9 Lessons to Make You Great in 2024

This is a special episode of the knowledge project it features segments from nine of the most downloaded and popular guests of 2023 this conversation spends how to make work work the four pillars of integrity and how to feel more alive strategies for moving on when things don't go your way and more it's time to listen and [Music] learn Intention is incredibly powerful for us and it's said in the Buddhist teachings that intention is also um the basis of um Karma or cause and effect that um the state behind your action matters as well as the

action itself so I'll give an example you know suppose you pull out of your driveway and you drive through the fence of the house next door crash through it And you know into their living room now suppose it happened that that was the neighbor who cut down all the trees you loved on the property line you know and shot at your dog and did a whole bunch of horrible things and you just were so enraged that one morning you they did one more thing and you couldn't take it and you just crashed your car through

that will make a certain Karma and the blue lights will come and you'll have to deal with all of the you know legal Consequences of what you did suppose instead your accelerator pedal stuck so the exact same thing happens you get in your car and you pull out and then it crashes through the fence into the house so the outside no one could see anything different right but your intention was entirely different it was an accident you know and the person comes out Furious and you say my gu colorat or pedal stuck and They might

still be furious and you have to deal with insurance and things but there will be entirely different consequences because the intention was different so it becomes really powerful to start to pay attention to our intentions and setting our intentions deliberately and also of course it's important then to notice the the impact or the consequences because you can have good intentions and still out of them there can be a bad impact so You need to notice that um and that will shift your intentions often but one of the beautiful things that mindfulness training invites is the

setting of deliberate intention and it can be inwardly or can be outwardly you know in a meeting with people um before you know whether it's before an athletic game as you were talking about or whether it's a business meeting or it's you know an education or whatever it happens to be um what's our What's Our intention um and setting intention starts to steer everything um there's something in that's quite traditional in the kind of training that I did uh in which you set these long-term vows sometimes they're called bodh SATA vows is simply somebody who's

committed to the well-being of everyone um the Dalai Lama wakes up in The morning and says this prayer may I be uh food for the hungry and medicine for the sick may I be a resting place for the weary and a lamp uh for those in darkness may I be a boat a bridge a wrath for those to cross the flood and may I do so to benefit all beings for as long long as time and space exists some some little pesky little intention like that right actually kind of magnificent um and um you're invited

to quiet your mind and to Set your own best intention if you were it's like setting the compass of the heart if you were to set an intention um of what really matters to you most uh this is called long term intention almost like a vow this is what matters and this is how I want to live um uh it becomes a touchstone for you I mean it can be as simple as I vow to be Kind or I vow to live with more wakefulness and attentiveness to myself and others or with more respect can

be that simple and then when you get to place of struggle things are confusing you take a pause and you say what's my best intention what was that and it shines a light and it gives you a new direction or if you're in conflict in a conversation there you are talking with your spouse I'm here with my beloved Trudy who is my wife and partner and um Amazing wonderful woman but it could happen on occasion that we have a little conflict given the fact that we're meditation teacher and all of that it still could happen

and so there we are and if I take a pause a breath like that mindful pause I can also ask myself what's my best intention or my highest intention and then Consciousness changes and instead of proving how right I was which I certainly enjoy doing in certain Moments you know being right or them wrong or making my point or getting over on or or you know or whatever it happens to be or just being upset and angry in some way my I remember what's my best intention well my intention fundamentally is an intention to connect

to be kind to you know that we live with love respect and I feel that what's my best intention and my whole tone of voice changes Because I could say what did you mean and it you know it fuels an argument or I could say what did you mean I want to understand in that that same phrase but it shifts from blame to interest in care so the quality of mindfulness um or this capacity allows us also to tune into our intentions and to use them as a support for the for the life that we

most deeply want to live is that what it means to set an intention this is what matters and uh this is the Way that I want to live and then how often should we consciously evoke those intentions when we're not in it in a moment like should we just wake up and think these should we we we used to in the monasteries we used to every morning as part of our morning chanting and practice and things we would review our intentions so there can be a daily one I mean it would I I don't want

to make people even think that There's some kind of cookie cutter spiritual okay you should do your yoga and eat tofu and set attent good intention every hour and stuff it's not like that you you point to it quite beautifully in moments of difficulty or conflict taking a pause and asking what's my best or highest intention shifts your State of Consciousness periodically whether it's the start of a day or a week or some new venture or some new adventure um it can Be helpful to reflect on you know what's your best intention but it's really

organic and it's in a way what I want to say is what works for you we're sort of part of this always on go go go culture in what ways does that striving help us and in what ways does it hurt us so Thomas Merton who is a great Christian Christian Mystic said to allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns to Surrender to too many demands to commit oneself to too many projects to want to help everyone is itself to succumb to the violence of our times so let me ask

ask you again now we're now we're back on the basketball court you know where you want to win the game or now we're in the terrain of running a business or um teaching a class or something like that um have you had the experience of being Quite engaged so that you're devoted to something and putting your best energy in it without the energy of tension of grasping and striving as much as being engaged um in the present for its own sake and if you have what did that feel like I mean it feels great right

because it it feels like this feels like this conversation right one of the reasons that we book three hours um is because then there's no time pressure there's no You're not thinking about oh I only have an hour I got to fit all this in and so it's just I am here in this moment for this length of time and it it all it never goes three hours or very rarely but I find that that frees me to be more focused in the moment where if it's an hour it actually is detrimental to me being

in that moment and being present all right so here you are in the supermarket you got your list yeah you know and not only is it your list but There's other people that you're close to that put their on the list to right and you if you get the right kind of laundry soap and the right kind of ice cream or whatever for the kids or whatever I don't know who makes your list but there you are you have a time constraint because you have to get back there's something you know how are you going

to do it you could do it like Greening through the Aisles like good New Yorker grabbing things pretty quickly and trying to get through you know and at the same time think about all the other stuff that you have to get done when you get home and all of that that's one way you could do it the other you could actually enjoy I personally like shopping it's a it's a great thing in my marriage because my wife doesn't so I'm I'm glad to do it grocery shopping or other kind um but you could do it

and Have fun you could do it and I bet you have at certain points and say you know I'm now I'm shopping let me enjoy this and it doesn't mean you're going to be much slower you're not going to be the speed freak you you know but yeah let let me let me feel my steps and enjoy and be present and not try to work everything else out in my life I I'll just you know um in what there's one Zen saying that says you know when you sit just sit and When you eat just

eat you know to just be where you are and you can practice this and you start to pay attention to what it's like when you do it in a gracious way um and it doesn't mean you can't set a goal and it doesn't mean you can't give it your very best and that there are certain moments you need to really throw yourself into something but even that you can do it with a good spirit and with fun rather than being afraid of how it's going to turn out so This zen teacher M Korean roshi that

or zen master that I studied with so he was sitting in his Zen Center in Providence one morning um eating his breakfast and reading the morning paper and one of the students as as as we are up students that we get said hey wait a second didn't you say when you sit just sit and when you eat just eat what is this thing about eating and Reading the paper and he looked up and he said when you eat and read just eat and read and you know it was It was kind kind of a fun

dialogue um but the idea of it is still an invitation to bring this quality of mindful presence to actually be where you are more fully because honestly 90% of your thoughts are repeats maybe more than that when you Sit in meditation and you kind of notice what's going on your mind um it's a little bit like being stuck in Motel 6 at night with the shopping channel on or whatever or some other channel it could be you know whatever your favorite channel is but it it it they're they're not new um and it's it's the

brain and the mind reciting certain things and you can say thank you I appreciate it that's what Minds do um and then you can tune Into a deeper quality of being present there you are in the supermarket and say all right let me be here I'm not going to try and solve the problems of my life right now I'll I'll take my time to do it and then of course once in a while as you don't pay attention to your thinking some good new intuition comes I don't want to put it down thought is a

is a great servant it's just not a good Master you don't want to let it run your life you want the quality of Presence and compassion to run your life and thoughts to serve that listening is something a few people have told me that you're extraordinarily good at I suspect that's because you you listen below the surface uh and to the meaning and not just the words how would you teach uh your kids to become better listeners how do you teach adults to become better listeners I I guess the first thing I would say is

um that listening tends to be Contagious so how each of us listens does tend and to um wear off on other people so I've noticed again with my children that when I listen what we call I often call listening to win U which is to just make them wrong or like when I say oh that's not true you you look great or don't worry about that you you know you'll be fine um then um then it might feel good to me in the moment but it's not gonna they they don't feel heard and I find

That when people feel really really truly seen and heard it's one of the most extraordinary experiences um that a person can have and so um just being around that and having the experience of being on the receiving end of that sort of deep listening where you feel truly seen and fully seen is itself a condition right for for learning to listen well um on the other end of the spectrum there are very particular techniques that help People listen well for me the most important one has been really the training and UN in and understanding of

adult development theory particularly the one that um my colleagues and I are most um have most depth in which is the the subject object Theory um that it was developed by Bob Keegan and others and in the subject object Theory you're what you're listening for the stage of development is defined by what is subject and what is object and when I When I say subject what I mean is like what you're fused with it's like the water you're swimming in the lens through which you see things but you don't actually even know you have a

lens um and what is object is what can be held out and examined and talked about um like a value is object if you can see how it's shaping um what you do and don't do um a value is subject if it's invisibly shaping what you do and don't do for example so in the subject um this Growth Edge coach training that um several of my colleagues and I run what we're teaching coaches to do is to listen for what is subject and what is object and um in listening in that way you have to

be listening below the surface of the story um and every time you hear a word or a phrase wondering hm I wonder what that person means by that and so it's amping up curiosity um it's it's um really really Foregrounding the fact that we each of us never really knows what another person means and um so we can only be curious to find out so those are one is osmosis and one is really learning some very particular techniques grounded in a theory um that help um that help us develop ways to listen I like the

word curiosity because it sort of when I think of listening I think of seeing the world through the other person's eyes I don't have to agree with It I want to see what they see and I want to understand what they understand one thing you said there that uh I want to come back to in part because I have a child that does this is listening to win how as a parent do I coach uh intervene um get this out of their system how old is your child 13 I asked that because um it really

does make a difference at their developmental stage um how how you might go about this and I'm struck by by Your phrase I think you said um how do we how do we coach this out of them yeah maybe that's the wrong phrase but it like drives me c yeah and he's super smart which is like it amplifies it even more because often he's right ah so what is the hardest thing for you about that uh just the social nature of it right and how alienating it can be to um always be the person who

um is listening to win right so from his Perspective it's I listened to what you said there it I'm literal right uh and so it's it's incorrect and I'm going to do you he doesn't do it maliciously he's like I'm going to do you a favor and point out why you're incorrect and as a parent uh I don't know what to do with this because on one hand on a literal sense he's right on a social sense he's wrong uh and on a is this going to get you What you want in life perspective perspective

it's learning when to use that and when to not use that and I'm struggling with him in terms of how I I go about those so you're worried that he will alienate people or is he alienating you oh he's not alienating me I I think I'm worried that um he it makes it harder for him to fit in or be accepted by his peer group Uh yeah so I can hear that really that that sort of deep desire for him to not have um yeah for life not to be harder for him because because he

is playing on hard mode yeah he's playing on hard mode and he's already uh exceptionally bright which in another another way puts it on hard mode again right uh in certain ways so yeah I hear so so deeply this I mean gez um the the wanting for um to wanting to help somebody change something that Is making in your view making their life unnecessarily hard and and then worrying that maybe tell me if this is right but worrying that um that if you don't help them change this it might just become a more and more

and more ingrained habit that continues to make their life hard yeah well I think that as as he gets older I mean my role changes too right and it changes to um you're getting feedback are you seeing the feedback that you're getting Are you instead of a direct uh intervention like don't do this do this uh you know it changes to when you did this did it help you get what you wanted in that moment right or is doing this going to get you what you want and that coaching after the fact is usually very

helpful for him because he's like oh I didn't mean it that way or I shouldn't have done that or I wasn't thinking when I said something and so it prompts at least a little bit Of reflection around it which we all have as adults too right like we all say stupid things on occasion or make a comment that we didn't intend to make and it has an impact on another person and then we reflect on it and we we sort of that reflection codifies the learning a little bit so it takes that experience and it

translates that experience into a little bit of learning and with enough reflection and enough experience and enough iteration enough feedback we sort Of self-correct as as adults most of the time yeah and I think you may have a part of your answer already um so it sounds like what you're doing is you're creating the conditions for him to reflect on what the impact of the way he's listening or not listening um is is having well trying to when when you said the phrase listening to win and you were talking with your kids about not listening

to win I was like well is there a way that I can put a term around It or a label around it when I can just say you're listening to win yeah and in that moment that means this whole deeper conversation to him which is like an instant prompt to correct or not correct to nudge Behavior Uh towards a better that he's choosing right because I don't want to make his behavior choices for him but can I say something like that and when you were saying it that's what I thought you were doing so this

is where the question I didn't I didn't Intend for this to be like a longer question but yeah yeah um so your question is is language um giving language to something can that be a help um well it's sort of a broader question if we take it out of of the context of of me and my son it it's sort of can we learn to listen to ourselves better or does it take an outside person to sort of intervene and point out our blind spots and with my son I'm trying to intervene or or sort

of point out a Blind spot you're blind to this it's happening I'm pointing out that it's happening it sounded like that's what you were doing with your kids or maybe I'm misinterpreting when you said listening to in which I love that phrase by the way yeah there I guess my point is there are many things and what that you can can do to help somebody to notice what they're doing in ter in this case in terms of how they're listening one is uh reflecting back to them what You're seeing um and the impact of that

one is the invitation to invite them to reflect on it the connection between what they're doing and what they want H another is giving it language I I love hearing that listening to win is such a powerful phrase it is because you you can just say that it it it's like having a um some sort of a reminder every time you do something like a light goes off something flashes and it helps to create the connection between this thing that You're really instant connection um a reminder of what you're doing so the idea of listening

to win absolutely can be a super helpful um in in shifting a pattern because it it it helps you to notice the pattern instantly each time it's coming up we often cannot see what we're doing and this is why we need company and we need company with whom we have trust who will tell us things that we can't see in ourselves um this is this is one of the core Conditions for being able to shift and change I mean feedback is the feedback essentially is tension it's it's dynamism in the system and and you can

quite literally make the argument that life being alive is about needing feedback Like Everything You Touch as you walk as you listen as you feel the air on your skin as you communicate with others as you run there are millions of points of feedback entering and leaving your brain and that is that is essential If you take away your senses I've taken away your feedback and so you can't really operate in the world and the same thing is true of a business and he used to um use a bike as a metaphor so he'd say

you know you're if I put you on a bike and I say lock the handlebars and go how far can you go with the handlebars locked and the answer is like not very far at all if you ever try this you fall over within like 10 or 15 ft um but instead if you can have the feedback From the road and the resistance and the gravity and then slightly turn you know left and right as you go that's what you're actually doing when you go straight you're you're kind of in a dance with the information

that you have and as you move from point A to point B you're going to do some steering and so I think for organizations and for people in teams and for people in relationships that's what we're trying to do at our best is steer dynamically based on the Feedback we're getting based on what we value So based whatever your principles whatever your values are whatever you care about whatever winning means to you you're going to steer in the direction of that based on the input that you get but if you live in a system that's

far removed from feedback then it's problematic or even worse if the feedback you're getting is actually disconnected from reality because you were talking about that that part of Being disconnected from reality and it can happen a different way where the only feedback I get is from a boss the boss is telling me what they think is important that is not what the customer cares about it's not what the market cares about and so I'm actually serving the wrong master so to speak and end up end up getting stuck in a feedback loop that's inaccurate and

inauthentic that's so fascinating so in respon I mean it It's it's almost an argument for private businesses over public ones where you can take a longer term time Horizon it's very hard in a public company to do that and the examples that all seem to come to mind all have a large inside shareholder or uh found still in charge of the organization yeah they really do it's a common pattern across I mean we looked at 68 for the original book Brave New work and yeah it's a strong pattern so so with that said what are

the ways That um organizations sabotage themselves from the inside I mean essentially what tends to happen is that you have uh a few things that go on the first thing is that we tend to do what um what Jason freed calls scarring on the first cut so when something doesn't work or goes wrong or there's an issue or somebody steals a laptop the organization freaks out and it immediately reacts with a policy or a procedure or a you know new security Protocol or something just fire the person exactly right like just let it go and

then move on they don't wait for patterns right we don't wait for patterns generally we just overreact and try to systematize everything so that tends to that tends to sabotage us quite a bit the other thing that we do is that we uh we really get stuck focused ing on metrics that become incentives that become ways to drive mismanagement and so there there are many different names For this law but when a when a metric becomes a goal it ceases to become a good metric and the idea is that we're we're optimizing for something that

is a proxy for reality instead of reality itself and again we're we're putting our judgment down and just focusing on like clickthrough rate like I'm just I just have to hit this click-through rate and I'll do whatever it takes to get it and so that sort of over optimization on proxies or or abstract goals rather than Absolute principle driven goals is really problematic and then I guess the last one is that we and I talk about this a ton but we confuse the contexts that we're operating in so I talk a lot in my work

about the difference between complicated and complex and you've had some people on your show talk about complexity before as well but the the complicated context is like the engine of a car or a watch it is predictable there's cause and effect inside it the Parts fit in a way that if you're an expert you kind of know how to take it apart and put it back together again and so if there's a problem it can be solved and it can be delivered and it can be you know working again no problem there's very high confidence

in in solutioning in those areas but in a complex system which would be like weather or traffic or Gardens or six-year-olds um they are dispositional so they have an attitude away they're Trending but you can't fundamentally predict them you can't be sure what'll happen if you try something and if you bring that complicated approach the checklist the Gant chart the quarterly goals the objectives the management to that context you tend to really struggle and fail and what we see is that is that organizations tend to just over index on everything must be complicated and so

we're going to treat everything that way and I routinely get brought into Boardrooms with with Executives and teams that are like look we changed our company values and behaviors last year we put them on coffee mugs and posters all over the world all over the office and nobody's behaving differently why it's like well because you're yelling at the weather right you're yelling at the Garden that's not how these sorts of systems work if you have a manufacturing problem where you don't have a tolerance get that checklist out if you have a Broken engine take it

into the dealership but if you're trying to raise a human being or build a successful team or create a culture of trust that that Playbook doesn't work and so we Sav I ourselves by constantly bringing it to the table and being like the culture change initiative will be done in June of 2024 and we will achieve these five metrics along the way and that's our you know those are our pillars that's just all complicated talk brought to a Complex party I have a heuristic and you can you can correct this because you've worked with more

companies than I have but the heuristic is the more a company exposes their values uh the less they actually value yeah yeah that is funny cuz it it's sort of like uh yeah when you're when you protest too much right that would be the Shakespeare of it right thou doth protest too much when you when you're speaking constantly About these are our values and they're so important Integrity Integrity Integrity that that's a clue that something is going on that's not healthy when in fact good change and good patterns in culture are quite fluid and so

it should be moving effortlessly and behaviorally through the culture through modeling and through storytelling not through you know the poster with the five pillars it also works for people right on the outside where the people Who expe happiness the most on social media are probably uh inly the most unhappy yeah yeah anyone who says let me be honest with you right just take a take a beat so one of the things you said there was sort of like um we put procedures in place to lower variation to reduce mistakes because we're trying to avoid mistakes

at some level one thing I noticed is that procedures eventually circumvent judgment and so what happens is um if you follow the Procedure you never get in trouble even if what you're doing is absolutely the wrong outcome and you should know it's going to lead to the wrong outcome you can just throw your hands up and be like well I followed the procedure so therefore I'm absolved of all accountability for exercising judgment yeah I mean that is 100% uh what happens and in fact I believe there's a German word for that um that that you

are essentially saying it's I'm compliant so It's the bureaucracy fault it's the system's fault and that's because you've given away your right to think or your right to be accountable your right to be responsible in the ecosystem and it's a it's a lovely trade for most people because they're like here I just have to be compliant and then when things don't work it's not my fault and it's you know we have the term cya cover your ass uh in business for a reason people do a lot of things to to C and and it doesn't

Tend to lead to good outcomes so we have a lot of models that we use to explain this to people and to try to get them thinking about different ways of accomplishing the same goal but yeah it's uh as soon as you get into process and compliance theater everything goes downhill pretty quickly you know when Integrity shows up as a value inside of a company for example and then you ask people what does the value mean the normal thing That people say is do the right thing which is beautiful I get that great integrity then

tends to have more of a like a moral or an ethical um kind of orientation and the way I play with Integrity is none of that so Integrity for me is more of an energetic and I'll say what I mean by that in just a minute but again let's just do a little anemology here so Integrity from the root uh same root as integer so think of whole number think of wholeness so That's where I like to go think of wholeness so to me Integrity is energetic wholeness now what that translates to very quickly for

me is a phrase that I love full aliveness so when I am in Integrity I am energetically whole I am fully Alive we illustrate it sometimes with u there's work so much inmore because I think they fixed this problem but when I was a kid and you put uh holiday lights on a Christmas tree kind of the deal was that if if one of the Lights Went Out the whole strand went out you know first it might blink a little bit and then it all went out and if you think about the circuitry of those

Christmas lights being a circuit of wholeness and then if one little light goes out then they start to dim and dim and dim until they all go out so what I work with in my own life for many many years is am I fully alive I also love The question what am I willing to risk for full aliveness we'll come back to that because that's a fun question uh and then when I am not feeling Fully Alive whole so alive in my head alive in my heart alive in my gut alive in my balls if

I can say it alive in my spirit if I'm not feeling alive then I want to go check these four pillars because what reliably has been true for me is they are like the light on the Strand and if they get loose my Aliveness tends to diminish it doesn't go out all of a sudden but it diminishes so what Katie Hendricks articulated as the four pillars of Integrity the first pillar is radical responsibility and we talked about this a little bit in our last chat but it's really the decision to move out of blaming and

criticizing out of being at the effect of the world and move into claiming responsibility or agency a Sure way for me to blunt my aliveness my day-to-day experience of my Vitality is to live in victimhood blame the weather blame the traffic blame Debbie uh blame my body uh and what's happening in my body so what I notice is if I stop blaming and I choose to move the locus of control back over here and I choose to have agency to be responsible for my experience not the external world but to be responsible for my experience

there's A surge of energy that comes back in the body so that's the first pillar radical responsibility the second pillar is as simple as am I willing to feel my feelings so I was a nonfer much of my life now it came into the world like I think everybody does as a full feeler so as an infant I was a full fer I had access to my anger to my rage to my fear to my sadness to my joy to my Sexual Energy and then like most people I got a little bit socialized out Of

that you know the average kindergarten teacher when I was in kindergarten didn't really want 25 kids to feel all their feelings all the way through to completion they imagined it would have been chaos that's changed meaningfully in the last years but then I had some trauma in my life in my family of origin that came meaningfully to a head on my 17th birthday this is really relevant to me and feelings on my 17th birthday I woke up about 5: in the Morning to the experience of my dad having a massive heart attack he happened to

be sleeping in the single bed next to me we'd gone to bed the night before watching a Chicago white sock game and I woke up with him having a fatal heart attack and I was a 17-year-old young man kid and I was all of a sudden introduced to the death process which I'd never been introduced to before and that was traumatic in and another itself but then We followed the ambulance to the hospital and we walked into the hospital into the emergency room and my dad had been wheeled into one of the Bays there and

then the nurse walked out I can still feel I can still go back to that moment the nurse walked out and handed me his watch in his ring handed it to me not to my mom who was there and said he's gone he died and I instinctively almost like a wounded an animal I walked away from my Mom and I walked into a bathroom and again this was early in the morning the hospital wasn't crowded and I held my dad's uh ring and his watch in my hands and I remember just melting down the wall

and disintegrating into uh grief and heartbreak and loss and complete unknowing now here's what happened next so I did that for however many minutes I did that and then I I love the phrase I Pulled myself together I stood up I walked out to my mother my mom at that point was um a functional but a meaningful alcoholic and didn't have a lot she hadn't matured to develop a lot of adult coping skills so I was in a role of caretaker and helping her I picked her up I held her I helped her went home

I called my older brother told him that my dad had died called my sister neither of them were in the home and it's like I made a contract With myself in that moment Shane which is it hurts too bad to feel these feelings and I consciously unconsciously some vce there locked them away until my late 20s at least probably early 30s and I just didn't feel feelings now here's what I didn't know is the amount of energy not Integrity is wholeness energetic wholeness life force aliveness how much energy it takes to repress and suppress emotion

I tell people now it's like your Emotions are like a beach ball you know and you take them and uh you try to hold them under the water you know and the more inflated the ball is the harder it is to hold under the water and if you know one beach ball is sadness and one beach ball is anger and one beach ball is fear and after a while you're holding these things under the water you get exhausted and I got exhausted I was actually I think mildly depressed and a reason was that I was

Depressing my feelings so now this uh second pillar of Integrity is I just ask myself every day as part of my morning rituals is there a feeling here that wants to be felt and I've learned that these feelings can be felt very simply and efficiently and beautifully and the thing that I was terrified of was being overwhelmed by the feelings doesn't occur at all they become a natural enlivening part of life they actually allow life to appear in Technicolor and not black and white they allow Life Force to come back into my body so that's

the second pillar the third pillar is cander so if I want to be out of Integrity if I want to dance dampen my aliveness all I have to do is start accumulating withholds things that I'm not saying thoughts that I'm having um watchs that I have judgments and opinions that I have beliefs that I have Um we start with holding my anger my sadness my fear all I have to do is start holding back being authentic being revealed and I will I will and I find this to be true in almost all people I will

immediately feel less alive now we could explore this when I reveal and I find this true to be everybody when people reveal when they say what they're not saying when they become more authentic they immediately feel more alive now I just want to put a Little Aster by this they all also usually immediately experience chaos because I and we have been withholding for good reason I put air quotes around that because it made sense to withhold so I'm not questioning whether there's a reason to withhold what I'm questioning is its effect on integrity and its

effect on aliveness and when we talk about integrity in relationships and does the relationship Have integrity whether it's a personal relationship or a uh public relationship a professional relationship one of the questions we want to explore is how revealed are we how revealed are we because if we're withholding we say we use this little formula when you withhold then you withdraw and then you project which means you disconnect from relationship so when we look at high performing teams one of the things we see is they don't Have many withholds everything is transparent to the TR

to the decision process okay and that's true with me and Debbie whenever I have any withholds our relationship goes out of Integrity I go out of Integrity the life force of our relationship diminishes and Deb and I have known each other since we were 15 years old and we've been in an intimate committed relationship for you know almost 30 years 25 30 years and yet Almost every day if I do a real examination I find something that I would withhold and not say because I'd be afraid of the things that we say we would be

afraid of you know that it would hurt her or that it would create a little drama or it's not going to do any good you know that mind there's all these reasons but whenever I do that I immediately dampen my life force and I immediately dampen the life force of the relationship so that's the third one and Then the fourth pillar of Integrity is am I impeccable with my agreements am I impeccable with my agreements so an agreement is just anything I've said I would do or anything I've said I wouldn't do real simple it's

just who's going to do what by when and I find that one of the ways people bleed off Life Energy is they don't make clear agreements they just kind of live wishy-washy non clear non- clarified Non-intentional no clear agreements so they don't make clear agreements when they make clear agreements they break their agreements which creates a life force diminishment it also creates drama and relationships they they rationalize justify and explain why they didn't keep their agreements rather than just taking responsibility for it and they don't get back into Integrity so a great example before we

started recording we got on at The top of the hour and you know I think I logged in you know a minute or so before and there you were and you said to me you said I was going to be on time for this because you have heard or know this to be part of me and you said you know most people maybe show up a little bit late I understand that most people believe the thought that they have busy lives and therefore they can't be impeccable with their word around time and stuff like that

I think that's Actually a story and a belief in it saps energy I just find it so beautifully simple and enlivening to go we agreed we' meet at the top of the hour let's just meet at the top of the hour there's no yeah but you're not wondering you're not having to email or text me uh you know we're just just clean we're so clean so those are the four pillars of Integrity take responsibility feel your feelings speak candidly authentically reveal and be impeccable with your Agreements now in my experience when I live like that

I feel incredibly alive now we could also talk about you know do you eat well do you get a good night's sleep but you know how you exercise all of that of course would be part of feeling fully alive but seems everybody knows knows that we might not be doing it but we know it but not everybody is playing the game of let's be fully alive and play with Integrity so I have a couple things that I say a lot at home I Say a lot at work and I say a lot you know in

any setting where someone will listen to me but two things one reality is undefeated right reality is undefeated and the second is Embrace reality the the sooner you figure out what reality is and you embrace it then you can do something about it right and I have a friend who's a founder and he was he was down like six months ago and he asked he said can we have dinner together I'm not Feeling great and we went and we had dinner and um you know it's not like the dinner ended and all of a sudden

he was feeling great but then three weeks later he sounded like a different person so I asked him I said what happened what you sound so much better what happened and he said you know instead of just thinking about the problem in the last few weeks we've just started working on it he's like and we've only made like 1% progress but he's like it's so much Better now that we're just working on it now we're just working on a problem whereas before we were just thinking about it and I think that that comes from the

embracing of okay this is where we are this is what we got to go do about it and I uh I think your point of effectively trying to avoid reality and kind of Kick the Can on the road and have somebody else have to deal with it that's a real disservice to someone you care about or someone you love it's the Same reason that feedback is valuable it's the you know I I think it's the reason that sports teams are a good analogy when they're at the at a very high level because the feedback happens

every minute if you're not good enough to be on the floor if you're not good enough to be on the field the ball goes by you your team might give up a goal you know it is quite obvious and the feed me mechanisms are quick and so I think that um one of the things that I Think about is sort of this the speed of reality how quickly does reality hit you and what is the impact of reality and so there's that um saying that uh every morning in Africa uh I saw this on Twitter

recently but you know every morning in Africa uh gazelle wakes up and knows that if he doesn't outrun the fastest lion he's gonna die Okay cool so he wakes up running every morning in Africa a lion wakes up and knows if he doesn't outrun The slowest gazelle he's going to starve so he wakes up running well for those folks for the gazelle and the lion in that case reality hits you know very fast every minute of every day and the cost of not facing reality is death obviously that's not quite the same for any of

us sitting in our offices or whatever but I do think understanding that reality does hit you every moment and that not embracing it does have a cost I think that's really Important and valuable well let's dive into that a little more because you work with founders who live and operate in a reality-based world uh they can't create their own reality they have to deal with reality they're in the truth business if you will how do you help them see reality instead of misinformation or erroneous information or getting caught up in their own beliefs or their

own ideas That may or may not be true yeah well I think the first thing is a lot of Founders you know they're different some of them are amazing at that to begin with right that's their wiring that's the way they are and so frankly with those folks a lot of it is just making sure that you're helping get the right signals to them because by Nature they are such where you know they do that there are some who I think I'm sure you've heard about the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion field right I think that's

actually been pretty negative overall to the like startup ecosystem because I think that people have heard that as Steve Jobs didn't Embrace reality and Steve Jobs I actually think that his was quite different that was a representation of ambition that was a representation of we need to be great and I think that that was a representation of I'm not going to be constrained by what someone tells me Can or can't happen he still was embracing reality as to whether or not people love the product right he still was embracing reality as to whether or not

it was selling and things like that and so I think that um I think one aspect is sort of reminding people that the Steve Jobs example which is incredible in so many ways you kind of have to dig underneath that the reality Distortion field wasn't that he wasn't listening to Market signals right it was That he was ambitious for his team of we can do better we can do more we can do more right go ahead when when I think of jobs what I think about when that happens this reality Distortion field which I I

think we've mislabeled in a way I think that his standard was just so much higher yes yes the better example to me of jobs is have you ever heard the anecdote about him with the with uh when he looked at a cabinet no it's an amazing Anecdote okay so there was this beautiful cabinet that he saw okay and he loved it and he thought it was gorgeous and then he looked around the back of it and in the back of it was plywood and it was ugly and he was so offended by this notion that

the front of it was beautiful and the back of it was ugly because someone's like no one's ever going to see the back and he's like no I see the back the back should be beautiful too if you want to try to make Something beautiful it should be beautiful from every angle right if the purpose of this is It's supposed to represent craftsmanship and Beauty don't don't go halfway and make the back ugly to me the things that are interesting are like if you tear apart the iPhone even the switch even the board underneath is

you know clean and gorgeous and thought thoughtful and I think that even the words on the back of the iPhone where it says you know Designed in California assembled in China like it doesn't say made in China and so every choice that they made I think represents those are cool stories about jobs and the standard that he had and the sort of willingness to be disliked in the name of going to get Excellence there's a story about Alexa with Bezos that's similar where they came back and said look the latency is going to be this

and I don't know what the unit was but jobs or Bezos Effectively said well I want it to be you know one of that and they said that's impossible we can't do that he's said well then we're not going to ship it but that was the magic and then they ultimately ended up doing it so I think that consistent raising of the standard that's the lesson from these folks and so I think going back to your point on reality of talking to Founders I think it's helping them see the right signals because sometimes especially in

the Environment and look you know investors you know uh all of us we sent many of the wrong signals for a couple of years where people were rewarded and so they could look at something of like what are you talking about my business keeps on getting valued higher and higher and higher you know I'm doing the right stuff but I think the duration of their perspective was not necessarily correct in that ultimately you know your business is going to be measured on the Financial performance of it and the financial performance is a representation of how

much customer love there is and how much what you've actually created but I think the point Shane for me on getting people to embrace reality is okay cool that signal that you're looking at is supportive of the point that we're doing great what about all these other signals and I think that um you know you have to earn the trust of somebody like you said to Be able to share that perspective um but I think that idea is one that um I I think is really important to make sure that people have there's a lot

of concern about artists and even writers about training in AI to produce work to generate work to creative work and there the concern is is well you know uh my material that I've worked really hard for has been used to train this Ai and people can use it to imitate me and sometimes those Imitations are quite amazing but really what you want to be able to do is to have a style so to speak to have something that's hard to predict that's um that's unpredictable that's in ediable that you you that you can't be imitated

and this again goes back to my other piece of advice about don't aim to be the best uh aim to be the only so if you are in this category that it's hard To imitate you that's a that's a really good place to be in the human world and also a really good place to be in the AI world because AIS will have difficulty in imitating you I think I'm in trouble my kids went into chat GG or GPT the other day and they they drafted this email on why they should get like more video

game time but they did it in the style of Shane Parish yeah so they basically like it was an email from myself to me and I was like this sounds Awfully familiar I was like what was your what was your query here and they were like uh dropped an email to Dad about in the style of Shane Parish I was like oh my God this is in TR I'm in trouble yes yes um so so yeah so you you you if you were if that was hard to do then you have an advantage because your

your job is not going to be taken by an AI um and so um and so the idea is is to not be so predictable yeah in the sense particularly again if you Have if your views on on the environment can be deduced from your views on religion or something that's going to be that means that you're kind of not really that much of an independent thinker and that's going to become more valuable because AI at least at first is going to give away uh standard thinking for free so it'll raise the bar for some

people but it'll be so conventional for independent original Thinkers right exactly right now the best way to think of these AIS the the chat training the L the llms is that they're um they're the epitome of um wisdom of the crowd yes okay okay they're wisdom of the crowd thinking this that's what it is it's a collective all the average people in the world and all their average foibles and all the average genius and is going to get a very kind of average thing that is often very correct but oftentimes not because It's the average

and so um so it's the it's the wisdom of the crowd AI um which is really good if that's where you want to be um but and actually I have you know I've been trying to figure out the Practical use of these things and how people are actually using them so I have a friend who runs a very very popular blog site and he uses them to help them write headlines and sometimes he used to have did to write a punch line at the end And he said it's often very generic and he has to

kind of push them to be snarky he'll say no no no make it more snarky or pretend you're a snarky editor or pretend that you're a conspir have to kind of push them to not be that standard average deliberately say no you need a a little bit um on a little fringer you've got to be a little bit angry or you've got to be um something and then the'll role play more provoca if you don't do That you w get the kind of as you said the standard average I want to come back to AI

a little later because I think we'll have a broader conversation on it I want to go to the next piece of advice that sort of stood out as I was reading these which is always demand a deadline because it weeds out the extraneous and the ordinary a deadline prevents you from trying to make it perfect so you have to make it different different is better it is right different is better Um you so so so deadlines is again took me a long time to kind of figure out that I needed deadlines and deadlines were the

difference between you know a dream and a something that you complete and um what happens with deadlines for me anyways you got a ship you're you're you have to abandon the project and um it's not perfect oh my gosh it's not perfect but because it's not perfect you kind of have to be ingenious about making a Little different and that and and and I find that deadlines force me to make decisions that you know that you you you don't have enough time you never have enough time um and so you you you think of something

to I wouldn't say it's a shortcut you think of a way to finish it and that little those little decisions are what make it a little different what one of the shocks to me about um working at Wired on a monthly magazine was every single issue after years and years and years was a miracle that it got done on time it was like you would think it would come down to some some formula and you just you'd be done on Friday afternoon you go but no it was it was this last second getting it out

the door every single time and part of that was because we kind of kept up being the the goal the quality you know we're we're trying to make it better than last time And so you come down to the same thing where you are being driven by the deadline to try to excel but not making it perfect by by by by doing something a little differently than you did before because without a deadline you can convince yourself that you can always make it a little bit better but then you never ship right how do you

find that balance between in a world of Leverage right like where an internet article can go viral and Reach a 100 million people or it can reach 10 people how do you find that point at which I've done enough I'm comfortable with this versus the tradeoff of do I raise the bar do I make this better what is the advantage to doing that so there's a couple things a couple bits of advice buried in a book about that one one is this rule which was actually based on some research uh in various Different um fields

of life that when you trying to optimize something versus trying to explore where you you have something that works and you just want to make it kind of better and go you know and optimize it versus doing the inefficient thing of going out to try and try something new and comes down to something like when you go out to eat at a restaurant do you get your favorite thing that you know works or do You try something that is a new dish that may not work and so the ratio is actually 1: three or 2

to three one to three so you you actually want to spend um two-thirds of your time trying to optimize things that you want to go deeper and better and then a third trying trying new things and that's been shown many many ways to to be roughly true so that's one answer is yes lots of times you're going to just try and make it really really better and not thing But a third of the time you want to be taking a chance so um so yeah so I think um the second thing is this idea that

um I learned from doing art and that is is that um there was actually a book called writer's time about how to write a book and and it said that basically look the the the the amount of work to write a book is infinite it's just bottomless it just could go on and on and that's true of Almost any project in terms of perfecting it's bottomless so really the only thing you control is your time you say I have this much time to give to it I'm going to do the very very best in this

amount of time and that's sort of what a deadline's about it's saying like yeah I mean it could could go on forever but but I have a deadline so I'm going to do the best I'm going to write the best book I can in a year or year and a half whatever it is or I'm going to do The best podcast I can make in a week and so that is a deadline and what it's doing is it's giving you some way to control because you can't control the amount of work which is infinite because

you always can find some way to perfect it so so this is the idea that you control things by controlling the time I wonder if If part of us is hiding behind fear too we don't want the deadline because we actually don't want to put the work out there we can convince Ourself that hiding you know making it better hiding behind this Perfection is in and of itself work and that we're accomplishing something we don't have to put it out in the world and get feedback and right right right right right yeah yeah that's that's

true because it's not good enough yet yeah um and and there's one of the things I Have Become um a really big proponent of which is you know doing things on a regular basis so the advantage of someone like you Doing a podcast regular basis like if this one's a complete flop that's okay tomorrow you have another one we'll try again and you just do it over and over again and you put out whatever it is that you do you you know you're trying your very best but you know that that that there's more from

where that's come from and that gives you some kind of freedom to fail in a certain sense because I'm going to do it again and that's true of making art which I do Every day I make a piece of art every every day so I'm going to put it out no matter what and if it isn't up to the best standards that's okay because tomorrow I'm going to do it again and that's true about writing or anything else is this this idea that you want to do things on a regular basis because that is the

source of great stuff but it also gives you that confidence and Liberty to put out something that's not quite the best and not get really hung Up on it because we're going to do it again how do you shift that mindset where circumstances uh sort of like when you feel you're a victim I mean effectively you're a victim to circumstance you feel like you have no control and you're powerless and there's nothing you can do what would you say to to somebody like that that's a really great question I think that there are two ways

of looking at at victim uh things that have happened to you you Know you can be a victim or you can be a survivor and those are two very different cognitive positions you know you can't control what happens to you in either circumstance but one is very powerful um You have overcome one is you know you have had something happen to you and you are under that thing for quite some period of time so for me if I hear someone and I I hear that kind of helplessness um one is that I never I I

want to reframe that experience I want To tell different story I want them to tell a different narrative to themselves I want them to rewrite that um and in some ways you want them to rewrite that narrative to survivorship and overcoming and what it took and you ask the right questions to get them to see um you know that their own throughway in that case is based on their strength and ability and you want them to see those things rather than seeing the the kind of helplessness and Powerlessness it's the reason why often times you

know like people engage with and they think we're going to go back in time and talk about their I don't know inner child or something um but I am I am someone who's going to start with who you are today because going back to the past is not really useful unless it informs who you are standing in this moment we can't change it we can't uh you know go back and going back to times of powerlessness also it puts you in a Bad mindset it sets you up in a negative way so I oftentimes will

go back and restructure some things around you know risk for example as a really good area where we'll do some uh discussion when people are hesitant to take risk I want people to go back and say hey tell me about times you took risk and it really paid off like let's talk about that I want people to understand what they're capable of and sometimes to see what they're capable of in ways that they um That they quickly forget right I mean negative things sometimes Shadow our entire mindset and how we think about things and we

end up tossing aside some of the good things right like you'll have uh you know 20 compliments on your haircut and one person says oh what' you do to your hair and that's the person who gets all the attention so you think about I don't want them shoving aside those 20 compliments or those 20 times They took the chance or the 20 times that they overcame something really incredible that they kind of you know kind of shove off to the side I want them to see those things very clearly and to see the minority of

yeah you know things happen periodically that aren't great for us and don't make us feel well and we make bad some bad decisions but so what everyone does I think that that that's really important I mean we all make bad decisions it's what you do next That sort of matters I want to go back to something you said about childhood though which is I hear this a lot and I've always sort of wondered about it which is like uh when people are in therapy and they're talking about their childhood and then they do this sort

of like destructive behavior and then it's uh or self-sabotaging behavior and then they explain it away with well that's because of this when I was a child and it you know I'm always listening to this And I never comment but in my head I'm going but you're an adult now right right like at some point you take control over your your response and awareness of it is not the same as doing something about it right I mean like I think that it's so this is this is really fascinating to me too and I I love

hearing things like that when they come up because they're such clear like flags and clearly they are for you as well like you hear that and you're like Oh this is a problem right I mean and immediately so I think about it like this you could be sitting and this is the example that I always think about because it pulls people away from some of the more emotional stuff but you could be sitting in traffic and we've all sat in traffic right I mean traffic is long as the eye can see and there will be

some people you look out and they'll be like beeping and dodging and you know like they're all over the place And you can surmise how that person must be thinking right I mean it's just like never going to get there can't believe this is happening like we could antici at that these are coming from strong thought patterns and emotional places but if you look to your right I mean there's probably also some guy or girl listening to a podcast texting someone windows are down look as relaxed as could be and so some people are going

to say you know when you get home like why Are you so upset oh it's the traffic the traffic makes me nuts right right but if the traffic really makes people nuts it would make everyone nuts and so it can't be that it's how we're thinking about the traffic um that really makes people be relaxed and productive or it makes them be just absolutely enraged and out of control so when people are telling me that like you know I'm doing this because of my childhood I'm doing this because of this I think you know you're

You know you're giving up some amount of um Power you're giving up a lot of power to something outside of yourself and you're also how you're interpreting that event is not useful to you you know it may be there may be a lot of Truth to the terrible things that have happened but you know those those terrible things you you have to shut the door at some point and say you know I am my own man or woman and I move forward and you know working on those Traumas is important if you go to a

therapist and and I think that that's really valuable stuff and it's worthwhile because it can change the course of your life but if you're somebody who uses other events as a reason to self-destruct your seating power and we see that even with um you know in companies right like I'm doing this because so and so made me angry I'm doing this because you know and you end Up making some poor decisions um and seeding power because of someone else you know you're willing to make a poor decision you're willing to give up you know sometimes

people are willing to give up you know their entire future dreams because you know X Y and Z and it's a tragedy uh so you want people to really understand the power they have to create their own lives at some point and that they that creation is not given to anyone else but you I love what you said There I think it's these ordinary moments that really dictate the outcome of our life for a lot of our big decisions we know we're making a decision we're well aware of it but in these ordinary moments when

things like this happen we sort of tend to react without reasoning and when we do that we put oursel in an increasingly bad position right you go home you yell at your spouse well now your whole weekend's wrecked your marriage might be Wrecked like all of these things sort of like compound and then you can't be present at work because you're solving something at home and we just don't realize how the these innocent little moments uh can derail us and put us in a worse position I agree I think that like being intentional and being

deliberate is something that we don't we let life happen to us right and we don't decide that we are going to control the trajectory of it and I think that that's True whether it's in the small moments and sometimes even in the large ones like people will stay unhappy at a job or stay unhappy in their role and they'll just stay unhappy uh instead of just saying hey you know like eventually they'll reach a point and this is true for everyone right like they're unhappy they're unhappy they're unhappy and then finally I've had enough and

all of those excuses they've used there will come a point when none of them matter and They're going to take that leap but why does it have to get to that point and why can't we kind of flag things earlier on and I think early intervention you know I I talk about that notion of like fighting upfront early intervention in almost every case is worth it's it's worth the attention the the hassle the time that it takes because those are the the moments that allow you to really gain ground and to have a much more

Productive future to have much more productive relationships to be more productive at work is to really intervene early um and I think intentionality is really the key thinking about you know um how you want your life to look and what you're willing to put up with you know what kind of standards are you holding for yourself and and you know how do you value yourself and a lot of those are around you know when you take action and You know how much you give and what you're waiting for and how much you're willing to take

so so I understand there's no repeatable framework that you can just apply but I would imagine there's there's sort of repeatable principles and methods of thinking that you use what are the ones that you find the most helpful well I I look very hard uh at what's working what's not working and in other words you know some things are uh not working at all uh something Things seem to be working reasonably well and then there are sort of the stuff that you're sort of humming and haing on um so obviously you you prioritize the I

mean I've I've sort of separated with people very very quickly because I think the function the functions that they were responsible for were barely breathing and at that point you know I I don't hesitate you know I move on quickly immediately um you know I go after Cultural issues you know people that are are just you know egregious violators of just things that we we all generally find normal and acceptable um you know we we very quickly separate um Behavior you know performance is something that we will give more time Behavior we won't and that's

because Behavior is a choice not a skill set and if if you can't choose you know the way a normal person would then uh you know because you know when you come in as a new leader Everybody's watching not just what you're doing what you're not doing and um so if you're not moving on things that people that everybody is seeing right and uh then you know your your leadership brand is already in question because you know apparently you're blind and apparently you're hesitating uh or you're tolerant of of behavior that you shouldn't be tolerant

of so yeah there's pressure because you know it's not just what you want to do It's the whole world's watching you know and um you know if you're hesitant uh you know to move that will not help you you know you said behavior is a choice not a skill set I've never heard of quite framed that way I think that's a very um that's a really interesting way to look at it but you also said that you sort of you'll give time for performance but not for Behavior how much time how do you learn like

when do you pull the plug when do you reinvest and how do you Think about that well look you know behavior is uh it'll it'll smack you in the face uh usually but I've also seen things happen underground where you know I wasn't aware of it and I wasn't seeing it but it was happening because of what happened on calls that I wasn't on and um you know one one time I uh I got tipped off by uh an employee of my former company that said look you know that office over there is a complete

you know the disaster and uh because they Knew people there and you know how sales people are right everybody talks doesn't matter what company you're in um and then you know we started you know basically peeling away the layers and all of a sudden you know you come across you know really bad situations Abus of situations you know harassment all these kinds of things uh because sometimes it's just not visible it's happening people don't like to talk about it you know they're worried that they're Ratting on people and they don't want to go to their

manager because they don't trust their manager you know they they don't trust HR you know which is usually you know your your second choice or maybe your first choice to go when you have you know real behavioral cultural problems and then it just it just keeps going on so um I'm I've been surprised before about how much you know wasn't visible uh to us not just to me but also the people that were that I had brought In that were close to me they were not seeing it either eventually you know believe me it it

we will we will find it and we will get to it and then we will we will move at lightening speed um because you you want to get bad behavior you know out of an organization fast that that is your leadership brand you you start tolerating that you know there there's there's no end in sight to what you're G to have trust is key to to moving quickly I would imagine with Velocity and organizations how do you go to establishing trust in a performance-based culture well you know people need to believe that you're that you're

fair and that you that it's not just personal preference right that you're not doing things because oh I don't like your haircut or whatever it has nothing to do with that it has to do with you know um how do we come together how do we behave as a group and you know if if if you have you know people Behaving in huge you know conflict with that then it's like yeah we are going to move on it um sometimes you know I I I've had situations especially with young people where hey we need to

do a reboot reset come back tomorrow I'm sure your parents didn't teach you you know to behave this way and you can do better um but tell me that you can and I've seen people come back literally over the weekend and be a different person because for whatever reason they were Leted astray by you know by managers that just you know were inspiring that kind of behavior that happens right people learn behaviors from what they see around them with the behavior that gets encouraged and they don't realize that they are just getting a drift you

know from from their own upbringing and their own you know personal principles because that's sort of the environment starts to you know really it's a slippery slope that they get on and all Of a sudden they're in a place where they don't even recognize themselves anymore and that that's where a reset can really work you know because basically you're regrounding them to you know normal behaviors and then things can work out really nicely uh from there on but most of the time unfortunately it's like look you know you're not a fit here you know this

is this is not who we are who we want to be and uh there there's zero tolerance I mean Behavior Like like you just said you know it's choosing you know it's it's it's just look we want you to be this way not that way and you know for some people it's like hey they learn behaviors in other companies it's part of who they are it's their culture this is not this is not for you man Alan malale put it to me this way he said uh when you're you're choosing a behavior that's not the

organizational behavior that's desired you're choosing not to be a part of the Organization I thought that was a powerful way to think about it yeah you're uh you're you're separating and you're in you're in violation of the the cult driving culture is really important because if you don't um you know other people will will fill that void right and you get subcultures in in a city or a division because strong personalities can do that so unless you are you are filling that void right um it will get filled by something Or somebody else and before

you know it you know you're just a grab bag of stuff and it's just a bunch of fev Dums running a company well you don't want that the company needs to stand for something this is who we are you know seems like there's a lot of organizations that um are more family based I mean they take a very similar approach to a family and they they don't necessarily think in terms of performance what are your thoughts on That well you know we we we've talked about this quite a bit in uh in recent years you

know I don't think a business is a family um because you know um unfortunately in a family you can't fire your family even though you sometimes want to um you have to tolerate them and deal with them and of sometimes in the most egregious way that is just the nature of families I mean all the dysfunction that comes with it um but in in business it's more like being a Professional sports franchise right you're you're assembling the best players and uh you know we may be friends but we don't have to be friends because we're

not coming together on the basis of friendship we're coming together on the basis of mission you know in other words share purpose and uh you know we're we're very demanding of each other and it's really about you know our respective contributions to the to the mission That's the basis of our Relationship so this much more akin to uh to professional sports I think that's the correct analogy no some companies don't want to be that way you know certainly uh you know companies like Salesforce and and even Google come to uh to mind but you know

in the end they're laying people off too by the thousands okay so I guess it it's not family after all you know so one thing that the best seem to be able to do and I think we hit on this in that answer is Two things stood out there they know when to walk away they know when to fold it they know when to to you know just okay it's over move on next one they're able to move on but they also know when to push their advantage and I'm thinking Tom Brady right he was

the ultimate sort of quarterback he would take the check down but he also knew when to push it down the field how do we learn when to how do we learn to cultivate those skills in ourselves how do we know when To push and how do we know when you know what this just isn't going to get us the outcome that we want best question I've been asked by an interview in an interview in my lifetime like that's an awesome question that nobody ever asks it's the question for anyone who's trying to be successful sustainably

successful when do you press how do you know when to press both in golf in the markets the the the Paradox is there sometimes you got to let it happen and Sometimes you got to make it happen and when people try to force force a result when they shouldn't like that's when when you get stopped out and the opposite is also true so how do you know when to oppress it Advantage number one I'll say about Brady don't forget lot of failure early and so what happens is when you failure fail early you start to

recognize what a real opportunity looks like and then oh by the way when that opportunity um presents itself there's a Lot of fuel to make it happen you're like oh like you should you know it's Mark Wahlberg in acting it's like you're letting me into this club okay there ain't no way I'm giving up my advantage so it becomes this Relentless you know one of the things about Tiger Woods that's so remarkable is is the only golfer and I mean this in the history of the game who's ever played better with a lead so even

Jack Nicholas who's arguably the best of all time Jack said I was better if I was trailing because what happens is when you're when you're chasing you know you're play with nothing to lose you're able to be Fearless so so that's a real Advantage as being the underdog Tiger Woods is the only one who is the favorite every week and would start with a lead and and then extend that lead blew the world away and and to this day it blows that because how do you do that how do you like that's why Greyhounds and

dog racing are Always chasing a rabbit the psychological Mech even in in running you have somebody who's pacing you right because we know the brain works in ways we're having something to Chase is the way to get the best out of yourself well how did Tiger Woods do that when he was in the lead the one being chased well he was playing against history so even when he was leading the tournament he was still trailing Jack necklace so he benchmarked he would index his thinking To the fact that he hadn't caught Jack Nichol he was

in his mind always chasing so it begs the question when you talk about judgment is knowing when to what an advantage looks like and when and how to press your advantage and when patience uh when the situation calls to do nothing and here's one way to assess it evaluate your why because what happens is when people press an advantage incorrect irly it's usually out of Impatience it's usually out of frustration it's happening right now in the markets there's not a lot of volatility in the market place right now and and you're on the your mandate

as an investor is to return well 10% right you say that's your number and you're only up 5% and there's no way to make money in your strategy all of a sudden it's like well I've gotta I'm gonna press whatever Advantage I have that's a low probability advantage and but you're Going to force a little Advantage you're going to make a mistake and then you're going to lose your job so number one is you have to question question what's underneath the desire so let's talk about desire for a minute which we haven't talked about which

what we need to talk about if you look at the Human Condition look at all the major religious Traditions one of the universalities of the human condition is desire and every school of thought has Found a way to try to deal with it so for example you look at Christian Catholicism how does Catholicism deal with desire well too much desire leads to um you you'll wreck your life and everyone else's right it could lead to real problems the desire so Catholics punish it with guilt what do the henst say hedonists say well you know if

you want it it's a good thing you satiate that desire if you have an it scratch it and we know that that leads to Overindulgence to sloppy life you know typically a drug habit in one way or the other you know you know sex you're gonna have an addiction you're gon to blow your life up if you're a hedonist Buddhist and Hindu say desire is the key thing that leads to suffering right so if I want this pen the moment that I want the thing that I can't have I feel a state of suffering so

all human suffering comes from desire and so and so the way to happiness is to remove all Desire to ex to get rid of all your worldly possessions and to sit in observation of yourself and so happiness is to want nothing so the universality of The Human Condition is desire but what we know is that that desire is the thing that leads to all the cognitive biases that that that almost all of the mistakes people make in life is a function that they want a particular outcome they want a particular thing the good of it

is desire as Ann Rand AR Articulates right as as Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations when he talks about free markets he says that that the desire leads to Innovation Innovation leads to to competition which eventually leads to the best product in the market which is what elevates the Human Condition and that's why proponents of capitalism and free markets you can just see it in modern day the world moves because because individuals innovate and evolve whether it's Bill Gates Steve Jobs Jeff Bezos has created $800 billion dollar of wealth for other people you know

you see the way free markets work they're a function of desire and that's what Freud called sublimation if you sublimate and channel desire uh into Evolution it's what creates great works of art architecture right andrean writes about this in in Fountain Head so desire channeled proper L can lead to some of the highest highs uh and the ele the best expression of The Human Condition The problem is the downside of Desire left unchecked leads to the kinds of behaviors that are duplicitous that desire run ack we all become a worst version of ourselves this happened

to Tiger Woods like don't forget the same desire that fueled arguably the greatest body of work in the history of sports the fuel that burned inside him you saw come out in his celebrations there's a lot of want in there but that's the same desire that when it got channeled the Wrong way that led to the bad decisions that you know led to blew up his marriage that led to you know to him getting these injuries and harming himself and he wouldn't stop practicing so he'd get injured he played the US Open on a broken

leg and one and so you have to go back to the first order variable which in his case is desire to to to answer the question and if you look the causal chain the way the dominoes fall in decisionmaking which is A cognitive act not an emotional one you have to understand what are the the the the the variables that have led to you wanting to push your advantage and so essentially in modern day analytics you're running probabilities you know if if if if you have a a trading strategy and the numbers say that you

have an advantage you know the old saying that if you don't know who the sucker at the table is you're the sucker ER and that's true in all games in the achievement Domains where there's a scoreboard and there's competition and so you have to find a way to map your advantages and know in the moment whether you have an advantage and if you do how much risk are you how much risk are you willing to take and what losses are you willing to tolerate and then the psychological component under that is can you handle losses

well and if you can't if you're the sort of person who's going to say you know if I lose this Much money on this trade it's going to meaningfully affect what I do in the future that's your tell so one of the things we do even though we try to are about The Human Condition from decision making you know as Antonio deasio writes in um in in in in searching for Spinosa you know he says like when you look at people with localized brain damage who have no ability to feel emotions their decision making is

not good when human beings get localized brain damage where They can't feel emotion their decision making is not better it's worse in fact so if you look at someone like you know I guess an enlightened individual they are not without emotion they have refined their emotional reactions in a way that elevates their senses so you know you want to push the advantage you have to evolve to a level where you're some version of a complete human being where you know yourself right the socratic dictum of Nai sutron know Yourself and know others complicated games require

complexity of thought you know life at the tail end of the curve does not lend itself to simplistic thinking you have to have complexity of thought though the decision is final you know the the decision yes or no is binary and and sometimes you know you you engage as what I call Caveman golf like SE ball hit ball um you know don't over complicate it um and and be decisive in your Decisions