Shane Parrish - Mental Models, Good Decisions & Better Content | Modern Wisdom Podcast 334

1. 0:00 – 0:31

   Intro

   1. SPShane Parrish0:00

      Let's say I write an article for the website. It- it's really popular. So now I know if I write another article like that, it's going to be really popular. Well, if I do this over and over again, and- and- and on a weekly basis, it won't make a difference, on a monthly basis, it won't make a difference, but if I do this for years, eventually, I become irrelevant. And I become irrelevant not only in my knowledge and my learning and my development, but I become irrelevant to my audience because this is the same thing rehashed over and over again. And all's I'm going for is that immediate dopamine hit.

   2. CWChris Williamson0:28

      (wind blowing) So

2. 0:31 – 2:12

   Obsessions

   1. CWChris Williamson0:31

      I fell in love with a tweet of yours from the other month which said, "If you're not obsessed with it, you'll never master it. Being obsessed want- with something won't ensure mastery, but not being obsessed will ensure you won't master it." What have you been obsessed with this year?

   2. SPShane Parrish0:47

      I've been obsessed with taking care of my family. I mean, it's COVID, right? So it's obsessed about taking care of all the people in my life. Um, work-wise, I'm just obsessed with little details, right? Like the font on the website and the Instagram backgrounds and, you know, people- people think that that's a little bit obsessive, but it's part of the craft. It's part of what we do. Uh, writing, I'm trying to get better at. I'm obsessed with getting better at writing and being clear and being succinct and being relatable to people. And it helps my- clarify my thinking, right? Because writing is thinking on the page. And often, I discover that through writing, that I really don't know what I'm talking about, and that's- that's a great feeling in a way. It- it's bad in a way, but it's sort of like the dawning of wisdom, right? Because, you know, you- you can't learn anything if you- you think you already know it, and when you write it down, you- you force yourself to confront the fact that maybe you don't know it as well as you did, especially when you're trying to write it down for an audience that might not have the context or might not be a domain expert in what you're writing about, so you have to simplify. And simplify doesn't mean that it's simplistic. It just means that you're using different words that everybody can relate to, so you're- now you're translating it, it's out of the domain in which you might have learned something, you're translating it to a more relatable domain for everybody else. And I think that that's so powerful for us to just calibrate our own knowledge and hone our understanding of what we know.

3. 2:12 – 5:07

   Avoiding bogged down in details

   1. SPShane Parrish2:13

   2. CWChris Williamson2:13

      How do you avoid getting bogged down in little details? Tiago Forte had a tweet a couple of months ago talking about how the highest leverage people that he knows, most of their work has a rough-edged, half-assed quality to it because perfectionism is a low leverage activity. How do you avoid restricting the pace at which you ship work by focusing on the minutiae?

   3. SPShane Parrish2:36

      Um, I think I dabble in the minutia all the time, right? So the font, the layout, the paragraph spacing, all of that stuff, I dabble in it. But it's not important to shipping. It doesn't hold back what we're doing because that can always be solved later. Um, but when it comes to... You know, sometimes you just have to put a time box around things and it's like, "I'm going to give this the best effort I have in this amount of time," and sometimes you don't. And a lot of that comes from circumstance and preparation and a whole bunch of things that you maybe do or do not control, right? Like, you're- you're born into life, you're born into a certain country, you get genes, a lot of this you don't control. Your parents, you don't control. You're pushed through this. I call it the lucky push, right? Your parents, your socioeconomic status, that you grow up with your friends, your school, and you go off into the world and you have more time to dabble, you have more time to do different things than maybe somebody who isn't as lucky. But at some point you take control, and you take control of your own trajectory, and that- that is, um, the point where you start making decisions that really impact what's going to happen to you in life. And some people realize that they do and some people don't. And you have to realize what's core and what's not to what you're doing too in your craft, right? If you're focusing or obsessed with the details on something that's not important to what you do, then, you know, that's probably not a productive or high leverage use of time. But if they are part of the craft, you know, writing a sentence, it could take all day to write a sentence, but that's part of the craft of what I, what I do, um, when it comes to Farnam Street. And so th- those details matter, and they matter a lot. And you can outsource that to other people and you can be hands-off about it, but eventually then you just become somebody who's outsourcing everything, and, um, maybe that's what you want, and you'll scale really well. And- but the internet gives us leverage to begin with, right? And so the leverage of the internet is for us to sort of like double the number of readers, it's no additional work for me. Double the number of listeners to your podcast or my podcast, it's no additional work for us. And, uh, whether you obsess over the font on your cover art photography... I remember I listened to a podcast on the way here today where you were talking about it took you six months and you woke up in the middle of the night and you discovered the name of the podcast, but you had dabbled for six months, so you're obsessively working on this for six months, and then it hit you in the middle of the night. And I thought that that was like a key, uh, that's a key relatable story to how it- how it all actually works.

4. 5:07 – 7:56

   The selection effect

   1. SPShane Parrish5:07

   2. CWChris Williamson5:07

      Well, from a user, good avatar for someone that does browse fs.blog, it comes across, I think, the degree of finesse that the site has. It really is beautifully and aesthetically put together. Another thing that I noticed, your tagline changes seemingly every other time that I go on, whether it's "get yourself together" or "sort yourself out," "mastering the best of what other people have figured out," like all of these are top-notch taglines, and it's obvious to a user, so at least an observant user, that you are iterating on this stuff, and I think that you're right. When the marginal cost of increasing the size of your audience is essentially zero, the selection effect which chooses whether or not you are going to go from second in the world to first in the world or from 40th podcast in your country to 39th to 35th-... a lot of the time that is going to come down to quality as you get towards the top. So, I oft- I've been citing this stat a lot recently which is 90% of podcasts don't make it past episode three. And of the 10% that do, 90% don't make it past episode 20. So, by simply producing 21 podcast episodes, you're in the top 1% of podcasters on the planet, which is a beautiful power law to see. But of all podcasters that have produced 300 episodes or 500 episodes, what's selecting them as they're-

   3. SPShane Parrish6:39

      I agree.

   4. CWChris Williamson6:39

      ... further through the maturation process? And I actually think that's a really interesting distinction that you're talking about there that's probably missed often. Twitter obviously is not perfect for nuance, but, um, Tiago's tweet misses that, which is that as you get towards the peak of your craft, those fin- f- fine-tuned points, the level of detail and resolution that you see things with perhaps does matter.

   5. SPShane Parrish7:04

      It, it also, I think, depends on your particular goals. Like, what is it you're trying to achieve? I mean, I dabble in this stuff just because I like dabbling in it. I like fonts. I like, um, changing up the tagline. We don't use any real metrics for, uh, any of our page views or anything like that, or signups. We just want to be the best that we can be, the best version of ourselves and get better every day about what we're trying to do in the craft. And we're about to redesign the whole website, which will come out in the next sort of like 45 days. But the, the idea there is also selection, right? So, we just don't... we don't want the most readers, we just want the best readers. And same as listeners to the podcast. We, we don't really... we're not going for a mainstream podcast. If we were, we'd be releasing an episode every day, and what we're going for is we- we just want a really good audience who loves what we do and that'll take care of itself.

5. 7:56 – 9:13

   Countering iteration consistency addiction

   1. SPShane Parrish7:56

   2. CWChris Williamson7:57

      That's really interesting.

   3. SPShane Parrish7:58

      At least I think that's the theory.

   4. CWChris Williamson7:58

      Really, really interesting point, man, to, to counteract the consistency and iteration addiction, um, a- as with everything, I think it is a balance. One thing that-

   5. SPShane Parrish8:08

      Well, eventually you become irrelevant, right? So, it, like, just, just work through this with me. And this is my hypothesis, so I don't know if it's correct or not. But let's say I write an article for the website. It- it's really popular. So now I know if I write another article like that, it's going to be really popular. Well, if I do this over and over again and, and, and on a, a weekly basis, it won't make a difference. On a monthly basis, it won't make a difference. But if I do this for years, eventually I become irrelevant. And I become irrelevant not only in my knowledge and my learning and my development, but I become irrelevant to my audience because it's the same thing rehashed over and over again and alls I'm going for is that immediate dopamine hit of what the audience wants. And I know it's popular because the metrics tell me it's popular. Same as with podcasts, right? Big name guests probably get more downloads than, uh, people that nobody's ever heard of before. But if you only do big name guests, then you're not having fun as a host, you're not getting to explore the subjects you want to explore. It becomes a business instead of a craft. And that's fine because, uh, you can look at it as a business. That's why I said it depends on your goals and, and what you're trying to achieve.

6. 9:13 – 11:08

   The best we can be

   1. SPShane Parrish9:14

   2. CWChris Williamson9:14

      When you say, "The best that we can be is what you're optimizing for," how are you... What are the ways that you're adjudicating that?

   3. SPShane Parrish9:23

      Well, A, we have to make a living, right? We got payroll, we gotta pay people. So, we do need to generate some sort of income off what we do. Um, but we also want to give back to the world, so part of what we're trying to do is equalize opportunity in the world. Not outcomes. I don't believe in equal outcomes, I do believe in equal opportunity. And we don't have it, so what we're trying to do is popularize thinking, mental models, um, critical thinking and sort of, um, give people a broader education than what they got in school because we specialize so early. And so the best version of that means it's just increasingly relatable to other people. It means we're creating timeless content, we're talking about timeless things. We've been... I, you know, have been blogging since 2009 and honestly you should be able to go look at any article from 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and it should still be relevant today. And that's the goal that we have for ourselves and that's independent of sort of page views. Now, with that said, you know, we also u- we need feedback and the feedback comes from touching people, um, and by touching them I mean interacting with people who read your website. Not physically touching them, because we're all supposed to be physically distant right now, uh, but we go to events, we talk to people, we hop on the phone with readers. Um, we have an engaging learning community where people give us feedback about what we're doing and touching that medium is really important because if you don't touch the medium, you get out of touch. And so we have to know that what we're doing is relevant for the people that we're trying to do it for. So yes, we're trying to do it for ourselves but we're also trying to do it for other people, and if we're writing in a way that doesn't resonate with other people, that the examples don't resonate, the, um, theories are too far out there, the prescriptions are not applicable, then we're not doing our job in the way that we want to be doing it and it's not going to help us accomplish our goals.

7. 11:08 – 18:57

   Map and territory model

   1. SPShane Parrish11:08

   2. CWChris Williamson11:08

      That's an interesting thing to do with anyone that's a creator or has goals online. The map and territory, uh, mental model is a perfect example of this, right? That you have a dashboard which is a rough-hewn set of statistics but it is a proxy for telling you the things that you might actually be optimizing for. Presumably page views must at least in some part be aligned with popularity because the more popular it is, the more people see it, but why is it popular? Is it just racing-

   3. SPShane Parrish11:34

      Yeah.

   4. CWChris Williamson11:34

      ... to the bottom of the brain stem?

   5. SPShane Parrish11:36

      Exactly.

   6. CWChris Williamson11:36

      And then what's that, what's that effect where when a measure seeks to become the measure, the outcome itself?

   7. SPShane Parrish11:45

      Oh, I think I know what you're... I don't remember the, the term for it.

   8. CWChris Williamson11:47

      It's not the Parkinson... It's not Parkinson's Law.

   9. SPShane Parrish11:48

      Yeah.

   10. CWChris Williamson11:49

       People are gonna be screaming at me. Anyway, that thing.

   11. SPShane Parrish11:51

       (laughs)

   12. CWChris Williamson11:51

       But when you optimize for the outcome of the measure as opposed-

   13. SPShane Parrish11:54

       Yeah.

   14. CWChris Williamson11:54

       ... to the actual outcome itself. Yeah, um...

   15. SPShane Parrish11:57

       Well, that's what we do at work. All these KPIs, right? We're optimizing for... But if you... The map is not the territory, it's a perfect mental model, and that's exactly what we were talking about in this sense. We get so far distant from what we're actually doing and the feedback of it, we're operating based on a map, and we're not in touch with the territory. So when the territory changes, we don't know that the territory has changed because it takes a while for the map to update. We do this in organizations. If you run a team and you have, let's say, multiple managers below you, everything gets filtered. W- we learned this in kindergarten, right? One, one way we learned this is sort of how information gets filtered to us. So in an organization, we distill it into a dashboard. We have metrics, we have all these things. And if you're doing it that way, if you're operating that way, your job as a manager or your job as a leader is to touch, touch the territory on a regular basis. How's the morale with people? Are these still the right metrics? What's behind the scenes with these metrics? Is the goalpost changing? Is the way that we calculate them changing? Are they still the relevant metrics? So your job changes from just sort of managing to being active, and then it becomes, "I need to be active touching the territory." In kindergarten, we'd do the, the telephone tag game, right? You sit in a circle. I don't know, we'd do this in Canada. You sit in a circle, one person says a sentence, you go around the circle. By the time it gets back to the person who started, it sounds nothing like... And everybody just changed one word. Well, that happens in organizations, right? So if you're the CEO of an organization and, and somebody who's really close to the problem, say you work in manufacturing and they're on the floor, they know exactly what the problem is but... And they pass that up. But as that gets passed up layer of layer of management, everybody has their own slight tweak on it, different motivations, different incentives to say something different, and the information gets lost in the process. And that's why it's so important, um, that we actually touch the territory. And one way that we've done that, or popularized that, is sort of management by walking around. I hate that term, but what really goes on with management by walking around is you're getting away from the map, and you're touching the territory to make sure the territory still relates to the map. And if you think about it that way, it makes all the sense in the world because you're not just walking around to say hi. I remember, I used to work with people who did that. They would just walk by and they'd be like, "Hi," and you'd talk... And, you know, they read this book and they're like, "Oh, that's management by walking around. He saw all of his employees today and, you know, went back to their office, and..." But that's not what it means. It means you need to be connected to people, connected to the people you work with, connected to their work. You need to understand it at some level. And if you wanna solve problems, you really need to get as close to the problem as possible, because nobody understands that problem, at least the individual context of that problem, like the person closest to it. You might have a global context that you can add to it which might change the solution to it, but you really need to talk to the people who are closest to the problem if you want to solve it.

   16. CWChris Williamson14:44

       The interesting challenge there online, especially for content creators, is that you're inherently buffered away from the problem. You're away from the map and the territory itself as well, right? Like everything has got distance between you and it. Have you got any advice about how people can improve that?

   17. SPShane Parrish15:03

       Well, well, not only is there a ton of distance, there's a ton of noise, right? And that becomes hard because now you have to pick apart the signal from the noise. So who's actually telling me something that matters versus don't. I don't know about you, but I get a negative com- I'll get 1,000 positive comments, I'll get one negative comment. And it's that one negative comment that, like, really hits me, uh, and I can't let it go. And so touching the territory is sort of like, okay, are there... I'll give you a great example of something we messed up. Uh, we released an audio book called The Great Mental Models Volume 1, and I did the narration for that. And we did it with a studio that had never done narration before, and a whole bunch of other things. Anyway, the narration sucked, uh, and it's totally on me. But when I get the feedback from it, the first bit of feedback is sort of like, "Okay, well, one person said that." Now, that... I'm not gonna... Like, it bothers me, but it doesn't carry a lot of weight. But as more and more people, and you start to get a cohort of people. And it doesn't have to be a large cohort, but it's enough people that for the second volume, we switched narrators, we get a different narrator. Um, so it's sort of like, okay, we got feedback on it. The feedback made sense, and it was... It wasn't consistent, but it was enough feedback to be, um, relevant and statistically large. So okay, at that point, now the world's telling us something. We have a choice. Do we adapt to what the world is saying, or do we continue to believe that, um, they're wrong and I'm right and the narration is fine? And it's like, "Well, no, I don't have any ego in this. I don't really need to be the narrator. There's no reason for me to be the narrator." Um, and so it's, change the narrator, right? And it's, it's that sort of simple. But it's really hard when the world gives us feedback like that, when the w- the map or the territory is, is changing, to change the map. Especially if we created the map. And that becomes, like, a really interesting nuance to this, is because now, uh, not only is the map... If you created the map, it's easy for me to be like, "Oh, the map's wrong, change it." But if I created the map, it's a totally different problem. It's much harder for me to, to go back and say, "Oh man, this thing I created, I spent maybe thousands of hours on, that's wrong. I gotta do it, uh, differently, and I gotta think differently about it." And I think that... The phrase that we, we use internally is "Outcome over ego," and it's about putting the outcome first and your ego second. And so often what we do in organizations and what we do in life is we put our ego first and the outcome second. And a great example of that is sort of knowledge workers, where we go to work, we're a knowledge worker, we get paid for knowledge, right? That's inherent in the, the title of what we're doing. So if we're not right, what are we? And that means we're wrong, and we can't be wrong because we're getting paid to be a knowledge worker. So, and then what happens is you start distorting reality through the lens of you being right. So it's not about who has the best idea or who gets us to the best outcome. It's about me being right. And we never work so hard in life as we do to prove ourselves right. Even when we're wrong, we will go to the ends of the earth to be right. We will discount evidence. We will ignore other people. We will prove them wrong. We'll get a chip on our shoulder about it. We'll be the "I told you so" person. We'll be, you know, not our best selves. And so one way to do this... And creators get this all the time, right? So if you think about the creator economy and, and sort of, I wouldn't say thought leaders as much, but people who create things for a living and rely on people buying them.... it's different, right? You're in a different frame of mind because you're getting constant feedback. That sold, that didn't sell. People are telling you. You're getting a lot more nuances along the way. You wanna be right, but the world will give you very clear evidence that you were wrong, and you have two choices. You won't last long in this business if you don't adapt, and you don't... Same as organizations. If you don't adapt to the, the reality as it changes, um, or as you learn more about it and it's unchanging, then you're gonna be facing a big problem.

8. 18:57 – 22:17

   Incentives of bad actors

   1. SPShane Parrish18:57

   2. CWChris Williamson18:58

      An additional challenge which is faced online are the incentives of bad actors, because as you've identified, comment sections can be a pretty ugly place to be, and you don't know whether this person's commenting from a place of good faith. Is there some sort of selection effect that this particular medium or demographic or time of day or content or guest or whatever is selecting for which is skewing the kind of feedback that I'm getting, I'm not able to run this through the filters that I would be able to. So yes, I agree, the online content creator has more immediate feedback from the market, and they are in some ways closer, but in other ways, they're further away, because they-

   3. SPShane Parrish19:38

      Yeah, they have a lot more noise to sift through.

   4. CWChris Williamson19:41

      Great way to put it.

   5. SPShane Parrish19:42

      Yeah.

   6. CWChris Williamson19:42

      You had a tweet as well, talking about ego. You had a tweet that said, "Don't let the victories go to your head or the defeats go to your heart." How can people detect when their ego is serving them and when it's deceiving them?

   7. SPShane Parrish19:52

      (smacks lips) Uh, when you just get too high on yourself in that sense, right? Like when you're... Y- you sort of have a win, and... Uh, I had a friend who inspired this, and I definitely won't mention their name, and hopefully they don't listen to this podcast, but, uh, they made a lot of money on Bitcoin, and it sort of, you know, went to their head. And by went to their head, it, it, it made them think that they were a great investor, and I think that's gonna lose, uh, them a lot of money in the future instead -

   8. CWChris Williamson20:20

      Shane, there is no way that that person is going to work out who that is because there are about 100,000 people-

   9. SPShane Parrish20:26

      Yeah.

   10. CWChris Williamson20:26

       ... just in America that are, are in that position.

   11. SPShane Parrish20:29

       Yeah, well, I only have a couple of friends, so...

   12. CWChris Williamson20:32

       (laughs)

   13. SPShane Parrish20:32

       In that position, so it's, it's not, it's not hard for them to discern who that is. But, uh, I think that, you know, we just... We get overconfident in our abilities, and a dose of humility... But it's the same for the opposite, right? Like, uh, you're not a bad person or, you know, you don't need to give up if you write a tweet and not a thousand people like it, or, um, you know, that... You can't let that affect your drive and your motivation, and you also can't get overconfident in your ability if you... You need to distinguish between when you got lucky and when you're good, and if you're good, you can't be complacent because the world won't let you be complacent. That's what I mean by letting it get to your head. If getting to your head means it affects your drive, it affects your, um, what you do and what you take on, then it's a problem. And I think y- the same on the, the opposite end, right? Your heart is where your drive comes from, and not everything is gonna go the way you want it to. I mean, n- nobody would have predicted last year, but we've all come through this pretty tough year together. And for some people, it's really got to them, it's got to their heart, and it, it's sort of depressing and demotivating, and I, I think that it's not... It's trying not to allow that, and you control your circumstance, or not your circumstances, but you control how you respond to your circumstances and what's happening. And so if you have a good day, that's great, you had a good day. And if you have a bad day, that's great, you had a bad day. And what I try to teach my kids is, um, they win or they learn, right? And so if you're in school, you're playing a video game, maybe you lose, it's what did you learn, right? That's a win. You, you can look at this totally differently. Don't let it affect how you... Ho- how motivated you are to play or where you go from here. Uh, don't let it affect your heart, just help it.

9. 22:17 – 24:40

   How athletes deal with situations

   1. SPShane Parrish22:17

   2. CWChris Williamson22:17

      One of the things that-

   3. SPShane Parrish22:18

      Or let it help you, I guess.

   4. CWChris Williamson22:19

      Yeah. One of the things I've been thinking about a lot is how athletes deal with situations. I've been... increased... I played sports as a kid throughout all my childhood and I'm a big fan of watching sports as well, but only recently have I realized just how beautiful of a environment for high performers it creates. It's bounded. It's got very easy to quantify objective metrics of success and failure. There are slow, um, contributing factors that you can get to in terms of your speed and your stamina and your power and your outputs, and you can run drills which you then apply so you can kind of do a dry run of the thing that you're going to... Me and you haven't done a dress rehearsal of this podcast before we come on here-

   5. SPShane Parrish22:57

      Yeah.

   6. CWChris Williamson22:57

      ... and then do it, right? So I'll say this and then you say that and then, yeah, we'll wait for a bit. So I, I, I've just been fascinated by seeing that, and one of the problems, uh, one of the reasons I think that people become disheartened with work is that there is such a myriad of reasons about-

   7. SPShane Parrish23:13

      Mm-hmm.

   8. CWChris Williamson23:13

      ... why this could have gone well, why this could have gone badly, what contributed to my preparation or lack thereof. Was it the sleep last night? Was it the diet? Was it the argument with the missus in the morning? And, um, yeah, I think athletes, for those that are listening, uh, you have a very... You're blessed with a, a very particular environment within which you can deploy your excellence.

   9. SPShane Parrish23:37

      But it's also super competitive, right? It, it's... You know, you miss a step, you might be off the team, and, and athletes are a great example of not letting victories get to your head or defeats get to your heart. Um, you know, if Michael Jordan, for example, playing basketball, missed a shot and let that affect his drive, um, then he wouldn't be the Michael Jordan we knew. And if he, you know, won and it went to his head, he wouldn't have worked as hard in the off season to get back there next year. And, and so, like, I think athletes are a pure sort of manifestation of that. But we're, we're, we're knowledge athletes in a lot of ways, right? It's just as competitive, uh, at least if you're a competitive type person, and, you know, slight nuances because of leverage can make a huge difference in your ability to not only deliver for the organization, but deliver on you... your goals and, and what you want to get out of life. And I think it's important that we're, we're not complacent, we don't coast, and we, we sort of keep moving forward. And what do we need to do that? Well, we can't let everything go to our head and we can't let it affect our drive, so that's

10. 24:40 – 26:52

    Desire to improve

    1. SPShane Parrish24:40

       where that came from.

    2. CWChris Williamson24:41

       Do you think it's possible to have a desire to improve that doesn't come from a place of insufficiency?This is something I've been thinking about a lot recently. People, many people that want more out of life, I think, are doing it from a place of a fear that they're not enough-

    3. SPShane Parrish24:57

       Uh.

    4. CWChris Williamson24:57

       ... as opposed to a desire to do more.

    5. SPShane Parrish25:00

       Well, I can only speak, uh, in, in my personal circumstances. I w- I would word it as pleased but not satisfied. I mean, uh, I'm super happy with, um, my life and where things are. Does that mean that it, it can't be better, that I can't do more for other people, that I can't live a more meaningful, fulfilling life? No, not at all. Do I have to discover what those things are? Yeah, that's part of life. Um, but I don't think, for me, it comes from a place of insufficiency, and I think, you know, we all have drive for different reasons. Mine is a chip on my shoulder, you know, from, uh, being a kid and told that I couldn't do anything, being told that I sucked at school and I'd be lucky to pass high school and all of those things. And drive, everybody has their own drive, um, and if your drive comes from insufficiency, I would sort of encourage people to change that story. Like, let other people become the fuel for your fire, but you choose how that fire burns. And if it's in- insufficiency, it's not a r- I don't think it's a healthy fire, and I don't think it's gonna burn really long and really hot. I think you need to turn that into, um, a different sort of story that you tell yourself, which is, "I am enough. I'm enough. And if people don't think I'm enough, then maybe I have the wrong people in my life." And I think that it's really hard to get rid of people in your life because you're scared, um, but that's a much better choice than living your life like that for the rest of your life, where you feel like you're not enough and you feel insufficient. And I bet you, I bet you, if you did research, you go talk, go to an... Actually, this would be a great example. Like, go to a retirement home or something and s- and just volunteer your time there and talk to people, and I bet you they will all have felt those things at various points in their life. But now, they'll be able to give you perspective on what they would change, what they would do differently, and I bet you they'd delete people from their lives a lot quicker who made them feel that

11. 26:52 – 32:37

    Perspective

    1. SPShane Parrish26:52

       way.

    2. CWChris Williamson26:52

       Yeah, man. It's so strange the way that our formative years, when we grow up, it, it just embeds into the substrate of who we are, right? And then you spend, you know, you've got 10 years of imprinting and then 70 years of deprogramming. It's kind of-

    3. SPShane Parrish27:06

       And then you-

    4. CWChris Williamson27:07

       ... funny.

    5. SPShane Parrish27:07

       Yeah, and you don't have perspective, right? You only see sort of, like, so for, in the mental model context of relativity, right? And so the way that we learn relativity, and I'll relate this back to the story in a second, is grade nine physics. You're on a train, you're holding a ball, the train is moving 60 miles an hour, you're holding the ball. How fast is the ball moving? Well, relative to you, the ball's not moving at all. A casual observer, it's moving 60 miles an hour as the train passes by. And is, as you're listening to this, if you're sitting and you're not in a car, you could say, "How fast are you moving?" And you'd be like, "I'm not moving at all." Uh, you know, you're stationary, I'm stationary. But if we put ourselves on the sun, we're moving at, like, 18,000 miles an hour, right? All of a sudden. And it... So this perspective matters, and I think w- we, we often get caught in our immediate perspective, and we're blind to the how do we actually put that in perspective of life, perspective of meaning. And so talking to somebody who's older or imagining yourself being older is a great way to get out of your current perspective and put whatever's happening in a greater, broader perspective. You probably don't want to wake up at 90 having lived this life where you feel inefficient or insufficient to other people. You, you... That is not the way that you want to live. And you can imagine yourself at 90, and you can really work backwards and see that that's the case, or you can sort of go talk to somebody who is 90 about this thing, and they'll put it in perspective for you in their, their way, right? With their wisdom, uh, of having lived a much longer life.

    6. CWChris Williamson28:38

       Starting with the end in mind is such a powerful, uh, mental model to do, but it's so difficult to hold onto, man. You get caught up in the urgent, right? The day-to-day. You've got to reply to this email and pick the kids up. Well, you... I don't, you do. And, you know, d- all the, all the different shit that we've got to do, right? And it's very, very easy, death by a thousand cuts, to slowly be skewed off your trajectory of where you were going, and you can end up doing stuff that in no way contributes to what it is that you want. Yeah, I, um... Something that, uh, I heard you mention on Rich Roll's show was that you guys take the two months off every, every summer. Are you guys still doing that?

    7. SPShane Parrish29:16

       Yeah. Yeah, totally. So, uh, things start winding down June 1st, and, uh, they, we, we go to four-day weeks, and then, uh, this year, we gave August off to everybody, uh, in the entire company. And I mean, I take July and Au- most of July and August off. And that helps balance and perspective. But going back to what you said, yeah, you get caught up in the minutiae, but the problem is we prioritize the minutiae. And you should be giving yourself the best hour of the day, either for learning or the most valuable thing that you're contributing to the, the company. And how do you do that? 'Cause people always say, "Well, I don't have time to do that." And it's like, no, you don't have time not to do that. And the way to do it is you book it in your calendar, but you don't book it for tomorrow, because you look at your calendar for the next month, you're booked solid. Of course, everybody's booked solid. But you go two months out, and all of a sudden you see a 9:00 AM slot on a Monday. Well, now you book every Monday at 9:00 AM, and you book a meeting with yourself, and then you book Tuesday, Wednesday, and ideally, you get up to five days a week. You just go out as far as you need to do to do this. And then what'll happen is you'll wake up in October, and the first 90 minutes of every day at work, you know is your time. It's your time to learn. It's your time to work on the most important thing. It's your time to, to sort of make decisions. But the problem is we look at our calendar next week, and we're like, "There's no way I can do that," and it's, well, of course, like, because you're booked solid, and that's...... you know, you're making choices too, being book solid. But I would encourage you to go way far out, book it now, make it consistent, make it repeatable, and then you never have to find time. And what ends up happening is all this minutia that doesn't really matter gets crammed into the last hour of the day, and then you're really good at prioritizing in the last hour of the day. You're terrible at the start of the day. At the start of the day, anybody can usurp your time. They send you an email, you go on this wild goose chase. But the last hour of the day, you're like, "Man, I gotta get home. Uh, I got a date," or, "I gotta get my kids," or, "I just wanna leave the office." And so now it's like, "Uh, I don't need to do that." And then the other thing that you learn, and this is the lesson I- I sort of... I went to one of my bosses one day, and she said, "You know, balls bounce for a reason, but most balls won't bounce." And so what's important at 8:00 AM, unless it's really an emergency, often by 4:00 PM that problem has already been solved. So this thing... So you're actually gonna save a ton of time when you start pushing out a lot of the stuff to the end of the day. Uh, and w- and the other thing that I've noticed in organizations, and- and I- I don't know if this relates to some of your listeners or not, but, uh, there's people who- who hog your time. And by hog it, I mean they'll send out a draft presentation, and you know it's a shitty draft. And they'll be like, "What do you think of this?" And you'll spend like an hour fixing it, and what they've really done is they've outsourced their job to you. And you need to have standards, and your standard is, uh, you know, "Is this the best you can do?" And they'll never say yes. They'll be like, "I'm looking for comments." "Well, send it to me when it's the best you can do, and then I'll take a look at it," right? And that can be your standard, and then people will stop annoying you with that.

    8. CWChris Williamson32:19

       (laughs)

    9. SPShane Parrish32:19

       And I think it's really powerful, uh, way to get out of all of this, 'cause I- you know, I used to get consumed by... I worked for a- an intelligence agency, right, which is, and still i- in many ways, government. And you get consumed by this stuff, and it's like, "Well, that's not why I signed up. That's not what I wanna do. None of this is actually productive."

12. 32:37 – 36:52

    How to Structure Your Days

    1. SPShane Parrish32:37

    2. CWChris Williamson32:37

       How do you structure your days or your weeks to be productive? Have you got that 90 minutes first thing in the morning?

    3. SPShane Parrish32:44

       Uh, I have three hours. So from 9:00 to 12:00, I don't book any meetings. Um, so every morning, every day, with very few exceptions, I know I don't have to find time to do what I wanna do. And what I wanna do can be, uh, spend time with the kids, go for a bike ride. What I wanna do can be write a book. What I wanna do can be whatever is the most important thing for me in that moment. It could be sleep in, right? But I never have to find the time. And the problem is, we're always looking for time for the most important thing for us, and we need to change our- the way that we think about it and give ourselves ... W- we get one life, right? Y- you could die tomorrow, I could die tomorrow. Uh, I don't wanna live that life knowing that I just got caught up in email. And part of that means, you know, about three years ago, I went through this crisis where I used to answer every email I got. And I was like, "It just takes like three, four hours a day answering email." And I'm like, "Th- I can't do this anymore." And i- it's really... You know, at first, it's really hard for me, because again, staying in touch with the media and being connected to people. So now I- I- I read, or at least skim, every email, but I don't reply, and I really just don't reply to a lot of things, right? Like, I'll- I won't reply to group threads at work unless I have something of value to add. And- and my baseline for contributing in meetings, uh, on emails, and all of that doesn't start from, "Here, I'm gonna share what I know with you." It starts from, "What's my unique take on this particular problem? Do I have something that you probably won't see? Can I see a blind spot that you're missing? What do I know about this problem that you don't already know?" And so often, what consumes time at work, two things. One, we're telling people what they already know 'cause we're signaling that we did work. We're signaling that we're a knowledge worker, we're signaling we're smart, but we're effectively just paraphrasing something that everybody already knows. That's a huge waste of time. And w- we get stuck in this sort of, uh, rut where we're just telling people what they already know. So, to change that around at your next meeting, instead of saying, "What do you think of XYZ?" say, "Does anybody..." Change the value of signaling to signaling something that not everybody knows. What's your unique view into this problem? And then reward people with that sort of signaling, right? So now you're giving us, you're contributing information to the problem instead of just telling us what we need to know. And if you're saying something that we already know, it's easy to go, "Oh, we already know that." Like, that's established. Or, um, you know, you can- you can sort of, uh, help people move to this point. And it'll take a couple weeks for it to work its way through, but it's really effective at gathering information and gathering high-quality information. Because what you're really trying to identify is, what are our blind spots? And the other thing that consumes people at work is poor decisions. And so we get rushed into this culture where, I think we've all been there, you get this briefing. It's like 70 pages, either a PowerPoint presentation or, you know, a big document with a lot of research. You read the executive summary 'cause you have no time. You read it on the way to the meeting, and then you- you signal that you did the work by, you know, paraphrasing the executive summary. Nobody's actually looked at the data. Nobody understands the territory. You've only looked at the map. And then you make a decision based on that, and the problem with that is, that decision comes about to bite you. But it doesn't bite you right away. It'll bite you in three to four months. And then the other way that we ... You would think that that would be great feedback for us to make better decisions, but it's not, because there's a lot of people between us and the implementation. So now we blame execution. Wasn't the decision we made. It was the execution, right? 'Cause it's so easy to wash our hands of any... Absolve ourself of any responsibility. But in reality, poor initial decisions consume a ton of time at work, and what we're really doing with a lot of our time is fixing our own mistakes. We don't want to admit it to ourself, but that could be a communication mistake, it could be a mistake in the decisions you made. It can be a mistake... And then that consumes a ton of our time.

13. 36:52 – 40:33

    Learning vs Exploiting

    1. CWChris Williamson36:53

       Man, I, um, I dent think how much time has been saved and then re-lost over the last year with this switch to virtual. So, all of the meetings that were potentially used for... I saw this amazing meme, I think it was Rory Sutherland that, that shared it, where he said, it's this guy looking and he can't believe it, he's sort of staring into his hands, and he said, "All of those meetings really could have just been video calls." And it's like, that's like the synopsis of, of 2020-

    2. SPShane Parrish37:22

       Yeah.

    3. CWChris Williamson37:22

       ... 2020, I suppose.

    4. SPShane Parrish37:23

       I know, uh, o- a lot of those, uh, video calls could have been emails, and a lot of those emails could have been texts.

    5. CWChris Williamson37:28

       (laughs)

    6. SPShane Parrish37:28

       And a lot of those texts, like, shouldn't exist.

    7. CWChris Williamson37:30

       Didn't (laughs) didn't need to be sent, yeah.

    8. SPShane Parrish37:32

       Yeah.

    9. CWChris Williamson37:32

       Here's, here's another thing that I've been thinking about I wanted to get your thoughts on. Is there a point where we should stop focusing on exploring and learning skills that we want to acquire, and instead focusing on exploiting the ones that we have? This kind of growth treadmill, people constantly looking for new acquiring, I think this probably ties in a little bit to the place of insufficiency thing, "I need more, I need to know more," as opposed to just focusing on exploiting and really getting stuck into the work.

    10. SPShane Parrish38:02

        Two thoughts there. I don't, I think that's a false duality, I don't think it's an either/or. You should always be learning and you should always be using the knowledge that you learn. I think what you're, you're talking about in a broader sense is, we're channel-surfing life, right? And in a lot of ways, we're, w- we have a poverty of commitment because there's so many options. We don't wanna commit to any one option, because the minute we commit, it locks us down into something, and we start to get feedback and maybe we're not good, and, you know, we're a beginner and it's hard. So we just, we, we change the channel. Remember when you were a kid and you just, like, flick, flick, flick? We, we do this with N- Netflix now, like the endless browsing. You don't actually end up watching things. You know, it's 45 minutes later and you've just sort of previewed all these shows. But in life, uh, what we really value, and I, I was reading about this a, a little bit recently, like, what we really value, anybody that we hold up to be, um, amazing or do incredible things, they've all committed. They've all gone all, all in on one particular idea, whether it be, you know, Elon Musk, or Jeff Bezos, or whoever. It doesn't really matter, right? Uh, any athlete, same thing, right? They've gone all in on what they're doing. And so we really value it in other people, but we're scared to commit to something for ourselves. And so we endlessly, like, channel-surf. We're always looking for the new latest hack, we're always looking for the, the new way to do things, when, you know, in reality, uh, it's the boring things that actually lead (laughs) to the outcomes, right? Michael Jordan, the best basketball player in the world, and he's just top of mind 'cause I've been reading about him recently, first pra- uh, first pass that he would practice at every practice was a chest pass. Well, he learned how to do a chest pass when he was, like, five. It is literally the most basic pass in basketball, and you have somebody at the pinnacle of their career working on their chest pass. And, you know, that's all in, that's commitment to one thing, and that comes with consequences, it comes with costs, and it might mean that we're wrong, and I think that's what we're really scared of. And so if we endlessly channel-surf, we're never gonna be wrong, but we're never gonna be right either. And I think that that's really interesting from a, you need to decide how you live your life, not let other people tell you how you live your life. You need to decide what's meaningful for you. You need to decide what you're gonna commit to, what's worth committing to and what's not. But if the answer is nothing's worth committing to, then the problem isn't the options available to you, the problem is you.

14. 40:33 – 43:07

    The Power of Marginal

    1. SPShane Parrish40:34

    2. CWChris Williamson40:34

       I love that. I was reading The Power of Marginal by Paul Graham. It's quite an old blog post now.

    3. SPShane Parrish40:40

       Okay.

    4. CWChris Williamson40:40

       And he says, "The more successful people become, the more heat they get if they screw up or even seem to screw up. In this respect, as in many others, the eminent are prisoners of their own success." As your platform grows and fs.blog gets more and more renown, do you sense this at all? Do you have any strategies that avoid becoming too concerned about the success and about what comes with that?

    5. SPShane Parrish41:08

       Uh, well, the success isn't really about me. We ca- Uh, I mean, I called it fs.blog for a reason, and instead of Shane Parr-

    6. CWChris Williamson41:14

       Not Shane, shaneparishisgreat.com. Yeah, exactly.

    7. SPShane Parrish41:16

       Yeah, well (laughs) definitely not that, right? Because it's not... And, and our tagline, the one that sticks all the time is, "Mastering the best of what other people have figured out." And so I don't have the answers. I mean, noth- I've, I've come up with nothing original in my life, and so-

    8. CWChris Williamson41:30

       (laughs)

    9. SPShane Parrish41:30

       ... I don't, I, I think that the-

    10. CWChris Williamson41:32

        Too modest, man. (laughs)

    11. SPShane Parrish41:33

        The popularity is for the website, the popularity is for the concept, the popularity is for learning. The popularity isn't, uh, on Popular, uh, and I don't, I don't see it that way, in that, I mean, I don't, um, I definitely don't think of myself as that way. And, um, you know, I was talking with, uh, my buddy James Clear about this the other day, and he, he, he had this wonderful phrase where he's like, "I wanna be the most well-known person that nobody recognizes." And I thought that that was really interesting, right? So, uh, not being sort of recognized or approached and having a big audience, but... Well, and, and the question is, like, why do you want a big audience? Is it for a big impact or is it because you want a big audience because that's your, your fast car, or that's your, your sort of internal ego driving you? And I think, you know, for me, I see Farnam Street as a project that outlives me, and so I'm just a caretaker or curator at this point in time, and there'll be another person behind me, uh, who does the same thing under the same brand with the same audience or new audience. But it just continues, because what we're talking about doesn't, doesn't change. What's valuable, learning, we might have to re-contextualize some of the lessons for today's day and time, but we'll still be talking about the same issues. And so I don't view the website as, like, my lifetime. I view it as something that surpasses me, something that lives in infamy, and hopefully just goes on forever, right? And, but it's not about Shane, it's not about me, it's not about anything that I do. I'm just the temporary steward of this,

15. 43:07 – 46:09

    The Optimal Level of Fame

    1. SPShane Parrish43:07

       this vessel.

    2. CWChris Williamson43:07

       You're sounding a lot, you're sounding a lot like the Dread Pirate Roberts here, it's like Ross Ulbricht meets, uh, meets Shane Parrish.

    3. SPShane Parrish43:13

       (laughs)

    4. CWChris Williamson43:13

       There's a, a quote from my buddy Rob Henderson who says, "You want everyone to know your name and no one to know your face."And I think-

    5. SPShane Parrish43:20

       Oh, yeah. That's int- I will pass that on to James. Yeah, that's really interesting.

    6. CWChris Williamson43:24

       I think Rory's identified the optimal level of fame as sometimes having someone come up to you in the airport. That was his definition of the optimal level of fame.

    7. SPShane Parrish43:34

       Well, y- h- yeah, I think so, but, like, on the internet it's different, right? Because now people can attack you, and people can make up stories about you, and, uh, they can, you know, try to take you down a peg. Uh, even if they don't know you, they've never met you, the stories are false, uh, you know, they can carry their own weight. And I think that, you know, there's a bit of a different world now where, you know, you used to be able to, to sort of, um, that one crazy person, if there, there was one, could sort of, like, yell in a, in an airport or a theater and cause a scene, but the number of people impacted are, you know, I don't know, tens. And now it's thousands and possibly millions, and I think that the, you know, the world is different now, and we haven't quite adjusted to what that means. And we'll have to find some way to do that because we don't wanna, we don't wanna prevent people, um, from sharing their thoughts. And you mentioned Paul Graham's essay. Paul Graham's a great example of somebody who's, uh, you know, profound thinker, great essayist, great writer, and we, we don't wanna discourage, um, the next Paul Graham because they don't want... Um, and so I think anonymity is gonna be a big thing, and I think that that's gonna, whether it's enabled by the blockchain or something else, I think that people wanna have an identity that's online that might be detached from them as a person. And everybody online just sh- we already do this when you think about it. We, 'cause we just show part of ourself online. You don't see my whole life. Um, you see sort of what I'm thinking about. You don't see my time with my kids. You don't see any of the... So we just see one part of people, so if we detach, uh, people's identities from their, th- their self and we put them out there as, "Here's one part of me. I'm gonna put that out there," and maybe it'll be controversial, and that'll be good because now we can start playing with ideas a bit more again, right? We've, we've stopped that because if you're, um, fairly popular on any platform, you don't wanna do anything too controversial. And so you might not say what you actually think, but that, that in itself is suppressing ideas being shared, suppressing freedom of speech, suppressing other people benefiting from that. You might be wrong, and you get feedback that you're wrong, right? But now you don't wanna put it out because you're too big, there's too much at risk, there's loss aversion about what you're doing. And I think that that, we need to fix that because we want the best ideas. We want them to circulate. We want people to talk freely. And I don't mean that in any political sense. I just mean it in sharing ideas, technology, moving the world forward, equalizing opportunity amongst everybody so we all start with a level playing field. Not that we end up with a level playing field, but we start with a more level playing field.

16. 46:09 – 49:00

    The Future of the Anonymous Creator Economy

    1. SPShane Parrish46:09

    2. CWChris Williamson46:09

       I'm still undecided about the future of the anonymous creator economy. George Mack, mutual friend, is super bullish on it, adamant that that's going to be the future. I appreciate, given your background and how the blog started, that it makes a ton of sense. The one fly in the ointment that I see is that people follow people, they don't follow things, traditionally. You know, you think Cristiano Ronaldo has 40 million followers. Real Madrid has 16 million. Elon Musk has double the amount that any of his companies do all added together because we require that. Maybe the ano- anonymity will permit people to get around that. Perhaps we'll s- get used to the persona, following the persona, not the person, um-

    3. SPShane Parrish46:51

       Yeah.

    4. CWChris Williamson46:51

       ... but I'm not sure. And that'll be-

    5. SPShane Parrish46:52

       But I, I mean, Farnam Street started as an anonymous blog.

    6. CWChris Williamson46:56

       Yep, yep.

    7. SPShane Parrish46:56

       Um, and it would've been a lot quicker to build an audience, I can 100% say that with confidence, if I started it under my name.

    8. CWChris Williamson47:02

       Shaneparishisgreat.com. I'm telling you, that was-

    9. SPShane Parrish47:04

       (laughs)

    10. CWChris Williamson47:04

        ... that would've been, that's the one to do it. Final question, man.

    11. SPShane Parrish47:07

        Yeah.

    12. CWChris Williamson47:07

        Eliade Zukowski tweeted this the other day, and it's amazing. Such a good question. "If you were a character in a book, what would your readers be yelling at you to do?"

    13. SPShane Parrish47:18

        Oh, that's a great question. Um... What would they be yelling at me to do? Probably... be more open about working at an intelligence agency, be more open about stories.

    14. CWChris Williamson47:40

        (laughs)

    15. SPShane Parrish47:40

        Do more, do more interviews. Uh, this is what people already yell at me to do. Uh, you know, I keep, I keep my profile pretty low-key, uh, for some of this, and I would say, "Do more, speak more on the podcast," 'cause I don't talk a lot in our podcast, and, um, I think that that, that's what I already get yelled at, so I would assume that that, that is-

    16. CWChris Williamson48:00

        (laughs) Just scale it up.

    17. SPShane Parrish48:02

        ... uh, just scale it up a bit. And, you know, um, that's okay because that's not me. That's not what I wanted to do. So, uh, I just need to live a life that, in accordance with what I want and what I value and, um, doing things just to grow or, or get myself out there more that do- don't have another purpose, that aren't gonna help our mission, don't really help me.

    18. CWChris Williamson48:21

        Well, I'm glad that you broke the habit today and, uh, joined me. Fs.blog. Uh, where else should people go to check out your stuff?

    19. SPShane Parrish48:30

        Uh, @shaneaparrish, P-A double R-I-S-H, on Twitter. And, uh, if you just Google Shane Parrish, you'll, you'll find a whole bunch of stuff, and yeah, would love for you to follow along and join us on our mission.

    20. CWChris Williamson48:43

        I love it, man. Thank you so much.

    21. SPShane Parrish48:45

        Thanks, Chris. Really appreciate this.

    22. CWChris Williamson48:47

        Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks. And don't forget to subscribe. It makes me very happy. Peace.

Episode duration: 49:05