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Episode Transcript:

Jefferson Fisher 00:00:00  Time is a great sifter of things like what matters right now rarely matters tomorrow. You think about what you were stressed about three days ago. You probably can’t remember, but in that moment, it was everything you had to get this done. And a great test for that is thinking of a time where you wanted to respond to somebody over email because you thought their email was snarky, and you type out a response and instead of sending it, you don’t and you wait. And then the next day you read it again. You go, I don’t really need to send this.

Chris Forbes 00:00:39  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.

Chris Forbes 00:01:06  But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:24  There are certain conversations we all postpone not because we don’t know they matter, but because we know they do. And so we wait for the perfect moment, which usually never comes in this conversation. Jefferson Fisher and I talk about when to speak up, when to wait, and how to know the difference. And one of my favorite ideas from this conversation that if something is still bothering you after time has done its sifting, it probably needs to be said. I also loved thinking of arguments as not things to be won, but knots to be untangled. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Jefferson. Welcome to the show.

Jefferson Fisher 00:02:07  Hey, Eric. Thanks for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:09  I’m excited to talk with you about your work book that just came out called The Next Conversation Practical Exercises for Arguing Less and Talking More.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:19  But before we get into that, I’d like to start, like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. Think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Jefferson Fisher 00:03:00  It tells me there’s two choices. You can either do things to improve your life, or you can do things to ruin your life. And either way, you could say they lead to the same destination and that that would be the end of our existence here.

Jefferson Fisher 00:03:16  But the difference is that what do we do at the time that we have to me? When I hear that, I kind of turn in my head to say, well, what I believe in, in my faith is what do you do when you’re born to be the wolf that does a lot of bad, and yet you strive to be the wolf that does a lot of good. And so it’s making it’s making the hard decision of, though you were born a bad wolf, how do you live a life of doing all the good that you can? And so to me, that’s a it’s a challenge of both, a joy when when trials are in front of you. Yes.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:50  It is certainly a challenge because that bad wolf can be particularly loud in a lot of circumstances. Yeah. So I want to start with an idea from your work that says never win an argument. Talk to me about that.

Jefferson Fisher 00:04:08  A lot of people think that you have to get into an argument in order to win it.

Jefferson Fisher 00:04:13  You want to win. You see lots of books. You see lots of articles on when every argument, how to win everything that you do. I, even though I’m an attorney, I’ll be the first to tell you winning an argument is not something you want to do. Winning an argument is a losing game, Eric. You lose relationships. You lose friendships. And really, all you’ve won is contempt. You’ve won that awkward silence between you. And you haven’t spoken for months because you were so set out on having the last word. So set out on saying no. They have to agree with me to win that element, to poke in their eye. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve talked to people who’ve, you know, if they’ve been estranged from a brother or a sibling or a child that they have. And it’s usually because there was a conversation that turned into an argument and somebody decided they had to win it, and what they did was lose a lot more.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:11  So usually when we’re in an argument, a lot of times we get into arguments that you look back on and you’re like, what were we even arguing about? But often there’s something there that matters to us.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:22  We want a certain outcome. There’s something we want to be different about the situation that we’re in. So what’s a good way to reframe that? So if I’m not aiming to win an argument, what am I trying to do when I’m in a conversation where me and the other person have a disagreement and it’s a disagreement that needs some kind of resolution, it’s not like I disagree with you about politics. I mean, it doesn’t matter, right? You could just let that go. But if we disagree about how we’re doing something with, say, one of our children. That is a discussion that, you know, we may not want to win, but we do have a point of view.

Jefferson Fisher 00:06:00  There’s a difference between arguing to be simply understood versus arguing on behalf of a certain action that you’re wanting to move for. So what I teach is you don’t want to see arguments as something to win. You want to see arguments as something to unravel. Meaning there’s a knot in the conversation between the two of you.

Jefferson Fisher 00:06:20  There’s something that is a kink in the water hose. There’s a reason why water’s not flowing. It’s because we got a kink in it. And most of the time I’d say when, like vast majority of the arguments that happen, let’s say, Eric, you and I are talking about, it could be politics, it could be the state of our world or what people should be doing. I’m not arguing against you. I’m arguing to be understood by you. I’m not fighting you. I’m fighting to be understood by you, and so much of it goes away when you actually stop a firm acknowledge that you can actually understand where they’re coming from, rather than fighting and saying no, your perspective has no merit. It counts for zero. If you just acknowledge this a little bit, there’s a lot more good that can be done. So the right frame of mind would be this. When you go into that next difficult conversation, have something to learn, not something to prove. When you go into the conversation with what can I learn from this? What can I get out of this? Rather than they have to agree with me, better things are going to happen in your life in general.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:34  You talked about conversations to be understood, in conversations to solve an issue. Does it make sense to usually orient around the understood part before you get to that second part of solving the issue?

Jefferson Fisher 00:07:48  Yes. So let’s say we’re in a meeting together And you throw out an idea. If I automatically just shoot it down. No, no, that’s the stupidest idea. Why would you even pose that? Is that going to give any good feelings from you towards me?

Eric Zimmer 00:08:05  Of course not.

Jefferson Fisher 00:08:06  Yeah, of course not. And that’s what we do with our spouse. That’s what we do with a lot of things. When somebody says, hey, I’m gonna do the thing. I know I don’t want to do that. We only like it if it’s our idea. It’s what I want to do. It’s what I want to initiate. And so it’s it’s like in a business meeting people, they will find ways to shoot down every idea you have, and yet find every way to try and uplift every idea they have.

Jefferson Fisher 00:08:30  I don’t like it because it’s not their idea. It’s like like in a husband and wife context. It could be the wife suggests something and the husband goes, no, no, no, no, I don’t want to do that, you know? And then all of a sudden he’s like, you know, it’s a good idea. We should do that. Like the very same thing that the wife said. It’s like, we just don’t like it if it’s if it’s not our idea. So what do you start with? You start at that element of acknowledging and understanding. It sounds basic, but so many people just don’t. Just don’t do it for me to sit down and say, hey, I hear you, that makes a lot of sense. I can imagine I’d feel the same way if I were you. Yeah, of course you would feel that way. Rather than me telling them that what they’re feeling isn’t true, or telling them why they shouldn’t feel that way.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:14  So I’m going to jump to slightly difficult situations here, and maybe we should be doing more of your framework to start.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:21  But I’m just going to kind of go there, which is a lot of times, let’s take a marriage dynamic. I could take an old marriage of mine as a dynamic. Things are so fractured that conversational repair can take a long time. So here’s what would happen with me. I would be like, all right, I’m just we’re not communicating. Well. I’m going to learn to communicate better. I would read a book on communication or something about couples, and I would come back with the general thing. You’re saying sort of the acknowledge the try and understand. And it was still just then the same attack would come and I would then go, well, this isn’t going to work like I tried. I’d get more mad, right? Like, well, I tried to be understanding. I tried to acknowledge their side of it, but they’re not doing that for me. So how would you counsel people to be patient with the process?

Jefferson Fisher 00:10:15  Let me ask, was this something that you ended up you said in a prior marriage, right?

Eric Zimmer 00:10:20  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:20  We did not work it out.

Jefferson Fisher 00:10:21  Okay. That’s what I’m saying. So that’s also an option. Yeah, right. We just have to find our reasonable. Like there’s certain people that you mix with. And this person is not reasonable to me, and I’m not reasonable to her. And. Right. But then they end up marrying somebody else. You know that. It’s like I found my. I found my reasonable person. we are not always going to be fitting like Legos. So that’s an option. There’s an option that how do you be patient with the process of knowing that most of the time big changes, personality changes, issues that you have to talk about are not things that are going to be solved in one conversation. We think that if I just talk to you once, you know, right in between all the busy things we have during the day, right after the kids get picked up from school, right when we’re tired and exhausted at the end of the day, and this is when I choose to have this conversation with you, that it should be as easy as flipping on a light switch in my brain, and usually big conversations.

Jefferson Fisher 00:11:16  What I like to say is, the bigger the topic, the longer of a conversation it’s going to have meaning. Feel the difference, Eric, of this of me saying, hey, okay, I need to decide something right now with you, right in this very moment, versus me saying, hey, Eric, I want to have a conversation with you. That’s important to me. I really want to have the conversation, you know, throughout this month or over the next few weeks where it’s okay. Now we have time to actually let it breathe. Now, we don’t have to force this. Now it’s we get to talk in perspectives rather than talking about Running against a brick wall. And usually it’s your head, you know, just hitting against it. So whenever you are able to draw it out, the better that conversation is going to be. So you take like a very hard impact issue and you kind of like you tease it. Like, I, my daughter who’s six, when her hair is getting long as a baby, you know, they get tangles, right? And it’s not like I can just grab a brush and just rip it out.

Jefferson Fisher 00:12:17  I can’t. That’d be. That’d be terrible. That’d be horrible. What do you have to do? You have to, like, grab each strand and, like, slowly tease it out to see how it takes time. It takes effort. You can’t do it by brute force. And so that’s the metaphor there in the conversation. If you’re able to leave enough time to go granular and go, okay, let’s look at the breakdown. Like what am I missing when you say that? What my brain says is give the time to show that kind of patience.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:45  That’s such a great line. Like, what am I missing if I assume that the person has a point? At least that makes sense in their mind. So there’s something I’m not seeing. It just means they have a perspective and I’m not really seeing it. So I love that question. You know, what am I missing? Or tell me more or what else? Another question would be not just how to have a conversation which will spend more time on, but when to have a conversation.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:16  Talk to me about how we think through when I in some cases, even if we should have a conversation.

Jefferson Fisher 00:13:24  There’s really a really three that I stand by when you have these kind of questions. And number one is does it need to be said that really need to be said number two. Did it need to be said now. And three the most important. Am I the one to say it? Because there are certain things in life that people just have to learn on their own. Like, as my grandfather would say, he’d said, look, I can only tell it to you. I can’t understand it for you. And there’s a lot of that. Well, you see, like on social media, people just go and type whatever posts and they think that they are really changing the world by just having some anger. Post up just what the world’s coming to. Yeah. And all they’re doing is just stealing their own joy when they could be probably going and playing with their grandkids. You know what I mean? When it comes to like, when to have a conversation, it needs to be on a time frame.

Jefferson Fisher 00:14:35  Most importantly, that is not theirs alone. Meaning you might have somebody let me give you an example. I had a guy who was picking his daughter up from school and why he was walking to go pick her up. One of the assistant principals or counselors came out and just started railing on him of an issue that it doesn’t matter, but just almost verbally attacking him. And he got sucked in and started giving it right back at that moment versus saying, I’ll schedule a time with you when it’s right for me. Instead of having that, you know, step into now, I’ll get to choose when I’m into this conversation. And it’s not going to be right now. So we get into the the vortex a lot of time, especially when people are saying stuff that ignites us, gets us aggravated, that we follow their time frame. When I haven’t at all asked myself, am I ready for this conversation? As an attorney, I imagine if I went into trial and I didn’t really know what the case was about, I just somebody said something and I didn’t have my evidence.

Jefferson Fisher 00:15:45  I didn’t have my documents. I didn’t have my exhibits. I didn’t have excerpts that I wanted, like I hadn’t had time to sift out how I feel about it and what they need to understand from it. And that’s what happens. We get up and we just decide to do it on the fly without really having a basis for it. And it’s that own time that you have to make sure that you, you speak on, on your time frame. Now you got to make sure that you’re also not doing it the other way. It’s a balance when you’re trying to push a conversation and the kids are in the middle of their bath and you’re trying to get dinner ready and okay, now. So half the time, the conversation about the budget, you know, that’s that’s that’s not going to happen. You know, for me, in my world, we’ll be in bed and I’m ready to just sleep and my wife will roll over and say something of like, okay, so I’ve been thinking, and it’s something very important.

Jefferson Fisher 00:16:36  And I’m like, this is why, what did you say? And I like barely one eye open. I’m ready to clock out. Yep. That’s not what her brain is. And so how do you how do you gauge that? Like, there’s I always have to say, like I want to talk about this. I will be much better to talk about this if we move it to tomorrow or this afternoon or later. And so how do you deal with that at a time where somebody puts you the conversation? That’s not a good time. Number one is to know when you’re ready. If you’re not ready for it, you need to voice that. And I say you voice that with I can tell. So number two would be I can tell, I can tell I’m not ready for this conversation. I can tell I’m not myself right now. I can tell I’m getting defensive. I can tell I that’s a way of having self-awareness in it. And number three, just you need to say, I want to talk about this, even if it’s something you disagree with, even if maybe you don’t want to talk about it, it’s still going to need to be addressed.

Jefferson Fisher 00:17:32  So it’s I want to address this. I need to address this later. I want to talk about this. I will be much better engaged. I’ll be a better person. I’ll be ready to, you know, get into this with you at a later time.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:13  It’s amazing how much of good conversation is saying some of the things that you just said, where it’s like we acknowledge what’s going on inside of us, or we acknowledge the dynamic or we acknowledge the challenge. And I just think that takes so many things that are happening inside of us and puts them out so people know where we are.

Jefferson Fisher 00:18:41  Yeah. I say that when you claim it, you control it. Meaning when I say how I’m feeling in the conversation, that signals why I’m responding that way. And it’s. It’s a sense of vulnerability. What does that mean? It’s a sense of connection to the other person. Not that we grow closer together, but that they understand me better. So if I’m talking to you and I get on this podcast and I say, Eric, I can tell I’m a little bit grumpy because my daughter woke me up at 430 and I’m a little sleepy, you know, like that’s wouldn’t you rather know that than you go? Why is he.

Jefferson Fisher 00:19:16  He’s just a grumpy person.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:17  He just doesn’t like me.

Jefferson Fisher 00:19:19  Yeah, yeah, that’s a perfect example. All of a sudden, you might start taking that personally. Yeah. Oh, well, they just don’t like me. And now I’m gonna. In fact, you know what? And now, because they don’t like me, I don’t think I like them. And now I’m gonna act a little bit different, and now I’m gonna have different thoughts. And I’m going to talk about them differently to other people. All because I didn’t voice that, that sense of awareness. So I can’t tell you how many times it’s helped me and helped other people in arguments. If I can just get to them and say, look, I can tell that I’m getting defensive or I can tell I’m getting defensive defensive here. Or let me rephrase that, I can I can tell that what you just said is getting me defensive, or I can tell hearing that is making me defensive. I’ll tell you, it is a strength into me.

Jefferson Fisher 00:20:05  Such a sign of a good communicator and attractive relaying conversation. When somebody can acknowledge that they’re getting defensive, that signals to me that that person is emotionally intelligent. And if you’re in it with him, you can have a really good conversation, even even when because I’ve had it where the other person goes. I don’t know if I’m saying this because I’m defensive or I’m saying this because I’m insecure. And I mean, I was just floored by that response because I’m like, that’s the kind of awareness of regardless of what you say, I’m going to believe you. I am going to be more engaged with you now because you’re not keeping your cards close to the vest, right? You’re putting them out there, and then I can put them out there rather than us. That’s. It’s kicking the water hose.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:51  I shut down in conflict. Like, I just kind of. It’s like I kind of go offline. You feel.

Jefferson Fisher 00:20:56  Like.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:56  You avoid it, I avoid it, but it’s even more than that.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:00  It’s like my brain goes blank, ecstatic. Yeah, I’m having a hard time knowing what to think. I’m just. It feels like sort of like the power is shutting down inside me a little bit. And I didn’t for a long time know how to say that. So it would drive some conversational dynamics that were not great because the person is coming to me with a problem or an issue, and I’m not saying anything, I’m not responding. And I just have found it much better to say, oh, I’m kind of having a problem where I’m shutting down a little bit. Give me just a second here Or I’m also someone who likes to think before I respond. Like I really want to take a moment and process, particularly in emotional moments. And I have also found that that is helpful for me to say, like, I heard you and I’m just processing everything you said is a way for me of the other person, then doesn’t take my quietness or my silence as I don’t care.

Jefferson Fisher 00:22:05  Correct.

Jefferson Fisher 00:22:06  You said some important things. One is it’s very important that when you don’t want to respond and you don’t really have a response, you got to acknowledge what they said. There’s a difference between saying nothing at all, but she’s only going to upset them more, you know, versus you saying, I hear you. I need to take some time thinking about my response to that. Like, oof, that sounds pretty strong to me to say, I’m going to choose my timing here. I’m going to think about what you said. I need some time to think about what you said before I say something. That, to me, is a sign of big strength. And I’ll tell you in my my own marriage, when it gets to a point where I’m not in a good place. I what we say is, I’ll say I’m in the red, meaning like a like a battery. Like, it’s it’s typically I mean, it’s I’m 20% or below right now of just how I’m feeling. And if I say I’m in the red, she knows that.

Jefferson Fisher 00:23:12  Okay, well, we’re going to time out. We got to stop. We got to recharge. That means, you we we’re going to have this conversation tomorrow. We’re going to take some time. We got to take a breather. And so as soon as I can say, I could tell I’m in the red. But, I mean, we’ve been very long enough. She knows when I’m in the red. So she she’ll sometimes pre-emptively go, I can tell you’re in the red right now. We’ll, we’ll talk about this this evening. And so yeah, but what I’m saying is damage, real damage is done.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:38  Yes.

Jefferson Fisher 00:23:39  When you don’t voice that, you’re in the red. And more so when the other person knows you’re in the red and they keep pushing anyway, that creates like irrevocable damage to a relationship because that breeds contempt, that breeds resentment. I was crying, uncle. And you still didn’t let go. Like, that’s the kind of stuff that you will hold against them for a very long time, because now that’s separate from the actual issue of the conversation.

Jefferson Fisher 00:24:12  It’s not about the thing anymore.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:14  The thing it’s about how you were treated.

Jefferson Fisher 00:24:17  Exactly.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:18  Or how you treated someone else.

Jefferson Fisher 00:24:19  Yeah. Now, now it’s a different level.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:21  I agree, the art of knowing when nothing good can come from continuing the conversation is so important. Like, I’ve just realizing, like, okay, I’m in the red, she’s in the red, however you want to call it. We are beyond the point that anything constructive can happen, and anything that we continue to talk about is likely going to be destructive. And knowing that, I think is so important.

Jefferson Fisher 00:24:47  It’s a difference between having a relationship and ending your relationship. I mean, it’s it’s where you have so much animosity that it’s not from the actual thing. It’s that you talked about or argue. It’s about something much deeper. That’s like where you could have solved it. You really could have made everything better. Have you just addressed that little? Not like if you had just taken the time, maybe you needed to use some tweezers and just, you know, tease it out, but instead it’s just making it’s it’s just a big jumble of like an open faced fishing rod, like you just it’s so much, so tangled that you go.

Jefferson Fisher 00:25:36  I would rather throw this away than put through the effort of going through every single string to do this. And so that’s what happens when people say, I can’t. It’s not worth it to me. I am tired, I don’t want this anymore because I’m just in so much of a knot and it is incredibly easy to do. Yep, yep.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:01  It is very, very easy. So I want to go back to when to have a conversation, and I want to flip it to me, deciding when I should have a difficult conversation with someone else. Like, how do I know that I should speak up? And then how do I know when the right time to speak up is?

Jefferson Fisher 00:26:22  The time is a great sifter of things like what matters right now rarely matters. Tomorrow. You think about what you were stressed about three days ago. You probably can’t remember, but in that moment it was everything you had to get this done. And a great test for that is thinking of a time where you wanted to respond to somebody over email because you thought their email was snarky, and you type out a response and instead of sending it, you don’t and you wait.

Jefferson Fisher 00:26:50  And then the next day you read it again. You go, I don’t really need to send this doesn’t really it’s not going to matter. Yeah, I can tell you that. Somebody was me many times as an attorney where you have I have the sharpest email you’ve ever said that. I’m just it’s full of things that I know. I’m getting it off my chest. And then I read it the next morning, and I almost laugh at of like, what? What was I going to do? Sending that?

Eric Zimmer 00:27:14  I had to set a rule for myself. I can’t send any emails after 4 p.m..

Jefferson Fisher 00:27:18  That’s like.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:19  Because what would happen if I get through all my meetings for the day? I’m tired. I’m trying to get out the door, I’m in a hurry, I’m a little agitated and so on, and I’m flying through emails and I just had to learn, Like particularly. Like anything. That is it all sticky. I can draft it, but I just shouldn’t send it correct. And to your point, I would come in the next day and almost always be like, hang on, I want to do that differently.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:43  Even if it was just because I was rushing, even if it was just because I was in a hurry, you know, taking a little bit longer on an email that like, there’s some emotional content too. Yeah. I have found again and again to be one of the most helpful things I did back in my previous career.

Jefferson Fisher 00:28:01  I think about like when, let’s just say 1800s, like you sent letters, like you spent time thinking about what you wanted in that letter, you know, and you.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:13  Don’t have to go back to the 1800s. I mean, I’m old enough that I used to communicate with people to me.

Jefferson Fisher 00:28:18  I was thinking like, oh, I just went on like a Civil War tour, and I was thinking of, like, a stagecoach. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of, like, you know, you get the letter from your your love. Who’s a they like, hang on to this letter. You know, that’s like five sentences. And it really, really doesn’t give much.

Jefferson Fisher 00:28:35  But that’s not the world we live in now. So it’s not something to.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:40  No, it is not.

Jefferson Fisher 00:28:40  Yeah. It’s not like we’re going to go back. We’re not. We live in a different age. And that just means we got to be careful about how fast. How quick. Like, you don’t get points for the quick draw response. You don’t get an extra sticker. You don’t get a gold medal. There’s not a stopwatch where people goes. And yes, we now have a broken world record for the fastest text response, you know, email response in the world. There’s no award that’s given for that. And rarely does. The thing that is said fast. Rarely is the thing that is said fast excepted. Well, that’s the whole point of when I teach. Let your first word be your breath. When I when I can breathe and actually hear the question and show you in signaling that I am listening and that I’m analyzing and that I want intention, I want to show you that what I am about to say is something I’ve thought about, that I’ve given my precious time to think.

Jefferson Fisher 00:29:34  It’s easier said than done, for sure. But. But time is a great sifter. And so how do you do that? Like you said, that rule of nothing after 4 p.m.. That’s great. You get a text message. It’s okay to leave some time. What I’ll do if I get a text message in the morning, and I know it’s in the middle of doing stuff with kids, I’m already. I’m in kind of a work mode. I will read it, then I swipe and I mark it unread again. So like so I can remind myself I’m going to look at this with fresh eyes later, because otherwise I read it and then life happens. And it’s been 30 days before I’ve ever responded to it disappears.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:33  I still am figuring out how to manage my text inbox. Like, I’m really good with email. I kind of got that all figured out. But like you said, it’s that text. It’s the ones that get me are the ones where I’m like, okay, this deserves a thoughtful response more than what I can just type out.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:49  So I want to give this the time it deserves. And then, like you said, if I’m not careful, it just it disappears. Buried under 15 other texts. And I look back, like you said a month later, I’m like, I cannot believe I did not respond to that.

Jefferson Fisher 00:31:03  Yep, that’s exactly right. And so it’s how do you how do you find your own system? And each everybody does. Everybody has to find their own system of how you want to communicate to the people, people around you. Because the sad thing is, it’s not just text to strangers. Like it could be a text to your mom, your dad, a grandparent. Like it’s hard to make sure you’re devoting time to distinguish between what requires an actual sitting down for a thoughtful response. So how do you make sure that you know when to have a conversation is when you’ve been able to inject enough time into the conversation to slow it down and be able to respond thoughtfully?

Eric Zimmer 00:31:43  I get emails from listeners who often have.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:46  I mean, they’re in the middle of a really difficult situation, and they’ll honor me by sharing that with me. And I’m always in this. I’m trying to sort of balance like, well, I don’t I don’t want to reply to them in a month and I don’t have a quick answer. Right. Like, I really sometimes I am, I’m like, yeah, you know, I kind of recognize the pattern and but a lot of times I’m like, whoa, all right, that’s heavy. Let me, let me give that some time. So I’m going to keep coming back to when because I have the tendency to say, nah, now’s not the right time and now’s not the right time. My problem is not often that I pick the right time and I’m thoughtful. My problem is I convince myself that it’s never the right time because I don’t want to do it.

Jefferson Fisher 00:32:34  Yeah. Yeah, that’s I, we we can all relate to that when it comes to the hard conversations, the really difficult conversations, the longer they sit, the more they fester.

Jefferson Fisher 00:32:47  Let’s put it in terms of the truth. Telling somebody the truth, the shorter you can make the distance between the truth and verbalizing the truth and giving somebody that truth. The shorter you make the distance, the better it’s going to be. But the longer you wait to share that truth, the worse it becomes to where all of a sudden, now you’re living the lie because you were uncomfortable enough to tell the truth in the shorter time period. Maybe it’s somebody who you knew that you were going to let go from their job. Maybe it’s news you didn’t want to share with your company. Maybe it’s something that happened that you didn’t want to tell your spouse. They will find out eventually. It’s going to happen whether you’re alive or not, and it’s going to be the rare chance that people don’t find out the truth. And the longer you wait, the more painful it is. And so the faster you can have the hard conversation, the better people appreciate it. And I’ll tell you, when you proactively tell people the hard thing, the easier it is for them to take in, the better your relationship becomes.

Jefferson Fisher 00:34:05  Like when you and you can forecast the problem spots. That’s the difference between, let’s say, with your spouse or somebody at work or a business partner. You got a bad report on something and you don’t really want to share with, you know, the other coworker that you have. The longer you wait and then they find out later and you could have told them, but you didn’t. That doesn’t help your relationship. That hurts your relationship. So that’s what I would say. It’s going to hurt, but the faster it goes, the easier it feels. It doesn’t. It’s it’s contradictory to think that way. But usually the more painful of a topic it is, the faster you say it, the better it feels. Really?

Eric Zimmer 00:34:47  Yeah. I mean, I think what you said, there’s really important because the more distance you put in there, that distance itself becomes part of the problem. When you eventually get to talking about it, there is the thing itself. And then there’s the why did you let it go on this long before you said something? Exactly right.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:05  So now we have two problems in the conversation. The news we didn’t want to share, the thing we didn’t want to do. And now also the frustration from the other person. The other sort of rule I have for myself. I don’t follow this one perfectly. I don’t follow any of them perfectly. But is that I ask myself, am I ever going to want to have this conversation honestly? Like, because we can be like, I’ll do it when I feel this, or I’ll do it and I’m like, am I ever going to want to do it? And if the answer is no, then the sooner I do it, the better for the reasons you just stated, but also the amount of time I have to spend dreading it reduces dramatically. Yeah, yeah yeah. Because if I’m like, I know I should say something, but I’m not gonna do it right now. I’m not going to do it right now. Then I’m carrying that dread around. And so if I’m like, I’ll never want to have this conversation or there’s never a good time for it.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:58  Yeah, I probably should just try and do it as soon as I can.

Jefferson Fisher 00:36:01  It’s like, yeah, having to tell somebody, no, somebody’s invited you to a party and you really want to say no. Instead you just kick it. You’re like, let me see. I don’t know, I’m just wanting to see my schedule opens up. You use that excuse knowing full well you don’t want to go. Yeah. And it ends up that you’re the one who, like you said, has to carry that anxiety. Or that thought is now living in your head rent free. when you could have been done with it. Yeah. Weeks before.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:29  This is a really dumb example. I was on a sales call where somebody was trying to sell me something this morning. It was something I was interested in, and I wanted to get on the call. I mean, I’m not saying, like, I got a spam call. This was something I entered into voluntarily, and I liked the product and I’m interested in it, and it’s more than I will spend right now.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:46  And so as we were going on, I was in the sort of like, well, I’ll just let her continue to demo the thing and then I’ll get off the call and be like, oh yeah, let me think about it. And I just thought, you know, maybe it’s because I’ve listened to some of your stuff recently. I just thought the kind thing to do is just to tell this woman right now, I’m not going to be able to afford that. I’ve saved her 20 more minutes of demo. I’ve saved emails back and forth. Oh yeah, I’m thinking about all because I’m uncomfortable saying that. And I just was like, I’m just going to give her the gift of just saying no.

Jefferson Fisher 00:37:22  Yes. They just want you to. They want you to choose. I mean, but it’s also, like you said, it’s kind for me to say. If you had said, oh, let me think about it. I’ll get back to you. Let me. And then what does she do? She follows up two weeks later.

Jefferson Fisher 00:37:34  She has to make sure she’s tracking you in her CRM, you know, and like.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:39  It’s in her pipeline.

Jefferson Fisher 00:37:40  She’s.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:41  Gone predicting one.

Jefferson Fisher 00:37:42  Yeah, exactly. All that stuff. Or you could just cut it and say, hey, look, you’ve done a great job with the presentation. Really like the product. It’s not the right time for me right now. So you can go ahead and put me on the the no list. I really, you know, appreciate your time. Hope you have a great day. Like that’s much better.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:58  Yeah. So I did that today and it was good. And again, I think some of it was probably immersing myself into your framework. I want to ask another question. I seem to be making this entire thing about when to have a comment.

Jefferson Fisher 00:38:15  It’s a good question.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:15  To have a conversation, but but I’m going to come back to another element of it. This is a very difficult question to answer. I’m more interested in how you would think about it.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:25  There are certain things in relationships that do not get resolved. You don’t get what you want or you. You realize that this is just part of the relationship that is maybe not going to change. It’s something you’re going to accept and it bothers you. And so there’s this balance of every time I’m bothered by it, I would feel like, well, I guess this is this is pertinent to experiences in my life that I’ve had. I would feel like, well, I just don’t want to bring it up all the time. We’ve already talked about this. We sort of hit a place where we’ve said, like, this is something we’re going to live with. But not saying anything is also problematic because there are times that that’s what’s operating in my brain. I’m feeling frustrated by that situation again. So how would you think through in those kind of situations, finding that balance where you’re not constantly being, you know, just sort of beating your head against a wall versus ignoring how you feel.

Jefferson Fisher 00:39:25  Well, we definitely don’t want to ignore how we feel if that is truly how we feel.

Jefferson Fisher 00:39:29  That’s the first thing that goes into my head. Second is when you feel bothered by something. That’s one. That’s one way of knowing. If it’s a conversation that needs to be had, that it continues to bother you. You reach into your pocket and it’s still there. It’s hanging over your thoughts.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:47  You let time do the sifting, and even after the sifting, it’s still there.

Jefferson Fisher 00:39:52  It’s still right. That’s right. And you go, okay. That, to me, is a clue that I need to say. So this is this is what it’s going to be. I think from a framework standpoint, an approach, it’s much better to say, hey, look, I, I’ve been thinking about this. You’re something you said like two weeks ago and it’s still bothering me. That’s why I need to tell you that is a lot better than this snippy little, you know, response that you might have had right in that at that moment, is it sitting and still? Something doesn’t sit well with me.

Jefferson Fisher 00:40:24  You have to say it. If you don’t, it will hover and stay in your pocket till the end of time. You’ll still be probably 60 years old, 70, 80, 9000 years old and go, I should have said this, you know, because it’s you’re not going to forget that kind of stuff. You’ll forget the little things, but you won’t forget that kind of stuff. And the closer they are to you, the longer you’re gonna remember it. Think about it this way. Everybody remembers when they were on the playground at school, and there was somebody who said something to you that wasn’t very nice. They made fun of your hair, your looks, your weight, how fast you were, whatever. And they gave you an insecurity at like age six. And you probably know that and can point it out and remember it for the end of time. I will never forget the time that I was eight. I just got new glasses and a girl came up to me and called me four eyes.

Jefferson Fisher 00:41:26  I was crushed all right, because I was. So it’s the first time I’d ever had glasses. And, it’s like you, you remember that kind of stuff. So the point is, when you have those moments where it’s really bothering you, you gotta voice it because it’s not going to go away, or there’s certain things in life that we’re going to just carry with us. So what do you do with that? Whenever you feel like you are in a place where I need to say something, that’s when you approach them with exactly what you need to say. Because if if it’s just left unsaid, I don’t think that’s the kind of life we want to have. You want to travel light y y, carry a bunch of baggage that is gonna always hover. And I feel like a lot of people go through life with a lot of baggage that they could have let go a long time ago, but rather than doing this and open up their hand. Yeah, they clench it.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:17  Travel light, I like that, yeah.

Jefferson Fisher 00:42:19  In your conversations for sure. In your communication. Travel, travel light. The more you start getting in your head about other people. And there’s a lot of people I know who kind of get neurotic. So distance after like conversations, they’ll be, oh, I shouldn’t have said that. Oh, why did I say this? And they like over explain and they overthink and then they I think that’s that’s always that’s too much baggage. Need to travel light. Carry on. You need to bring a carry on.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:44  Speaking of what you just said there, talk to me about over explaining what it is, what it sounds like and how to stop doing it, or why to stop doing well, both how and why to stop doing it.

Jefferson Fisher 00:42:56  Over explaining is exactly what it’s I mean, it’s self describing. It’s saying too much more than what the situation in normal social society would say. It’s called for. I have people well, let’s put put it in a term of an example of us. If you ask me a question of what did I do yesterday? And all of a sudden I start talking about a mental breakdown I had at the age of 14 or something like that.

Jefferson Fisher 00:43:24  I don’t know, I’m making it up that you’d be like, oh, that’s a little, that’s a little much. That’s that’s not what we’re going for. You know, there’s people who I’ve heard that they’ll have like a pizza delivery or somebody, and then next thing you know, the pizza delivery guy is just there and he’s like, ma’am, I gotta go back to the car because they’re just wanting to, like, use them as their therapist.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:46  Yeah. Do you ever see the movie airplane?

Jefferson Fisher 00:43:47  Yeah, I know.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:48  The scene I always think about is anybody who sits next to the pilot because he just won’t stop talking. Like there’s one scene where, like, the guy next to him is trying to light himself on fire. And there’s another where you see, like, somebody hanging themselves because they’re sitting next to him.

Jefferson Fisher 00:44:02  They can’t, they can’t, they can’t. They can’t deal with it.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:05  They just can’t do it.

Jefferson Fisher 00:44:06  Yeah. So over explaining to natural, it’s normal. And the reason why we do it is really more of an insecurity.

Jefferson Fisher 00:44:13  We feel that the more we say, the more will be liked, the more we will be believed. So we have this tendency to give more because we feel like what we said wasn’t enough. And it’s the same thing with even. I mean, you could make the metaphor a lot of different ways in life, but that’s really what it comes down to. If I’m new at the office or I’m new at work and or I’m leading a team, there’s a tendency to kind of over explain because you’re afraid that you’ll sound like you don’t know enough of what you know about, but that the weird thing about it is, the more words it takes to tell the truth, the more it sounds like a lie. The more words it takes for you to answer, the more it sounds like you really don’t really know what you’re talking about. It’s a balance of things. And so what I teach is instead of being a waterfall of information and let your message just gets swept away. Instead, I want you to be a well, ride to where people can come to you and draw the knowledge and take exactly what they need.

Jefferson Fisher 00:45:19  It’s not too much, it’s not too little. They’re able to come to you and ask, and you’re able to provide without feeling like you are over explaining, because deep down it’s it’s really an insecurity.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:33  Yeah. I think so much over explaining that I’ve done in my life, and I still have some of it. It’s one of the things I notice about you in the content you do, and in this conversation. You say something and then you’re done. Probably right? Yeah. Which is really good. I will find I’ll explain something and then often I’m scanning the other person or people and I’m not getting quite the response I want. So then I’ll try and say it a slightly different way. And like you said, you end up sounding like you don’t know what you’re talking about and confused. And often, if it goes on too long, like people who had to sit next to the guy in airplane. So how did you learn to do that?

Jefferson Fisher 00:46:12  Yeah, you can definitely sound like you’re floundering.

Jefferson Fisher 00:46:14  You know, if you if you kind of get in that. Yeah. It’s because, Eric, we’re terrible judges. We’re terrible subjective judges of our objective words. We are our own worst critic. And so we feel like I didn’t get the reaction I wanted, just like you said. So let me let me approach it a different way. When they probably thought how you first said it was just fine, and most likely they’re not even thinking about you to begin with. Right. They’re they’re thinking of in their head of like, do I look like I’m engaged or what am I having for lunch today? Like, we’re our brains are always going around, you know? I mean, how many people, when they listen to a church sermon, they might listen to that sermon. I bet you 30%. The 70% is all the other things that they think they have going on in the week. What’s happening? Where are they eating for lunch? Oh, we got family coming over. I mean, it’s hard.

Jefferson Fisher 00:47:05  It’s hard. And that’s when you’re sitting down and being still and being quiet. All right. it’s not like everything else gets better. So a lot of it for me was it’s hereditary. My dad very much his way. My grandfather’s. There’s a lot that I was raised around in the courtroom I’ve seen. I mean, I trained people on how to take depositions. And so I teach on being very succinct in only answering the question. And here’s the thing. I trust you, Eric, that if you wanted to know more, you’d ask more. I teach my witnesses. I’d say, don’t do their work for them. Don’t try and guess and say, oh, I see where you’re going. Let me continue to give you more information. Trust that if they want to know, they will ask. I just give them that. You don’t have to be the curator of the entire experience. It’s not going to be that way. And so if they want to know, they’ll ask, you know, people who over explain because they feel like I didn’t say enough in my head.

Jefferson Fisher 00:48:10  So now I have to give more. And usually it ends up being in a bad place. But when you say something very concisely and very clean, has kind of a clean edge to it, it doesn’t just, you know, dribble out. It sounds better, it sounds more confident, it sounds more controlled. Doing this whole process of the videos, I make this whole different world from being a an attorney. It was hard for me to talk more often on the first few podcasts that I was on a few years ago, because I didn’t give enough, because it was like some people would want you to continue to kind of talk and rolling, then you kind of get the rhythm of it, but otherwise you have to believe in the words that you give.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:51  In the workbook and in the book that spawned the workbook, you talk about saying it. You have three rules. Say it with control. Say it with confidence. Say it to connect. Do I have those right?

Jefferson Fisher 00:49:05  Yeah. You got all of them right? Yeah.

Jefferson Fisher 00:49:06  Those are the I was trying to put it into a framework that I could. I could teach the people. What’s the best way to try and communicate?

Eric Zimmer 00:49:14  You talk about framing conversations. What is a frame for a conversation, and how do we create one?

Jefferson Fisher 00:49:21  When you look at a picture, most of the time there’s a frame around it and a painting will actually look different depending on the frame that is on a frame enhances that imagery more than you think. It’s in a good. And a lot.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:37  Of times makes it.

Jefferson Fisher 00:49:38  Worse or makes it worse. Exactly right. But yeah, you know, at museums, most of the time we don’t even notice the frame because it’s doing its job. It’s it’s enhancing the picture. A frame is a way of structuring a conversation to make sure that the ultimate destination is where I want to take it. It’s not manipulating. That’s not being pushy. That is setting up a world that provides safety and provides certainty for both you and me. If I can eliminate the variables of where the conversation is going to go.

Jefferson Fisher 00:50:15  The safer you are and the more certain you’re going to be of. Okay. I’m good with talking about this. Imagine being, you know, of what they call those spaghetti bowls, like at a traffic huge metropolitan city. It’s everybody’s going everywhere. Like, that’s incredibly stressful just to look at. But if I no go, no, no, no, we’re going to go straight shot from A to B. You want to come with me. It’s like, okay I can do that. I know, like I like to say is you have those meetings where people go, alright guys, we got a whole lot to talk about. And everybody kind of groans because nobody feels like you talked about all that. You talked, but you didn’t really get anywhere. So when you have everything to say, you have nothing to say at the end of it. So what what does a frame sound like? I break it down into three things. Number one is I tell the person where I want to go, what I want to talk about.

Jefferson Fisher 00:51:04  That’s it. Just what I want to talk about. two. I tell them the end. I mean, I tell them what I want to walk away from. That’s what I like. That’s the phrase I like to use. What I want to walk away from. Take away from the conversation. I mean, what’s the one nugget of my purpose and what I need from this conversation? What am I taking with me? What am I putting in my pocket, underneath my arm and taking it with me? Three I get your buy in into the conversation. Make sure you feel good about it. So what does that sound like? It could be as simple as, hey Eric, I like to talk to you about what you said last Wednesday, and I want to walk away from that conversation feeling like you and I are on the same page. Can we do that? And now, you know, Eric, I’m not trying to talk to you about X, Y, and Z. You don’t have all this anxiety.

Jefferson Fisher 00:51:51  Imagine me saying, hey, can I talk to you about some stuff on like later today? I just got some stuff on my mind. It’s you’re like stuff. What are you talking about? That’s like me texting you and go, we need to talk.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:03  Exactly. I was going to. That’s what I was saying. That phrase that causes dread. Yeah. We need to talk. Nobody like, oh my God.

Jefferson Fisher 00:52:10  Nobody gets that and goes, yes, this is the best news ever. Eric wants to talk. This is.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:15  So.

Jefferson Fisher 00:52:15  Great. Yeah, like nobody high fives about that. They go, okay, something’s something’s terribly wrong is what we do. And because usually it doesn’t mean anything good. So if I can eliminate that anxiety, the uncertainty we want to know, is there a bear in the bush, like, what’s what’s why do you want to talk? Yeah. If I can put that out front, the better of a conversation we’re going to have. So it can be positive.

Jefferson Fisher 00:52:44  It can also address things that are more negative. Hey, Eric. Something that’s really on my mind that’s been bothering me. And I want to talk to you about. It’s. It’s about the comment you made about two weeks ago at the, at that meeting. And what I want to walk away from is you knowing that I, I didn’t appreciate that and I really want to talk about it. Can we do that? You’re not going to say no. I’ve never had any time. Say, can we do that? Can we do that? Like, everybody just kind of nods. And now you know exactly what the conversation is going to be about and exactly what the point is. What’s how do we know when the conversation is done, when we’ve checked the box of that understanding or whatever it is? It’s it’s setting the goalpost.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:27  What would be one takeaway from this conversation that people could do today that would improve their communication?

Jefferson Fisher 00:53:35  Well, people can learn from our conversation today is that timing is everything when it comes to conversation.

Jefferson Fisher 00:53:43  Well, you can really nail down when to have a conversation, not just when you want to have it or when they want to have it. But there’s a balance that we have been able to talk about here that’s going to give really practical tips and help a lot of people. And the good news is, it doesn’t matter when they hear the podcast, it’s going to apply no matter what.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:03  Beautiful. Well, thank you so much. You and I are going to continue in the post-show conversation where we’re going to talk about your three rules that you give in your book about having better conversations. Listeners, if you’d like access to that and add free episodes and the joy of supporting the show, go to one you feed net. Jefferson, thanks so much. It’s been a real pleasure.

Jefferson Fisher 00:54:27  Thanks for having me, Eric.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:28  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do.

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Episode Transcript:

Eric Zimmer  00:00

The inner critic is usually, though not always, inhibitory. It’s trying to stop you from doing something. When my inner critic whispers that I’m not good enough to write this book, the action that naturally follows from that belief is not to write at all. A wise response is to take the action that aligns with what you believe in and know is good for you, regardless of what the critic is saying.

Chris Forbes  00:34

Welcome to the one you feed throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true, and yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer  01:18

Hello, everyone. This is a special book edition of the one you feed. And we’re going to do something different here, something I have not done in a long time, which is going to be a solo episode for those of you who’ve been around with us for way back when, I used to do these more often, and I don’t quite know why I fully got away from them, but I haven’t done one in a while, but I’m just going to talk for the next period of time about ideas from my book. Now, one thing I will say about my book is that it is packed full of ideas. For better and worse, lots of people advise me that I’m trying to say too much in one book that I should make it about one simple little thing and do that. And my experience is, I’ve read a lot of books like that, and I’ve come across a lot of these. They are books that could have been said in an essay. There’s no reason for them to be all the pages they are. I think this book is very different than that, and I think that that is good for the type of person listening to this show, someone who cares about ideas, who cares about nuance, who doesn’t believe in easy answers and cliches, because life does not reduce down to those and this book does not do that either. It resists tidy and easy answers, which is part of what I think makes it such a good book. And again, my friends who told me the thing to do probably sell more books because it’s easier to market, as you can tell by the way I’m talking about this. But what I wanted to do here is highlight five insights that come out of the book. I think there are a whole lot more. There’s a whole lot of subtlety in here, but these are five, let’s call them things I could just pluck out and talk about in isolation. So I thought I would do that these ideas I had to really think about because the book was chosen as part of the next big idea club, Book Club, which is something that Susan Cain Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Grant do, where they select books each month that they

Eric Zimmer  03:30

think are valuable. And they chose my book, and I had to create a little something for them about some of the insights from the book. And so this is that, but a lot more casual. Me just kind of talking about it. And the first insight is that little by little, a little becomes a lot. You’ve heard me say that so many times, the title of the book is obviously how a little becomes a lot. And that makes this the first idea. Now you’ve heard some version of this idea, probably from me, but we hear it in popular culture all the time. Rome wasn’t built in the day. Slow and steady wins the race. You eat an elephant one bite at a time. And yet, when we try and make change in our own lives, we can’t help but hope for faster results. But the good news is that meaningful, lasting transformation doesn’t take a lightning strike miracle or a willpower of steel or some huge epiphany. It takes the simple idea above. But when I say little by little, I do mean something very specific. I mean low resistance, actions done consistently over time in the same direction. Low resistance is about choosing something that we will actually do. Consistency is about repetition. And in the same direction means that all the little steps are headed towards the same thing. So I want to talk. Talk about each of those aspects, because I think they’re important. Low resistance actions. These are actions that you can get yourself to do. They’re going to be different person to person. So this is not a repeat of bj fogg’s idea of tiny habits or get 1% better. What it means is we’ve got to find the behaviors that we are able to get ourselves to do consistently. An example I often give of this is meditation. When I started trying to meditate, it was really hard for me. I was trying to do it for 30 minutes, because that’s what all the books I was reading said you need to do 30 minutes or 45 minutes or an hour, there was no internet. There was some weird guy who taught TM. That’s a fun story. Actually, on my way to my first transcendental meditation class when I was 18, we had to bring white handkerchiefs. And I have, I mean, I’m an 18 year old kid in 1988 it’s not like I’m carrying around handkerchiefs in my sport coat. So I went to a department store that if you are old enough and you lived in the Midwest, is a name you will not have heard in a while, which is gold circle. And I went to gold circle, and I did what I was prone to do in those days, which was shoplift. So I shoplifted my white handkerchiefs on my way to my great spiritual awakening. And I got arrested. Luckily, they let me go, and I still made it to Transcendental Meditation, where we put some fruit and flowers on my white handkerchief, and I was given the secrets of the universe.

Eric Zimmer  06:36

Not not actually I was taught to do TM, but meditation was really hard for me, and doing it for 30 minutes or 45 minutes or an hour was incredibly difficult because it was like pandemonium in my brain. I’ve joked before on the show, it was like the dark circus came to town. I would sit down to try and do it, and it was so hard to do, and I could only stay with it for a few days or maybe a week or maybe a month at the longest, but then it was too hard and I would give up. Now there are other people who sit down to meditate and find it to be a somewhat peaceful experience. So for them, sitting for 30 minutes in meditation might not have been that hard, but it was incredibly hard for me, so low resistance is going to look really different for me versus them. Same with you, depending on the thing you’re doing, low resistance might look very different from you, from your neighbor, from someone else. We have to find what is low resistance for us, done consistently over time, means we just keep doing it. That’s how a little becomes a lot. These things accumulate and then in the same direction is really important, because I believe that we are in a world right now where we are given more ideas about the way we should change our life in an hour than most people would have encountered in five years before get on Instagram, if you follow this kind of stuff, and you’re gonna see a load of them, you should be meditating. You should be doing yoga. You should be doing strength training. You should also be getting enough protein cold plunging. You should be journaling, doing morning pages. The list goes on and on, and I’m not even naming all the weird stuff, right? That’s just the common stuff. It’s a massive list. And the problem for a lot of us is that we try one of these things for a very short period of time, and then we quit, and then we do something else, and then we stop doing that, and then we do something else, and we’re all over the place that does not work. Lots of little things scattered. All over does not lead to a lot. It leads to feeling scattered and feeling like you failed at 50 things instead of just one thing. So going in the same direction is important. Now there’s a reason that little by little works, and I want to explain it in a little bit more detail. The harder something is to do, the more motivation we need to do it, the easier it is, the less motivation we need. So we can think of the challenge of difficulty and motivation as sort of an overall resistance to a given action. Right? The more hard it is, and the less we’re motivated, the more resistance we face. So there are two ways we could lower that resistance. The first is we can raise our motivation level, which is a little bit easier to say than it is to do. Motivation is more a feeling than it is anything else, and feelings don’t have levers that we can pull. The other way we can do is make the behavior easier, to make it smaller is often the way to do that. And then an interesting thing happens when we do this and when we succeed at doing it. So we pick our little thing, we do it for a few days in a row, something happens. And what happens is that our motivation goes up. Because motivation goes up when we feel good about. Ourselves and our chances of success, and it goes down when we feel bad about ourselves and when we think we can’t do something. So by doing something low resistance that we’re able to do, we get more motivated. The other thing that happens is that we get better at doing the thing, so we can do more of it with the same level of difficulty as I got used to meditating for just a couple minutes a day. I got better at it, and it became less hard. So now I could do five minutes instead of the three I started at. And then over time, I could do 10 minutes, and it still felt about the same level of difficult, because I was getting better, and that’s really the key here. That’s why this works. The success that we have of Little by little, leads to us feeling better about ourselves, which drives up our motivation, and we get better so we’re able to do more difficult things, which makes us feel better. It’s an upward spiral versus the normal downward spiral, which is, we say we’re going to do something. We do it some of the time, but we don’t do it all the time, and we end up feeling bad about ourselves that we’re not doing it more often. And then we give up, and we start to tell ourselves stories about why we can’t make change, which drives our motivation down further. And so that’s why little by little actually works. It’s not a cute saying. There’s real, tangible reasons that emerge from behavioral science about why this works. So that’s insight, one you

Eric Zimmer  11:40

an insight too, is that change is a skill that you can learn, and this is really, really important. We think when we are unable to make a change, whether it’s adding a positive behavior to our life, or to stop doing a negative behavior, we think it’s because there’s something wrong with us. We think that we are lazy, that we are undisciplined, that we don’t have motivation, that we have some other character flaw that is at the heart of it, and when we treat change like it’s a character issue, we’re already halfway to quitting. As a coach, I heard that sort of thing all the time. I’m just the kind of person who can’t stick with anything, or I’m the kind of person who has no willpower, or I’m the kind of person who never finishes what I start. And those beliefs get ingrained, and they start to feel like facts, and once they feel like facts, we behave like they’re true. This reframe makes it not a character issue, not something that you either do or don’t have that’s inside you, but it’s about skills, and we all know that we can learn skills in many ways. Getting sober, for me was a matter of getting the right skills aligned. I didn’t know how to not pick up a drink and do it. It’s not like I suddenly became a different person overnight, and suddenly I could do it. It was that I started to learn the skills. Oh, when I go to meetings, this becomes easier. Oh, if I call my sponsor, this becomes better. Oh, if I don’t walk past the bar on my way home. This is a little bit easier. It’s skill acquisition, and that’s really, really important. So what do we do with this? How do we orient? And one way of orienting towards it is we shift how we label obstacles. AJ Jacobs once told me that he loved a quote he heard from Quincy Jones, which is, I don’t have problems. I have puzzles. A problem feels heavy. It feels final. A puzzle is an invitation. You assume there’s a way through, even if you just don’t see it yet. And that’s what I used to say to coaching clients all the time. This is a puzzle. We’re going to get the right pieces gathered, then we’re going to put them in the right order, and this will then work. We are solving a puzzle. We’re not solving a problem being you as a person. When I was writing this book, I faced levels of self doubt I had not faced in a long, long time. With each new page, my brain would basically say to me, either Who are you to offer wisdom to anyone? Or could you write a more boring sentence? That is the most boring sentence outside of an accounting textbook that I’ve ever read, and that’s hard to work with. So what did I do with that? Well, first, I learned to work with negative self talk, not against it. A lot of self help veers into positive thinking, but this full cheerleader mode has never worked for me. I find it easier and almost just as effective to aim for neutral. So instead of saying to myself, I can write a great book, I know I. Can, you know, I’m the next John Steinbeck, you know, look out. Hemingway. Here comes Zimmer, which is BS, I wouldn’t have believed it. I could get to something like, you know, do I know that I can’t do this? And my most pessimistic self has to admit that the answer is no. I don’t know that. I might not yet believe I fully can, but I no longer believe I can’t. Which is a place to start. The other thing was also to really think about the fact that it’s not that I either can write well or I can’t write well. It’s a question of me being able to get better at writing. So I could say, well, I don’t know how to make this chapter good. Yet, I’m back to a puzzle. How do I make this better? What things can I do that are going to make me a better writer? And I kept the door open to keep trying, which is what really matters. So if you’ve struggled to change, the most accurate conclusion isn’t something is wrong with me. It’s I’ve been using the wrong strategy. I’m missing a few skills, and as I said before, we can always learn new skills. Insight number three is a question that I come back to again and again, and it’s a question of, what do I want now versus what do I want most? And for many of us, what we are doing on a regular basis is we are trading what we want most for what we want now. Or to say it slightly differently, we’re trading what we value, what’s really important for us for what we want right now. And in the book, I talk a lot about values. I define values as the thing that our wisest, truest self thinks is worth wanting, and our desires are what just show up whether we want them or not, and the gap between them is where a lot of our struggle lives. In the book, I make a point that change comes down to sort of two fundamental things we need to figure out how to do. The first are structural. It’s knowing what we want. It’s knowing exactly what we’re doing, when we’re doing it, how we’re doing it, where we’re doing it. It’s setting up our environment to support us. It’s enlisting people to help support us. It’s all these things that we do that make it more likely that when the moment comes, we make the right choice, and by doing the structural things we find ourselves at clear choice points. And a clear choice point is where we are choosing to either go right or go left, to go in the direction of what we want most, or to go in the direction of what we want now. And in the book, I identified what I call six saboteurs of self control that are these things that show up at those choice points. Some of you may have seen it’s a lead magnet that was out there and is still available on the website that identifies these. And I want to talk about one of them right now. There’s six of them, and I lay out what they are and strategies for working with all of them in the book, but the one right now is what I call the short sighted stumble, and it means that all we see is what we want. Now researchers call this delay discounting, which is a fancy way of saying we value what’s present over what’s in the future. We’re not very good at seeing the future versus the present. In the book, I talk about an episode of The Simpsons where Marge is talking to Homer, and she says, someday you’re going to regret not spending more time with the kids. Homer replies, that’s a problem for future Homer boy, I don’t envy that guy. Before he pours vodka into a mayonnaise jar, shakes it up and slugs it down. And I have to say, that’s disgusting. Now I drank some of the worst shit out there. Chris and I used to drink this bargain basement whiskey that you could buy at a convenience store that was called Old Dan Tucker. We called it old Dan fucker because it was

Eric Zimmer  19:17

truly disgusting. But I drank it wild Irish rose Mad Dog, Alabama, Alabama, slammer. I mean, this is the bottom shelf rot gut stuff, and I am still, I feel confident in this. I’m wary of saying never to things, but I’m gonna go out on a limb and say I am not ever pouring vodka into a mayonnaise jar and shaking it up and drinking it. Homer promptly collapses after he does it, which is all we need to know. It’s not a good idea. But the scene gets to the core of the pitfall. He’s not even thinking of his future self, or really of the future at all. The technique from recovery is called playing the tape all the way through. We can’t stop a. The first frame, you know how good it would feel to do the easy thing. We have to keep going. So if I, in the early days, had a craving to get high, I couldn’t just think about how good it would feel. My brain was very good at doing that. Just focused on that. I had to say, like, what comes after? Well, in my case, what comes after is I feel good for a very short bit, and then I know that despair is going to come rushing in. I know a crushing sense of shame is going to come rushing in, and I know that I’m going to want to use even worse than I did, and I didn’t have any money, which means I would have to steal, and I had all sorts of prison time hanging over my head, right? I played it through. Now, most of our situations are not that dramatic, but there are consequences, and we want to find a way to make those feel real. We have to pause long enough and envision, try and see it in your mind, try and feel the feeling. If you have a problem where you stay up too late at night, you have to put yourself in the morning. What does that feel like in the morning? How lousy do you feel, and how bad do you feel about yourself? You’re just like, Oh, I did it again. What’s wrong with me? All of that. That is how we make the future seem more present, and it allows us to then say, Okay, well, what do I want Most, versus what do I want now?

Eric Zimmer  21:42

The next insight is that we are meaning making machines. I think if there is any one thing I would instill in people, if I could give one gift to people who didn’t have it, it would be this. It would be recognizing that we do not see things as they are, we see them as we are. Niacin said that it comes from a Talmud phrase. Stephen Covey quotes it in his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. We don’t see things as they are. We see them as they are. Now I am not saying there’s no reality out there. I actually think we co create reality, and there’s two parts of that, there’s what actually happens, there are facts, and then there’s interpretation. And a lot of what we would call a fact is really, indeed interpretation. A fact is something that you could almost capture on a video camera or on an audio camera. Somebody actually said X, Y and Z. That’s a fact, somebody actually did X, Y and Z, but then everything after that becomes interpretation, and one of the most dangerous interpretations we do is that we say we know why they did it. This gets us into all kinds of trouble, but there is simply no such thing as a truly objective view of reality. Even when we think we’re seeing all the facts, we are always seeing them through the colored lens of our own perspective. I say often there is no view from nowhere, meaning there is no perfectly removed perch from which we can see all angles at once, and when we forget that, when we assume the way we’re seeing the world is just the way it is, rather than the way it looks to us, we cause ourselves and others a lot of needless suffering. And that part about we see it as we are is really important, because we are projecting a story whose Plot Characters, even the genre, are shaped by our past experiences, our cultural backgrounds, our emotional state, our personality traits, how well we slept last night, so many things someone else watching the same screen might see a completely different movie. And I wish it was possible to just take those glasses off completely. Sometimes I think that that’s what enlightenment is. My moments where I’ve experienced what I would call enlightenment moments, Satori moments, feel a little bit like that, where I see things without so many of the filters. But again, even then, I’m sure I’m still seeing through filters. I don’t think we take them off, but what we can do is we can sort of imagine, like, if we’re looking through tinted sunglasses, we can slide the sunglasses down our nose a little ways, just so that we can go, oh yeah, the whole world isn’t slightly green. You know, there’s other stuff out there we see around the edges, sometimes I think that’s the best we can do. But there are three questions that I think are enormously valuable and useful. And the first one is, what am I making this mean? And this is so important because it makes us aware that we’re actively creating meaning, because it happens automatically. And subconsciously. So this question makes us recognize we’re doing it and think about it. And sometimes that question alone is enough to make us reconsider our conclusions, but then we want to go on to like, what else could it mean? And the could is key. The goal isn’t to necessarily replace your interpretation. It’s to recognize that other interpretations are possible. And then finally, which meaning is most useful. We have to act. Life requires us to act without having all the facts, and we never have all the facts. But if I’m creating the meaning and several meanings could fit, why not choose the one that empowers me and reduces suffering? I talked with Nir Eyal about his recent book beyond belief, and he says something in there, I think that’s really important. He says that beliefs are tools. And he’s getting at the same thing here. He’s saying that the things that we believe about reality are tools, and that we can be conscious about what tools we pull out and what we use again. This is not denying facts, but when you really get into it, when I really get into it, and I realize how much of every day what’s swirling around my brain is meaning making. It’s pretty sobering. I’ve got a lot of meaning making going on as I get ready to launch this book. As I’m recording this, the book is not out yet. By the time you hear it, the book will have been out, and there’s a lot of meaning making happening. There are people that I thought for sure

Eric Zimmer  26:39

would support me, and they don’t. There are people that I didn’t expect to support me who are stepping up in big ways. There’s a ton of people that are buying the book and telling me about it. There’s a lot of people that are not saying anything, that are indifferent. I have no idea what’s going on out there, right? I don’t know what’s going to happen with this book, but I can start to tell myself a story about it, the colors my thing. I was having a day recently where I thought I’m just not getting, you know, the kind of publicity that I want for this book. And then I talked to a friend. He’s in this space. He’s written books, he’s he knows all this stuff. He goes, I cannot believe all the amazing things that you got lined up. Which of us is right? I don’t know, because we’re both interpreting this. We’re making a meaning out of a certain amount of facts. Here are the places I’ve been booked. Is that good? Is that bad? I don’t know, but I do know that when I think I’m doing good and that I’ve made progress, it encourages me to want to do more, versus me feeling like nobody pays any attention. Nobody cares. Why am I wasting my time? Right? You can see how the fact, which is unequivocal, like here’s who booked me to talk on their show. There’s the fact the meaning that I made and he made are very different, and it turns out his meaning for me is a lot more useful. So this is a profound and deep truth that I live into all the time, even quote, unquote, knowing this, I’m still always having to question meaning, because the mind just does it. And it seems true. All right. The last one is extreme language produces extreme emotions and behavior. I’ve mentioned on the show many times. I have back pain, and I had it this morning. I woke up, and as I was walking through the kitchen, getting my coffee ready, getting ready to unload the dishwasher, my brain is saying what it always says in these situations, which is my back is killing me. And then I don’t question it, just says that. And then I go about the next thing, and I bend over to get a dish out of the dishwasher. Oh, my back is killing me. I’m going about my morning doing this. Well, if I pause and I actually pay attention to my back, I notice, oh, my left hip is a little bit tight, and there’s a small ache radiating from it that is a far cry from my back is killing me. I’m not denying that my back hurts. I’m just trying to be a little more nuanced in how I talk about it. And we might not think this matters, but my experience is it matters a lot. There’s all sorts of ways we can apply this. We describe things in extremes. If you want to start a fight, the best way to do it this is a guaranteed walk up to someone and accuse them of always or never doing something. It works like a charm. The minute I say, Chris, you never do X, Y and Z, Chris is going to immediately say, that’s not true. Sometimes I do that thing and we’re going to be arguing. So this works in our external conversations also, but internally. If I’m saying to myself, Ginny always does x, that is going to cause me to feel very strong about something that I might feel less strong about if I were to say to myself, Oh, sometimes Ginny. He does. Why? Let’s pretend I’m like, Ginny never listens to me, which is not true, by the way, but let’s just pretend Jenny never listens to me. That would be very different than me saying something like, sometimes I feel like Jenny’s not hearing what I say. You can feel the difference there. I tease my mom about this, because my mom says about everything, it’s horrible, it’s horrible, and the truth is, not everything is horrible, but the way she describes it creates her reality. There are some other ones. This is one I love. I can’t believe they did that. Now let’s examine that really. Can you really not believe it? Or you just wish they would have chosen to do something different. If we try and rephrase it to something like, I wish they hadn’t done that. That’s different than I can’t believe they did that. Now, if you’re auditioning for The Real Housewives, stick with the original but since you listen to this podcast, I’m assuming you want a calmer existence. You’re going to do better with a more subtle reframe. There’s some other ones, horrible. Disastrous is a good one. This is disastrous. This is unbearable. I can’t, you know, I can’t take it pronouns and absolutes like everyone and no one, no one loves me. Everybody thinks I’m stupid. After you gave a presentation at work to five people that didn’t go quite as well as what you wanted. The goal is not to gloss over what’s hard. It’s to remind ourselves that reality is rarely black and white, and that there are real benefits to seeing things in more color and in more nuance. You

Eric Zimmer  31:54

all right, the next thing I would like to do here is just read you a section of the book. And this comes from the chapter on, be a friend to ourselves. It’s about self compassion. It’s about an inner critic. And so I come up with a method in here of a better way of engaging with our inner critic. I’m going to offer you a three step guide for engaging with your inner critic in any situation, just like you would with a friend in pain, you’re first going to greet your critic by name and make space and time for a heart to heart. Next, you’ll listen to what they’re saying from a healthy distance underneath their monolog of complaints. What are their real fears and desires going on? What’s holding them you back. What’s keeping them stuck? Finally, you’re going to respond wisely, interrupting the cycle of self loathing, with a response that combines love, loyalty and your best guidance for moving forward. Greeting your critic. Naming your inner critic is a simple way to take away some of their power when that list of your supposed failing starts playing in your mind, picture this newly ideaed character as the one talking if the image is kind of ridiculous, all the better. My inner critic these days is less angry. Tom Zimmer, that’s referring to my father, and the chapter starts with my father and I on the golf course, and sort of how I learned to be my own worst critic. My inner critic these days is less angry Tom Zimmer than Eeyore from the Winnie the Pooh books known for his chronic pessimism and air of gloom. He’s a gray stuffed donkey with a pink bow on his detachable tail in a scene from pooh’s grand adventure the search for Christopher Robin Eeyore says, as he puts the finishing touches on a house he has been building, not much of a house just right for not much of a donkey. By hearing my most morose thoughts in Eeyore’s voice, I suddenly see them as simply that, a cartoonishly glum voice, not the truth, not reality. As a bonus, I very often make myself laugh. Ginny named her critic, the Evil Queen from Snow White, not the queen in all her mirror obsessed splendor, specifically the old hag she becomes to tempt Snow White, imagining her anxieties in the voice of a gnarled wart nosed crone brandishing a suspiciously shiny apple makes Ginny laugh too. Her critic thinks she’s so intimidating when she’s really just so extra. Identifying your critic as a separate entity is key in getting the distance necessary to engage with it in a healthy way. We need to be willing to turn toward our pain to look at it and say, Yes, I see you there. But we also need to avoid falling into its gravitational pull, becoming so consumed that we lose all perspective. Dr Kristin Neff, a researcher of Psychology at the University of Texas, who is going to, I believe, come to my. Book event in Austin on April 23 which, if you are hearing this, I would be thrilled to see you there as well. Anyway, she refers to this safely distanced awareness as mindfulness. It’s the type of consciousness that doesn’t shy away from discomfort, but also doesn’t blow it out of proportion without it. She argues, self compassion becomes a Herculean task. How can we be a friend to ourselves if we’re in denial about our suffering? On the other hand, if we’re so entangled in our pain that we can’t see beyond it, how can we step back and offer ourselves the care we need mindfulness, which we can prompt by saying, hey, Eeyore, or whoever allows us to recognize our thoughts and feelings for what they are. Thoughts and feelings, not irrefutable facts, not permanent states of being, but the day’s grumbles from an animated donkey next step, listening with distance. Once we’ve identified our inner party pooper, our interactions with them still tend to go one of two less than compassionate ways. We either argue or we agree. I’m standing in front of Amir rehearsing a presentation. It’s a TEDx talk in front of more than 1000 people. My reflection stares back at me a mix of hope and fear in his eyes, right on cue, that familiar voice pipes up in my head, your presentation sucks, and so do you? My response is a dejected sigh followed

Eric Zimmer  36:29

by a mumbled Yeah, you’re right. Who am I kidding? To try this? It’s terrible. It’s funny to see it written out like that. This toxic Oracle suddenly gets treated as if he has profound, exclusive insight into the situation, I don’t like what he has to say, which must mean he’s dishing hard facts. You could replace my presentation with any challenge you’re facing right now. Maybe it’s a job interview, a first date, or your attempt to kick a bad habit. The critic’s script changes, but the essence remains the same. Critic, you’re not good enough us. Makes sense. No further questions. If we ever want to get on that stage, go on that date or create a better habit cycle, we can’t blindly agree with the critic. Maybe we should argue with it then, hey, now that’s not true. I told my inner heckler that day pacing the green room. I’m intelligent and articulate. My speech is clear and effective. It’s gonna be great. So far so good. According to plenty of cognitive behavioral therapy I’ve encountered, I’d used positive self talk and given a rational response to the biased distortions of my critic. Undeterred, he came back swinging. How do you know that? Are you sure? Okay, maybe you’re not a total disaster, but let’s be real. Everyone else here is great. You need to be better than you are for anyone to even notice you with a thought loop like this, it’s like trying to reason with a toddler having a tantrum. You can present all the logical arguments you want, but the toddler is still going to scream and throw their toys. So what’s the alternative? Remember, the best way to be a friend to ourselves is to treat our inner critic like someone else we care about. If you’re sitting down with a loved one in distress, your first instinct probably isn’t going to be to shut them up, nor is it going to be to tell them they’re not making any sense. Your first move is going to be to listen to what’s wrong. The same thing applies with our self talk. The goal should not be to immediately silence the critic or win arguments against it. The goal is to change our relationship with it entirely. We need to recognize it for what it is, a part of us that feels threatened, to find the fears behind the flailing, we need to listen with genuine curiosity. What is the propaganda campaign of your critic asked Dr Aziz gazaporo, author of the wonderful book on my own side, in a conversation on my podcast, what is it steering you toward? It’s telling you you can’t do that. You’re not attractive enough. You mess that up, what’s wrong with you? And usually it’s steering you toward something by getting curious about what that something is. Gezipura says we can start to notice patterns. Maybe your critic is trying to keep you safe by lowering your expectations before anyone else can disappoint you, or maybe by convincing you that everything is your fault. It’s preserving the fantasy that if you just stopped messing up, you’d be free from all emotional complications, whatever your critic’s emphasis argues gazipura. Its function is to primarily keep you safe from harm, safe from pain, safe from emotion. The critic is just trying to stop it all. All this often means discouraging you from taking action entirely, because why risk something you’ll

Eric Zimmer  40:07

just mess up? In case you haven’t spotted the flaw in this logic, your critic is trying to shut down the whole experience of having a life not ideal, but by understanding where it’s coming from, we can put ourselves in a better position to work with the underlying negative emotions with my TEDx speech. I could have chosen to acknowledge my critics presence without either buying into its story or shouting it down with affirmations. I could have said, I hear you’re worried about the presentation. Thanks for trying to protect me, but I’ve got this that might have averted at least a little bit of angsty pacing. Turning down the volume of your critic is ultimately not about positive thinking or about rational responses. It’s about empathy. Third step, respond wisely once you understand the hurt and rationale beneath your critics nagging voice, it’s time to make a game plan for feeling and doing better. This could mean prompting a behavioral habit. Hey, I know you’re feeling depressed, and I love you regardless, and I promise exercise is going to make you feel better than sleeping until noon would. Or it could be merely in the realm of thought letting some mental daylight into a spiral of negativity. It’s here, in the role of self advisor, that all your previous introspective work, identifying your values, making plans about what you want to do, will act as your compass. The inner critic is usually, though not always inhibitory. It’s trying to stop you from doing something. When my inner critic whispers that I’m not good enough to write this book, the action that naturally follows from that belief is not to write at all. A wise response is to take the action that aligns with what you believe in and know is good for you regardless of what the critic is saying. So for me, that means keep writing wise responding may at times consist of correcting distorted thinking. I’m not failing at everything. I’m struggling with this one thing right now, at other times, it means acknowledging the fear behind the criticism I hear that you’re worried I’ll get hurt by putting myself out there, but I’m strong enough to handle whatever comes my way. The beauty of responding wisely is it doesn’t silence your inner critic. It changes your relationship with it. Over time, that voice becomes less of a demon and more of a nervous companion that you’ve learned to reassure it might never fully disappear, but it no longer has the power to thwart you from living the life you want to live. All right, friends, that is going to be a wrap on this episode. I have taught you some important things from the book, but a very, very far cry from everything that is in the book, which, as I mentioned earlier, is stacked with great ideas and insights, and I think is also a really good read. So I would be thrilled if you would check it out by buying it, Amazon, your local bookstore, wherever you want, or literally checking it out. Go to your local library, check it out or put a holder request on it. It all matters. What I want is people to read the book. So whatever way will get you involved with reading it is wonderful, and then I would love to hear what you think about it, honest, true reviews, the kind I actually love also are when people write me and say, Yeah, but this because that’s really helpful, because then I can say, Oh yes, well, I’ve worked with people, and here’s how we overcame that. Or you might be making a really valid point that’s going to help me refine how I think about something. Because what I want is my ideas to prove actionable in the real world. I want them to make real difference to real people, and the way I do that is by hearing from you. So thank you, as always, for listening. Thank you for your support, and until next time, take care. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better, and that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together, we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one you feed community you.

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Episode Transcript:

Automatically Transcribed With Podsqueeze

Dorie Clark 00:00:00  We know we have big projects that we want to accomplish. We know we have big goals that we want to tackle, but we keep putting them off systematically because, oh my gosh, there’s so many emails I need to respond to the emails, or I need to have this meeting or whatever the urgent thing is. And so often our attention turns to that, and we find ourselves with never enough time to do the thing that actually we claim is most important.

Chris Forbes 00:00:33  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living.

Chris Forbes 00:01:09  This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:18  There are so many moments in life where something we want just doesn’t happen. A project stalls out. An opportunity falls through. Something you are excited about doesn’t go the way you hoped. And I think it’s really easy in those moments to make it mean more than it actually does. One of the things that I really liked in this conversation with my guests, Dorie Clark, is that we talked about how often that turns out not to be true. Some things that look like failures are just unfinished. Sometimes what feels like a dead end is just a delay. And if we stay with something long enough, a surprising number of things can come back around in a different form. We talk about what it means to play the long game, how to keep going when results take longer than you want them to. And I assure you, they always will. And why? Long term thinking requires a different kind of faith than most of us are used to.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:07  I’m Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi, Dorie. Welcome to the show.

Dorie Clark 00:02:13  Eric, I’m so glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:15  I’m really excited to talk with you about a book of yours. It’s a couple years old at this point, but it is an idea that I think we need now. Probably even more than when you wrote it, which is the long game. How to be a long term thinker in a short term world. And we’ll get into that in a moment. But we’ll start, like we always do, with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf. Whichever sends things like greed and hatred and fear, and the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:04  So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Dorie Clark 00:03:11  One of the reasons that I actually wrote the book, The Long Game, is that the the wolf that kept nipping at me and I think probably is the case for a lot of people, is short term thinking. It is so common that we know we have big projects that we want to accomplish. We know we have big goals that we want to tackle, but we keep putting them off systematically because, oh my gosh, there’s so many emails I need to respond to the emails, or I need to have this meeting or whatever the urgent thing is. And so often our attention turns to that, and we find ourselves with never enough time to do the thing that actually we claim is most important. And by writing the book, I wanted to try to examine that a little bit more and begin to fight back against it. Because if you want to be a long term thinker, you have to fight for it.

Dorie Clark 00:04:05  You have to really make a conscious choice in this world.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:09  The amount of things that can command our interest in the short term are astounding, and many of them need to be taken care of. I mean, there’s that old saw in the business world of focusing on like, what’s urgent versus what’s important. And the reality is we end up with enough urgent and important things going on that it’s not that simple of a delineation. When we draw up a little chart from a seven Habits of Highly Effective People, it makes it seem really easy, but it’s hard to to parcel those out. But one of the big reasons that you say is the heart of this is busyness. Talk to me about busyness and how that gets in our way.

Dorie Clark 00:04:49  So I began to notice a few years ago that whenever I would ask anyone, you know, how are you doing? Their answer wasn’t, oh, I’m great, or oh, I’m not so good. Their answer, actually, bizarrely, was about how busy they were.

Dorie Clark 00:05:06  You’d hear, you know, oh, I’m so busy.

Speaker 4 00:05:09  I’m crazy busy.

Dorie Clark 00:05:10  I thought, you know, what does that have to do with anything? But it became this, this way that people talked about their lives and almost reflexively. And I started to look into it, and I came across a study that was done out of Columbia University by a woman named Sylvia Bellezza and her colleagues. And what I learned, I thought was very surprising, which is in our modern society, part of the reason why so many people default to the oh, I’m so busy answer is that busyness turns out to be a socially accepted form of status, and we certainly may not think of it that way consciously, But what we are telegraphing is I’m so important, I’m so needed. I’m being pulled in a million directions because I am so essential to this enterprise, whether this enterprise is your family, your business, whatever. And so when we’re trying to unravel the mystery of why are we so busy when none of us actually likes to feel that way? A big part of the lure, subconsciously, is that for a lot of us, we’re trying to find a way to feel meaningful or feel important.

Dorie Clark 00:06:29  And it’s a lonely world. And so that’s one of the things that a lot of us latch on to, but it ends up having deleterious consequences.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:38  Yeah, I think about that a lot because if you ask me how I’m doing, that is often a response I will give. And I’ve thought a lot about this. I do think there is the social aspect that you’re talking about. It is a signaling sort of thing, like I yeah, look at everything I’ve got to do. I also think, though, that it is the reflection of how our life feels. I’ve often got so much to do. And you talk about this also that busyness can function as sort of an anesthetic, right? It crowds everything else out. So if you ask me how I’m doing, I don’t really even have any idea. All I’m conscious of a lot of times is that I’m doing a lot. I did a lot. I have a lot to do. Like, that’s the emotional world that my head inhabits.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:22  A lot of the time, if I’m not being really conscious about it.

Dorie Clark 00:07:26  Yeah, I think you’re really right, Eric. And in fact, I did a TEDx talk about that topic. You know, the real reason you’re so busy and what to do about it. And one of the points that I raised in there was the issue of busyness as an anesthetic. There are a lot of things that we don’t necessarily want to feel that we might be feeling in a given situation, Maybe, you know, like your job actually. And it is kind of hard to face that because that means all of the struggle of getting another job or oh my gosh, how am I going to get a job? How am I going to pay the bills that I need to do? Maybe you’re not really happy in your relationship. And so you are traveling a lot or working a lot because that is a again, a societally acceptable excuse. Oh my gosh, I, I couldn’t possibly spend time at home because I have to do all these other things.

Dorie Clark 00:08:23  In my case, about, gosh, a dozen years ago now, I had, I had this, this pet, this cat that I was super, super close to who died. And I think anyone who’s a real animal lover can relate to that. we had been together for 17 years, and when he died, I was, you know, I was living on my my own besides him. And it was just this enormous loneliness every time I went home into the apartment. And you just expect him to be there and he wasn’t. And so I started really, like, working like a maniac, because I didn’t want to have to feel the feelings that were associated with that. And, you know, it’s better than some forms of emotional relief, you know? You know, we have choices and work is a better choice. But, but still, you’re you’re masking the feelings.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:17  Yeah. As a former homeless heroin addict, I am I am cognizant of the times in life that I have let work be the better coping choice, and it is by a long shot.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:26  And as you say, anything that is a coping device that you use too much becomes problematic. I also love the way that you quote Derek. Is it Sivers? I never know. I’ve seen the guy’s name seven times, but I don’t know if I’ve ever heard it, Sivers says. Don’t think of it as a status marker. Think of it as servitude and lack of control. I mean, that’s a sobering thing to say, and it is really a valuable way to think about it. I mean, you and I were talking before we started about, I’m in a season where, like, I’ve got a book coming out and that is very front and center, and I’m making a conscious decision that, like, the next three months are going to be a little out of the ordinary for me in how much I work. Like as I’ve gotten older, I’ve been able to do I really treasure my space and my free time and for a couple for a couple month period. Now I’m going to sort of say I’m going to give in to that for a little while, but I, I want to keep remembering all the way through.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:24  I am choosing to do that. That is a conscious choice versus it just being the autopilot. I’m so busy. I’m so busy. I’m so busy as if I can’t catch a breath.

Dorie Clark 00:10:35  Yeah, I think that’s a really wise way to look at it, because being totally heads down and busy all the time obviously is not a tenable solution for how we live our lives, but to consciously choose a season of it is perfectly reasonable because you have a goal, in your case, your book, that you want to move forward, and it’s only going to move forward if you have a really concerted focus on it. But the the important part is that it needs to have an end date and it needs to have a rebalancing. So it’s like, how do we build in so that after the launch is over, there’s a time, you know, kind of an equal and opposite reaction where you can recover and reset the balance. I mean, I’m curious, Eric, leaving aside this moment right now with book, if we’re thinking about a kind of I see an air quotes like a more normal time for you.

Dorie Clark 00:11:25  Yeah. What what is a good rhythm? Like what do you want your life to look like in terms of being the right amount of busy but not too busy?

Eric Zimmer 00:11:33  I like to have my work stay within certain bounds of time. I carve out kind of. Here’s when I plan to work and try and keep it more or less within there. Now, of course, doing something like I do or I guess any of us, right? Oftentimes we’re thinking about work even when we’re not doing it. So that’s a slightly different animal. I have nuanced thoughts on that. So for me it’s keeping some some work within constrained hours so that I spend time with my partner so that I play guitar, so that I take care of my health so that I see friends. And then for me, over the last really four years, it’s also become about taking bigger chunks of time off. I spent the first 52 years of my life, so I started working in a restaurant. I had a paper route when I was 12, so let’s call it 40 years of my life.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:27  I don’t think I was ever off more than seven days ever. And so I’ve really tried to correct that over the last 3 or 4 years and say, like, I want time off. It started with two weeks. I’m going to take two weeks off. That was such a huge like, I can’t, I can’t believe I’m going to do this, you know? And then it became I took a month off. So I’m into that kind of thing, like work hard, constrained hours for a period of time, and then with the intent of being able to take chunks of time off completely. Now I’m in a semi privileged situation that I own my own business, that I can do that. But it is a choice that comes with consequences, right? Like, I would make more money if I didn’t do that. Yeah, right. I would make more money if I didn’t consciously say, I want to take two months a year off. That has economic implications for sure. It’s just a question of my priorities at this point.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:18  And so that is more important to me than money right now. But I’m in a position where I’m not fighting to keep the lights on either. I don’t have so much money that it doesn’t matter either. So yeah, it’s very conscious. And I think this kind of leads to the next part of your book, which is saying no even to good things. Right? Like, it’s really easy, I think for some of it. Well, not everybody. Some people say yes to everything, but but at a certain point, you can say no to the things that clearly don’t make sense. But there are so many good things that you could say yes to. And, you know, delineating that. So for me, that’s the this is the exact same thing. Am I saying yes to a month off work, or am I saying yes to two more workshop opportunities that generate more revenue? Like what am I saying yes to? And it’s, it’s it’s hard to say no to good things. Talk to me about that in your own life.

Dorie Clark 00:14:09  Yeah, I would love to. I just have a quick follow up, if you don’t mind, because I’m curious when you’re taking a month off, when you’re taking two months off, how do you set the boundaries around that? Are you, like, not checking email at all? Like, you hand it to an assistant and you’re like, don’t even bother me unless the house is on fire.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:25  Pretty much.

Dorie Clark 00:14:26  Okay.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:27  That’s the goal. Now, there are variations on this. There are like a month completely off. Please don’t bother me unless you have to. And, I mean, I spent time designing the business that way. And I spend money hiring somebody that does things that I technically could do, but if I have to do them, then I can’t. I can’t leave like that. So these are choices that have consequences as far as like, okay, yes, I’m going to have somebody who’s good enough that I can say, here’s the keys for the business for a month, and I have to work really hard beforehand recording a bunch of interviews, all of that sort of stuff.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:04  But but yes, that’s my goal. But then there are other periods, like we spent five weeks in Portugal in the fall. We were lucky enough to we have friends there and they were away for three weeks, so we got to stay. I wasn’t like completely off, but that was a little bit of a downshift. Okay, I need to keep working. I’m going to be working, but I’m going to I’m going to downshift it a little bit because I’m in a slightly different position. So it depends. But I do really work hard to take concentrated breaks that it is off. Off. I feel like that’s where I do best. I can either be really engaged or I found I can totally turn it off. There’s a middle ground in between that is a little bit less satisfying for me. I’m not really in it and I’m not really out of it. And so for me, I found that it’s being able to totally turn off, and I didn’t know if I actually would be able to.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:57  That was my first like, can I? Is that even possible? And it turns out, yes, very capable of if I know that, you know, Nicole has got it and she’ll text me if there’s a problem. I am very capable of being like, well, it’s time to think about something else for a month, because I’ve thought about this a lot for the other 11 months.

Dorie Clark 00:16:15  That’s fantastic. I love it, and in the long game, I actually talk a little bit about this question of how do you make it feasible for yourself to take time off? And I have a colleague named Dave Crenshaw who I profiled because similarly, he takes two months off every year. He does one in the summer and one around Christmas time. And the way that he structured it, he said his framework, he calls it distance to empty. Kind of like on your, you know, gas reading in your car. The distance to empty tells you. How far can you go before your car, you know, shortens out and collapses.

Dorie Clark 00:16:50  And so he always thought of it as how do you systematically increase the distance to empty in your business? Meaning for him, how long can you be away from your business without your business collapsing? And he just steadily worked to kind of test it. Okay, first it’s a week, then it’s two weeks, and you have to set up the systems so that things don’t go haywire. But he’s eventually been able to get it so that regularly a month goes by and no big deal.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:20  Yeah I have a business coach I’ve worked with years. I think you might know him. Charlie Gilkey. Oh, yeah. That was a very intentional part of our work was, how do I get here? This is the business I want to build. And yeah, distance to empty is a great concept. And luckily for me, I can record a bunch of interviews, and then Nicole and Chris can just handle getting them all out. And as long as I don’t schedule in-person events or, you know, things that require me to show up at a certain place at a certain time.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:49  Now, Nicole might need a month off after she after I’m off for a month when I hand her the whole business for a month, she’s probably like, well, lovely for you. But yeah.

Dorie Clark 00:18:01  Yeah, absolutely. Always, always the consequence. But yeah. But it’s great that you’ve been able to work that out. But I wanted to, to go back to the question that you had asked me initially, which is about saying no to good things. And this is something that I really started to grapple with in the first years after my business kind of started to take off. It almost when when you’re first starting and everything is so slow and it feels like an uphill climb, it’s it’s like a problem that that doesn’t even come into your consciousness. It’s like when anybody starts, the question is like, how do I get a good opportunity? And you’re just, you know, clamoring for them and eventually, oh, it’s a good opportunity. Fantastic. You dive in, but then you reach this point.

Dorie Clark 00:18:45  I feel like it’s so often in life that there’s never exactly an equilibrium. It’s like early on, there’s never enough good opportunities. And then there’s not like a balance. It’s like suddenly one day a switch flips and then it’s like, oh my God, there’s too many good opportunities. What do I do?

Eric Zimmer 00:19:02  Yeah. And then the switch flips back. You’re like, wait, hang on. I say, what happened? I had too many and now there’s not enough. Like, I feel like for me there’s been these like, you’re right, it’s never the right amount. It’s either too many or not enough.

Dorie Clark 00:19:13  Exactly. And so it’s relatively clear what to do when there’s not a lot of good opportunities, which is the minute you see one, you jump on it. But it because that is our training for all of us. As we’re building our business, it becomes really hard emotionally, more than anything, to say no to good opportunities when you were in that mode of of having too many.

Dorie Clark 00:19:37  And so we get ourselves into these problematic situations where you’ve said yes to, you know, to 25 things because they’re all good and they are all good to take in individually, but take and collectively it is too much and and it creates a problem. And so you have to learn, you know, it’s hard to make peace with it, but you have to learn to sort of triage. Is it a seven out of ten or is it a 9.5 out of ten?

Eric Zimmer 00:20:23  Context is everything, right? This is the thing you just said it like individually, these might all be. Yes. And if I consider them individually, I’m going to say yes. I have to consider them in context of what else is happening. I think this is, you know, and I’ve worked with clients on this where we just set up a rule which is anytime anybody asks you to do anything, the answer is, that sounds really exciting. I’ll get back to you. Like, no matter what, even if inside you’re just like, fireworks are going off so that you can go back and go, okay, well, where does that fit? Oh, look, I already have seven other things that very month.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:01  I’m going to hate it if I do it in that month. Right. Like that’s the I think that’s the key. And you talk about other things like what’s the total commitment. What’s the physical and emotional cost. What’s the opportunity cost. And then as I’m saying where does it fit. So for example, if somebody asks me to do something on April 5th, that was really cool, I would have to say like, hang on a second. My book came out six days before. Does that make sense there? And the answer might be no, it doesn’t. If it’s not moving the book forward. Same opportunity. If they asked me to do it August 1st, I might be like, that’s a great opportunity.

Dorie Clark 00:21:38  That’s that’s exactly right. And I think your point is well-taken, which is that this is not always true. I mean, there are some there are some things that are just a date certain, and you can do it or you can’t do it, but there’s actually a fair number of things that if you’re creative, you can you can kick the can down the road a little bit and find a way to make it work.

Dorie Clark 00:21:58  you know, is it possible to do it later? Is it possible to start it now and maybe have one kick off session, but then delay the implementation by two months? You know, there’s there’s ways that you can be just a little bit creative and squeeze a little bit more out of the out of the orange. But yeah, sometimes hard decisions do have to be made. I mean, I have a friend that has a timeshare, I guess you could call it, but it’s like a high end timeshare in Tuscany. And he actually reached out, you know, a few weeks ago, and he’s like, we’re going to be in Tuscany in March. Do you want to come and stay in the spare bedroom and, you know, for free for like a week or whatever in Tuscany? And this, of course, sounds amazing. I’ve never been to Tuscany. This, you know, this would be great, but unfortunately, I looked at the calendar and, you know, it was a couple of months lead time, and I just I had too much booked.

Dorie Clark 00:22:54  I was already traveling a lot and it would have been possible. That’s the hard part, right? If, if, if it was totally impossible, then I could have just let it go. But it would have been possible. But I would have had to do this ridiculous thing where I was like, you know, flying to Tuscany from Dallas and then going back and going to another speaking gig, and it just wouldn’t have been able to be fun as a result of that. So I said no to a free vacation in Tuscany, which is painful, believe me.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:28  Yeah, you’re going to be very busy in March helping promote my book too. So.

Dorie Clark 00:23:32  Exactly. Eric, I didn’t even know, but.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:35  Yeah, exactly. I mean, I’m glad you said no to Tuscany, because that’s not going to work for us.

Dorie Clark 00:23:40  That’s right. It’s so hard to properly promote when I when I’m stuffing my face full of pasta. So I feel you. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:47  So let’s talk about setting the right goals.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:50  Tell a story about Marian Stoddard. Why don’t you tell the story?

Dorie Clark 00:23:54  Yeah. So about 15 years ago now, I fulfilled this long standing dream since I was a teenager, I always thought, oh, it’d be so amazing to direct a movie. And of course, I was picturing Hollywood movies. But what I ended up doing, which was actually very cool in a different way, is I directed an environmental documentary, and it was about a woman named Marion Stoddard, who was really quite extraordinary. And she she’s now still alive. She’s in her 90s. But, in the 1960s, she was, you know, as, as was so often the case, a very overeducated housewife who was staying at home raising kids, kind of looking for a project that was meaningful in her life. And she ended up successfully leading the cleanup of one of America’s most polluted rivers. And so my collaborator, Susan Edwards and I made this documentary film talking about how exactly she did it. And so we spent a lot of time with her.

Dorie Clark 00:24:54  And one of the really interesting stories that she told us that I think influenced a lot of her subsequent life decision, was she told us the story about her mother’s advice to her as she was leaving for college, and literally as Marianne was walking out the door and leaving to to head off, her mother gave her a piece of advice which was if you have a choice between two decisions, always choose the more interesting one. And I thought, oh, that’s fascinating. And I thought that actually is a pretty good rule of thumb for life. And so I included that in the long game, as I think a pretty helpful heuristic. Many times people get paralyzed. They get hung up about, you know, what’s the right decision. And you know what? Where am I going to make the most money? Or you know what’s going to be, what’s going to look the best or what’s going to be best for my career? And the truth is, we often don’t know. You can’t predict, you know, sometimes even the safe thing isn’t so safe, right? But if you pick the more interesting, you’re usually going to end up in a pretty good place.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:01  That is wonderful advice. Optimize for interesting. The other thing that you mentioned in that section, which is about setting the right goals, you talk about people going to extremes. Explain to me where going to extremes fits in. Like what’s the value here? And in being sort of a long term thinker or playing the long game.

Dorie Clark 00:26:23  Yeah, yeah. I mean I would say the Value of being a long term thinker, and the reason why lots of people pay lip service and say, oh yeah, that sounds like a great idea, but then they don’t do it. Is that the the payoff takes quite a while. And so it’s a little bit invisible because you get a good result and most likely you’ve probably been building toward it in one way or another for years, you know, months or years or decades. But people kind of only see it pop up later on, and they are ascribing some kind of immediate cause to it. So it’s hard for people to really appreciate the value of it. But the way that I think about it, the metaphor that for me makes the most sense when I think about long term thinking, is the difference between a jellyfish and a speedboat in the ocean.

Dorie Clark 00:27:14  There are some people that truly don’t have a vision. They truly don’t care where they end up. But but most of us do. You know, we do have some ambition about, oh, you know, I’d like my life to look like this. I’d like my career to look like this. And the problem is that if you are not making conscious choices and you were just acting, you know, letting other forces act on you, you know, sort of like, oh, okay, I’m not doing my own thing. I’m just responding to the emails that come into my inbox. It’s being a jellyfish. Like you’re letting the waves just sort of whap you around, and you might end up in the right place. You might end up literally across the world from the right place, because it is the luck of the draw in terms of what waves are hitting you. Whereas if you are exercising agency that comes with long term thinking, if you’re saying, all right, I am making the choice to do this and not that you are more like a speedboat because, you know, the truth is, we can’t control everything.

Dorie Clark 00:28:09  There might be a tsunami, there might be rogue waves. You might get kind of knocked off course. But anyone can see that if you have a motor that is propelling you in the direction you want to go, you are much more likely to either get to that destination or to get close to that destination. And so for me, long term thinking is basically about making conscious choices rather than just letting things happen.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:35  Right. And so where doing extreme things. You mentioned somebody who wanted to play Carnegie Hall. Tell us that story.

Dorie Clark 00:28:45  Yeah. So there was a woman that I profiled in The Long Game named Marie, and she was a, you know, jazz musician. And of course, you know, for any musician, there’s kind of a big goal, right? I mean, you know, if you’re a football player, you want to be in the Super Bowl. And if you’re a musician, you want to play Carnegie Hall. That’s the the big dream from the time you’re little. And so in Marie’s case, she actually found a way to do it.

Dorie Clark 00:29:12  She found a path to do it. And, you know, she got accepted to be able to play at Carnegie Hall. But what she didn’t realize was that in order to actually have this concert there And, you know, there’s there’s different things. If you have a. You know, promoter backing you or something, then they take care of all of this. But Marie did not have a patron. She was having to to do it herself. So she gets accepted to perform at Carnegie Hall. And all of a sudden she realizes these things that she never knew, which is that, oh my gosh, if you’re performing, you have to pay all of these fees. And there’s like, you know, unions there to like, okay, there’s the lighting union. And if you want to have a prop on stage, oh, that’s, you know, the prop masters union. And all of a sudden for, you know, the whole rental and all the expenses, it was going to be $40,000 to do this concert.

Dorie Clark 00:30:06  And you make some of it back from the tickets. But you know, this this is an economically very dicey situation, especially for someone who was making less than $40,000 a year. I mean, can you imagine having to spend your entire year’s salary plus some? write on one day, but this was this was her big vision and her big goal. And so it became a kind of central organizing principle for her that she. She was like, well, I have to do it. I have to figure out a way to do it. So she started doing all of this really intensive fundraising. And that goal sharpened her focus so much that she actually was able to do it. She carried it off. She successfully played at Carnegie Hall, which is amazing, and it’s a thing she can always talk about and carry with her. Sometimes you need a really big goal to be able to, to crystallize that focus for yourself.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:03  It’s funny, just the other day, I was talking with a friend and we were talking about a book marketing, and he was like, yeah, I always think it’s good to to like, take 10% of your time and your resources and try some crazy ideas, like just like 90% of it like you do the standard basic stuff.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:24  You do that but take 10% and just do something way out there with it because it may not work, but it might. He was telling me a story about he teaches entrepreneurs, and he’s got a chance to do a workshop in Brunei, and he’s decided that he wants to make a point to try and meet the Sultan of Brunei. Now, the odds of this are very low. He’s like, but even if I don’t, the stories that I will tell in my attempts to meet the Sultan. And if you’re listening, by the way, I have to do this for my friend. If you have any contacts to the Sultan of Brunei, please send them our way. So I’ve been trying to think about like, well, what would that look like for me for the book? And I don’t have any good answers yet, but I’m looking for a couple of like, what are some wild things I could try? One of the things I’ve wanted to do is be on Armchair Expert, which is a Dax Shepard podcast, and he interviews celebrities.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:14  I’m not a celebrity, but he talks about addiction and all that. I thought, maybe I’ll hire one of those trucks that drives around in broadcasts and I’m just going to have it circle Dax Shepard’s house saying like, Eric Zimmer would be an amazing guest for Armchair Expert. I mean, I don’t know, I’m going to do something. So also, if you have crazy ideas for book marketing, send them my way. But I love that it was funny that he and I talked about that. And then the next day I read your chapter about going to extremes and I was like, interesting.

Dorie Clark 00:32:41  Yeah, I think, I think that’s great. And I think you’re raising a really important point, Eric, which is that 10% is great because you you don’t want to do everything in your life to extremes, and you don’t want to risk everything by doing something like totally nuts. But it is good to, you know, as I wrote The Long Game, I realized, you know, I kept going further and I’m like, oh my gosh, you know, this is a book about life and about your career.

Dorie Clark 00:33:10  But in in many ways, it’s almost an exact parallel as like a personal finance book. Right? Because good personal finance is about playing the long game. And similarly, you know, they always, you know, a kind of piece of reasonable investment advice that some people state. I’m not an investment advisor, but, you know, is often like, okay, do you know X percentage safe but then have 5% or 10% in, you know, kind of crazy assets, right. Like, this is, you know, like the, you know, it could be Bitcoin or it could be some, you know, hedge fund thing or, you know, alternative assets, whatever that means. You know, artwork people, people try different things and you can argue about the the merits of them. But it’s interesting to try to identify what is the thing that is not correlated to other outcomes. It’s a little different than other people are trying, and it could be a worthy experiment. And in fact, there’s a whole section in the book where I talk about, you know, sort of the concept of Google’s 20% time, which is basically the corporate version of this, where Google years ago, it’s become kind of less of a thing over time, but they encourage their employees to spend up to up to one day per week, up to 20% of their time doing purely discretionary activities that were bets, essentially.

Dorie Clark 00:34:28  And that’s how Gmail was invented. It’s how Google News was invented, was somebody said, you know, this could be interesting. And there’s, you know, a million more that didn’t work. But the ones that work really do.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:40  You know, as I read the book, I was like, this person, you are amazing. Like you just mentioned a woman hiring somebody to play at Carnegie Hall. Well, at a certain other point in the book, you dropped like, oh yeah, and I have a Grammy for a jazz record, and you just mentioned a documentary that you did. You’ve also decided that you were going to write musicals. Like, there’s a lot of different things like this in your own life where you just get an interest and just go do it. And I just love that. Use the word earlier agency like this agency of just saying, like, I’m interested in this, I’m going to do it. I mean, it’s why the one you feed exists. I didn’t start with like, well, I think podcasts would be a really good.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:24  I just was like, this sounds like something that would be kind of fun to do. I don’t know how to do it. And we did it. And, you know, I was sort of surprised, like, oh, wait, actually, this is working. So I just love all these little things that you, you take on. Tell us about the decision that you were going to write a musical, because this is one of my, my favorite ones in the book.

Dorie Clark 00:35:45  Yeah. Thank you Eric. So in writing musicals, which I’ve now been doing for for ten years, I actually got started because I realized that I was kind of burning myself out with with the approach that I’ve been taking to work. I was traveling every week, and I was living in New York at the time, and it was really expensive to live in New York, and I was I was hardly ever there. And when I was, I was usually Sick because I had been on airplanes so much, and so I decided that I was going to do what I called one uniquely New York activity per week.

Dorie Clark 00:36:26  That was my that was my goal for the year. My New Year’s resolution was, okay, I’m if I’m going to be here, I’m going to appreciate the city. And so I tried to to pick things that you could only do in New York. So not stay at home and watch Netflix, but go out and and do something interesting. And one of the things that I did was go with a friend to a Broadway show, and it was very impactful to me. I mean, I had seen shows before, but honestly not that many, and it was not my genre of choice growing up. And I saw this and I just thought, oh, this is this is so fantastic, I should be doing this. And I did not know how. I had no idea, but it just really hit me that I know something resonated. And I’m like, I want to learn how to do this. And so it’s not easy to learn from scratch, an entirely new discipline. But I, over the past decade now have committed myself to trying to learn the form.

Dorie Clark 00:37:22  And I’ve now written three complete shows. An initial goal that I had that I talked about in the long game was over ten years. I wanted to write a show that would make it to Broadway, and it hasn’t happened yet. It takes it takes a little bit of time, but I can say that all of the shows that I have written have had readings or workshops, you know, been featured in festivals. We had a one night production at a at a club Off-Broadway. So we’re getting there, and it’s been a very joyful learning process.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:26  So did you have a musical background? Did you have a writing background? Like, I go see Broadway musicals, and I’ve never left thinking I should do that, although I, I play guitar and I’ve written songs. Did you have some connection to it in some way, or is this just like out of the blue? Like, I am going to make musicals. I just I’m fascinated by this.

Dorie Clark 00:38:45  It was a little bit out of the blue.

Dorie Clark 00:38:47  I mean, I did play guitar, bad guitar as a teenager, so I wrote my share of angsty songs. So I had a little bit of knowledge, although I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t say I was well trained, but a good thing about musicals, actually, from this perspective, is that it is typical for there to be a collaborative team. So, I mean, Lin-Manuel Miranda is actually the exception in the world of Broadway, He writes, you know, he writes the lyrics, he writes the music, he does the whole thing himself. What is much more common is, you know, a writer of words and a writer of music get together. So, you know, sort of the classic ones like Rodgers and Hammerstein or, you know, Lerner and Lo, famous classic Broadway musicals. And so similarly, I was able to recruit a musical, actually, a couple different musical collaborators. So I did the lyrics and the so-called book, which is the script of the musical and, and they, they handled the music because I certainly would not have been able to do the technical element of putting it all to music.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:48  So let’s talk a little bit more about this. What was the process of, okay, I’ve decided I’m going to set a ten year goal to have a musical on Broadway in ten years. Where did you start?

Dorie Clark 00:40:04  So like like, like any good, you know, person pre II. I started with Google. Eric. I googled how do you write a musical? And honestly, it was not that evil. You would think that there would be better books about it. And I did find some books, but yeah, but it was it was a little bit of an opaque process. It’s kind of it’s kind of complex. And so I was fumbling around and I was, I was literally googling questions like, how many songs are in a Broadway musical? And, you know, how many words should the script be like? I just had no idea. So I started and I was coming up with stuff and it was it was bad. And I didn’t even understand how it was bad, because I didn’t know the form and I didn’t know what mistakes I was making.

Dorie Clark 00:40:49  So eventually I decided to essentially take my own medicine because, you know, one of the hats that I’ve worn over the years is executive coaching. And, you know, I run an online course and community as well. So I believe in the power of getting help for things. And so at a certain point, it occurred to me I’m like, oh, I could hire a coach, and I also didn’t exactly know where to go, but I figured somebody would know. So I asked a friend of mine who was closer into that world, and he got a suggestion, and he found someone for me who was a musical theater writer, who I paid to coach me in this. And that was really helpful in terms of accelerating my skill development. It’s like a lot of different leads you have to put together at a conference. I ended up meeting a guy who was a musical theater writer, and he was a graduate of a program that BMI, the music publishing company, runs, and he told me about this program and he said, you have to do this.

Dorie Clark 00:41:46  And it was a training program, which amazingly, it’s pretty impressive that BMI does this. It is a completely free training program, but you apply and it’s quite competitive to get into it, as you might imagine. But if you do get into it for two years, you get free instruction in musical theater writing. And that I thought that was great. I’m like, well, instruction, that’s what I need. So I did apply and and you know, through I think the help of this guy’s recommendation, I was accepted. And so I trained up and spent a lot of time, you know, the 10,000 hours plus learning to write musical theater in that way.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:24  So when you get an idea like this, are you the sort of person that it sort of captivates you and you find it really easy to put the work in? Because one of the things I think is challenging for a lot of people, and I know it is for me some of the time, is I have these ideas of what I would like to do.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:45  And yet back to busyness. I’m busy. It gets to be eight at night, done working. You know, I’ve eaten dinner and I’m like, it’s really hard to imagine working on something else for two hours. Like, does that come pretty naturally to you? Did you find yourself having to set structure for yourself. Like what was that process like?

Dorie Clark 00:43:08  Well, I’m a big fan of creating forcing functions for ourselves because I agree. I mean, you know, at the end of the night, it’s hard to motivate ourselves to do anything. but in my case, I decided, all right, this is important to me. And I had gotten very clear insight from the guy that I met who was a graduate of the program, that this program would be a good thing to do. So I really made it my North Star. So I said, all right, there is an application deadline. So that is the thing that I’m working toward. I have to get the application ready for this. And then once the application was done and I managed to get accepted into it, it was a structure.

Dorie Clark 00:43:46  It’s a built in structure that Monday nights you go to the session and you work around it and then you get assignments. And so about every three weeks an assignment was due, and then you had to present it at the program and other people would critique it. So you had to be ready for that presentation. So, you know, it’s the same thinking as hiring. Hiring the fitness coach. So that. All right, you say you wanted to go to the gym. Well, you know, gym is going to be there at 6 a.m., so you better go meet gym. I think a question we can ask ourselves so often, the reason we slack off is because the next step, or whatever the thing is to do, is a little bit foggy or a little bit unclear. And the the deadline for sure is unclear. And so if you can create a structure for yourself where it is perfectly clear what you need to do, and it is perfectly clear when you need to do it by, I think that most people actually, at that point are more likely than not to do it, because you don’t want to let somebody down or you don’t want to look stupid when people are expecting it.

Dorie Clark 00:44:48  So I’m curious. I mean, clearly you got your act together very well to to write this book. What was the system that you put in place to make sure that that happened?

Eric Zimmer 00:44:58  Well, I didn’t decide to write the book until I felt like I would be able to have some time to do it. You know, so once I had a contract, the book proposal had its own thing. So once I had an agent, then we had a book proposal and the same thing forcing function on that. Once we had a deal, I knew I had a year, and I had no idea how long it would take to write a book. I couldn’t say like, oh, I’m going to write a thousand words a day or a chapter a month, or I didn’t have the foggiest idea. All I really could do was say, this is the time I have available. And so my focus was always on 30 minutes at a time. Did I use that time? You know, here’s the time I have available.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:35  I have four 30 minute blocks today. Did I show up for those 30 minute blocks and do my best to write in those windows was pretty much how I did it. I mean, the book is how a little becomes a lot, and the book was literally written that way. It was written, I would say to myself, just 30 minutes, sit down and do it, 30 minutes, and I would do it. And then I obviously sometimes I would hit the 30 minute mark and be like, I’m doing great, keep rolling. But yeah, for me it was just about setting the structure, and it’s kind of what you said. Structure forcing functions when it comes to doing things like this. Ambiguity is a really big problem. Right. I think ambiguity is really a big driver of procrastination, because we’re almost not even procrastinating because we haven’t even said what it is exactly we’re supposed to be doing. We just have this vague intention and vague intentions, at least in my life and in the work that I do with people.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:26  And what I talk about in the book is vague intentions got to be translated into actions that we can understand, that are doable in our context.

Dorie Clark 00:46:36  Yes, exactly.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:36  So if I had said I’m going to write for six hours every single day, I would have failed at that, because that wasn’t reasonable in my context. But I could say, okay, three days a week I can carve out four hour windows. And again, that’s a little bit of a stretch. But I’m, I’m, I’m prioritizing. I’m saying yes to this because I’m saying no to other things. And then it’s just yeah, putting the putting the effort in in those windows. I’m curious for you. You set a goal. A goal is a musical on Broadway in ten years, which you haven’t quite hit. Ten years is a long window. So how do you stay motivated in the in-between time? Are you deconstructing that? Like, okay, that’s still the big goal. But right now the goal is to get into this workshop.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:24  Right now, the goal is to complete this week’s exercise. Right now, this job is to complete this workshop. Right now, the job the goal is to get the first draft. Talk to me about going from a big goal down to the actual things that both give you structure, but also sustain your interest and momentum and confidence.

Dorie Clark 00:47:48  You raise a really important point, Eric, which is that for big goals, they almost necessarily take a long time. And so there’s a huge gap between committing to do it, deciding to do it, and then actually attaining it. And so one of the biggest problems when you’re embarking on this is that for a lot of us, and I certainly would count myself among this, you don’t necessarily know what all the steps are like early on. One possibility is just you don’t know what the process is because you’re new to it. One possibility is that circumstances might be changing rapidly. And so maybe the way that things are done in year one are not going to be the way things are done in year nine when you’re close to accomplishing it.

Dorie Clark 00:48:38  So what I like to use is my mantra is that you really only need to know two things. The first is the next step. What is literally the next thing that you are focused on or need to do? And then the second piece is the last step. You know what? What is the ultimate goal? So in my case, you’re exactly right. If the ultimate goal is I would like to get my show on Broadway. Step one is okay. Well, I need to get into this BMI training program. So that became the focus and it clarified a lot of things. I wasn’t I wasn’t worried about all of the the different pieces. I was just, you know, it’s almost like being a Central Park horse with blinders on. It’s like, all right, I am focused on the road ahead of me. There’s a lot of traffic around, but I am just not dealing with that. I am dealing with what I can handle. And so I think that’s the question for all of us is just understanding.

Dorie Clark 00:49:29  All right. Find your next step. Do that and then find another reasonable next step. And even if it turns out it’s not optimal, in the end it is going to be a useful data point. And you’re probably not going to waste a lot of time or effort because pretty rapidly you’ll discover, oh, that wasn’t really the move. All right. Let me let me shift over here. Let me try another next step.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:51  I really love that next step. In the last step. That’s very helpful. I’m a big fan of the next step. You know I’m in recovery, and one of the sayings in recovery was always do the next right thing, which turns out to be remarkably sufficient for living the good life. You know, like, what’s the next right thing? And knowing where you’d like to get is helpful. So imagine you hadn’t gotten into the BMI program. How do you think you might have pivoted it at that moment? So that was the plan. I’m certain in your in your musical journey and we’re glossing over ten years at this point, I’m sure there have been plenty of times where the next steps appears to be a, and then A evaporates or falls apart, and you have to pick another.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:35  So can you tell us either you could theorize on what you would have done if BMI hadn’t happened, or you could pick another example, but I’m curious how you audible when what you thought the next thing was. Turns out not to be doable or possible.

Dorie Clark 00:50:50  Yeah. You are hitting on something that that is really useful, which is I have found so often that when people get one rejection or one sort of block of their progress, they are really too quick to take it as a final referendum or, you know, oh, you know, it just didn’t happen. It just didn’t work for me. The universe said that it wasn’t the right thing. And, you know, I always like to interrogate that a little bit and say, you know, is the universe really saying that? I’m not I’m not so sure. So in fact, just to complicate the story a little bit, I didn’t get into BMI the first time I found out about the program. I applied didn’t get in. I didn’t, you know, like, I really didn’t get in.

Dorie Clark 00:51:37  Like, you know, there’s a couple of rounds like, you know, sometimes you can qualify for an interview. I didn’t even qualify for the interview. And so obviously I was not I was not doing it right. I knew I wasn’t doing it right, but I didn’t know what to do. And so that was the point where I said, I’m going to hire a coach. Yeah, there’s always this the saying, right, that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and thinking you’ll get a different result? I said, I am going to do a different thing. I am going to come at it from a more educated approach, because I will have this coach train me over the next year so that my application will be good. And then the second time it was much better and they did let me in. So that was one clear pivot that I made. So I think that step one is saying, all right, the thing you thought you were going to do. Is there a chance that if you try again in a better way, that you might actually be able to do it? That’s that’s one alternative is just trying again? But yeah, in the case of musical theatre, there’s a variety of different things that you can do.

Dorie Clark 00:52:35  I mean, in the world of musicals and, you know, it’s different for every genre. But one of the common ways that you get noticed is applying to festivals or awards or things like that. So I do think that hiring a private coach was actually very useful for me. And, you know, I think sometimes people might, might think, oh, but you know, isn’t that so expensive? And it’s true if you’re working with, like, you know, one of the world’s elite, executive coaches, sure. You’re going to pay tens of thousands of dollars for that if you’re hiring a musical theater coach. Guess who that is? That’s an unemployed musical writer. You’re probably going to pay $50 an hour, which is what I paid. So. Right.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:14  Right.

Dorie Clark 00:53:14  Yeah. You know, you can you can get pretty far, with not that much money. I think it’s much more accessible than people might imagine. But I think probably what I would have done is work with a coach, as I did, and then just really have a concerted effort to try to apply for for different festivals and awards and just keep at it until I got something which I could use as my hook to to meet people, to get to get the work noticed, etc..

Eric Zimmer 00:53:43  While we’re talking about things not going according to plans, I’d love to talk about a chapter in the book that’s called Rethink Failure, and in it you tried to set a bunch of audacious goals for 2019. Talk to me about what those goals were and how it all worked out.

Dorie Clark 00:54:02  So by 2019, I was doing, you know, really pretty well in my business. I had written three books that had been published with with major publishers. I was making over $1 million a year by a lot of outside measurements. I think people would have said, oh, yeah, I mean, she’s she’s pretty successful. And one of the lessons that I thought was so powerful, which I wanted to share in the long game, was that even when you’ve reached a certain level of success that, you know, other people would say, oh, that’s that’s pretty good. You still get rejected and you still are failing all the time. Maybe not in super visible ways, but ways that are painful and disappointing. And you have to keep relearning the lesson about how to overcome failure if you want to keep stretching and growing.

Dorie Clark 00:54:55  So I wanted to kind of give people a play by play. So in the long game, I write about these five goals that I had for myself in 2019. One of them was to co-author a book with a prominent author. One was to option the the movie rights for a musical that I wanted to write, and these were all reasonable things. The author said yes to co-authoring the book. The creator of the movie said yes to my optioning the work and turning it into a musical. I had a friend who worked at a major newspaper who reached out to me and said, hey, we would like you to try out to write this column. I was like, oh my gosh, this would be so amazing. I wanted to speak at a at a major conference and I, you know, knew some of the people who were on the committee. So I thought, okay, you know, these these are all things this is not outlandish goals. These are all kind of reasonable goals, and I failed at every single one of them.

Dorie Clark 00:55:55  They just they didn’t work out. They chose someone else for the for the column. The filmmaker decided after saying yes, that he wanted to revoke that because he wanted to develop the property himself. The author that I was going to work with, got got a million, $1 million book deal and needed to go work on that instead. you know, all of these things just were not, you know, I got I got ghosted by the conference program. They never even got back to me. But clearly that was a no. So it felt kind of depressing. It was sort of like, oh, gosh, I guess nothing is working right now. but I did have a fifth goal. And that one, that one thankfully did work out which was which was meaningful to me. In 2019, for the first time, I was named to a list that while it is niche, it is not, you know, as famous like the Pulitzers or something. It is very meaningful within the world of business thought leadership, which is that there is a conference called.

Dorie Clark 00:56:52  Thinkers 50 and they did this biennial ranking of the world’s top business. Thinkers. And so I was named to that list. And that was that was really exciting. They do it at this black tie dinner in London, which was very cool. But an update to this story, you know, I mean, so like moral a of the story is, gosh, you know, even when you when you’ve reached a certain level of success, there’s never a point where it’s like, oh, everything’s smooth sailing from from that point on, there’s always failures and setbacks you have to deal with. But an interesting thing is, if you play the long game sufficiently, even some of the failures can turn into victories. The book deal that ended up not materializing in 2019. I actually signed that book deal last year. And so that is the book that I’m working on right now. So that is amazing. And I thought it was dead. And it is not dead. It just had to wait an extra six years.

Dorie Clark 00:57:44  So that’s pretty cool. And now for the speaking at the conference. I didn’t get to speak at that conference, but I got to speak at another analogous one. And that talk kind of went viral online. That was really cool. I’ve now four times been named to the list of top business thinkers. And so I think it’s really important to just mention that things that seem like a defeat at the time, if you keep going. Not all of them, but you can turn a lot of them into victories in one form or another if you’re just willing to persist.

Eric Zimmer 00:58:20  Well, that is a great place to wrap up. What a wonderful story, and I agree. I mean, the number of things that don’t work out, that kind of come back around with persistence is really true. And knowing that there will be failures all along the way, I think is really, really valuable. It’s a good lesson for me that I keep having to remind myself of like, okay, that didn’t work, but something else might.

Eric Zimmer 00:58:43  This might. You and I are going to spend a few minutes in a post-show conversation talking about the three habits of mind that are especially worth cultivating as a long term thinker. Listeners, if you’d like to access that post-show conversation with Dorine, you’d like to get ad free episodes and be part of what we do and support the show. You can go to one UFI and we’d love to see you there. Dorie, thank you so much. It’s been a real pleasure.

Dorie Clark 00:59:09  Great to speak with you, Eric. Thanks.

Eric Zimmer 00:59:11  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.

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Episode Transcript:

Eric 00:00:00  Specificity, particularly in the beginning, is always our friend what am I doing? Where am I doing it? How am I doing it? Any unknown about it? Get it out of there. Because if we’re trying to figure out what to do and motivate ourselves to do it at the same time, we’re in trouble.

Chris 00:00:22  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Eric 00:01:07  Okay, so this is a slightly different type of episode. I am being interviewed about my book, and as I thought about who I wanted to interview me for my book, I first thought of Chris and then I realized he is largely incoherent. So he was out. Don’t anybody get upset. Chris and I are still great friends. It’s a joke. And then I thought about somebody that was on the show over the last year named Sahil Bloom. When I talked to him, I was really struck by his clarity of thought. He’s both very rational, but also really contemplative and thinks really deeply. He’s also very kind. He seemed like the perfect person to interview me about my book, and it was really fun to see the parts of the book that he chose to pull out and focus on, because they might not have been what I would have chosen. It’s a great conversation back and forth, and there’s a lot of things that get featured about my book that I’m hoping will be really useful to you.

Eric 00:02:07  Here’s Sahil and I discussing how a little becomes a lot the art of small changes for a more meaningful life.

Sahil 00:02:17  Eric, what a pleasure to get to do this. How are you doing?

Eric 00:02:20  I’m good. Sahil, thank you so much for doing it. This is really fun for me, and I appreciate you doing this.

Sahil 00:02:26  Well, it’s an honor for me. So without belaboring it too much, I do want to just dive right in. And where I want to begin this conversation is with with a quote from the book which just said, when we think about life changing events, we tend to think in the singular the epiphany, the miracle, the watershed choice that will put us on a new trajectory for good. But that’s not how real change happens for most people. Most of the time, it happens little by little bit, with a thousand chances to do A or B, each choice a thread woven into the fabric of who we become. Could you speak to that?

Eric 00:03:02  Yeah. I mean, I think the tail end of that.

Eric 00:03:04  That each choice gets woven into the fabric of who we become is a metaphor that makes a lot of sense to me. Or is it a simile or an analogy? I don’t know, I never can keep those three straight, but because that’s how our life does get formed, it gets formed by one little thread at a time, over and over and over. And so. Yeah, we’re thinking about big things, and big moments matter in a way, but they’re anything but the full story. I start the book by sharing. If you were going to film the movie of my life, that it would show me walking into a treatment center in Columbus, Ohio, in the dead of winter in 1994 as a homeless heroin addict weighing £100, yellow and jaundiced from hepatitis C, prosecutor telling me I had up to 50 years. And I went in and they said to me, we think you need to go to long term treatment. And I said no thank you and went back to my room. It still cracks me up to think of what was that guy thinking? And I in my room, I had one of those we call moments of clarity where I saw so clearly, like, if I leave here, I’m going to die or go to jail.

Eric 00:04:13  And so I walked back out and I said to them, okay, I’ll go to treatment. And in the movie that would be the pivotal moment, right? If we get a lot of time and it is an important moment in my story, but it is not the whole story, because it would only have meaning based on the thousands of choices that I made afterwards. And so that’s kind of what that section of the book is speaking to. We can have an epiphany. We can have an insight. We can have a moment where it appears that things turn, but those have to be lived into. I had plenty of moments before that where I said, I’m going to get sober, and I didn’t because I wasn’t quite ready to make those changes. And so those moments seemed significant in the moment, but they weren’t because I was unable to do all the things after that kept them significant.

Sahil 00:05:01  I guess what you’re speaking to, which is a really important point for all of us, is this idea that epiphanies rarely feel like epiphanies in the moment.

Sahil 00:05:11  In some way, they may feel significant in some way, but an epiphany is really something that we denote with the benefit of hindsight. And in this context, this epiphany moment for you, which was extremely powerful to read right at the heart of the book, right at the beginning, this gut punch, it is very clear that it is only an epiphany because of the millions, I would argue, of tiny actions that you have made since that have led you to this point where you are here, releasing this book into the world. What about that moment with the benefit of hindsight, acknowledging it made it the one that you felt started this snowball or this ripple that allowed you to start taking and start threading these tiny threads that have led you to here today?

Eric 00:05:58  That’s a question that can best be answered with some degree of speculation. It was certainly a culmination of all the little moments before that that led up to it. The times that I tried to get sober before and didn’t, those were those were important, I learned something.

Eric 00:06:15  We talk a lot about a bottom in recovery, you know, hitting rock bottom. And in many ways I was at a rock bottom. But I’ve seen people continue digging far beyond any kind of bottom. That makes sense. So I think, yeah, there has to be some degree of consequence, like there’s got to be a reason to change, and at the same moment there has to be hope. It’s like a mixture of despair and hope coming together at the same time. And somehow I got that when I was there, somewhere in there, hope started to take root. And I think it was borrowed hope, certainly for a long time, because I didn’t have faith in myself, but I saw enough people saying I was just like you and they could talk about it. And I was like, yeah, they are just like me. And they were sober. And so I went, oh, well, maybe this is possible. Yeah. I think that’s the main piece.

Speaker 4 00:07:07  You know, the thing that I.

Sahil 00:07:08  Think is so powerful about this book in particular, and I was saying this to you before we started recording, but I think it bears repeating here is I’ve read hundreds of books within this category of, you know, self-improvement, personal improvement broadly. I obviously wrote a book in this category. The thing that I think most suffer from that we often fail to acknowledge is they are about efficiency at all costs, productivity at all costs, productivity, maxing right, optimizing all areas of your life. And in particular when it comes to habit formation, behavior change. You lose something. If you focus on productivity at all costs, it is possible to optimize the life out of your life. And what I felt came across so powerfully in your words and in your book and in your story and in the frameworks that you offer. Is this idea that the behavior change and the actions you are taking in those threads, you are starting to weave together, all flow alongside this pursuit of meaning, this pursuit of mattering, of significance, of actually figuring out who you want to be just as much as what you want to do along that journey.

Sahil 00:08:25  Was that intentional? Where did that come from in your own journey, and why do you think that’s so important?

Eric 00:08:32  It was intentional, and it started in a program I started a number of years ago that I called Spiritual Habits. And the idea that I was interested in is, can we use the science of behavior change to help us become better people? You know, to not just optimize for productivity for an exercise habit, but can we use it to change how we think and how we relate to the world? And so that was what I tried to do. And and those were my two interests. I looked at the podcast over the years. I kept going, what are the two things I come back to? And I kept going. I keep coming back to the science of behavior change because I’m fascinated by how and why people change. And then I keep coming back to what does it mean to live a good life? What’s a meaningful life? And so, yes, it was very intentional to try and thread those two together.

Eric 00:09:24  And I do think that’s one of the things, and I’m glad you’re calling it out. That does differentiate the book.

Speaker 4 00:09:29  You know, the other.

Sahil 00:09:30  Area that jumped out to me was how clearly you address the struggles of like, motivation or willpower when it comes to behavior change. I think that so much advice that you see in this space comes down to like, hey, you know, just grind it out, get the thing done. You know, just put push through it, you know. Wake up. Rise and grind, whatever it might be. Right at 4 a.m.. The cold plunges, like, whatever the thing is. Hey, I’m just going to grind it out. And we know if that were what it took, everyone would have six packs and be rich. It’s not enough willpower, motivation. It fails and it fails spectacularly and very quickly for the vast majority of people, myself included, by the way. And I consider myself to be an extraordinarily disciplined person. I recently tried to, you know, cut my phone addiction like this was a big thing that I was trying to do this year.

Sahil 00:10:21  And the first month that I tried to do it, I completely failed. And the reason was because there was a lot more to the motivation around it than met the eye. It was not so simple as to say like, well, my motivation is there. You talk about motivational complexity, explain that idea, what you mean by it, and sort of how we should really think about the role of motivation, the role of willpower when it comes to these changes.

Eric 00:10:43  Yeah, I think there’s a few questions embedded in that one. The first thing I’ll say is for the people that can get up and grind, go to it. This book is for the other people, right? This book is for the other people who are like, I try to make changes and maybe I do okay at it, but then I slip back there, slightly frustrated. That’s who the book is for. This question of motivational complexity, I think, is important because we are a soup of competing motivations inside of ourselves, and we need to acknowledge that.

Eric 00:11:16  That’s part of why I the parable that I use to start this show, I have used for so long, because it speaks to that, it speaks to like there are these there are these competing forces within us. It’d be nice if it was as simple as two of them. There’s a whole bunch of them. I simplified it down for the purposes of the book, and it’s an oversimplification of our inner world, but sometimes oversimplification is useful into values and desires. Values are the things that, like the best, wisest part of us have decided are worth wanting. desires are the things that you just want. They just show up. There’s a whole bunch of them. I’ll have 50 of them in a day that are all over the place. And so we all do that. And so the first type of thing that most of us struggle with is, I phrase it as a simple question. It’s what do I want most? Versus what do I want now? What I want most are my values.

Eric 00:12:08  What I want now are my desires. And not that my desires are bad because they’re part of the energy that drives us. But we want to start to start to sort these things out.

Sahil 00:12:19  So would you recommend to someone that they actually just sit down and go through that exercise like, you know, get a blank sheet of paper in front of you and split it in two and just start writing down on one side. What do I want most? You know, what is that life that I’m actually trying to create?

Eric 00:12:36  Yeah, there’s one exercise in the chapter itself, and then there’s a whole bunch of exercises in the appendix, which has all the chapter exercises that people can do to start to get in touch with their values and figure that out. But as you said, there’s a very simple way to do it is just to start to identify like, where am I trading what I want most for what I want now? And most of us will know the answer to that fairly quickly.

Speaker 4 00:13:03  It is such.

Sahil 00:13:03  An interesting thing that knowing something and doing something about it are very different. Yes, I perceive that the most disciplined people that I know, and I would put myself into this bucket a lot of times in my life. I think there’s a wiring that I just have around this, have this ability to what I would say is bring the after into the before. So you sort of, you know, you’re sitting where you are and there might be something hard that you have to do, but, you know, you feel good after doing that thing, whether it’s working out or waking up early or doing the work that you didn’t want to do, whatever it might be, they have sort of like a time traveler’s ability to, like, pull that feeling from the after into the before so that they can go and endure whatever that that struggle is. Is that something that you have seen in your own pursuit, in your own learning and research?

Eric 00:13:54  Absolutely. The term we used in recovery was play the tape all the way through.

Eric 00:14:00  The problem is we all stop at the first scene. We stop at the scene where we know how it would feel to get high. We know what that cupcake would taste like. We know how comfortable it is sitting here on the couch reading Substack. Whatever our thing is, we see that. But that’s all we tend to see. And so the playing the tape through is exactly what you said. Bringing the after into the before. I see what comes next, both in positive changes and negatives. So an example I use in the book is imagine your thing as you scroll Instagram in the morning, you end up being late for work regularly. If you’re sitting there, you got to play that through. But it’s not enough to just go like, oh, I’ll be late. What we have to do is see and visualize and feel That. So if you do that and you look at oh, and then is going to come the frantic scramble out the door with the drive where I’m angry at everybody because they’re not going fast enough.

Eric 00:14:56  And then I got to do that awkward shuffle past my boss’s office, and then I’m going to all morning, have that low burn of fear. Like, did I screw up again? Or self-criticism like, how could you do this again? If we can see and feel that we’re a whole lot more likely then to be able to set Instagram down, get ready for work. And that’s the trick, is doing that, walking through that process, it’s not the only thing that happens. I mean, part of what the book tries to address is the idea of a choice point. And there are things that we can do before the choice point to stack the deck in our favor. And then there are ways that we can examine that choice point, and we can learn to rescript what we’re saying and feeling to ourselves in that moment. Because if we know what we should do, for example, it’s like, all right, I know I need to leave the house by 830 to get to work. And 825 comes and we we don’t respond.

Eric 00:15:57  It’s because something was happening inside of us in that moment. I call them the six saboteurs of self-control that hung us up at that time. And the good news is, we can just examine that choice point very closely, and we can learn how to change that. We don’t need to do Jungian analysis on our entire life. We simply need to say, what am I thinking, feeling, and saying to myself when I make the choice I wish I didn’t.

Sahil 00:16:23  It reminds me of this like general process that I’ve heard in the past of sort of the key to all of this being make the pain of not doing the thing greater than the pain of doing it. And so like when you when I hear you speak through the, you know, you think about shuffling past your boss and think about the drive when you’re angry and all these things. A lot of what that is, is like make that pain feel much more visceral. Yeah. Because, you know, the pain of of doing the thing which is like, it’s gonna hurt.

Sahil 00:16:49  I really want to be procrastinating and scrolling Instagram now, so I have to put it down that I know that pain. I know what that is because it’s right in front of me. Let me make the pain of not doing that thing that I should do just as bad right in front of me.

Eric 00:17:01  Yeah, and it’s hard. I mean, researchers call it delay discounting, which essentially means we value what’s right in front of us far more than we value things in the future, because the future is an imaginative exercise, whereas present is very clear. And so there’s a whole bunch of different strategies. The book covers a lot of them of of how do we do that? But that’s the big piece of it is, as you said, is really trying to visualize and feel the future make it more real somehow, some way.

Sahil 00:17:55  You speak to BJ Fogg’s behavior model in the book? Could you just briefly lay that out and then I want to you sort of use that as a transition point into your spa method and talking through, you know, sort of your core framework around this.

Eric 00:18:12  Yeah, people can look it up online or it’s in the book of visual of it because it works better as a visual, but it’s a graph and it’s axes are one is motivation vertically and the other is effort going horizontally. And his point is that an action happens when behavior and motivation and a prompt, an ability to remember something, come together at the same time. The key insight of the chart, though, is that the harder something is to do, the more motivation you need. The easier something is to do, the less motivation you need. And we know motivation goes up and down. So what we’re trying to aim at is how can we find a task that is easy enough that we’ll do it when we know our motivation is going to be fluctuating? So that’s the core idea.

Sahil 00:19:01  You bring up an example of your own experience with meditation. Talk about that. Like for me personally, that one slapped me in the face just because of my own experience with this exact challenge that you’re referencing.

Sahil 00:19:14  So just talk a little bit about that and how it relates to all of this.

Eric 00:19:18  Yeah, I tried to get a regular meditation practice for a long time. I got interested in meditation when I was 18 in Columbus, Ohio. There was no internet, there were books and some weird guy teaching transcendental meditation. Once in a while. That was that was it. That was all that was available if you wanted to know anything about meditation. And so what I was reading were books by Buddhist teachers, and they would say in the book, you should meditate 30 minutes to an hour a day. So that’s what I would try and do. And I could do it maybe for a day or a week, maybe a month. It was really hard for me, which meant I had to have sky high motivation. The reason it was hard for me is that I would sit down and it was pandemonium in my brain, like the dark circus rolled into town. I did not like it. It was very hard.

Eric 00:20:05  I didn’t settle easy. And so eventually what I did is I shrunk the the task down far enough. I started at three minutes that I could do it. And the good news about that approach, and this is the little by little approach, is that by doing it successfully, I felt better about myself. And as I felt better about myself, my motivation went up. Because motivation goes up when we feel good about our chances of success, when we believe in ourselves and it goes down when we don’t believe in ourselves or we don’t think we can do something. And so by succeeding at my little thing, I was able to build, I was able to do harder things, i.e. more meditation, with the perceived difficulty staying about the same because I was easing into it and my motivation was going up versus what would be a sporadic, longer meditation, but twice a week or something. And all I would do is berate myself about the five days a week that I didn’t do it. So that’s how I got into meditation.

Eric 00:21:09  I think it’s a good example of the motivation and the effort that’s in the fog model, and why this little by little approach works.

Speaker 4 00:21:17  And it also.

Sahil 00:21:18  Just creates profound ripple effects into every other area of life. You know, one of the things that I have certainly seen that I think you allude to frequently is motivation doesn’t exist in a silo, like when you’re talking about your life, the motivation that you can build as a result of doing this tiny thing, whether it’s meditation or something else. The three minutes, that winning sensation that it starts to create. Yes, that has ripple effects into every other area of life. And so not only do you start to feel a little bit more motivation for this one action and doing it a bit more and showing up on a daily basis, but you also start seeing yourself a little bit differently in terms of the type of person that you actually are. That who you become in the process. And so you show up a.

Speaker 4 00:22:05  Slightly.

Sahil 00:22:06  Little bit better at work maybe that day, or you show up a little bit more present with the people you love, or a little bit more energy for whatever it is that you’re taking on.

Sahil 00:22:15  And that is this profound ripple effect that you’ve just created through this tiny action that you just happen to show up for.

Eric 00:22:25  Yeah, I don’t remember quite where it is in the book, but I have a little section that I call The Stakes of Change. And there are two core things if we’re trying to do something. So let’s imagine we’re trying to build an exercise habit. There’s the benefit that we get from doing the exercise habit. There’s a reason we’re doing it. We want to be healthier. We want to live longer. We want to have more energy, whatever your thing is. And if you’re not doing that successfully, you’re not getting the benefit of that thing. So that’s a problem. The deeper problem is that we start to not believe in ourselves. The deeper problem is we start to think that we can’t make changes. And when we feel that we lose a sense of agency in our own life, we lose a sense of us being the author of our own life. And so a lot of what I’m trying to do is help people get to a point where they can make and keep promises to themselves, because that is so foundational to how we see ourselves and our ability, as you say, that ripples into all aspects of life.

Sahil 00:23:27  Yeah. You summarized it well. You said, we believe we get motivated and then act, but often it works the other way around. We act and motivation follows. Motivation is a byproduct of movement, right? So just start moving.

Eric 00:23:40  Yes, that’s my general strategy is get moving in any way I can, ideally towards the thing I’m trying to do.

Sahil 00:23:49  I want to transition or at least extend this thought into your Spa method. Specificity prompts alignment, resilience. Can you speak to that? I know obviously if if a reader which they should gets deeper into this, they’ll they’ll be well versed. But I would love to have you just sort of lay out the high level idea around the framework.

Eric 00:24:10  Yeah. The first thing I’ll say is that I think change needs two core competencies from us. One I call structural. And this is what the Spa method, it’s all structural. It’s what am I doing? When am I doing it? How am I doing it? Why am I doing it? Who’s supporting me and doing it? And I’ll go into more detail in that in a second.

Eric 00:24:32  That’s really important, and it solves a lot of what we think are motivational problems. And then even when we know what we should do, when we should do it, we’ve got the plan. There’s then that moment we talked about before where we have to make the right choice, but the structural is where we start, and the Spa method is a way of going through that. And so we take a behavior that we want to create and we first we get specific about it. Ambiguity is often the mother of procrastination. The things that sit on my task list the longest are the ones that are semi ambiguous. I don’t know exactly what the first step is. You know it’s get video done when that’s actually a six step process. So specificity, particularly in the beginning, is always our friend what am I doing? Where am I doing it. How am I doing it. Drive it. Just any unknown about it. Get it out of there. Because if we’re trying to figure out what to do and motivate ourselves to do it, at the same time, we’re in trouble.

Eric 00:25:30  So Specificity. The P stands for prompts. It’s how do I get reminded to do it? That sounds obvious, but it’s not always for me. In the morning, I need a prompt to tell me it’s time to put Substack down and get on the bike like I need my alarm to go off on my phone. That’s what wakes me up. So we need a prompt. The A stands for alignment, and it’s about structuring our environment in whatever way we can to make it easier for us to do the thing. It’s who is supporting us. You know, James Clear. We both know James. He he talks about this in his book. He talks about making something easy and attractive. You’re doing everything you can to have the thing be as easy for you to do as possible. And then finally, the R stands for resilience. And I used to do this with coaching clients. We’d work through a plan and then I’d say, okay, what’s going to go wrong? Right. Because something’s going to come up.

Eric 00:26:26  Like, let’s think through your plan to meditate in the morning after the kids get on the school bus. Well, what are we doing on mornings that the kids don’t get on the school bus? That’s something we can predict and plan for. The answer might be, on those days, I just let it go. It’s fine. I didn’t meditate today. Or it might be. You know what? I’m just going to sit in the room where they are, and I’m just going to spend three minutes watching my breath. But I have a fallback for what I do in those situations. And so that’s the Spa method is it gives us a way of creating a framework for the behavior. And if you look at one of the best known models for change, it’s quickly called the trans theoretical model of change. Often the stages of change model, you realize that there are three full steps in it before you ever do anything, and that the Spa method is helping us with some of those.

Sahil 00:27:17  The thing that I love about this spa method in particular is, is the r, the resilience, and the reason I find it so important and worth reiterating is my own experience in my own life, and also with the thousands of people that I’ve interacted with.

Sahil 00:27:32  Around behavior change is that the ambitious mind is particularly bad with resilience for one reason when they miss, which inevitably you are going to miss with whatever behavior change you’re trying to create, their bias is to try to make up for a miss. I’m going to say make up for in quotes. And what that means is like, you know, let’s just use an example to actually bring it to life. Hey, I’m going to do, you know, 30 minutes of cardio every single day because I’m trying to get healthier. I’m going to walk for 30 minutes every day. Well, something happened. Chaos. My kid was up all night, I didn’t sleep, I had to get straight to work. So I missed on Tuesday. But I tell myself, okay, I’m gonna make up for it tomorrow. So I’m going to try to do an hour tomorrow so that I can make up for the missed. Because it was 30 minutes I missed. I’m gonna add it to tomorrow’s. And then they go out and they run for an hour.

Sahil 00:28:20  Then they get hurt because they tried to run for an hour. Their foot is really sorry the next day. So they miss the next day, and then they have to go to the doctor. So they miss the next day. All of a sudden, this desire to try to make up for the missed, to try to like, punish yourself in a way for the fact that life happened, leads to a cascading negative in your life. The resilience you tried to embed into the model actually ends up hurting you rather than helping you. And I have seen that over and over again. This this desire to make up for something, being something that actually, oddly enough, holds you back. It’s one of the reasons this way, this way of thinking about resilience really stood out to me. It’s also a reason why I loved this quote where you talked about, you said, besides no longer using mind altering substances to burn my life to the ground. No single change has made a bigger difference in building a life worth living than this.

Sahil 00:29:16  Learning to treat myself with kindness that I think of as a beautiful transition point for this conversation, but also as a beautiful way to capture this idea of resilience because resilience is often about kindness. Yes. Kindness to yourself. This recognition that it is, it is okay. You are on the path. There are going to be storms. There are going to be moments where the dark wolf, to use your analogy, wins out, but you don’t continue feeding it by punishing yourself with this self-loathing on the back end. Anything you would add to that? As we hinge point, I.

Eric 00:29:55  Think that’s a really beautiful insight that you have. And it’s true. And so it’s part of why I have a phrase which is just a little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing. Meaning if you plan to run for 30 minutes that day and something gets in the way. The way I deal with that is I try. Then, you know, can I get a five minute walk in? Yesterday I had this.

Eric 00:30:17  I’m in the middle of a book launch. I did not exercise as I should. I sat down in the morning and got started on something. Day got away from me, but after dinner I went and did a 15 minute walk. I’m doing something to honor the underlying value of health. So yes, you’re absolutely right. And then. Yeah. Kindness is the key part of it. And it’s why I said the one option might be if the kids don’t go to school that day, I just say it’s okay to not meditate. That’s it. Done. No problem. That’s a kindness to yourself. And so yeah, I do think kindness is both the biggest upgrade we can give ourselves in our life. And it is critical to how we change.

Sahil 00:31:20  So to this point in the conversation, we have Mostly circled around what you speak of as habits of behavior. We’ve talked a lot about in your book, Framing the Beginning. Right. It’s the mechanics of the change values versus desires, the Spa method, BJ Fogg’s model, all of these things.

Sahil 00:31:39  I want to transition because kindness is a good transition point for this into what you speak about as habits of thought, which is one of the areas that I think makes this book so unique. Because you address this, you speak to all of these different schools of wisdom and ancient thought and parables and these beautiful ways that tie together what is habits of thought as a general framing? And from there, I want to talk about a couple of the frameworks that you offer there that I think are really sticky for people to learn about.

Eric 00:32:07  Yeah, habits are thought are just what are the predictable patterns that our brains fall into. And we all have them. We all have predictable things that we tend to think consistently. A Zen master called it habit ridden consciousness. And I love that idea. You know, we think of habit often, particularly with James work and BJ Fogg’s work. Habit now is often associated positively, but for a long time it was associated with bad habit. And we have, you know, quote unquote bad habits of thought, thoughts that cause us to suffer, thoughts that cause us to be less effective, thoughts that cause us not to be able to change.

Eric 00:32:45  And so that’s what the focus is there.

Speaker 5 00:32:48  And when it comes to habits.

Sahil 00:32:49  Of thought, you have this idea of these still points. It relates to something that you said a couple of minutes ago just related to the like five minute walk. But I sort of think of it as like the thought version of that, these still points that you create in your life. What are still points? And for an average listener that’s sitting there listening to this today, this to me feels like one of the you can go do this right now, today, implemented in your life, and start to feel a dramatic change. Not not a tiny change, a really dramatic change in ripple effect from this. So just frame it up for people and make it actionable, because I would love to see more people take this idea immediately and start implementing it.

Eric 00:33:28  Yeah, it comes from the concept of if we’re going to change how we think or relate to the world, that process is not going to change instantly. You’re not going to read a book Sunday night where you see something important about the way you think, and then that’s it.

Eric 00:33:47  Even if you get to a daily meditation habit, which is great, but a lot of people can’t get to, or a reflection period in the morning where you think about what’s important, then the day starts and you’re off and running. I’ll give you an example of a practical still point. Let’s pretend that you want to be more patient with your children. That’s what we’re going to work on. A still point is a very small moment of time 30s a minute that you do frequently throughout the day, and we can drop whatever we want into a still point. So let’s take patience as the example. You decide that the prompt you’re going to use is every time I go to the bathroom. So every time you go to the bathroom, as you’re going about your business, you think about, why is it important for me to be patient with my children? What about that matters to me? You go to the bathroom 3 or 4 times, you get home that night, you’re far more likely to be able to be patient with your kids because you thought about it four times that day.

Eric 00:34:51  Then you are. If you read about it and felt bad snapping on Sunday night, that’s the core idea. And so we can all weave into our day. We don’t have to set aside time because we’re all busy. You can weave into your day ways of reflecting that over time, change how you feel and how you think. And so that’s what a still point is. And the key is we have to architect them into our life because they don’t happen automatically. We don’t remember. So prompts become really important there. An alarm is a prompt. We have an app we’ve created called a still point app. And what it does is it randomly goes off and you say, I want it to go off five times between 7 a.m. and 8 p.m. or whatever hours you want, and it’ll display a message. Your message could be, you know, I want to be patient with my children. It goes off little ding on your phone, you pull it up, you look at it and you go, yeah, that is important.

Eric 00:35:46  Why is that? And you just take very brief reflection. Those all really, really do add up. And little by little you find yourself relating very differently. We talk about we’re going to get into self-compassion. And I said that’s the biggest upgrade I gave myself that happened by thinking about it a lot. Lots of little times.

Sahil 00:36:07  I think it was Viktor Frankl, famous psychologist, Holocaust survivor, that said, between stimulus and response, there is a space in that space is our power to choose our response. When I read about Steel Points, that was what popped into my head was it’s a mechanism for creating space in your life. Yes, because we all know this and we experience this, that modern life has this feature of just feeling like this constant fixed loop of stimulus and response. Right? You know, you you wake up in the morning, you know, you probably have your phone on your bedside table, the alarm goes off. You grab it, you’re still lying in bed, and a thousand people come rushing into your bedroom.

Sahil 00:36:49  Right. Text messages, emails, social media notifications, all of it. And from that moment until the time you get into bed and put your phone down, you are in this constant fixed loop. Yep. And if you do not force space into your life, modern life has sucked every bit of it out. There is no ventilation. And so in a lot of ways, what you’re talking about is like ventilating, forcing the air of space into your life through these triggers, through these, whether it’s your Still Points app or whether it’s your own ability to create this. Of just these tiny little pockets of of of space and deliberate space, intentional space that is leading you to act and behave in the way that your ideal self wants to show up in the world. I think the parent example is such a powerful one, because consistently I have found I’ve, you know, a young I have a toddler son. It is very easy to say how you want to be as a parent. It is very difficult when you get caught in those moments, you know, in those you’re tired at the end of a long day and your kid isn’t behaving, or they’re not eating the meal you made for them, or they’re not going to bed at night.

Sahil 00:37:55  I find that it gets, you know, it’s kind of linear or maybe even exponential in terms of the difficulty over the course of the day, you’re like really patient and kind first thing in the morning and you’re like, oh yeah, so we’re with you, whatever. And then at the end of a long day, it’s anything but, right? The difficulty level is so much higher. And so what you’re talking about is like insert space so that you can circumvent that curve and continue to show up. Remind yourself of who that person is. You talk about self-compassion, speak to that a little bit more, and whether it’s your own journey with it or just the importance of it as it relates to this process of of change.

Eric 00:38:30  Yeah. Self-compassion is so important for two reasons. Reason one is it just is really lovely not to occupy brain space with an asshole, you know? I mean, to put it simply, it’s just nice to have it be pleasant in here and spend more time with myself than anybody.

Eric 00:38:47  So that’s that’s very nice. And again, probably biggest upgrade I’ve given myself. It’s also really important to how we change, because change is a learning process. And when we are being hard on ourselves and when we’re falling into our usual scripts of you’re lazy, you’re this, you’re that, you always do it. You screw up, what’s wrong with you? All of that ramps up our emotional state. And when that state is ramped up. The part of our brain that does the learning is sort of turned off. And that’s the exact opposite of what we want. What we want to have happen is, oh, I was exercising, you know, every day this week. But then Friday and Saturday it fell apart. I wonder why. What was different? What was different between Thursday and Saturday? Then we learn, but all we do is go see. I knew you would do it. You always screw up. You haven’t learned a thing. And so self-compassion is really critical in that dimension.

Sahil 00:39:49  Also, where do you think self-compassion or do you think rather self-compassion can go too far for some people. And I guess the question here that the origin of it for me is to just say, what is this balance point? You know, for someone that does need dramatic change in their life, even not dramatic. So let’s say they just need they need to create change in their life. Yeah. At what point does self-compassion become self-sabotage or a excuses? Yeah. An excuse.

Eric 00:40:22  Yeah. So I define self-compassion as a middle place between self-improvement and self-acceptance. So self-compassion is not about justifying anything, any behavior. I can still hold myself accountable, but I can do it in a kinder way. I score high on conscientiousness on the big Five personality test, which means I pay a lot of attention to what I do, and so I frequently see ways in which I have, you know, for lack of a better term, fallen short of what I wanted to do if the person I wanted to be.

Eric 00:40:58  But I can be self compassionate in that by looking at the behavior, focus in on how do I change the behavior, what can I learn from it without having to say mean things to myself? An example I use in the book is, if you can imagine, two students, Bobby and Susie. Bobby is in class and the teacher says, Bobby, what’s three plus four? And Bobby goes, eight. And the teacher goes, Bobby, you moron, what is wrong with you? It is not eight. You’re never going to get it. You’ll be lucky to get out of elementary school, let alone college. You might as well write that off. Bobby is going to struggle in math, right? Susie, on the other hand, is asked what three plus four is, and she says eight and her teacher doesn’t go. You’re right, Susie eight. It is great job. She goes, no, Susie, it’s not at seven. Here’s why. Right now you could do this. And by the way, if you want a little extra help, stop by after class and I’ll give it to you.

Eric 00:41:54  I know you can figure this out, right? We can tell who’s going to do better. That’s what self-compassion is.

Sahil 00:42:00  It all sort of feels to me like it relates to this middle way concept that some people will be familiar with from Buddhism, but you speak to and write about in the book? Can you connect it to that?

Eric 00:42:14  Yeah, that’s exactly what. Self-compassion, for me, is a middle way between self-criticism and self-indulgence. And so I’m a cliché of the middle way. I feel like that way of thinking has so imbued so many aspects of my life, and I give a lot of different examples of it in the book. Now, there are certain things I can’t do middle way. I’m a I’m a recovering substance addict, right? For that, I am extreme. It is abstinence. But most things in my life I find a middle way approach works. A middle way approach works if we’re trying to make a change. Because if you think you should do it perfectly all the time and you don’t, a lot of people just give up.

Eric 00:43:01  Like, it’s not like there’s a place either I do it perfectly or I don’t do it at all. You could think of this on a day you’re trying to eat well and you have breakfast and, you know, somehow you end up with Krispy Kreme donuts for breakfast. Most people in a non middle way approach go oh fuck it. You know and the whole day is gone. They’re at McDonald’s at lunch and they’re at Baskin-Robbins for ice cream after dinner. The whole thing derails. A middle way approach says, yeah, okay, I messed up a meal. No big deal. But I can still keep with my plan.

Sahil 00:43:32  It all sort of relates to this embrace of the ordinary that I absolutely love. There’s this poem like one of my favorite poems. It’s by a man named George Martin. It’s about parenting. But the final two lines of it are make the ordinary come alive, and the extraordinary will take care of itself. You sort of lament this idea that people are told everyone can be extraordinary, and you should strive for the extraordinary.

Sahil 00:44:06  It all kind of connects to this middle way, this embrace of the ordinary, this middle path, this boring show up daily, basic, small. Can you talk a little bit about that and your relationship with ordinary versus extraordinary, what you have seen in your conversations that you’ve had with people and and what that means to you?

Eric 00:44:26  Yeah, I think there’s a lot of pressure in the self-help movement is one of the main perpetrators of this of exactly. Like I said, everybody can be great, everybody can be exceptional, you can do anything. And I just kind of think that’s BS. And the pressure to do that leaves us always feeling like we’re not enough. It’s not enough to be a good parent anymore. You also have to have a job where you’re killing it and you’re on LinkedIn influencing people. And you also started a charity in Africa for children, and you’re on the PTA board at school, and, and and there’s no ever is enough. And that does not lead to a satisfied life, and it certainly doesn’t lead to a life where we’re our best self for other people.

Eric 00:45:14  Because if we go back to this idea that we do better when we feel better about ourselves, if we constantly are focused on the things that I don’t do, then we don’t feel good. And I’ve coached so many people like this who are wonderful people. They’re successful at work, they’ve got children that they’re a great parent to. They’re a decent and kind person overall, and all they feel is I’m just not enough. I’m just not enough because they’re comparing themselves against Mel Robbins. I don’t know whoever your whoever your comparison point is. And that’s a really crappy way to go through life. And so for me, the more that I am able to just be a person among people doing the best I can and not having to be extraordinary or special, the better I do. Writing a book is a is an interesting process in this, because there’s a certain amount of ego in it to do it and get it done, and to promote it and to push it into the world. But I have to be very careful about gauging all of my life on how successful this book is, you know, gauging my self-worth on what podcasts I got on or whether I got on the Today show.

Eric 00:46:26  It’s a very slippery slope. That’s the sort of advanced version of it. But if you’re in that mindset, it doesn’t matter. You will always think there needs to be more.

Sahil 00:46:36  How much of that challenge, let’s say, do you feel has become ten times more difficult in 2026, as it maybe was in the 1990s or even the early 2000? Pre social media, pre the internet.

Eric 00:46:55  I think it has definitely gotten worse. I don’t want to blame the internet and technology for what our human things. Right. People have had problems with comparing themselves to others. There’s the old phrase, you know. Keeping up with the Joneses. Right. That was all about you’re comparing yourself to your neighbor who has more than you. So this is not a new thing. This has been around forever. And social media is a constant comparison engine. It just runs and runs and runs on that. And to expose ourselves to that again and again and again is definitely problematic. If that’s where I go for my relaxation and my my downtime.

Eric 00:47:36  But what it causes me to do is feel less than as I’m doing it. It’s not a great strategy for relaxing, right? I mean, we all fall prey to it to a certain degree. We all have our little digital tic. Mine is checking my email way more than is possibly needed. But yeah, I think social media has exacerbated all of these things. And the fact that social media is driven by an algorithm that prioritizes the extraordinary, the extremes, the best or the worst. It makes it even worse.

Sahil 00:48:09  The thing that I find so damning about it is keeping up with the Joneses has always existed. But the Joneses was it within? I shot right. It was actually like the people on your street that you could see the Joneses lived there. And so your comparison, while it existed, was always local in nature. And so it was somewhat bounded in what you could experience. Now comparison is global and you are comparing yourself to the top 0.0001% in whatever area and whatever domain. And you’re comparing them, you’re comparing yourself to that group and the 0.01% of their life that they are actually willing to share.

Sahil 00:48:47  So it’s even worse than that. It’s not like, hey, I could see the Joneses on the corner of the street. I see that they have a nicer car, the man, a nicer house. But I also see them arguing in the window every single night. So I know there’s there’s different sides to their life that you don’t on social media. All you see is the beautiful house, the car, the private jet, whatever, and the beautiful marriage and the children and none of the other issues. Right. And so it steadily creates and compounds this thing. And in addition to that, the algorithms feed the negative. We know scientifically that negativity drives clicks and shares at an outsized rate versus positivity. And so all of it is designed to create this perception in your mind that you are not doing enough, that you need to do more. The entire consumer economy is built on that idea, right? Hey, you’re not doing enough. Here. Buy this thing and you’ll be better. You’ll be feeling better.

Sahil 00:49:34  I have found when you ask people to map, you know their happiness during the course of a day. Just self mapping it. Your least happy moments tend to be times when you’re spending too much time on your phone. Screen time? Yeah, it’s a pretty simple hack to circumvent that, to step away from that a little bit, get away from that comparison engine. Realize that most of these comparisons are completely arbitrary in nature. Before we conclude and sort of get into some concluding thoughts, I want to just ask you about this framing that you share. Suffering equals pain. Times resistance. I’ve loved that ever since I read it. Yeah, and it has clicked with me in so many different ways in my life that I see on an ongoing basis my my resistance in particular. Like, what is the resistance that I’m feeling here? Talk a little bit about that and how to think about that in our own lives.

Eric 00:50:25  Yeah. I believe the meditation teacher, Shenzhen Young, is the originator of that phrase.

Eric 00:50:30  So credit due. And it’s been extraordinarily important in my life. And so the idea is that like suffering is the total overall, let’s just call it yucky ness of something. Pain is the situation. It’s the back pain, or it’s the job that you don’t really like or whatever it is. And then resistance is all the stuff that we’re saying in our heads about it. And the reason that equation is so good is the precision of it. It’s a suffering equals pain Time’s resistance. So let’s just take back pain. That’s a simple one. My back hurts. On a scale of five. Five points out of ten. Of back pain. And I’m resisting it out of five because I’m thinking it shouldn’t be this way. And what am I going to be like when I’m 80? And why me? You know, whatever our thing that we’re spinning around, the fear, the resistance. So 25 total points of suffering. If I can turn that resistance down a little, I don’t think we can turn it off.

Eric 00:51:31  I just don’t think that’s what I think enlightenment is when you turn the resistance totally off. But for most of us, most all of the time, that’s not possible. But if I turn that resistance just down two points to a three, five times three, now I’ve got 15 total units of suffering. So the whole experience is less yucky. And again, that’s a very scientifically precise term. The whole thing is less yucky. But I didn’t have to change the underlying problem at all. Which is good because sometimes we can’t.

Sahil 00:52:02  It reminds me of that, Buddhist parable of the two Arrows. You know, if you’re struck with one arrow, does it hurt? Yes. If you’re struck by a second arrow, does it hurt even more? Yes. And then the Buddha teaches that the first arrow is the thing that happens in your life. You cannot control it. The second arrow is your reaction to the first, and it’s within your control to send that arrow into the ground rather than into you.

Sahil 00:52:25  That is avoiding that resistance. One of the questions that you offer that I thought really stuck with me, that I found myself continuing to ask myself when I feel this resistance, particularly when it comes to like professional related stress, is will this bother me in five hours, five days or five months? Yeah, that has been this moment for me. Like all of these random little stresses that hit my life, that then linger, that I feel this resistance towards, that increases that suffering. Most of them melt away when you realize that they aren’t going to matter. And I mean, frankly, most of them in five hours, but definitely not in five days. so I would definitely recommend that to anyone listening to this. Whether or not you end up reading this book, when you encounter a stress, when that situation comes up, ask, Will this bother me in five hours, five days, or five months? Generally speaking, you will find that the answer is not more than five hours, and so it’s probably not worth ruminating over.

Sahil 00:53:20  And so sitting with in this moment.

Eric 00:53:24  That question saves me so many hours of frustration. I’m on hold for customer service, and I find myself starting to get irritated. Like, why? You know, I should answer this phone quicker. What I’m like by dinner, I will forget this even happened. And plus I choose to keep stirring myself up. And sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes the answer is you go, yes, this will matter in five months. And that’s good information because that is worthy of your time, your energy and your concern, the things that matter. We just dissipate so much of that time and energy on the things that really don’t.

Sahil 00:53:58  You I conclude the book by offering that this is all really about changing our relationship with change itself. What did you mean by that? What do you want a reader to come away from this conversation and from the book itself? Understanding and thinking. When it comes to change.

Eric 00:54:20  It’s a bit of a paradox, right? It’s a book about how we make changes, and then ultimately, it’s a book that argues on some degree that we need to not approach everything from a change mindset.

Eric 00:54:33  There’s a place where we focus on becoming better people, becoming healthier, succeeding, whatever those things are. And there are ways to do that, and they are worth doing. And there are lots of parts of life that that mindset is problematic. It’s both my best and my worst quality that I always see how things could be better. That’s good. That’s part of why I’ve been able to do the things I do. It’s the gift I have to give to the world, and it is profoundly a pain in the ass for a lot of parts of my life. If I don’t know how to set that down. Then again, nothing is ever good enough. My my partner will accuse me of this. She’s like, you’re just never satisfied. Now, of course, sometimes I’m satisfied. Never is a way to start an argument. But her point is that’s my default, that I have to consciously work to counter. And so that’s why I wanted to end with presence and acceptance. Because a person like me, who’s focused on change all the time, needs to know that not everything in life needs to be changed.

Sahil 00:55:39  You write little by little, we become who we are. What does that mean to you?

Eric 00:55:46  Our thoughts and our behaviors. The little things that we do day by day. It is who we are. It’s back to that idea of the threads that are woven in. And it also speaks to the idea that who we become is important, not just in what we accomplish, but but who we are and the things I have. In the second half of the book, around self-compassion and a middle way approach and acceptance and presence, when we weave those threads in, those are the people that we become. And those kind of people, to me, are a gift to the world.

Sahil 00:56:20  Beautiful. Well, thank you so much for writing this, spending the time doing all of the tiny little actions, the I know millions of actions that actually lead to producing and publishing and actually releasing into the world a book. no small feat and something you should be extraordinarily proud of. Having read this and having had the opportunity to have this conversation.

Sahil 00:56:43  I know that it’s going to impact many people all around the world that take the time to read it, that engage with the ideas and more than anything else, that actually go and take some tiny action according to what they learn. You know, read the first ten pages and then go and dive into something. Go and create one of those still moments, those space that we talked about. Go and do one tiny thing, because the message here is powerful, but the ripple effect it can create in your life is even more so.

Eric 00:57:09  Thank you so much for coming on and doing this. I always appreciate the way you think and your views on things. So having you talk with me about this book was a great pleasure. So thank you.

Sahil 00:57:20  Thank you.

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Episode Transcript:

Eric 00:00:00  With specificity. What we’re trying to do in the beginning is get rid of all ambiguity, all off roads from the path you want to be on. Because the more that we have to think about what to do in the moment and then do it, the harder it becomes to do it.

Chris 00:00:23  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Eric 00:01:09  Today’s episode is a little different.

Eric 00:01:11  I’m sharing a live coaching conversation with a listener named Birgit Burgess. In a season of rebuilding, she’s been dealing with a long term illness. Her kids are grown and she’s trying to get some things back on track eating well, exercising regularly, doing more creative work. She’s already made real progress, especially in how she talks to herself, but she’s looking for help with the practical side, how to actually structure her days. So the things that matter to her don’t keep sliding to the bottom of the list. Now, your life might look nothing like Bridget’s, but the tools we walk through. How to build a habit, how to plan for the days when things go sideways, how to get back on track without beating yourself up. These apply to pretty much any change you’re trying to make along the way. I’ll share some ideas from my book, how a Little Becomes a lot that connect to what we’re working on. Here’s Bridget. Good morning Bridget. How are you?

Birgit 00:02:09  Good morning. I’m well. How about yourself?

Eric 00:02:11  I’m doing very good.

Eric 00:02:12  I’m excited to spend some time together and work together on a couple things. So to kick us off, why don’t you just tell us a little bit about you and some of the situations in your life that you’d like to get some coaching on.

Birgit 00:02:26  So I’ve been a master for a while, and also coming off of a long term illness. So kind of have a lot of unscheduled time, you know, have the external, you know, job 9 to 5 type of schedule. And my husband has a really varied work schedule as well. And so that theme is like, I don’t have a schedule, which actually isn’t great. I’ve taken a couple of classes with you, the Wise Habits class. And so that was probably looking back at like a year ago. And I feel like I’ve made a lot of progress. A lot of it being it’s just how I talked to myself, just kind of, you know, maybe I have a bad day of not getting much done. And it’s like, okay, well, that was that day.

Birgit 00:03:09  So moving on. And not nearly as much negativity. Also, you know, making progress on a lot of self-care, making sure that exercise is a big part of my life. Some things get pushed aside. I think having so much unstructured time, it’s like you pay the bills, you take the taxes because you have to and you’ve got that external deadline. But self-care and creative work a lot of times gets pushed aside. So maybe I do accomplish something with creative work, but it’s more rushing and getting it done, which just doesn’t feel as good as if you have that daily habit and make it accomplished easier. So just trying to build, I think a key habit in the mornings would be a really good beginning and that would, you know, just help me make progress on prioritizing.

Eric 00:03:58  Okay. There’s a finish proverb. I love what you leave behind you. You will find in front of you. It means that the things we don’t plan for don’t just disappear. They show up later dressed as obstacles.

Eric 00:04:15  And I think that’s part of what Bridget is describing. The old structure, kids schedules, the demands of illness. That was the plan, even if it wasn’t one she always chose. Now it’s gone. And what’s left behind is an open space that hasn’t been filled with anything intentional yet. What’s interesting to me is what she said about self-talk. She’s already made real progress. They’re learning to have a bad day and just let it be a bad day, instead of turning it into evidence that she’s failing. That’s a shift in how she relates to herself, and it’s the kind of change that tends to be invisible until you notice it’s been carrying you for a while. What you’re describing is really common. I think people who do not have an external accountability schedule often find it challenging to get things done, and this can range from retired people. This can be people who are between jobs. This can be people who are entrepreneurial and have their own thing. They’re trying to drive forward. But that lack of a structure or a schedule can become really problematic, because when you can do something any time, it becomes hard to ever pick a time.

Eric 00:05:36  And so what I find with a lot of folks is we want to address putting in some degree of structure that fits your life. I often say structure liberates, but everybody’s different in the kind of structure they need. So the key is to find for you what’s the right amount of structure that starts to steer your days in the way that you want them to go? And I also think with you, we want to be spending a little bit of time thinking about self-talk, how you talk to yourself, and then just also the feeling of overwhelm where you’re trying to do everything you do. All of a sudden you’re like, you know, you’ve had an illness for a while. So there’s a there’s a sense of, okay, I’ve got to take care of all of this stuff. And then that becomes overwhelming and we don’t want to do anything. Where I’d like to start is with this morning habit that you think would help you kind of structure your day. What habit do you think would be good to put in as a place to begin?

Birgit 00:06:37  I think a really good habit that would affect a lot of things would be having a good, healthy for me breakfast.

Eric 00:06:45  I want to pause here because Bridget just did something that’s easy to miss. She didn’t say, I need to overhaul my whole morning. She didn’t say, I need to fix my diet and my exercise and my creative work all at once. She picked one thing breakfast. In the book, I talk about how we’re always trying to balance two competing needs choosing something easy enough that will actually do it, and significant enough to matter. Most people on the side of too much. They build the perfect morning routine on paper and it lasts about four days. I’d much rather have someone succeed for a week and decide to do more than fail and give up. And that’s exactly the instinct Bridget is following here. That’s a really good one. It is a thing that ideally should happen most mornings. I have a process in the book called spa, and it’s a way to structure our habit when I think about building a new habit of behavior. I think of it in two core components, and I’m hoping we’ll get to both of these.

Eric 00:07:51  The first is what I call structural, and this is what we’re going to work through with spar. It basically means knowing what I’m doing when I’m doing it, how I’m doing it, making it as easy as possible to do it. It’s all sort of structural things that we can do, and that takes us a long, long way. And then the second part is the internal right. If we find ourselves knowing what we should do, being aware, it’s time to do it. But we choose to do something else. That’s because we’re thinking, feeling, or saying something to ourselves in that moment. We want to examine what that is. So you and I are going to start with the structural and spar is a way for doing that. And it stands for specificity prompts alignment and resilience. So let’s start with the specificity. How can we get specific. Would you do it at the same time each day? Would you do it like after you get out of bed. Like, let’s get specific about what time or or time frame we would be doing this.

Birgit 00:08:50  It would be at the same time every day. And I’m recognizing that for a long time I haven’t slept with an alarm. But I need to. I am getting enough sleep. it’s not like that would be a problem or it’s unhealthy for me to do. So yeah, it would be at the same time every day. And I think the best thing would be to just have it be basically the same thing every day. So then I’m even probably getting faster as I go along with getting that prepared.

Eric 00:09:17  One thing I want to add here, because it doesn’t come up in the conversation directly in the book, I make a distinction between two core competencies that we need in order to change behavior. The first is structural. That’s what Spa is about knowing what you’re doing when you’re doing it. Making the path as clear as possible. But the second is Internal. And that’s the part that kicks in when you’ve done all the planning, you know exactly what to do and you still don’t do it. That’s because something is happening in how we’re thinking or feeling in that moment.

Eric 00:09:55  And that’s a different kind of problem that requires a different set of skills. We’re going to focus mostly on the structural side today, but I want listeners to know if you find yourself with a solid plan that you keep not following, it’s because there’s something happening inside of you at the moment that you make a decision, which I call a choice point that’s worth paying attention to. So let me ask you a question about that same time piece. You say that you think setting an alarm would be good. What’s the reason not to say you do it when you wake up, versus enforcing another sort of thing into your schedule, that maybe even another change to make, right? We’re trying to change breakfast. Now we’re also trying to get up to an alarm. We’re starting to stack a couple things that we may or may not need to stack.

Birgit 00:11:22  I think that habit stacking is something that I learned from you and is actually really helpful. And so I have a few things that I stack in the mornings. And those are the things that I usually actually get done.

Birgit 00:11:35  You know, drinking water, taking medicine and stuff like that. So I think it will just actually give me a really good jump on the day.

Eric 00:11:42  All right. We’ll start with that. You’ll set the alarm. What time will that be?

Birgit 00:11:48  probably 630.

Eric 00:11:49  Wow. That’s early. Goodness gracious. Okay. I mean, not for some people. For some people that’s late. You know, the miracle morning crowd, the optimized morning routine crowd has been going since for. I get up at around noon, I don’t I don’t get up at noon either, as is typical of me, I’m sort of in between early and late. All right. So you’re going to set the alarm. It’s going to go off. And what’s going to happen between the alarm going off and having breakfast. And the reason I’m asking this is with specificity. What we’re trying to do in the beginning is get rid of all ambiguity, all like sort of off roads from the path you want to be on. Because the more that we have to think about what to do in the moment and then do it, the harder it becomes to do it.

Eric 00:12:37  So what we want. Particularly in the beginning, is getting rid of any. Not sure. So you wake up, then what happens? Walk me through what happens to get to breakfast.

Birgit 00:12:46  Okay, so wake up. Take morning medication that I have to wait an hour to eat after. Okay, so make sure I get a decent amount of water. Go back in the bedroom and do meditation for about 20 minutes. Okay, then it’s sort of breakfast prep time.

Eric 00:13:03  Okay. And is meditation currently a regular habit or is that another one you’re going to be trying to add?

Birgit 00:13:09  It’s pretty regular.

Eric 00:13:10  Okay. Okay, great. All right. So you’ve kind of got that then breakfast prep. And you mentioned you’re going to try and pick the same thing to eat each day. So you don’t have to kind of figure that out I think that’s a good place to start. I basically have the same thing for breakfast 95% of the days. The other questions I might be asking, but they’re obvious in this case.

Eric 00:13:32  But for people listening, they may not be obvious depending on what you’re trying to do, which would be like, where are you doing it? How are you doing it?

Birgit 00:13:40  Well, and that’s a question because then if if it’s ever a different schedule, it’s like, okay, how do you make a plan for that?

Eric 00:13:45  That’s exactly right. The key idea again is just specificity. In the beginning is our friend. Ambiguity is the enemy. Let’s walk on to the next part of spa which is prompts. And this is basically what cue triggers this or what happens right before there are different types of prompts. We could use a time based prompt, a location based prompt. For example, every time I go in the bathroom preceding an event prompt and it sounds like that’s the one you’re going to use, the preceding event meditation ends. I go to the kitchen, I start prepping, prepping ends, I eat. So I think you’ve got the prompt kind of figured out. In this case, the next part of Spa is alignment, which is really about how can we set up our environment to support us? So are there any things that you could be doing to make it easier for you to do this thing each morning, you know, in your environment wise?

Birgit 00:14:46  Yes.

Birgit 00:14:46  First of all, meal prepping says that like the proteins already ready. And then I think even just having everything for that breakfast in the same spot in the refrigerator every day. Okay. Because, like, I ran out of something. Okay. I got to refill that for tomorrow.

Eric 00:15:02  Excellent. Now people listening, maybe thinking this is ridiculous. Like, do we really need to put the stuff in the same spot in the fridge each day? And the answer is maybe the example I always give is my guitar. If my guitar is on a stand, I play it something like 70% more than if it’s in the exact same spot in a case. When I think about that, I feel like, what kind of weird animal are you that that extra 30s to open the case. Take the guitar out. Deters you that often? It’s bizarre that we are that way. But we are. And what we’re after. If we’re trying to make any positive changes to stack the deck as much as possible, so that when the moment comes, all we have to do is focus on just doing it with as little resistance as possible and having everything in the same spot in the fridge all ready to go lowers that resistance.

Eric 00:15:56  I told the guitar story in that clip so I won’t repeat it, but I want to say something about why this stuff works because it’s counterintuitive. We tend to think the thing that separates people who follow through from people who didn’t is willpower or discipline. Some inner steel that the successful people have and the rest of us lack. But the research and my own experience says something different. BJ Fogg, who studies behavior at Stanford, boils it down to a simple model. Behavior happens when motivation, ability and a prompt come together at the same moment. And one of the really important things that we can control is ability, how easy or hard we make the thing. That’s why putting the food in the same spot in the fridge matters. It’s not silly. It’s one less micro decision standing between Birgit and the thing she actually wants to do. And then finally, the last one is resilience, which is for us to think about, okay, what’s going to go wrong here? What are the things that are going to get in our way? So as you anticipate the ways in which this may not work or days you may not do it, and you can look back on previous experience and go, oh yeah.

Eric 00:17:15  What are some of the things that might stop us.

Birgit 00:17:18  If I have like a doctor’s appointment or if somebody else in my household, which now it’s my husband, maybe he needs me to give him a ride or something so that it’s happening earlier or it’s not happening. And that’s I love what you were saying about putting it in the same spot, because when it doesn’t happen, then it really does kind of mess up your day, especially if it’s one of those keynote parts of your morning.

Eric 00:17:42  Yeah, that’s a great one. I think those are really, really common ones. That’s what happens to me with my morning routine is something else suddenly is in the spot that my morning routine would be. So there’s a couple of approaches we can take with that approach. One is that we say, well, today’s awash. The second approach we can do is come up with a plan for what we will do on those days. So the first one, I think, is one that is often worth doing. It’s often worth just saying, you know what? Today didn’t work out because of X, Y, and Z.

Eric 00:18:17  That’s okay. Instead of feeling like, God, I screwed it up again. I didn’t do it right. We just write it off now. We don’t want to get in the habit of writing it off, or we end up making excuses. So this isn’t about making excuses, but it is about allowing reality to be reality. But let’s talk about what you could do. Let’s say you do have a doctor’s appointment in the morning. What are your options if you want to try and keep this thing alive?

Birgit 00:18:42  I think just completely cooking it before and then just having it to warm up or have it be something cool that I can take with me. Yeah. And so it’s it’s a lot of the night before, but.

Eric 00:18:56  yeah, that’s a great one. I think a version of this would just be to say, I know what my on the go morning breakfast is, and it might be a healthy protein bar that you have a stack of in the cabinet. It could be, as you said, something cold that you take, but it’s knowing what that will be.

Eric 00:19:16  So you can just do it. That’s one approach. So approach one we’ve talked about is you can just say, all right, you know what? Doctor’s appointment this morning. Gotta go take care of that. I’m gonna let this go. Option two is we have a plan for what we do. An example I often give is back when I traveled a lot for work. It was great at, like, exercise and meditation and all that when I was at home. But when I traveled, it would just get all messed up. And I finally realized that what I needed was a travel routine, one that it wasn’t the same as at home. I didn’t have as much time. I have this today. I have a mini version. If my morning gets away from me or my morning has to do something else, I have a mini version. And then the other thing that I think about a lot is a phrase that I use a lot. A little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing.

Eric 00:20:05  In your case, that doesn’t quite make as much sense, but for me, with exercise, if I miss my morning exercise, I will often just look for where in the day can I move? Oh, I’ve got a 30 minute break there. I’m just going to take a walk for 30 minutes. What I’m doing is I’m honoring the underlying value, which is to to move my body to become healthier, to take care of myself. I’m honoring that. I’m just doing it in a slightly different way. So for you, you think it would be to kind of have a to go option planned and ready?

Birgit 00:20:39  Yes, definitely. Because my tendency has been to like just go get fast food or something and, you know, for everybody that’s unhealthy. But for me, it’s like there’s a lot of things that you really shouldn’t be eating.

Eric 00:20:51  So yeah. Does some of that relate to your health? Yeah. Your underlying illness that you’re getting over. Yeah. Okay. So it’s particularly important for you that that not be the way you operate.

Eric 00:21:03  Yeah. Looping kind of all the way back to the top of this. One of the things we need to think about and we won’t cover it in this call, but I want you to be thinking about and you can also do the spa method on this too, if you want, without getting too meta. But when are you getting the food that you need to have ready. There’s a pre step here which assumes that the stuff is actually in the fridge and and available and ready. And so that’s something I would be thinking about also. Yeah. And you can also think about what do I do if that pre step hasn’t happened. Because sooner or later it won’t. That’s the thing about these sort of plans is that life intervenes in all kinds of weird ways. And we just want to be adaptable. But the ability to be adaptable is often to think about what will happen. So you’ve got some things that sit in the pantry or in a cabinet that are your go to when everything else has sort of fallen apart.

Eric 00:21:59  For me, that ends up being a really high quality protein bar. I probably eat more of those than would be ideal, but they’re a much better choice than either not eating or all the crap I could eat if I stopped at the local gas station.

Birgit 00:22:13  Exactly.

Eric 00:22:14  So we’ve walked through this plan. This is good. Do you feel like you’ve got a pretty good picture on how to go about doing this. Yes. All right. I want to talk about creative work, because I think you and I, in a previous conversation, you mentioned that you thought perhaps breakfast could act as a keystone habit of sorts, that if you did that, you could start to build some of the other things you want to do on top of that. Talk to me about that.

Birgit 00:22:40  So yeah, the creative work, one of the habits that I try to do and decent about doing it is The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. The morning pages of writing three pages by hand every day. And so after breakfast, I need to either do that or exercise.

Birgit 00:22:58  And I honestly think it doesn’t matter which, you know, it could be what I feel like doing today, just based on circumstances. But have those both follow after that?

Eric 00:23:09  Okay. I think flexibility is good. I would be careful though in the ambiguity there because if you end breakfast, you can get stuck in a loop that looks like this. Should I do morning pages? Yeah, I guess I could, but you know, I probably should exercise also. Well, when did I last exercise? Well. And morning pages. And if I’m going to exercise, what might I do? Right. All of a sudden we get lost again. And those are all ways that we basically just bail out.

Birgit 00:23:39  Right. Yeah. I think actually it’s more important to get the exercise in because I find I don’t do it before noon. I don’t do it okay.

Eric 00:23:47  And so what I would say or you can be like Monday, Wednesday and Friday or morning pages Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. Our exercises.

Eric 00:23:54  It doesn’t always have to be the same thing. What I’m trying to eliminate is you having to make a decision. And the principle I talk about is separating decision from action. Because when we have to decide and act in the same moment, it gets tough. So ideally, we’ve decided ahead of time the wisest, truest, smartest part of us has come up with a plan, and then all we need to do is have that other version of us, the one that shows up day to day, the one that’s tired or grumpy or whatever. It just says, I’m just going to follow the plan. So, okay, you’re going to do that afterwards. I think that’s a great plan. I might even break it down to what is the smallest action there. So for example, exercise, I assume you know what exercise you’re going to do.

Birgit 00:24:42  Yeah. Usually it’s just walking outdoors.

Eric 00:24:44  Okay. So for you the next immediate step is put on your shoes, get out the door. You can just say I’m going to exercise.

Eric 00:24:50  We don’t always have to drill these things down to their smallest thing. But that’s what we do when we’re struggling. So I know for me, the peloton bike is the thing. It’s the goal. All right, I’m going to do a 30 minute ride on my peloton or I’m gonna do an hour ride. But what I often end up having to focus on is put on your bike shoes, because that’s a small enough step that I can kind of get myself over the hump. I want to underline something that came up in this section, because I think it’s one of the most useful ideas in the whole book, and it’s easy to skip past. Separating decision from action. When we have to decide what to do and then do it in the same moment. We’re asking a lot of ourselves. The deciding part burns energy, and by the time we’ve decided, we’ve often talked ourselves out of it. So the goal is to make the decision ahead of time when the wisest, calmest version of you is running the show.

Eric 00:25:48  And then when the moment comes, the only job is to follow the plan. You can put all of your energy into simply doing the thing that is in front of you. The next thing I want to do is talk about what happens when you get off track. You’ve mentioned you’ve had challenges with self-talk before, and so I assumed some of that self-talk comes from when you are doing well at something, and then you just kind of stop doing it for whatever reason. Is that where a lot of negativity comes in?

Birgit 00:26:42  Yes. Like even, for example, we were talking about meditation and there was a time when I had been meditation on a timer every day for almost a year. Something happened and every time I see that record I’m like oh man.

Eric 00:26:59  Okay. So I have a framework in the book I call the renew framework. It addresses exactly this thing whether you’re off track for a day, whether you get off track for a week? A month it’s all about resetting. And that’s the key is that we are always going to get off track.

Eric 00:27:15  And that’s step one. R stands for recognize. It’s normal to get off track, to miss a day, to slide off for a week. It happens to everyone. So we want to recognize it’s normal. You know for you it might be okay. I didn’t make breakfast this morning. That’s just what happens. It happens some of the time. So we just normalize that fact. The second is we embrace our why. We kind of go back to like, well, what about this is important? Because one of the things that sometimes happens if we slide away from doing something, it’s because it may not be important or right for us anymore. And it’s always worth checking that. All right. Is it? Why does this matter to me? And does it still matter to me? So embracing your why so for you, what’s the why? Here again for the breakfast.

Birgit 00:28:05  Might feel so much better physically, emotionally, mentally if I get that healthy for me. Breakfast.

Eric 00:28:11  Okay, so there you have it.

Eric 00:28:13  You kind of have your why? So if you miss a couple of days, you recognize it’s normal. You embrace your why? Why is this important to me? The next one. N is a really, really important one. And I call it neutralize the emotional drama around it. What I mean by that is we start to tell ourselves stories when we miss. Let’s say you’re going along and you’re eating breakfast really well and you miss three days. For whatever reason, it’s very common that our brain might start saying, see, I knew you couldn’t stick with it. You never stick with anything. You’re undisciplined, you’re lazy, you’re whatever awful ways you might talk to yourself.

Birgit 00:28:54  I actually had this come up with cooking breakfast. I was in the middle of doing it and I was like, why does it take so long to cook? And then I’m like, you’re doing it. It’s a few minutes away.

Eric 00:29:07  Yes. Yes, exactly. So we want to neutralise the emotional drama, which is usually, again, kind of going back to the R.

Eric 00:29:13  We recognize it’s normal, we’re off track and we want to stick with the fact. The fact is often like you were doing something for a while, then you didn’t. And now you can do it again. That’s the facts. Everything else other than that is interpretation. Oh, you’re the kind of person who are not necessarily. Oh, I’ll never stick with anything. I’m lazy. Those are all interpretations that we’re making off of the fact. And the fact is very straightforward. I was doing this thing, now I’m not. I can do it again.

Birgit 00:29:44  And I even have that going back quite a few years, where I had just built into my day eating routine and an exercise routine, and I just actually lost quite a bit of weight that, you know, was feeling a lot healthier. And so looking at it now, coming off of some health issues, it’s like, hey, it happened before, it can again. And even if it doesn’t, I still feel better in all these different ways.

Birgit 00:30:10  So it’s completely worth it to get back on that horse.

Eric 00:30:14  Exactly. And I think one of the things that you’ve gotten a lot better about, and we’ve talked about this because you were part of the Wise Habits program. You’re part of our community. So I’ve had some experience with you is you’ve gotten way better at how you talk to yourself. You know, you’ve gotten way kinder in your self-talk and way more accurate in your self-talk.

Birgit 00:30:32  That’s so amazing that it shows that somebody else actually really helps a lot. And I’ll look for it in the future.

Eric 00:30:40  Yeah, yeah. And the reason that neutralizing the emotional drama is so important is partially because it makes us feel better, but it’s really critical to the next step, which is to extract the lesson. You know what threw you off? This is curiosity, not blame. But when we are really revved up emotionally and we’re really hard on ourselves and down on ourselves. We don’t learn because to say to yourself, I’m lazy, or I’m the kind of person who doesn’t stick with anything, you don’t learn anything by saying that what we want to learn is what happened.

Eric 00:31:13  Why? Why were you going along? Fine. Having breakfast every day. And now you haven’t had it for the last three mornings. What’s going on?

Birgit 00:31:22  I think you’ve talked about this a bit. Where we don’t, for whatever reason, have the emotional energy for whatever it is that our tasks you’ve talked about, like when you’re giving back to exercise, getting yourself to get those shoes on or, or what’s tough. And so I think it’s like you’re tired in the morning and you don’t think that you want to eat even though you should. It’s not exact thinking. That’s it’s what I think. It’s the derailment.

Eric 00:31:51  Okay, good. So you have observed this pattern before and you have extracted the lesson. And the lesson to you is mornings where I am really low energetically are going to be hard, so that’s great. Now that we know that, we can plan that, right? So back up to our our step in spa resilience. We can think about, okay, what do you do on those mornings? I talk about this and I’m vastly oversimplifying a bunch of complex neuroscience here.

Eric 00:32:21  And I’m probably even not just simplifying, I’m probably messing it up, but it’s an analogy that works for me, and I think that our brains do something like this. It all happens subconsciously, but my example is I’m sitting on the couch, I’m scrolling Substack, and I think to myself, it’s time to get up and exercise. And my brain does this little calculation. It goes well, that exercise that takes ten units of energy. Eric, you’ve currently got one unit of energy. This isn’t going to work. And I just keep scrolling. When I flip that to put on my bike shoes, my brain can run the same calculation. All right, I’m going to put on bike shoes. That’s one unit of energy. Oh, I have one unit of energy. Okay, I think we can do this oversimplification. But again, this is kind of what we’re talking about with you. It’s that ability to take what feels like too much. Oh, I got to go in there and I got to prep and then I got to eat it.

Eric 00:33:17  And I really don’t even feel like eating it. All. That becomes overwhelming. So we want to get to the very first step that you just push yourself to the first step, which is like, might be for you, get in the kitchen. Yeah. Or get in the kitchen, open the refrigerator, take the stuff out. And I often am negotiating with myself. I’m like, all right, just go put on the bike shoes. And then I say to myself, if you put them on, you still don’t want to get on the bike. You don’t have to. I’ll get on the bike and I’ll be like, if you still really don’t want to ride after five minutes, you don’t have to. Now, the good news is that once we get moving, for me, I almost always can do it. There’s a lot of, like. It’s like a rocket, right? It takes a ton of energy to get that thing out of the atmosphere. It takes a lot of energy.

Eric 00:34:02  Or we face a lot of resistance to get started. But once we start, we often find, okay, motivation kind of comes along. So I think that is good. So you’ve embraced the lesson and we’ve been able to kind of go back and take that lesson and put it into your resilience planning. So this is perfect. This is exactly what I’m talking about. But again, if you were being hard on yourself, you wouldn’t have been able to think, oh, well, it’s really mornings or I’m emotionally or energetically low that this is happening. And you just sort of thought, oh, I’m just I’m not good at this. And then finally, as you walk forward, you know, do something really small that moves you in the direction of something that matters to you. So that’s the renew framework. Recognize it’s normal, embrace your Y, neutralize the drama, extract the lesson and walk forward.

Birgit 00:34:53  Like.

Eric 00:34:54  Okay, well, that’s where we’re going to wrap up. I again want to acknowledge your progress in both and how you talk to yourself, but also in learning to think about all these things and make forward progress.

Eric 00:35:09  You’re navigating a difficult situation, coming off a chronic illness, difficult, empty nesters. That’s a real thing. You know, a husband with a work schedule that’s flexible. You don’t even have his schedule to be an anchor. You’ve mentioned he has ADHD. There’s a lot of challenges in the middle of all this, so I just want to make sure to acknowledge that I think you’re doing a great job, and that’s important for you to do also is to focus on the successes you’re having, not the times you don’t do it. When you don’t do it, use renew. Get back on track, but focus a lot on every time you do it. Try and feel good inside I did it, I did something that matters to me today. Yeah, if you and I were doing this as a real coaching, we would have gone slower. I would have asked you more questions, but we went a little bit fast to this. But I think you have the core ideas. And thank you so much for being willing to come on, be honest and be vulnerable because it’s going to help a lot of people.

Eric 00:36:05  So thank you so much.

Birgit 00:36:07  Oh well thank you.

Eric 00:36:08  What I notice about this conversation now, listening back, is that Birgitte didn’t need a completely new plan. She needed a little more specificity, a little more structure around what she was already trying to do and some permission to be imperfect at it. I think that’s true for most of us. We already know roughly what we want to be doing. We just haven’t made it easy enough to do consistently. And when we fall off, we make it mean too much. Like, it says something about who we are instead of just being a thing that happened. Birgitte said something near the end. I keep coming back to. She talked about a time years ago when she’d built these routines and they were working. And then she said, it happened before. It can happen again. That’s it. That’s the whole thing, really. You did it before. You can do it again. And you don’t have to do it perfectly to have it matter. I’m grateful to Birgit for being willing to share this, and I hope something in here was useful for you.

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Episode Transcript:

Alex Hutchinson 00:00:00  It’s a cliché for a reason that being on a journey is fulfilling in its own way, independent of the destination and and arriving at the destination like you ought to have a destination that you’re aiming for. But I don’t want to just stop and say, hey, I’m here.

Chris Forbes 00:00:19  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:04  There’s a real tension in my life between wanting to be content with what’s here, and wanting to keep reaching for what’s next. It’s a tension I feel deeply. Part of me wants peace and stillness enough, and part of me comes alive when I’m somewhere new, trying something unfamiliar. Stepping into the unknown. In this conversation, Alex Hutchinson and I talk about that tension through the lens of exploration, what it means, why some of us resist it, and why exploring doesn’t have to mean climbing mountains or crossing deserts. It might mean new music, a different way home, a choice that carries some uncertainty. We also talk about the risk of living too narrowly, and why a meaningful life may require us to keep stretching even a little. Alex’s new book is The Explorers Gene. I’m Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi, Alex. Welcome to the show.

Alex Hutchinson 00:02:20  Hi, Eric. Thanks for having me. I’m glad to be here.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:22  I’m really excited to talk with you about your book, The Explorers. Gene, why we seek big challenges, new flavors, and the blank spots on the map. I find this topic really fascinating for a lot of reasons that we will get into.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:36  But before we do that, we’ll start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. Think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Alex Hutchinson 00:03:13  I love the parable. The first thing it says to me is, is the reminder of our autonomy. For better or worse, that none of us are born good or bad or strong or weak, or, you know, all these things that we’re making choices every day, small choices that reinforce our journey to the place we want to be.

Alex Hutchinson 00:03:29  And so we’ll be talking about exploring today. And when I was writing the book and telling people, hey, I’m writing a book about exploring, one of the common answers I would get is, oh, that sounds interesting. Personally, I’m not an explorer, and there’s a lot of things behind a sentence like that, which is, you know, they’re saying, I don’t want to, you know, parasail to the North Pole or something like that. But but also when I think about this parable, I think about those conversations. And I think you’re feeding the, path of not wanting to explore. It’s not that you’re not an explorer that you’re essentially choosing not to be. And I love exploring, but there’s lots of times when I don’t want to explore, but I’m trying to continue to to feed that path because I think it makes me a better version of me.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:11  Yeah. I mean, the book says the explorers gene, which leads us to believe there’s some gene in there. Also, if we look at like one of the most well, standardized ways of looking at personality, which is called the Big Five personality test, there is something on there which is openness to new experience.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:31  And so it does seem that there is some degree, perhaps of a little genetic predisposition towards adventuring. Perhaps there’s a personality trait, it’s a little bit more adventurous. But I agree with you in the main, which is that sentences that all ever really start with. I’m not the kind of person who I think are worth examining because we can be very different types of people, right? 30 years ago, I was a homeless heroin addict. Right. We can we can cover vast areas of difference. And so I think this idea of exploration, I love that you’re setting out right away. Like, we don’t have to say we are or are not in explorer. It’s just what degree do we want to pursue that? And and why is it valuable?

Alex Hutchinson 00:05:22  Absolutely. And I should start with a my apology about the book title. so I published.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:28  Sure.

Alex Hutchinson 00:05:29  Well, no, no. So here’s the here’s the truth is I pitched this book to to my publisher under the title of The Explorers Gene.

Alex Hutchinson 00:05:36  And, based on some research which, you know, we can get into on that, there is some genetic element and the, you know, the publisher accepted it and we signed a contract. We started working on it. And then I said to my editor, like, we’re not really going to call it exploration, right? Like, because it’s not that’s exactly the opposite of the of the message that I want to send, which is that we can all explore and it’s like, no, no, no, no, we love the we love that title and no, no. So the title is, I would like to say, a little bit tongue in cheek, in the sense that it’s a straw man that that I try to knock down in the book. But you’re right that there is a genetic element and there are differences. You know, you can you can go to any kindergarten and you can see some kids who just are just dying, bouncing off the walls, wanting to go and explore the world and others who are more cautious.

Alex Hutchinson 00:06:21  but to me, the big message from actually the genetic part of the story is that without getting too sidetracked by it, but there’s a dopamine receptor in the brain called CD4, which whose activity correlates pretty well with exploratory behavior. The message isn’t that some people have that gene and some people don’t. We all have D4 receptors. We all have this response. In some people it’s turned up a little louder than others. But but the message is really actually universal, that if there’s an explorer’s gene, we all have it.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:48  So I want to hit on something that you say, I believe very late in the book. I may have even pulled this from the afterword, but you say the trajectory of adulthood is towards ever greater efficiency, narrower focus, and well-worn routines that make each day more and more similar to the last. Exploration is the anti habit, the antidote to a diminished palette of life’s choices. Say more about that. That that really jumped off the page at me.

Alex Hutchinson 00:07:20  Well, thanks. And I think it really gets at the heart of what got me launched on this book.

Alex Hutchinson 00:07:26  And I would say in terms of the the behind the scenes conversations, the other conversation I had with my editors is it’s not a it’s not a midlife crisis book. I’m not I’m not just going to write about my midlife crisis, but here I just turned 50 a month or two ago. So I was as I was writing this, I was in my mid-forties. And that is a time when you start thinking it’s like, is there anything new left for me in life? Have I have I done all the cool, fun adventures that I’m going to do? And now I’m just kind of, is there this sense that the paths are narrowing. I’m not going to learn new stuff now. I’m just going to keep doing this stuff that I’ve done in the past. And when you dig into the exploring literature, there is actually a logic behind the idea that kids are explorers and adults. We explore less and less, and the logic makes sense. Like, I would talk to all these researchers and say, but should we tell adults that they need to explore more? And the response was generally like, well, you don’t necessarily, when you’re 45, want to explore like when you’re a kid because you know, a lot of stuff.

Alex Hutchinson 00:08:24  You already know you’ve tried things, you know that it doesn’t work to tie your shoes that way. You know that it doesn’t work eating that particular plant or whatever. So you don’t want to necessarily pretend you don’t know anything. So we do become less exploratory as we age, but it’s about the trajectory. It’s about still finding opportunities to explore no matter where you are on that trajectory.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:44  Yeah, it’s one of the things that I have found. I’m about five years older than you. You look great, by the way. I would never have. I would never have guessed you were that age. Something about aging that is a narrowing. And I feel it in myself. I feel this just. I don’t know how else to call it a narrowing both of what I want to do. And I’m not one of those people that it’s like fight against aging at all costs. Right. There’s a there’s a wisdom to age gracefully, but for me, it has felt more and more important to try and not let that narrowing, not let that collapse towards what’s most comfortable happen.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:27  And and it takes some effort. But I really love this idea that exploration is a way to work against that.

Alex Hutchinson 00:09:34  I think an example that a lot of people will identify with is the music we listen to. Right. You know, when you’re young, you’re obviously influenced by what your friends and peers are listening to, but also you’re exploring. You’re finding out what you like and you’re trying different genres. And people do studies on this, and it’s like the peak period of like emotional resonance for the music you discover is in your late teens and early 20s. Yeah. And that’s an intense time of life, too. But, you know, by the time you’re my age, most people aren’t going out and discovering new music. And I will say, in all, you know, humility and honesty, I’m not either. When I, when I flip on my music, I’m like, oh, yeah, I want to listen to that album that I just loved when I was 25. And that conjures up all these memories.

Alex Hutchinson 00:10:15  And there’s a there was a great editor by by one of the editors at Pitchfork on making the case for continuing to listen to new music. And one of the one of the arguments we all, you know, there’s lots of arguments supporting the arts and yada yada, yada. But also it’s like, think of the albums, think of the music that has emotional resonance to you, that you that you discovered when you were a certain age and you associated with that time by listening to new music. Now you’re creating the soundtrack for you to look back on in ten years. You want to continue to make memories, not just you don’t just want to coast on your existing memories. And it’s hard. So I wrote a book on exploring, but I still just like listening to the music I loved when I was 18. But I fight against it.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:51  Yeah. It’s interesting. This is one area that I still tend to explore because music is so hugely important to me. I mean, so much of the music, some of my favorite music I found in the last, you know, 15 years.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:06  But I mean, what I’m listening to right now, semi obsessively, are two records that came out last year. However, my genres are sort of like, okay, I kind of know what I like in these areas. I mean, I like to push the envelope a little bit, but I always sort of gravitate back to. For me, it’s the song. I mean, I think it’s just the art form of a song that is is the heart of it to me. So this is an area that’s important to me to keep exploring, but I notice that my exploration is within certain bounds.

Alex Hutchinson 00:11:42  Sure. And that’s maybe a good balance between the wisdom of of discovering that, you know, maybe you don’t like. I won’t call out any genres. Just know you don’t like opera.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:50  Maybe I do not like country rap. Let me be clear. Let me be very clear on this topic now. Maybe there’s good country rap and I just haven’t heard it. But I’m going to I’m going to make a bold statement right there.

Alex Hutchinson 00:12:05  I will I will say no comment, but I think, I don’t think you’re gonna get a ton of pushback. But but the point I’ll make is that I think this is a great example of how we can be more exploratory or less exploratory in different parts of our lives. So it’s like, as I confessed, I’m not being particularly exploratory in my music habits these days. I’m finding my exploration in other parts of my life, and the people who don’t want to parasail down the North Pole, which is all good.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:29  Can you do.

Alex Hutchinson 00:12:30  That?

Eric Zimmer 00:12:30  Is that actually technically possible?

Alex Hutchinson 00:12:32  South pole? Who set the fastest? the fastest solo record to the North Pole, a South pole. Bjorg, Iceland. I think I’ve probably got the name. And it was basically like. Yeah, like he had a sail and he was a ski. Ski sailing or something. I don’t even know. Probably. Anyway, people do. Because. Because there’s no new places on the globe to go. You have to find new ways of going to old places.

Alex Hutchinson 00:12:56  And so people people are doing that. And so when I have, when I would have these conversations with people who are like, oh, I’m not an explorer, the way I would push back is to say, I bet there’s areas in your life where you are continuing to explore. I hope there are areas in your life where you, whether it’s music or the books you read or the ideas you think or the places you go. There’s lots of dimensions. One of the bodies of research I looked at is you can bring people into a lab and have them do various tasks that kind of test your baseline willingness or desire to explore. And there is a trajectory where, as I was saying before, whereas the older you get, you get better at exploring. You actually pick the right choice more often. But you you stick with the familiar more often and that’s fine. That’s, you know, that that does reflect the accumulation of knowledge. But there’s a subset in that data. And in one study it was about 20% of of older adults who were just like, no, I don’t explore at all.

Alex Hutchinson 00:13:49  It’s like you give them a set of choices where exploring is obviously the best, the right answer, and there’s like, no, no, no, I’m just going to stick with the known. And so I think the message for people, for people like me and and you as we, as we, you know, we’re not riding off into the sunset, but as we see the sunset in the on the horizon is it’s not that you have to pretend you’re 18, but if you get to that point where you’re no longer pushing yourself in any dimension of your life, you’re no longer experiencing the the feeling of discovering something new, of being bad at something, of of trying something where you don’t know whether you like it or not. That’s I mean, I don’t want to be judgmental, but that that’s maybe I don’t know if it’s a problem, but it’s unfortunate because I think what’s one of the great joys that we can find in different aspects of our lives?

Eric Zimmer 00:14:30  It’s ironic we’re having this conversation right now because my son, who is 27, just last night texted me and got off of a route in Morocco.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:44  I don’t know how to say it, but it could currently be described as exploratory as it has not been previously documented and no one has yet completed an uninterrupted traverse. Wow. And I don’t know if he did the whole thing or not, but it’s ironic to me that we’re having this conversation literally after last night, he was like, okay, we did it and headed back to Marrakesh. Amazing.

Alex Hutchinson 00:15:04  So I hope he was parasailing because that would really make it into it at the end.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:09  But you can parasail in the desert and mountains.

Alex Hutchinson 00:15:13  I’m not even sure what parasailing is, to be totally honest now.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:15  Me neither. I always mix up parasailing with, like, kitesurfing and windsurfing. I, you know.

Alex Hutchinson 00:15:22  I need to say, it sounds like it’s an awesome trip. And and it is a reminder that. Yeah, like the the world’s a big place. And even if somebody has been there before, you can still take trips where you’re like, man, I don’t know what’s going to happen around the next corner.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:35  Yeah. So you describe in the book, you kind of start off by sharing a journey that you made hiking with your wife and your kids that you really didn’t quite know where you were going. It was very exploratory. It was not like the Appalachian Trail where you go, okay, here’s the trail. I go straight up here, through here. It was a lot more all over the place, for lack of a better word. You end the book by talking about being in the Pyrenees, which was a much more known trip. Are you finding that the adventures that you are going on and taking your family on are more in this slightly less exploratory than the really exploratory ones, or is it still a mix?

Alex Hutchinson 00:16:20  So I’m still I’m searching for the perfect mix. And I would say, you know, big picture. When I started off writing a book about exploring, my assumption was that, you know, the subtitle would be something like why exploring is always amazing and you should always Do more exploring.

Alex Hutchinson 00:16:34  And I came away with with a more nuanced take that, because there is this sort of the arrival fallacy, the idea that if you can just do, you know, there’s this point off in the distance. And if you can get there, if you can achieve this thing, you’re going to be happy and you get there and it’s never the case. And so I come from a background as a runner and it’s like, man, if I could just run this fast or make that team, you know, I would be the human I always want it to be. And then you do that and you’re like, I think I can go a little faster. I wonder if I could do so. I started to see the analogy there when I thought about exploration, is that there was a danger in in the pursuits in my own sort of adventure, travel pursuits. And then what I was starting to impose, my wife and I were starting to impose on a family that were every trip, were trying to one up the previous trip.

Alex Hutchinson 00:17:17  It’s like, okay, we took our kids on a three day backpacking trip. Now we’re going on a four day backtracking trip. We took our kids on a alpine hot trip, hot to hot trip. So now we’re going to take a trip that’s a week long where we’re carrying all our food. And you know, the trip we did last summer was the hardest trip we’ve ever done. And my kids are. They were then nine and 11 for the for that trip. So it’s not like I had learned my lesson and said, I’m only going to, you know, I’m trying to turn inward and explore, you know, my interior landscape instead of putting us through these ordeals. I’m still trying to find the right balance because there is a thrill. There’s a there’s a feeling that you get when you’re taken to your limits, where you don’t know if you can do it and then you do it. It’s addictive. But there’s also the sense that the danger that you end up never enjoying anything you do because you’re always chasing.

Alex Hutchinson 00:18:04  The bigger, the harder, the more obscure. So the ending of the book was my acknowledgement and my almost reminder to myself that, Alex, there can be amazing feelings of exploration without forcing your kids to do, you know, death marches through the jungle.

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Eric Zimmer 00:19:34  I feel like this is a fundamental tension that sits at the heart of my life. There is some part of me that comes alive when I am somewhere new. When I’m doing something different, I can feel it. It feels deeply right in a way, and it can become a constant search for something different. So my my spiritual practice, my Zen practice is the exact opposite. I mean, the basic message is like you could be fully content and happy with just sitting here staring at a wall, which I haven’t quite figured out. I’m still working on all that, right? But that that tension that you described near the end of the book is one that I feel a lot.

Alex Hutchinson 00:20:20  Yeah, I would say too. For me, it’s it’s almost the fundamental tension that I’m trying to figure out at this point in my life that my career has gone better than I could have expected. You know, I have a wonderful wife and two children. If you time machine back to 20 years ago and ask Alex what would be just an absolute, you know, plot out.

Alex Hutchinson 00:20:37  You’re absolutely fulfilling career in life for you, what would allow you to sort of sit back and say, man, I, I did really good at life. I’d say, you know, and then you describe where I am now. And I was like, Alex, you should be content. You should. Why are you still striving like you’re comfortable? You can feed yourself like you’ve you’re you’re professionally fulfilled. But it’s like, as you said, there’s a feeling of being alive when you’re when you’re there’s something to. And it’s like the ultimate cliche is like it’s the journey, not the destination. But it’s a cliche for a reason that being on a journey is fulfilling in its own way, independent of the destination and and arriving at the destination. Like you got to have a destination that you’re aiming for. But I don’t want to just stop and say, hey, I’m here, you know, let’s right, let’s kick back on the sofa. but yeah, but but as I say, it’s the danger is that you never actually enjoy the things that you’ve been pushing for.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:28  It is definitely a balance. And I used to wonder about a resolution of it or which is the right one. And for me, I’ve just realized it’s both. It’s just. It just has to be both for me. They’re both skills and parts of myself that I want to cultivate. And you bring up Paul Bloom at the end of the book, has been a guest on the show. And his term motivational pluralism. I call it motivational complexity in my book, but it’s yeah, it’s this idea. We just want lots of different things. And that’s what it means, I think, to be human to a certain degree. And we all have to figure out how to work with that in the wisest way possible.

Alex Hutchinson 00:22:06  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think in terms of this idea of being able to hold desires in our heads at the same time, Oliver Berkman, who wrote the book, I think it was 4000 weeks. So really one of my favorite sort of personal development or self-help books or productivity books ever, because he was, you know, he’s talking about getting your inbox to zero, which has been the bane of my adult existence.

Alex Hutchinson 00:22:26  Frankly, it’s like the major source of unhappiness in my life, or I’ve lost sleep is like, oh my God, I have 2538 emails that I haven’t applied to. His productivity hack isn’t like. Here’s a way you can get to inbox zero and it’s not. Also give up on your emails. Just forget about it. Don’t reply to all these people. These these people aren’t important. It’s neither. It’s just accept that you are going to live in this tension and don’t don’t let it dominate. Don’t let it make you unhappy because you’re never going to get to inbox zero, but you’re always going to keep working on it. And you just have to learn to accept the messy reality. And so that’s a hard that’s a hard truth to accept. But I think it’s also a metaphor for for what we’re talking about, which is that we’re always going to have both poles. Poles.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:05  Yeah. Oliver was one of the very first guests on this show 12 years ago.

Alex Hutchinson 00:23:10  Amazing.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:11  Yeah, a great guy.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:12  And also, I would be remiss in not plugging my book at every possible opportunity. Listeners are like, please shut up about it. he blurred the book, which was a big special moment for me because I just think he’s so good.

Alex Hutchinson 00:23:26  That’s fantastic. Yeah. You know, I’ve recently, this isn’t intended as self promo either, but I’ve recently started using Substack, and one of the great joys is seeing his little notes, you know, not full articles, but he’ll, you know, he’ll he’ll share a thought. And I’m like, man, that guy, he’s nailed it again. I love.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:42  Him. And I was about to say, and what he’s working on sounds really exciting, but I don’t know if he wants anybody to know that. So I’m going to quiet down on that. Let’s get further into your book, though. We’ve been talking around this a little bit, but a lot of the book is around a very well-studied, you call it a meta choice between exploring and exploiting.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:07  Talk through what that means and give us some examples in our own lives today.

Alex Hutchinson 00:24:12  Sure. And so the first thing to say is exploiting is not like taking advantage of people. This is just a term of art in the in the exploring literatures.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:20  Yes. Thank you.

Alex Hutchinson 00:24:21  You face a choice between exploring which is trying something new, feeding off into the unknown, or exploiting, which is exploiting the knowledge you already have, sticking on the path. You already know where it leads and what what it’s going to give you. And so the classic example that that researchers use is you go to a restaurant, you’ve been there before. You know that the burger is pretty good. Are you going to order the burger because, you know, it was good last time you had it? Or are you going to try the special, which sounds interesting. Intriguing. Good. Might be better than the burger. It might be worse if you order the special. Someone else at the table is probably going to order the burger and you’re going to be like, oh man, the burger looks good.

Alex Hutchinson 00:24:53  Why didn’t I order the burger? So this is a dilemma we’re all familiar with. It’s like, do I stick with what I know or do I try the unknown which might be better or might be worse? And once you start thinking about decisions this way, you start recognizing this dilemma in all aspects of life, you know? And it can be like, do I get engaged to my, you know, long time partner, or do I keep swiping left or right or whatever it is to try and find someone better? In other words, have I found the best or do I venture back into the unknown? You can zoom out to a corporate strategy level and say, should we be spending our resources advertising the product we’ve already got? Or should we be devoting more resources to R&D to try and develop a new product which might be better than our current product, but which might actually be a flop. And so from the trivial ordering the burger all the way up to like how societies allocate their resources, we’re choosing between exploring and exploiting.

Alex Hutchinson 00:25:46  And there’s been this like 80 year journey from decision scientists and mathematicians and so on to try and figure out what’s the optimal answer to the explore exploit dilemma. And the answer is it’s impossible to to say like, first of all, the math is intractable, but also it depends on the context. It depends on time horizon and volatility and all these other factors. So there’s never a right answer, but we have to be thinking about the real goal is to be conscious of the choices and understand when and why you’re making a decision in one favor, in one way or the other.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:16  Yeah. And I think you said this earlier, but I want to come back to it that we can be very different in different aspects of our life. Like I’ve mentioned, I have a certain degree to do new things and do novelty, but when it comes to eating, I’m going to order the one that I like. You sort of talked about like context and all that. I think there’s a risk context for me in that I have a narrower palette that I find acceptable.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:40  So it’s a lot easier for me to end up outside of it in like a situation where I’m like, that’s disgusting, right? Probably not that, but but I’m fairly narrow there. I get the same kind of pizza every time, you know, I’m like, no, don’t go messing that thing up with, you know, what, you like that on it or that on it, but I’m sure I am missing out on some different flavors that might be rewarding in a different way.

Alex Hutchinson 00:27:07  Yeah. So a couple of things. One is that our decisions about exploring and exploiting are never just about like, am I an exploring person or am I exploiting person? There’s a lot of contextual factors, you know, and risk is distinct from desire, desire to explore. So the example I would give is every summer I go on a canoe trip with a bunch of friends. We could paddle a whitewater river somewhere in northern Canada. And I love, you know, you’re just totally off the grid for, let’s say, a week.

Alex Hutchinson 00:27:36  There’s an exploring element to it, and you don’t know what’s around the next bend of the river. There are also rapids. The rapids are kind of fun and exhilarating to paddle through, but they’re at the edge of our skill level, so and among, you know, not to pat myself on the back here, but among the people I go canoeing with, I’m probably the most experienced at handling whitewater in the canoe. I’m also the least likely to want to paddle. Any given set of rapids will come, will come to a set of rapids, will scout it. And you know, there’s a few people in the trip who will be 100%. They’ll be like, let’s do it. Load up the canoes, let’s go. And I’ll be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I think we should portage this. And so I don’t want to die. So I have I have very high and I don’t want to be extracted by helicopter because we wrapped our canoe around a rock or whatever.

Alex Hutchinson 00:28:21  So I have very low risk tolerance, even though I love exploring these wilderness where some of my friends, they’re like, yeah, I don’t really care where we go as long as there’s big, big rapids that we can crash down. So one example of the fact that the decision to explore isn’t just about are you willing to explore? It’s like like you’re saying, are you going to have a miserable time because you’re getting some pallet experience that’s just not fun for you? And so it may be that that’s why you’re pursuing your exploring in music rather than food.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:51  Right? And you say this, which I think is really interesting, which is that a single instance of exploring will likely yield a worse than usual outcome. Right. I might get the food that I really don’t like, but the collective effect of repeatedly breaking free of your usual routines will be better outcomes. Say more about that and put it in an example that we would all understand.

Alex Hutchinson 00:29:18  You zeroed in on a, I think, a really crucial point, a really key one.

Alex Hutchinson 00:29:23  And so the best example I can give of that is, you know, as I said, explore, exploit, dilemma. Restaurant ordering is a great example. So in this brave modern world, we have huge data sets of how people order in restaurants. And so some Harvard scientists did an analysis of like remember, it was like 2 million orders on a food delivery company from a food delivery company called Deliveroo, trying to understand how people decide where to order from. And there were a bunch of interesting insights from it. One, one of which is that, all else being equal, people are more likely to order from a restaurant that’s been rated fewer times than restaurants made it more and really, totally, totally the opposite of what I would have expected. But the data is pretty clear. So, you know, assuming that the genre is the same and the number, the star rating is the same, and the delivery time and the price is the same, then if one’s been rated five times and one’s been rated 500 times, more, people will order from the one that’s been rated five times.

Alex Hutchinson 00:30:14  Because there’s still the unknown there. There’s the chance that this is the greatest restaurant ever. We have a chance to learn about something, whereas if it’s been rated 500 times, you know that it’s it’s a 4.2 star restaurant.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:23  Well, I always assume that those five ratings are from their parents, and I shouldn’t trust them at all.

Alex Hutchinson 00:30:28  And that’s maybe why when people do, when people do. Because there’s the truth to that. When people do order from a restaurant that they’ve never ordered from before, on average, and then you look at their ratings, it’s like, oh yeah, they got a subjectively worse meal. You’re less likely to get a meal that you consider five star or four star. When you order from an unfamiliar restaurant than when you order from one of your old favorites. So that’s an instance of what you’re saying. Like a single shot. If you make a choice to explore, the odds are you will be disappointed. And so that seems like a really powerful reason to say, well, let’s not explore that.

Alex Hutchinson 00:30:59  Do it. But if you then zoom out over time and say, how do people’s ratings change over time? You see that if people continue to explore over time, their average ratings creep upwards? Because every time you try a new restaurant, sometimes you get a dud and you say, I’m never going back to that restaurant. Sometimes you get a surprisingly good restaurant and you’re like, I’m going to add this to my roster of usual restaurants. And so your roster gets better and better. Only if you’re willing to tolerate those occasional bad meals. And I think this is like a general truth about exploring, which is that if you just look at it as a single shot, you’re like, this is not the smart move. It’s probably going to turn. There’s a greater than 5050 chance that I’m going to regret it. But if you average that over the course of a career or a life or whatever, then you’re like, oh, I’m glad I took the chances and explored, because even though I had four bad meals, I discovered that one restaurant, which has changed my life.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:14  I’m going to ask a question about that study to see if, you know, is there anything in there about frequency of orders, like people who order more often are more likely to explore. Because this ties a little bit to this idea that as we get older, exploration has slightly less benefit, and I often think about it in the sense of like, if I’m ordering out five days a week, then I, you know, I’m going to take a flyer every once in a while. But if I’m doing it once a week, that’s my once a week thing. I don’t know. And I think the same thing about like, vacation. Like if I had unlimited vacation, I would try all sorts of wild things. But I’ve got, say you’ve got a one week window. You’re like, well, I don’t want this one week. This my shot, this six months to be terrible. Yes. Is there a frequency bias in all of this?

Alex Hutchinson 00:33:07  The answer to the question on the on the food studies, I actually don’t think that’s they analyze that in the study.

Alex Hutchinson 00:33:11  But it’s a big long study. So I don’t I don’t remember, but I think your point is, is super important. And I was writing an article about exploring for I think it was men’s Health. And they were like, can you put this in a career context? Give an example of like some of the advice you’re taking. And the advice I was given was like, be optimistic in the face of uncertainty. Take a chance on on things. And so I was saying like, okay, let’s say you’re considering two jobs and one of them is relatively stable. It’s a kind of sure thing, but probably not exactly what you want to do and not great opportunities for advancement. The other is maybe it’s a company that’s less stable or it’s less clear whether this is going to pan out and it pays less. But there’s a clear path that if we’re not going out of the park, you’re going to be able to progress to your dream position. And so being optimistic in the face of uncertainty would be take the choice with the best case scenario.

Alex Hutchinson 00:34:02  My editor looked at this and said, yeah, but what if you need to pay the rent? Like how can you advise someone to, to, you know, take this swing for the fences if like their financial security depends on. And I was like, okay. Yeah that’s a good point. And so I need to contextualize this and says, say, if the context permits you to take that chance, then you should take that chance. And I think that’s a really good thing to keep in mind that this is, again, it’s never about always do this or always do that. And so if it’s like, this is your one chance to order out this month and it’s a special occasion and it’s Valentine’s Day and you’re, you know, you’re trying to impress your, your girlfriend. And it’s like, don’t, don’t just close your eyes and pick because you’re an exploratory kind of guy. There’s situations that override the superficial attraction of exploring where you really want to make sure you’re exploiting all the knowledge you’ve got to, to maximize that.

Alex Hutchinson 00:34:54  Sometimes the single shot is more important than the long term average.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:58  Right. And that’s essentially what you’re saying. Is that a single instance, if you’ve got a single instance, you might get a less than optimal outcome. All right. Let’s move on. For now I want to talk about you describe meaningful exploration. So what does meaningful exploration mean to you. You said meaningful exploration I will argue, involves making an active choice to pursue a course that requires effort and carries the risk of failure. What the mythologist Joseph Campbell called a bold beginning of uncertain outcome.

Alex Hutchinson 00:35:33  So I think the easiest way to answer what meaningful exploration is, is to give an example of expression that I consider not meaningful, because what I realized when I was, you know, writing about what’s great about new things is this could describe scrolling social media. You’re scrolling down TikTok and it’s like, oh my God, I’ve never seen that video before. Who knew a cat could do that? You know, like and I’m like. And I was like, that’s not what I’m writing about here.

Alex Hutchinson 00:35:57  This is not what I’m what I’m trying to glorify. So, so what does it mean to to explore meaningfully? And there’s a couple of things that I think become important. You’re not really exploring if you’re not making a choice, if you’re not following your own decision, if a choice is being fed to you by an algorithm you’re not exploring, you’re being exposed to new things. And there’s some really interesting and quite subtle neuroscience research that showed and actually education research too, about the difference between being fed something and going out and discovering it for yourself. And so, you know, great, great teachers really try to create that environment where students can make a discovery for themselves. And it’s, you know, it’s not easy, right? Like there’s a lot of information to learn. But but this is that aspiration that it’s not just a question of you open your skull up and let people shovel stuff into it. There’s a distinction I would make between actively exploring and passively exploring.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:51  Yeah. Say more about that.

Alex Hutchinson 00:36:52  There’s a couple of ways you can think about that. One is imagine you’re in the passenger seat of a car driving through a city and in an unfamiliar city, and you drive through or, you know, a part of the city you don’t know, and you get to your destination. And then someone says, okay. Can you trace your route back through this city? Now, if you were the driver in that car, there’s a decent chance you’d be able to trace your route back because you had to look around and pay attention, at least if you weren’t totally glued to your GPS. If you were the passenger in the car. You saw everything like you were looking through the same windshield. Your eyes weren’t closed, but you just didn’t have to pay attention. You were passively going through that city instead of actively. And I think that is a pretty good metaphor for being fed titillating tidbits by social media algorithms or even these days, like not to open a big can of worms, but like having AI do things for you, or teach things that if you’re not seeking out the answers and finding them, it’s being processed by your brain in a different way, a different, less lasting, less effective way.

Alex Hutchinson 00:37:54  That’s one aspect of meaningful exploration, I think. There are others. If it’s a sure thing, you’re not really exploring, if it’s like it’s just the mere fact that you’re trying something new. Like if you’re changing the channel on your TV. Sure, you’re exploring the airwaves, but that’s not. That’s not really what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about taking a chance where the outcome could be better or could be worse, and accepting that as part of the bargain. And so these are the kinds of things that then they raise the stakes, but they then make the outcome more meaningful. Whether it ends up being a good choice or a bad or a bad choice.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:26  So we didn’t really hit on this, and I just love to go back. If you were making the case for exploring more, and again, I get that your book is a is a nuanced take on it depends. Right.

Alex Hutchinson 00:38:39  All good complex arguments end up with it depends, so I apologize.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:42  Yeah, of course they do.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:43  I joke that my book I could have just written, it’s complicated and turned it into my editor. Yeah, but if you were going to make the case for exploration, what are the benefits? Like, if I tend to not really explore much, why might I want to more like, what’s in it for me?

Alex Hutchinson 00:39:03  Yeah. So there’s there’s two ways of answering that question. The sort of instrumental way that it leads to better outcomes and a kind of value or psychological way of saying it feels good and it feels meaningful. And so we’ve been talking about ordering in restaurants, and I’ve been focused on like, well, if you order, if you explore enough, you’re going to get better meals and you might say, well, you know, like that’s not a focus of my life. And that’s fine. And so the, the instrumental argument that it leads you to, you know, develop better products for your company or whatever, whatever. Yeah, it’s a powerful one in some ways, but it’s not the most powerful one to me.

Alex Hutchinson 00:39:38  The most powerful one to me is that putting yourself in a position of taking some chances, trying new things, getting uncomfortable, risking getting lost ends up correlating pretty well with the extent to which people feel they’re doing meaningful things in their lives. There’s a there’s a body of research called the effort paradox, which this is not exactly it’s a little bit neighboring to exploring, but I think related and the effort paradox is basically asks, why do we do things that are nakedly unpleasant? So why do we climb mountains? Is the classic example. And it’s like, well, there’s a pretty good view on the top for sure, but okay, we’ve put a gondola to this top of the mountain. You want to take the gondola? No, I want to climb to the top of the mountain. Like the fact that it’s hard is part of the attraction. In the same way that people, you know, millions of people run marathons. It’s like the goal isn’t to get to the finish, because the finish is literally, like two blocks from the start.

Alex Hutchinson 00:40:31  Usually you could walk there. The goal is to have traveled that journey. Ordering furniture from Ikea. There’s there’s research into the Ikea effect, which is that people tend to value the furniture they’ve had to struggle with to put together more than if you just gave them that same piece of furniture already assembled. So there’s this whole sort of suite of activities where we do them kind of because they’re hard. And so the question is, why do we do that? And the answers are very like, there’s a lot of different theories, a lot of different answers. But the one that I find most compelling, based on research from a guy named Michael Intellect at the University of Toronto, is that people tend to find effortful things meaningful. Now, meaning is a somewhat complicated topic. I’m not claiming to know the meaning of life, but if you ask people what were the activities that felt meaningful to you, they can answer that question. And there’s a pretty good correlation between things that were challenging, that push them out of their comfort zone, that where they had to rely on their resources and make decisions and deal with, you know, the potential of failure.

Alex Hutchinson 00:41:31  Those things turn out to be meaningful. And the extent to which people are willing to undertake effortful things and find meaning in it correlates also pretty well with how well they do in their jobs and how much meaning they perceive in their lives and how happy they are. And so that, to me, is a much more powerful argument than you might get a better meal at a restaurant.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:52  And so given that that effortful things tend to feel better and feel more meaningful, it’s also sometimes hard to get ourselves to do hard things or to even want to do hard things right. It’s one of those like, we kind of know what’s good for us, but yet we don’t do it. A whole bunch of my book is on that whole question, but I’m curious from your perspective why some people seem to get it right. Like they just keep pursuing things that are challenging and other people never really pursue anything challenging. Any ideas on why? And that’s a you can just say like it’s complicated and we can move on, but.

Alex Hutchinson 00:42:34  It is complicated. I’ll say two things. There is no like trick that makes challenging things easy, because if there was, they wouldn’t be challenging anymore. If I had a trick that made it easy to do something to exploring, then that thing is no longer exploring for me. In the same way that let’s say you take up running and you’re like, man, it’s really hard for me to go out and run one mile. Well, five years from now, it may be easy for you to run one mile. You’re no longer getting the same thing. So that means that’s why you need to be running two miles by that point or whatever the case. So. So the challenge never goes away. And if it does, you need to find another way of bringing back the challenge. Now why do some people embrace that challenge? Look, I’m not an expert in this, but but I think that that’s primarily environmental. It’s the result of a thousand experiences and chance encounters and, you know, meeting a mentor at the right time or having a positive experience or a negative experience where someone yells at you because you didn’t do the right thing, and you’re like, I don’t want to take that risk again.

Alex Hutchinson 00:43:30  And so I think people tend to get pushed down paths and again, it can be different. People might be willing to take on hard things in one domain of their life because they’ve been encouraged to do so, and they might be totally unwilling to take a chance or to push hard in other domains of their life because they’ve received negative feedback. So look, you know, you know, there’s a whole nature nurture thing, but I really think it’s something that is malleable and it’s changeable. And that isn’t just like, well, I’m not a person who does that kind of thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:56  I’d love to talk about five rules for exploration that you came up with, and I’ll just read the rule, and then I’ll let you elaborate on it, and we’ll kind of see where it goes. And maybe we get through all five, maybe we don’t. The first is explore then exploit. So we’ve sort of talked about what those two are. But why is that order useful.

Alex Hutchinson 00:44:20  Yeah. So there’s some logic and there’s some evidence.

Alex Hutchinson 00:44:23  So the the logic way of thinking about it is it’s not that you should always explore or always exploit. They’re both important. So how do you put them together. Well, it makes sense that you should figure out what all your options are. You should really know what the terrain is, but you know, you should check out every path and have a kind of an idea where they lead. And then you plunge down it and you go for it and you stop. So it’s not useful to exploit if you don’t know what your best option is. But conversely, exploring all the time isn’t useful if you don’t eventually decide this is the best option. And this is the way I’m going to go. And so what’s really cool is there’s an amazing analysis by a guy named David Wang at Northwestern, who analyzed thousands and thousands of career trajectories of film directors, scientists and artists and Classified every moment of their career into whether they were exploiting or or exploring and analyzed where their most successful parts of their career were.

Alex Hutchinson 00:45:18  And there’s this really clear signal that when people had a period of exploration of, let’s say, a few years, followed by exploration, exploitation, that’s when they went on a hot streak. So I think it’s a it’s logical, but it’s also evidence based.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:30  Yeah. I loved that idea of a hot streak where, yeah, you you explore widely and then you kind of I thought of it in the context of, as I do many things, musicians and you’ll see like certain musicians just like hit like a three record hot streak where you’re like, they just had it. And I think there’s probably something to be said for them knowing how to both explore and exploit. I think of the Beatles, right? You know, Paul McCartney is often thought of as like, the safe Beatle, but he was the one who was out getting into all the weird stuff, like particularly. Right. So he was very exploratory, and you sort of see that a little bit in what he creates. There’s a lot of variation in it.

Alex Hutchinson 00:46:16  So he was able to bring those explorations back into the sort of more conventional forms and then exploit what he learned or gained or been exposed to. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:25  All right. Number two, seek the uncertainty. Sweet spot.

Alex Hutchinson 00:46:29  Yeah. So this is we all have different comfort level. We talked about this earlier with like I say, we’re wired to explore. But the truth is we are also we’re filled with trepidation by the idea of venturing into the unknown as we should be, because it can be dangerous. And so there’s psychological literature that goes back to the 1800s that that finds this sort of upside down U-shaped curve where if things are too obvious and too easy, it’s not engaging or interesting to us. And if things are super complicated and impossible, you know, unpredictable, that’s unpleasant for us. But in the middle, there’s a sweet spot. And without belaboring the point, too much that you know. So there’s logic. Of course, you want an intermediate level of uncertainty, but there’s good evidence that our brains are wired to kind of even from the point where we’re eight months old, you can do experiments that babies can kind of figure out, oh, that’s to you.

Alex Hutchinson 00:47:16  Show them a sequence of shapes. And if it’s too simple, if it’s just repeating, they’re they’re bored. If it’s too complicated, they’re bored. But if there’s a repeating pattern that that’ll keep their attention. And so there’s this idea that we’re wired to feel engaged by the level of complexity or uncertainty that teaches us the most about the world. And so that it’s a question of eight month old babies can do it. But as adults, we’re bombarded by other, you know, bosses telling us what to do or feelings of guilt or whatever it’s like. But if you can tune in to like, what do I find interesting? All else being equal, what would I really be interested in pursuing? That’s a good sign that it’s it’s your brain is recognizing that this is an opportunity to learn about the world.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:56  Yeah, there’s a lot we didn’t have time to go into about the brain as a prediction machine. We’ve talked about this on the show in several other episodes and that. Really what we’re trying to do is reduce uncertainty and that that good feeling is in many cases, the uncertainty being reduced.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:15  And again, we’re not we’re not going to have time to get into it. But it’s it’s a great section in the book. And then three play more.

Alex Hutchinson 00:48:23  Yeah. And again this is, this is me going around to all these researchers and saying like so as adults do we need to tell people to play more. And and the answer being like, by definition, play is something that you do because it feels good. It’s self-motivated. You don’t have to be told to do it. You have to give yourself permission to do it, but it goes back.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:42  Is there a difference between playing and exploring?

Alex Hutchinson 00:48:45  Yeah, yeah. So and it goes back to what your, what you were just saying about this idea of, of the pleasure of reducing uncertainty and exploring. We’re heading out into the world, finding areas of uncertainty and experiencing the pleasure of reducing them. We find out where that trail leads or what’s over the horizon. Play is essentially the art of creating our own rules so that there is uncertainty.

Alex Hutchinson 00:49:06  The key point in a good game is that we don’t know how it’s going to turn out, and we get the pleasure of finding out. Or if you think about kids, one of the examples of what a researcher gave me is like, you take your kid to the playground. They’re like, I wonder what it’s like to go down that slide. They go down the slide a few times now. They know it’s not fun anymore. Now they want to know what it’s like. I wonder what it’s like to go up the slide and then you’re like, no, this kid’s coming down like, you can’t do that. But but they don’t want to hear your your crap, right? They just know that there’s an opportunity to learn about the world. They already know what it feels like to go down. So play is constructing the rules. Exploring is going, finding the uncertainty in the wild.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:41  And so play more. You said something interesting before I cut you off which was giving ourselves permission, right?

Alex Hutchinson 00:49:48  Yeah.

Alex Hutchinson 00:49:49  So this comes back to the, you know, me asking these researchers, should I issue this, you know, command that all people should play more and they’re like, you can’t say start having fun. But the reason adults maybe don’t play as much as they could or should is that they’re basically paying the rent and doing the things that adults are expected to do. So to the extent that you can give yourself space to ask, what would be fun? For me, that goes back to this idea that’s going to help you find your sweet spot. And it’s hard. It’s hard. We have, you know, as adults, we have a lot of responsibilities. And so it feels almost, sinful to be saying, oh, I just want to do what’s fun. But but that’s if you can find space in your work life, in your personal life to follow that to, to play, then that can be really powerful in terms of finding new paths.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:37  You might be the right person to ask about this, which is a tendency I’ve noticed in myself that I try and balance, which is I will do something that ideally should be playful, is enjoyable, and then I will promptly turn it into a job by thinking I have to get good at it.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:55  Rock climbing is an example for me. I know you do some rock climbing. It’s not like I go out and do it a lot. I mostly boulder and I’m not that great at it, but I noticed I did it at a time or two and I was like, oh, this is interesting. This is fun. And then all of a sudden my brain was like, I need to get a coach and I need to start training. And all of a sudden what should just be fun is now sort of a job. And I recognize on one level that there is enjoyment in the challenge of getting better, and there’s something else in there that doesn’t feel as helpful. And I’m just kind of curious your thoughts on that?

Alex Hutchinson 00:51:32  I have the exact same experience with rock climbing is that I took it. I took it up as an adult, and it was amazing to be like, hey, I’m learning something new. I’m doing something that’s totally non instrumental, that is just about tackling this challenge. But then you start feeling like, okay, how do I get better? Why does that seven year old look so easy doing this? And how can I, you know, emulate that seven year old.

Alex Hutchinson 00:51:52  And it’s actually again in my sort of main athletic world of running or the endurance sports. It’s I think one of the great kind of existential challenges of the sport is that people have all this wearable technology now, which, you know, in some critiques, turns, turns exercise into like unpaid labor for these companies that are harvesting the data. But on a more sort of prosaic level, it’s just like now you’re worried about exactly what your pace was every time you ran and how many, how many kilometres you ran, what your cadence was right and weather like. And so instead of just being like, hey, it’s fun to be out in the woods running and I, it feels really good. It’s like, oh no, this this route is too hilly. It’s going to hurt my average pace this week. And so I’m not going to get kudos. I think it’s a tough balance because I do think like you said, there is value and and meaning and fun in striving to be better. But I guess, put it this way, my solution to the running conundrum for me personally, in my particular situation and level of experience is I run with a Timex watch, the same model I had in 1990 that has no GPS, no monitoring, no heart rate, no nothing.

Alex Hutchinson 00:53:01  because I know that I am susceptible to this desire to quantify and optimize and strive and I will. I will love it, and I will love it so much that I may end up strangling the thing that I loved most about running.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:15  Yeah, that’s that’s well said. I think for me, the thing I try and key on is when do I start getting frustrated that I’m not getting better? And that’s the point to me that I go, okay, hang on. We need to we need to readjust here because this is supposed to be enjoyable, right? This is not supposed to be another job. It’s it’s supposed to be enjoyable. And as soon as it starts not being hard, that’s not what I mean. I mean, like, I’m getting mad at myself. That’s when I go, all right, you know what? I there’s plenty of places where that operates. We don’t need it over here.

Alex Hutchinson 00:53:53  Yeah, I could be mad at myself without the help of any other activities.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:56  Exactly.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:57  One more that I want to hit is minimize regret.

Alex Hutchinson 00:54:02  It seems like the simplest device possible. Don’t do things you’re going to regret, but it’s actually. This comes from the mathematical study of the explore exploit dilemma. Because like I said before, there’s no single answer that guarantees you will make the right choice in a in an explore exploit choice. But what decision scientists find is that there’s a heuristic. There’s a sort of rule of thumb that works well to minimize regret and regret in this, in this mathematical formulation, is the difference between how you hope things would turn out and how they did turn out. And that is to be optimistic in the face of uncertainty. That is, you know, we mentioned this before that that is to choose the option with the best realistic upside. And in doing so, you won’t always succeed. That failure is definitely a possibility. But that is what will reduce, I think, in the mathematical sense, but also in the sort of colloquial sense, it will minimize the extent to which you’re looking back and saying, oh man, I can’t believe that.

Alex Hutchinson 00:54:58  I wish I’d made another choice, Because even when it doesn’t work out, you’ll you’ll be able to look back and say, oh, but I understand why I made that choice. I was going for it. I went for it. It didn’t work out. And that’s okay. A simpler way to put that is do you look back at the high school dance and say, man, I really regret asking that person out, asking that person to dance? And they said no. Or do you regret all the times when you stood by the wall and didn’t ask? And you know, from the the fullness of my mature adult life, I could say, man, I definitely regret that all the times I didn’t ask. And in fact, I had way more of those I can’t even remember. Ask people to dance, but you want to be doing the equivalent of just saying, what the heck, do you want to dance?

Eric Zimmer 00:55:34  Yeah, well, that is a great place to wrap up. You and I are going to go into the post-show conversation, and we’re going to discuss 37%, which I think is the right answer to the explore exploit dilemma.

Eric Zimmer 00:55:46  So we have an answer, folks. You’re just not going to get it without coming to the post-show conversation. And we’re also going to talk about should we use our GPS less. You know, I think about this a lot. Should I not rely on it so much. So, listeners, if you’d like access to the post-show conversation to the thrilling answer of 37%. And if you want to support the show, which we really need, you can go to on your feed. Alex, thank you so much for coming on. I really enjoyed the book. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation at his lived up to my expectations.

Alex Hutchinson 00:56:21  Thanks so much Eric. I really enjoyed the conversation myself.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:23  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share info from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget and I’m certainly not a celebrity.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:40  But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one You Feed community.