EVERY SPOKEN WORD
160 min read · 31,669 words- 0:00 – 11:27
Hard Work is Massively Over-Rated
- CWChris Williamson
We already did this once. It went well, it went amazingly well, and I was very sad that we couldn't put it out because we had technical difficulties. This time, we're both in our home setup, no technical difficulties, and we're going to run it back from what we got through last time, plus more.
- SPShaan Puri
Well, last time I was also very sick that night, uh, after we rec- I had recorded a podcast, I did the podcast with you, so two podcasts in a row. And I went home and basically just was in bed with a fever for the rest of the night. So, uh, ha- if you thought that was good, great, uh, because (laughs) I thought it was terrible, and I was feeling terrible at the time. I gotta, I gotta do better than that.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay. Maybe that's just what all guests feel like once they've finished up recording with me.
- SPShaan Puri
(laughs) That's what I thought.
- CWChris Williamson
That might be like the, the post-coital-
- SPShaan Puri
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... like, depression that occurs after you've podcasted with me. I'm not, I'm not too sure. I'll have to ask some previous guests. All right, so I wanna go through some of your most controversial, semi-controversial opinions, which you've kind of become famous for, I think. First one, one of my favorites, hard work is massively overrated. Why?
- SPShaan Puri
Well, I'll take a step back. The reason I like these controversial opinions is, uh, A, you always look cool if you have some controversial opinions, uh, but B, I l- I'm- I've learned how much of what we believe is just simply stories that were told. Um, this goes from everything, religion to, uh, school, to being taught what you should be doing for your career, and all this stuff. And so I've actively tried to just deprogram myself and ask, and question the assumptions. So I actually started with looking at, what are the things that almost nobody disagrees with, and are those really true? And one of those that I found that I, in practice, disagree with was, growing up I was told hard work is what's most important, hard work is the key to success. Hard work is... And you just hear hard work preached, and it's almost like you'd have to be insane to be, um, anti-hard work, right? (laughs) Like, uh, some people do it just for the, just for the effect, but I don't, I don't really mean it like that. I just mean it's overrated. It's not that it's a bad thing, but that it is overrated. Um, because what I've found in my life is that what you do is far more important than how f- how hard you work on that thing. So, for example, you know, I thought about the hard work thing, and I used to work in restaurants. And nobody works harder than people (laughs) in restaurants. Restaurants are open, you know, from breakfast till, till late night, every single day, seven days a week. It is, uh, you know, a thankless job. You are working in a hot kitchen, um, and you are, you know... Cooks work hard. Cooks in the back line of a kitchen work hard. Janitors work hard. You know, the cleaning lady works hard. Um, but, you know, you sort of think about it, you're like, "Why isn't the janitor driving a Bentley?" Right? Like, if hard work was the key to success, then why aren't the people who I think works, work the hardest in, in most these situations doing better? Um, and it's because, you know, hard work will let you win the game that you're playing, but it doesn't help you if you chose the wrong game. And so the most critical decision is actually project selection, what you decide to work on. Uh, what you decide to do with your talent and your time and your, your work ethic is far more important. And I don't really hear that. In fact, I actually, growing up, heard the opposite. Um, you know, you get to college and they're like, "What's your major?" "Uh, I don't know, I'm 17, 18." Like, w- how am I supposed to... Uh, you know, I just came from high school, right? Like, I don't, I don't know what the thing is yet. Um, is there a list I can look at of, like, the jobs and what they're like? Can I, do, do I get to go see one? Um, y- you know, and instead it's just like, "Just pick." Oh, if you don't pick, if you don't declare, if you don't declare your major... This is in the US at least, I don't know how it is for you. I- i- if you don't declare your major, you're behind. (laughs) Like, already it's like, you... If you've chosen to wait and see or think or go test, you've fallen behind, right? So it, it just became this thing where picking what you do was like this quick one-second thing you were supposed to just get right right away with no preparation, and then spend the rest of your t- life working hard. And I just found that, uh, the opposite actually turned out to be true for me, which was picking the right projects made the, made a huge difference, and working hard enough was good enough. I consider myself to be, frankly, somewhat lazy, but very happy and successful. So, you know, I, you know, I don't know if I'm the outlier or what, but like, at least disproved it is not, um, it is not the main thing, uh, in terms of success. I believe it's overrated.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. To clarify here, I don't think that you're saying hard work doesn't matter, hard work isn't a competitive advantage. You're saying that for the people who believe that hard work is absolutely everything, it is the end-all, be-all, that there are other higher points of leverage that you can do that open up layers, uh, uh, levels, and, and, and layers to the hard work so that it can be maximized.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, exactly. Hard work is maybe the fourth or fifth most important factor or ingredient. Um, so you might say, uh, what, what's more important? So number one to me is what you work on. Number two would be who you're around, who y- who you work with, because those people will influence you in a far greater direction and provide more opportunities in the future. So what you work on, who you work, uh, who you work with, far more important than how hard you work. I sort of think it's something like fourth or fifth most important on the list. And that there really, there's r- just a threshold you need to reach. So, um, if you simply don't take action, you don't do the work, doesn't matter how good of an idea you had or how good of partners you had, obviously not gonna work. But, um, it is a threshold, and that going far beyond that threshold, going from 40 hours a week to 70 hours a week to 90 hours a week, like some people will, will popularize, um, has much less of an effect than I think people think. It just sounds good, sounds cool, and it sounds like you earned it.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Why, why is it... If, if you're true, if what you're saying is correct, and hard work is as overrated as you say it is, why is it such a pervasive myth?
- SPShaan Puri
Because it's virtue signaling. Most people, um... You know, the reality is, uh, if you looked at, um, like a contribution-... a, a, a chart that showed the contributions to success. Well, I was born with, like, kind of all my healthy functions, right? You know, 10 fingers, 10 toes, everything works. Great. Um, I was born in the United States. So, already, that was, like, far more inf- influential in my future success and endeavors than, uh, you know, somebody who had a, uh, you know, the genetic lottery played out differently for them. They were born in the w- in a different place with a different set of, of physical resources. Um, and then you just keep going down the list of, like, how, uh, what you, what, what actually contributes to your success, a lot of those things are out of your control. I can't take credit for where I was born. I can't take credit for the genetics that I wa- that I was given, or the gifts, the talents that I had, uh, as a baseline. Um, so what people try to do is they try to shove those away, pretend those don't matter, 'cause you didn't earn them, and people will say you're privileged if you, if you, if you bring them up. And so instead, they go to the thing that sounds like they made a choice to do it, and that that is the sole reason why they had the success that they had. Um, "I chose to work hard, I put in the time, I earned it." And it's sort of like, you know, the same thing happens in, uh, in any, any endeavor. Um, when I win, it's 'cause I'm great. When I lose, it's w- bad luck. So, why is that? Why do we think that when we win, it's 'cause of what we did, and when we lose, it's 'cause of what everybody else did? (laughs) Right? What, what the mo- what the economy did, what the weather did, what the, uh, you know, th- the government did. Like, you know, people are very quick on the downside to offload, uh, accountability, and on the upside, to load in a- accountability. So, I just notice these things. I notice human nature's tendencies and realize it does seem like that would be the convenient thing to do, uh, to assign credit to your actions, and to make it sound like you... If you g- if you have a lot, if you earned a lot, if you got a lot of success, the reason why is 'cause you put in a lot. And in reality, we know that sometimes it's asymmetric. Sometimes you just make a few critical decisions, simple decisions, that might have taken you a very short amount of time to do, but totally differentiated between success and failure.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, I think there's a few things going on. Um, one being, if you achieve success and it wasn't painful, people who are working hard and suffering and haven't achieved success, to you, uh, to them, you just look like a wanky sort of bourgeois aristocrat of some kind.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Like a, a, a randomness aristocrat that was blessed by this, this, this sort of chance. Um, Sam Harris has got this idea that I didn't get a chance to bring up with him on our episode, uh, the myth of the self-made man. Uh, and he takes this one step further because he folds in determinism and a lack of free will. So, he's basically like, "None of the things, none of the achievements that you have are yours to bear, because you didn't choose the circumstances, you didn't choose the laws of thermodynamics, you didn't choose your genetics, you didn't choose the randomness, you didn't choose anything." And he, uh, sort of aims this at the right and says, "This does an awful lot of heavy lifting for people right of center," and uses it to kind of lambast this, this myth of the self-made man. The problem that I have with that is it's a very disempowering story to tell yourself.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, I, I, I don't see it as an adaptive or useful story. Like, I want to feel pride in my successes, because otherwise, I know that I'm not going, I'm gonna leave more on the table, 'cause what's the fucking point? Like, I get satisfaction-
- SPShaan Puri
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... from doing things well. So, it's almost like a, it might be a literal truth, but a figurative falsehood, in that it, it, it's not adaptive to believe, even if it's true. And I think that y- I don't know, maybe there are times when self-deception, uh, can be justified, and that might be one of them.
- SPShaan Puri
100% agreed, um, on both of the points you made. So, I think the first is that, uh, you know, if you are honest about what actually works and what doesn't, it might annoy people, um, because if they have it ha- if, if things are going poorly or it's hard, uh, they wanna, uh, they, th- nobody likes to hear, uh, how easy it was for somebody else, or how simple it could've been if they had made d- different decisions. Uh, so it's a sort of, like, keeps the barbarians at the gates type of thing, to be like, "No, no, no. The reason... The only difference was I put in more time in this direction, and you put your time in this other direction." You know? And, and it's the most equitable way to describe this, uh, that pisses off the least number of people. However, for me, pissing off people is not really a priority or a concern. I'm not trying to do it, nor am I trying to avoid it. I'm just simply trying to be (laughs) , and let the chips fall where they may. If y- some people will love it, some people will hate it, and that's okay. Um, I don't really care too much either way. Um, the second point you made, which is, uh, there is no, you know, the, the complete myth of the self-made man, it is, it is disempowering. And so, um, I have this whole category of things that I always say are maybe true, but not that useful. So, for example, if it's true, but not useful, there's, there's plenty of things. Like, we'll be in a, a meeting at work and somebody will say something, I say, "That's, that's true, I don't argue with what you're saying, but it's s- simply unimportant. It's not useful to what we're trying to decide or what we're trying to do here." Similarly, if it is true that we sort of have no free will and that it's all determined anyways and that it doesn't really matter what, what you do, well, that's not that useful, 'cause e- it doesn't actually serve me. That's not a story that serves me. And once you realize that it's all just stories anyways, pick the ones that serve you (laughs) . Pick, pick the ones that make you feel the way you want to feel, that get you to the outcomes you wanna have, and, um, and not the ones that make you feel like crap.
- CWChris Williamson
A related point, another opinion of yours.
- 11:27 – 30:10
The Value of Enthusiasm
- CWChris Williamson
What are the most underrated skills in the world right now, in your opinion?
- SPShaan Puri
So, I have two. Wh- the first one, people don't even think is a skill (laughs) , which is how underrated it actually is, is, um, enthusiasm. Sort of a lame pro- maybe a little bit of a letdown from the way I, I, I framed that. But, uh, I don't think it should be a letdown. I think it should be exciting that enthusiasm is underrated. I'll give you s- a little story. So, I had a realization one day. So, I was 24 years old and I, uh, took a job in Silic- I moved to Silicon Valley to take this job. I joined the company, and I think at the time I was probably the youngest employee in the company. About 20 people there, I was the youngest of 20. And, um, and I looked around and there was engineers and there was designers, people with all kinds of talents that I did not have. Couldn't code, couldn't design, uh, you know-... can't dance, can't do a lot of things, right? So it's a, uh, not like, don't feel like I have a bunch of hard skills. And I was like, "What am I good at?" Right? You have this, you sort of have that, that sort of like imposter syndrome, self-doubt moment where you're like, "What? Why do they have me here? Why did they put me in charge of this project? Is it 'cause I literally have no..." Like, you know. And I, and I realized that like one of the things that I had that turns out to be quite important for most people who go on to do interesting things is I had a lot of enthusiasm. Meaning, I was very excited about what we were doing. I would paint a picture that was compelling to me, and then I would sprint at it. And the ability to paint a picture that excites you, the ability to bring excitement to a situation sounds cheap, sounds fun, sounds totally frivolous until you're around a group of people that don't have it. And then when the first person comes in that has a bunch of enthusiasm, that has hope about the future, that brings energy to the table, it's, it's contagious. It changes the way everybody feels. And if you're gonna do something that's important, generally, it's hard, right? I come from the world of entrepreneurship. So entrepreneurship, people sort of realize like, yeah, it usually starts off like you're starting from scratch, you have nothing, trying to make it happen. There's a lot of force of will that goes into that. And discipline is one force of will. Uh, I'm gonna show up at the right time and do the right things. The other is enthusiasm, which is I'm gonna believe before it's here, and I'm gonna believe that it's gonna happen. I'm gonna take the, I'm gonna borrow on that future excitement today. I'm gonna take out a loan against the future, and I'm gonna borrow my happiness and excitement of, about the future, and I'm gonna deploy it today to invest that, that enthusiasm today. That's how I think about enthusiasm is borrowing from the future. And, um, I think it's a skill. I think it is massively underrated. I think having enthusiasm when things are going good is quite easy. Having enthusiasm when things are neutral to bad is where you get the value of it. And, um, most things are hard and most things have s- pretty deep dips. Um, so having enthusiasm is, I think, completely underrated because people don't even see it as a skill. They don't see it as something you can develop. And they see, uh, and they don't place the importance on it. They don't realize how important that source of fuel is, um, how contagious that is, and how it brings everybody's level up when you have it. So I think that's underrated altogether. The second one is storytelling. I wanna go, I wanna jump, I wanna jump in on enthusiasm. Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Two things.
- SPShaan Puri
By the way, agree or disagree?
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, I have noticed since I've been in America, I've realized the value of people around me being excitable. British are, genealogically, like we are genetically predisposed to be kind of dour. Our sort of personality is very similar to the weather. It's sort of gray and everything's a bit shit. Um, but we're very great with the satire and the sarcasm and the cutting, the, the cutting remarks and stuff. But my disposition doesn't need any more of that. And what I realized one of the reasons that I flourished since I've been in America is I've been around people who believe that things are going to be better than they are right now. They continually presume... Progress is baked in. It, it's factored in all the time that things are going to get better. Of course, stuff's gonna grow. Oh, dude, it's gonna be fine. There's catastrophe, you're gonna get over it and everything... Da, da, da, da. That may be America overall. I'm not sure. That may just be my particular cohort of particular people in this particular city that I'm living in. But what it's done is it's raised my ambient mood an awful lot. Um, we do not know the things that are going to happen in the future, right? We are not clairvoyant. We don't even really truly know ourselves. We're self-deceptive. Other people deceive us. W- w- we don't have a crystal ball that shows us what is going on either outside the world or inside of our own minds and our own bodies. Given the fact that we have to have some form of delusion, why not pick a delusion that's going to be beneficial to you?
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
Like, you have the choice to do this. Why err on the side of... And the only real reason, I've been railing against cynicism for quite a while now. And it was Michael Malice's book, The White Pill, that really got me onto it. Cynicism is the opposite of enthusiasm in some regards. And what I realized is the people who were being cynical were doing it because it was like sour grapes at an existential level. I called it the cynicism safety blanket, that if you presume that things are going to be terrible, you can never be disappointed by the world.
- SPShaan Puri
Exactly.
- CWChris Williamson
And i- it just seems like, it's like a coward's way to live. And I understand, I understand people have had... Bad things have happened to them, they've gone through traumas, they've had discrimination, they've had all of this stuff. Like, don't... I get it, right? I understand. And that would set you up to believe this may very well happen in the future. But like, what does it do for you? What corn does it grow? Show me the corn that you're growing from this. The corn you're growing is fucking shitty.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
So yeah, I, I think less cynicism, more enthusiasm. The skill, two questions, you can respond, but two questions as well. How do you develop it as a skill and how do you fuel it effectively?
- SPShaan Puri
Let me, um, let me give you a couple different angles of this. Okay, so I come from Silicon Valley. In Silicon Valley, the cynics get to be right and the optimists, optimists get to be rich. Um, so the cynics get to be right that, you know, eight out of the ten things are gonna fail, of course. Yeah, you were right. You would get to be right eight out of ten times. And the two out of ten that actually work, you sat on the sideline thinking it was just another thing that's not gonna work. So Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley retrains your brain. So one way to train your brain to default optimism rather than default pessimism is to play the game where optimism gets rewarded. And so come to Silicon Valley, you get to play a game, uh, where optimism gets rewarded. Here's another, here's another angle where it comes from. There's a great Conor McGregor quote I love. It used to be my desktop background. I told this story before. I came to, to Silicon Valley and, uh, every engineer has like multiple monitors, and it was like a sa- a status symbol. Like, they don't have Louis Vuitton or anything like that. The status symbol is like how many monitors you have, how elaborate is your desk setup. So I'm sitting here with just my laptop and I'm like, "Shit, I got the..." I'm like the... And I'm wearing the, the, the thrift store version of, of, of this, uh, luxury status symbol here.
- CWChris Williamson
I'm the idiot kid at the party.
- SPShaan Puri
Exactly. I didn't even know what I would do with another s- screen, but, hey, I need another screen here.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- SPShaan Puri
IT guy, come on, let's go. So I get another screen and I don't know what the hell to do with it, and so I just put up one quote, 'cause I was like, I don't have any functional u- like, there's no functional utility here aside from, again, honing this skill of enthusiasm, I'm controlling my mood. And the quote that I had on there was a Conor McGregor quote where he said... They were like, "Conor, you always have this personality, and even when you lose, you seem to be having this, like... I feel like we never get to see you, you know, down in the dumps, and this is usually a sport of highs and lows." And he goes, "At the end of the day..." (laughs) The quote is this, "At the end of the day, you got to feel some type of way, so why not feel unbeatable? Why not feel untouchable? Why not feel like the best to ever do it?" And I just love that quote, which is, I'm... In any moment, I am going to feel something. I'm going to be feeling a certain type of way. And I think what a lot of smart people do is they try to make that neutral, 'cause it just, like, almost logically, mathematically, rationally makes sense. It's like, well, I'll make my default emotional home to be neutral, feeling nothing, and as good things happen, I'll feel better, and as bad things happen, I'll feel worse. And this is, like, a unspoken thing that I see a lot of smart people do. A lot of intellectuals do this. It is like a neatness in starting at zero, and then I'll go up if you're good, and bad if it goes down. Whereas people with the self-delusion in, which are usually if you've... You, you get to sit down with like, kind of, people, remarkable people every week, you'll notice that their emotional home is not zero. Their emotional home is closer to 10. They default feel untouchable, unstoppable, unshakable. They just enjoy that feeling, and they just start there. And yes, sometimes the world will beat them down a little bit and they'll, they'll dip, but they'll r- everybody always returns to your emotional home. And so you have to, like, program it, set that like a temperature, like a thermostat in your room. What is my default temperature going to be? And I, I just took time to do that. Um, so that's the first thing. The second thing is, here's enthusiasm in a non-business context. Um, anybody who's ever dated somebody knows that, like, there is the quote unquote honeymoon period. Like, the f- the start of every relationship that you get into, um, is typically where it's like, you know, the highs, the, you know, both people... Like I always say, a first date's like two people sitting down and deciding to lie to each other. It's like, you present your best self, you're going to, um, you're going to basically play everything up. You're gonna play... You're gentlemanly. How gentlemanly are you? You're gonna play it up. "Oh, let me get that door for you. Let me, let me dress up. Let me do X, Y, Z." You know, nobody farts on a first date. And so what happens is later in a relationship, um, people will retreat back to their emotional home, their, their personality home, um, and all of a sudden they'll start to behave differently. Somebody, you know, at the beginning, "Let me take out that trash." At the, you know, at the end, "Ugh, why do I always have to take out the trash? Why don't you do it every, you know, for once, once in a while?" Um, so we, we kind of slip, and we slip in these ways. And the worst way we slip is that the enthusiasm dips. Uh, we get comfortable and the enthusiasm dips. And the, kind of the classic trope here is like when, um, if you see somebody come home from work, you see like a dad come home from work. This person, you know, the dad might have been left, left the house at 6:00 in the morning, 7:00 in the morning, worked hard all day, drive back home, sit in traffic 40 minutes, get back to the house, open up the door. They're hungry, they're thirsty, they're tired. They put down the, the briefcase, take off the suit jacket finally, and, like, they sort of slump through the door, and what... All they wanna do is get to the couch, get the cold beer, turn on the TV, and turn off their brain. And this is how, like, I think a lot of the world operates. And I heard this once and I never let it go, which was that if you, if you, uh, if you do what you did at the beginning, there would never be an end. And, um, a- and this works in relationships. If you act the way you act at the beginning, there would never be an end of the relationship because both people would be on their absolute best behavior giving to each other, uh, uh, all the time. And the version of this that I try to, like, make as a practice or a habit is to have honey, I'm home energy. So honey, I'm home energy is like, if you've ever seen... I loved Lucy back in the day. The guy opens the door, he's bursting with energy. Like, nobody comes home from work like that, but this guy did it in the show because it was a show. He would come home and, "Honey, I'm home." And you could just hear from the voice, if somebody's in the house, oh, get ready, it's on. Like, get ready for a great ball of energy coming your way that is going to be loving, that is gonna be affectionate, it's gonna be playful, and flirtatious and charming. All the things we kind of want to be, um, but we, we slip and we don't do it. And so one simple practice to develop the skill of enthusiasm is to have this honey, I'm home energy, which is where before you walk through a door, whether it's to a meeting, whether it's to your house, your apartment, whatever it is, just decide to walk in with that home- honey, I'm home energy. And you only need to do it for like 45 seconds. But if you just do that for 45 seconds, you'll like the way it feels. They will respond to you differently, and it'll just carry. Um, versus if you come in slumped over, you're gonna have that type of energy and that type of interaction, those types of experiences which nobody actually wants to have.
- CWChris Williamson
We'll get back to talking to Shaan in one minute, but first I need to tell you about HubSpot. Look, I spent a decade and a half networking with people, and following up with them and ensuring that the messages that you send are well crafted is such a crucial part of that. And HubSpot's free follow-up email template guide is absolute gold for this. It's got over 30 email templates covering everything from a simple thank you to asking someone out for a coffee without seeming too weird. One of the best ones that's in there is their sharing resources template. If you ever come across a valuable nugget of information from, say, listening to this podcast perhaps or anywhere else on the internet, you now have a template to share it with other people, which in my opinion is a really underutilized networking skill because it gives them a gift for free and it keeps you in their mind. I highly recommend that you download the 100% free follow-up email template guide by going to the link in the description below or click hubspot.com/lnx. That's click hubspot.com/lnx or the link in the description below. Yeah, the enthusiasm or excitability portion is, it's almost kind of like-... personality trait that I didn't know about. It's like finding out that there's a new type of weather. You just step out one day, and you're like, "What the fuck is this? Oh, I've never seen this before." It, it's like that, right? And, um, yeah, I, I very, very much, I'm completely pro, I've been calling it toxic positivity. Uh, I'm very pro toxic positivity. Like, just seeing-
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... seeing the good in situations, being around people that do the same. There's definitely a, a, an undercurrent in the UK of, um, e- excitability almost being naive, it being, uh, kind of immature, it's being lame. Um, and then, you know, even as you move up through the, the IQ distribution, uh, smart people like the idea of being cynical because it seems heterodox.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
And it s- i- i- it seems like you've considered all of the options. Only somebody that's a, a, you know, smooth-brained idiot would believe that things are going to go well. They, obviously-
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
... you know, that's what, that's what a- that's what the normie mid-wits think. No, no, no. I- I've, I've considered the options. Um, but it fails to recognize that ultimately your experience of your life is largely determined by the story that you tell yourself about it. Uh, in fact, you could maybe say that it almost, it's almost exclusively determined by that.
- SPShaan Puri
There's a, there's a thing called the, so people talk about vicious cycles. And we've seen vicious cycles, how people slip into depression, how companies fail, how vicious cycle. A vicious cycle, for example, would be, uh, if you, if you break it down into its core elements, there's just three little, it's a triangle, three dots. Triangle, uh, dot one is belief. If I believe that something's not gonna work, this relationship is not gonna work, this company's not gonna work, this meal is gonna suck, whatever, whatever it is. If I believe that it's not gonna work, the s- the second dot is action. How much action am I gonna take towards making it happen, right? Like, I'm gonna take minimal action because I don't believe that it's gonna work. If you don't believe it's gonna work, you don't, you just, you sorta tiptoe in, you don't, you're not actually gonna, like, go full, full, full force on it. So, minimal belief leads to minimal action, which leads to a minimal result, which only reinforces your shitty original belief. And that's the vicious cycle. So then the next time, you just reinforce that. Oh, you know, um, I don't really believe I'm gonna stick to this diet, so therefore, I'm not actually gonna, like, throw away the junk food, I'll just put it away in the closet a little bit. And therefore, I'm gonna actually end up snacking on the stuff 'cause I know where it is, it's in the closet, it's just, I just have to open the door. And then I get a shitty result and I say, "Ah, I knew it. I just, I never follow through with these things." Right? Like, w- these are the stories you tell yourself silently in your head, the voice in your head. And the opposite is true. Th- there is also the winner's cycle or the virtuous cycle. The virtuous cycle is the exact opposite. Massive belief. Oh my God, this is gonna work. What if you knew that, like, if you knew that if you get to this, like, you're wa- you're going to the corner store, and if you knew at that corner store there is the winning lottery ticket. It is there. The next person who prints it wins. Would you, would you walk or would you run, right? Like, you're going to run. So your belief, if you really believe that, you would take massive action, you would sprint. And when you sprint, you would actually get there first, right? And then, like, you would actually have a different result than, you know, lottery's not exactly right, 'cause you're not gonna w- j- the belief is, is ill-founded in that case. But you would take massive action. And generally massive action over a consistent period of time leads to results which reinforces your belief that I'm the type of person that whenever I set my mind to something, I do it. And when I do it, I get results, right? Like, that, that just becomes how a winner thinks. And so enthusiasm is another word, it's, it's a sort of a, it, you know, roommates with belief. And if you say belief, beliefs are these kind of, like, heavy, long-term, you only have a few beliefs. Enthusiasm is a general state that you operate in such that it takes your default level of belief in something up, which takes your action up, which takes your results up over time. And that is sort of like the, the s- t- and to me, the strategy that under, th- that explains why this works. Not only does it feel good to have positive enthusiasm or positivity, but, like, there's an actual advantage. I think there was a TED Talk back in the day called The Happiness Advantage, and this guy was talking, he's a Harvard professor, and he, he explained that, like, happiness is not just, doesn't just feel good, it literally makes you perform better. They did many tests to see how you actually perform on the same, same test if you came in in a certain state versus a, a different, a different state. The happy, the happy state versus not.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, George Mack has this really great idea that I'm gonna write an article, a co-written article with him about, of, um, uh, public metrics and hidden metrics. And he talks about stuff like peace of mind being a hidden metric, but money being a public metric, and time is very interesting, time's somewhere between the two. We kind of don't know time, but we kind of do as well. Uh, so for instance-
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
... people will happily sacrifice their peace of mind in order to achieve money, because there's no dashboard that tracks your peace of mind.
- SPShaan Puri
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, and it's almost like, uh, enthusiasm, right? Enthusiasm's such a hidden metric, uh, as opposed to it being something that you fail to see the cost of, it's something that you fail to see the returns on, uh, because y- the, the, the inner texture of your mind is not something that you're open to. So, that's the f-
- SPShaan Puri
People will learn another language. They'll tick a box. They'll, oh, I, I'm gonna learn Spanish, um, versus work, uh, if you said I'm gonna work on upping my general level of enthusiasm, you'd be looked at like an insane person.
- 30:10 – 45:56
Why You Need to Develop Your Storytelling Ability
- CWChris Williamson
- SPShaan Puri
Storytelling. Um, so, s- stories are the, storytelling is, uh, i- is massively, uh, underrated because stories are the natural, um, like, transfer mechanism between individuals. So, like, if you want something to stick in somebody else's head, you really have two choices. Music or story. Um-And, you know, look at, like, through all of time, what are the things that have lasted thousands of years? Um, religions, how are religions coded? Do you remember all of the, all of the rules of religion? No, but people remember the stories. Um, same thing with, you know, anything that lasts a long time or sticks in people's heads. Uh, you know, I couldn't tell you what I learned in seventh grade, but I could tell you the plot of Lion King, (laughs) you know, uh, play-by-play plot of Lion King. Why? Because it's, it's encoded as a story. So stories are like an en- an encoding mechanism for, for information or for knowledge. Music is another one. People w- will naturally, you know, uh, remember catchy music. Uh, most people don't have the ability to make music, but almost everybody could tell a good story. (laughs) So, uh, if I could do the music thing, I would, uh, but instead I'll do the story thing. And I think this is underrated because n- um... And I think, you know, Steve Jobs had some quote like this, he's like, um, uh, something like, "The storyteller is the most powerful person on Earth 'cause they get everybody else to take action." So, uh, they're the ones who move one person to the next. And this is how politicians get people, this is how, uh, CEOs run companies is stories. And so, um... But you're very rarely taught how to tell a story. Like, if I went and asked somebody, like, "Just explain to me, like, how..." Uh, if I wanted to get better at storytelling, what would I do? Like, what, what, what are the skills? Like, give me, like, the two or three big concepts. And so they're very, uh, uh... Uh, nobody really knows how to articulate it, you're not taught this in school and, um, because of that, again, there's a massive arbitrage. You have a thing that is qui- is very valuable that most people don't know how to do very well. So if you even try a little bit, you'll become the top 10%, 1% of storytellers very quickly. And from there, you know, you get the sort of results that a great communicator would get.
- CWChris Williamson
What are the principles of storytelling as far as you're concerned?
- SPShaan Puri
So if you listen to, like, um, Aaron Sorkin, so the guy... you know, the, the writer and, and movie guy who did, you know... I think he did, like, whatever, West Wing and Newsroom and a bunch of other stuff, like, the, The Social Network movie. He's like, if you ask him... Uh, like, I wanted to take his masterclass. I had set out a day. I was like, "I'm gonna learn everything there is to know from this guy about storytelling 'cause this guy's a master storyteller." And I cleared my calendar and, like, in the first 30 minutes, he just repeats the same one principle over and over again. I'm like, "Oh, that seems to be it." Uh, which is stories are about intention and obstacle. He says, "I worship at the altar of intention and obstacle." So basically, if you watch any movie, you wa- watch any TV show, within the first second, you will l- you, you should know, right? Like, pa- at any given time, you should be able to pause, and you'll know this usually within the first five minutes of every story. There's a hero and the hero wants something, they have an intention, and they have an obstacle, what's in the way of it. Um, last night I was watching a show called Hijacked. You seen this? It's on Apple.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. I finished it. Did you finish it?
- SPShaan Puri
I finished it last night, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Hell yeah. Everyone should go and watch it. Idris Elba.
- SPShaan Puri
Good show.
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- SPShaan Puri
Right away, you see Idris Elba. While I, I'll... Well, I won't spoil it, but Idris Elba wants one thing, right? At the very beginning, is he wants to be with his family, and he's got some obstacles. Wife doesn't want to be with him. All right. So, like, you get that. If you go watch Die Hard, Die Hard, oh, it's this movie about defusing a bomb and doing all this to create this terrorist plot. What does he want? At the very beginning, he gets a call, he wants to be home with his family. But then there's this terrorist plot. And really at the e- at the end of Die Hard, all he's trying to do is just get to his family. Uh, like the whole movie is a hero wants something and there's something in its, in his way, right? In this case, a terrorist plot. Um, and so... And then throughout any story, that escalates. So like, let's take, uh, this show Hijacked, right? The name kind of gives it away. A plane gets hijacked. Okay, cool. So now this person wants something different. He doesn't want to, you know, bring his family back together. He immediately just wants not die from this terrorist, right? Or not die from this hijacking, right? Land safely. Now that's the intention. What are the obstacles? Well, there might be people working against that plan. And so every story must have, at its underpinning, an intention and obstacle, okay? That's the first key principle of storytelling. And, um, it doesn't matter if it's a ro- romantic comedy. "Oh, what does she want?" "Well, she's a high-powered lawyer, but all her friends are getting married and she's not dating anybody." What does she... She has an intention. She wants to be marri- you know, wants to have a loving relationship. The obstacle, she's so successful and all the guys she meets are assholes. Okay, cool. She's busy and me- meets assholes. Okay, now what do you do to, to make a story more compelling? The next ingredient you need to add is stakes. So you sprinkle some stakes on there. What are stakes? Stakes are elevating the what's at stake if they don't get it. So intention, obstacle. If the intention is I'm hungry and the obstacle is, you know, lunch is over there in the other room, it's not that exciting of a story. If the stakes are this person hasn't eaten in 30 days and they're, you know... If they don't eat, they're gonna die, right? Like, now all of a sudden you have s- something more interesting. So stakes are how you elevate it. Now, stakes don't always have to be life or death. The best stories, some of the, some of the best things, like, I don't know if you've seen this show called The Bear that's out recently. It's on, uh, it's on Hulu. And it's cool, it's just kind of like critically acclaimed, like, cool people think it's cool type of show. And in that, there's not life or death stakes. There is no terrorist plot. There is no, like, uh, life on the line. But they know that for everybody in a, in whatever your world is, there's something that's the highest stakes thing, the thing you want the most. And all you have to do is convince the audience that this character really cares about this, that the character really feels like it's a, like a life or death, it's a life-changing swing if it happens or it doesn't happen. So all you have to do is make it believable that, that that's the case. So when I tell stories, um, I ju- I, I actually take most pride in a s- in a story where on the surface, the stakes are small. Like, I told this story once at a corporate retreat, it was like an executive retreat. And they went around the circle and everybody's supposed to say what's going on. And everybody was trying to one-up each other with a more impo- a bigger problem, a more urgent fire that they had to put out. And I went the other way, I said... So I just moved out of my house, uh, into my own apartment. This was back in the day. I've just moved out of my house in my own apartment, living on my own for the first time, and my mom is coming over. Now my mom's coming over and I had told her that like, "I'm living on my own. I'm a man now. I'm gonna... I'm a big boy now, I can do it." But the reality was, I was still down. Like, clothes were all over the floor. House is a mess. I don't have groceries, nothing. But I had told her, "I'm cooking dinner for tonight, and I'll be damned if I didn't look like an adult for at least two hours while my mom is there." And so I've established the intention-... I've established the obstacle, right? I'm trying to look like an a- a- adult. Obstacle, I'm not actually an adult. Stakes, my mom's opinion of me matters to me, and y- I can convince you that it matters, and I can convince you that, like, drop everything. Thi- I will not fail at this. I will n- uh, it will be so bad for me if this happens. And I talk about th- in the story, I'm like, you know, I'm... and this is a true story, like I, I made brussel sprouts because that was the most adult thing I could think of-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- SPShaan Puri
... and I'm on YouTube and I'm trying to figure out how to make brussel sprouts taste good. I've never even eaten brussel sprouts. And like, I tell the story. People loved it.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- SPShaan Puri
They loved it because I took a low stakes thing and I told a story well.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm, I love that. That's really, really great. And yeah, I, I say this a lot, but aspiring, fledgling podcasters that ask me about sort of what I wish I'd known when I started the show, and there's all the technical stuff and all of the strategic s- stuff that's good for growth hacking, but when it comes to the show, when I first started doing it, I thought that the job of a podcaster was to basically be Blinkist for your guest, that you were supposed to ruthlessly index whatever's in their head and that you e- any moment that was meandering away from it, any sentence that wasn't directly driving some sort of, uh, return that people could action in their life... I basically wanted to be Andrew Huberman's website dictated, right, to people, but for, but for everybody on the planet. And over time, increasingly I've realized that the best podcasters are just vibe architects. They architect a vibe, and all that they're doing is they're just allowing you to marinade in that vibe. You know, today's vibe is here are some contrarian thoughts that you may take offense to but you're probably going to find interesting, and we're gonna whimsy our way through a bunch of side stories before I decide that it's time to move on to the next one. That's the story, right? That's the, that's the vibe for today.
- SPShaan Puri
Correct.
- CWChris Williamson
So people know what they're gonna expect. And I love these listicle-style articles in particular because it keeps everything quite snappy and it keeps it moving and it stops everything getting too... But it's not about being like, "Right, Chan, I, I need to know the five-step process on storytelling, and then I need to understand exactly how to do the whatever." It's good because it focuses you to make sure that you get something out of a conversation. But allowing someone to meander... And let's not forget, I've sat down opposite Rogan, uh, and a lot of my friends have multiple, multiple times. That man is a... Like, he is like a cook for meandering. Like, he is in love with meandering, and it works amazingly on his show because it's, it just feels so naturalistic because that's how you talk with your boys or that's how you talk with your girls, right? When you're sat at the dinner table or out having a beer or y- you've just finished playing pickleball or whatever, someone sees a, a particular type of bird. Guess what? The next 15 minutes are about birds.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
Like, "And then the next five minutes after that are about how birds are actually a PSYOP from the government, and I saw this conspiracy theory online. And, oh, what about Australia? Remember you said that thing that Australia doesn't exist and that's a PSYOP? Yeah, actually my aunt went to Australia. I've got a friend who's doing rattlesnake conversion therapy because rattlesnakes are turning gay d- due to estrogens in the water. How do you think that Alex Jones trial is going? And isn't he the most sued person?"
- SPShaan Puri
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
And you're like... It just fractures and branches off. It's like freestyle rapping but really slowly.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
And I think that that protracted just allowance of I'm gonna follow the curiosity, it, it keeps people who have got varied interests interested because it doesn't, it doesn't pigeonhole you too much. It's a natural representation of how people have normal conversations. And even if you sit down to try and have a normal conversation with someone and then you began to constrain it, everyone would feel the constraint. Like, I've got a friend, really famous comedian, who sat down for dinner with Jordan Peterson. This was a long time ago now. It's the first time he met him and now he's become friends. The first time he met him, he had notes. He tried to have a conversation with Jordan and apparently halfway through, he was like, "I, I need to, like, stop talking about with these notes. Like, I'm not, I'm not here to interview J- I'm not The New York Times, right-" Right. "...or like The Washington Post. Here, just have a conversation with the guy." And guess what? Like, if he had a bad flight that morning, you're talking about flights for 20 minutes, and that's fine.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
And yeah, I, I... Vibe architecting, storytelling, whimsy, really leaning into it, like, you know, unnecessary detail, like cold, blustery November night, all this shit. Like, yeah, get in there. I love that. I love that stuff.
- SPShaan Puri
(laughs) Yeah, I think it's, uh... Podcasting is a medium that allows for that. That's the beauty of it. Um, not... Other mediums, you can't do that. You can't meander into TikTok in the same way. But you could do other things in a TikTok which are very interesting. Um, like you can say nothing in a TikTok and it works as long as you had the vibe right there too. Have you seen this girl who did this, uh, What The Fuck Do DJs Actually Do video that went viral?
- CWChris Williamson
No (laughs) . No.
- SPShaan Puri
You haven't seen this?
- CWChris Williamson
No (laughs) . What is it?
- SPShaan Puri
Oh my God, we need Jamie here to pull this up for you.
- 45:56 – 56:43
If You’re in Your Head, You’re Dead
- CWChris Williamson
If you're in your head, you're dead. What's that mean?
- SPShaan Puri
I guess there's kind of a theme with these, which is, um, smart people do really dumb things. And I think, um, an example of that is people who are in their head a lot. So, "If you're in your head, you're dead," I heard that once, and it just resonated with me. Partly 'cause it rhymes. I'm a simpleton. But also partly because there was something that was very true about it, and I didn't even fully understand it yet, but I was like, "Yes what, though? Yes and what?" Uh, that was my reaction to it, which is a very good, like, signal for something you wanna know more about, which is an immediate visceral yes without the intellectual understanding yet. And what I learned from this was a very simple thing. I wanna be happy, like many people do. But I did something that most people don't do, which is try to figure out how the hell do you actually be happy? One of the things about actually being happy is that you need to get out of your head. So most people who are, again, the type of people who listen to podcasts, I'll, I'll call out a lot of people who listen to podcasts. They are in their head. Um, they try to think their way through life. They think their way into... They think their way through problems, and that serves them, but then they think they can think their way through feeling. Like they want happiness, so they try to think their way there. Wait, whoa, whoa. No, no, no. Hold on. You can't, you know, like that's like saying I'm gonna talk my way through cooking. No, no, no. There's two different things. Like I can maybe think my way, like in logic my way through logical problems. But I can't think my way through emotion. That doesn't, that's not how emotion works.
- CWChris Williamson
Trying to think your way out of overthinking is like trying to sniff your way out of a cocaine addiction. George Mack.
- SPShaan Puri
(laughs) Dude, George. Two bangers in this episode. Love it.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
He, he's great. I just added, by the way, I just added George to my work Slack, even though me and George don't work together, 'cause I was like-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- SPShaan Puri
... "I just need more George in my life."
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- SPShaan Puri
So we just have a channel on Slack where like I'll just dump random shit like this, and he'll do, he'll do the same. It's amazing.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
Highly here, highly recommend. Um, so the, the, the realization here was I always had a mindset. I thought the formula worked like this. I thought if you, um, think a certain thing, you will feel a certain way, which will lead you to do a certain thing, and that is true. If I think that this person is, um, this person just cut me off while I was driving, I will feel pissed, I will feel angry, and I will then do something in retaliation. I'll road rage, I'll drive, I'll cut them off, I'll flick them off, whatever it is, right? Think leads to feel leads to do. I thought it's a one-way street. And then I realized most like, like math equations, math equations are like reversible, like if A plus B equals C, then C equals A plus B. So the other way also works. And it actually works better in this case. So if you do a thing, you will feel differently, which will cause you to think differently. And so, uh, anybody who exercises knows this intuitively, whether they've wrapped words around this or not, which is, uh-... if you, if you focus on, if you think some, if you think you're feeling tired or shitty, and therefore you, um, y- you know, if you think, "I don't have enough time," or "I'm feeling t- I didn't sleep enough last night," whatever, you'll feel tired and shitty, and therefore you won't do exercise. But if you just happen to overcome that, if you, uh, if you quickly just short circuit that and say, "Nope, not listening to that thought," and you instead just go do the thing, you go and you get, do 50 push-ups right now on the ground, you go and do a cold plunge, you do something physical, you will immediately feel different, which will lead you to have a different thought. And, um, and so once I realized the equation works better the other way, the street, the traffic is less crowded going, driving the other way on that road, I was like, "This is the hack." And so, um, now I realize that the thoughts are not the sort of master controller of the universe. They're just an equal party to this, to th- they, they have one seat at the table, feelings have another, and actions have another. And actually, they all influence each other. So if you wanna feel differently, you can either think something different or do something different. And doing is just way easier, 'cause if you try to think yourself out of it, you just tie yourself up in knots usually. And so once I reali- realized this, I realized that I had lived a lot of my life in my own head, trying to think my way through everything, and a much faster version of this was to just do something. This plays itself out, um, in a bunch of different ways. So one time I saw on Twitter somebody say something like, "I've been having panic attacks. There's..." and so then he found a, like, a way to, you know, get myself to not have these panic attacks. And they were like therapy, or you could try just, you know, really talking yourself through it so you're not feeling that, you d- you don't think that thought, therefore you don't have that feeling, therefore you don't have the panic attack. And then Emmett Shear, who's the CEO of Twitch, the guy who had acquired my previous company, uh, replied to it, and this was, I never really thought a CEO would chime in on like, "Hey, here's how I deal with panic attacks," but he did. And he goes, uh, fastest, fastest hack for panic attacks, uh, immediately dip your face, uh, submerge your face into ice-cold water. Um, you will stop having the panic attack i- immediately because it activates the mammalian dive reflex.
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- SPShaan Puri
And, uh, I had never heard, heard of this before. I, it was completely new to me, but it was exactly in the same line of thinking, which is often the fastest way to change how you feel is a p- a rapid change in your physiology, which then will lead you to think a different thought, which then will lead you t- to feel a different way and have a different action, and it's just a hack. It's a, just a complete life hack that most smart people don't utilize. They're just brains sitting in a dead vessel. And you see this. Go, go watch how people operate. They just sit in their car, sit on their couch, and sit at their desk. Or like you wanna make a, you wanna have a meeting where you're gonna make a, a key decision that might change the trajectory of your entire company, and everybody sits there hunched over, tired after a long day, eating shitty food-
- CWChris Williamson
Full of muffins, yep.
- SPShaan Puri
... yeah, trying to get a coffee just to stimulate themselves just to kinda get through that thing.
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- SPShaan Puri
It's insane we make decisions when we're in that physical state. It is, it is a, uh, an absolute leak or weakness in most people's game.
- CWChris Williamson
One of the interesting things I learned from Kelly Starrett, s- Simple Leopard Guy, was if you've ever had to take a really mentally challenging phone call, what you will sometimes find yourself doing is like a puppeteer who's got a hold of you. You'll stand up from your seat and you'll start locomoting around the room.
- SPShaan Puri
Yep.
- CWChris Williamson
You'll just do laps. You'll, you've got a, a 30 square foot room that you're in, and you're somew- you've somehow managed to create some totally arbitrary route that you're wo- like walking in a figure of eight or an infinity symbol or whatever around this room.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
We're just built to move. Humans are built to move. We're built to be on the ground, we're built to be out in nature, we're built to be connected to the, the ground to see sun, et cetera, et cetera. There's, you don't need to go full, like, Aubrey Marcus psychedelic woo, like, biohack, Ben Greenfield biohack stuff here. Like, it's just, it, it, it's, notice within yourself what your physiology feels compelled to do when things happen to you. Like, you do something, you reach for something because the cookies or the cinnamon rolls or the coffee or whatever is in front of you, and you've conditioned yourself to think that that's the thing what's, that, that's going to change you. Huberman's got the best quote on this, which is, "You cannot change the mind with the mind. You have to change it with the body." I don't know if that's strict. As with most aphorisms, there's exceptions. Meditation is purposefully changing the mind with the mind, right? Like it's, it's actually isolating the mind to cycle on itself. But I think the, the broad rule is very true, and I've always said this, that if you gave me the choice between having a good night's sleep or going to the gym, I will go to the gym every time and my mood will be reset more from pre- to post-training than from pre- to post-bed.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
I can wake up and yesterday's bad mood or whatever can bleed through the night. I'll have a dream about being kidnapped by people from Liverpool and being forced to do their marketing or... I had, that literally happened a couple-
- SPShaan Puri
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... of weeks ago. I also had another one where, um, I'd committed a war crime in my old cricket team from 20 years ago, knew that I'd done it, and they were mercenaries hunting me, and Sam Harris was a newscaster trying to track me down. Speaking of Sam, the episode that I did with him, he had this really lovely bit where he's, he's talking about kind of this, um, like, cerebral pornography that a lot of us have, where we sort of pray at the altar of cognitive horsepower, and, um-
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... and, uh, uh, and presume that because we've got such good concepts, that we can just, you know, we can up, we can sort all of this. And when you, when he tries to explain to his smart friends that meditation and maybe letting go of that and, and finding a little bit more ease, releasing the tiller a little bit more might be a good idea, they say, "Well, that sounds roughly equivalent to being hit over the head with a hammer. You know, I, I, I, look at all of my great concepts. You would have a much better life if you had some con... You should have more concepts like mine. Like, imagine how great you'd be if you had my concepts."
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- 56:43 – 1:02:45
The Power of the Midwit Meme
- SPShaan Puri
uh, the midwit meme, the-
- CWChris Williamson
Yours, mine, and George Mack's. George is asking about, if he's going to do it, uh, The Midwit's Guide to Life. So-
- SPShaan Puri
No, I haven't, I haven't heard this.
- CWChris Williamson
He's thinking about doing a, uh, coffee table book, which is every page is a different midwit meme, and it's just th- just all of them. All of them.
- SPShaan Puri
I'm in. First customer, whatever you want.
- CWChris Williamson
Yep. Kickstarter. I'll, I'll put, I'll put money into it.
- SPShaan Puri
Co-author, whatever it is.
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- SPShaan Puri
That meme, I, I, I told, uh, my business partner at the beginning of the year, I said, "That's, this is the meme of the year." I said, "This meme explains everything I've done wrong in life and everything I've done right in life. When I did it right, I did it right according to this meme. When I did it wrong..." So, if people don't know the meme, it's basically, I'll... Actually, I think you might explain it better than I do. Can you articulate what is the midwit meme and then let's, let's play with that a little bit?
- CWChris Williamson
Of course, yeah. So, it's an IQ distribution, which is a bell curve, right? So, you have a graph, and from left to right you have stupid on the left and you have super, super smart on the right, and you have this bell curve that runs, showing that there's more people in the middle than there are on the edges. On the left, you have this guy that kind of looks a little bit like a Neanderthal, with this sort of furrowed brow and sort of these sort of recessed eyes, he looks kind of thick. And then in the middle, you sort of have this woke, sort of SJW, screaming, very tense, kind of like-
- SPShaan Puri
Stressed.
- CWChris Williamson
... glasses, stressed out guy. And then on the right, you have the sage, who almost looks like a-
- SPShaan Puri
A Jedi. The Jedi master.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, a Je- a Jedi, Jedi master or whatever. And usually you have both people, the stupid and the smart person, end up coming to the same realization, and the person in the middle has some over-complicated idea. So, one of the obvious examples would be, um, lift weights, eat protein. Stupid guy. Guy in the middle, "I must ensure that my pre-digested, grass-fed coffee butter is perfectly served 30 minutes before to ensure that my protein window..." Lift weights, eat protein. Right?
- SPShaan Puri
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Georgie's f- Georgie's favorite one of these is, um, the guy on the left says, "I'm the guy on the left." The guy in the middle says, "I'm the guy on the right." And the guy on the right says, "I'm the guy on the left."
- SPShaan Puri
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Fucking brilliant. Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
That is good. There's levels to the midwit meme-
- CWChris Williamson
Right, yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
... I'm now learning.
- CWChris Williamson
Matters.
- SPShaan Puri
Um, I think that meme explains so much of life. I think that most people should strive to be... Uh, you know, the funny thing, you could strive to be either the Neandthral- Neanderthal or the Jedi, doesn't matter, they come to the same conclusion. Um, and this idea of mental minima- minimalism. Can you distill down why you're doing something to one reason? People love pros and cons lists, and they tie themselves in knots trying to weigh this out, the scale of one pro, one con, two pros, one and a half cons, and they, and they can't make any decisions. Or, um, this happens to me a lot in the business world. I, I talked to a founder today, they're starting a new company. And I said, "Your last company was so interesting. You raised $20 million, you did all this stuff, you did some good things, but it obviously didn't work out. That's why we're here, uh, versus on your yacht." So, um, I said, "What'd you get wrong?" And he proceeded to talk for 20 minutes, telling me about everything he did right. And I was like, "Wh- what happened? I asked you a question." I said, "Where did it go wrong? You gave me 20 minutes..." Which already is an incorrect answer, 'cause the answer should be simple. Um, and then the 20 minutes were weaving through things you did right, and things that other people did wrong, and things that other companies try. Uh, what are you talking about? People don't even l- uh, learn the right lesson from what they did. And so, like, you know, I would simplify a lot of the things in life, right? The, like, the diet part of my life. Eat real food, not too much. Exercise, right? Like (laughs) , that's it, right? Um, um, eat real food, mostly veggies, and exercise. Right, this is, this is diet advice at the simplest level. Um, all I need to do now is intensely do that thing, right? The difference between knowledge and wisdom, knowledge is knowing what you should do, and wisdom is doing what you should do. Um, like, to me, that is my definition of wisdom. It's knowledge applied. It's doing what you should do. Um, you do need enough knowledge to at least know roughly what you should do. But what most people do is they then over-index on knowledge and go try to learn all the possible things that there are to know about the subject, and under-index on wisdom, which is actually doing and applying that, the, the base knowledge that they have.
- CWChris Williamson
Yes. So, trying to take the mental minimalism thing, uh, making it a little bit more applied. I think that...... it makes me think a little bit about the explore/exploit framework, which is that you need to be able to expose yourself to enough ideas that you can work out which ones are good, which ones are bad. Tim Ferriss has a phenomenal idea which is his, uh, system for memorization and it's called the good shit sticks. And what he suggests is, you know, if you're Tiago Forte and, and you're Ali Abdaal, and you're built from, like, that cohort of people, you'll have it perfectly organized-
- SPShaan Puri
Yep.
- CWChris Williamson
... Evernote external brain that's got everything's root folded and, and decision treed back to whatever, whatever. If you listen to something and it stands out to you, and you can't not send a screenshot of it to someone from a book, or screen record it and send it to your friends, or put it in a group chat or write it down in a note, yeah, that's good. That's good. The good shit sticks. And, um, that, that for me is the easiest way to remember stuff, because you don't ever have to remember things that you're not excited about remembering. It's easy to remember stuff. Like, the one that I've got from you earlier on today, that, uh, "Cynics get to be right and optimists get to be rich." Money. Beyond money. Right? I can't forget it. I can't for- I'm gonna remember that now for five years, right?
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
I'm gonna be quoting that in, in half a decade's time. Can't get rid of it. It d- doesn't matter. If the, if the story about storytelling, if you switched off and you started thinking about, like, what you've got to do later on today, or what you're going to make for lunch, or whatever, like, sweet. Then you don't need to go back and try and remember that, because it wasn't for you.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Right? And that's, you know, you just enjoyed the lovely warm tones of what we're going through. Uh, so, explore/exploit, good shit sticks, good. Good, that's, so we've got, um, how do I expose myself to it? How do I allow things to pop up? Like, what's my selection criteria from the things that I've been exposed to? So, that's a nice little framework to, to run ourselves through.
- 1:02:45 – 1:11:29
Clarifying Your Principles
- CWChris Williamson
And then I would maybe say, when it comes to, like, stopping yourself praying at the altar of cerebral horsepower quite so much, all of the people that I know that are the most e- effective in life have a very small number of operating principles, and one orientation, usually. One single orientation. And this is a lesson-
- SPShaan Puri
What's an orientation? What do you mean by that?
- CWChris Williamson
They are moving toward a, a, a particular destination. I hesitate to say goal, 'cause I don't think it's quite the same as a goal. It's more an area that they're moving toward. Uh, so for instance, for George, um, his would be he wants to be able to have fun and write. So, his entire life is built around him being able to have fun and write. He wants to write for two hours every single morning, it doesn't matter where on the planet he is, and he wants to have fun. And fun for him can be from hanging with friends, it can be doing cold, cold tub, it could be learning to play pickleball, it can be traveling, it can be doing whatever, right? Uh, two stories. One from Jeff Bezos. Apparently while he was at Amazon, every single decision that was made was run through one single orienting principle. That orienting principle was, does this improve the customer experience? Does this improve the customer experience? Every single decision. Don't know if it's true. Symbolically, it's useful. Second one-
- SPShaan Puri
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... Elon Musk. Does this get us closer to Mars? Does this get us closer to Mars? And if you have a single orienting principle, evidently, does me taking a poop now or taking a poop in 15 minutes' time, which one gets us closer to Mars? Like, that's, you know, you're not going to ask yourself that question. But just having that orienting principle, and this is why Homa Khorramzi, who is, uh, uh, got an interesting a- approach to this. He talks about periods of life. Uh, phases? Phases or periods of life. Um, and he was talking about for this next phase or for this next period, and I think he breaks them up into seven-year blocks. He was like, "I know that I'm going to be in Vegas for the next seven. So, I don't mind. Like, I can just lock in, I'm in Vegas, this is, this is what we're going to do. We've got the apartment. I've got, I know where I'm gonna buy an office and I'm gonna do the whatever and I'm gonna build a gym." Um, by having phases or periods of your life, it allows you to be more ruthless with your orientation principle because you don't, it, it doesn't need to scale for quite as long. If you accept that you're time bound on what you're doing, then I actually think seven years is fucking insane. Like-
- SPShaan Puri
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... obviously he's probably got it broken into ni- 90-day sprints and one-year blocks or whatever, whatever. But by having it at least time bound, what it permits you to do is be like, "Right, okay, all that I need to do within the next 90 days is build up a healthy eating habit. And my social life can go out of the window, and my business might take a little bit of a hit, but I've decided in advance that this is the thing that I'm going to do." And I like the orienting principle as, like, a way to simplify down. I've been exposed to all these ideas, some good ones have stuck about. The ones that I enjoyed are the ones that I've, I've kept. Now, what, what am I really, really aiming towards? Okay, which one spoke to me the most? How does it fit with my lifestyle and how can I time bind, uh, time bound that for the next however long?
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah. The time thing is interesting because, um, you can use it in a bunch of different ways. Y- you can play with time in a bunch of ways. So, when you think that something's going to be really hard, you shrink the time, t- time box to be like, "Cool. What's the best I can do in the next 45 minutes?" And all of a sudden, the brain becomes a, I call the brain an answering machine. You just have to figure out what the right questions, the right prompts, like AI. What, what are the right prompts I need to give it in order for it to give me a different answer? Ask a better question, get a better answer. And so, uh, you could time box on the short scale to be more productive, to be more creative. You can time box, like you said, to depressurize a decision. So you can think, uh, in both directions. What I'll do sometimes is say, "What if I was long, like, how do I take a longer term, term, uh, orientation towards this?" So for example, I might say, um, "There's a meeting on the calendar. I don't really see the agenda. It doesn't tie into this thing I'm doing right now. But like, over a long time horizon, I think Chris is awesome and I want to do awesome things with awesome people in the long run." Great. It's worth doing. Or, "You know, this person, I could kind of win more in this deal now, but maybe if I give a little-"... it actually builds some good will with us and it- it lubricates the next 10 deals we do together. I met a friend once, um, I really wanted to be an investor and I had no money. And he was like, um... Uh, so at first I just didn't do any deals because I didn't have the money. I just was limited by my imagination. Don't have money, don't do deals. And I missed three deals that became billion dollar companies and at th- that point I was like, "Okay, well, I don't want to really see number four, so I'm gonna s- find a way. I still have no money, but I'm gonna find a way." So I asked a different question of my brain. "How can I invest even though I don't have money?" Brain says, "Well, you've got friends who have money, why don't you ask them? Uh, why don't you, why don't you do a deal with them, take a lit- little less economics, but at least you do the deal." And immediately, go to a friend who's maybe 10 years older than me or so, seven- seven to 10 years older and, um, he's got money and I said, "Wanna do this deal?" He said yeah. I said, "Okay, well I don't really know h- what's the fair split here. Like, is there a standard? I'm Googling, I can't find it. I don't wanna be a sucker, but I also don't wanna be greedy and I don't know the answer." And he- I- I thought, "Well this-" And this guy's a business shark, so I'm like, "Certainly he's gonna shark me with this offer. I gotta prepare myself for this shark attack. This guy's been so successful, made hundreds of millions of dollars. He is... I'm- I'm playing chess against Magnus Carlsen here, trying to negotiate this deal with this guy." And instead he texts me and just says, um, "Uh, whatever you think is fair is fine with me in this deal. I actually don't care about this deal. What I care about is doing deals with you for the next 20 years." And I was like, "Huh, never had a text message like that. Never even had an experience like that. Never met somebody who takes that long term orientation." Bezos and others have- they- I think Bezos donates a lot to The Long Now Foundation, which is like this, in San Francisco there's a clock that's like 10,000 year clock or some shit like that. It's like, this- this tells you, like, think longer, think bigger, um, you'll operate differently than somebody who's only short-term minded. So you could go in that direction or you could shrink the time horizon and say, "You know what? I don't know the forever answer of my purpose in life and what I want to do with my career and all the stuff. But what I do know is, like, this is fun right now. I think it'll be fun and why don't I just set two years? What's a g- what are great decisions I can make that will- I'm happy to commit to for a two-year period, but not necessarily a 20-year period?" So you can depressurize the situation and allow yourself to think more clearly. My buddy Sam has a version of this called Worry Time and he's kind of like m- I'm a pretty laid back guy, he's a lot more, like, high strung in general and I'm like, "How do you live like that?" He's like, "Oh, I've found my mechanisms." He goes, "I have something called Worry Time." He's like, "I used to worry all the time about..." whatever it is. Money, uh, my car repair, whatever- whatever's going on. He's like, "And I realized, like, that really doesn't get me anywhere, um, to w- have this, like, low ambient worry at all times, this low level non-specific stress at all times." He's like, "So I just started setting out time." He said, "Okay, I don't think about- I don't worry about money except for Sundays from 11:00 AM to noon. And that's my time, I know it's there and I'll think about money during that time and I'll say, 'Do I have enough?' and, 'Am I spending too much?' and whatever, and I'll make some adjustments. I say I'm good till the next Sunday."" And he's like, "That's what I do. I literally just schedule it in i- and just fact that I scheduled it of, like, now is the time I'm gonna w- work on this or worry about this, um, totally changes my, like- allows me to then function freely and think clearly, uh, other than that." I love that hack. Justin Mares has a similar one about choosing what to work on. He's like, "A common thing you see is people get to a certain point, like middle of their career, and then they get paralyzed. They can't decide what to do. They're looking for the perfect project that has the perfect conditions that's just gonna be, like, sufficiently ambitious and prestigious and noble and, uh, lucrative and all these things, and they just don't know what to do. They feel totally lost." And he goes, uh, "One of the big things that works is basically committing to something and being like, 'I'm gonna not question this decision every day.'" Um, uh, y- my trainer says this thing, he goes, "You don't plant the seed and then dig it up the next day and say, 'Are you growing?'" Like, no, you plant the seed and you just water it. You just water it. You just- you bel- you know that that plant's gonna take a little time to sprout. You- that's okay. You don't dig it up every single time and question it. And so, um, sch- this sort of scheduled worry time or scheduled commitment times, I think- I think people are mostly victims to time and then you meet some people that are sort of masters of time. They manipulate time in a different way. And y- I didn't even have language around this until I met them and I started to realize, oh, there's some games you can play with time that actually make it work for you versus just this thing you're running out of and don't have enough of.
Episode duration: 1:42:03
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