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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.

Eric 00:37:12  Thank you for listening. 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:

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.

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Episode Transcript:

Eric Zimmer 00:00:00  You may have heard me mention my new book a few times, and I can assure you, you will certainly hear it a few more. But now we are offering some pre-order bonuses. One of them is the still Point method, which I believe is the only systematic way to interrupt negative thought patterns often enough for them to change. There’s a lot out there about what you should think and not think, but there’s very little that gives you a small and portable system to actually do it. You get the guide to the method, and three free months of a new app designed to help you implement it. There are other bonuses too. You can learn more and claim them at one. You feed your net.

Laura McKowen 00:00:42  As we go along further in life. The big thing for me, and maybe this is true for you, that I am learning that it all comes down to how much I can forgive and love and have compassion for myself.

Chris Forbes 00:01:04  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts.

Chris Forbes 00:01:10  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 00:01:49  There’s a version of healing that many of us secretly hope for. You do enough work, grow enough, learn enough, and eventually the same old pain stops knocking you over, but life doesn’t always seem to work that way. Often the same lesson comes back around again, but with the work. You can meet it with a little more awareness and a little more compassion. In this conversation, Laura McCowan and I talk about emotional sobriety, heartbreak, anxiety, and the realization that healing isn’t a straight line.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:23  It’s a circle. It deepens. We also explore the small practices that help us stay steady when things feel anything but steady. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi Laura, welcome to the show or welcome back to the show, I should say.

Laura McKowen 00:02:40  Hey, Eric. Good to be here. Thank you.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:42  I’m always happy when I get a chance to talk to you. I’ve been sort of following along with your sobriety journey. It’s 11 years now, so congratulations. And you’ve got a great Substack also where I have been reading and keeping up with. So I’m excited to talk about a bunch of different things. But before we start, we’ll start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with a 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.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:19  And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And their grandparents 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.

Laura McKowen 00:03:33  Okay, so I’m not sure how I have answered this question in our prior conversations, but I know how I would answer it today. I have been writing about and dealing with a lot of acute anxiety in the past couple of years especially. I had a relationship and we were engaged together for four years and it ended about two years ago, almost two years ago, and I’ve always struggled with anxiety to some degree. But since then it has been really acute periods of anxiety. And so I’ve had to try to find new ways to look at that, work with it and think about it and relate to it. And if you have struggled with anxiety in this way, or anyone who’s listening has struggled in this way, it can really, really, really take over your life and take you down on the days that it’s bad, it feels otherworldly.

Laura McKowen 00:04:23  It feels impossible. And what it has forced me to do is go back to the most basic practices of, I would say, sobriety, that I really started in sobriety, where this comes into the good wolf, bad wolf thing. If I think of waking up in the morning with like an empty stomach or two empty stomachs, the good wolf stomach and the bad wolf stomach, the the good wolf being the path that I could go down. That is going to mean that I’m able to manage my day just like very baseline expectations. The bad wolf meaning I am going to feed the stories. The lack of discipline, which I’ll get into a second, the practices, the sort of rote habits that will lead to a really horrific anxiety day and therefore a non-functional, very depressive day.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:29  Right.

Laura McKowen 00:05:30  I have to the the good wolf versus bad wolf, in which one I’m going to feed dials down to the like, minute by minute choices I make when I wake up. And what I mean by that is I have to be extraordinarily focused and disciplined with the thoughts that I’m allowing myself to chase and nurture in my mind, and I have to sort of stack up very, very, very basic practices that help me get to a level of okay ness versus like sliding down a hill.

Laura McKowen 00:06:08  And what those are for me are no caffeine on those days. Unfortunately, writing these specific prompts and sort of practices that I’ve learned in my journal and it takes, you know, sometimes it takes 30 minutes. So it’s a chunk of time. It means moving my body. It means putting my phone away. It means praying for me, and it means meditating for like 10 to 15 minutes minimum. And I think sometimes the the good wolf bad wolf thing can seem a little bit esoteric and like, you know, am I looking over my right shoulder or my left shoulder or am I, you know, reading this book or that book, or am I giving into, you know, desires or am I, you know, going to spend my time in some fruitful way where I’m of service to others, it can seem like these very sort of big, grand, Big stroke things that we have to decide. And and I guess there’s a long way of saying, it’s the teeny tiny, tiny things right now.

Laura McKowen 00:07:15  The seemingly teeny, teeny daily rote habits that I that I have to choose that stack up to me being really okay versus not okay. I have no shot at, the good wolf winning. Let’s say if I’m not doing these teeny tiny little habits and they’re so easy to let go of and they’re so easy to forget, they’re so easy to let go of, you wake up in the morning, you’re like, man, I just want to have a cup of coffee and like, zone out and scroll Instagram for 15 minutes. But if I do that on these days and these weeks and months where I’m in a really acute anxiety place, I’m gone. And it’s like a snowball and I can’t. I can’t track it. So that’s the good wolf, bad wolf for me right now. And it’s it really feels when I’m in the bad place, it really feels absolutely untenable. And it’s amazing to me that these small things add up to such an extraordinary difference.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:14  There’s so many things you said in there that I would like to hit on, and one of the things that I’ve enjoyed, the way you approach it, not that you are going through it, but that it has been the way you are writing openly about how devastating the loss of that relationship was, how serious the anxiety has been.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:32  And I think there is a tendency in sobriety circles for us to paint a happy picture of what sobriety is, because it is a much better picture, right? I think we would all agree at any time, those of us who are sober would say like, it’s much, much better. And you know what? It still sucks sometimes. Sometimes it’s still really hard. And I think about that parable too. I was actually saying to somebody it was interviewing earlier today, and I said, I don’t know that a decade on, 11 years on that, I would pick that parable as the way I would orient the whole show today.

Laura McKowen 00:09:09  Totally. Yeah, I agree.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:11  But when I’m in times of trouble, that parable rings really, really strong, right? Because it points to there are things that I know can help, and there are things that I know don’t help, and I’ve got to make that choice. And so I think that that’s really for me when it becomes, like you said, less ethereal and a lot more pragmatic.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:38  Now, I think part of emotional sobriety for me is realizing and learning how to do those kind of practices consistently, even when I’m not in trouble. Right. Yeah. Like that’s that’s kind of that’s kind of the trick is, you know, how do we stay motivated to do the things that are good for us when we’re not in so much pain?

Laura McKowen 00:10:00  Yeah, we’re saying the same thing. You said it in a different in a different way, a little bit more succinctly. I don’t know I don’t know the secret to that yet. I haven’t figured that out yet because they tend to get a looser with with things once I feel good. and I don’t know that that I don’t know that there’s anything actually wrong with that. I think that’s sort of a natural ebb and flow of life.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:23  Right, right.

Laura McKowen 00:10:24  I think we bounce back faster. We go back to our practices faster. We have built a stronger baseline of remembrance in our body and in our, nervous system and in our, in our, neural pathways, so that it’s like getting on the track is not that big of a deal.

Laura McKowen 00:10:46  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:46  Right. Yeah. So there’s something you wrote recently that made me laugh out loud. You’re talking about anxiety. I always want to find it here for a second. You said, I know my back is against the wall when I’m really reading Pema Chodron. Not like have her on in the background because it’s a nice voice, but like, I’m really reading it and that just made me laugh because that is so true. And she’s exactly the author. I would say that when I’m like, really freaked out, really having like an existentially bad time, she’s where I go back to and I don’t find her as compelling to me most of the time because I’m like, well, yeah, I know everything is groundless and but, you know, like, but when I am in trouble. And that just made me laugh. Like, I know I’m in trouble when that’s what I’m reading.

Laura McKowen 00:11:35  I think she’s that for a lot of people.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:38  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Laura McKowen 00:11:39  And God, I’m grateful for her.

Laura McKowen 00:11:42  When you’re really in the shit, she is my go to and she has been for like 15 years.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:17  So a couple years ago, I had, I went through a pretty difficult time, where there was a lot of grief. There was a lot of anxiety, there was a lot of surprise. I was just sort of completely taken aback by what was happening. And I remember having these moments where I felt like I thought I had done all this work. Like, you know, I’ve done inner child work, I’ve done I, you know, I thought I was through all of this. What is this. And having certain moments of feeling very discouraged. I had a therapist help me reframe that and we may get into that. But I’d love to know like was that your experience and how have you been able to put that in a context that’s useful?

Laura McKowen 00:13:06  Yes, it has been my experience throughout sobriety, and I think of things that have helped me reframe it, I think. Do you know about Spiral Dynamics and kind of that we heal? You don’t even need to know.

Laura McKowen 00:13:20  You know anyone who’s listening about the whole thing of Spiral Dynamics. But I think we heal in a spiral. Yep. Trending up. But we go around and around and around and.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:29  We see the same things again.

Laura McKowen 00:13:31  Feels like we are revisiting the same lessons. And we are. And I think we may be revisiting them in just a different context. We may feel we often feel like you said like, oh, I’m just here again. It’s the exact same thing. I don’t think that’s true, though. I love the quote. Nothing ever goes away until it teaches us what we need to know. And I think each time I say we circle, I’ll just pick an example. I have a pattern of relationships that I’ve had since it was imprinted in my childhood. Comes from my dad. I chase, or am attracted to, or in relationship with, or in some kind of situation with an unavailable, emotionally unavailable person. And I could look at the entire history of all my relationships, starting from very young and until this last one, and say, God, I’d never learned anything.

Laura McKowen 00:14:34  I just kept repeating the same thing over and over again. But if I look closer, that’s not true at all. Each time, certainly since sobriety, it’s gone up like that. My healing has gone up and up and up. It’s not a once and done, and it’s never going to be a once and done. I don’t think there will be a time, while I will ever not be triggered into that type of reaction, whether I’m in a relationship with a healthy person or not. Yeah, the difference is we get out of said situation more quickly, we recover more quickly, and sometimes I do think too. This is my theory right now, and I don’t have anything really to base this on, other than all the sort of spiritual reading that I’ve done over the course of my life, meaning there’s nothing scientific that I know about it. It’s just my feeling and what I’ve learned. Things get really intense before we sort of jump a level of healing. So this last relationship for me was like, you have got to be kidding me that I’m in this much pain.

Laura McKowen 00:15:48  Learning this particular thing again at ten years sober, and it was the most excruciating pain that I had ever experienced.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:59  Right.

Laura McKowen 00:15:59  And I did, in moments feel like that was a failure. Like, God, I haven’t learned anything or I’m hopeless. It’s just going to keep happening. But I know what’s truer is one, because of all the prior work that I had done, I was able to actually metabolize more of the hurt and the pain and therefore absorb more of the healing and the lessons. So I think it’s this strange inverse where it’s almost like the more capacity we have built, the more the deeper our sorrow and our pain. It’s like it carves more out of us. But then in that, you know, the Kahlil Gibran, the deeper our sorrow, the more joy we can contain. I think the deeper the sorrow, the more healing and the more joy and the more capacity we then have for the next thing. So there’s that. I also think that as we go along further in life, the big thing for me, and maybe this is true for you, that I am learning that it all comes down to how much I can forgive and love and have compassion for myself.

Laura McKowen 00:17:11  And that has really only come online in the past few years. Yeah, I still was what I would call healing or growing or, you know, my resilience was really based on some kind of pressure to just push forward and a little bit of self-hatred or a lot, a little bit of just, I’m going to exile that part of me. I’m still pissed. I just don’t want those parts of me anymore. And so I think the, the part where nothing ever leaves us alone until it teaches us what we need to know. I think the end point of what we really need to know, and what we really need to learn is that until we accept all the parts of ourselves and really learn to integrate those parts and love them and bring them along, we’re going to get that same lesson. So it almost hurts worse the longer we go along, because there’s more accumulated pain and exiling of those parts. So this part of me that chased that unavailable person, which is really just me trying to complete some story from my childhood with my dad, with just a new person.

Laura McKowen 00:18:19  Right. I now, instead of having done it ten times, I’ve done it 400 times. And I feel that and that part has been exiled 400 times, and the pain is deeper. And I’m also 11 years sober. I don’t have other coping mechanisms now, so I’m feeling it more. But the opportunity to integrate that part and to bring that part along and to have more self-compassion for that part and to actually say, okay, I’m not going to hate you anymore. I’m not going to punish you. I’m not going to say you’re stupid or you’re wrong or whatever. That opportunity is there. And with that becomes, it comes a another level of healing. It just hurts worse. So there’s a few things there. I think, like overall, I think we do keep circling the same lessons. I think we get better at recovering. I think we get better at acknowledging, I think our awareness increases, but I don’t think the pain gets easier. I think it actually gets harder the further we go along until we’ve really, really integrated the lesson.

Laura McKowen 00:19:28  And I think it always takes so much longer than we think. The ultimate acceptance is that we just don’t ever get to finally arrive at the healing place.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:39  Yeah, I don’t think there is one. And I think the tricky part with all this is like you lose a relationship to someone you’re engaged to, that you’ve been in this relationship that you’ve built all these ideas and around. What’s the healthy, healed response to that? It’s still an enormous amount of pain.

Laura McKowen 00:19:59  Yeah. The healthy, healed response is to be in pain.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:03  Check in for a moment. Is your jaw tight? Breath shallow? Are your shoulders creeping up? Those little signals are invitations to slow down and listen. Every Wednesday, I send weekly bites of wisdom. A short email that turns the big ideas we explore here in each show. Things like mental health, anxiety, relationships, purpose into bite size practices you can use the same day it’s free. It takes about a minute to read and thousands already swear by it. If you’d like extra fuel for the weekend, you also get a weekend podcast playlist.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:41  Join us at one UFI Net newsletter. That’s one you feed your Net newsletter and start receiving your next bite of wisdom. All right, back to the show. I thought a relationship that was really important to me was ending, and my therapist just kept bringing up my childhood and I was like, well, of course, yes, but if I came to you and said that my partner had just died, would you be telling me right now that the thing we need to be doing is finding out what’s broken about me from my childhood?

Laura McKowen 00:21:16  Oh my God, yes.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:17  Like, no, we would not be doing that now if my grief went on and devastated me and I couldn’t climb out of it. And of course. But there’s also a natural humanness that none of us get out of. And I think that the self-improvement world subtly tells us there is a way out of it. When I don’t think there is.

Laura McKowen 00:21:40  No, I think you’re so right. I was actually very grateful for the amount of pain that I felt and could feel.

Laura McKowen 00:21:49  My marriage ended. 13 years ago, I didn’t feel much of anything except relief. I was because I was still drinking. I was deep into my addiction. I just wanted to be alone with that, and I wanted to stop feeling like I was ruining his life and his dreams. And I wanted to stop lying. And I wanted to stop cheating and not being married removed a lot of that, and I couldn’t feel the pain because I couldn’t access it. I was so distanced from my own heart because of the drinking and all kinds of unprocessed shit. So I was actually so grateful that I felt it so acutely. This time I felt more real, I felt more alive, I felt more present, and I felt way more sober because, like, emotionally sober, because there’s this quote that I saw maybe six months after the breakup, when I was in this place of like, I just want this to go away. Why is this sticking around so long? You know, you don’t want to be in pain when you’re in pain.

Laura McKowen 00:22:54  It’s terrible. Yeah. And you mentioned the self-help world. A lot of the self-help world. And you said not so subtly. Subtly, I would say not so subtly in some cases. You know, we pathologies, all kinds of forms of dependence, like codependency is like this big thing now, like, oh, if you are somehow emotionally tied to another person’s being and process in their heart and you know, you’re you’re codependent. Yeah. And I think that’s bullshit. I think codependence is real. There is a certain level of pathology that belongs to that. But I think by and large, we have tried so hard not to need each other, not to depend on each other, that we’ve mythologized any emotional regulation that exists in a relationship that should exist. That’s very natural as the kind of animals and the beings that we are. And I saw this quote that said, this is a brutalization of it, but it basically was like we are undone by each other, and if we aren’t undone by each other, there’s something wrong.

Laura McKowen 00:23:59  We’re missing something. Yeah, we are undone by each other.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:03  Yeah. That’s beautiful. I actually think it’s getting better. And I would say in the last several years I feel like this is lessened. But there’s a psychology version and there’s a spiritual version of it which basically said we should be these, like you said, we should be these creatures that all our happiness is inside of us. I should just be happy and be able to generate all that just inside myself. And that’s what a healthy person is. And I think that the more that I’ve learned about what it means to be a human, the way we are wired up, the type of creatures that we are is that that is profoundly false. Yes.

Laura McKowen 00:24:59  Profoundly false.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:00  We should be undone by each other. And like you said, there are ways in which we should be perhaps less undone by each other. Right. And there are people that it’s worth letting undo us. And there’s people that we probably shouldn’t let in to undo us.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:14  And there’s a whole lot of nuance and subtlety in that. But to think that that wouldn’t be the case is to miss. I think a lot of understanding of what we are as creatures, and just a lot of the beauty of being alive.

Laura McKowen 00:25:27  A lot of the beauty of being alive, and a lot of the beauty of being in relationship, which is it’s kind of all we have. Yeah, it’s it’s the number one predictor of happiness is if you have healthy relationships or not. And also of health. Overall health and well-being. So I do agree. I think there’s some ways we are getting more of the nuance in there and getting it a little bit more right. Especially as we’ve understood the the reality of trauma and the impact of trauma. So meaning this sort of hyper individualism and this hyper sort of self-reliance, we’ve started to break that down a bit and understand that, like it’s not just a matter of if you want to be happy, you will. And if you want to have self-esteem, you will.

Laura McKowen 00:26:17  And if you want to have self-worth, you will. You just generate it yourself. That’s all you need is this relationship with yourself. Some of that has dialed down a bit with the understanding of how trauma actually works and, you know, other psychological factors, but I totally agree. And I think that’s a lot about what I’ve written about in this next book, just from a memoir perspective, not a teaching perspective is just sort of this coming around to the fact that we are undone by each other. And that’s not a bug, right? That’s not a problem. It’s a reality of being emotional beings, being biologically connected to each other. I mean, some of this stuff is just science. We we attune and attach to each other nervous systems. We do co regulate each other. When you’re with another person that you love and that cares for you, you co regulate each other. We need each other. We need community, we need relationship. So for me, because this is my, you know, sort of my ground zero lesson, this is what has been the hardest for me to sort of accept about myself that I can be impacted and that there’s nothing wrong with the way I am impacted, that my feelings aren’t a problem, that my quote unquote weaknesses are not actually a problem.

Laura McKowen 00:27:40  They’re beautiful. And part of what makes me just normal human. That that I don’t need to have shame about that. That’s what I’ve written about in my latest book, is just coming around to the fact that, like, emotional sobriety and so much like physical sobriety is learning to how to see the humanity and the behaviors that you have and that they are only always, ever a way to connect and feel okay and safe in the world.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:05  Yeah, that’s a beautiful description of it. Because the more I have reflected on my addiction, the more I see that’s what it was all about.

Laura McKowen 00:28:14  That’s all it ever was.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:15  Recently, you told a man you didn’t want to keep seeing him because he didn’t feel safe. And you described this beautiful scene. It really moved me where you’re you’re sort of you’ve told the guy this and you’re crying, but you’re not crying because the relationship, you’re crying because you you did it for yourself. You stood up and you went, okay, I’m not going to go down that path.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:37  And that’s a really big moment.

Laura McKowen 00:28:40  It was wild. And it’s really goes back to what I was talking about earlier about, you know, I have done that same dance 400 plus times in my life. It’s the thing I know best. It’s where I have actually tried to find safety. It is something I have hated and shamed myself for so many times. It has caused me such excruciating pain over the course of my life. And specifically, what I’m talking about is, is abandoning my self to try and be what someone else. To try to get some form of scrap of love, attention, affection. Because better than nothing, you know, to have that pathological sort of hope that, oh, maybe this will, this will turn into something different. Maybe this will rewrite that original story. Finally, this time, I’ll get the person who can’t see me to see me. Yeah, and what I meant by this guy isn’t safe. This person isn’t safe. As I knew I could feel it.

Laura McKowen 00:29:56  And he had said as much in not not that specific way, but he’d said he was looking for something different than what I wanted. He. He said it. And it was like this sliding door moment where I could go into that old dance. I could go into that old thing, and man, did I want to. It’s kind of like substance addiction, actually. It’s a lot alike. It like it where you really actually want to keep doing the thing. There is some kind of comfort and relief and deep familiarity with what is going to happen and your biology. And there’s a chase element and there’s a reward element. And, you know, it’s that equation that we have that’s in the background when we have a substance addiction, where I remember someone in in the rooms of AA when I first started and I was going to those meetings, say if there was even 5% relief left for me in drinking, I would still do it.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:03  Yeah.

Laura McKowen 00:31:03  And I remember thinking, oh, there’s still a lot of relief left there for me.

Laura McKowen 00:31:08  I still get a payoff. I still like it for the first couple hours, maybe even the whole night. Maybe I don’t hate it until the next day. But eventually and very quickly, once I, you know, my back was sort of up against wall, and I knew I shouldn’t be dreaming. I knew this thing had me. The relief window got really, really, really small to where it was almost nothing. And the relief window for this type of a relationship. For me, the payoff window has started to get smaller and smaller, but it’s still there. And man, it’s harder to break because it’s not a substance. Emotions love. People are not a binary. It’s not either you’re doing it or you’re not. We’re all sort of doing it or testing doing it right. And so sometimes you don’t know til it’s a little too late and you’re already attached to this person and you’ve already got some history and you’re attached to them, and your biology is firing to like, go towards this person.

Laura McKowen 00:32:09  I think it’s way stronger than substances, the biology, the biological urge to reenact the trauma.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:16  Yeah. And also substances you can eliminate.

Laura McKowen 00:32:18  You can eliminate. That’s what I mean. It’s not a binary.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:21  Yeah. I mean it’s one of the great things about if you have a substance addiction is you can just truly starve it out of existence. Yeah. I’m not saying it’s easy, but you will hit a point where, at least for most people, it ceases to be a problem. But relationships. You never get out of that dance.

Laura McKowen 00:32:40  You can’t. No you can’t. And like alcohol, I can remove it from my home. I can stop going places where there’s drinking. I can limit the access I have, you know, the places that I go with my friends. You know, all those things I could. Like you said, I can slowly choke it out and starve it out of my life. And truly, I haven’t had a drink in 11 years. I haven’t touched alcohol and I don’t have to.

Laura McKowen 00:33:01  I have to and want to be around people, and I want to be in relationship and I want love, I need it. Not only do you want it, you need it. You can’t. You literally can’t starve yourself out of relationship. So it’s messier that way. So back to this story. All of the work that I had done in the past had sort of brought me, bubbled up into this moment, and I first was able to verbalize to him that, and that’s something I’d never been able to do before. I would have been too embarrassed to say, you’re just not safe for me. And it wasn’t physically safe. It’s like you’re not safe for me to invest my heart into this will not just cause me pain, it certainly will, but it will cause me. It’s very costly for me. It’s not just like, oh, I might have a little heartache. Like, now this is this is going to equal a lot of anxiety. It’s going to equal pain that I will have trouble tolerating.

Laura McKowen 00:34:04  I will not function. I will, you know, it’s it’s it’s real deep for me. So I said you’re not safe for me and decided to stop pursuing this thing. And I had never done that before. Never. I had done the exact opposite. I’d run towards it. Well, maybe putting up some like, you know, saying, oh, I’m not going to do her. This is bad for me or what? Saying I trying to be the cool girl. I would do all kinds of gymnastics to try to make it okay and it could never be okay. And I cried for all the times that I hadn’t done that before. And I cried because it was fucking hard. And there was sadness there. I didn’t want to do that.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:42  Yeah, but you did. It’s just amazing to me. Like, I just love a story like that. And again, it’s not to say that you may not in two weeks do the exact same thing again, but those moments, I think, and I can recognize them in my journey to sobriety.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:59  I can recognize the moments where even if it was for a day or a week or one night where I was able to, like, go, oh, no, yeah, I’d be like, oh, look at that. Holy mackerel.

Laura McKowen 00:35:12  It’s a possibility that you now have it’s a little twitch of muscle memory that you now have that you didn’t have before. And people who haven’t been through something like this, it’s really hard to explain the knife’s edge you’re on in those moments, what it costs you to go in either direction.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:32  That’s a great way of saying it. What it costs you to go in either direction. One of them just costs a little bit more. One of them probably a little bit, actually. Maybe. Maybe a lot more in the long term. But yeah. And I love the way you describe it. So in AA we used to use the phrase cunning, baffling and powerful. Yeah. Right. And that’s what this sort of thing you’re talking about is I’ve got my own version.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:56  I’ve been in a relationship for ten years. I’ve got my own version of it, which is more or less, you know, like I have to really work because I think there’s a certain degree of distance that I like. And if you come too close, I want to back up. But if you start to pull away.

Laura McKowen 00:36:16  You five alarm fire in your body, right?

Eric Zimmer 00:36:19  Yeah. And and what I’m astounded by is I only know it now with a ton of awareness because it changes my entire perception of the other person. It’s bizarre to me the way like, oh, if you’re moving away from me, I suddenly it’s just crazy, like it’s, you’re the most beautiful person in the entire world. But if you’re coming at me, it’s different. And and to recognize that like to say it’s emotional. It is. But it’s it changes my entire perception. It’s biology. Really deep. Yeah.

Laura McKowen 00:36:57  Yeah. It’s truly biology. Yeah I think there’s there’s an emotional thing going on. There’s probably a spiritual thing going on.

Laura McKowen 00:37:03  But I think it’s truly biology. I think the attachment system goes nuts. And all of a sudden this you are in a, it’s a threat to your whole body that this person is moving away from you. And so of course they become more attractive. Of course they become more powerful. Of course they become. Yeah, there’s a fantasy about them now. There’s they have magical powers. They have all these things.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:29  Yeah. It’s amazing because I can look back at previous relationships and see like how wildly different I saw the same person, right? How wildly different? I saw the same person. And with years of remove now I’m like, well, maybe I see them as accurate as we ever see anything, which I think is questionable, but I can look back at like my wife of, you know, my son’s 28. So 26 years ago, I feel like I can see her with some degree of I’m not hooked up. Yeah. I’m not hooked up. Right. And I’m like, oh, okay.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:04  That’s interesting. She’s neither as amazing as I thought when she was moving away. And I think biology is a great way to say it because it changes perception in a really deep way.

Laura McKowen 00:38:17  That’s the only way I’ve been able to really understand it and explain it into the depth in which it animates you is biology. Yeah. And I’m not making that up. This is like I have have the fortune of being connected to the foremost sort of leaders in this space, the space being, you know, psychology, attachment theory, biology, complex trauma. I’m assuming you have some complex trauma in your past. And this plays into it because when you feel safe, I’m just going to guess because of what you just said, when you feel safe in a relationship. There’s a discomfort to that almost. It’s like that’s the sort of moving away thing. It’s like, it’s safer.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:06  Or it manifests bored. It manifests like.

Laura McKowen 00:39:10  Yeah, the person’s not that interesting or sometimes not that interesting. Like, there’s no spark.

Laura McKowen 00:39:18  There’s no electricity. Yep. And when someone’s moving away from you, it is familiar. It sparks that Disorganized attachment thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:31  Which I am, which I think is such a great term. Yeah.

Laura McKowen 00:39:36  It’s it’s and it’s and your body like you don’t sit there and this is not rational. No. All of a sudden your system just lighting up and you’re like, oh, and I can’t control that anymore than I could control my drinking at the end that this is deeper. This was underneath the drinking. This is a lot of the reason I did drink.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:56  Yes.

Laura McKowen 00:39:58  Was to try to soothe this sort of it causes this extraordinary existential pain.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:03  It’s been interesting to remain in relationship with somebody for ten years and and do this dance. Yeah. And a lot of it is me. I’m a lot more conscious of it now. So I can sort of just I can’t really make it go away. Exactly. But I can try and relax around it. So I sort of think about a lot of times I use being sick as a really useful analogy for a lot of things, because when I’m sick, I just know my brain isn’t working and I just do my very best to be like, okay, I hear everything you’re saying, but the world isn’t that black, that bleak, that like, just settle down.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:43  And that’s what I think I’ve learned to do. The other thing I’ve learned to do is name it a little bit and sometimes even not, not a lot, but sometimes even with my partner. And the minute I do, it’s gone. It’s so strange. It’s so strange. The minute I say I’m feeling this and I say it to her, it vanishes. Yeah, but I don’t want to be saying that all the time, right?

Laura McKowen 00:41:04  No, because that’s hard as a partner, but.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:06  As another person.

Laura McKowen 00:41:07  Yeah, yeah. But I think this speaks to the fact that we heal relationally. Yeah. That what you’re talking about is, like, really healing with someone in real time. And that person can’t be that for you all the time. We would destroy each other if we if we did that.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:23  If we vocalized every weird emotional fluctuation that went through us. Yeah. Of course.

Laura McKowen 00:41:29  But being with someone where it’s safe enough to speak that sometimes, and to put words to that and to have them stay and I mean, that is how we actually heal is relationally.

Laura McKowen 00:41:41  So this is all this stuff that is really deeply present for me now and at 11 years and that I’ve written about in this last book, and I’m still walking through and understanding, but I understand a lot more than I did before. Wow. It’s a wild ride.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:57  Yeah. Before you check out, pick one insight from today and ask, how will I practice this before bedtime? Need help turning ideas into action? My free weekly Bites of Wisdom email lands every Wednesday with simple practices, reflection, and links to former guests who can guide you even on the tough stuff like anxiety, purpose and habit change. Feed your good wolf at one you feed dot net newsletter again one you feed dot net. newsletter. Well, I think that’s a beautiful place to wrap up. I, as always, am inspired by you. Your writing, it’s outstanding and just the bravery that you show in this, I think, is such a beautiful thing. And you said something in relation to this that I just want to end us with.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:44  If I can find it. You say I’m sharing this mostly because if it’s your experience too, it might be helpful to know you’re not alone or somehow uniquely fucked up, especially in sobriety. It seems like we shouldn’t struggle in this way, but almost everyone I know does. We drank for good reason. It would be completely unmanageable if I was drinking. It’s still tough, not unmanageable, but tough. And I just love that because you’re normalizing this thing that everybody has and people in sobriety, you know, there’s the performative aspect of going to meetings and I’m sober and how wonderful it is. There’s a performative aspect to it is wonderful to see people write about honestly. So thank you for all that.

Laura McKowen 00:43:25  Oh, you’re so welcome. No. Thank you. It’s I’m it’s I’m grateful to have this conversation. You’re catching me when I’m, like, doing these things in real time. So I don’t have packaged sort of ways to talk about it. So I appreciate your patience as I fumble my way through my words.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:46  no real fumbling that I noticed.

Laura McKowen 00:43:48  Okay. Thanks, Eric. It was really nice to see you again.

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Episode Transcript:

Erich Zimmer 00:00:00  You may have heard me mention my new book a few times, and I can assure you, you will certainly hear it a few more. But now we are offering some pre-order bonuses. One of them is the still Point method, which I believe is the only systematic way to interrupt negative thought patterns often enough for them to change. There’s a lot out there about what you should think and not think, but there’s very little that gives you a small and portable system to actually do it. You get the guide to the method, and three free months of a new app designed to help you implement it. There are other bonuses too. You can learn more and claim them at one you feel. Net book.

James Patterson 00:00:42  Imagine life is a game in which you’re juggling five balls in the air. You name them work, family, health, friends, and spirit and you’re keeping them all in the air somehow. And hopefully you soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, believe it or not, it will bounce back.

James Patterson 00:01:00  But the other four bowls family, health, friends, spirit are made of glass. If you drop one of those, they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, knick damaged, or even shattered. They’ll never be the same.

Chris Forbes 00:01:22  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.

Erich Zimmer 00:02:07  One thing that feels true about the moment we’re living in is that disruption isn’t optional anymore.

Erich Zimmer 00:02:13  Technological shifts, economic changes, artificial intelligence. So many forces are reshaping the world around us, and it can feel like the ground is constantly moving beneath our feet. My guest today is James Patterson, one of the most widely read authors in the world. In this conversation, we explore how he thinks about disruption, not just in writing and business, but in life. How do we respond when the world changes around us? Do we resist it or learn how to work with it? His latest book is Disrupt Everything and When, where he looks at how individuals and organizations can adapt to change and even use it to their advantage. I’m Erich Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, James, welcome to the show.

James Patterson 00:03:02  Thank you very much. I’m delighted to be here.

Erich Zimmer 00:03:05  We’re going to be discussing all kinds of things, but we’ll be spending a fair amount of time with your latest book, which is called Disrupt Everything in Win Take Control of Your Future. But before we get into that, we’ll start like we always do with the parable.

Erich Zimmer 00:03:19  And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild. 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 grandchild stops and they 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.

James Patterson 00:03:51  Well, I think it just means that everyone is complicated, and I wish we could kind of look at the world that way. It’s very logical to me. It’s exactly what you see in life that people have, you know, in the writing. I always want highest common denominator. I mean, that’s just me, I want it, I want a common denominator, but I want the highest and in life.

James Patterson 00:04:11  You know, you do your best or I do my best. And most people, I think, do to, to sort of, feed your better side. It’s always worked out better for me to be a straight shooter as much as you can. to try and avoid spending too much time with people who aren’t that way. You know, if you have business to try to not deal with people, that the wrong side is coming out all the time. One of the things to me about negotiation is I always felt this way, and people have different ideas about it, but my thing is I want to walk away from a negotiation with the other person, feeling, okay, maybe I could have done better, but I feel okay about this and I want to walk away the same way. I want to leave money on the table if it involves money.

Erich Zimmer 00:04:55  Speaking of negotiation, we, I think, may share a literary agency. I’ve got my first book coming out, and Richard Pyne at Inkwell is my agent.

James Patterson 00:05:05  Yeah. No, Richard was early on. He and his father, Arthur and Richard and. Yeah, they were terrific. Very. I’m sure they’ll do a nice job for you. Yeah, or he will. I’m sorry. Yeah.

Erich Zimmer 00:05:17  Yeah. His father has passed. Before we get into the book I saw on your Substack, you have a Substack right now called Hungry Dogs, where you’re doing lots of interesting things. One of them is that you showed books on your bookshelf, the books that have helped shape you, that you’ve read. And I was struck by two things. One is you seem like a very positive person, very upbeat person. And yet when I looked at that bookshelf, there’s some pretty heavy stuff on there, Write a fan’s notes on naive.

James Patterson 00:05:51  Yeah, a lot of people think it positive. To me. It’s just a logical thing if you can do it to be positive.

Erich Zimmer 00:05:57  So some of the books that were on your list when you Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Bell Jar.

James Patterson 00:06:04  And Ken Kesey, even for Ken Kesey, who wrote that sometimes a Great Notion is another book that he wrote, which a lot of people think is better than One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I love that title. Sometimes, yeah, a great notion. That’s a really it’s a really cool title if you think of it. A great notion, yeah. Notion. An interesting word to use. I’m sorry, but go ahead. Ken Kesey yeah, yeah.

Erich Zimmer 00:06:27  Well, one of the things I thought was interesting is you’re going through the books and some of these books, like we said, The Bell Jar, those books, they’re pretty heavy books. And then you get to The Day of the Jackal and you say, you know, you had been very serious about your reading before you read that book. And it occurred to you that while you may not be able to write something like 100 Years of Solitude. You could write in that direction. Was that a real landmark? Was that a big change moment for you?

James Patterson 00:06:55  Yeah, I think it was.

James Patterson 00:06:56  I wanted to write for a living. It seemed to me that if you want to write for a living, to some extent, it probably has to be commercial. A and B, I thought I probably was capable of writing a literary novel, but I didn’t particularly want to write for those people, and I didn’t think I had anything, you know, incredibly profound. I thought I could write something that, you know, probably could get published and do okay, and I didn’t want to tell stories for it. For the people that read those books in particular, I was in graduate school at Vanderbilt just before that. And, and I started writing mysteries, which I didn’t read much. I had only read a few mysteries, but I thought de the Jackal and the other one was The Exorcist, and I didn’t read a lot of Pi. I was a little, you know, literary snob, right? You know, grad graduate English student on a, you know, and and I read those and I went, oh, these are pretty cool.

James Patterson 00:07:48  And maybe I can do something like that and keep writing and tell stories, which I love to do. And, you know, and part of it for me anyway, is when I do a project, when I do a book, it’s something that I’m that I’m passionate about when I, when I get into it, and I hope it will turn out really well. And that’s all that matters to me, that it does turn out that I can do the best I can. And at the end of the project I go, I’m really glad I did. That doesn’t always happen.

Erich Zimmer 00:08:14  I heard you on a previous podcast sometime in the past, talking about what you wanted to to do a book where there’s a detective, his wife dies, she comes back as a hummingbird. And you were you were doubting yourself on that one. Has that gotten any? I was going to say legs. But wings.

James Patterson 00:08:29  Yeah, I still like that story. I think it’s a cool story. reincarnation. Play around with that a little bit fantasy.

James Patterson 00:08:36  There’s certain things, certain kinds of books I can write a love story that I have. I couldn’t write a romance novel, you know, the old. Nothing against him, but I couldn’t write one. I don’t know how to do it. I don’t get that. I could not write a book about a general. I don’t kind of get them. I don’t get the way they talk. I don’t get the way they think. I just couldn’t do it. I’m actually writing now, which I’m loving a romantic. And I had written a few, you know, Yaris and a few of those, and I kind of liked them, I mean, and they were and, and I liked the idea of fantasy and world building, and I hadn’t done it. And I thought, well, that would be a cool challenge, and I think I can do it, and I’m loving doing it a lot. It’s it’s really exciting and fun and, and a challenge.

Erich Zimmer 00:09:17  What is it that keeps you moving forward? You’ve written, I mean, God only knows how many books.

James Patterson 00:09:24  It’s that that next book is going to be the best I’ve done, or at least that it’s going to be as good as I hoped it would be. I just finished a book with Viola Davis, a novel which is coming out in March, I believe, and I think it’s the best sort of legit novel that I’ve ever done. I think it’s very dramatic. You know, it’s interesting with viola because she said she said, James, you know, you would think I’m Viola Davis and I’m watching. The minute you would think that I’m getting all these great parts to play with great characters. He said, I don’t. And she said, what I love about this novel that we’re doing is I love this character. I want to play this character. But she says it’s rare. It just doesn’t. And, you know, people always go, well, oh. James’s style is in short chapters. It really isn’t. Every book that I do, whether it’s non-fiction, even even with Disrupt Everything or I just did a book about the Idaho murders out there.

James Patterson 00:10:19  You’re looking for a voice. I am, and they’re all different. Alice Cross’s voice is very different from the Viola Davis novel that I just finished. David Ellison sort of suggests that he’s Skydance or whatever. Very terrific reader, and he’s very interested in entertaining people, and he wanted to do something on it I wasn’t sure that I wanted to do the book initially. And then I talked to Vicky Ward, who I did that with. She’s a wonderful reporter, really, you know, digs up all sorts of information and, you know, very just fabulous to work with. But we didn’t want to write about, you know, this, this killer as much. But but we wanted to write about is to capture those two college towns, Moscow, Idaho and the Pullman, Washington, and what it would be like to have this incredibly sad, tragic, scary thing happen in your town. What would be the effect on the town? What would be the effect on the students? What would be the effect on the police who may never handle anything even close to that? Yeah.

James Patterson 00:11:22  What would be the effect? As you see the the all these terrible. Not not at all. But some terrible people on the internet who will expose people and go, well, that’s the killer and it’s not the killer, and you just put it out to, you know, half a million people that that person is a killer. What a horrifying thing to do. Yeah. You know, and that became the voice of it. The voice of if you lived in one of those towns, this would it be like, this is this is how you might feel.

Erich Zimmer 00:11:50  What is the co-writing process like? You’ve co-written with lots of.

James Patterson 00:11:54  Depends on who it’s with. Yeah. Do you want to try the. No. You’re too slow. We alternate words. Just kidding.

Erich Zimmer 00:12:01  Hang on. I was hoping we’d end this interview with us co-writing a book. Now, you didn’t warn me that was coming.

James Patterson 00:12:06  Never know. You never know the one you feed. You know, it really depends. With President Clinton, it’s very different.

James Patterson 00:12:13  And he likes mysteries and thrillers, and so he likes the genre anyway, and he brings authenticity to it. And he’s a good writer on top of everything else. The only trick with President Clinton is he wants every book to be like a thousand pages. And that’s that’s a little hard in that mystery world. But I mean, if the stories are a little far fetched and they are a little, the president would say, well, if it happened, here’s what the Secret Service would do or if something happened. Here’s what here. Here’s what it’s like in the white House. Here’s what it’s like to be the president or the most recent one, the first gentleman he didn’t get to be. He wanted to be the first gentleman. That didn’t happen with Hillary as president. so he would bring authenticity. Dolly Parton also brought incredible authors. So it really depends on who you’re working with. some of them, you know, want to do a fair amount of the writing by Olha did a lot of, of rewriting dialogue, which was great because she’s thinking of, of of what it would be like in the movie and how the dialogue might work better.

James Patterson 00:13:15  And there was one young character in there who she was particularly attached to, and she wanted to make sure that we got it right with that 13 year old. But it’s all over the life.

Erich Zimmer 00:13:47  Keeping up with your catalog is is a full time job. So I don’t know if the fact that you wrote an autobiography, then a book about being an advice for dads and now this book about disrupt everything. Is this your first real foray into, for lack of a better word, the advice world?

James Patterson 00:14:06  Yeah, I you know, I don’t give advice as much as sort of lay out some thoughts that I’ve had. And I did a thing online and it had to do with the way I write. And I say, I don’t give advice. I’m going to tell you what I do. You might find some of it useful. Yeah. The only thing I said about it is that the stuff that you’re nodding at don’t pay attention to because you’re already doing it. The stuff that you shake your hand at, that’s the stuff you ought to think about because you’re not doing that.

James Patterson 00:14:33  And maybe you should. Maybe you shouldn’t. But that’s that’s the interesting stuff. But but yeah, in terms of, you know, what’s disrupt everything. Maybe there have been others, but it is both a little bit of self-help and a business advisor. And I think I’m in a position to talk to people about that because I had two careers. I was in advertising, and I was the youngest CEO ever at the J. Walter Thompson, which at that point was the biggest ad agency in the world. But everything I did there was about disrupting. I went there, I was in grad school at Vanderbilt and what it was there in Vietnam, and it was during the lottery, and I had a high lottery number, but you had to leave school. So I left after one year there, but I needed to get a job and I didn’t. I had no marketing courses, no advertising. So I went to J. Walter Thompson and said, you got you need a portfolio of it. So I quickly I did a portfolio of ads and that was supposed to be the deal.

James Patterson 00:15:23  But the second week I brought him another portfolio, and the third week I brought him another portfolio, and they said, okay, well, these portfolios are pretty good. And this guy seems hungry and whatever. And we like him up to a point. And so they hired me. But everything there was a disruption when I took over the New York office. A lot of their offices were quite good. But Newark, New York was terrible and nobody wanted to go work there. And I did this thing right. If you want work, did an ad on the back page of the New York Times, it was eight questions like, here are the ingredients on a can of beans, oil, vinegar, whatever make it sound delicious. And what you could do when you read these eight answers that people wrote in was you could tell A whether they could write and be whether they could solve problems. That actually was the most important thing. In ten minutes, you could tell. And over the course of a couple of years, I hired over 40 writers on that.

James Patterson 00:16:17  One of them went on to be the showrunner on cheers. Another one has written a couple of movie scripts that got produced and, you know, whatever. But once again, another disruption in the book business. You know, as I went over and I had been involved in because I wrote a book when I was 26, a novel, I got turned down by 31 publishers, and they went on to win an Edgar, which is bizarre, so turned down by everybody. And then it’s the best first novel of the I don’t know, whatever that’s all about. In those days, it was sort of like you do the one book a year, and that’s the rule. I’m going, well, I mean, why is that the rule? I don’t understand. It’s fine to do one a year or one every five years or whatever, but why is that a rule? I don’t quite get it. And I remember going to the publisher and I and the Alex Cross series that was going on and that was successful, and they said, okay, well, this year I really like to do three books and I want to do Alex Cross.

James Patterson 00:17:11  I said, yeah, that’s great. And then and then I had another idea for a mystery novel. I said, oh, okay, that sounds okay. And then I had a love story, Suzanne story for Nicholas. And when I told them the story, the the CEO actually cried while I was telling the story. And then when I was done he said, oh, well, we want to do the Alice Cross and we’ll do the other mystery, but we don’t want to do the love story because that’s not your brand. And I go like, okay, I don’t know. I was in advertising, I kind of, I don’t think of myself as a brand, but if I did, I think what it would be that James will keep you turning the pages. So if you want to read a love story that kind of moves along, you might like this. Yeah. And so reluctantly, they published it and it’s now, I think, the section of the third most popular book I have ever published.

James Patterson 00:17:53  But once again, it’s just this thing of disrupting positive disruptions, which is basically been the secret of my whole life, just, you know. Well, why is that? And and I think I can help other people to deal with it. And what that can do immediately is remove a lot of stress from their lives immediately. And anybody you talk to your doctor, they will all agree stress kills. Stress is not good. So if we can remove some stress or if, you know problem comes in the late. Whatever the hell happened this week or today, whatever it is. And it’s like, oh my God, you know, artificial intelligence. They’re bringing it into our company. It will help you to make the first step in terms of, okay, how do you deal with that? Let’s suppose that your job is threatened. What are some of the skills that you have? What are some things that you could do. So it’s a useful thing if for no other reason just to calm you down, you know, or if you have a product that you think you believe in in terms of, okay, here’s a lot of steps to figure out how to maybe deal with that product and ultimately bring it to market.

James Patterson 00:18:56  So depending on whether you want a little or a lot, that’s what the book is, is about. And we also we have a series with Franklin Covey. They, they do a lot of courses around the country, businesses, and they’re doing one based on the book. And I think that’s very exciting too, because if you’re in a business, one, you need a mission. Obviously the one you feed you need is a mission for that. What are we going to do? What’s the sort of style of it? How is it going to work? So disrupt everything helps you to make sure that that mission is as tight as it can be. But then you need buy in for the mission. So for our publisher, for for Hachette, they had some new people in there and they had a new mission. And for that to work, it meant that all the editors need to disrupt the way they’ve been editing and the way they’ve been buying books. The sales department would need to disrupt the way they’ve been selling books in the receptionists maybe has to disrupt the way they greet people and talk to people.

James Patterson 00:19:53  So and insofar as you get in a company or in your at your team, in a company, insofar as you get buy in, the mission can work. If you don’t get buy in, the mission doesn’t work right. You know so so the book does that. And that’s what the Franklin Covey, that’s a lot of it, helping companies to make sure that their missions are, are going to operate at optimum or closer to optimum.

Erich Zimmer 00:20:15  So what caused you to decide writing a book about disruption. And that was just a writer.

James Patterson 00:20:22  Yeah, it was a fluke. I got invited, I said, I went to undergraduate, I got invited to do a little lecture for their business school, you know, one one hour lecture. And they said, you can write anything you want. And I did about the power of disruption and doctor laden. It was his course. And afterward he said, I’d love to do a book with you. Would you consider it? And I said, well, I don’t know, but maybe.

James Patterson 00:20:46  And he started doing disruption. And over the course of three years, actually, Patrick did a lot of research on it in terms of disruption and how it might work. The book has a lot of tools and things that you can you can work on in there, and that’s very useful for a lot of people. I’m not as tool oriented as some people. And so the research was really, really, really valuable. And then I sort of insisted that it not be a boring business book and that we went out and we just did a lot of talking to people. And then the book is full of stories. it’ll tell a story. And then which kind of illustrates whatever the point is to be made. You know, one of them was about a young guy, and he had just he was about to go off in business, and he had a brother who was on the spectrum, and he wanted to take care of his brother. And he decided on this car wash company where, where people with autism could work.

James Patterson 00:21:40  And now they have four and they have I think they have 100 employees, but 80 of them have, you know, autism. And that’s driven his life. And Patrick said to him, you know, if you hadn’t done this, where do you think you’d like to be? And he said, I like to be right where I am now with these companies and my brother and, you know, so the stories kind of illustrate the different points, but they make the book more interesting. I don’t know, a lot of business books to me are unreadable.

Erich Zimmer 00:22:05  Yeah. There’s certainly a lot of frameworks in this book as well as a lot of stories. If I name a story or two. Let’s see if you remember the story.

James Patterson 00:22:14  You know we talked about.

Erich Zimmer 00:22:15  How about.

James Patterson 00:22:15  That.

Erich Zimmer 00:22:16  You’re here. All right. How about.

James Patterson 00:22:17  I mean, one thing that I particularly love is, is the posse. And I know the people who were involved in it. And this is a great thing in terms of having an idea, but then executing it.

James Patterson 00:22:27  There are two pieces here. The idea was especially when the posse started, that a lot of colleges wanted to bring in kids from inner cities and whatever, but the problem was that they would arrive at a Brandeis or whatever, and there wouldn’t be many other kids from the inner cities, and some of the kids would be lost. And so they came up with the notion of the posse, where at a Brandeis or Vanderbilt actually is one of the schools that the school would bring in 5 to 10 every year, kids who had been trained to deal with and to get ready for it because you’re going to go to a college, it’s going to be like this here are going to be some of the things you’re going to have to deal with, and you will have your posse to help you get through it, which is brilliant. And then they sold it into, I don’t know what, they’re 40 or 50 schools at this point, and it was a great way to solve that problem for a lot of colleges, which is how do we bring these kids in and then keep them right and also make it a good environment for them.

James Patterson 00:23:25  So that’s one that I particularly love.

Erich Zimmer 00:23:27  Yeah, I loved that story. Also, how you were helping people to make connections with people, and then the whole of them was much stronger than any of its parts.

James Patterson 00:23:38  Yeah, yeah. And solving problems. It’s you have an idea and it’s kind of a cool idea, but okay, I don’t know what to do with it. Well, we can help you. Not always, but but we can. We can help you with that. Or even if you have an idea at work, there’s something that you know would make your group or the company. And to help you to be able to frame that and make it more concise so that when you bring it in, people are going to listen more rather than, oh, I get this idea and it’s all over the place and blah blah, we help you to focus it, which which is important in terms of getting people to listen and take what you’re saying seriously.

Erich Zimmer 00:24:12  Right? So this is a question I talk with a lot of guests about, and I love your perspective on it, because I think there’s two sort of things that we could get caught in.

Erich Zimmer 00:24:23  We’re not caught in. I guess I’m going to ask the question more simply, how do you balance ambition and striving with being content with what you have right the way it is?

James Patterson 00:24:34  I don’t know if they balance. Yeah. You know, I mean, one of the things that’s really big that I write about, actually, most of the novels, the Alice Cross novels, even, it’s about balancing your work life and your home life. And I think that’s huge. Alice. Crossing people, whatever. What it’s really all about is Alex has this, you know, over the top work life as this detective and then a home life. There’s a series now with Alex Cross on Amazon, and Aldis Hodge is a perfect person because in terms of an actor to play that part, because he’s very intense and as a detective, he’s very believable and very intense, and that works in terms of this terrible day job that he has, and then he’s great with the kids. And we all have not not all of us, but on some level, most of us have that thing of like, how do I balance that? You know, difficult work, life, very demanding at times.

James Patterson 00:25:26  And then I got to go home and deal with my family and somehow keep it in balance. And that’s a big thing. I have another series, Michael Bennet, and it’s complicated how it happened, but Michael winds up with, you know, 8 to 10 kids. They’ve all been adopted. He’s a New York homicide detective. How do you balance that crazy bit of, you know, but. And people identify with it. Which which is which is really important. The dad. The dad book you mentioned. Yeah. How to be a better dad in an hour. And that’s not meant to be a joke. It’s a very serious thing that a lot of what a lot of dads, young dads especially, are being overwhelmed, totally overwhelmed. And there’s a lot being written about that now. And most of them will not read a 400 page book about being a dad. So this thing is like one hour. And my promise about that book is if you spend an hour with it, what I’m going to make it engaging and it would be some comedic at times or whatever, you know, you’ll be able to read it in a good way.

James Patterson 00:26:22  And I guarantee that if you invest one hour in it, you will be a better dad. Period. Absolutely. You know, and it’s not an advice book. It’s just I, I interviewed a lot of dads and whatever and read everything I could read about it. And here’s a whole lot of shit to think about. And if that doesn’t work for you, go to the next page. And if that’s, you know, but I guarantee you you will walk away from that book. If you’re at any age that a young dad or even an older, then go and people love it. I mean, it’s amazing kind of thing when you write a book and people go, that’s really great to read. And it’s and it’s useful.

Erich Zimmer 00:26:57  Check in for a moment. Is your jaw tight, breath shallow? Are your shoulders creeping up? Those little signals are invitations to slow down and listen. Every Wednesday, I send weekly bites of wisdom, a short email that turns the big ideas we explore here in each show.

Erich Zimmer 00:27:16  Things like mental health, anxiety, relationships, purpose into bite size practices you can use the same day it’s free. It takes about a minute to read and thousands already swear by it. If you’d like extra fuel for the weekend. You also get a weekend podcast playlist. Join us at one you feed. That’s one you get and start receiving your next bite of wisdom. All right, back to the show. How old was your child when you wrote that book?

James Patterson 00:27:50  The dad book? Jack was probably 25.

Erich Zimmer 00:27:53  Okay, so he’s around that age.

James Patterson 00:27:55  Jack’s 27. Yeah.

Erich Zimmer 00:27:56  Okay. Oh, my son is 27, actually. we have sons the same age. How did you balance in Jack’s childhood.

James Patterson 00:28:05  Was easier for me with Jack because we had Jack, I was 50. Yeah. First. First marriage, whatever. And Sue was 40. Second marriage for her. But she didn’t have kids in her first. But we didn’t have financial issues. Yeah, we had time. If we needed help, we could get help.

James Patterson 00:28:23  We didn’t. I mean, we were very. I think we were good parents. And really, you know, we were there. Yeah. And I was there because I was I was home every every day. I’m home. I work at home. So there it is. Here’s Jack. You know, so we had a lot of advantages. And then there are tricky things with when we’re in a town that’s wealthy. You’ve got a dad who’s been successful, a mom who’s been successful in other ways. And how do you make sure that Jack or your son or whatever, they’re going to be okay with that? And I was always like, you know, I write a lot of books. Who cares? So it’s not a big thing. And trying to keep Jack where he’s comfortable with that and trying not to. Where he feels he has to compete. Yeah. Insofar as you can help.

Erich Zimmer 00:29:34  How do you work with that idea of kind of going with the river as best you can? Swimming upstream is often a bad idea, and yet disruption is a sort of swimming upstream.

Erich Zimmer 00:29:45  Or do you think of it differently?

James Patterson 00:29:46  Well, for starters, the disruptions are coming at us. We have no control of that. It’s never been, to me more overwhelming than it is right now. Yeah, it’s just really very disconcerting and overwhelming and I think difficult for people. So I don’t think you can get out of the way of that. But once again, part of it is having some perspective on things. That’s sort of the sky, the river, it’s the river. It just go with the flow a little bit, try not to go crazy on things that aren’t going to necessarily help the problem, but maybe we’ll drive you a little crazy. Just try to get sync with this stuff a little bit if you can do it. Tiger woods would always say he’s never concerned about a bad shot, so he just moves on to the next shot. Yeah, with the confidence that you’re very good at what you do, you’re very smart, you’re very logical and just have that confidence and go on to the next the next day.

Erich Zimmer 00:30:42  Yeah. In the book, you talk about a baseball player, Dansby Swanson, who talks about compartmentalizing failure, which is critical in baseball because even great hitters fail 70% of the time.

James Patterson 00:30:55  Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Or strike out three times in the same game? Yeah. Danby. He was. He was a Vanderbilt. They had very good baseball teams. Yeah. This really actually of a good football team, which is unprecedented.

Erich Zimmer 00:31:07  A lot of this stuff, I think is the discernment. It’s one of the sections in the book is around learning to discern. It’s the discernment. Like, do I compartmentalize that failure? Move on. It’s just a bad shot going in the next one. Or do I learn or do I spend a little bit more time with this thing? Right? In order to learn the lessons it has to teach?

James Patterson 00:31:27  Yes. And both. I’m still learning about the novel business. You know, as I look back in the beginning. I mean, one of the things I did early on is I want to do a block book.

James Patterson 00:31:37  So I had a half assed idea about destroying Wall Street, which seemed like an attractive idea at the time. blowing up Wall Street. Cool. I didn’t do the research, and I didn’t think about the characters. The book I published. But I mean, it’s not a good book if you do the research and please don’t fill the book with it. At least not my kind of book. But if you’ve done the research, you’ll be much more confident in terms of writing about that particular scene or that character. And then and then the character. And now, you know, when I’m doing an outline for a book, I’ll also have a side thing where I’m just everything I can think of about this character. What does a character do? What is a character like? What happened to why does the character think this way? Why does the character act this way? What was the effect of this on the character? What’s going to differentiate this character? You know, because the last thing that I want is here’s the typical, you know, detective who goes home and drinks himself to sleep and blah, blah, blah, blah.

James Patterson 00:32:35  Unless you’ve got some new twist on that. Right.

Erich Zimmer 00:32:37  Right. It’s a.

James Patterson 00:32:38  Little.

Erich Zimmer 00:32:38  Bit of a played out theme.

James Patterson 00:32:40  Yeah, it’s a cliché, 100%. Yeah.

Erich Zimmer 00:32:42  So you mentioned that in addition to outline. So you’re known to do a lot of outlining of your book.

James Patterson 00:32:49  And a lot of writers don’t. David Baldacci, who I interviewed, David doesn’t doesn’t align, and he’s very good and very successful at it, but he doesn’t outline at all. I have a suspicion that James Joyce did not outline Finnegans Wake. I don’t know, it’s just a guess.

Erich Zimmer 00:33:07  How about Ulysses?

James Patterson 00:33:08  You know what I think he did kind of outline Ulysses. Or at least in his head he did. Yeah. It’s very I mean, it’s very, very, very complex, but the pieces kind of fit together. You know, they they follow certain things about story, you know. So who knows? Yeah. I’d like to ask him, but. Yeah.

Erich Zimmer 00:33:27  Yeah, yeah. So when you create an outline for a book and you’ve written so many books, there’s not going to be any like, I always do it this way.

Erich Zimmer 00:33:34  Right. Because it’s so many different books. You evolve, you change. How do you outline what you want to have happen and yet allow yourself to have room to surprise yourself? How does how does that process unfold?

James Patterson 00:33:47  Oh, because one of the nice things about the outline is you sit down. You never sit down to a blank page. This is the the notion for that chapter. That’s a useful thing. But I never labeled the outline. And what happens? You’re writing the book and all of a sudden the character gets much more interesting than you thought. Yeah. And suddenly you’re writing a lot more about that character than you thought you would in the Michael Bennet novels. It was a sort of a sidekick, and he just kept getting more and more and more interesting. So you write more about that and or this was going to happen and you go, hey, this is here’s a much cooler ending for that. Yeah. And that sort changes what goes after that. And I never, not, never almost never know how it’s going to end.

James Patterson 00:34:28  I think I do in the outline, but it’s almost never that’s what happened.

Erich Zimmer 00:34:31  Really? Really.

James Patterson 00:34:33  Yeah. Yeah yeah. So so so the key is for me the outline helps me to keep moving forward also. I mean, for me, and I think this is useful for a lot of people writing a lot of kinds of books is if I’m stumped, I just move on to the next chapter. I’m not going to sit there and torture myself and it’d be TBD. I’m not going to drive myself crazy and create all sorts of psychological problems, because I can’t solve this thing. And eventually, in fiction, at least you can. Okay, you know what? I can’t solve this problem. And it becomes two paragraphs in the next chapter. Yeah. It’s just like I couldn’t really solve it. Solve it. I need it to happen. But I don’t need that. I don’t need that scene. I can move forward without it. Yeah, but the main thing is don’t sit there and drive yourself crazy because that’s not going to be useful.

James Patterson 00:35:22  And when you come back to it and you should always be rewriting anyway, when you come back to it, you got a new mind. You refresh and sometimes you go, oh, I know what to do with that now. You also will have written a lot more about the character of the story.

Erich Zimmer 00:35:35  I would imagine you’re a fast writer. You would almost have to be. Do you kind of go all the way through and then go back and start editing? Or how is the process? Yeah, you just kind of plow through.

James Patterson 00:35:46  And once again, the co-writers and some of the co-writers are not famous. They’re just, you know, good at what they do. And with the co-writers, I will write a long outline, and sometimes they’ll have to do a lot of rewriting, sometimes not.

Erich Zimmer 00:35:58  So I’d like to turn a little bit to the number one dad book. And what I’m interested a little bit in is how you were parented, how that drove part of the desire to do this book.

James Patterson 00:36:13  I’d just give you a jolt about my family. The only time as an adult that I ever hugged my dad was on his deathbed. He was a bright guy, and he was very lucky in the sense that the people who ran the poorhouse liked him a lot. And they took him under their wing, and they lived near the high school. So. So once he got into high school, he would stay in their house during the week and then go back to his mom on the weekends. And he wound up getting a scholarship to Hamilton’s very good school and coming out of Newburgh, that that was a jump for anybody.

Erich Zimmer 00:36:48  Yeah.

James Patterson 00:36:48  In a lot of ways it helped that he was, you know, homeless because that was part of his story. But he didn’t have a dad, so he he didn’t know how to be a dad. And, he was about to go off into World War two, and he got this call from this guy, and the guy said, my name is George Hazleton.

James Patterson 00:37:04  I live in a nearby town. Just bear with me a little bit. And George Hazleton said to my dad, he said, I’m about to go off and into the Pacific Theater. And after dinner, my parents took me downstairs to the living room and they said, George, you know, we love you so much, but because you’re going off to the war, we have to tell you we’re not your natural parents. And then George Hazleton said over the phone to my father, he said, I’m your brother. And, you know, George had been adopted when George was a little boy baby. And my dad stayed with with the mother. And that’s the first time my father knew that they had a brother. And they both survived the war and came back. And a few years after they got back, my uncle called again and they became great, great, great friends, my father and my and my uncle. But he said, I found our father and he said, he’s tending bar in Poughkeepsie.

James Patterson 00:37:54  Let’s go see him. My father said, I don’t want to go see the bastard. And so my uncle went up by himself. My uncle was kind of a shy guy, very smart, but shy. So he goes to this crummy little bar under the Poughkeepsie Bridge. And, here’s his father, bartender, and he orders a Coke. He doesn’t drink, and he’s watching this guy. He watches him for about 20 minutes, and he leaves. He’s so turned off by this guy, he doesn’t introduce himself. He just leaves. So, yeah, all of that, I think, has something to do with the dad book. Yeah, it can be tough. It can be tough. And I think, you know, as I say, and you know this, there are so many guys out there that are struggling, you know, how do we fit in? We’re not, you know, the breadwinner, all these these things that sort of people assume they don’t kind of work that way anymore.

James Patterson 00:38:43  Ergo, who am I? How do I forget? Who’s making the rules up? Are there rules? And I thought that between talking to a lot of dads, reading a lot of stuff in my own experiences, I could throw out some ideas that that guys would find useful. And as I said, I do. And anybody that’s listening, you can’t read this book and not become a better dad. It’d be a struggle. You’re going to pick up some stuff that’s useful.

Erich Zimmer 00:39:13  We have insight. We might read something in a book and have insight. And then there’s the challenge of sort of application. how is your book deal with that sometimes gap between like, okay, now I know better, but I don’t know how to do better.

James Patterson 00:39:28  Well, it tries to help a little bit in terms of how this might work, how it might.

Erich Zimmer 00:39:32  Work.

James Patterson 00:39:33  Yeah. And it’s just a whole lot of things for people to think about here. And as I’ve said, if 1 or 2 of these are paid for for people, that’s that’s great.

James Patterson 00:39:42  Yeah. You kind of encourage people to do things that aren’t necessarily natural. Do the hard thing a little bit. Yeah. Put in the work a little bit. It’s worth it when we talk about that a lot in terms of how important this job is, that you’ve undertaken this job of being a parent for mom and dad.

Erich Zimmer 00:39:59  Yeah.

James Patterson 00:39:59  It’s crucial. And instead of the monster effect on these kids, and insofar as you can, to help them to take it as seriously as they can, try to make it as enjoyable for them as you can empathize with the fact that a lot of days there are things you’d rather do. There’s some tough love in there for sure.

Erich Zimmer 00:40:20  Yeah. I thought maybe we could pull out a couple of the items in here and just see what you might have to say about them. And this sort of ties to what you just said, which is tell your children your story and help them discover who they are. Yeah. And it sounds like your dad telling the story of him growing up Actually, was him helping you do that? That’s a way in which he was a good father.

James Patterson 00:40:44  Yeah, he you know, look, he he did the best he could. Yeah. I have a friend, teacher all his life, and, he had a religion doing the best I can. Religion? Yeah. And if people are doing that, I give him credit. Yeah. You know, I think my dad did the best he could. I think my mom did the best she could. They were both functioning alcoholics, for whatever the reasons. But I think they did the best they could. So, you know, I’m not going to blame them for it just. Okay, that’s the deal. And, you know, once again, here it is. You know, the river is life. And we just kind of move on hopefully.

Erich Zimmer 00:41:20  Yeah. There’s a real theme also in this book, progress versus perfection. Right. There’s no way to be a perfect father.

James Patterson 00:41:27  I don’t know what the perfection thing is. Yeah, it’s a thing we need to get out of our systems or be able to handle a little better.

James Patterson 00:41:35  I mean, you see it in these people that write about and complain about athletics and whatever. Oh, it’s not perfect. Oh, Buffalo, the football team. Give me a break. This team, for years they were the second best team in the NFL. And people are like beating them up. No, they’re the second best team. This is really cool. It’s Buffalo. You know what do you expect. You’re the second best team. And nothing against Buffalo. But I mean come on celebrate it. Yeah yeah. You you want it. You try. You try. I mean, maybe maybe we can, but but you can’t really control okay. Here’s Tom Brady and Tom Brady is this incredible quarterback. You had an unfortunate thing that you know you had to go up against Tom Brady and stuff. He’s going to win very often.

Erich Zimmer 00:42:18  That seems to be the case. Before you check out. Pick one insight from today and ask how will I practice this before bedtime? Need help turning ideas into action? My free weekly Bites of Wisdom email lands every Wednesday with simple practices, reflection and links to former guests who can guide you, even on the tough stuff like anxiety, purpose and habit change.

Erich Zimmer 00:42:42  Feed your good wolf at one you feed. Net newsletter again one you feed net letter you talk about being willing to admit when you’re wrong. Can you think of any times in your parenting where you had to admit you were wrong? None. Never. Never. Okay.

James Patterson 00:43:00  Yeah yeah yeah. One of my weaknesses is not wanting to go to the Galapagos, do some of these things. So a lot of times Sue and Jack would go and I wouldn’t. I don’t even know why this is, but, you go to Italy or you go to Vilnius, Lithuania, where we went. And after about two days, I don’t want to be there anymore. I feel like I’m in, like a two day documentary movie and I’m in it. You were talking about 48 hour documentary movie. I don’t want to see any more churches. I don’t want to see any more things with the with the arrow in Jesus’s heart or whatever. Yeah, I’ve you know, I kind of like I’m, you know, so.

James Patterson 00:43:42  And that’s a weakness. I didn’t do as much of that as I could of and I should have I should have done more of that.

Erich Zimmer 00:43:48  What do you like to do for vacation?

James Patterson 00:43:50  Right.

Erich Zimmer 00:43:52  Well, that would make sense. You know.

James Patterson 00:43:53  I love I love beautiful locations. Sue and I, my wife and I did a book, mother Daughter Book Club, which is coming out next year. Novel. And it’s set in Lake Como. So we went to Lake Como and it’s beautiful. It’s gorgeous, unbelievably pretty. They’re unbelievable, you know. And that was great. And we wandered around the streets and you know all that and and that’s fine. And it’s Italy. So of course the food is excellent. And that was good. And you know we took some boat rides and you know walked. Yeah. Whatever. So so you know that that was okay. I’d like to go to South Africa. Still I’ve been a lot of places the best vacation for me. And it was before I was with Sue was the Kenya.

James Patterson 00:44:34  I spent two weeks there. You know Safari. Not a camera. Safari. Spectacular. Yeah. It’s just so much better than I thought it was going to be.

Erich Zimmer 00:44:42  What would be the one thing from the book about fathers that you would want to leave somebody with?

James Patterson 00:44:48  I read one thing from it, and we mentioned this thing about balancing and keeping things in balance. And I don’t know where this came from, but I’ve lived by to some extent. And this is the five balls. Imagine life is a game in which you’re juggling five balls in the air. You name them work, family, health, friends, and spirit, and you’re keeping them all in the air somehow. And hopefully you soon understand that work is a rubber ball if you drop it. Believe it or not, it will bounce back. But the other four balls family, health, friends, spirit are made of glass. If you drop one of those, they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nick damaged, or even shattered.

James Patterson 00:45:33  They’ll never be the same. And if you remember that, it does help you to balance your life.

Erich Zimmer 00:45:39  Well, that is a beautiful piece of advice to end on. Thank you, James, for coming on. It’s been a pleasure to meet you. I’ll be in touch soon about our co-writing project, but until then. Okay, well. All right.

James Patterson 00:45:51  Okay, thanks. Bye bye.

Erich Zimmer 00:45:53  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:

Light Watkins 00:00:00  Giving people the benefit of the doubt is a really good way to leave a positive final impression. And if you want to have influence over how that person is seeing a situation, guess what? You’re going to have way more influence if you help them feel seen and heard versus the person who cuts them off, dismisses their point of view as nonsense, and makes them feel stupid.

Chris Forbes 00:00:29  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 00:01:13  We spend a lot of time thinking about first impressions, but we rarely think about final impressions. How did I leave that conversation? Did I make that person feel heard? Did I close that loop? Well, in this conversation light. What can shares this idea that has been really helpful for me? And it’s that one of the simplest ways to live well is to leave every place better than you found it. This spiritual minimalism, as he would call it, is a very simple rule to try and apply. I can ask it any time. It’s very simple to ask and very simple to know the answer. We also talk about giving what you want to receive and about finding freedom in fewer choices. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed highlight. Welcome to the show.

Light Watkins 00:02:04  Thanks, man. Good to be here. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:06  We’re going to be discussing your book, Travel Light Spiritual Minimalism to live a more fulfilled life and whatever other topics come up. But we’ll start like we always do with the parable.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:16  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 and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparents. They said, well, 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.

Light Watkins 00:02:48  Well, you know, I’ve been writing a lot about this idea of following your heart voice, which is how I identified the voice of your spirit. And obviously there are a lot of other voices in our awareness. There’s the voice of fear. There’s the voice of our past traumas. There’s the voice of our parents, teachers, coaches, preachers, neighbors, news, cultural indoctrination, all of these voices.

Light Watkins 00:03:18  And what I encourage my followers and my readers to do is to split tests which one is the voice of their spirit, because that’s the one that’s going to encourage you to do the right thing when you don’t feel like it. That’s the one that’s going to cheer you on when you want to give up. That’s the one that’s going to want to make you more compassionate, more generous, more empathetic, etc. and if you follow that voice enough times, then that’s how you turn the volume up. So it’s not just a still small voice, but it can actually become a loud, annoying voice. So it’s kind of like that good wolf, you know, it’s right in your ear and it’s louder than the bad wolf. And if you can hear it and experience it in that way, it’s easier to follow the good voice. The problem is, we follow the voice of fear so much that that’s the default one that we oftentimes hear. And that’s why it’s easier to to follow the fear voice than it is to follow the still small voice of your intuition.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:21  Well, it’s the guy who spent the early part of his career in software testing, right? I’m very familiar with the idea of split testing things. Right. But not everybody might be. And so basically what you’re suggesting is, well, say more about what you are suggesting. How do you split test that? And I love this idea of like see which voice brings about which results, but say a little bit more about that.

Light Watkins 00:04:44  Well, that’s essentially it. You know, like we may have two voices, a good and a bad. There may be a neutral voice, there may be another instigating voice, you know, and there may be another shame voice. And so there’s all these voices. And if we want to turn up the volume on the one that we feel supports us the most, and that leads to the result that we want the most, which I’m assuming is we want to feel like the most authentic version of ourselves. We want to feel the most expansive. We want to feel the most creative.

Light Watkins 00:05:15  We want to be able to tell the best stories. Right. I think about it not in terms of what’s happening right now, because I get that what is happening right now could be very chaotic, and there are lots of things that need to happen. Right. But let’s fast forward and project to our final moments and maybe even beyond that, let’s go to our funeral and let’s say we’re now in spirit form. We’ve left the body. We’re at the funeral, and we’re watching people come up to the podium to talk about us and to report on their experiences with us and what sorts of testimonials. What sorts of reports would we be proud of at the end of our days, when people go up there and talk about us, do we want to hear people talk about how we always paid our bills on time and how, you know, we got that promotion that one time? Probably not. Probably. We want to hear about how we were a good person. We gave people a second chance. We were the one that listened when nobody else would.

Light Watkins 00:06:22  You know, these kinds of more altruistic exchanges and dynamics. And so if we play that little game with ourselves, then we can just reverse engineer back to this moment where all this chaos is happening and there’s not enough time to do anything, and then we have a clear idea of how we want to move through this moment. So split testing is just another way of saying, don’t put so much pressure on yourself to try to figure out which one is the good wolf or the bad wolf. Just follow the one you think is the good wolf. And if you do that enough times, you’re not going to get it right all the time. You know, the ego is really good at disguising itself as that good wolf. But if you do it, say, 100 times or 500 times, you’ll have a pretty decent idea of which one is the voice that you ultimately want to follow, because there’s a feeling tone that’s associated with it. There’s a little sense of anticipation. There’s a little bit of fear, perhaps, around what’s going to happen next, because there’s no certainty related to following that good wolf.

Light Watkins 00:07:24  But if you follow it enough times, you’ll see that on the other side of it, there’s this feeling of expansion that is very consistent, and it’s something that helps you sleep better at night. It’s something that helps to make you wiser, and it’s something that you ultimately will be proud of at the end of your days.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:42  Yeah, I love that idea. And, you know, I often in certain groups that I’ve led, we’ve done that sort of funeral exercise. Right. It’s a very clarifying exercise. Like what is really important. What do I want people saying? You know, and the other thing is, depending on where you are in your journey and path, right, you may get very good feedback relatively quickly after you follow a certain voice. Right. At a certain point, there is a sense of being in integrity with ourselves. You know, of our actions matching up with who we want to be and to be out of that. Oftentimes we really know it. You know, sometimes we don’t.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:19  Your point is well taken. Sometimes it’s confusing. And on big, you know, confusing decisions. But there’s a lot of feedback that I’m able to find pretty quickly. You know, after I do something like, okay, what do I feel inside? What I’d like to ask you is I find this idea of an authentic self inside of us, a little bit of a confusing idea. And what I mean by that is you listed a lot of ways we’ve been conditioned. You gave a long list and we could add to it. We could spend the next hour right, Laying out all the factors that have conditioned us to be the person we are today. So that makes this idea of like an authentic self a little bit harder to tweeze apart, right? Because we do have all this conditioning. Talk to me a little bit. You know in your mind about what that authentic self is. Is it different in me than it is in you? When you get down to that true. As deep as level?

Light Watkins 00:09:16  I’m so glad you made that distinction, because I’m a big fan of defining concepts that people just take for granted that everybody understands, and we’re all on the same page.

Light Watkins 00:09:25  And the reality is that actually, that’s not the case at all. And so I’m happy to unpack this idea of authentic self. And just to keep it really simple. The way I define authentic self is in a range of behaviors that we do. It’s different for different people, but we act upon what we feel like, as you said, is most in alignment with our own personal integrity. But let’s just talk about it, generally speaking. Let’s just say, generally speaking, as a heterosexual man, right? We’ve all had the experience where you see a pretty girl out somewhere, and it may be clear that she is not in a relationship, she doesn’t have a ring on or anything like that. And everything in you says, go up and talk to her. Go up and say hi. Go and strike up a conversation. Just take a leap of faith. Just see what happens. You know, say f it or whatever. We’re saying it in our minds, and we’ve all had the experience of not doing it.

Light Watkins 00:10:26  And when you don’t do it, what ends up happening? You think about it, it bothers you, right? And you keep playing the scenario out in your head over and over and over. Maybe for hours, maybe for days. You’re hoping you’re going to see the person in the same place again. Now you’re sort of stalking the place, hoping that she’s going to walk in in those moments, which are probably more rare. Those moments where you did go up, you did say something. Even if it doesn’t materialize into anything, you always feel like, you know. This sense of expansion. Yeah. And you feel so good that you at least did something, and it’s easier for you to move on to whatever the next thing is. And without thinking about whatever could have happened or should have happened had you behaved differently, I would classify your authentic self as you making choices more in alignment with that expansive feeling where you knew that you did what was a little bit nerve wracking, a little bit scary, a little bit, you know, anticipatory.

Light Watkins 00:11:29  But it was something that made you feel like the best version of you, the story that you ultimately want to tell. If you’re the superhero of your life and you’re just breaking your life down into these moments. And the question is, what would the superhero do in this moment? Well, the superhero was certainly go up and talk to the person. The superhero would certainly stand up for people who can’t stand up for themselves. The superhero wouldn’t be in the room gossiping about anybody. They’d be the person, you know, shutting down the gossip conversation and saying, hey, this person’s done all that bad. You know, they have these and that great qualities. So when we think about our own personal hero, what the qualities are of that personal hero. Those are qualities that we deep down want to embody for ourselves. Yeah, right. And so when we can operate in alignment with those qualities, that is our most authentic self. And that’s different for everybody. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:25  And it’s interesting that the example you gave is a good one.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:28  The the example that came to my mind is extending kindness to strangers. You know, there are moments where it’s like I see an opportunity to extend a kindness. It could be any number of different things, but I’m anxious to do it. Like, does the person want me to extend the kindness? Do they just want to be left in their little bubble. And I know that the best version of me does the kind thing, and if it isn’t received well, then it isn’t received well. But I know that I was acting from the part of me that knows that that’s something I really value, right? Is to try and be kind to everyone. And so I think, yeah, we all have this sense of expansiveness and I love that idea. I’ve often thought about just that very idea expansion versus contraction, you know, as a really good guide for how to make decisions and how to orient, you know, does this feel like it makes me a bigger, more open, better version of myself? Or do I feel like this closes me down and it causes me to contract? And for me, that’s almost been the best way of thinking of certain things is in that sense of expansion versus contraction.

Light Watkins 00:13:40  And I think when you look at it that way with feeling tone, as opposed to even semantics and trying to come up with language for it. Just see how you feel. How does it make you feel? Does it make you feel a little bit more expansive, or does it make you feel like a smaller version of yourself? And if you just follow those expansive feelings, you know, just like with eating French fries or doughnuts? Look, I love French fries. There’s a time and place for a donut.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:03  But absolutely.

Light Watkins 00:14:04  If you eat these things all the time, because the idea of it makes you feel expansive in the moment, but then 20 minutes later, you feel shitty. Yeah, that’s an indication that this is not taking you in the direction of your most authentic self. Yeah. Eating these kinds of foods, you know, going to work out may make you contract initially, but then afterward, what happens? No one ever walks out of the gym or an exercise class having killed it, and feel like a smaller version of yourself.

Light Watkins 00:14:32  You feel like the superhero version of yourself. And so, you know, you got to look at it in a broad spectrum of activity as opposed to how you’re feeling in the moment. And then again, once you have enough of these types of experiences and you have a point of reference, then you can make those decisions easier and easier.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:50  Yeah, it’s funny, I’ve interviewed a bunch of behavioral scientists on this show and I always ask them, I’m like, explain something to me every single time I have ever worked out. And it’s thousands and thousands and thousands of times, right? I’m not a young person, right? Every single time I have left going, I’m so glad I did that. You would think I would run to workout every single time. And yet it’s still difficult. No one has ever really satisfactorily been able to answer why that is. I think it just has something to do with an inbuilt wiring to conserve energy. As a living being. I think we just have some degree of that, but it’s funny, I could have that kind of track record 100% success and still I still have to talk myself into it.

Light Watkins 00:15:37  I mean, but look, let’s expound on that further. Let’s say you’re looking at doing Navy Seal training, but then you’re like, there’s no way I don’t want. I just don’t want that sort of stress in my life. Right. But you know that after you get through Hell week and all that crazy stuff, you’re going to feel like a freaking super machine. Yeah. Right. Even though, you know it’s going to take you to the brink of your potential. And so we all kind of have that. It’s just a matter of to what degree do we feel it, you know, and challenging ourselves. But we know that getting to the other side of that challenge is going to feel amazing. But, you know, it’s just a matter of, okay. What sort of challenge do I want today? And, you know, maybe working out presents, what seems to be a very steep obstacle for us. But we know that once we get to the other side of that obstacle, it’s going to feel great.

Light Watkins 00:16:24  But do we want to take on that level of obstacle that day? Or maybe there’s a smaller obstacle that we’re satisfied with because we know that it’s not going to stop. It’s going to just be the same thing the next day and the next day and the day after that, etc..

Eric Zimmer 00:16:38  There’s an absolute art to get in that, right. You know, not too much, not too little. Sort of threading the needle on that before we get into the book. More specifically, I wanted to ask you about a recent Instagram post that you did, and you said in it, look at happiness, income, and stress as debt. Say more about that.

Light Watkins 00:16:56  So that post was referring to this idea that I think a lot of people find themselves stuck in, which is the acquisitive approach to happiness, which is happiness that comes from the outside to the inside, which means as soon as I get the promotion, as soon as I get the better job, as soon as I get the better spouse, as soon as I move to the better house, better car, better city, better this another zero my bank balance that I’m going to be happy and let me do whatever it takes in order to make that happen.

Light Watkins 00:17:29  And the opposite of that is what the Buddha and all of the sages and gurus over millennia have said, which is happiness. There’s no way to happiness. Happiness is the way. So in other words, happiness is an inside out proposition, and therefore it requires some sort of inner inner practice that will help to cultivate the happiness that you ultimately want. And now, you know, science is backed this up. And research has said that in American society at least beyond, you know, having your basic needs met and you making a salary of like 70, 75,000 bucks, making more money is not going to increase your baseline level of happiness. Right. This doesn’t mean that you can’t be any happier than you were at $75,000. It just means that making more money is not the thing that’s going to increase it. What will increase it, though, is having strong friendships. What will increase it is being of service, having a greater purpose in your life, and what’s also been shown to increase the happiness is cultivating more of the chemicals that are responsible for happiness serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, etc. and the practices that can do that very effectively are gratitude and meditation.

Light Watkins 00:18:48  So the thing that stops us from feeling happier than we would be at that threshold, that $75,000 threshold primarily is lack of those chemicals. And so what does the body do that prohibits us from feeling those chemicals? It reacts to demands pressures and changes of expectation. So that’s another way of saying stress. It’s experiencing stress. Stress depletes the body of serotonin dopamine and oxytocin. So it makes us want to run away from whatever the experience is or fight that experience. Meditation. Gratitude helps to create those chemicals which makes us feel more present, more fulfilled and happier inside, more content with whatever it is that we’re experiencing. Just to put a definition to happiness, because a lot of people think. Happiness is me walking around with a big smile plastered on my face all the time. And that’s not the reality of what happiness is. Happiness is being in a state where you don’t need other things to be happening, to make you feel more fulfilled as a person. That’s what true happiness actually is. So when we can get the body addicted to those happy chemicals, then our body will respond by making us crave those experiences that are responsible for those happiness chemicals which makes us wake up in the morning.

Light Watkins 00:20:10  You know how some people will wake up. They can’t wait to have their coffee, or, you know, they can’t wait to turn the television on, or they can’t wait to start scrolling on social media. Well, those are not arbitrary experiences. You’ve programmed and conditioned your body to be dependent upon the chemicals that are associated with those experiences. And the good news is that the same thing can happen with more positive experiences like meditation, like gratitude, like being of service, like operating from a purpose. And so as you go throughout your day, your body is actually prompting you, hey, hey, Eric, it’s time to sit down and meditate or hey, Eric, you haven’t really thought about anything you’re grateful for in a moment. What are you grateful for right now? You know, and you start having these kinds of experiences from the inside out, and you feel yourself being more present and more fulfilled. And as a result, you’re not sitting there thinking to yourself, oh, I’m very present right now.

Light Watkins 00:21:03  I’m very happy. I’m very fulfilled. No, you’re just completely engaged in whatever the activity is. And as you’re walking around, you’re noticing things. You’re noticing the birds, you’re noticing the sounds, you’re noticing the colors, you’re noticing the breeze on your face. And when a demand is placed on you, you don’t jump right into scarcity. Oh, my God, I don’t have time for this. No, you’re able to be present with that and to be the person that stops and helps the person across the street, because you have the time. In fact, your time billionaire, because that’s what presence does. So it’s not that you need to even be aware of that any of this is happening. It becomes who you are and that’s what that means. The more of those happiness chemicals you get. It’s kind of like that’s the true wealth that you’re actually looking for. And the more stress you have, it takes away your ability to feel that. And that’s why we want to start to see stress as a debt, as a liability, and not this thing that we need in order to find our edge or whatever it is that we’re telling ourselves.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:03  As we drop into the book and this idea of spiritual minimalism, I want to talk about what you describe as one of the principles of that. And it’s that the fewer options you have, the more freedom you have to make decisions and the more present you become. Say something about that because we tend to want to maximize our optionality, right? We tend to want to give ourselves the widest range of options. Right. Because then we can make the best choice. And we know there’s a paradox of choice out there that if you have way too many options, you get overwhelmed. But even well, short of that, I think you’re talking about, you know, short of that. So why is less options often more beneficial for us in a spiritual minimalism sense?

Light Watkins 00:22:46  You’re referring to principle seven of spiritual minimalism, which is celebrate the freedom of choice looseness. So there are a few different seemingly contradictory truths in that statement, right? One truth is that having options is actually a good thing. Like if we have the option to be well versus the option to be sick, we’re going to choose the option to be well.

Light Watkins 00:23:08  We want that option 100 times out of 100. And at the same time, let’s say for whatever reason, we’re not in a situation where we can be, well, we don’t have what it takes. We don’t have the money, we don’t have the resources. We’re in a weird physical location where we can’t get access to care. Right. So then there is a freedom that is associated with that. And what that means is that we can either focus on what’s not happening, which again yanks us out of the present moment, and it actually makes the body sicker. It doesn’t heal the body to be in that mindset. Or we can accept where we are and what’s happening. Provide it. We’ve done everything we could, right? And this is where we are. So we accept that now, just through sheer acceptance, we’re able to anchor ourselves more in the present moment. And then it’s through that present moment awareness that we’re going to be able to see and detect and feel things that we would not have had access to otherwise.

Light Watkins 00:24:14  My, one of my spiritual teachers used to say, if you want to know what’s going to happen tomorrow, then you better get present today, because the richest information about what’s happening tomorrow is only found in the present moment right now. So otherwise, you have to use speculation and guesswork to try to figure out what’s going to be happening tomorrow. So both of those things can be true. You know, I like options, and I’m recognizing that I don’t have a lot of options for whatever reason. And so I’m just going to do the best that I can right now. If you have time, I’ll tell you a little story about that. Sure. I used to teach yoga back in the day, and I remember I had a yoga class. It was like at 10:00 in the mornings on, I think, Wednesdays and Fridays in Los Angeles. And I lived about ten minutes drive from the yoga studio, and I had my commute time down to the minute I left 15 minutes early, it would take me, you know, seven minutes, eight minutes to drive there, park, go upstairs, go to the studio, set up my room, and I had to have an extra five or maybe seven minutes to greet people as they were coming in.

Light Watkins 00:25:20  And I’ve done this, you know, hundreds of times. There was never any traffic in one morning. I get in my car and I’m well, you know, right within the time frame that I always gave myself and there was all this traffic on the main road going in the direction of the studio. So like any good LA driver, I zig zag my way down to the next street and I hit another pocket of traffic. And this is highly unusual. There’s never traffic on one of those streets, much less both of those streets. So now I’m recognizing that I’m going to be late. And I hate it being late, but there was nothing I can do about it. So I tried to, like, breathe and calm myself down as I’m inching through this traffic. And then I finally get to the the main intersection that crossed both of those streets. And if there was going to be anything causing this traffic, it would have been at this intersection. But I didn’t see anything. I didn’t see any construction.

Light Watkins 00:26:13  I didn’t see any obstruction, no accident. There was no reason why there would have been traffic on those streets. And then eventually this traffic just kind of spontaneously cleared up. I arrive at the class ten minutes late. I’m embarrassed. Right? Because now I’m sending the message that it’s okay to show up late to my class. And as I walk into the room, the actual room, I have flip flops on and I feel all this crunching underneath my flip flops, and I look down and there’s like, there’s a million shards of broken glass all over the floor. And I look up to the front wall, which is a wall of mirrors probably about ten feet tall. Each pane of mirror was about three feet, four feet wide. And in the very middle of the room there was a missing panel ten feet tall by four feet wide. There was no mirror there. And so what had happened was apparently about ten minutes before I came in the room, right at the top of the hour, when the class was supposed to start, that panel of mirror somehow dislodged and came crashing down right where I would have been sitting had I arrived at the class on time.

Light Watkins 00:27:21  So evidently, that phantom traffic jam that I was secretly cursing on my way there was actually saving me from having a very unlucky start to my day. And the reason I like that story is because it tells the flip side of the freedom of choice looseness, right? Which is when you’re being rejected from something, when you’re losing something and you think to yourself, oh my God, if only I had done X, Y, or Z. If only I left earlier. If only I hadn’t made friends with this person. If only I had put more money into it, then it would have worked out better. That’s how we play it out in our minds without realising that although the situation was bad, it could have been a lot worse and I would have had a very unlucky start to my day had I gotten there when I wanted to get there. So the universe or nature, whatever you want to call it, was gifting me with a freedom of choice looseness. And after that happened, whenever I’m inconvenienced, it doesn’t bother me anymore.

Light Watkins 00:28:21  When I miss a flight, when there’s traffic, when someone’s not texting me back as quickly as I think they should be, I think back to myself. Phantom traffic jam, broken mirror. Okay, you know this is not what’s meant to be happening now. Again, it doesn’t mean I’m sitting on my hands waiting for things to happen. I’m still doing everything I can do, but when the thing is not happening beyond that, then I have an easier time saying, you know what? This is fine. Let me keep focusing on what I can control and let go of what I can.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:11  It always seemed to me there are situations in which there’s something I can do about this, and I absolutely do it, or there’s nothing I can do about it. So I let it go. And then there’s all that middle ground where we’re like, wow, you know, I don’t, you know, I don’t quite know, you know, I’ve got a job that I don’t love, you know? Do I accept that? Because by accepting it, I might start to like the job more.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:35  And I’m not resisting it. You know, it’s that middle ground that’s always so, so confusing. And like we talked about, you know, there’s there’s an art to finding, you know, what’s the right response and what situation.

Light Watkins 00:29:48  Yeah. And I think one way to kind of navigate that is to again, remind yourself of what are the most important things that you want people to say about you at the end of your life. And just narrow that down to like three things. I’m the person that gives people second chances. I’m the person that leaves the world more inspired. And let’s say I leave places better than I found them. So that gives you a different point of focus in these moments where the outcome isn’t what you think it should be, and therefore you can now become more process oriented. And guess what? The value that you ultimately want from the experience is going to be found from the process of it versus from the outcome of it. So going back to our earlier example of, you know, going through hell week as a Navy Seal.

Light Watkins 00:30:35  Sure. It’s wonderful to say that you’re a Navy Seal, but let’s say you had a hookup, Eric. Let’s say, you know somebody in the Navy who could just make you a Navy Seal without you having to bother with hell week, right? Would anybody want that? No self-respecting person would want to have Navy Seal status without going through all of the things that you have to go through, which is advertised as hellish. This is going to be hell to go through these things. But that’s what makes you into the person. That’s what gives the experience its inherent value. And so as a Navy Seal, you’re the kind of person that does things beyond the point where most people give up. You’ll go through whatever you have to go through and make sure you protect your fellow seals. You’re the kind of person that doesn’t come up with excuses about why you can’t make things happen. Instead, you find solutions. So when you put yourself through that experience, you actually become that person. And then 20, 30, 50 years later, when you look back, that’s what you remember fondly.

Light Watkins 00:31:41  Yeah. I didn’t give up. Right? And yes, I went beyond where most people would quit. And yes, I do protect people, you know, just because I expect them to protect me, etc. and that becomes a part of who you are and that shows up in everything you do. And you realize, yeah, it was the journey. It wasn’t the destination. That was the most valuable part of the whole experience.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:02  Yeah. You touched on there one of the key elements of spiritual minimalism that you talk about. I find it just to be a good, all purpose intention in life, which is just to leave every place better than I found it like that, just to me, almost encompasses. Right. So much of what what I value. Because that could look a thousand different ways based on what you mean by that and where you are and all that. It is a way of orienting towards all of your situations that I just have found to be, like I said, a good all purpose intention.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:38  It’s one of my fallbacks.

Light Watkins 00:32:40  Yeah, there’s a story in that principle in that chapter called Final Impressions, and I talk about how we’re really good at making first impressions, putting our best foot forward. But we’re really bad when it comes to final impressions. And what I mean by that is, you know, if anybody could say these things about you, they didn’t show up to the meeting that I set up for them, and they never notified me, or they broke up with me over text message, or they ghosted me, or they didn’t do what they said they were going to do. So I just stopped screwing around with them. You know, these kinds of little things, you know, to us, they’re like little things. They can become these really big moments that we get known for if we do it enough times And you know, when people are gossiping. Usually they’re not gossiping about the first impression. They’re gossiping about your final impression, how you left the situation, you know, and then you start to hear the grapevine version of how you left this.

Light Watkins 00:33:39  It’s never it’s never like what actually happened. It’s the exaggerated version of what happened that you have to then give context for, for the rest of your life and have to explain for the rest of your life. And it could be distracting, and people don’t want to have anything to do with you, because now it’s blown up into this whole thing. And these would be, you know, ridiculously simple situations to correct. Maybe just by giving a little bit of clarification, maybe giving an apology, maybe just giving someone a chance to feel seen and heard, you know? And so I try to remember that in my day to day life, everyone that I’m encountering, that’s an opportunity for me to leave a positive final impression. And that could just be listening, that could just be acknowledging what someone just said or what they’re going through. I’ve experienced this recently. I don’t want to make this, you know, time sensitive, but, you know, there’s some international conflicts that are happening right now as they’re there almost always are.

Light Watkins 00:34:42  There’s something happening somewhere in the world. But, you know, having these conversations, especially if you feel strongly about one side or the other side, is really easy to dismiss someone who doesn’t agree with you. And I think that that’s an opportunity from a spiritual minimalism point of view, to help people feel as seen and as heard as you would like to feel, even if you think they’re wrong, even if you feel like they’re misguided, they’re not seeing the full thing, well guess what? They probably feel the same about you. Yeah. So at the end of the day, who’s right? Who’s wrong? We don’t know because we’re all being propagandized. We’re all being indoctrinated by whatever our echo chamber has been conditioning us to believe, and that’s been repeated throughout the history where we thought things were one way, but actually, turns out they were a different way. And so just exercising the benefit of the doubt, giving people the benefit of the doubt is a really good way to leave a positive final oppression.

Light Watkins 00:35:40  And if you want to have influence over how that person is seeing a situation, guess what? You’re going to have way more influence if you help them feel seen and heard versus the person who cuts them off, dismisses their point of view as nonsense, and makes them feel stupid. And because nobody wants to feel those ways. So some very powerful work that we can be doing on a daily basis. And that’s what that principle of spiritual minimalism give what you want to receive actually means.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:09  Check in for a moment. Is your jaw tight, breath shallow? Are your shoulders creeping up? Those little signals are invitations to slow down and listen. Every Wednesday I send weekly bytes of wisdom, a short email that turns the big ideas we explore here in each show. Things like mental health, anxiety, relationships, purpose into bite size practices you can use the same day it’s free. It takes about a minute to read and thousands already swear by it. If you’d like extra fuel for the weekend, you also get a weekend podcast playlist.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:47  Join us at one you feed. That’s one you feed newsletter and start receiving your next bite of wisdom. All right, back to the show. So you kind of segue us into another of the principles. We were sort of talking about leaving every place better. And but you’ve kind of named it here, which is, you know, give what you want. You say give what you want to receive. It doesn’t matter how much or how little you have. If you want a friend, you must be friendly. If you want love, you must be loving. You know, you’ve talked in the book about if the community that you want isn’t there? Start creating it. So talk a little bit more about this. You know, give what you want to receive.

Light Watkins 00:37:27  When I turned 40, I had an epiphany. I was like, man, I’m not really going out very much. And I reflected on that and I realized the reason I wasn’t socializing was I had stopped drinking when I was about 25, 26, started drinking alcohol, and I never had a problem.

Light Watkins 00:37:46  I just kind of did the math in my mid 20s and just realized it didn’t really add up. It didn’t make me feel like a better version of myself when I was drinking. It was expensive, you know, all the things. So I decided to experiment with not drinking. I’m just not going to order any drinks and see what happens. If I miss it, I’ll go back to it. If I don’t miss it, then great. I’ve liberated myself from feeling like I need to drink in order to be social. And so I never missed it and I just stopped. I just stopped drinking over the course of like six months, and then I just didn’t really think about it much. But yeah, when I turned 40, I thought, okay, well, I want to be more social. But then I was thinking, you know, well, where would I go? And all the places that I was thinking of were places that were, you know, centered around drinking either directly or indirectly.

Light Watkins 00:38:30  So I thought, well, maybe I’ll create an experience. There’s got to be other people out here who also want to socialize without having to feel pressure to drink. So I started hosting these gatherings once a week at this little dance studio in West LA. It was costing me $50 each week to rent this place out for like an hour, an hour and a half, and I’ll be in my kitchen making honey lemon ginger tea, which I really loved from when I visit India. I would have a question of the night, because one of the things I hate is going to a social event as an adult and you don’t know anybody and you feel like everyone’s in their little clique, and then you have to kind of get out of your shell. So I was like, how can I create an experience where people feel naturally inclined to approach other people? Right. And I said, oh, let’s do this. Let’s have a question of the night. Something like, who’s your personal hero? Or where would you like to go on vacation next? Or what’s a book that changed your life? And instead of writing their name down on a name tag, write the answer to the question of the night on your name tag and wear it on you.

Light Watkins 00:39:32  And that way when people come in and they write their answer, you’re going around and you’re seeing everybody’s answer and it’s a natural conversation starter. So we said we did. We did that. And then I led a meditation because I thought, why not have meditation at a social event? And we had someone else come in and give like a quote, Ted talk. So I would have like my salsa teacher come in and talk about like what the principles of teaching salsa. And I had like someone else come in as a coach, a life coach, come in and talk about that. And it was a really cool little experience. You know, we only got like 12 or 13 people coming out and it was a free event for them. But it just it really lit me up inside and I didn’t know what was going to happen with it. I was just happy to have something to do every Wednesday. It was like a purpose driven thing. For me, it wasn’t even about making money. But then I had this volunteer in one day, she said as we were straightening up.

Light Watkins 00:40:24  Afterwards, she goes, why don’t you start taking up a collection since you’re paying for it out of pocket? Just take up a collection and just, you know, at least you can pay yourself back or use that to pay for the the rent of the space. So the next event, we took up a collection and there were probably 13 to 14 people there and we collected $55. So now I was a little disappointed, honestly, Eric, because I was thinking, man, $55. That’s it. After all this work I’m putting into this, it’s like I got to see how the market value this experience, and it wasn’t as high as I was hoping. And, and so I got home that night and I had my $55 in cash, and I thought to myself, you know, I could spend this 55 bucks paying for the next rent, I said, or I could give it to somebody at the next event, and I think it tasks them with the mission of using it to help somebody in some positive way, and then have them come back and share what they did with the $55.

Light Watkins 00:41:27  Obviously, it’s not enough money to make a huge difference in someone’s life, but that’s the point. Like, you don’t need a lot of money to make a positive impact in the world. So let’s see what someone creative can do with $55. So we randomly awarded someone that the next event, the $55, they come back to the following event and they said, yeah, I put this kid through a summer art camp. I added 50 bucks of my own money, and this is the kid’s name, and this is how the summer camp worked. And everybody was so inspired. And I was like, oh my God, this is the missing component of the event. And so that night we probably still had 14 people, but we collected like 120 something dollars. So the donations went up. And that became a sort of pivotal moment where we saw hockey stick growth in the amount of people who were coming, because when people would share the story of what they did with the money. Everyone was inspired and I would tell people, you don’t have to win the money.

Light Watkins 00:42:21  You have 55 bucks in your checking account, probably pretend like you want it and go and do something about it and come back and tell us what you did and we’ll share the story together. And so it got to the point where we were getting hundreds of people, man. We had like we had events with like 300, 400 people coming six months later. And we had to charge because we started serving food. It became this whole thing. We were doing it in New York. We were doing them in London, we were doing them in Germany. They were all over the world. And we started getting written up in The New York Times and NBC and all the different outlets, and I ended up getting a girlfriend from that experience, you know, because she was volunteering. So basically everything that I was lacking in my life came into my life. As a result of that event, I got my first publishing deal, which was like a six figure publishing deal. And even though I didn’t make a dime on the event directly.

Light Watkins 00:43:14  But that’s the message behind giving what you want to receive. Instead of sitting around thinking about how no one is doing what I think they should be doing, and you know, this world is screwed up. You give that give that to people in whatever small way you can. And if it’s authentic and if it’s in integrity with, you know, whatever your heart is having you do, people will respond to it and they’ll come to it. And so on my own podcast today, I just launched the episode of me with one of my childhood friends who’s become the mayor of Montgomery, Alabama, where I grew up. And he has a wonderful story of being an outsider. And you know how that all worked with him getting into politics. But I think that’s another area that people complain about a lot and criticize a lot. It’s like, well, these are just people just like you and me. So if you want to see something different, throw your hat in the ring and, you know, give it a run and see if you can make a difference, if you feel like no one else can.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:26  It’s a great story on so many levels. And, you know, I think the lesson I would take from that is I think sometimes we think if we do something, it has to turn into what that turned into for you. And it doesn’t have to. Right. If what you want is a couple more friends, if you start hosting gatherings and you get a couple more friends, you’ve succeeded. It doesn’t always have to turn grandiose to be valuable. And that’s one of the things I see in a lot of people that I work with is this idea that things have to be grandiose to be meaningful, and that’s a trap.

Light Watkins 00:44:58  Yeah. And I tell people in the book, I said, you know, don’t be distracted by all these things that happen. You know, even if you just cook the home, cook dinner for people, everyone loves a home cooked dinner. Or if you want to walk and you want company to start a walking group with your friends from church, and it could be 3 or 4 of you or movie night, or just keep it really small.

Light Watkins 00:45:16  I mean, you never know where it’s going to go, but. Right. Yeah. My intention wasn’t like built as big event. My intention was just to create an experience that I actually wanted to have, that I wanted to see, and it grew from that. And in the process, you know, it forced me to have to be a leader because leading people who are getting paid is one thing. Leading a bunch of volunteers is a whole other skill set. Indeed, you have to keep them motivated and inspired all the time.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:40  Yeah, indeed it is. Principle number six is find comfort in discomfort. And I want to read something that I believe one of your teachers said to you, which is the most dangerous place you can be, is in the ever repeating moment. And the safest place is to be moving towards the unknown. So talk a little bit more about finding comfort and discomfort or that particular line. Yeah.

Light Watkins 00:46:05  So we have our comfort zone which we all heard about right. That’s the zone where you kind of know how things are going to go.

Light Watkins 00:46:13  There’s not a lot of surprises. There’s a lot more certainty. But yet you’re not really stretching yourself. You’re not really growing into your potential. And just to use an analogy that we’re all familiar with is the gym. Right. Imagine if you go to the gym. A lot of people do this. You go to the gym and you do the same exercises that you know you’re good at. You stay away from the ones that you know. You’re you’re weak in those areas. You know you’re weak because you don’t like feeling weak. Nobody likes feeling weak. Nobody likes feeling like they can’t do something. So left up to our own devices, probably we’re going to do more exercises that we feel stronger in. Skip the look what happens when you hire a trainer? Yeah. When you hire a trainer, the reason you’re hiring a trainer is to push you beyond whatever your comfort zone was. And so that trainer may immediately see, oh, you’re weak in this area of that area. You know, after.

Light Watkins 00:47:10  After doing their little diagnostic assessment with you. And yet they’re listening to your goals. You know, I want to have a stronger back. I want to have a bigger. But whatever the goal is. And the trainer is like, okay, well, this is what you have to do if you want to achieve those goals. And probably the reason you haven’t achieved those goals is because you haven’t been doing the kinds of exercises that you need to do in order to achieve those goals, and that’s going to make you very uncomfortable. So the moment you start getting uncomfortable now, you’re moving towards your growth zone. And the growth zone is almost always uncomfortable. So if we want to grow in whatever area of our life, then that means we have to start making friends with discomfort. And that’s what finding comfort means in discomfort is, is that is an essential part of the process of getting stronger, accessing more of our potential, becoming the person that we ultimately want to be, etc..

Eric Zimmer 00:48:10  It really is interesting.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:11  I think we hear that and we know that. You know, get outside of your comfort zone. And yet we very often don’t. I know as I’ve gotten older, I do think this is one of the things that happens as you age, if you’re not careful, is that we begin to prioritize comfort more and more. And this goes back a little bit to this idea of choice closeness, right? Like, I’m a Zen student. It’s very rigid. It’s very formal. You know, like you do these exact things a certain way, which is against my very nature. But the fact that I just give myself to the form, I just hear it is stop your endless debate about how you want things to be. This is how you’re going to do them for this period of time. I find that helpful. But this idea of discomfort is it’s hard to keep pushing yourself outside your comfort zone. And like we’ve talked a bit about in this conversation, right. There’s an art to finding, like how far outside your comfort zone you can go and still maintain it and continue to do it.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:10  You go too far and you’re like, you run back in. So I know you don’t go far enough. You don’t grow. And that’s what a good trainer does, right? A trainer, a good one knows I can push him to here any more than that. And he’s going to, you know, he’s not going to come back, right? I can push him to here. And so I think that’s the other piece of this is finding, like, what way outside of our comfort zone and how do we maintain being there.

Light Watkins 00:49:34  Yeah, I would say that that is associated with spiritual maturity. Right. So when you’re young and you want to change, you tend to go a little too far, too fast and you end up getting the pendulum effect. Yeah. But as you become more spiritually mature, you understand the value of discomfort, but you also understand the value of taking the tortoise approach as opposed to the hare approach. And so that becomes the new gauge through which you approach Change because you realize that everything is just different forms of change.

Light Watkins 00:50:12  You’re changing, they’re changing, circumstances are always changing, and there’s less of the whole binary. This is good, this is bad. There’s goodness and everything and there’s, you know, negative aspects to everything depending on what perspective we’re looking at it from. And so if we can kind of condition ourselves to stay engaged in the process, and that’s where the discomfort really is, I think the greatest is being just in the process and maybe not understanding how it’s all going to turn out, but just knowing that being in the process is the goal. It’s not about reaching the outcome, it’s not about the destination. The destination will be whatever it is. But again, the more process oriented we were, the more we will extract the value from the experience. And I have this thing that I’ve written as well which says, you know, when you’re seeking advice, should you seek advice from people who’ve done what you want to do? Or should you seek advice from people who haven’t done and they’ve lived with the with the regret, with the pain of regret from not having done it? Who should you seek advice from? And I say seek advice from the person who has been the most consistent.

Light Watkins 00:51:26  They’ve consistently put themselves out there with whatever they were trying to do, and sometimes they’ve succeeded and sometimes they haven’t. But they keep going back again and again and again. And if we can just adopt that approach of being consistent, even if it looks like it’s not going to happen, or if it looks like it’s a sure thing, we’re still showing up as if it’s not going to happen. Right. That’s the ultimate habit that we’re cultivating is consistency, which means I’m not attached. I’m not rigidly attached to the outcome. Sure, I have Preferences. Sure, I would like for it to go in this direction or that direction, but I understand that the real value is just me showing up every day, and I’m giving my best and I’m letting the chips fall where they may, right? So the outcome will be whatever it is. But if we have the consistent ability to show up, then we can apply that to anything.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:28  Before you check out, pick one insight from today and ask, how will I practice this before bedtime? Need help turning ideas into action? My free weekly Bites of Wisdom email lands every Wednesday with simple practices, reflection and links to former guests who can guide you even on the tough stuff like anxiety, purpose and habit change.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:50  Feed your good wolf at one you feed. Net newsletter again one you feed net letter. My Spiritual Habits program is based on one key idea and that is little by little. A little becomes a lot, right? That that’s how real change tends to happen and stick is. It’s just little by little, you know, a little becomes a lot. And it’s that consistency and that really does add up. And that does really lead to change. It’s just not as fast as what we might wish.

Light Watkins 00:53:24  Yeah. Another spiritual guru I can’t remember who it is. He says what are you rushing towards death. Like what’s the big hurry if you keep extrapolating it? What’s the hurry? Yeah, ultimately you’re gonna die. So, you know, there’s no real point to all the rushing around if that moment is going to be fleeting anyway, I think the better approach is to just enjoy whatever little moments you have right now and extract whatever presence you can right now from those moments.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:50  Yeah, well, we are at the end of our time.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:51  You and I are going to, in the post-show conversation, talk about meditation. You’ve got a way of meditating that you believe leads to making it the most enjoyable and sustainable. So we’ll talk about that. Have you lead us in a guided meditation? Listeners, if you’d like access to that other post-show conversations, add free episodes. Episode I do called Teaching Song and a poem and the deep internal satisfaction of supporting something that you love. You can go to one. You feed and become a member of our community. Light. Thank you so much. Such a pleasure to have you on and I’ve really enjoyed our conversation.

Light Watkins 00:54:27  Absolutely.

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. 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:

Nir Eyal 00:00:00  The brain does not see reality as it is. We all live in our own simulation. It’s not like the matrix where there’s one simulation is that we all create our own simulation, because the brain is simply incapable of processing all the information that it’s taking in. We know that the brain takes in about 11 million bits of information every single second. That’s the equivalent of reading War and Peace every second. Twice.

Chris Forbes 00:00:31  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 00:01:16  One of the most liberating things that’s ever happened to me is realizing that my thoughts aren’t necessarily true. We see everything through conditioned lenses, and one of those lenses is our beliefs. Nir I all and his great new book, Beyond Belief The science backed way to Stop limiting yourself and achieve breakthrough Results, makes this point very clear. He describes beliefs as tools, not truths. He says the real question isn’t is this belief true? But does this belief serve me? Near as always, a pleasure to talk to? And there are a lot of gems in this conversation. I’m Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed Hi, Nir. Welcome to the show.

Nir Eyal 00:02:00  Thanks, Eric. Great to be back.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:02  I am excited to have you on. I loved our first conversation and I’m really excited about this one because we’re going to be talking about your new book, which is called Beyond Belief The science backed way to Stop limiting Yourself and Achieve Breakthrough Results. But we’ll start, like we always do, with a parable.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:21  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 and they 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.

Nir Eyal 00:02:55  So last time I was on the show, I had a different interpretation. I kind of took that story with with the grandpa’s words and took that to heart. And I think now, having spent the past six years going so deep on the powers of belief, I think what really resonates is that those two wolves aren’t just good and evil. That was kind of my original interpretation of your good instincts.

Nir Eyal 00:03:17  Your bad instincts. I think it’s it’s deeper than that. They both live within us in that one represents, to me at least now over the past six years. One is about our limiting beliefs primarily around fear and how debilitating fear can be, and how how many problems fear causes in our life through these limiting beliefs. That to me is the bad wolf and the good wolf are these liberating beliefs, these these beliefs that help motivate us, that elevate us, and that reduce suffering in our lives?

Eric Zimmer 00:03:46  I think that’s a great way to think about it. And I wanted to just start with a core thing that you say early on in the book, which is that beliefs are tools, not truths. Say more about that.

Nir Eyal 00:04:01  Sure. So this was really the the mind blowing revelation that I had as I looked through the research. And this is an, you know, I feel bad taking credit for any of this because what I do, I take a really long time to write my books because I really start from first principles.

Nir Eyal 00:04:13  Looking at the studies, there’s over 30 pages of citations to peer reviewed studies. And so I, I like to go as deep as I possibly can into the research literature. And what I kind of put together from everything I read was that I had misattributed what is a belief and kind of used that as a synonym for a fact. Right. We hear people saying a lot of times, I believe this, I believe that, and I kind of took that to mean the same thing. And it’s not the same thing that facts are objective truths. They are things that are true whether or not you believe in them. The world is more like a sphere than it is flat. Sorry flat earthers, the world doesn’t care what you think. That’s a fact. On the other end of the spectrum is faith. Faith is a conviction that does not require evidence. So what happens in the afterlife? God rewards the righteous. This is not something that requires evidence in between. Fact and faith is what we call a belief.

Nir Eyal 00:05:05  A belief is defined as a conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence. And what’s so remarkable about a belief, and what differentiates beliefs from faith and fact is that they can change. We can adopt new beliefs. And so the thing that I really took away from this research is that these beliefs are tools, not truths. They are tools, not truths. So we can change them, we can examine them. We can adopt new beliefs to find the ones that serve us rather than hurt us. And when I say hurt us, I mean quite literally that we know that our beliefs are at the core of chronic pain. They in fact shorten our lifespans. If you have limiting beliefs like literally, people with certain beliefs live, on average seven and a half years longer than. People who have these limiting beliefs around aging. They affect so many different aspects of our life from from our relationships to our financial success to how we see reality are all defined by our beliefs.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:09  Yeah, I think about this a lot.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:10  I’ve got a chapter in my book, and it’s similar to a chapter you have in your book where it’s like how we see the world as a result of very much how we are. Then we talk about like, well, you can ask yourself questions like, what am I making this mean? And what else could it mean? But the last question that I often have is, is this useful? And that’s exactly what you’re saying with belief as a tool. If I am sort of interpreting reality, you know, there’s the facts, then there’s the interpretation. Why not interpret it in the way that is most useful to me?

Nir Eyal 00:06:44  Bingo, bingo. And I think if there’s one criticism that I hear sometimes is that people ask, are you just telling me to lie to myself? Like if if I could just make up beliefs and I can just choose them for myself. Aren’t you just telling me to gaslight myself? Like, come on now, you can’t do that. To which I say, newsflash, you are already lying to yourself.

Nir Eyal 00:07:05  These limiting beliefs are already delusional. Right. You think you see reality. You don’t. In fact, what we know, we used to think that the brain. You know, we every generation has its metaphor of how the brain works. During the Industrial Revolution, Freud talked about how the brain has these desires that need to be blown off like steam because they accrue pressure in the psyche, and then because that was the best metaphor that he had. And then, you know, during the chemical age when we were trying to, you know, Dow Chemical was was helping us live better by creating plastics and all kinds of objects in the industrial age. Then we thought the brain was like a scientific test tube lab where, you know, the the right amount of chemicals and the wrong proportions. And so you had all these chemical imbalance theories, which turned out to be woefully inadequate. And then we had the computer processing age. And that’s what we thought. The brain, how the brain worked, that it created mathematical computations.

Nir Eyal 00:07:55  That’s not true either. The best model we have today for how the brain works, it’s called predictive processing, that the brain does not see reality as it is. We all live in our own simulation. It’s not like the matrix where there’s one simulation is that we all create our own simulation, because the brain is simply incapable of processing all the information that it’s taking in. We know that the brain takes in about 11 million bits of information every single second. That’s the equivalent of reading War and Peace every second, twice. So the light entering your eyes, the sound entering your ears, the ambient temperature of the room, 11 million bits of information. But conscious attention can only process about 50 bits of information. So 50 bits versus 11 million bits. And so the only way that the brain can make sense of reality is to filter our reality through this tiny, itsy bitsy keyhole of attention. And that’s how we see reality. And what is that keyhole of attention? It’s belief. It’s all based on our prior understandings.

Nir Eyal 00:08:56  What happened to us? Our history, our our background, everything we’ve done in our life that is literally how we see things. And so what to think that we are seeing things clearly is, is a delusion. I think that’s one of the most important things I learned, is that we need to hold our sense of reality. What we are sure is true. We need to hold it very lightly, because it turns out that none of us actually sees reality accurately.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:20  Right. It’s one of the big cognitive biases called naive realism, which means we believe we see things the way they are, and everyone else is the one who’s right, which is the. Once you’ve got that bias in place, you’re pretty hosed.

Nir Eyal 00:09:34  That’s right, that’s right. Because it’s so true. There’s this immunity to change that the brain has this immune system just like your body. You get a splinter in your finger will create an infection to defend against this invader. The same happens with our mind. We hate changing our beliefs because we have these understandings of the way the world works, and if something interrupts what we expect, it can be very jarring, especially if it’s something that reflects poorly upon us.

Nir Eyal 00:10:00  Oh, it’s really, really hard to change. But in many ways it limits us. And that’s why we call them limiting beliefs. Because the more we believe about our limitations, we will actually only see our limitations. And then the more we see those limitations, the more they become true, because we act in accordance with them. So it’s this vicious cycle that keeps us trapped in a cage of our own making.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:22  So one of the things you and I are both very interested in is how people actually change. And you talk about belief as being part of a motivational triangle. Walk us through what the motivational triangle is and the role that belief plays in it.

Nir Eyal 00:10:38  Absolutely. So I used to believe, you know, I was an economics minor in college, and so I kind of bought into the classic paradigm of motivation. What is motivation? Motivation is when you have an incentive, right? People are ruled by incentives. And so if I want this benefit I will do this behavior. And that generally works.

Nir Eyal 00:10:55  But there’s something hidden that we don’t often think about, which is that it’s not good enough to just know what to do the behavior and want the benefit. There’s something missing. If it was that simple, if we if it was all just about knowing what to do and wanting what the behavior will get you, well then we would all have six pack abs and be multi-millionaires. Because in this day and age, who doesn’t know, right? If you have a question, you ask ChatGPT. You Google it. The answers are all out there. There’s no more secret knowledge to getting your goals. And basically all of us, if we’re really honest, we know we have the books on our bookshelves, we have access to the experts, we can figure out what to do, and we can want the benefit, but we still don’t do it. And that is maddening. And this is so annoying for me because, you know, as an author, I always thought, well, if I just tell people the answer to their problems, well, then they’ll just go do it.

Nir Eyal 00:11:44  And not only do they not do it, I don’t even do it. I have books on the shelf of things that I haven’t put into practice. I paid for consultants and gurus to tell me what to do, and I haven’t done what they’ve told me. Why? Well, because motivation is not a straight line. It’s not good enough to know what to do and why I need to do it. There’s something missing that if I don’t have a belief underlying those two things, then the behavior doesn’t occur. So motivation is not a straight line, it’s a triangle. So if I want the benefit, but let’s say I don’t believe that I will get the benefit. For example, let’s say you have a boss who doesn’t have your best interest at heart, somebody who you don’t believe will give you that raise or that promotion. Well, how motivated are you going to be to work for them? Not very much. More common is actually what happens when I know the the behavior I need to do, but I don’t believe in my own ability to sustain motivation.

Nir Eyal 00:12:37  Right? If I don’t believe I’m going to do it, if I believe that somehow I have a limiting belief that that I don’t have time, this is too difficult. This is too painful. This sucks. I’m not gonna. You know, I’m not cut out for this. Guess what? I’m also going to lose motivation and I’m not going to do it. So underlying sustain motivation, which we know from from several studies. Now that sustain motivation is the differentiating factor between who wins and loses is who can just continue. Right. The number one reason people fail, the number one reason people fail. Not a lack of knowledge, not of lack of resources. When we fail on our goals, the number one reason, obviously is we quit. It’s as simple as that. The number one reason we fail is we quit. So to sustain motivation to achieve pretty much any of our dreams, we have to understand that knowing what to do, the behavior and wanting the benefit is not enough. We also have to have that belief that undergirds both of those aspects.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:00  I’ve thought about this a lot because I did one on one coaching with people over the years, and I sort of build myself with a term I don’t. I don’t even know if it’s a real term, but behavior coach, right? It was people who were having trouble changing something. Right. You don’t hire a behavior coach unless you generally have failed at changing something a bunch of times. So that was one of the underlying biggest problems is that people came thinking, I can’t do this. I’m the kind of person who X, Y, and Z. I’m not motivated, I’m not disciplined. I don’t have what it takes. And how you unwind that is really, really critical. Because if you don’t believe, like you said, that you can do it, you simply won’t do. It is one of the biggest oppressors of. If we think of motivation that there is right. We. I think we’re more motivated when we believe in ourselves, and we’re less motivated when we don’t believe in ourselves.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:57  And that shows up in a lot of different manifestations. But the question then becomes, how do we change that belief when we’ve got a lot of evidence to support it? Right? Like, I’m a recovering heroin addict, and there was a time where every single time I had tried to change that, I had failed. Again and again and again and again. So how do we work with this underlying belief. How do we change it when the evidence points a different direction.

Nir Eyal 00:15:28  This is something that was really frustrating to me because we, I think we all kind of intuitively know that beliefs are super important. Right. We’ve heard Henry Ford telling us that whether you believe you can or you can’t, you’re right. We know this kind of stuff and then you’ve got the positive thinking movement and the manifesting movement that just tells us that we’re not thinking positively enough and we’re not manifesting hard enough, and that that’s so unsatisfying. It turns out to be scientifically not true, that there’s so many problems with that. Because if you have problems in your life, well, that means you didn’t do it well enough.

Nir Eyal 00:15:57  You didn’t think positive enough you. And so you brought these bad things into your life. And I think that’s that’s bullshit. That’s not true. I think the problem is we haven’t been told exactly the science of how do we effectively change our beliefs and what beliefs are worth challenging. And so I think the beliefs worth challenging where I found the most leverage are the beliefs around suffering. And this is particularly pertinent to people who have struggled with substance use disorder or some kind of compulsive disorder that I think one of the biggest beliefs that we don’t, we don’t look at and we kind of accept to be true, is that pain and suffering are the same thing that we think that if if someone causes us pain, including ourselves, that that must make us suffer and pain, as we talked about earlier, is just another signal. It’s just one of many, many data points that 11 million bits of information that our brains are constantly taking in suffering is the psychological interpretation of that data. So one of the things that totally blew my mind and then helps me makes this point is when I stumbled on the research around hypno sedation, and in the book I share what happened to a guy by the name of Daniel Geisler.

Nir Eyal 00:17:05  Daniel Geisler was in his 50s and he had a freak accident, and he had to have these screws put into his, his his ankle. He shattered part of his ankle a few years later, after the operation, he was healed up, but he still had to get the screws removed. Now, this operation was a 55 minute pretty serious operation, and what Daniel found along the way over those years is a technique called hypno sedation, where he trained himself to separate pain and suffering, and through the power of attention, by training himself. It took him several years, but it’s not rare, in fact. Tens of thousands of people are just like Daniel who have done this before. He underwent a 55 minute procedure where scalpel was cutting into flesh, where metal screws were being wrenched from bone completely without any sort of anesthesia, no general anesthesia, no topical anesthesia, nothing. And I wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t see the tapes myself. His heart rate was stable. His blood pressure was stable. He didn’t show the physiological signs of suffering.

Nir Eyal 00:18:08  He didn’t show any of those symptoms because he had learned through the amazing power of belief to channel his attention, that little keyhole of attention, to focus on what he wanted to focus on and leave the rest behind. And why do I tell this story, Eric? I’m not asking for people to to do hypno sedation. I’m not going to do it. But I tell this story because it proves to us that if we can change our perception of reality to the point where people, Humans. Just like. Just like you and I are as well. All of us. If people if human beings are capable of going under surgery for 55 minutes without anesthesia, what does that tell us about our capabilities? What does that tell us about our untapped potential to weather pain? Because, you know, the hardest part about an impulse control disorder, like an addiction is the wanting. It’s the craving, right? That is so psychologically painful. And so when we learn to manage discomfort throughout our life, right, we know that when people repair relationships, when they come to grips with their past, when they ask for forgiveness and forgive others, their cravings subside.

Nir Eyal 00:19:13  They learn these impulse control skills by learning to deal with their suffering in a new way. How do they do that? It’s fundamentally about changing our beliefs.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:24  Yeah, it’s interesting you say that about craving and how psychologically painful it is, because that is the one thing that I reflect on the most is that worst feeling I knew was this sort of being torn apart. Feeling of addiction. Yeah, right. Of just this craving that was relentless with the deep knowledge. Like you should not. Don’t do it, you know. And that that wrenching, you know, is is brutal. And thank God that goes away.

Nir Eyal 00:19:55  Yeah, yeah. And how does it go away? I mean, your question that I didn’t really answer well before. Of how do we change those beliefs? It’s the same exposure therapy technique. So what happens? And you tell me if I’m wrong here about. About what your journey looked like, but through exposure of. You know what? One day at a time, I can I can make it through a little bit longer.

Nir Eyal 00:20:13  A little bit longer. You’re exposing yourself to get comfortable with discomfort. You realize, hey, nothing’s going to happen, right? If I wait a little bit longer? Yes. It’s uncomfortable. And so the fuck. What? It hurts. Okay? It hurts. But everything worth having in life. Tell me one thing in life that’s worth having. That’s not on the other side of discomfort. You want to have a beautiful family. Let me tell you, it takes work. You want to build a business?

Eric Zimmer 00:20:35  Ice cream. What’s that? Ice cream.

Nir Eyal 00:20:38  Ice cream. Well. Ice cream. You got to pay for it. You got to find the money for that, right? Everything. All the good things in life. Take work. You want to start a business? Takes work. It’s going to be uncomfortable. It’s going to be painful. Now, it doesn’t necessarily have to lead to suffering. And that’s. That’s the big change. So the basic process. How do we do this? We take out our limiting belief.

Nir Eyal 00:20:57  Okay. Which is very very difficult. Again we have this psychological immune system that tries to protect us the way I think things are the way things are. We misinterpret our beliefs as facts. This is the case absolutely all the time. That’s who I am. That’s my past. This is what happened to me. This is the trauma. This is going to suck. This is going to hurt, right? We have these stories in our mind and we can’t see them for what they are. They are just beliefs. Very few of them are actually facts. And so what we do first is we hold a mirror to ourselves. You know, it’s like if I asked you to look at your face, how do you look at your face? You can’t look at your face the way you can look at your hands or your feet. You have to have a mirror. You have to. Now we’re on a zoom call so we can see your face, but without some kind of external way to do it, you can’t see your own face.

Nir Eyal 00:21:41  Same goes with our limiting beliefs. We can’t see them because we believe they’re true. We don’t think of them as beliefs. We think of them as facts. Right? And so it’s only by exposing ourselves to those limiting beliefs and then offering a different perspective, either through small steps of agency, of making it one more day at a time and showing, hey, I can get through this. I’m not going to die. I’m okay, I’m safe. And you bring down that fear. You know, fear is this, this great creator of pain, even chronic pain. I document in the book how effective it is, how changing your beliefs can cure chronic pain. People have been suffering from terrible back pain, terrible fibromyalgia, terrible diagnoses where they are full of suffering and by changing their beliefs, by trying something different, by looking at a perspective that makes no sense, the total opposite of that perspective. They can Repair this pain, the suffering that has plagued them for very, very long time.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:36  So let’s dig into this just a little bit more. You sort of hit these a little bit and I want to get them very clearly, which is the three powers of belief framework. Right. So we’ve talked about attention. Our beliefs shape what we see and what we notice. You also talk about anticipation and agency. Sort of walk us through all of those in one sort of framework.

Nir Eyal 00:23:01  Sure. So the first power of belief, the power of attention, it’s the power to shape what you actually see, your present reality. Because we look at the world through this tiny keyhole of attention, our beliefs shape what we can actually see. So when you think about a relationship, how two people can experience the same exact thing, right? So I remember one time my wife commented that there were dishes in the sink, okay, dirty dishes in the sink when she saw me looking for a cup. She was just making a statement of fact. I heard that as a criticism that I hadn’t washed the dishes.

Nir Eyal 00:23:28  Same exact words, but I saw things differently based on my beliefs. Based on that, I thought I was being judged. And as you said, you don’t see things as they are. You see things as you are. And that comes all the way from the Talmud. This is ancient wisdom. Yeah. Then there’s the power of anticipation. The power to change what you feel. Your physical internal state. That’s how the power of belief will shape things like chronic pain. The power of the placebo pill, how we experience various products and services based on what we anticipate will be our reaction when we experience them. And this and this science goes on and on and on. There’s fascinating science about how powerful the placebo effect can be. And then finally, the power of agency. The power of agency determines what we are able to do, how our beliefs shape what we can actually do in our lives. And so this this comes down to how do we use our beliefs to help us do the things that we previously thought were impossible? And also make sure that we don’t adopt these limiting beliefs that can act as a nocebo effect.

Nir Eyal 00:24:24  One of my favorite studies was this case of Mr. a mr. A as he’s called in the in the literature was this guy who, one day had a very bad breakup with his girlfriend and decided that he wanted to end his life. And so he took an entire bottle of pills of antidepressants. And after he takes these pills, he reflects for a minute and he decides he doesn’t want to die. And so he he stumbles over to the neighbor’s house. He asks his neighbor to rush him to the hospital. He gets to the hospital. He crashes onto the floor with his bottle of pills slipping out of his hand, and he tells the nurse, I took all my pills. I took all my pills. Now he’s clearly showing signs of an overdose. They wheel him in on a gurney. They take his blood pressure and his heart rate. They notice that that his heartbeat is is dangerously low. His blood pressure is falling, and they’re trying to figure out what he took so that they can give him some kind of antidote to this overdose.

Nir Eyal 00:25:16  And they look on the pill jar and they see that it doesn’t say what medicine is in the pill jar. It says to call a number. And so they call this phone number. And it turns out that Mr. A was in a clinical trial. And the clinical trial was of antidepressants. And so they said okay, quick, hurry. Hurry. What is this substance? We need to know what he took so that we can we can try and save his life. And they look up on the computer and they look at Mr. A’s file. And very quickly, they determined that Mr. A had taken the placebo, that he was in the group in the study that was given an inert substance that had no way of causing these physiological symptoms. And yet here he was, you know, near death almost. So within 15 minutes of them telling Mr. A that he had just taken a placebo pill, 15 minutes later, his blood pressure was at normal, his heart rate returned to normal, and he walked out of the hospital.

Nir Eyal 00:26:06  And so that is an amazing example of how the stories we tell ourselves can have physiological effects. This was a completely inert substance. And because he had this expectation, he had this label that he was going to die, his body cooperated, his body did so. And so this is one of the reasons I think we, you know, we need to be very careful that our labels can become our limits, that we tell ourselves these stories constantly. That can do nothing but act as nocebo and reduce our ability to act.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:36  Check in for a moment. Is your jaw tight, breath shallow? Are your shoulders creeping up? Those little signals are invitations to slow down and listen. Every Wednesday, I send weekly bites of wisdom, a short email that turns the big ideas we explore here in each show. Things like mental health, anxiety, relationships, purpose into bite size practices you can use the same day. It’s free. It takes about a minute to read and thousands already swear by it. If you’d like extra fuel for the weekend, you also get a weekend podcast playlist.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:14  Join us at One Coffee newsletter. That’s one you feed. Net newsletter and start receiving your next bite of wisdom. All right, back to the show. So you’re giving us some examples of sort of the the extremes of how far this can go and, and how strong the mind body connection really is. I’m always curious about placebo and nocebo. It’s a very prominent part of the scientific literature. It’s not made up. It’s real. Right. And yet, lots of people don’t respond to a placebo. Right. There’s lots of people who think I won’t overdose from drugs, who end up overdosing from drugs, even though they have a belief they’re not going to. Right. I mean, no sane person would keep doing heroin in today’s world if you didn’t have some strange belief that, like, not me. So what do we do with these situations where either placebo doesn’t work, there is a physical reality underlying some of this stuff. So. So talk to me about how you, you think about applying sort of edge cases to day to day life.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:32  Yeah.

Nir Eyal 00:28:32  I show the extreme cases to show what the the mind is capable of doing. Right? Right, right. What? What is it possible to. Now, I’m not saying we should do any of of of those extreme cases, right. I’m not saying we should do hypno sedation. I’m trying to illustrate how much more powerful we are than we can ever imagine. That we are limiting ourselves. Why? Because our default state is passivity. We used to believe in this concept called learned helplessness. And what everybody knew learned helplessness. It was this idea that you are taught to be helpless. And so this explains why certain socioeconomic groups stay stuck in poverty and why, you know, all kinds of phenomenon. There was there was a there was kind of an accepted truth. And then the people who who ran these studies, Seligman and Meyer looked back at the data. And then a few years ago, they came up with the complete opposite conclusion. They determined that we actually don’t learn helplessness. Helplessness is our default state that we always fall back to our defaults.

Nir Eyal 00:29:30  We always fall back to our limiting beliefs because our default state is safe, right? What I know before the reason why does someone keep taking heroin? It’s not thinking that. They just think, hey, this is this is never going to happen to me. It’s that they have shown themselves that nothing has happened in the past. So the brain predicts nothing will happen in the future. Right? Right. So? So to me, that would be crazy. That’d be incredibly risky. But to them, they’ve proven it. And to to somebody else doing something like going on stage that’s been it’s crazy. Well I’ve done it many, many times. And so I’m not scared of it anymore. It’s essentially exposure therapy. Exposure to what? Exposure to the fear that is causing the limitation. It’s all about that fear. It’s this fear pain, fear cycle that the more I fear something, the more I pay attention to it, right? The more I see the potential for pain, the more I anticipate pain.

Nir Eyal 00:30:18  The second power of belief and the more I reduce my agency. And so whether it’s a vicious cycle or a virtuous cycle, it’s the same exact three steps. This is the same loop that causes chronic pain, and it’s the same loop that heals our pain and suffering in life.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:53  So let’s walk through that loop. In the case of causing chronic pain and then of helping to alleviate it. Like like give me an example. Kind of each step along the way.

Nir Eyal 00:31:02  Yeah. I mean, I’ll tell you personally, I used to suffer from back pain. And I took the conventional advice. The conventional advice used to be. Now the medical community has, has really changed over the past few years. I mean, we used to be obsessed with pain. Back a few years ago. You know, this actually led in large part to the heroin epidemic that we’ve been struggling with in the United States. We were constantly asked about our pain. Right. We thought this was the new vital sign. Remember, they used to have the they don’t do this anymore.

Nir Eyal 00:31:29  But every hospital, every doctor, constantly. As soon as you step in, they took your heart rate. They took your blood pressure, they took your temperature. And they asked you to rate your pain on a pain scale. Remember this?

Eric Zimmer 00:31:39  Oh, we don’t do this. Remember it because my mom, who I believe has had chronic pain for a long time, and I think some of it is kind of what we’re going to talk about. I used to always answer that question with like 34, what’s your pain on a scale of 1 to 10, 34 or 18 or. Right. Always way off the top of it, right? Yeah. Always way off the top of it, which I think is interesting.

Nir Eyal 00:32:01  Yeah, yeah. So what does that do? Step number one okay, so I was told to constantly pay attention to your pain. How are you feeling. How are you. How. Tell me rate your pain. How is it. What’s going on. Right. And when? When a doctor tells you that this is as important as your blood pressure and your heart rate and your temperature, what does that say? Doesn’t say that pain is just a signal, which is the truth.

Nir Eyal 00:32:23  It tells you that something’s broken, something’s wrong, and there is pain associated with damage, obviously. And that’s why we have pain, right? When there is physical damage, then that is a signal sent to the brain to say, hey, there’s something wrong here, but there’s a difference between sickness and illness. We use them as synonyms to two separate things sicknesses in the body. Illnesses in the mind. And all pain is real. All pain is real. I’m the last person to tell you that. Chronic pain, that people are making it up. That is not true. Pain is real. All pain is real. I want people to hear me loud and clear. But all pain is also in the brain. Pain doesn’t happen here. Pain doesn’t happen here. Pain happens here. Even physical damage is processed in the mind. Right? And so we can have sickness without illness and illness without sickness. How can that be? Well, you can have cancer and not know it yet. And so you can have sickness without any kind of illness, without any kind of symptoms that you’re conscious of.

Nir Eyal 00:33:19  You can also have illness in the mind. Without sickness, as in the case of chronic pain. And so what happens with chronic pain? First we pay. We become hypervigilant. We pay attention to it all the time. So when I had this back pain, every little tweak. Oh, no. Oh, it’s coming again. Okay. I was looking for every tiny little signal. Then came the anticipation. The second power of belief. So every time I would get a little back pain. Okay, what did I have to do? I became terrified because I anticipated that it would. It might get worse. And then once I would get a flare up. Oh my God, what if it never goes away? Is my entire life going to be like this? Am I not going to be able to sleep tonight? And how am I going to play with my kids and what am I going to do? All this anticipation was causing more fear. And what happened? When you’re in fear, you regress into that state of passivity.

Nir Eyal 00:34:08  And so what happens? Because that’s safety. Safety is don’t move. Safety is don’t act. Safety is is retreat. And so what does that do to your sense of agency? The third power of belief. Now you can do less. And that’s how chronic pain becomes symptomatic. That’s how what we call neuro plastic pain versus physiological pain. It’s pain that has no physical symptoms that we can detect and lasts for more than six months. Because it turns out that actually I mean, if you think about it, you know, modern medicine, I think it’s because we have so much modern medicine that we expect instant solutions. But if you think about it, for 200,000 years of human history, people had pain all the time. They had abscesses and cysts and parasites and all kinds of diseases. How could they possibly function with 15 different parasites and infections in their body all the time? Guess what? Because your brain has the amazing power to tune down the pain. Did you know that there’s no connection when when they gave doctors scans of people’s backs? Do you know there’s no connection between slip discs that a doctor can detect on an X-ray and whether that patient is suffering from pain? No connection.

Nir Eyal 00:35:15  Yeah, because not all damage causes pain and not all pain is caused by damage. So how do you reverse this cycle? So this is called a pain reprocessing therapy. And by the way this is just a small part of the book. But I think it’s fascinating. And it applies to other areas of our life. Pain reprocessing therapy which has been shown to be even more effective than leading medications. What we do, the first step is to realize we’re safe. Okay, just because I feel pain, it’s a signal. That’s all it is, just a signal. Second step is to reduce the urgency. It’s all right, I feel it. It’s okay. It’s going to go away. When it goes away doesn’t mean it’s damage. I’m safe. There’s nothing wrong here. And by the way, this is again, as a disclaimer. This is when we don’t know when we can’t detect any physical symptom. And it’s lasted for more than six months. Okay. So if there is a physical problem okay.

Nir Eyal 00:36:02  If you have a broken arm this isn’t going to work. Right? Then there’s a reason why the pain is happening. But we’re talking about neuro plastic pain. So the second step is to reduce the urgency okay. We don’t have control about whether that pain can turn off like a light switch. Not going to happen that way. And it’s only a ridiculous expectation through modern medicine that we even expect to be able to turn off. So we change our anticipation. We change our expectation. It doesn’t have to urgently go away. Then we bring levity, humor and agency to it. What we’re doing is that we’re teaching the brain to not be afraid. You can’t laugh at something you’re afraid of, right? It’s very difficult if you’re afraid to laugh at the same time. So what did I start telling myself when I felt that pain? I would say, I see you there. I see what you’re trying to do to me. It’s okay, I see, I acknowledge you, but I’m not going to pay attention to you.

Nir Eyal 00:36:45  In fact, I’m going to do the exact opposite of what I used to do. So now I still, every once in a while, I’ll get a little tweak in the back. So you know what I do, I don’t immobilize, I don’t ice it, I don’t heat pack it. I don’t worry about it. I do the same thing ten times. I will literally go up and down, like if I’m about to sit my chair. And that’s, you know, when I get a little tweak on my back, I’ll do that movement ten times to teach my brain just a signal, just a signal, just a signal. And over the years, my pain has reduced dramatically. And I’m not alone. This this pain reprocessing therapy has worked for for thousands and hundreds of thousands of people at this point.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:17  It’s really fascinating. It’s been a number of years now, but I interviewed Yoni Ashar, who is one of the early people really involved in pain reprocessing therapy. And the thing that struck me was, and again, this has been years ago, I may not get it exactly right and the science may have evolved, but the thing that they were able to sort of show is that in people with chronic pain, not all people, but in the people who are a good candidate for this thing, what they were able to show via brain scan was that the signal was all in the brain, meaning you think it’s coming back to brain, but in these cases, it was all in the brain.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:03  It was coming from memory, parts of the brain. And that was really illuminating. And again, it’s not to say that pain isn’t real because it is real. It’s just not coming from where you think it’s coming from in all cases. And I think that it’s a really powerful modality. My mother is older and less of cognitively capable than she used to be, and so I feel like praying pain reprocessing therapy seems to be just beyond where she’s quite capable of focusing in on it, which is really sad. And all the things you say are true. Attention goes to that, you know, anticipation, constantly thinking it’s going to be there and then reduced agency doing less and less and less. It’s a it is a sad cycle and a beautiful cycle when we can get it to go the other direction.

Nir Eyal 00:38:52  I would love to give an example of of the virtuous example of this, so people can take away, even if you’re not suffering from, from from chronic pain, how can you use this in reverse? So this is where this amazing study at Yale blew my mind that people who have certain beliefs about aging live seven and a half years longer.

Nir Eyal 00:39:10  I mean, talk about like all the, you know, how many articles have you seen about longevity and, and you know, rich which reredos who are spending millions of dollars on matcha enemas to expand their lifespan and doing all kinds of crazy, ridiculous stuff to to live longer. And it turns out that one of the simplest things we can do doesn’t cost a dime, is change our beliefs about aging. So in this study, they found that people who had positive views about aging versus negative views about aging lived, on average, seven and a half years longer. That is longer than the effect of smoking, quitting smoking that is longer than the effect of a good diet. That is longer than the effect of exercise, right? So for all the talk about you have to exercise. Eat right. Stop smoking. Turns out your beliefs can make a bigger difference than any of that stuff. Now how is that done? I hate to tell you, it’s not magic, okay? Your beliefs don’t magically become your biology.

Nir Eyal 00:40:03  It’s behavior. Let me back up. What do these beliefs sound like? And I suggest that every single person listening to the sound of my voice. I voice. I want to save your life right now and I’m being dead serious. I want you to stop telling yourself this limiting belief that you’re having a senior moment, okay? That aging involves inevitable decline. Stop saying that stuff right. Is it true? Who cares? It might be true, I don’t care. It doesn’t serve you. What’s a better belief? What is? And this is exactly what the study found. People who thought something as simple as growth is possible at any age. Just something as simple as that. Versus aging involves inevitable decline. Growth is possible at any age. Eric, which one of those is true? Which one’s a fact?

Eric Zimmer 00:40:48  Well, I don’t know. Both of them. They’re. Yeah, both of them. Either of them depending. Yeah. Yeah.

Nir Eyal 00:40:53  Exactly. Does it matter? So I choose to believe every single day growth is possible at any age.

Nir Eyal 00:41:00  I don’t tell myself I’m having a senior moment. I’m 48. My birthday’s tomorrow. I don’t say that stuff. It doesn’t serve me. I tell myself growth is possible at any age. And so what’s the magic here? It’s not that that makes my cells and mitochondria sparkle with unicorn flutters. No, what change is, is that when I believe that when I choose the belief that a growth is possible at any age, what does that do to my attention? I start to notice examples of other people who are proving that point. I start looking at myself and saying, hey, look, I got a little stronger, I got a little faster, I could do this and that, and I don’t pay attention to the stuff that doesn’t show me that evidence. I anticipate that I’m able to do things, and I’m proud of the fact that I can do things that other 48 year olds can’t do. Right. And then finally, agency that what this study found is that people who have positive views of aging, the big of the study is that when you have a positive view of aging, you’re more likely to go out and see your friends to take that walk, to go play another round of golf, to to garden, to volunteer, to do things that do actually expand your lengthen your lifespan.

Nir Eyal 00:42:09  So it’s not that it’s magic. Beliefs change your biology on its own. It’s that when you hold these beliefs, your motivation to do the right behavior changes. And that’s why we live longer.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:21  So let’s go into some of the nuance here. You multiple times in the book say this is not the power of positive thinking. This is not about, I’m going to say like just simply believing things that are not true. Even in this chapter on aging, you point out some studies that, I mean, I’ve had Ellen Langer on the show. She’s given me the, you know, the study of people who go into a house that’s rolled back 30 years, how they’re younger. I’ve heard the studies about how if you tell anyone who cleans a hotel that their activity is exercise, they lose more weight. I mean, I’ve heard all of that and you debunk some of it. So. So what is the reality here? How do we sort this out? Because you’re not just saying believe anything and magic happens.

Nir Eyal 00:43:06  That’s right. And I appreciate that. Wow. You’ve really, done a very careful reading of the book. I think you’re the first person who’s who’s asked me about that. And I think it’s super important, and I. I hate to critique, other researchers work, but I think it’s I think it’s very important. I mean, this is what science does, right? Yeah. Science is all about beliefs, actually. We’re looking for evidence that can help us better understand the world. And I think it does us a disservice when we start spreading studies that really don’t hold up. So, for example, the the two studies you mentioned, the made study, turns out it didn’t replicate that. When they tried to do the exact same study, they didn’t find the same results at all. The effects were very, very weak. The study where they turned back the clocks. And then men started aging in reverse and acted younger and all that. Turns out that wasn’t even published. It was an anecdote, and we’ve never replicated it again.

Nir Eyal 00:43:58  And so I think what I discovered when I look at the studies that were well done that are replicated, I’ll give you one that was replicated, that I think is also very illuminating is the steroid study. When they took two groups of men and they told them, hey, we want you to exercise and want a group of men. They monitored and said, just do your normal routine. The other group of men, they said, we’re going to give you this amazing new steroid, okay, you’re going to take the steroid pill. here you go. And we’re going to monitor how much muscle mass you gain. Well, lo and behold, it really is true that even though those men were given a placebo, they didn’t know they were given a placebo. But even when those men were given a placebo, they tacked on more pounds. So placebos really do work when it comes to muscle mass gain. That’s amazing right? We can give people sugar pills and they’ll put on more muscle mass. Now, the previous studies that I kind of debunk not really, but I show don’t build your foundations on them.

Nir Eyal 00:44:52  A previous study would say you see your beliefs become your biology, but that’s not what the placebo steroid study found. When you look into the study, what actually found, what they found was that these men who were given the placebo steroid, they did one extra rep. They put on a little bit more weight on the barbell and they worked harder. So beliefs become biology, not through magic, not just because you think it, but because you did something differently. You worked a tiny bit harder. So that just means we need to use placebos and this effect appropriately, which means we can all do it right. So for example, you know, I think it’s a good investment to pay a little bit more money for those expensive running shoes if you can afford it. Or maybe, you know, take a little vitamin C as long as if you think it’s going to help, it probably will. It’ll make you feel better. It’s not going to cure you. It’s not going to change your biology.

Nir Eyal 00:45:41  It’s not going to cure the sickness, but it will change your perception of that sickness. It will make you feel better. And it turns out that about 80%, 80% of our healthcare spending today is not spent on sickness. It’s spent on illness. It’s spent on treating the symptoms of sickness, the illnesses. And so I think it’s a great investment to know what placebos can and can’t do. Placebos Can’t fix a broken arm. Placebos cannot cure cancer, but they can change the perception of pain of those maladies. And so that’s how we should use them appropriately.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:12  So I’d like to talk a little bit about motivation and procrastination. We earlier talked about how motivation is a triangle between belief, behavior and benefit. But you also talk about procrastination being a belief issue or a pain management issue. What do you mean by that?

Nir Eyal 00:46:31  So I think it’s a very fascinating topic to actually dive deeper into. Not only why did we procrastinate, which I think is such an interesting question, right? You know, we know that it’s not a new question.

Nir Eyal 00:46:40  We think that, oh, procrastination was caused because of our cell phones or social media or whatever. No no, no. Plato was talking about the tendency to do things against our better interest 2500 years ago. So procrastination is just part of the human condition. But why isn’t that so interesting that I know what to do? It’s going to benefit me. It’s right there, and yet I’m not going to do it. It’s so interesting. Yeah. And so I think what I want to do was dive a layer deeper into not only why do we procrastinate, but why do we do anything and everything. And it turns out that this paradigm between carrots and sticks, we’ve all heard that that’s how you motivate people. Right. You have carrots, the benefits and you have sticks. The punishment turns out neurologically that is not true, that neurologically we can actually see it in the brain, that the reward centers of the brain don’t make us do things because we want to feel good. Everything we do, everything we do is about the desire to escape discomfort, everything.

Nir Eyal 00:47:34  And this hits people the wrong way. Many times we’re like, what are you talking about? I love to be with my family. I love to be. I love to do fun things. I like to eat delicious food. Yes, but think about it. There’s a reason we say love hurts. You know that old song from the 80s? Love hurts. It’s exactly right.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:47  Oh, it goes back to Roy Orbison. It’s even older than that. Right. Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. Very classic.

Nir Eyal 00:47:52  He. He was a neuroscientist. He got it right. Well, before most of us understand. Because what happens is even when we desire to feel good. Lusting. Hunger. Desire. Wanting. The brain makes us feel bad. To kick us in the butt. So that we could go get the things that make us feel good. Because the brain doesn’t motivate us by things that feel good. Right now, we already got it. It makes us feel good by things that felt good in the past, right? That’s what we go get.

Nir Eyal 00:48:20  We are chasing that pleasant feeling and the chasing itself is spurred by discomfort. Yeah. So that therefore means if all human behavior is spurred by a desire to escape discomfort, it means that time management, procrastination is pain management. Money management is pain management. Weight management is pain management. It’s all pain management. And so once we understand that, once we understand this is the crucial point here, is that we have a problem with dealing with our discomfort. It’s not a character flaw. It’s certainly not a moral failing. It’s just that we haven’t learned the skills to deal with that discomfort in a healthier manner.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:00  And so let’s take procrastination. What is the discomfort that I am relieving when I procrastinate?

Nir Eyal 00:49:09  Sure. Is there something you’ve been procrastinating on? Is this a anything come to mind?

Eric Zimmer 00:49:12  I am actually in a very good non procrastination state in life right now. Awesome. Not always, not always. But. But right now I’m kind of dialed in. So no, it’s not a personal interest.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:24  But I think about this question a lot. Having wrestled with procrastination in the past and knowing so many people who do and knowing, I mean, it’ll be back. It’s right. I just, you know, something about the way I’ve got everything, you know, set up right now is working. But it’s always a question. And I do think about, you know, like you said, I might not say it right. Oh, yeah. That is the big question. Why do we do things that we just know are the wrong thing to do, and we watch ourselves do it?

Nir Eyal 00:49:55  That’s right, that’s right. It’s all about pain management, that the brain is limiting. It is trying as hard as possible to take the path of least resistance. So anything that hurts, we try and avoid. That’s how we learn. And so we’ll continue to do that. So for me, you know, I used to be clinically obese. I don’t know if I would say it’s an actual addiction to food, but I would say it was pretty close.

Nir Eyal 00:50:14  There was a time when food definitely controlled me in ways I didn’t like. And, as any formerly obese person will tell you, I wasn’t eating because I was hungry. I would love to blame the fast food companies and say they did it to me. But I’ll tell you, I know exactly why I was obese. It was because I was eating my feelings when I was lonely. I would eat. When I was, bored. I would eat when I was ashamed about how much I had just eaten. I would eat. And this is the classic sign of addiction, right? What starts out as a solution to a problem becomes the problem. And I that that hunger got worse and worse and worse and worse until I did something about it. And so when you realize that procrastination is just another impulse control issue. So for me, you know, exercising is painful. I’m not going to say it’s not painful now. I don’t suffer from it anymore because I’ve changed the dialogue. I’ve learned to see it differently.

Nir Eyal 00:51:02  I’ve changed my belief about about exercise. But yes, it’s still painful. So when I used to procrastinate about exercise and I still catch myself from time to time doing this, especially if I’ve got other stressors in my life, we know that that’s a contributing factor to neuro plastic pain. If your pain gets worse when you’re stressed, that’s neuro plastic pain. Classic hallmark. And so when challenges are more difficult, when they’re stressed in your life, when you haven’t gotten good sleep, whatever, this is a great sign that the problem is your inability to deal with discomfort. So exercise is a classic example. Why do I procrastinate going to the gym? Sometimes it’s because exercise hurts, and whatever I’m doing right now checking email, being with my family, watching TV, reading the news, even if it’s things I think are productive. Right? I’m working. I’m writing. So therefore I can’t go to the gym. It’s because going to the gym is painful, right? So fundamentally, if you can change your beliefs about that, how do I do this? How did I actually do this? I took out these limiting beliefs.

Nir Eyal 00:51:57  I took out the limiting belief that told me that exercise was suffering. And I used to tell this to myself all the time. Exercise suck. I hate it, right? And when I took out that limiting belief and actually assessed wait a minute, is there another point of view? So step one, you take out the limiting belief. Step two you ask yourself, is it true? In step three, you find what Byron Katie calls the turnaround. You look for the exact opposite of that belief. Could something else be true? And when I discovered that that mechanism, I found it. And so now I have these mantras that I repeat hundreds of times a day, sometimes to remind myself of these liberating beliefs. For example, when I face the pain of a difficult task, like going to the gym. And today at 48, I’m happy to say I’m in the best shape of my life. I have these mantras that I take out, for example. This is what it feels like to get better.

Nir Eyal 00:52:47  This is a prayer of mine or a mantra I tell myself dozens of times per day when something is painful, this is what it feels like to get better. So now what I do, it seems like a very simple mantra. It’s actually quite complex because I’ve taken something that I’ve attached pain to suffering and now I’ve detached them. Feeling the pain becomes pleasure. Why? Because I believe I’m getting better. Is it true? I don’t know. Does it affect my performance? Am I more motivated? Do I suffer less? Hell yeah. So that’s what I’m going to believe. This is what it feels like to get better.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:20  Before you check out, pick one insight from today and ask, how will I practice this before bedtime? Need help turning ideas into action? My free weekly Bites of Wisdom email lands every Wednesday with simple practices, reflection and links to former guests who can guide you even on the tough stuff like anxiety, purpose and habit change. Feed your good wolf at one you feed. Net newsletter again one you feed net letter.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:52  What are some other mantras that you use regularly that you found helpful?

Nir Eyal 00:53:56  Yeah, I’ll tell you another one. So writing is also really hard. Very painful. I’ve written three books now. I’ve published dozens of articles. I’ve been in the New York Times, The Atlantic. Let me tell you, it never gets easier. It’s always fricking hard when I sit down to write. You know this. You just finished a book. Write. All I want to do is check sports scores and read the news and look at stock prices and check email. Do anything but the fricking writing. The thing that I actually want to do. I would keep procrastinating. Or here’s the best one. Eric, let me do some research on that. Right? Like, look, let me just Google that for a minute. And of course that turns into hours of waste of time. So the mantra I repeat when I have a similar incidence is is this I close my eyes and take a deep breath, and I repeat to myself, it doesn’t get easier.

Nir Eyal 00:54:44  You get stronger, it doesn’t get easier, you get stronger. Just a bit of a prayer, a tiny reminder to again Disconnect pain from suffering that I don’t have the anticipation of it getting easier. The problem, the reason I kept suffering, Eric, is that I somehow expected, or if I was a professional author, this would be easy, right? Malcolm Gladwell doesn’t feel writer’s block. Know everybody has these things. Everybody feels pain. It’s just that they process it differently. So that is another mantra that helps me. And I’ll give you a third one that this happened with my family. So I read this amazing research around around luck, around how there is no such thing as lucky people. There are only people who think that they are lucky, right? Statistically. Think about it right. Luck is kind of evenly, evenly spread statistically. But it turns out that people who think they are lucky create their own luck. That luck is not chance. You can manufacture your own luck. Turns out that lucky people notice when they get lucky.

Nir Eyal 00:55:41  And so a mantra we’ve had in my family is that every time there’s something good that happens to us, we go to a restaurant and there’s no line. We go to the airport or something and we can. We can check in quickly and our flight’s on time or whatever. Like small incidents, meaningless stuff. Whenever something nice happens, we will just say out loud. Somebody will say out loud, you see, everything good happens to us. Everything good happens to us now. Is that actually true? No, no, we just don’t talk about what most people talk about. What I used to see. You know what I used to say? This always happens to me, right? goddamn. There’s that person in front of me who just cut me off in traffic. there’s always a traffic again. Or, you know, this person annoys me. Or my mom said that thing. She’s so annoying. She’s so, you know, she’s so judgmental. She’s this. She’s that. You know, we do this about everybody.

Nir Eyal 00:56:26  We judge them, we put them into little boxes, and then we reinforce again and again and again the way we want to believe they are. We don’t see people as they are. We see our beliefs about people. Right. And so we stopped. I stopped doing that. And God do I feel it. More peace. I’m so much happier again. Is it true? I don’t care, it serves me. I’m more at peace. I’m happier. I’m more productive. I sleep at night better. Everything gets better when you choose the beliefs that serve you. Because beliefs are tools, not truths.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:56  Well, I think that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for the book. It’s wonderful. I enjoyed reading it. We’ll have links in the show notes to where people can find the book. Find all of your stuff, and thanks again for coming on.

Nir Eyal 00:57:12  My pleasure, Eric, thanks for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:57:13  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.