's some recognitions that can happen that allow for decisiveness. So once you really understand what's happening behind decision -making, then you can, then decisiveness starts to flow from that. Like why, why is it hard for people to make decisions?
Why are some decisions hard to make? Why are some choices like I'm going to go to the grocery store? I took a left here.
I'm calling my friend. Why we don't even think about those and why some are really difficult to make. And when you get that, when you understand that, then decisiveness becomes like there'd be less and less decisions, more and more choices.
And the result is better and better. It feels to me like system one, system two, thinking a bit from Daniel Kahneman, thinking fast and slow. So the system two is very deliberate and you sort of have to pay a lot of cognitive attention to it.
And then over time you train system two into system one and the sort of carefully thought decision becomes the default.
types of people tend to struggle with decisions the most? What's the avatar of the sorts of people who tend to be the most indecisive that have the toughest time when it comes to? Well, I'll give you like what humans, what most people in society would call them.
And then I'll tell you like the thing that's underneath, right? So it's going to be people who are perfectionists, people who've been criticized a lot as children, people who, um, who We're told that their value was in getting it right.
And it's really important for them to get it right. And people who are like, have a tendency to be scared of consequences. Those are the people that are going to have a hard time making decisions that they're going to be long, prolonged SWOT analysis, you know, thinking, thinking, thinking, still thinking about it six months later.
Should I marry them? Should I not marry them? That's, that's going to be what's behind it for them.
How much is. Decision -making an emotional problem and how much is it an informational problem? 100 % an emotional problem.
So that's not me. That is neurology. So if you read a book called Descartes' Air, 2012, he wrote that the emotional center of the brain is what makes decisions.
So there are people who've had the emotional center of their brain damaged and they cease to be able to make decisions. Their whole, their IQ stays the same, but their whole life falls apart because, well, what color pen should I use? And 15 minutes later, they're still trying to figure out what color pen or where am I going to have lunch?
Right. So there is just to be, because there's some. neuroscientist in the audience who's going to quibble with me.
There is a place where the emotional center of the brain doesn't make the decision. Like if a snake comes at you and you jump away, then it bypasses that. If you're trying to decide who to hire, if you're trying to decide what investment to make, no matter what your spreadsheet says, you're making a decision to feel a certain way.
So if you think about your life and you say, how many decisions did I make to feel loved, to feel liked, to feel valuable? How many decisions did I make to not feel like a failure, to not feel like a loser, to not feel dismissed, to not feel rejected? Right there is guaranteed 90 % of your life.
So that is actually how we make decisions. Neurologically speaking, that's how. So the idea that you're going to make a logical decision is absolute crap.
It's a great idea and it's a great way to justify emotional repression, but it's not true neurologically. So that's why I say it's 100 % an emotional decision. Where logic comes in is logic says, I'm going to logically try to figure out how I'm going to feel if I make this decision or how I'm going to feel.
if I make this other decision. So a SWOT analysis of where you should take your business, where you should invest a million dollars. And if I said to you, and let's say your number one modus operandi was happiness.
And I said, hey, I guarantee, and you believe me, you'd be happier if you did this. And you had that knowledge, the SWOT analysis goes away. It doesn't matter.
Maybe your thing is like a meaning, like this will give you the most meaning. okay, I'm going to do that thing. But whatever that thing is, you're going to do it.
And all the logic is doing is trying to figure out how you're going to get to the emotional state. And so that's just the neurological reality of it. And it gives us the biggest clue on how to make great decisions.
If you are scared to feel a certain thing, then a certain solution set in your decision -making is not available to you. If I'm scared to be a loser, I'm not going to be able to take the same kind of risk. So you and I know the guy at the bar who doesn't mind getting rejected, doesn't mind that feeling of rejection.
They'll go and hit on 10 women and they will have options that the person who's scared of rejection, I don't want to feel that. And then I make a choice because I don't want to get rejected to not hit on those women. I have no choice.
And it's that in everything. I'm scared that my boss will yell at me and I will have to feel like a dweeb. I don't want to feel like a dweeb.
So I'm not going to say the thing to my boss. And therefore that option is off the table. So that's really what's going on behind decision making.
So if you can get to, oh, I love, and this is going to sound weird to everybody, but like, I don't mind feeling rejected. Like that guy, like I'm good with that. Even like, I look forward to feeling rejected.
I know that I'm winning if I have tried enough times, right? Just like a hurdler who's like, I know if I practice enough, if I do enough reps, it doesn't matter how many times I fail, I'm winning. Or if I say, oh, I'm okay feeling like a dweeb.
I'm okay embarrassing myself. I'm okay not looking good for a moment. then I can make really clear decisions because then I'm making decisions based on my principles, based on what's most important to me, not based on a fear of a consequence.
Yeah, your value, your option set gets constrained a lot if you're not prepared to face a ton of emotions. James, business partner in Nutanix, used to work door -to -door selling. like gas for n power which is like a utility company in the uk and he needed i think two more sales before the end of the week in order to hit his target and not lose his job and he was getting all stressed about it and he spoke to his the team leader and the team leader said what's your sales rate like how many doors do you need to knock on to get a sale yeah he said at the moment it's one in 50 yeah okay so if you do 100 doors you've hit your target.
You just need to be rejected 98 times. If you're rejected 98 times, you've hit your target. I always think about that frame.
Yeah. So I have it even better. I had a barber.
It still is my barber, but he doesn't give haircuts to very many people anymore. And the reason is, is because we were sitting and I was looking at his paintings and I'm like, wow, man, you've got some amazing paintings. He's like, yeah.
I'm like, well, are you in any galleries? He's like, no. And I was talking to him and I saw that fear of rejection.
I said, hey, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll give you, I think it was one or $2 ,000. I'll give you $2 ,000 if you can get 50 rejections in the next 60 days.
$2 ,000 if you can get 50 rejections in the next 60 days. Okay. He couldn't get 60 rejections.
He got two acceptances. And so now he's making a living selling his art. But the reframe was, you're not failing, you're winning.
Yes, yes. So that's a hack, but the deeper truth, right? So manipulative.
It was. It totally was. Yeah, it totally was.
And for his own good and his art deserves to be out there. But that's the thing is like he wasn't scared of making $2 ,000. He was scared of the feeling of failure.
It's a great frame. how do you come to think about decision making then what are the component skills yeah so so the other thing to understand is like in that before i can go into that the the the decision like back to decisions and choices so choices are often done because we have subconscious emotions that we don't want to feel and never gets into consciousness, right?
Like, so I'm going to smoke the cigarette so I don't have to feel the thing, or I'm going to scroll so I don't have to feel the thing, or I'm going to tell my wife I love her because that lets me feel the thing, right? So that's one set of like, how do you make good choices? How do you make great decisions?
The thing to understand, I noticed the thing that like unlocked this for me around making decisions was that every time I was making a decision, I was in fear. So if you are in fear, your brain does certain things. One of the things your brain does is it goes black and white thinking.
Like you become very binary. Should I take the job? Should I not take the job?
Should I break up with the girl? Should I not break up with the girl?
It doesn't say, oh, I could talk to the girl. and say, this is what I need if we're going to stay together. It doesn't say I could buy the car or I could lease the car or I could buy the car that's a different color or whatever.
So it doesn't see all the possibilities. It narrows things down into black and white thinking. The other thing that fear does in the brain is that it creates a false end.
Like, okay, so you make a bad decision. So what? Like you get to make another one tomorrow.
And you get to make another one after that. Amazon is another great example of Amazon. Make decisions fast if you can pull them back.
If you can't, then okay, take a minute, make your decision. Reversible decision. Yeah, exactly.
So that's another one that fear does to the brain. And so that false end is like, you don't see through the end, like what's happening afterwards. And so that's why most people think of, decisions as like what do i do about this decision they don't think about decisions as a portfolio the way somebody who's running a hedge fund or in your stock account if you have one you're saying i don't need to get everything right i just need to be principled about what i buy because a majority of them will work out And so people are thinking this decision right now is really important instead of the portfolio of decisions that I'm going to make this year.
Final decision I will ever make. Right, exactly. And so that's how we know that we're in fear.
Now there's the rare occasion where someone's like, oh, I'm just going to really think through this. And I'm, okay, I've thought about it. I've collected data.
This is what I'm going to do. That's pretty rare. So most of the people are like, oh my God, I got to make a decision.
What am I going to do? It means there's just a tremendous amount of fear that's going on under the surface. And so one of the things to learn is that the fear is of a consequence.
And if you go and you feel that consequence, you're going to make a better decision. So I'll give you an example of this. My wife and I.
have been married now 27 years. We've been married a long time. But I've been married to three or four different women all with her name, right?
She was very different at 27 than she was at 37 than she was at 47. And so there's been these moments in our life where... the marriage is rough.
What are we doing? And I'm scared to lose her. So I'm trying to make decisions to keep her, but I'm abandoning myself by doing that.
I'm abandoning my principles. So both of us have come up with this method where we basically just mourn the marriage. Because what I'm scared of is that I'm going to lose her.
So I'm just going to assume I've lost her. I'm going to feel all that stuff. And then in feeling all that stuff, I'm not scared of it anymore.
And then my response is, okay, this is who I am. And I'm going to show up like that. And she shows up as who she is.
And then we work out like, how are we going to be together? Do we want to be together? What's going to actually go on?
But that fear isn't there. And this is like an age old process. So whether you are a stoic or a samurai or Tibetan book of living or dying, The way to overcome the fear of death is to actually visualize and feel the experience of death over and over in slow motion again and again.
They include watching your own body decay away and stuff. It's like even after you're dead, you're thinking about it. Because you're going past the false end.
Oh, right. That's why it's critical. Interesting.
It's the same thing if you're going to like... mourn your marriage, you don't go to the moment of divorce. You go to like, and then I'm lonely after, and I can't find a woman.
And then, you know, you do the whole thing. And then, and then, and then, and then, and then I have a marriage again, or then I'm, you know, whatever it is. So, so overcoming your fear that way is a really critical thing, because if you're having a hard time making a decision, it's not because you don't know what to do.
Typically it's because you're scared of a consequence and the consequence you're scared of is an emotional consequence. that is the episode like that's the that that's really lovely that's a great a great summary why is it fear why is that the emotion i understand that there's this sort of absolutist thinking uh i understand that creates a a type of constraint which will cause panic i also understand that if there's a kind of finality to things because you don't think that they life is going to continue beyond this decision.
And if you choose, especially if you choose the wrong one or not. But why fear? Like, why is that the case?
Why is that the emotion default? Yeah, this is a great question because the fear is because the identity is going to get messed with, right? So like, who do I think I am?
I think that I am a very successful person. It's important for me to be a successful person. So taking this job is really important.
The things that are really important to us are the things that define us and our identity. And so that's going to be where we're really important. And in some way, every time we're making a decision and we are in that fear -based decision -making process, it teaches us exactly where we're not principled in being ourselves.
And so that's actually the antidote. So for instance, I have a set of principles that I make 80 % of my decisions by. And I make them that way, the same way that like, Berkshire Hathaway says, this is what we invest in.
It's not guesswork. It's like, these things have to be true for us to invest. And I think right now they're sitting on like $230 billion because nothing is true enough to invest in.
They're like, it doesn't hit what we invest in. So we're just holding cash, right? And that was the case maybe like three months ago.
I don't know where they are today.
And so it's the same thing. I'll make a decision based on a set of principles of who I want to be in the world. And if I'm thinking about those principles, the way I think about the principles are, if I have five, seven principles, do they get me where I want to go 80 % of the time?
Do they almost guarantee success over time? Not a single success, but over time. And do they solve 80 % of my problems?
Can you give me an example of a principle? It doesn't necessarily need to be one of yours. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I'll give you a decision -making principle we have in our business, which is whenever we're building something new, we go to the thing we know the least amount about and we build it first. Give me an example. So if I'm going to build a car and I know how to build a car, but I don't know how to build a catalytic converter.
most people will build the car, then build the catalytic converter and then go, oh shit, the catalytic converter doesn't work inside this car. I'm going to have to rebuild part of the car. I'll say, let's build the catalytic converter first and now build the car around it because it's going to be a more efficient process.
Why? Why is it a more efficient process? Why do the hard thing first?
Because then I don't have to redo the car because I don't have to like - How does that help with the decision? like i suppose that's a principle but right in what way does that make the decision more likely to be successful right so if we're yeah so the so uh the decision that we're if we're in the decision of we're going to build out a podcast for the first time we're going to be more successful because we went to the thing we don't know and we've solved that first rather than do all the things we know right and solve that later okay uh can you give an example that's uh something from a personal life not a business life oh yeah yeah so my i have a personal I have a personal, this is actually the perfect one.
I have a personal principle. So everything is an iteration. So what that means is the same thing that I was teaching to the barber, which is failure is in the thing.
There's just, I run experiments and I learn, and then I keep on running experiments and I keep on learning and I keep on running experiments. And then I learn. If I do that, instead of thinking I fail or I succeed.
I'm just like constantly learning, then I ultimately always succeed because I'm just running iterations until I figure the thing out. And there's a lot of neurology on this. There's something called the habenula and it basically prevents us from failing inside of our brain.
And it's basically the part of our brain that's in all invertebrates, I'm loosely speaking here, that if a bear goes and fights for mating rights, and they lose, it stops them from going, I'm going to go fight for mating rights again right now, right? Like it's the same thing in our brain that it's like when you're on a diet and you're like, I'm going to be on this specific diet for a while.
And you're like, great for like two weeks. And then you eat that one piece of chocolate cake or whatever. And then you're like, fuck the diet and you're completely off.
But you just ate one chocolate cake. Like, so what? You just get back on the diet.
But we don't because that part of our brain is like, we can't fail again. In my world, it's everything is an iteration. So what's the experiment I'm going to try?
What's the next experiment I'm going to try? What's the next experiment I'm going to try? And they did this study with people who were, I think it was like at the poverty line who lost weight successfully.
And all of them, or not all of them, but a grand percentage of them, all were doing iterative mindset. They were all saying. I'm just running a series of experiments until I find something that works.
So for me, everything is an iteration. Everything is, I'm trying. So we run, we do this in our business, but I do this in life.
So I do something that goes horribly wrong. I'm like, great, that was an iteration. What's the next iteration?
Or I'm like, I have a big decision to make. I'm like, oh, well, just what's a simple iteration? I'm going to do that.
Yeah, you've been, at least in your business, impressively prepared to put stock in shit that I've told you to do. oh yeah and i'm like huh he listened to me i mean not just listen to me no just give me lip service or do the thing say that he wants to do the thing and genuinely want to do the thing and then encounter some practical fear or some emotional barrier like i've said hey i think you should do this i think we might have even talked about it last time on the podcast yeah you doing i wanted you to do basically the uh master coach critiques breakdowns emotionally of these things and these videos are ripping and you guys are doing like the you you fucked it on a few of the early ones yeah and had a couple of winners on the early ones and then changed it and changed it and now it's like yeah it's fucking awesome yeah it's really good yeah and that's and so that's what that's exactly it and so that's the way it is with everybody in the company anybody wants to try and experiment as long as it's like within brand go
As a matter of fact, we actually have a criteria. Everybody who works for us has to run, depending on where they are, three to five experiments on how to do their job differently every quarter. Wow.
So that's how deeply we take everything as an iteration. And it allows you to make mistakes. It allows you to learn.
It allows you not to care so much. It allows you to have pace over getting it right. Most people will lose in life because they are trying to get it right rather than trying to keep a pace it's like forward progress is more important than getting things right i think the as you're explaining it i'm noticing what's coming up in me is a reduction in the sense of grandeur about and and uh pressure around decisions like well i'm just moving forward you've removed the finality of this decision and also kind of baked into it that an experiment that doesn't prove the hypothesis isn't a failure you did still learn something which is that hypothesis was wrong and we continue and continue i'm sure you've heard and i'm never and i'm never done yes i'm just going to keep on learning and that's just one principle Tell me if this sounds familiar.
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That's functionhealth .com slash modern wisdom. Have you heard of GPS brain or the GPS principle? It's something not too dissimilar, which is if you are trying to get to a destination following Google Maps, When you miss the turn, Google Maps doesn't judge itself or you for you missing the turn.
It just updates the route. Correct. GPS brain.
Yeah. Which is cool. Yeah.
So there's this guy who was a, I love this story. This guy, he was a surgeon and he was a dog trainer. And so in dog training, you have this little click that tells the dog you did it right.
You need to go click, click. click and that just it's like a gps brain click click click click so he's working with this um dog his dog he's pretty successful but he loses his shit one day and just fucking yells at the dog doesn't do the clicker just yells at the dog and the dog like goes back like regresses horribly and so he's like oh crap like that's what happens when there's any kind of emotional content And his assumption is either good or bad.
It's just like, you did it right or you didn't do right, GPS brain. So he goes to his surgeon students and he's teaching them like how to tie tendons and stuff. And there's like a six thing problem.
And he starts bringing a clicker.
Instead of saying, good job, you got it right. Don't do that. What are you doing here?
And he just clicks when they get it right. And he improved the rate of their learning dramatically by having GPS brain. So that's another, like, okay, if everything is in iteration is a principle that gives me GPS brain, which is what it does, then it helps me be more successful.
So now when I'm confronting a problem, what do I do about this? One of the principles I look at is everything's in iteration. If everything's in iteration, what would that tell me to do?
And this is in service of trying to improve the quality and accuracy of decisions, but also rid that fear, get rid of that fear, not just feeling it, not just going to the like reductio ad absurdum of the kind of mental projection. It's mostly, this is who I want to be in the world. Do I want to be neurotically freaking out about each one of my decisions?
Nah, I don't really want to be that. Does this work as to make me successful? Yes, it does.
Is this like more comfortable and awesome? Yes, it is. Cool, that's a principle.
Like I have another principle that is connection. It's, you know, we have the connection course, but it's a principle. It means that if we build somebody, how do we build them with connection?
If I'm sitting here talking to you, how do we actually build connection? And over the years, we've actually built connection. If I...
run a course? How do I make sure everybody feels like we're deeply connected with them and we really care about them because we do? And how do we help them find connection?
And I have this video with Ali Abdaal where I'm coaching him and we're having this moment where I was like, oh, I'm not sure if I mentioned it's one of my things. I was just like, okay, let's go through all your business problem and look at it through the lens of connection. What would make you feel more connected to yourself and others?
as a solution and you could see him come up with like multiple solutions to the problem because he's just looking through the lens of that principle right and so it's the same thing and so so now i have a decision to make let's say like do i go on the chris williamson podcast and i'm like everything's in iteration okay i don't give a shit if i blow this like why would i care okay that's a one that's a and connection well i i love being with chris this is something that makes me feel connected i'm gonna do it and i get to connect with a lot of people yeah okay And so I'll just go through my principles if I have a decision to make and I will do that.
It feels like, I mean, we haven't even got into the structure, but this seems really interesting to me. The idea of engineering bravery or courage in a way that this is like improving your bravery to some degree. It's increasing your preparedness to face scary things.
When people think about bravery and courage, a lot of the time, that's what it is. uh so is bravery or courage are those words that factor into this at all it's so interesting because as you say it i'm like yeah that's true but it's it's but it's not wasn't the thought process right so so the thought process was what are the thing how i can't control the outcome of a decision but i can control how I want to be in that decision -making process.
Am I proud of how I made that decision? That's the thing I can control. So it came from that.
It came from like, I think over a portfolio of decisions, these principles are going to work and I'm going to be proud of them even if they don't work. And if they don't work, I'll iterate on the principles themselves, right? You know that from the outside, somebody looking at you choosing to make decisions that are big or scary or difficult or whatever in that way would go, wow.
That is brave. Very courageous that you've chosen to do that. Right.
So then what happens? So this is the cool thing. So then you start making decisions that way.
And most of them are easy. You're like, okay, I'll make it. Yeah, that makes sense.
Okay, that makes sense. And then there's one where it's like, I don't want to fucking do that.
There's nothing in me that wants to do that. But if I look at my principles, it's very clear. That's what I'm supposed to do.
And you look and you say, well, shit. all I can say is that my principles work most of the fucking time and I can't come up with a better solution. So I'm going to do it even though I don't want to do it.
And you do it and maybe it works. Most of the time it works. Occasionally it doesn't work.
But every time you act on the principle, the courage, there's less and less courage required. because you are positively reinforced that the principles work, which means you trust them more in future. That's one.
And the other one is because you are being who you want to be. So there is an implicit reward whether no matter how it works out. Yes.
Yes. I'm showing up in the way that I want to. And if the choice was between showing up in the way that I want to and the decision going wrong and showing up in the way that I don't want to and the decision going right, a lot of the time people would actually prefer the former to the latter.
I think Margaret Cho, if I have her name right, she had an early standup, like I'm saying how old I am, but she had an early, I think it was her first standup. And she was a comedian who had like an Asian sitcom and it failed. And her whole sitcom thing, basically, this one woman show is, it failed, but that's not what hurt.
What hurt was I abandoned myself and then it failed. I would rather have been true to myself and fail than been fake and succeed. Have I taught you about audience capture before?
Do you know this term? No, no. I detest how afflicted you are with not being on the internet.
I require you to be more terminally online. Fucking infuriated.
Okay. So audience capture is when a creator, typically on the internet, but I'm sure it's happened with newscasters and people in late night shows and more traditional media as well, begins to not create what they want to, but they create what they think their audience wants.
So it's referred to as throwing red meat to the audience. I get it. Yeah.
Very common and may have even been born out of the politics wing. If you're a political commentator, you know, you have your takes and your audience comes to you. Wow, that's an interesting take for the person that's on the left or the right or the whatever.
And then after a while, you realize because you're looking at the popularity, maybe the play count, the positive reinforcement that you get. When I talk in this way about this kind of subject from this lens, people seem to give me more positive reinforcement.
And over time, you like Pavlovianly condition yourself into this type of behavior. Gotcha. What's interesting about this is it's almost like a looking glass creator.
Wow. here yeah yeah it's fucking cool yeah i have a lot of thoughts here um what you the thing that's one interesting wrinkle is it's not what the creator knows the audience wants it's what the creator thinks that the audience wants right and people don't always know what they want right which is interesting what's that henry ford line if i asked the customer what he wanted he would say a faster horse yeah yeah um So that's one interesting thing.
And then you roll the clock forward a little bit. You roll the clock forward six months, one year, a couple of years. This creator is now out of touch with their taste because they haven't created something from themselves for a very long time.
They are kind of marionetted or puppeted by the audience, but their projection of the audience, which means they don't actually know what they want. They're just kind of trying to do something that they think that they want. And this is the kind of pernicious thing.
the audience stops loving the work that you do when you compromise yourself in order to serve them. Yeah. You will resent them so quickly because you say, how can you not love me?
How can you not appreciate what I'm doing? Look at what I did for you. I even pushed myself to the side.
Right. I shunted myself to the side of my own work just to serve you. And I'm sure you got lots of things, but the one final bit on top.
Yeah. Ethan Strauss wrote this fucking outstanding article and it's called Criticism Capture is More Dangerous Than Audience Capture. He wrote it about three or four years ago.
He's a sports reporter, but he thinks about audience dynamics and like creative dynamics too. What he basically said is he thinks that it's the criticisms, not the compliments that are more deranging to people. And when you see this.
you actually realize that many people are criticism captured, not just audience captured. So there's two things going on. They protect themselves from the potential negative.
They do it by being more inflammatory, by being more aggressive, by sort of like the guy outside that flares his lats outside of the nightclub. Or they do it by neutering themselves, by sort of staying small and milquetoast and always sitting on the fence and never actually staking a claim in the ground. Maybe they do it by always caveating, by always having some sort of equivocation.
before they speak so that every single potential negative permutation of what they were going to say is already being put out there. There's a lot of ways that they can do this. But you see some people that are more positive reinforcement compelled.
And then you see some people that are more negative reinforcement compelled. And the perfect example, and I think that this is true, and it's the canonical example that's used by Ethan in his article about criticism capture, is Jordan Peterson. is very criticism captured and you see how warping and that man maybe had apart from perhaps like trump and tate but whilst not being a tatey and trumpian kind of individual yeah uh a volume of criticism that almost no one in history has had to deal with right outside of like fucking leaders of countries right like that and um who would be able to deal with that almost nobody But I do think it's a fair comment to say that criticism did some fucking warping.
So audience capture, criticism capture, some new ideas for you. Yeah, I love, there's so much stuff. The first tangential thought I have is like, it also creates the creation of porn -like entertainment.
Oh, this is George Mack's idea. You run enough split tests and you end up with a porn website. Yeah.
This is Georgie's idea. Okay. Yeah.
It's brilliant. It's fucking wonderful. It's like, I'm going to, if you're red meeting your audience, I'm going to give them more and more emotional, like this is happening on our news and everything.
I'm going to give them more and more emotional hotness and, but I'm going to desensitize them so much as I'm doing it that the, the only thing that's left is like hate. And yeah. So most base.
Yeah. The inflammatory. Yeah.
Uh, so, so it's an interesting thing. It's like audience capture. leading to the destruction of your audience.
The pornification of everything. And the destruction of your audience, which is like fascinating. The second thought process that I had there is like, this isn't just creators, this is life.
This is how people operate in a business with their boss. Did I make them happy? Did I make the people around me happy?
More pleasure and less pain. Yeah, exactly. And that doesn't make good decisions.
Like if they, at the end of the day, if you look at somebody who's been doing that, they either their business or their audience or their personhood has dropped off of a cliff somewhere along the line, whether that is in Jordan's case, uh, anxiety, like deep anxiety, or, um, you know, you become the person that you hate or you have the resentment.
it doesn't actually lead to a successful life. But if you're principled, if you're saying these are the principles, and this is true for companies too, somebody who's principled about what they're doing, it doesn't mean that they're not listening and they're not reacting, but if they're principled about what they're doing, if they're like, this is our brand and we don't stray from the brand, or this is what we're here to do, this is our mission, we're not straying from the mission, we might find 20 ways to get it done, but we're not straying.
These are our principles. Those people have a much longer lasting success without the burnout. too.
And it's the same with a human in life. Like if you look at the people who are 70 years old, have done something significant and are happy, they're almost always have lived a pretty principled life. You might not agree with their principles, but they've lived a pretty principled life.
Does this mean that we need to canonize our principles before we can start making good decisions? I don't think before, but it's super fricking useful. We have a course called the great decisions course.
Which everyone needs to Get ready to sign up for, because it's in January? January, January.
Sells out usually in a day. Fuck, yeah. Yeah.
Well, okay, get ready. Yeah, does this mean, okay, process, component skills. So that's one of it, yeah.
Decision making. Does that mean that, is that one of the first things to do? I mean, you're not going to stop making decisions.
You'll be like, I'm going to put all decisions in a holding pattern. Right, no, no, no. Including what pants I'm going to wear today up until the point at which I've done my principles.
Yeah, so one of the things you can do is just start looking at the decisions you made in the last year and say, what are the principles I've actually lived by? Am I proud of those? And are they working?
It might be an ugly reflection. Yeah, for a lot of people it is. But yeah, so two main components of great decision -making and making great choices is can I become comfortable with all sorts of emotions so that I have my set of solutions available to me?
And the other one is - I don't have to talk to the girl in the bar. Right. And the other one is what are the principles that I want to live by that are going to lead me to success that are going to solve most of my problems for me if i just live by my principles and those two things are going to be incredibly like that's a huge portion of the work yeah that that's really I imagine that's going to be hugely disappointing to a lot of people that they were expecting to have some lovely framework for how to bypass having to feel things or having to face things.
It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. What's the flow chart that I follow in order to make sure that my decision doesn't require me to encounter any negative emotions? Yeah.
So here's the coolest thing. This is one of the things I get to see in my work so much. And they're going to hate this even more.
I'll give you the example that just happened recently. My daughter is applying for colleges. And she's like, I don't know what to write the essay on.
The essay is so important. This is a big thing. Fear.
Black and white thinking. I can't do this. I can't do that.
I'm just watching her say. And I was like, hey, babe, fuck them. Fuck what the colleges say.
Fuck what everybody says. Fuck. Like, what the fuck?
Like, who the fuck are them? Be you. What the fuck do you want?
And she's like. what are you like what's going on why are you swearing exactly and i'm like i see how angry you are at this whole thing that you have to prove yourself to people like this is bullshit go get angry for me like and we have a thing in our house where anger is like so she gets out the tennis racket she gets the thing and i'm i'm like in nepal at this moment right and she's at home and oh you're doing this virtually i'm doing this virtually wonderful so you're uh cursing You're the half to, you're subjecting her to like hearing the bang, bang, bang.
She doesn't do it in front of me. And so she's like, okay, I got it. I'm going to go get angry.
And she calls me the next day. She's like, I've already written three essays. I have all these ideas.
They're not quite good enough. They're not what I want to be yet, but I'm still writing. This is great.
I have to get angry again. And a dozen times during the decisions course easily. in a week you'll see somebody do that you'll see somebody who had a massive decision they couldn't make and it was just an emotion that they needed to feel and the whole thing unlocks for them Momentous just made one of my favorite products significantly better and $50 cheaper.
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That's L -I -V -E -M -O -M -E -N -T -O -U -S dot com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. What are the most common emotions that people encounter when it comes to that? They're stuck with it.
Anger, fear, and grief. Sadness. Yeah.
Sometimes helplessness. Yeah. Some of the really like hardcore decisions, but the, but the underneath that emotional content is like the identity breaking.
Right. So with my daughter, there's like, she had to let go of this identity of being the smart one of the straight A student of the one who can get anything she wants done, done. She had to say, I'm going to be myself and people can accept me or not accept me.
and that was her anger her anger was fuck you like i don't care if you judge me if it's if you're if your school can't see me go fuck yourself this keeps on sounding like bravery and courage like that's the word and maybe my conception of bravery is is tied up in in decisions more closely than it should be but like you hear that and you say hey this place is going to take me or it's not going to take me.
And I'm a 17, 18 year old girl. And you know, it's a big deal. And all of my friends are going to have things to say if I don't get into college or whatever.
And I don't care. I'm just going to do the me thing. Like that level of it from the outside, it seems like self -assuredness, self -esteem, self -worth, confidence, resilience, bravery, courage.
It's like all of these things wrapped up. It doesn't feel like it in the moment. I'm with you because I'm like, yeah, that's true.
I can't deny it. But in the moment when you're doing it, it feels like I'm being honest. So it doesn't feel like shit.
There is that moment of like, oh my gosh, because there is like that I'm stepping into a bigger room. There's like, oh my God, I'm getting on stage and I'm doing this thing. There is that excitement that comes along with it.
So you feel the excitement, but mostly you feel like honesty. Right? Because we know what it feels like when we compromise ourselves.
It doesn't feel good. Like there's a way to say it takes a lot of courage and bravery to feel like you're compromising yourself. That feels like far worse than feeling like you've done the right thing and been rejected.
Alex has a line where he says, fear is an . That's so good. Hold on.
That's so good. that's so good that is so freaking good yeah yeah yeah they're looking out over this massive lake and oh my god how am i ever going to be able it's so terrifying you go like oh it's a little splash that's right oh fuck right it wasn't that bad and i mean he he so i don't know how much you know about alex actually it would be wonderful to introduce you to at some point um he i i'm I have enough internet to know who he is.
Oh, impressive. Wow, he's broke it. He's really reached escape velocity.
Holy fuck. I mean, I geek out on business content, so there's that. And I actually really appreciate, I appreciate how straightforward he is.
Very much so. So the straightforwardness, I think, is one of the things that I appreciate about him. And we were talking about, maybe over dinner or maybe it was on the pod, about the first time he had to make a really difficult decision and he'd done the, classic college i will be son of a middle eastern father success right path yeah and then he realized that he wanted to start a gym and the middle east was he from iran yes you know i lived there why because my dad was you were in iran for when the revolution happened yeah and then that was when you left yeah yeah yeah holy shit yeah yeah does that feel strange now watching so much of the world center around iran a place that you know you knew quite well Yeah.
There's a grief in it for sure. Because like the people of Iran are beautiful people. They were like an incredibly beautiful people.
So there's a lot of grief around that. Yeah. So Iranian father and, and, and with all of the accoutrements that come along culturally.
Um, and yeah, Alex sort of tells this story. I was on track to do this thing. And then I move, I start, I start gyms and I have to tell my father and my father, you know, all I've wanted to do is kind of impress my father at some point.
Um, And he says, from the outside, that looks like an incredibly brave decision. But the way that Alex made that first decision was he drove across the country before he rang his dad.
He literally essentially went from coast to coast to put himself a few thousand kilometers away before he was prepared to pick up the phone. And one of the things that I'm sure you'll resonate with is when you're faced with a difficult conversation or difficult decision or whatever, especially a conversation.
You're worried about it and you're thinking about it and you're ruminating and thought looping about it and then you do it Fear is an inch deep in a mile wide and you step in you realize it's not as soon as you do that first one You go, all right, fucking who else is on the chopping block? What else can I do here?
And you go from having, I don't know, being a bow hunter who's taking forever very carefully to wait to release the thing. And as soon as you release it, the bow sort of turns into a belt -fed M140 machine gun. And you're like...
It's just interesting the way that the momentum thing works with that. And I think that you mentioned this before, that there's kind of a breakthrough moment and then it kind of tumbles downhill. spiraling off into that and also there's just to say this there's like also a long -term short -term effect on bravery because the fear has got that false end the other thing that's occurring is like if you're doing the thing that is true to you over time every time you will have a life that's true to you Because the things that aren't true to you are going to be failures.
The things that are true for you are going to be successes. Like you're going to create a life that's organized around who you are instead of who you're pretending to be or who you're trying to be or who you want people to think you are. And so short term, making a decision that compromises might work to get your immediate need met, but it's not going to work.
for creating a life that actually is suited for who you are, essentially. And I think Alex is a great example of this. He is like, I am going to be me, period.
As much as my consciousness knows who I am, that's who I'm dedicated to. And he's created a life that is for him, that works for him. Well, regardless of whether or not you like him or don't like him, I think even a...
And maybe, I might be wrong, you might tell me I'm wrong, maybe a better example than Alex is Donald Trump, because it's somebody who has an obvious lot, maybe an even more obvious number of reasons to not be the person that he's being, if that makes sense. Yeah, I see what you're saying, right. Like the price of being Donald Trump is quite high.
Somebody else that's actually probably less triggering, although maybe similarly triggering, is Sam Harris. So I think a lot about Sam Harris when I think about this.
People regularly accuse Sam of flip -flopping on his beliefs, of not being logically consistent in some way, that they see that they think that he doesn't see, whatever. But the reason that I've always had a good bit of faith that he is doing what he believes is that he pays an incredibly high price for the positions that he takes.
How many people do you know that are anti -Trump but also anti -woke?
anti -Islam, but also pro -nationalized healthcare that are from the left, but are concerned about people coming across the border. It's a very non -fungible, unique construction. It's very idiosyncratic.
And for each of those, every time he goes on one side of the fence and then back over to the other, he pisses off both sides. In order to arrive at that kind of outcome, to me, it... If you were just doing it in order to feed red meat or to like placate yourself for the world in some sort of a way, you wouldn't choose that.
Those wouldn't be the decisions that you go for because it's like deranging. Everybody else is confused about what. So if that makes sense, the more, the higher the price that someone pays for the positions that they hold and the less that you can predict.
what their next opinion is going to be. Basically, if I know one of your opinions and can accurately predict everything else that you believe, you're probably not a serious thinker. And I find that that's not necessarily the case with those guys.
Yeah, I think that those are some extreme examples. I also see that there are people who are living regular lives that are saying, I'm going to be true to myself, and they end up with a life that's actually true to them. And it doesn't mean that they have to be committed to something that pisses people off.
Yep, yep, yep, yep. The bravery can show up in mundane and very boring, normal ways every single day. Exactly.
But there are going to be moments for those people where they are going to go, I don't want to do it, but it's the right thing to do. Okay, what else is there to say about breaking down those component skills that we haven't covered so far? Yeah, on the choice side of things, that's really important is, To slow down, this is where you get into the world of habits.
The underlying principle is that your identity is still at stake, right? So you still have to work through the identity piece. But the other piece is to really be able to slow down the emotional process that's happening there and be present with it in one way or another.
So if you are...
trying to quit coffee as an example, because your coffee, somehow you'd decided is bad for you.
What you should do instead is reach for a new tonic. Yes. Sounds like a true investor.
You have like a series of habits that are going to trigger that desire for the coffee. It's going to be an unconscious reach for the coffee when you drink it. Can you, actually be totally present what's the emotion that's happening before you drink the coffee that makes you want to drink the coffee that you get after the coffee to slowly unpack that experience and start noticing what you're avoiding or trying to run into so this is kind of unwinding current choices to become decisions yeah way yeah yeah i would say making turning choices into conscious conscious choices right yeah and and so that's a really important skill set if you want to change kind of the habitual choices that you're making, which is there's lots of tricks.
And James Clear is amazing at what he writes for all the tips and tricks. But one of the key ones on the emotional level, because the decisions are being made emotionally, is can I slow down, unpack, and feel the stuff that I don't want to feel that drives me into some bad habits? It comes back to awareness.
Again, interestingly. Yeah, I mean, I can give you an example from my own life that because I've been fighting with health stuff for the last couple of years, a lot of the time that's disrupted my sleep. When I wake up on a morning, if my body decides it wants to rip me awake at 3 a .m.
or 4 a .m. or something, and there is this story that I tell myself of, oh, well, fuck, like today's already going to be ruined and this is really, really painful and I'm going to lie awake and I'm going to stare at the ceiling and this is super annoying. It's not going to suck, and I'm not going to perform as well on the podcast, and then maybe people are going to laugh, or they're going to like me, and my whole life's going to fall apart, and I get gluten intolerance and live under a bridge, and it's all going to go wrong.
And reaching for my phone and distracting myself from that emotion is now, after a while, your sleep has improved, which has meant the fear's gone away. but you're left with the fucking residue of the habit. It's this very strange situation where you're being puppeted by the coping mechanism of emotion that you're no longer feeling.
Right. And that sticks about a lot of the time. And as now there'll be something else I'm doing, I'm sure that is the case.
And I'm like, well, I've got to unwind this thing that I don't even need anymore that kind of maybe served a... purpose to some degree or whatever and now i'm like well fuck like i've got to have you going to get rid of that and i'm sure there's some other shit that i'm doing right now that i probably should be pointing out too so like you end up if you're not careful i think and this is why people the sort of parito principle of to those who have everything more will be given and to those who have nothing more will be taken on matthew principle um the reason that it seems to suck so much for many people and the reason that spirals go down and spirals come up is that if you don't step in and consciously design your life if you're living it by default you will begin to like sedimentary rock accumulate these things over time and you're like where the fuck why have you got that habit it's like oh i don't know like 15 years ago this thing was happening and i did it and now i'm still puppeted by it even though that's gone does that make sense oh yeah totally yeah i think about this in a company structure all the time which is bureaucracy does not
destroy itself you have to actively go in and destroy bureaucracy and what you're describing is the kind of an ah that's so good it just like well i mean connor's line one of my favorites that he's given to me a gazillion times but he dropped yesterday one of my favorites is we try to control that which we cannot trust yeah yeah i yeah i love that one yeah it's like shit the first time he told me that i was like I was like, just close the call.
I don't need to hear from you anymore. I'm going to go and think about that. I'm going to think about that for the next couple of days.
Yeah, we try to control that, which we cannot trust. And that's the bureaucracy thing. But to some degree, that's also the emotions thing.
Well, so yeah. So let's unpack your situation for a second. You're sitting in bed, waking up, and your brain's doing da -da -da -da -da -da.
The emotions underneath are probably sadness and helplessness. Probably some shame as well. Yeah.
Yeah. And probably some shame. The shame is most likely the thing blocking you from feeling the sadness and the, so, and so a bureaucratic free mentality is I'm going to cry.
I'm going to be scared. I'm going to go back to sleep, but nope. Before you can do that, you have to fill out this paperwork.
It's called a phone. And you need to like scroll on the phone for this bureaucracy. And then, okay, now you have to, well, you've been scrolling on your phone.
You kind of feel like shit. So you need to, and you didn't get enough sleep. So now you need some caffeine.
And now, but that caffeine, it kind of makes you anxious. And so you've got this bureaucratic thing that you have to go through just to get back to some level of normal. Yeah.
You've accumulated, you've sort of piled this bunch on top. Okay. So.
Yeah. Choices, choices, making the unconscious choices more conscious. That's one step.
Yeah, yeah. And feeling the emotions that are happening around, bringing your awareness to the emotional experience around the choices. And in all of them, so it's feeling the stuff that you don't want to feel, learning how to embrace, love the stuff that you don't want to feel.
So that's, this is, I think, the hardest part for people to really grok.
So my story is, emotional abandonment was like, I had an alcoholic father, I had an Al -Anon mom. My needs were not taken care of for a large part.
Some were, and they did the best that they could, but a lot of them were not taken care of. And so when I was growing up, when I was like in my twenties, I was like, I'm going to be emotionally abandoned by everybody.
Fuck you all. Like anytime I felt emotional abandonment, I would do one of two things. I would be like, fuck you.
I don't need you anyhow, which created more people emotionally abandoned me. Or I get needy, which would create more people getting like emotionally abandoned me. So I was recreating this situation.
Once I learned that I could embrace emotional, abandonment, right? So that feeling would come up and instead of trying to get rid of it by going, fuck you, or please come closer.
And I was just like, oh, I can actually experience this. I can allow for this. I can allow this in my life.
I don't need to run from it. Then I stopped doing this and I stopped doing this and people abandoned me, emotionally abandoned me a lot less. And when they do, I don't really mind because I get to have that experience again and learn more deeply from that experience and realize that, oh, their emotional abandonment doesn't hurt even half as much as me emotionally abandoning myself.
And so then all of a sudden I'm like, oh, I can't wait to be emotionally abandoned again because I get that experience. I get to learn again, which is weird, but you have that moment. And when you have that moment with one of these emotions that you're like, this is ridiculous, what starts happening is you're like, oh, let's see where else, what other emotions I can love.
And all of a sudden, these patterns that have been ruling your life, like emotional abandonment, start collapsing. Because all you're trying to do is feel the thing that you couldn't feel as a kid, which was like, this fucking sucks. No one's here for me.
That was the feeling I couldn't feel as a kid. Because if I did, my whole life would collapse. So I couldn't feel it then.
But somewhere in my 20s, I learned to feel it. And then the pattern starts. dissipating in my life.
And so what you start seeing happening is when people start accepting these emotions, learning how to love and accept and say, oh, I can't wait to feel, I welcome this emotional experience. And you got to experience this in Groundbreakers. You got to see what happened.
All of a sudden, these patterns that are in their lives for decades just start falling apart. It's fucking terrifying. Yeah, it is.
It's really destabilizing. Because their choices change because their decision -making changes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Some people may have problems with like, what am I even going to wear today? Or, you know, how am I going to have a conversation with this barista at the coffee shop? But for the most part, I think it's going to be bigger things.
Yeah. And when it comes to bigger things, am I going to stay in this relationship or not? Am I going to marry this person or not?
Am I going to leave this job or not? Am I going to move to a new city or country or not? Yeah.
Is there anything different when it comes to that? Because it's less routine, right? Like you're not going, this is less of a reversible door, not necessarily a reversible door, but significant.
Like, fuck, if you're going to like move back from a country, you picked up all of your possessions and you've gone over there and maybe there's financial implications and stuff, things happening. And also how many times have you moved countries previously? Like show me the CV of how this has gone for you in the past.
I don't know. I've never done it. I'm thinking about.
When people are facing the biggest decisions of their life, what they feel are the most impactful, the most momentous, the scariest, the grandest, how do you advise them to go through that? Well, there's a couple of things that I think are really important to see first, and then we can talk about the advice. So you started with the guy who was like, how do I talk to the barista?
It doesn't matter if it's, how do I talk to the barista? If the decision is like as hard as it is to like, where do I move? It's because the identity is at stake.
So that person probably has like social anxiety, some sort of version of that. And they're like, Oh my God, like, am I going to be liked? Am I going to be like their whole identity of, I am a person who's not good with other people is at stake.
If they talk to the barista, uh, the person who's like moving their whole identity is take from like more obvious reasons. Like I'm a, I'm a, I'm a British guy in England. He's a party boy.
I am a guy and. Austin, what the fuck is Austin? Who's going to like me, right?
So the identity starts, in either case, that's like a really important piece to understand. The other thing to understand is that we have no idea what their big decisions are. We have no fucking idea what the big decisions are.
So you could say my big decision was to marry my wife, Tara. Well, how about the decision to meet my wife? I didn't make it.
How about the first date? I wouldn't even gotten to getting married if I didn't have the first date decision, right? So there's a whole bunch of little choices that I made along the way that allowed for me to even be considering whether I am going to marry my wife.
I think that's interesting. It's certainly true that there are some choices or decisions that we face that we don't realize what the future impact of them will be. I would say that there is a certain category of decision or choice that we are going to make where we realize the likelihood of this being small isn't that great.
Like this is probably going to be a big decision. So you have like type one decision errors that sneak up on you. But then the other kind probably don't evaporate quite as readily in the other.
It's unlikely that moving countries is not going to be a big decision, let's say. Right. The reason to think about.
The fact that there's a whole bunch of decisions that led to this that you had no thought over and maybe no control over is to get you, get the identity of you out of the way and make the big decision, right? So the identity is that if you're having a big decision, the identity is like, oh my gosh, who am I going to be in this situation?
You know, you talked the other day about the Love Island thing, right?
couldn't see yourself the same way after the love island thing you didn't choose for that to happen but it had a massive stake in your identity if you knew that that was potentially a potential for joining love island oh you would have existential crisis island yeah right you would have been like i have to make a choice what am i gonna do i thought i was just gonna get to wear swim shorts right exactly so so the the reason that you can that is to start separating the personalness the stop stop start separating the identity and that's the biggest thing about making like a really big decision whether it's the barista decision or the thing is to really start looking at who is it that i want to be like or who even more profound is what am i exactly Like to really question that identity.
So if I move to England and I have no friends, what does that mean about me? What is it that I'm scared of? How could I be proud of myself even if I have no friends in England?
What essentially am I? And that question, I remember when that question hit me, that was a question I asked myself like 10 times a year. a day for like years what am i essentially what am i essentially that hearing you say the words what am i essentially gives me fucking ptsd reason that we're not going to bring up beautiful beautiful very grand ptsd yeah um okay and so so so in those moments the the added piece i would say is like this is a great moment to really wrestle with what you are essentially or what you want to be.
And it's an opportunity instead of seeing it as like, how do I make a great decision? Like a crack in the veneer of what you think you are, which means a crack in the veneer of the limitations you put on yourself. Wow.
Gets to get opened up and you get to see yourself for who you are. Do you think about fear of change? is that playing in because most decisions will result in some kind of change yeah i suppose interestingly uh inaction is also a decision right the decision to continue doing what's happening now we have like a status quo anchoring bias inertia momentum thing that kind of carries us through and yeah well that's also kind of a decision it's just a decision to not change as opposed to a decision to change.
But I think about fear of change, difference, different, things being different. Is this got a role to play? So I just think it's like a higher order or lower order, right?
So fear of change, what's actually behind the fear of change? The fear of change is that unknown and what's behind the unknown, I'm not going to be okay. And I'm not going to be okay as identity.
I'm scared that the job situation is going to change. Okay, cool. I guarantee you the job situation is going to change, but I also guarantee you that you are going to be better off because of it.
Okay, cool. I don't, I'm not scared of the change anymore. I'm only scared of the change because of the potential negative repercussions on me.
It's an unknown thing that might be bad for me. And it's the me that's the essential part of it. So yeah, I do.
Obviously there's a fear of change. It's just a higher order. It's like, it's not the core of what you're dealing with.
Understood. Yeah. Is there anything else to say on the difficult decision, big grand decision?
No, not much. Just that it's a great opportunity. I mean, I've had some amazing, that level of like, if I have a client come to me and they're like, I'm in a big transformation moment in my life, like shit is changing.
I'm like, yay. Because that's where the most growth is going to happen for a person. And if you look at your own life and you say, When did I grow the most as a human or decline the most because I didn't pay attention?
Yes. It's going to be those moments of transformation. And so I get excited for them.
They're huge opportunities. I'm aware you get excited because you are the... cross -leggy emotional equivalent of a navy seal drill sergeant right or like a particularly rough pt like anyone that's ever worked with a trainer or been on a sports team or whatever and they've seen the strength and conditioning coach the strength and conditioning coach has got this unnerving grin on their face on the morning of one practice and they're like oh we're gonna have fun today that's the face you pull yeah that's the face you pull more than you should as you're staring It is because you're a bastard.
I take pleasure in somebody else's discomfort. If they're working hard or doing the thing and you, you're like, you're going to face it. Like you're going to face it.
So drill sergeant. It's the freedom on the other side that I am excited about. And also, yeah, it's kind of fun to watch.
Mental torture, emotional torture. okay are there any big indicators that somebody's about to make a terrible decision that you could see that somebody could sense inside of themselves where they're about to like oh i'm pointing in the wrong i'm really pointing in the wrong direction the reason i ask this is yes i think good yeah i think um expediting success is is great and what we want but avoiding failure like the um what's warren buffett's two pieces of trading advice uh number one is never lose money and number two is please read number one um that if you can go through life avoiding pitfalls that's a pretty fucking good start yeah and expediting success can come after rule number one yeah avoiding pitfalls so somebody is about to make a terrible decision what's going on so I think there needs to be a definition of like, what does it mean to make a terrible decision?
Right. So most people think a terrible decision is a decision where they don't get what they want. That's what they think a terrible decision is.
Meaning like they're sitting there saying to themselves, I want a girl. No, I want. That's not a terrible decision.
Use something else. I want a cigarette. I want a cigarette.
There we go. I want a cigarette. And they, they.
And if they get the cigarette, then they have made a successful decision.
That's what they're thinking, right? I want the girl. Did I get the girl?
I made a good decision. I want the money. Did I get the money?
I made a good decision. I want the job. Did I get the job?
I made a good decision. That is not what makes a good decision. Because the question is, if I got the cigarette, did the cigarette actually give me what I want over the next year, month, week, decade?
If I got the girl, did I get the thing? Yesterday we talked about people be successful so that they can get the mate of their choice, but then the mate of their choice is the only mates of their choice are the transactional ones who only want them for their success.
The question is, if you're thinking about it that way, no, I don't have a way to tell you if you're making a great choice or a bad choice. I can tell you that the more fear that's in the choice makes it less likely that you're going to get the thing you want. Because if I'm coming to you with something that I want and I'm scared I'm not going to get it, you're less likely to give it to me.
I was wondering if you could donate to my cause. Right. Isn't going to be as good as like, hey, I've got this great cost.
So the more fear that I have, I'm probably going to not get the thing that I want. The more fear that I'm running when I'm doing it. Not that fear is a bad thing.
It just means your fear is unprocessed. Yeah. But if you're looking at what's a good decision, like a good decision is I want the cigarette, but I don't get it.
That is, it's easy. Like if a person is compromising themselves to do the thing, then they're making a horrible fucking decision. Right.
And how will you know if you're compromising yourself? That is a hard question. There is something in us that knows, oh, I just don't like how I am right now.
And it is something that you become more and more sensitive to. It's exactly what I was about to say. It's exactly where I was, that there is a category of person, maybe even a large majority of people, who have suppressed that voice for so long that it's an entirely detrained muscle, right?
They've atrophied that. And even the lightest, even the bicep curl of a cigarette is a weight that's too heavy for them to lift. They're not attenuated enough to that.
So let's say there's somebody who hasn't used that muscle for a long time. very atrophied they can't hear the voice particularly well yeah how would you start how would you begin to retrain the muscle yeah what i would say is look at the last week month two months and what's the one way in that time frame that you heard that you you felt this isn't the right thing to do and you did it anyway what's the thing or what's the thing that's creating resentment in your life why resentment Because resentment means you've abandoned yourself, right?
Like if you ask me to do something and I don't want to do it and then I do it, enough times I'm going to resent you, period, right? So if you look at a marriage and somebody resents the other marriage, it means the other person in the marriage, it means that they're doing shit that they don't, they're not holding their boundary.
They've abandoned themselves because they're trying to make the other person happy or trying to make them not angry or they're walking on eggshells or they're accepting some sort of criticism because it's just keeping the peace. So resentment is a great way to look at it or just look back and go, where's the ways that I don't feel like I was the person I wanted to be in the last week, right?
And take your time with it because I think most people, if they look at that fully, it's quite a ego collapse. There's a certain category of person who constantly needs reassurance from others that their decisions are okay. Every single one of those moments of needing reassurance from others is a self -abandonment.
Why? How do you explain this?
It's saying, I don't know what's right for me, which is a lie, but you do, which means I am literally giving my power over to you. I'm saying, and I'm giving my happiness. The responsibility for my happiness is yours now, not mine, which is a self -abandonment.
And I'm saying, you know the answer for me when the truth is that I know the answer for myself. All of that is some level of self -abandonment. In other news, have you ever noticed how some websites make it ridiculously easy to buy while some feel infinitely harder?
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this would make a wonderful case for never listening to anybody ever about anything in your life. No, I'm not ever saying don't listen to people. I think listening to people is like where a tremendous amount of wisdom comes from.
I'm saying that if you're looking for their approval and there's a big difference. Is this okay for me to do? Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Like somehow or another, it's like, if you're saying, if you can't say, I feel good about doing this without like looking over to you and say, is it all right that we do this?
Then, you know, you're, you're abandoning yourself. How much of decisiveness do you think is learning to cope with increasing amounts of uncertainty?
Yeah. So without a doubt, if you are confident in your identity, decisiveness increases dramatically.
People who have a very stable sense of self are far more decisive than people who don't. There is also, in business, what you'll notice is that most CEOs start realizing that making decisions is better than getting decisions right. Making decisions is better than getting decisions right.
Yes. Meaning if I have a choice between making 10 decisions a day and making them right, making sure that they're right, which I never perfectly do, or making 100 decisions a day and just getting them made, the 100 decisions a day is a better choice. And the reason is, is because as soon as you make a decision, then you're testing your thesis against reality.
If I'm sitting there going, how do we market? Well, let's make sure we market it best. What's the thing?
And do all the data. I'm not running any experiments. I'm not actually going, well, what did the audience say?
Okay, what did I learn? As soon as I make a decision, then I run an experiment, then I learn something, then I can make another experiment, then I'm interacting with the world and learning from the world immediately. And so making the decision allows the action to happen so that the learning can occur.
And so it's the same in life, is that making that decision is really important. The thing that stops you from making the decision is, again, if your identity is in jeopardy. So there's certain identities, like if I have the identity of I'm an action guy, then it's easy for me to be decisive by nature.
But if I have the identity of, I have to be right because every time I was wrong, my parents criticized me for 20 years and made fun of me. And like six years later, I'm at dinner table and I'm still being told how I like made a mistake from six years ago. Then I'm going to be like, okay, I gotta, I gotta make this thing right.
Because my identity is, is engaged. And so as people start to be really confident of like, this is who I am and I'm valuable. just because i'm valuable those people become far far more decisive and and even more than that it's like there's less decisions and more choice because there's less fear because there's less there's less identity at stake like what like what what what do i have to worry about george has this line he says i'd rather be high conviction and wrong than low conviction and right oh fucking right absolutely cool Yeah, because I will learn I'm wrong a lot quicker.
Yeah, I'd rather be high conviction I'm wrong. I love this thought process that there's this test we use for gauging talent. And it's a test that has XY axes that people think are not, they think they're contrary when they're not contrary.
And it's called paradox axes. And so one of them is. and one of them is openness.
And most people think you can either be convicted and open. But this graph is basically saying you can be high in convicted, high in openness, low in both, right? Why do you place yourself on the graph?
I test as both very open and very convicted. Right. But I say that because that actually makes it...
makes really good decisions. But that comes from a confidence in your identity, meaning I am totally happy to be wrong and that doesn't threaten who I am. So I love being open and I have high conviction because if I don't have high conviction, I don't take action.
Does regret play a role here? Lots of people fear future potential regret so much so that they get... stuck and paralyzed in the moment now i must transpose it from the future and start to feel it down in the present yeah yeah yeah i see that for sure the interesting thing that i noticed with a lot of people and i think this is really useful for folks at home do you re will you regret what you're imagining will happen more than you regret being indecisive for three months about whether to marry the woman or not.
What's interesting is that the thing that people fear is often the thing that they are feeling and stuck in in the moment of trying to make the decision. Like, I'm really scared that if I marry her, I'm going to be stuck. You're stuck right now trying to make this decision for six months.
I am really scared that I'm going to regret that I wasted my time. If I do this wrong, you're wasting your time right now and making this like decision for like three to six months, low conviction stew. Exactly.
So, so what's amazing is that the oftentimes the thing that people are scared, the emotional consequences people are scared of are far less. They're one inch, but the shit you're stewing in right now is like, 10 inches deep, to use Alex's metaphor.
There's a line from Alain de Botton talking about leaving relationships. And he says, people are worried about leaving relationships because they're scared of being lonely. But what they don't realize is that exiting is the first step towards feeling connected, that the loneliness they fear is what they're already enduring.
Exactly. That's exactly, that's oftentimes the... The consequence that we're scared of in the decision is the thing that we're actually currently suffering.
Yeah. And there's less at a velocity or an amplitude that's less than we're currently dealing with. Well, there's also the opportunity for it to stop where there isn't any opportunity to stop unless you take the action.
Yeah. And presumably less shame around what I am doing this to myself. Yeah.
I'm choosing to, I'm like imprisoned inside of this cell. And I know that not only am I the prisoner, but I'm . And for some reason, I refuse to put the key in the fucking lock and turn it and open the gate.
The other thing that's really interesting is I think people, when they're in that deep indecisiveness, they really forget that they're being super self -abusive. There's a lot of self -abuse in that. You have to get it right.
Why? Why can't you get it wrong? What's the problem?
you you don't know it's like you're literally telling yourself you have to get it right you don't know you don't know what's best for you you don't like you can't and whatever happens you're not going to be able to work yourself out of it you know that right like you're not going to just be able to take it as a lesson and then like grow from it it's going to destroy you forever like that's the that's the subtext of being indecisive right and so that level of self -abuse is is often unacknowledged or unrecognized.
And when somebody actually sees it, it often can allow them to see like themselves in a way that allows them to be more decisive. Can you go just for a little bit, can you go full? Joe Hudson, Connor Beaton crossover and apply as much pain as possible to people that are being indecisive?
Like what are the costs that people - Not to apply pain, but to give them freedom. Give them the gravitas of the situation. Like how important is this?
And what is it that the situation is costing them if they continue to be indecisive? What does indecisiveness cost you?
Yeah. I think the thing I would say in that is some version of, I'm really sorry you're depressed and that somehow or another you think you need to be perfect to be valuable, to be loved, to be worthy. And you don't.
And if you could see yourself clearly for a moment, you would see that this decision isn't going to define you for who you are and that you're worthy of love no matter what decision you make here. So make the one you're proud of.
I would say something like that.
What else is there to say? You dweeb. Fucking idiot.
How does this relate to assertiveness? Because I imagine, maybe not quite the same. Yeah, yeah.
But the people pleasing, the standing up for myself, the saying what's true for me, the assertiveness. I imagine people who have clicked on an episode about decision making to become better with their decisions may also, you may also like this thing. You may also be interested in being more assertive.
How do you come to think about assertiveness? I'm not going to be audience. like what was, I'm sorry, what was it called?
Audience. Captured. Yeah, I'm not going to be audience captured like that.
I don't give a fuck. That's right. Yeah, fuck you.
No, no, no, no, no, no. I'm going to talk about fucking sushi. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Assertiveness, I think, can be, so there's a difference between being assertive, I would say, and having agency. I would say that if you do the work to be decisive, you definitely feel like you have more agency.
I'm happening to life. Yeah. Agency doesn't have to be assertive.
And I think those get confused a lot. Can you give me an example of a way that somebody is agentic but not necessarily assertive? Yeah.
Like a great actor. They say, I'm going to be this kind of an actor, and I'm committed to these kinds of roles, and I'm going to do it, and people accept me, and I'm going to go for auditions. But I'm not going to create my own role and get directed and buy a script and produce the thing so that I can finally have the role that I want.
Some people would. I would call that more assertive. But this person has agency.
They're saying, i'm going to live the life that i want to live i want to be the person that i want to live i think there's an assertiveness that in some people's definition that goes along with aggression like i'm going to like fundamentally and and i think for some people their nature is not that level of aggressiveness they don't have that fire imposition in that way yeah they don't have that fire but at the same time they're not going to compromise and i remember when i was in college there was a right before I got kicked out of my first college, I was taking a class on Hermann Hesse and there was a German teacher.
And the German teacher lived through the Berlin bombings. And he said, when we were under the tunnels and the bombs were happening and people were yelling up top, it was always the quiet.
non -macho man, kind of the non -assertive type who went up and pulled them out of the bombing. And it was always the bravado guy who didn't. And so that to me would be the difference.
Like one of them has assertiveness, but they don't have the agency to be themselves. Are they inversely linked, in your opinion? More assertive people, less agentic?
No, not at all. I think they're just not correlated. Right, okay.
Yeah. But I do think there's a tremendous amount of people who are, my experience is there's a tremendous amount of when you, when you become, when you get really good at decision -making, you, it's a very high agency place. Well, it's, I would imagine it is difficult to be high agency and indecisive.
Correct. So even if decisiveness is, it's necessary, but not sufficient. Right.
Perhaps. to be agentic george is currently trying to get his conception he's got this fucking tricycle that he sent me a photo of the other day george george mack he's writing a book on agency he's going to be writing the definitive book on high agency and it'll come out at some point in the next year and a half and i've watched this guy craft this thing like watching like a david be carved out of a massive block of gray do you know the story about david about how a number of other uh, uh, sculptors had tried their hand at that block of marble previously.
I had no idea. Really cool. So I've been to see it twice and I've taken the same tour and I just, for me, it's Michelangelo.
Yes. Yeah. Cause that also is yes.
True. One of my favorite, by the way, one of my favorite symbols in the world. Oh, it's beautiful.
god stretching out reaching for man and man's just not worth he's not i'm not gonna even fucking lift a finger for you bitch yeah it's so true well i actually got the guys to move that a tiny little bit because when you look at how close together it is we looked on the the painting and it was too close it was closer than it is in the painting because the whole point is that um even the ligament that was uh the way that the hand was shaped because there was a ton of dissections being done right by michelangelo and he realized the way that the ligament is when it's relaxed and when it when it is stretched but it was too fucking close i was like i i know that we've done all of this time in the studio i was like can we just move it like about two inches further apart um but no so michelangelo's david uh this block of you know gargantuan block of marble have you ever seen it in person i have not a dude it is and because it's on a plinth it's a motherfucker plinth so it's already
his foot's pretty much head height or maybe even higher and then he's eight feet tall maybe 10 feet tall maybe more massive massive maybe even more maybe like 12 feet tall he's a huge guy and with the proportions as well that were used to kind of accentuate that so much bigger hands by proportion longer arms longer legs by proportion yeah than you would have so it's long and tall and big at the same time anyway this block of marble had been A number of sculptors had had a crack at it previously and sort of started like, it's too unwieldy to use.
It's a gargantuan thing. And he was the one that went to go and do it. And my favorite thing, which I've said a gazillion times on the show, but not for a while, is the Michelangelo effect.
Two people in a relationship, friendship, intimate partnership, see the best in each other. And over time, like... Michelangelo saw David inside the marble and he just removed that which was not David.
Yeah. And then David emerged. I love that.
And it's the same thing that, you know, the best kinds of friendships and relationships are is I see in you the best parts of you and I'm going to help to bring that out. I'm going to try and cut away all of this other stuff that isn't you. I don't even think all that is necessary.
It's just seeing the other person. Like my experience is like that's the when we teach people coaching. That is the core of what we teach.
See the wisdom, see them as who they actually are, even if they can't see themselves, listen to that part, talk to that part. That's all that's really required is to just see them as they essentially are and everything else takes care of itself. How do people know the difference between the genuine embodied wisdom -fueled intuition and something masquerading as intuition, impulsivity, fear that I imagine many clever people that are two hours into a podcast about decision -making will be afflicted with.
They've managed to... cleverly contort and pretzel this thing actually oh that is my intuition speaking but it's not it's just a clever like confabulation of of what is actually fear or maybe it is impulsivity or coping or whatever is there a way to discern yeah the way in coaching relationship it is your capacity to understand yourself right so the more clearly you see yourself the more clearly you can see others and exactly the way i can't see myself is exactly the way i'm not going to be able to see you can we can you tell me about what your retreat was like that you did recently i've been real excited to learn about this are you do you mind talking about this i don't want to talk about this okay yeah there's a lot i mean i can go for a walk i can tell you i can tell you like a broad thing but i can't yeah um yeah i've been ever since i was in my 20s i really got into uh vedic sciences generally just as one of the avenues in which i've learned so i got into zen i got into herman hess i got into the vedic sciences and the vedic sciences have a part that's all about health and they have something called ayurvedic health and they have something that they do for longevity called panchakarma you could call it longevity you could call it health i'll call it health
And it's basically like a reset where there's a very particular diet and they give you, in this particular place where I went, they give you like six hours of treatments a day. And they're all sorts of crazy treatments. And so I did it.
I've done it three years in a row now. This is the most intense one that I've ever done. I found a very intense place to go.
And it was... An amazing emotional roller coaster, which I haven't experienced in years. So that was really cool to watch my emotions do this thing.
Yeah, I imagine that sounds a little bit like a Brazilian jiu -jitsu fourth degree black belt going, I got twisted into a pretzel. That's been a little while. I didn't think that that was going to happen.
I remember what that feels like. Yeah, and it was all through physical stuff. So the part that I enjoyed the most about it is that they really discouraged talking.
everywhere there's rooms saying silence there's no phones in the cafeteria there's no talking in the cafeteria that like you're basically alone quiet it's in a forest you know and so little like noble science adjacent noble silence adjacent yeah so i got to do a lot of meditation which made me really happy so i got to really observe the the craziness of basically I think the mood was mostly just a nervous system because there was a huge part of it as a nervous system reset, or in their words, it's like a Vata reset.
And, and so there was just this massive kind of for the six day period of just like, wow, holy crap. I got to do things. Why am I got to do that?
I don't need to do anything. Why do I have to like that? And I was, and it was in this contrast between like.
absolute bliss and peace so i'm like oh this is amazing and then it just turned on and then it just turned off and then just turn back on because they're just like what happens when i do this what happens like do that right yeah and i got to experience by the way i got to experience the doctor having that facial expression He was a Navy SEAL.
I'm going to poke you in the thing and it's going to make this stuff happen to you. Wonderful. It makes me, that's karmic for me to find that you're on the receiving end for once.
I feel incredibly satisfied. I much prefer to be on the receiving end because that's where the freedom's on the other side of it. And there's no shortage of it.
You've met my wife, but you haven't met my daughters. There's no shortage of me. I met one very briefly.
I think she come from. Ross? Oh, yeah.
Okay. So you met Una. Yeah.
We did a podcast with her. Such a good podcast. Was it like, was it something titled like what it's like to be Joe Hudson's daughter or some shit like that?
I can't, I don't remember. Yeah. Okay.
You're not in the titles. I am. I am.
I am horribly not on the internet. Again. Yeah.
Afflicted with it. Dude, I love you. What a pleasure to be with you.
I love you a bit. People that are interested in this. What?
should they go and look at where should they go uh we have the decision there's we have a couple podcasts on decision making that go into some depth on all of the things that we talked about and uh the decision great decisions course i will say it's only a five -week course but oftentimes it is an extremely intense course because you're going right into a lot of these emotions so just like know that that's what you're with care yeah that's know what you're getting into And that's at the, that begins at the start of January.
I think we sell it the very beginning of January, like as a new year's resolution kind of thing. When does that go live? You got any idea?
Like when the, you can get on, you can get onto the waiting list and the waiting list gets a 24 hour early thing and you can get on the waiting list today. And it usually sells out where the waiting within the waiting list. Great.
Uh, connection course, all of the other surf out of accomplishment podcast. You're the best. Thank you, man.
All right. See you next time. My beauties.
Dude.
that's a good one a quick note lots of people tell us that youtube unsubscribes them from the channel even though they already pressed it so just check down there and see if the subscribe button is pressed you get access to episodes before anybody else if you do supports me and the show helps me to bring you bigger and better guests and it makes me very happy so just go and give it a tap for me i thank you
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Most advice on decisions hands you a spreadsheet. Joe Hudson, who coaches founders running billion-dollar companies, opens by throwing the spreadsheet out: neurologically, he says, every decision is made to feel something, and the ones you can't make are the ones where you're scared of a feeling.
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