Transcript for:
Insights on Writing and Productivity

so you did it we talked 3 years ago and now it's real well the book is great I think it's going to crush fingers crossed but that's not a thing I can control so yes about it but it already did crush the way to think about it is that it already did crush and that to what extent do you enjoy writing I enjoy showing up and then I enjoy finishing at the end of the writing day I feel good all of this stuff comes back down to the process yes I said this thing once maybe you agree with it but it's like amateurs are obsessed with tools people will go like what kind of uh pen do you journal with like this [ __ ] matters at all right pick a [ __ ] system and stick with that system I think it's not quite sufficient to just say trust the process because it's hard to trust a process that you have not been through there's a expression I like that says painters like painting writers like having written o [Music] nice and then you start the next one oh by the way in case you have not yet heard my book is about to come out it's called Feelgood productivity how to do more what matters to you and it's a book that I've been working on for the last 3 years now it's being published at the end of December 2023 but pre-orders are actually available and I know people don't like pre-ordering the book but if you do pre-order the book and you email me your receipt you will get completely free access to a live exclusive event that I'm hosting in the first weekend of January of 2024 and this is a live online Workshop all about annual planning goal setting and reflection and so I'm going to be facilitating a group with hopefully hundreds of people from all around the world and we're going to be going through how to figure out what to do with our life and how to turn that into goals for the year and how to build systems and how to be consistent with stuff and how to make sure that we are enjoying the journey along the way that is purely exclusively available for people who pre-order the book as a thank you for our little community so if you want to check it out you can check out the book you can maybe considered pre-ordering it the link will be down in the video description so you did it we talked three years ago and now it's real we three years ago we talked on the 7th of October 2023 which was like a three years and a week ago that's nuts and I was saying to you in that interview that like hey Ryan you know I've just started writing my first book any tips mhm and you gave some really good advice yeah and what did I say do you remember you said you said so much stuff you said uh the importance of structure okay the importance of having your materials assembled and kind of knowing what you want to say before you begin to write sure and the analogy you used was like you're like well you know it would be weird if you decided to settle from New York and try and get to San Francisco but you were just like you know what I'm just going to walk and I'm just going to figure it out along the way you would you know it would be sensible to have a map although even I would say what actually the problem is people don't even know they're trying to head towards San Francisco right they just know they're trying to get somewhere and figuring out where you're trying to go as you're as you're doing it it's a bad idea that was that was a big part of my problem in that like the destination changed radically like every year in three-year process sure yeah well you do you do the more the problem is you're trying to figure out when you're work when you're starting a book you're trying to figure out the end result but you haven't done all the thinking required to know the end result yeah this is why I think like the proposal was a bit of a scum because the proposal when I look at compare the proposal to the final result there's like almost nothing in there that that's like the same that's how it is a business plan very few businesses resemble the business plan but there's an Eisenhower quote he says um plans are worthless but planning is everything and so I think it's actually similar there in that if you don't do a proposal this is why actually I think most self-published books don't work it's that because there's no forcing function required to get approval to start um there's no deadline there's no constraints as to how long it can be what it can look like you can basically do whatever you want which you would think would be an artistic sort of creative dream but it's actually like uh potentially a death sentence how so how how do you think about this balance because like you've already made it you can do whatever you want etc etc and yet you still write books on seemingly on a deadline cuz they come up fairly frequently like how do how do you balance these well I do balance it uh so I sold this four book series on the cardinal virtues so I've done two and then I finished the third and then I pushed it a year so it's done I'm taking more time to do it um it's it's now like in in and the the deadlines or the the releases the summer of next year but um there's a tension so on discipline I felt like pushing it and it was actually the right thing to push through and the deadline forced me to get serious about it and do it right and then on this book I was actually more or less ahead of schedule and doing great but then I decided for just family and lifestyle reasons to push it a year so am I pushing it a year because I'm being lazy or am I pushing it because I want more time to do it well or I want it to fit more in a more balanced bed way into my life you know so I think uh i t i function well with deadlines I function well with the sort of day-to-day of it and I think again people people think that the perk of success is being able to do whatever you want and weirdly you actually find that once you can do whatever you want you need to self-impose constraints and boundaries if you want to keep doing it well and in a balanced way m yeah I found that when the pandemic hit and that was when I took you know took time out of full-time medicine for the first time suddenly my whole calendar was empty yeah and I immediately realized that uh oh like I kind of need some constraints here and so I sign up like art lessons and singing lessons and piano lessons and stuff to give some structure to the day and fit in the YouTube and then some later some of the writing stuff around that and I found that that was really nice but it it it always felt like a constant battle between kind of structuring myself and scheduling things things in versus following my energy and like oh you know today I have a lot of energy therefore I want to film a video today versus I don't really feel like it today but like you know I I said I would do it every day that whole thing yeah it it'd be wonderful if inspiration was sufficient but it it usually isn't um and you have to build a structure or a system uh I think it's really important anyway what is your like I guess daily routine look like what's what's the structure you've built around your um I usually try to get up early I'll give you an example though I try to get up early I try to take my kids for a walk that's like the beginning of what we do and this morning we got up I got up early I made their lunches I uh just sort of having quiet time in the morning and then my son got up and he got really into Legos and it was also cold and so I was like do I want to rip him out of this thing that I'm that's also good that's also I'm trying to encourage to have a fight over a thing that might spoil him un wanting to do the thing in future times I'm going to say no uh so I sort of ripped up the Playbook and then I made them breakfast and then I was taking a shower and then um literally as I'm getting in the shower they wanted to go on a walk uh and so we ended up doing like we just sort of so I I guess in the 48 Laws of Power the final law which I think a lot of people Miss is assume formlessness so there's all these laws about do this don't do this do this don't do this but the last law is a kind of a strategic flexibility and so to answer your question earlier about how I think about this stuff I I have found as I've gotten older and more successful that the rigidity that served me well early on has had to give way into a kind of flexibility now there's always a tension or a a concern is that is that flexibility actually just complacency or laziness um and I have to question each time why what is my motivation here but but that rigidity has to become flexibility or one you suck all the fun out of it and two it's not sustainable over a long period of time and it's not it's very susceptible to being disrupted or blown apart by the complexity of life so I'm I'm less I have less of a routine and I have more practices that I try to do consistently yeah and I move them around depending on what's Happening what are some of those practices well I try to get up early I try to walk I try to do some form of hard exercise every day I try to not eat until like I try to have kind of a fasting window um and then I try to I try to do writing before I do other things okay so like I am flexible on a lot of stuff but I don't write at 3 in the afternoon because that's not conducive to doing it well so so just you kind of know what go it's more of a an Intuition or a gut feel as opposed to when I was younger it was like it was almost it was almost a form of OCD like it has to happen at this time if it doesn't happen at this time then there is distress and and that distress you're almost doing the tasks to avoid the distress which is not a good way to live and how did having kids change your relationship with work well just blows your whole life up yeah in a good way but it blows your whole life up I remember this New York Times Reporter was doing this piece on me right as my son was being born and she she asked me like how do you think you know like having kids is going to change your routine and I said something like I don't think it'll change it at all and which was of course Preposterous and uh and very naive but uh it's just totally blown it apart but it gives you important stuff that you Center your life around so like I think people are concerned that like having kids or getting married it'll tie you down and it does it objectively does but it ties you down to reality like it tethers you to the Earth there are school starts at a time and it ends at a time like there's nap time there is eating time there is activities that happen every week you know there's stuff right and so it prevents you from making it all about you uh and it forces you to sort of have non-negotiable things I mean I guess it doesn't Force you you could be a bad parent if you want but if you want your kids to not be a nightmare you realize like routine is very important structure is very important but then also rigidity is you know um impossible there's um uh uh Lyn Manuel Miranda was talking about how he had a kid right as Hamilton blew up and so he would do the play and then it's the hottest thing in the worlds and so every night celebrities attend and then they come backstage and they go we're going Hereafter we're going here he was getting invited all this like incredible stuff and he had to say no to all of it cuz he had to get home he had to get home not just cuz he wanted to see his kid but um he knew that his sleep was already a precarious touch andgo thing CU he has an infant in his house so if he stays out till like 2:00 in the morning and then he gets home and he's woken up five times in the middle of the night or whatever he's just not going to be able to perform the night before then the next night and so his point was that having a kid actually saved him from spinning off the planet from this kind of stratospheric success that he has and I I have found that for sure that like again we think these things are going to be baggage it's more like ballast like it balances you out um in a way that thinking hey I'm totally unencumbered I can do whatever I want I can fully enjoy all the fruits of all the cool stuff that's happening you think that's what you want but it's kind of a recipe for disaster oh okay that's so interesting to hear cuz I guess I've been I've been feeling a bit burnt out from you know the whole like rush to finish the book and then all of the batch filming podcasts and YouTube videos and the audio book then and then like all of this book promo stuff that it is apparently sensible to do and all all this kind of thing yeah and the conclusion I came to a few days ago like was screw it I just want an empty calendar a fully empty calendar yeah and I guess I'm sure if I experienced that for a few weeks I'd be like ah actually I probably want a bit more structur I you want an empty calendar of the stuff that you you want it emptied of the stuff that you don't want to do so like when I have an empty calendar that means I have as much time as I want to write and as much time as I want to spend time with my family what I haven't scheduled is interruptions from those things um even if those things are fun or interesting or whatever ni by the way I was reading your your bio it does you it does you no justice it says 4.5 million YouTube subscribers and it say over 93 million total views yeah but it's way more than that yeah it's like 4.8 4.9 now no no no you've done like hundreds of millions of YouTube views have we yeah oh I don't even look at that number but you don't really I made it a point early in the journey I think uh thanks to all the stoicism Kool-Aid that I was drinking to only focus on the things that were within my control okay uh to the point that I almost never look at analytics and the the only thing I can I even vaguely keep track of is like oh oh yeah I mean I was watching one of my own videos and it said 4.9 million rather than 4.8 million cuz it doesn't even give you the sure know as you get more the numbers get less precise because you it matters less and I can see it in YouTube studio if I go on and and and stuff and I'll occasionally do that just to look at comments and things but I don't know I really try like the more the more I look at the numbers the less happy I am with the creative output well so so tell me why stoicism taught you not to look at how your YouTube videos are doing them that's very interesting to me I realized that when I would look at how my YouTube videos were doing in the back of my mind there would always be that sense of you know the whole like dichotomy of control thing sort of like number of views on a YouTube video is sort of in the in the intersection where it's partly in my control but partly outside of my control um and I knew that if I like looking at those I I wasn't able to look at them purely dispassionately and I would always get a sense oh that one didn't do so well that one did or that one didn't um and I found that you know if I if I keep a general eye on the trend over sort of a period of several months that gives me all the data I need to be like oh that sort of topic is really resonating with the audience that sort of video got like a th000 comments compared to 300 that helps me figure out okay maybe what like I should do more of this and less of that yeah but I try not to take it too far because you know you get the whole audience capture thing where you become a caricature of um of the person that you're audience initially initially enjoyed yeah and I fell I very much fell into this trap during the pandemic actually so um the word productivity in my videos was like really taking off any video with the word productivity or productive in it I was like it immediately like doing super well and so I was thinking well you know this does really well let me just say every put productive in everything my productive day in the life my productive de setup my productive dating habits my productive sleeping routine and all this kind of stuff and after after a few videos of it like people in the comments started to be like okay this is getting a bit much and I started feeling icky about the content because I was putting productive in it to try and get the views because videos with the were productive in it were getting more views I don't know whenever I I I I have this sort of weird relationship with numbers versus what's in my control well it's it's interesting too because it's somewhat in your control as you're making it but then once it's out it's done yeah but that's when we spend the most time like refreshing like it we' you've you you flung it to the public you've put it out and now you're like well do they like me do they like me do they like me how much do they like me give me all the likes right um when if there was any time to think about how something was going to do it maybe could have been as you were making it right but now that's over so now you're really just moting about what you would like to happen and the ship has sailed yeah man that's so true like the the way we do use analytics is in idea generation and titles and thumbnails yeah and that's the thing thankfully one of my team members does because I don't I I don't get joy out of trying to package up a video with the perfect title and thumbnail to make it click baity enough but not so clickbaity that it feels clickbaity right so I come up with a concept that hey I'd love to do a video about I don't know Ryan's new book yeah and we were like okay cool we can't call it disciplin Destiny cuz that would be a bit weird we okay we've got to find an angle of like the one habit that's changing your like the discipline expert or like how do all that kind of stuff I Outsource that to the team and then they tell me okay we've we've tested this with the audience we think the best title is this book made me more disciplined and I'm like great I can make a video based on that title sure yeah and it's also it's not just one of the ways I found it to be dangerous is actually when it works so um I don't know an article comes out about you and it's positive or a video comes out and it's doing well um your book is out whatever you're doing the thing and then you lose you lose a day or more than a day just kind of Basking in it you're just like refreshing and watching like so it's not even like you're torturing yourself you feel crappy that nobody likes you but your it's like your reward for succeeding is a loss in productivity because you're just soaking in this thing that's really not in your control that if it had gone the other way you would be trying to work your mind around not taking it seriously do you know what I mean you'd be like that's not why I made it what matters is that I like it what matters is how it does it the long ter you'd be trying to think through logically why you shouldn't be devastated by this bad news but then when the positive happens you don't do any of that and you just you just kind of sit there and soak it in and really the punishment though is that you're not spending your energy where it matters or where it makes a difference which is like making the next thing or just taking the day off like if you're going to waste a day go waste a day don't waste a day refreshing your Twitter feed I think it's that like Zen proverb or something which is you know before Enlightenment after Enlightenment before Enlightenment chop wood carry water after enl lighten him a chop would carry water sure and I I often think of that when it comes to videos and I I also Suspect with the book because I think currently I have an unhealthy attachment to the New York Times bestseller list as as a lot of writers do um but I just really trying to remind myself of whether or not the video does well you know learn stuff write about it make a video it's like that's that's the thing it's like getting back to the process rather than thinking at all about the outcome when you asked me about self-publishing earlier one I experienced this unintentionally and intentionally when the obstacles way came out uh I'd already sold the sequel and so in one respect that probably cost me a lot of money because the obstacles way did over the next year or two start to do really well so if IID waited I probably could have sold what became ego as the enemy for a lot of money uh a lot more money and I was but I'd actually sold like a proposal version of it while I was still figuring the book out so I was under I I was still figuring doing the work of figuring the book out but I was under contract so I really didn't care that the book kind of was doing okay and then I really didn't care that much when it started to do well like that right there is the the the first time that book hit the bestseller list which was five years after it came out oh wow ni so I i' not only written the next book but I'd written several more books like I by having contracts for the next projects I was just focused on doing the next projects not on how each one did and then with this four book series it's kind of been the same thing like in 2019 I sold I basically locked myself in till 2024 2025 so basically like the next four five years of my thing were locked in so again the downside is uh courage came out it did okay discipline came out it did spectacular so maybe I could have been selling I could have sold Justice for more but um all of that was irrelevant because I was just in the middle of writing the book and I think it's better to be wood and carrying water then going re constantly renegotiating your rate for what you are going to chop wood and carry water for or whatever you know what I mean like like to just have the next thing so you know if your thing is I make a video every week you are already making the next video before one comes out yeah right a comedian comes up with an hour records the hour then there is time before that hour comes out and and it's in that interim period that they're already working on the next hour so if the special comes out and it's a huge hit they're working on the next hour if the special comes out and it's not a huge hit they're working on the next special and you want to be in a rhythm like that because it insulates you from the thing that's not in your control which is whether other people say you're amazing or whether other people say you suck yeah I feel like all all of this stuff comes back down to comes back down to the process and you know big what we talk about in in that book is um you know trying to find a way to make the process enjoyable and energizing um and yeah I find that when I have that in at the front of my mind when it comes to the videos or even even writing the book you know like there were periods in the book journey where I sort of forgot to enjoy the process because the seriousness of writing a book was like Weighing on me and then I would read like I don't know one of your like your newsletter or one of your books or like drive by Dan pink and I'm like oh it's so good this stuff is so good and I'd be comparing it to my first draft and be like why my why is my writing so [ __ ] um and it would take my Editor to remind me that you know the whole the whole message of the book is find a way to make it enjoyable and energizing so you know well it's hard if people say trust the process right but it's hard to trust a process that you have not been through before and so um once you've done it one time you have a sense of the full scope of the process or what you think is a full scope of the process then you do it again and again and again and you start to go oh yeah this is the part where you start to doubt yourself this is the part where you get excited but uh like in Texas we have this season it's called false fall so it's cool and awesome right here it'll probably get hot again right like we think we think the Summer's finally broken but there's actually like several more hot days coming projects are like that too you think you're over the hump you think you've done it and then oh wait no it's going to get hard again but you you you start to get a sense of The rhythms of it and then you can trust the process and then you can also enjoy the process because you know it's like the first time you go on a roller coaster that specific roller coaster you have no idea is this going to be one of the ones where it's like this or is it going to be the ones you right but then once you've done it before then you have some you can kind of anticipate it and you know when to hold on tight and when you can just go with it right and you can kind of watch the other people that have never been on it before how much scarier it is for them and so I think it's it's it's not quite sufficient to just say trust the process because it's it's hard to trust a process that you have not been through yeah that's so true I think like so I I realized this very um sort of tangibly or so you know I've made like 700 plus YouTube videos in my time and I know that recording it always feels like a total [ __ ] show where I'm making so many mistakes and there's so much like crap in it sure but I've done it enough times I know the final product is going to be good because our editor's amazing we'll chop out all the crap will make it look amazing but then when beginner YouTubers see the final result and then they see themselves recording and suddenly they're spluttering and swearing all the time and yeah you never see that raw uncut version of a YouTuber's first take you only see the final product and so now that I've been through the process once with the book knowing how crap the first draft was and then seeing the magic of editing over several months to trim it down and make it good I'm like oh okay I don't so much about having a crappy first draft now well yeah you have your you have your crappy first draft I actually have a shirt there's a Hemingway quote and he says I have a print of it in my office I have a shirt too but he he says uh you know the first draft of everything is [ __ ] and uh the the conceit is that it's sort of showing how even that sentence probably didn't write it perfectly the first time but the idea when is that every every first draft sucks and you want to get comfortable with that you have to get comfortable with the messiness of the the process but weirdly as you get better I do think your first drafts get less shitty or less wasteful right so like um you with your videos and certainly I found this with my books is that there is less and less left over at the end because you start to be able to shoot only what you know you're going to use or you write less you go down less blind alleys as a writer or you you overwrite less because again you know you know what isn't going to be possible what's going to be extraneous you have a sense of what you actually need right so you're trusting the process but also you understand the process better and so yeah when you're you tend to be overdoing whatever it is you're doing the first time and then one of the signs of Mastery or I guess a trait of Mastery is the conservation of energy like you know when and what to apply at any given moment whereas when you're just starting or you're doing it for the first time there's a lot of just kind of sheer force of will and enthusiasm which is important but often inefficient yeah yeah I imagine a video three years ago maybe you shot an hour of footage for a 10-minute video and hopefully now you could shoot 20 minutes of footage for a 10-minute video yeah it is a little bit tighter now than it was before um but even like yes especially on the writing front initially my my worry was I don't have enough material and then after the first draft I was like oh my God I have way too much material yeah yeah um you find that I think writing becomes a process much more of tightening as you go because you realize you just needed to get it all down and then you're realizing oh I've said this twice now and actually here covers it over here so I can they cancel each other out or I can get rid of one so it's it's a process of understand understanding that so I have a question about productivity for you because I feel like people are obsessed with productivity and I'm not always sure why like I I said this thing once maybe you agree with it but it's like that amateurs are obsessed with tools right like what's the best software to do this is the way you know people go what what kind of uhen do you journal with like this fcking matters at all right the what what program do you write with um and if I was to rank the things that contribute the most to what I do tools are like not even in the top 10 today's episode is very kindly brought to you by heel now I've personally been using heel regularly since 2017 when I discovered it in my fifth year of medical school and if you've not heard of hu they're a business 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show notes and that will let you sign up to trading 212 and if you use that link you will also get a completely free share up to the value of £1 so it's l literally free money so you might as well so thank you so much trading 212 for sponsoring this episode yeah that was kind of I was uh as you were saying that I was thinking yeah the tool is maybe the extra 1% left over at the end potentially if like writing in scrier is just a little bit nicer than writing in a Google doc sure but like this is the thing like as I've basically tried to read basically every productivity book on the market um and then some it all fundamentally comes down to really the way to be productive is to figure out where you're trying to go figure out what what habits and what daily weekly routines you need to get there then just sitting down and doing the thing yes and then finding a way to make the thing fun so that you don't get distracted with other [ __ ] and then just doing the thing for a long time yeah and if having a slightly I mean I have a really crappy pen that I stole from my brother now because my fountain pen ran out of ink and it was such a nice fountain pen but like I can write just as well with a crappy B Point yeah the the 1% tweaks um but it's so much more it's it's almost like you know I'm I'm I'm trying to trying to get into to Fitness now and I just love researching you know on running shoes should I get this padding versus that padding been for a run maybe once in the last six months I love the idea of researching running gear because it's great procrastination from actually doing the thing which is put on anything and just go for a run yes or like just go to the gym and do anything with Progressive overload yeah it's like people are optimizing a thing they're not doing yes which which is never going to be the way to get there that was a great uh a great moment um that my my girlfriend told me out out on this the other day uh you know the whole like sauna ice plunge everyone in Austin seems to be doing it I was saying to her hey you know what if I join a gym and it's like you know depending on how busy the SAA is like you know hubman says like four times versus five times and like 24-minute protocol versus 12-minute protocol and she was like you've been to the SAA once in the last six months let's let's just go to the SAA first and then we can worry about optimizing it later sure I was like yeah so true and know I think this obsession with productivity it often feels productive to be reading productivity books ironically and re searching the tools as a distraction from just sitting down and doing the thing well the irony that obsessing about productivity is a form of procrastination right it's giving you the the sense that you are serious that your heart's in the right place that you are trying or making progress but in fact you're not and you're avoiding the hard thing which is doing the doing the thing there is one aspect of I think um there is one aspect of productivity that I think is valuable to obsess over and that is kind of journaling prompts and just ask asking yourself serious questions about why you're doing the thing that you think you want to do where you're actually trying to go I spend a lot of time comparatively like thinking is the direction I'm currently going in actually the direction that I want to be going in sure and I find that the there's almost no amount of too much journaling that can that can happen there because you know in like an hour of journaling I might land on one Insight which is which would if if it nudges my course even like 0.1% that compounds over the long term well yeah I would say being intentional about what you're doing and then clear with yourself about why and what you are doing is really important whereas like productivity a lot of productivity advice seems to me is like optimized optimizing for how you're going to pack your suitcase or what your suitcase is is is or what brand it is or whatever and you really haven't questioned why you're going where you're going or if you should be going there if it's the right time to be going there any of the actually important questions that are going to determine whether this thing is a success or not yeah I think the other unfortunate thing is uh you know we we did a video recently that was something like I read read 107 productivity books here's what actually works and all of it was basically like pick some goals figure out the method it was like the the basic stuff and then we made another video that was like 12 productivity tools I can't live without and that video did so much better and I'm like oh it's so annoying that like the thing that had the meat versus the thing that had the candy the candy performs better yes and so RIT large you know the incentives are there for people who write or make videos or whatever about this stuff is to lean into the tools because the tools are the thing that you know is the the people want well I don't even know if it's candy it's just it's it's concrete right so you can go here's this sort of ephemeral you know metaphysical question about why you're doing it what success is you know why does it matter you're asking these big picture questions and by the time you get to the end of it there actually isn't an answer because it's about the question and that's a lot less clear than the these are the three best pens this is the number one bit of software or here's a really interesting complicated system that a successful person uses whose work you are a fan of yeah right like one is very concrete and the other is essentially ineffable right and so you naturally especially at the early stages one's much more digestible and understandable do you know what I mean like you're you're also contemplating questions that someone if they're a an aspiring High School insert you know um is not even going to understand as a question you know what I mean like like Tom Brady talking about whether you know how much is enough enough or you know where to find deep motivation or whatever that's a lot for someone who's not even competed at an elite level to think about so it's easier to start with what do you have for breakfast right or like what what kind of gloves do you wear do you know what I mean like one one is much more relatable and accessible But ultimately much more inconsequential yeah I do I do find that there are some tools that certainly when I was more of a beginner in the space helped develop the Habit which was the thing that actually mattered so for example uh reading about uh how different people do a weekly review is quite helpful and I you know I downloaded like the initially the PDF template and then the Google Docs template and now notion templates are all the all the rage um but the point is the weekly review journaling prompt questions helped me actually do a weekly review and a weekly review is just a very useful Habit to figure out like how do I do this week what what are my top three things I want to do next week great let's just do those things so there are there there are some instances in which a tool helps build the Habit which when where the Habit is the thing that matters sure but it's easy to take it too far like I I find whenever I rewatch your video about your note card system I know I'm just procrastinating because the thing you actually do is is you write every day but I'm like even in the car on the way here I was like you know what if I had an analog note card system and then I'm like no but I'm traveling it's like oh well I get dang it like let me look at the zle casting system or let me find another app and it's so easy for the mind to go in in those directions because it's like Ryan holiday has a note card system I also find it's like um you know like people who believe one conspiracy theory tend to believe all the conspiracy theories right even though it actually becomes less likely that they're all true right like it's like if you pick one and that's your thing maybe you're right maybe you're wrong but if you believe all of them simultaneously well they contradict each other so it doesn't really work right but it's like I tend to find people who are really into productivity systems the problem isn't that you know that this system is not as good as this system it's that they're missing the point that a lot of it is a placebo which is like pick a [ __ ] system and stick with that system that's the H like you're supposed to pick a thing and then that's your thing right and then you stop thinking about it yeah uh the problem is they're like first they're over here and then they hear this one's a little better and then they switch so it's actually it's not the system that's the problem it's not the tools that that's actually the amateur quality the amateur quality is the constantly moving and abandoning moving and abandoning because that's what's profoundly inefficient right like like you've you found the system and it was working for you like I know actually at this point there's probably something better than the no card system but is it transformatively better probably not right so am I going to uproot the thing that I'm comfortable with that works for me that my old stuff is in for something that's 9% better like if I'm if I want a 9% productivity increase that's pretty easy to find you know what I mean as opposed to relearning how I do everything so uh back in the day I used I used to be a a close-up magician and I would perform at like balls and parties at University and stuff and there was a a phrase that was often um you know in the in the World of Magic the the amateur magician is is the person who performs 100 tricks to you know the amateur magician is the person who put who performs 100 tricks to the same audience whereas the professional magician is the one who performs the same tricks to 100 different audiences yes or what to that effect and In The World of Magic as well there was this constant thing constant like battle between you know on the forums there are the professionals who are actually doing the thing and then there are all the amateurs being like what are the best tricks and the professionals like it doesn't matter just pick three to six of them and just do them at nauseum and you will guaranteed be a professional magician and the amateurs are like oh but like I've got $1,000 I want to spend it on like this trick versus that trick versus that trick it doesn't matter just pick a few and just stick with them and do them repeatedly over a long enough time and that is how you get good at the thing but that's a lot less sexy sounding advice than this one this one trick will change your life yeah like I've been to conferences that have changed my life but I'm always interested when I notice people are going to lots of them like the chances that every single one is going to have that same effect is very low right and so it's like you should you beat the casino leave you know what I mean like um there's this tendency to sort of Chase more and more when you've already gotten most of the games I had some I've got some friends who who attended like a sort of $85,000 Mastermind weeklong Retreat type thing and after day one they were like damn we know what we have to do we kind of want to leave and just do it but like we $85,000 so we've got to kind of stay for the next 5 days knowing full well that like all of this is going straight over their head because they know they got the one thing and they just need to execute on the one thing and then two years later maybe the thing number 20 or3 will become relevant yes but by then youve forgotten about it and you'll need to go to another event so to back to procrastination my one of my favorite quotes from Sena he says the one thing all fools have in common is that they're always getting ready to start right so like they're going to do it tomorrow or they're going to do it later they're going to do it once they get all all the the materials or tools that they needed so I did give you the advice that to to start a book you want to do all your research first which is true and yet really the important thing is that at some point you start doing it yeah right and because it can go on forever to sort of preparing and analyzing and Gathering and you know I just need this other thing first I just but really what you need to be doing is the thing yeah it it always just comes down to this it comes comes back back to this um and I've I I don't know if you've played around with this but i' I've experimented with so many different ways of doing the thing some you know when it comes to videos for example Some Day Some some weeks I'm like okay the way I'm going to keep doing the thing is I'm just going to make a video every single day and then I'll do that for a bit and then I'll be like okay but that's like too rigid and I like want more flexibility like okay cool Tim fah says batching is good so I'm going to batch it and Thursdays are going to be my filming day and it's like I'll do that for a bit I'll be like oh no but like I missed that Thursday and then I'll be like you know said batching is good so why don't I batch in a whole week and film 15 videos in that week and then I can chill for six weeks and then this was supposed to be a batch filming week in Austin and I F nothing because I was like I'm actually not feeling it so there's almost this constant search at least in my life for like this magical consistent system that will cover me 100% of the time um thankfully we have still still been publishing like two videos a week for the last six years so it's like it's not hopefully you're not going to take too much away from actually actually doing the thing but I wonder for you like you've been doing this a lot this sort of stuff a lot longer than I have how how how often has your system for doing the thing actually changed um well I do a handful of different things right so like but the main thing and I think this is important you have to know what your main thing is right we live in a world where there's all these other kind of supporting thing they're necessary yeah not absolutely necessary but I think they're important and but still you have to know what the main driver of everything is and so for me that's writing like writing the books is the main thing that the other things are supporting the writing of the books yeah and the writing of the books is creating the ideas and the platform and the brand and all that make the other things necessary to begin with so the writing routine is essentially unchanged um there's little tweaks here and there but the main thing is like just sitting down and doing that thing and it's not a thing that can be outsourced it's not a thing that can be batched it's the day-to-day of doing it on a consistent basis to what extent do you enjoy writing uh well there's an expression I like that says um painters like painting writers like having written um so at the end of the writing day I feel good do I feel good the entire time not always sometimes when it's [ __ ] working it's nothing better yeah but if you that's the only thing that fuels you you're going to you're not going to be in a good spot cuz some days some of the most important things come it's one sentence in the midst of two otherwise unproductive pointless hours you know so I enjoy showing up and then I enjoy finishing and sometimes that middle period can be torturous so I was going to ask you that like when you say Feelgood productivity does it actually have to feel good uh there there's one school of thought that says it's all about finding the torture that you can tolerate and it's actually the ability to put up with the grind of it that separates kind of the winners from the losers yeah that's the thing so I think it my my thesis in the book is that it doesn't have to feel good but it is generally more energizing when it does generally like positive emotions feel feel energy feel creativity feel like reduce stress all that all that fun stuff and so the question that the question that led to the book in the first place was you know when I was trying to juggle working fulltime as a doctor and also building the YouTube channel and the business on the side it just felt like a huge amount of grind in the day job and then a huge amount of grind afterwards to do the videos and it seemed like you know everyone talks about how you know Journey before destination and I realized that I wasn't enjoying my day-to-day because of this sort of grind approach and so I tried to find any tweak that I could to make it feel just a little bit better and that's not to say that it was fun all the time or that it objectively felt good all the time but I found a series of strategies that meant that almost anything I could make feel even just a bit better and if it felt a bit better it generated more energy and it meant I had more energy at the end of the day to give to my my other hobbies and friends and family and stuff and it also made me more productive so I think it's like you know when it comes to writing for example there are some some basic things that I found was you know the first chapter in the book is about play and about trying to approach things in the spirit of Play now play you know a lot of people have talked about about how comes about as a result of um often a result of the stakes being lower so like Roger fedro probably isn't feeling play when he's in the Wimbledon fight final because the stakes are too high and I found that for example with with with with writing the book when I when I was thinking about the stakes being high like this is my first book and it's traditionally published and it's a big deal that would suck the joy out of it yeah whereas when I tried to lower the stakes to be like no it's okay I'm just writing because I enjoy it and the goal is for me to write a book I'm proud of suddenly it became more enjoyable so the same thing but like just a different framing that makes it feel no the Pro the problem is you're not in the Wimbleton finals but you're fooling yourself into thinking you are that's where ego comes in and uh anxiety comes in you're just you're just like you're making it much more than it is yeah uh and then you're actually ironically making yourself worse at it yes exactly you the other big one is um you know the idea of power so we talked talk about talked about in Chapter 2 uh play power and people are like the three main energizers that I found um if you shoehorn a bit uh and this idea that um we get to choose what we're doing like it's you could be doing the same thing but if you think of it as I have to do this versus I choose to do this makes a huge difference to how we personally feel about the thing um I I really found this a lot when I was when I was working in medicine where you know there was one day where um I I'd finished the end of like a 13-hour shift and I was just about to go home to be like yes I'm going to go home and then the nurse was like Hey Ali can you put an IV a canula in this lady in Bay number four or whatever it was and I was like [ __ ] like this is going to be another half an hour job it's like the nurse has tried and she couldn't do it and so this is going to be really hard I was just about to go home 13 freaking hours haven't eaten and then I overheard that some other patient talking about like oh it's so nice being in hospital the doctors have been so nice to me and things and I kind of realized that I'd been falling into that trap of thinking I have to do this thing and I think Seth gon has a blog post about this that I remembered at the time which was you can just reframe that to I get to do the thing sure so I was like huh I get to do this can I get to make this person's morning sickness better so that you know her baby's better and that she's better because I was working on on OBGYN and it was just like this huge wave of relief that came over me purely as a result of a simple mindset shift of like have to becomes get to well also I think one of the things I add to that is is like important things are hard right and so uh if you are good at something if you have some sort of in um you're like like I I I feel like each of us has kind of a unique potential or we get sort of certain opportunities and with those opportunities comes a kind of an obligation so like when I hear about someone who is really talented and really good and then I get the sense that they're just kind of half assing it or they're stuck or whatever it's not that I'm judgmental but I find it to be sad you know like what do you mean you only wrote one book in 10 years like uh you're not Robert Carol you're not like you're not you weren't slaving away on some amazing Masterpiece you were just ill disciplined and you took the obligations that I think your talent came with you took you didn't take them seriously so I agree uh you should mostly be doing what you want to do but I also think there's something kind of sad and maybe even pathetic about people who are just like not unproductive but uh maybe only partially fulfill their potential yeah I was going to ask you about this so you said earlier that you know you sometimes ask yourself am I pushing this book out of laziness or completion complacency versus like out of a genuine need for balance or something like that I was kind of thinking in my mind like why does it matter like why why does it matter to you if you're being La lazy or complacent you you've written like a book a year for the last like 10 years or something up said like that like Point like you have I I would argue that we sort of have a higher self and a lower self right and you know the lower self says H just like eat whatever you want uh work only when you want um I don't know say whatever you want don't think about consequence like there there's this the sort of immediate gratification sort of short-term impul impulses that we all have right that if indulged repeatedly tend to get us in a place that we actually don't want to be right the person they don't have any friends cuz they say mean things right they're they feel gross they look gross they're not in good health because they don't take good care of themselves you know they look back and they go oh I wish you know I wish that hadn't take like if I gotten serious about that earlier I'd have been done sooner it would have could have done more could have helped more people whatever right so so there's this kind of tension between like our higher self and the lower self stepen pressfield says in between is the resistance right and so to me the question is is whether I'm am I am I doing this because it's the well adjusted mature responsible you know right thing to do or am I just doing it because the other thing is harder you know what I mean uh the other thing is uh going to take more out of me and I'm scared or intimidated by that so I it's not like I feel like oh I have to write these certain number of books so then I'll be remembered forever it's just um so I just took today off but what did I get out like what for what reason do you know what I mean like so I watch TV all day I sat around all day I if if if I decided not to work because I'm going to hang out with my family or I'm going to take a long walk on the beach or I'm going to read or I'm going to take care of myself the that's perfectly fine that's part of a a great life sure um doing it because I want to watch TV yeah that that doesn't I don't think that gets you where you want to go some people might argue that watching TV is self-care and so it's like oh I didn't work today because I felt I don't know stressed or burned out and I needed to watch TV no I think if you're doing that because if if that's actually what it is more power to you but is is that it or are you lying to yourself so for you when it comes to like writing more books I'll put it this way recovery is important right like if you work out recovery is important you have to have a certain number of days where you recover you let the body rest and recuperate yeah um is that what you're doing or are you just not doing it because it's hard to do H it's always hard to do right so and the whole point is that it's hard to do if it was easy to do there wouldn't be any benefits to it right so um you know are you stopping because you're sensitive to an injury or are you stopping because pretending that you're being sensitive to an an injury is an excuse to stop this episode is sponsored by kajabi and they've actually got something really valuable for all of our Deep dive listeners now if you haven't heard of kajabi it's basically a platform that helps creators diversify their revenue with courses and membership sites and communities and podcasts and coaching tools so it's one of the best places for creators and entrepreneurs to build a sustainable business we started using kajabi earlier this year and as soon as we started using it we were like oh my God why haven't we been using this product for the last 3 years it's got everything you'd possibly need for running an online course or hosting an online community or building an online coaching business and it essentially makes it really easy to run your entire online business from payments to marketing tools to analytics kajabi has everything that we creators need all in one place and actually you don't necessarily need a huge audience to generate a sustainable income a Creator on kajabi can for example make $100,000 by converting just 350 customers a year depending on your price points and in fact there are creators on the platform that are making millions of dollars every year with fewer than 100,000 followers across the social media platforms we've been using kajabi to host all of our online courses since the start of 2023 from 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keynote at the kajabi hero live event but as an exclusive deal for deep dive listeners kajabi have very kindly offered to provide the recording of that keynote completely for free to anyone who listens to this podcast so if you're interested in getting completely free access to that keynote just head over to kajabi.com Ali that's kajabi.com and that'll be linked in the show notes in the video description as well you just enter your email address and then you will get the recording of that keynote completely for free whether or not you ever become a kajabi customer so thank you so much to kajabi for sponsoring this episode hm so I was re rereading um bertr and Russell's essay In Praise of idleness um where he's basically talking about how this you know this attitude that the modern world inculcates within us which is that kind of work is inherently meaningful is like bad and problematic and all that jazz I'm like I'm I'm curious for you like you're presumably planning to write more books because you're fairly young in the ground schem of things um but like why what is the if if if not like I want to be remembered I want a legacy then what's what's what's old in service of no he has a great line he says the first sign of an impending nervous collapse is the belief that your work is terribly terribly important and I think he's totally right you know if you have this sense like I'm building this Monument you know or the world has to experience my genius uh this is going to last for a thousand years you know uh that's not that's not only delusional but like it's uh kind of a miserable place to be and it usually end usually feeds on itself and eventually you know wears you down um at this point I write books that I am interested in writing like that I find myself better for having done um this this book that I just did in the virtu series so I did uh courage and I did uh discipline and now I'm doing Justice I'm almost certain this will be the worst selling book in the series The Justice one cuz it's the least you you talked about certain terms you know will perform good yeah discipline obviously was I knew if I did a good job it would be a home run this one even if I do the greatest job I possibly can be possibly can do you know it probably has a ceiling on it in some way but like I was better for having done it it I learned something I articulated something too myself in writing about it um if my kids are the only two people that read it you know like I try to I try to find standards of success or motivation that have become more self-sufficient as I've gone y so at this point I write things because creatively I find them interesting and I love the process of being in the middle of it even even when it's really hard and I the same thing is true with running like I love and I hate running like uh I obviously not doing it is easier than doing it but when I don't do it I feel worse like I feel not in an addictive way but I feel when I do it I feel proud of myself I feel uh physically good I I'm my mind gets in like it it's better that I do it than not do it and there the feeling of being in the middle of a book both the momentum of it and the frustrating this of it it all kind of combines into just an overall rewarding immersive experience there's that's what a flow state is yeah so it sounds like for you writing is the thing that your higher self does and wants to do and therefore is almost uh good in its in its own right regardless of how the outcome turns out to be I think so and so you push yourself to right on days even when you don't feel like it it's like going for a run like going to the gym it's like the thing that you know is good for you that you know is aligned with your own personal values and you don't want to be the sort of guy that's like you know what I'm going to skip writing for the next year so I can play more video games kind of vibe yeah one of the stoics his name was M ruus he says when you do something shameful for pleasure the pleasure passes quickly but the shame endures and then he says but when you do something hard for good the effort passes quickly but the good endures oh and I think that's good you find whether it's pushing yourself physically like exercise it's throwing yourself into a big project you know whether it's sacrificing for someone or something you know you quickly forget all that it took out of you and all that went into it and you think about the impact that you had or you just think about the plane you temporarily ascended to to get there and then when you think about I don't know the cake that you ate or you know the the day that you took or the urge that you submitted to afterwards there's that period where you go that's what I did all that for you know that that that 5 Seconds you know um or not even the 5 Seconds right and that's the higher lower self so you've recently done a bit of a well I wouldn't say pivot like side hustle on the whole daily dad stuff which is interesting um a lot of um I've I I've been just found I found myself reading a lot of like parenting advice recently uh I'm not even close to becoming a bad but I was just curious and I'm part of your daily newsletter on on that as well because it's just it's just interesting but there seems to be this really common thing of like uh people working hard uh in their career sometimes at the expense of their family mhm um and you know you'll hear people say that like I thought I was doing my kids a favor by working and doing this thing and like focusing on on my career and stuff but actually what I maybe should have done in hindsight is to spend less time on my career and more time on the kid stuff yeah how do you think about that balance between like working hard at the thing but also like being there for the the small ones well it's very Insidious cuz you say I'm doing it all for them and so you are doing something very selfish but you are cloaking it in selflessness like that's why I'm getting on this airplane that's why I'm staying this late at the office that's why I'm you know blah blah blah blah blah but if you asked your kids you know what do they want like more money would be nowhere in that list right or if if it if it was on the list it would be such a preposterously and refreshingly childlike understanding of money you know that it would I think it would humble you so you're you're saying you're doing it for them but you're not you're doing it for you you're doing it for you um um and the tragedy of of and the irony of I'm doing it I'm doing all this for the people I never see is a very sad [ __ ] up place that a lot of sort of high power to accomplish people find themselves in and I heard something great when someone said like success is your kids wanting to be with you when you're an adult uh and so like how will you measure your life at the end right um it won't be like the size of the inheritance that you leave them it will be you know are you still in each other's lives now so how do you invest in that's not something you can do later you know what I mean so you have to make those decisions now and they're and they're costly and uncertain and and um the worst part is you don't even know how much it's costing I mean this is obviously much scarier and sort of systemically imposed on women right so like you're going to take three years out of your you know cumulatively three years out of your working life in your 20s and 30s which has this enormous cumulative compounding effect on the trajectory that you're going to end up uh on you know that's a very scary thing um and it's it's it's unfair in a lot of ways um but at the end of your life you know it's probably going to be something you're glad that you did and so I think a lot of men just sort of unthinkingly don't do it at all but i' I've tried to sort of go yeah what is what is it that you want to do and who do you want to be there's this great term an art monster I forget this female writer she was saying like my dream was to be an art monster basically just just me and my work and no family no you know uh no baggage no impositions just me and and it there are a lot of art Monsters and they've written great stuff but when you read their biographies you just sort of go H what you know uh was that worth it you know um and it kind of It kind of taints all of the stuff that they did it makes it much more Bittersweet and not so great how did you decide to you know go into the dad stuff rather than quit stay in your lane as the sto guy I don't know if I really decided it um I mean so writing the daily dad I mean the the reason I decided to do the daily dad was that writing the daily stoic made me better as a person you can't every single day sit down and try to take insights from the wisest people who ever lived and distill them down into a couple hundred words over and over and over again and not emerge some somewhat bonded to those idea like it just it gets in your bloodstream right you're just that's what stoicism is STO what marus was doing in his meditations was writing down things a lot of it comes from other stoic texts he's just writing it down rephrasing it and writing it down and writing it down and rephrasing it and looking at it this way and looking he's having this philosophical discussion with with himself and that's how Marcus realist becomes Markus realist so the process of writing the daily stoic book and then writing the daily sto every day now for seven years it's almost a million words that I published for free uh to you know I think we've done 3,000 daily sto emails it's like seven or eight books worth of content um I have benefited from that like it's built a business around it but like if I had made precisely zero dollar that would have been the bargain of a Lifetime right like I've gotten so much better from having done that and so I just decided that I would do the same thing about parenting and if it helps other people great you know um if it sells books great but the process of having to intentionally sit down and think about and then write about and then publish you know how I want to think about these things has made me better H and that's how that's how you should think about it I was I was talking to my wife last night we were talking about this um book that we were reading and um you know you get all the way to the end you're like oh that was good but actually you needed in you needed to read it over like six months like a couple Pages a day like um I just read this great book by this parenting expert name is Dr Becky Kennedy um and so I read it but then because I'm going to write about it for daily Deb I went through it Page by Page after and took out all the stuff that I liked um and it was the second part was where I got stuff out of it not the reading at once from cover to cover and so there's something about the page a day format that's worked in Daily stoic and daily dad like if you're trying to absorb a philosophy or a new way of thinking or transform yourself from here to there it's it's not 300 pages that you read you know from October 1st to November 17th you know it takes you a month and a half to read it's much better if you're layering it like a page a day for a year or two years or 3 years and you're coming back like the process of that sort of over and over and over and over again that's that's where the stuff gets absorbed what is some of the key um I guess you know from from here to there like through the course of writing daily D and kind of being a parent what is what are some of the key lessons that have really sort of separated the Ryan today from the r maybe like three years ago um um I think patience I think like if I'm thinking like the the things I've struggled with most as a parent but that have also made the most difference uh number one like the greatest thing you can give your gift your your your kids is presents like not gifts but presence like just actually being there not doing something else so you know in a digital world that's extremely difficult to do um so I struggled that patience of course um you know it doesn't happen it doesn't have to happen quickly it just has to happen um to take your time with it to let them take their time to not rush things um every time you think you can't go on like this that's when you get some sort of breakthrough every time you think they're never going to figure it out that's when they figure it out so I think patience has been a big one um i' I've read a lot and thought about like sort of how do you just like just root for this person like not not attach any conditions not attach any judgments not attach any expectations but just be an unconditional supporter of them and who they are for who they are and what they are um which I think ties into another idea I've been thinking a lot about which is like your job is to help your kids become that person not to make them a person that you want them to be you know so to just sort of help them become who they are that's something I've thought a lot about and worked on a lot um and then the one I've been thinking a lot about which I heard about in Dr Becky's book obviously I knew about it but it made sense she talks about like don't try to be a perfect parent try to be a parent who's really good at repair like at fixing it when you mess up fixing it when things didn't go the way that you wanted them to go you know reconnecting when you know there is conflict or when people go in separate directions but but repair so I would say those are those are sort of The Perennial ones that I struggle with and I'm thinking about that's really cool yeah I I um you know my YouTube channel is is essentially an exploration of the stuff I'm interested in and I've recently started to become interested in uh relationships in terms of reading books about how to have a healthier happier relationship uh and I I hope that when I become a dad and continue making videos then I'll be like yeah reading all these parenting books and like making a video every every couple of months to be like right I've just read this sick unconditional parenting Alfie go good good [ __ ] 10 10 takeaways that sort of stuff I found I guess similar to you kind of writing daily stoic through me trying to make a video or two every week for six plus years all personal development adjacent those lessons seep into your subconscious in a way that like they really wouldn't otherwise yeah yeah Senus is we learn as we teach and so if you as a person who writes self-help books or makes YouTube videos or as a poast or whatever if you're thinking I'm really smart and I am telling you everything that I know not only is that egotistical but it actually continues to inflate and uh puff up the EGO right but if instead you see it as like I am trying to figure things out and I am explaining what I am learning as I am learning it yeah you are learning it and other people are learning it and you're creating this feedback loop in which you're both learning at the same time and by having to articulate it and explain it and distill it you are understanding it better than if you were just learning it for yourself yeah yeah there's a book I'm reading at the moment called uh notes from a fellow traveler by Darren Brown he's a magician yeah yeah he's really into STM oh he's he is his book happy is very good basically all about stoicism um but I really like the title of that book notes from a fellow traveler he's he sort of a book written for other magicians um but that framing like a fellow traveler I really like that cuz he's not trying to be a guru he he's not saying I've got the answers he's just like hey I'm in this business just as you are and here are some notes MH and I just love that framing of it it just takes takes all the pressure off reduces the seriousness makes it feel more like play all all the good things yeah someone who's just a little bit further along the path in some ways or struggling with their own things and you're and you're sort of channeling that and trying to make it accessible and practical to other people what is what are some like I I really like this list of the the parenting some things do you have any on relationships in general like uh like the Romantic relationship with your wife and things what are some things that you guys do that maybe you've discovered through Reading and stuff that well I always say that the number one SE so I've been with my wife now for 17 years we we met when we were in college and um we uh we met at a college party we got married almost 10 years ago I think 8 years this year 9 years so it's been a long time so it's and we basically been married that whole time uh in that we always had a a very sort of involved like serious relationship as opposed to just we known each other a long time um and so people sometimes ask what the secret to like you know lasting that long is and I usually say that the the secret is to not break up that's the secret that's the number one secret is to just not break up um because I'm joking but I'm also not joking right like I think just as a productivity system or a business or a lifesty what it's about picking a thing and then sticking with that thing right um through the ups and downs of what life inevitably brings you and I find you know obviously we got together before online dating was really even a thing but then dating apps and like I notice that a lot of my friends struggle because it's easy to break up and it's easy to find another person do you know what I mean like essentially an unlimited amount of other fish in the sea exist and if you conceive of that it makes it very hard to do what a relationship requires you know what I mean which is sacrifice which is struggle which is putting up with [ __ ] you know so it's heart it's like it's really heart it's heart uh so I I uh profess to have no no secrets other than don't quit I mean it's it's amazing how in in all these different spheres like you know the stuff you were talking about with the kids presence patience rooting without conditions judgments expectations being repair not being perfect all of that stuff applies to every other aspect of life as well like work too well even the kid Stu applies to self right because we all have sort of we all have this inner child that needs work right that's stuck somewhere not fully developed and one of the beautiful things about having kids is the way that it allows you to reparent yourself because you suddenly fully understand what a six-year-old is going through or a nine-year-old is going through or a 9-month-old is going through and you can see more clearly now the things that you didn't get that maybe you needed um or the ways that how everyone used to do things was insufficient um maybe just for you specifically or maybe just as a practice it was terrible and you can kind of see oh okay I can't go back in time and fix that but I can do things differently here and I can also empathize connect with an earlier version of myself that needed those things too and that by giving that thing to someone else you're also partly healing yourself that's great stuff um you're in pretty good shape what are some of the secrets to stay staying in good shape as you've you know been a parent I possess to have profess to Have No Secrets there either other than I try to run swim or bike every day I just try to do some hard strenuous physical activity every day um and if there is a health benefit to that I consider it a bonus on top of the two real benefits that having an exercise practice gives you one you are literally practicing having a practice like every day I go for a run the default is that I do the thing and every time I do the thing I'm building the muscle of doing the thing and being the kind of person that does what I I say I'm going to do yeah like it's not fun to do it it can hurt to do it but I get up off the couch and I do the thing that I say I'm going to do and the second benefit of having the physical practice is that it's usually getting the mind moving in some way uh and so you know there's no screens there's no multitasking you're just in that head space so like I have the I have the the flow state every day from the physical activity and the days when I don't have it nothing else is as works as well do you do any weight training or yeah I try to lift weights like I don't know a couple times a week feel like I've seen some b-roll of you in like the backyard yeah I like kettle bells or I have like a squat rack like I do some stuff not as in the pandemic I got more into it than I do now the important thing for me is I run swim or bike like that I do some form of cardio exercise for a long period of time and then if I can get the other stuff in sure changing gears a bit um I was Rel listening to the conversation we had three years ago in the car on the way here um and the one of the things you said in that has actually stayed with me for the last three years it was something to the effect of you know you've got all these who are in real estate and sometimes you're like huh maybe I should get into real estate and then you realize all your friends want to be self-help book writers and you're like huh I've got a pretty good gig I wonder if you can just sort of like Riff on that for for a sec senica had this word emia which he defines as Tranquility it says Tranquility is the sense of the path that you were on and not being distracted by the paths that crisscross yours he says especially from those who are hopeless lost which I think is very beautiful and [Music] true sometimes you find like when you're running you know someone will pass you and you go are they faster than me they could have started 8 seconds ago and you could be five miles in or they could be stronger than you they could be doing steroid you know like there's un the idea that you're comparing yourself to this person when you don't know when they started and you don't where they're finished finishing is madness right um and life is like that like we're all running our own races and you got to have a sense of the race that you are running and what victory or success in that race is to you so I think that's like just the number one life lesson and something I I remember learning run around this track in college and I would sometimes catch myself picking up my Pace to keep up with someone else and then they would stop and I'm like I just gassed myself you know now I have to cut the Run short because I was competing with this person and I have no idea what their goals are what they're doing I I know nothing about them other than someone competition you know and it it sucks you in so I think that's a really important lesson that I've learned from the physical practice over the years but one of the things about jealousy or sort envy that sort of competitive urge that we feel in other parts of Our Lives is that we don't spend a lot of time thinking about who that other person is what their life is like uh and what they want you know Marcus really says like these the people whose approval you you crave he says take a minute to think about who they really are and whether and see what that does to the approval you want from them right it's like you just go oh this person has this I want to be like them or I want to to be accepted into that group I want to be in this club and you're not really thinking about who those people are what they do whether it's working for them and I've had this surreal sort of experience pertaining to that where you meet people and you think they have it all and then you know you're jealous of them and then it turns out they're jealous of you right like you you jealousy almost always takes for granted what you have cuz it's you know eyeing what someone else has and there's usually a an ignorance of would you act what what is it actually like to be that other person and i' yeah I found it's funny you meet and meet these billionaires or whatever and what do they actually want to do they want to write books like they they have all the money in the world and what are they trying to spend the money on they're trying to spend it on having the thing that I get to do and so I I try to remind myself of that and count myself as lucky to get to do this do you feel that sense of comparison or or do you slid you ever feel that sense of comparison when it comes to uh bestseller lists and book sales numbers and H James clear's got this many five star reviews on Amazon and I've only got this many you know that that whole shebang well that's why it's important to understand what race you're running right so um I remember I was at a conference in Canada I don't remember I was at some conference in James who was uh then he had this popular newsletter and I S vaguely knew his work we talked a couple times I was doing a panel or session on publishing and he came and he asked for a bunch of advice but he was just generally if I remember correctly quite skeptical about why anyone would traditionally publish or publish a book at all he's like why would I do this I have this huge email newsletter why wouldn't I just write stuff on the internet and I thought I said look people have read books for thousands thousand of years it's a it's a medium that has a certain cultural significance and books are actually a great way to deliver ideas right but there I was a person who' published you know a few successful books at that point and I'm sort of like condescendingly telling this internet writer why publishing should uh you know be something that he considers and then a couple years later he puts out a book and that one book has sold more than all of my books combined and then some so you know the one reaction to that would just be jealousy scorn s like you could you that could make you feel shitty and I think there are times in my life when maybe that would have made me feel shitty but first off I like James second I think he's a great writer and I think Atomic abits is actually a very good book and third I don't know how many I'm counting now but whatever there is no Universe in which that book selling more or less copies affects my life in any negative or positive way right like so that book could sell a 100 million copies they're not it's not coming out of my pocket right so more power to them right um and so I've tried to remind myself of that but then what I you have to do when you realize you're running your own race is you have to go James is writing a book about habits which is for everyone I am writing about an obscure School of ancient philosophy which I would like to be for everyone but by definition is probably going to be for fewer people and that is a choice that I made willingly I can write about whatever I want I could have written about whatever I want I chose this thing or this thing chose me because it's the right thing for me and you have to be able to go ah right this is where I'm supposed to be I made a series of choices and For Better or For Worse those choices made some outcomes possible and some outcomes not possible like I remember I spoke to these uh high ranking officers in the Navy once a couple years ago and I was talking about ego or something and I said you know like if you got into this for like money and recognition and fame you [ __ ] up like you shouldn't have joined the Navy like you joined this because there were certain parts of it that Lit you up that were meaningful to you you that you thought were the right fit for you you chose classical music not pop music right and by nature of making that choice some outcomes are possible and some outcomes are not possible and you have to accept that and the worst thing you can do is make those choices which are objective and sort of unbeatable and then work really hard and expect things that are in contradiction of that choice do you know what I mean like if you're a classical musician and you go my goal is to be the best classical musician I can be and to push the boundaries of blah blah blah blah blah then you can succeed if you go I'm putting out this album and I hope it debuts at number one on the billboard charts you know you're almost surely going to be severely disappointed because you've chosen something that is a smaller pool you know maybe you have a higher flooor but a lower ceiling that's the nature of the choice that you made and being honest with yourself about that is really really important at least for happiness yeah do you ever meet writers who you feel have sort of this unhealthy relationship with comparison is like or most of the people you just hang out with fairly enlightened no no I mean definitely there's people that are you know sort of driven by how much they sell or how much money they make or whatever but again if that's why you got into books you [ __ ] up you know what I mean like if you got into writing books for money and fame and power you're an idiot like like there's that's not even that's like that's probably the worst of all the different genres of entertainment or Show Business yeah you pick the worst one like for that if that's what you're optimizing for you pick the worst one um so to expect like the sto say don't expect figs in Winter that's like the essence of happiness is to not expect figs in Winter there's a time when you can get figs and it's not winter um so you know you can be successful writing books you can make uh a good amount of money you can make more money than you need but are you going to rival the fortune of Warren Buffett no you know so to expect otherwise is probably silly it's not even probably silly it's stupid it's stupid and it's not fair it's not fair to you or to the people around you right because you are feeling grieved that you didn't get something that it was not possible ever to get so my book is coming out in at the end of December so I'm not sure when this is going to be aired but end of December uh any advice it's the first one um you've been been through this a lot yeah um so I always tell people when they finish a book yeah that you have completed the first of two marathons and you you finish this first marathon and you think and you're like you stagger across the finish line and and you think they're someone grabs you by the hand and you think that they're going to take you over to like the metal stand and instead they're just leading you over to the starting line of the second Marathon which is now marketing and selling the book MH talking about it and getting it into people's hands yeah and so understanding that these are two equally important races um I think is really really important and not enough people do that they just write something and they just expect or assume that the world owes them success which it doesn't people are busy people have a lot going on there's not only all the books that are coming out but there's literally everything that has ever been published for all of human history up until this point and a lot of it is very good and most people haven't even gotten into a fraction of that so the idea that your thing is going to jump in front of that line is inherently presumptuous if not delusional and so it takes a lot of work to break through you know the obstacles the way when it came out first off I said to myself I'm writing a book about anci philosophy and most people are not interested in ancient philosophy yeah so it's already an uphill battle and then I said to myself I read a lot how many books do I read the week they come out or the month they come out or the year they come out and I read way more than most people how many books have I pre-ordered ever in my life maybe one or two so the idea that this thing is going to come out of the gate as a hit is stupid you know it's going to take a long time so first off you try to make something that doesn't need doesn't have an expiration date on it that's number one number two seeing it as a marathon and not a Sprint is really really important so the obstacles the way came out in May of 2014 I had started writing it in 2012 so it took two years came out it sold three 4,000 copies its first week it got skunked on the New York Times bestseller list skunked yeah like it should it probably sold enough to hit the what was then the extended list there was 20 spots on the advice how to then and it didn't and it certainly sold enough to hit the Wall Street Journal hard cover business list and uh someone at my publisher had decided to list it as a like a different like it didn't qualify for that list like they categorized they checked the Box cized something different didn't hit it yeah so it did not hit any bestseller list until September of 2019 wow nice at which point it had sold close to a million copies um so again we think like you know we think of what a bestseller is we we forget that bestseller lists are categorized by the week so a book that sells 10,000 copies in one week will hit a bestseller list for that week almost certainly but a book that sells 1,000 copies a week for a year sell five times as many copies but almost certainly not make any bestseller list and which would you rather have um and so it's about setting yourself up to last and it's about not quitting on it nice um and the obstacles way sells most years sells more copies than it did the previous year which is you know pretty rare in publishing but every single week that comes out it that it is out how many copies it's sold in its first week becomes less and less important right and yeah unless you are not successful that will be true for your project right like every week the percentage of how you did at the beginning becomes more and more meaningless becomes more and more meaningless but that's very hard to think about when you when it is 100% of the weeks that you have been out right um takes time and and realizing that when the thing I've try tried to say to myself is um the to people who have never heard of you you are new so I I'll prob almost certainly have an in email in my inbox when I get done from this from someone that say I just read your book the obstacles away that is approaching its 10 year anniversary yeah right and so to them it's a brand new book and it's a brand new book to them because they're a junior in high school yeah you know and they were eight when it came out you know um and so you know that's what sort of lasting can do um and to and to yeah to to sort of be be patient with is the main the main thing we so we we have a telegram group for our podcast and we said we were going to to interview you and we had loads of people asking loads of questions there's one comment from one guy that I felt a bit salty about he was like Ryan holiday says the same stuff on every podcast he's interviewed on and I was like H cuz I also I I say the same stuff on every podcast I interview and it's like it's kind kind of like a thing you have to do and like I I found that it was it was less a common in you and more like I started thinking [ __ ] you know I've made the same video so many times I've talk been talking about productivity for like six plus years now I've basically been saying the same stuff but each each month we get like 100,000 new subscribers it's clearly new to someone yeah there's some main character energy in in people who don't realize that um yeah most people are consuming this thing for the first time and hearing about this person for the first time M so you know a as a Creator there's a little bit of narcissism in that you go like everyone's following everything that I do and in fact not only is most people not know that you exist even the people that know you exist and are fans you're like 500th on their list of priorities like I think about my favorite bands my favorite authors like how closely am I following their life like not at all yeah I'm I main character energy my own life so realizing that like that self-consciousness can actually hold you back as a Creator cuz you're like they'll people will get mad that I just talked about this two videos ago and actually they didn't see two videos ago so you're not but um the other product of this is is the other part I would say to that person that's a little tricky is it's like dude it's not my fault like I can only answer the questions that I'm being asked and I tend to get asked the same questions right what is so so so like I would love to be I would love to have a totally new and unique conversation every time and I do I I definitely feel like there are ones where I'm going that that was interesting to me for a change I didn't feel like I was sort of you know uh giving the same song and dance but a lot of people are just asking the same questions because they're introducing you to Their audience or they want to get the the basics you know what I mean so it's it can be weird do you ever good get boarded writing about stoicism um not really uh because one of the ideas from the Greeks is this idea that we don't step in the same river twice because the river changes and you change and so I mean I've been doing the daily stoky maill every day for seven years and I've probably used some of the same quotes hundreds of times at this point but it feels new to me every time I do it because what I'm trying to say or the way into the idea is different and I know the audience is different and I know what's happening in the world is different so it it keeps it it certainly keeps me it feels fresh to me because life is fresh um but when I am bored I just write about whatever I want you know like it isn't the only thing that I do uh and so when I feel like writing something I write that thing H yeah cuz people sometimes ask me that you know are you Bor aren't you bored of talking about productivity like honestly not really like I'm bored of I guess making videos that are like top 10 productivity tools but I do very little of that these days and I think productivity is you know really just about using our time well which covers basically everything in personal development and so even if I'm writing about relationships or making a video about health I would count that as productivity yeah but but also you know productivity to you when you were in medical school is different than what productivity is to you now as you are not in medicine it's different to you when you had one employee it's different to you when you had 10 you know it what you're going through and where you're applying it is fundamentally different so even if you're talking about the same ideas you have a larger sense of it you have a larger set of experiences to draw from and so even if it is the same it's it's better and different yeah because it's based on more nice why do you think people are so interested in passive income oh I'm really interested in passive income does it exist I I think it does um so there's this the this whole dream I I'm I'm not sure if if Tim Ferris used the phrase in four hour work week or if it was a thing afterwards but I remember reading that book when I was like 17 and just about about to yeah and just like just about to apply to medical school and my mind just absolutely blew wide open at the the thought that I could be making money while I slept and just that thing of like you know was always always in the back of my mind and now we know it's it's another one of those things that anytime we make a video on YouTube uh with the with the phrase passive income in it we know it's going to do well cuz people love the idea of of doing a thing and then it making money without needing your additional input I think kind of like books books are a source of passive income yeah well intellectual property exactly yeah you know you wrote the obstacles away 10 years ago and it's now been making you passive income ever since um I've certainly found in our business um the stuff that I I I get so much satisfaction out of seeing like a a stripe notification that someone bought a course I filmed three years ago and I've made $149 from it and way less satisfaction making way more money on a sponsored video because there's something about it being an asset that is spinning off I guess free money that is like really nice and also I guess it really appeals to other people yeah I guess that makes sense I was talking to an internet marketer person that I knew and you know like let's say he was saying like the email subject line like follow a strategy to make $1,000 a month or to make thousands of dollars a month would actually perform worse than say like this strategy helps me make $1,447 per month like the spe he was saying like the specificity of it if ital people and I alwaysed what there's something naive is not the wrong right word maybe unsophisticated is a nicer way to say that about the idea that you if you just do all this stuff at some point you won't have to do anything do you know what I mean because that's not really how life Works in my experience yeah no it's not really how life Works um nor is it how you would actually nor is it how the life works for most of the people that you admire do you know what I mean yeah like people who do stuff that you're like that's cool I want to be like that are not people who own a series of vending machines that passively make money while they sleep do you know what I mean they're people who are actively engaged in what they do yeah I guess um I so I've I've I've kind of gone back and forth on this whole passive income thing um we we still make videos about passive income and I always do a whole like 20 minutes of philosophizing at the start to be like okay here's how money Works money is an exchange of value blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah um but I find that like if I think back to myself back when I was in medical school the thought of being able to if I if someone gave me a vending machine business and it was making 3,000 a month I'm like whoa I never need to work a day in my life now now I can now I can do what I really want to do sure and just that Co being able to cover the basics through some sort of automated income stream even if it's not like greatness or anything even if it's just like I don't know automated vending machine selling Coke cans or like a t-shirt business or whatever the thing is I think that is that that is still very appealing because then it's like cool the bases are now covered I can now spend my time doing the things that I I actually want to do I get that yeah I I I I thought about I thought it about it that way earlier in my career I mean for if I had a job as I was becoming a writer which allowed me to make certain creative decisions that maybe if I was a starving artist I wouldn't have been able I wouldn't have had the luxury of being able to turn things down or doing things a certain way or having as much time but then yeah I thought I it was like I don't have a trust fund but if I have sort of income streams other than like the creative work that I do it's like I gave myself a trust fund yeah and now I have a certain amount of Freedom or Independence that I wouldn't if I was living and dying by how single paycheck yes or or till I burned through the book Advance or whatever it was you honestly like there and anytime I make one of these money themed videos there are always some comments that say oh I can't believe you're so obsessed with money like stop talking about money all the time I'm like oh this guy is such a so greedy and and stuff but I'm always like no like having having more than on stream of income is genuinely life-changing like the fact that I had money coming in from my YouTube channel and my business meant that I could leave my day job or at least go part-time on it to focus on the thing that actually brought me joy and fulfillment being able to have an extra stream of income is what allows parents to spend more time with their kids sure it's like one of the most worthwhile things in the world to have if you care about personal freedom and fulfillment and stuff um and so I was sort of feel I feel a bit dist of of the phrase passive income but I almost view it as a bit of a a troan horse into kind of teaching people that like hey you know the way you actually make money is by creating x amount of value and capturing y% of it now just figure out a way that you can do that that's not correlated with your time generally by creating something that's like Media or code or basically those two things yeah or Investments or or yeah or money itself yeah yeah uh yeah people talk about like you know I want to earn like [ __ ] you money but really you could just have enough to be like eh you know or like I don't need to yeah or you know just just enough that it can it can kind of help you swing you one way or another as you're thinking about making a decision do you know what I mean uh whereas if your livelihood is dependent on this thing entirely it's very hard to I think about like I mean obviously you're not American but in in America the fact that for most people their health insurance is tied up yeah it's the D it's especially as a country that celebrates entrepreneurialism and risk-taking it seems like the most basic thing in the world that you would want to separate those two things so people could take bigger risks and bet on themselves and do like you shouldn't think I could literally die if I leave my job that's Madness to me but being able to go hey actually I'm going to I'm going to it's I'm going to see where this thing takes me and I know I'm not going to starve like I know that I have this thing maybe it's not covering my full expenses like you know what I mean like I I have these things that allow me like when I when I did the obstacles the way my publisher offered me about half of what I'd gotten paid for my first book so if I didn't have my day job um I probably I don't know if I would have said yes um but I I wasn't indifferent to money but I was able to go I really don't care what the amount is what I care about is are you going to publish this book because if you are then I'm going to go all in on this thing do you know what I mean and and so having I I do see how that gives you gives you a certain amount of freedom of movement yeah I think like even like even in the UK so obviously like Health in your health insurance is not tied to your employment and the National Health Service is very good but even then people still act as if quitting their job means that they're going to die yes and I'll often speak to people who you know like you know back in the day I was a bit concerned that oh if I leave medicine will people think oh [ __ ] you I don't want to listen to your content anymore uh but it's actually kind of the Opposites happened people are like oh man you got out of the system you like I don't know something about the Matrix and stuff so people keep ask ask ask me for advice around quitting their job all the time they're like yeah I really want to leave my job and do this thing I'm like great what's stopping you they're like oh but like you know the paycheck and I'm like okay are you on the poverty line where like this paycheck is actually meaningful there is a difference between survival and not they're like nope have you got any dependence nope these are all people in their 20s that have a safety net from their parents and yet still the thought I might quote fall behind yeah and like fall behind my friends who are then getting that promotion at Mackenzie or whatever the thing might be is preventing people from making a decision they just very unlikely to regret so I try and like nudge that as much as possible well I I got so lucky when I dropped out of college since I've talked about this before but when I went in there I was like I'm here to drop out of college and they were like what you know uh they're like just fill out this form you take out you're you're just taking an indefinite leave of absence you can come back whenever you want there were some consequences like I I remember I was signing I signed something and it was like your scholarship may not be here when you're back as an adult now I realize they probably just would have given it to me again but like so there it wasn't totally without cost but there was the idea that like I thought it was this permanent irrevocable lifestyle decision when in fact it was a pause and you think hey I'm going to leave this to go do this I'm going to go give this a try I'm going to open this coffee shop you think you can never go back yeah and of course you can go back if you were in the hospital for a year would you be sitting there going I can never go back to my job no you would know there's going to it's going to be an adjustment period I might have some ketchup I have to you know there's but you you just go get another job like that's how life works right and but especially when you're younger and you don't have the experience it feels like the shift or the transition or the the quitting can never be undone and only the time you realize that the stakes were so much lower than you thought they were yeah yeah I find the the Tim FIS fear setting exercise to be just really helpful actually the worst case scenario what's the worst case it's like okay what does it look like how could you me to get against it let's say the worst case does happen what can you do to come back to where you currently are or at least some place that's good enough um I think I've done that like three or four times in my life had the sort of Crux of making a big decision and I've always been like oh this is really helpful yeah the worst case is never as bad as we think it is and recovering from the worst case is also never as hard as we initially think it's going to be yeah I remember when I was thinking of dropping out I was talking to this person and and who was telling me I should do it and I go you know what happens if it doesn't work out you know and he he was like when I was in college he's like I got mono or something he had he got some and he he spent a year recovering yeah and he's like do you know how many times this has come up in my life that it took me five years to graduate from college zero times nobody knows nobody even does the math you started college at this date you got your first like nobody knows it just it as more time goes by it just all go like you spent your time in college now you're not in college no one's like oh but what about that year between your sophomore and your junior year what was that about it it never comes up and his point was like if I take this risk and it doesn't work out I just go back and it takes you four years to graduate five years whatever it's it's a it's a rounding error in the big scheme of things there a good I think it's the thing that Jeff Bezos says um which is like you know he's he's talking about kind of the game of Entrepreneurship and he's sort of likening it to a baseball match and he's like normally in a baseball match you can either hit one to four runs or whatever the number is I don't know anything about baseball but he's like in entrepreneurship you can take a swing but like the upside of the Swing is infinite yes and so if you take enough swings you can actually get an outcome that way outperforms what you could have done if you were doing the job thing sure for example um and I think the you know I I I wish more people would appreciate the asymmetry of The Upside that you get from taking a risk and doing your own thing potentially right so you you you understand and you articulate the downside Which is less than you think and then it's hard to wrap your head around the fact that the upside could literally be incom comprehensible like when Jeff Bezos starts Amazon he has some idea that it could be successful but it would have been literally impossible to conceive of what it became yeah because it didn't exist yet and when I left I had this sense that I wanted to be a writer and I knew that I thought leaving got me closer a better chance of being that writer than staying and maybe it's true maybe it's not but like the the writing that I ended up doing and the level at which I ended up doing it would have been if I thought that's what I was doing I should have been certified you know what I mean like I would have been a sign of a mental illness like there any sense that this is how it was going to go yeah you know what I mean so you're just taking it step by step yeah I think the the other big thing that I found really helpful was you know back in Jeff's day we where there were very few examples of what does entrepreneurship look like like these days no one like people don't have that excuse anymore like if someone want is even entertaining the thought of being a writer there are a zillion interviews with professional writers out there if someone wants to be an entrepreneur there are a zillion interviews with entrepreneurs where they're literally talking about how much money they're making yeah similarly for YouTube and stuff um and so so surrounding I think an information diet is a really important part of this like even just watching videos reading books and listening to podcasts from people who are doing the thing that you think you want to do helps you realize that oh are fair Fairly normal they've just been doing it for a while and oh that's what the outcome could look like yeah like look if you're no one no one goes must be impossible to be an accountant how does someone become an accountant right because you accountants are everywhere right although you know if you grew up in the inner city and you're parents didn't work and you never had it might actually seem utterly unattainable and impossible to become that thing and the reality is it's not people do it every [ __ ] day and that's not to say it's easy but it is possible it's very possible and if you steep yourself in how possible it is and surround yourself not physically but intellectually with people who have done it you figure out how it can be done and you we talk a lot these days about like nepo babies and nepotism I think so much of that is if your mom was a famous actress sure that gives you advantages and introductions and you're in this sort of millu that's beneficial but also that doesn't seem impossible or impractical cuz your mom is doing it she's not that great do you know what I mean she's like you know you're just like people do this it is a job you see how it works it's deconstructed and mystified for you in a way that allows you to go to give yourself that self- assignment like I could do that yeah it was the same for me with the medicine stuff like I didn't have any in any official Advantage getting into medic school but my both my parents are doctors all of my friends's parents are doctors basically everyone I knew growing up was a doctor and so like it doesn't seem that hard people become doctors people become doctors and then you know it was only when I started applying to med school and stuff where some people oh my oh my God you're applying to me wow that's so hard is I is it like everyone I know is a doctor like it's not that big a deal um I think it's that same concept applied to yeah anything so people will probably be listening to this towards the end of the year where they start thinking of habits and resolutions if someone's like I want to be more productive next year yeah what would you tell them oh if someone wants to be more productive next year all right I've got got three three things number one is actually just figure out or at least make a rough first draft of where do you actually want to go like sure you can be more productive by cranking out more words per day or whatever but like if you're not trying to be a writer and don't have a vague sense of what productivity is not a goal exactly yes productivity is like uh sort of an Effectiveness measurement on route to a particular goal and if you don't have that goal then optimizing for productivity is completely pointless yeah so I think step one is to figure out what the goal is you know some people don't like the word goal um the the most helpful exercise i' I've ever found for this is uh something called The Odyssey plan from the book designing your life by Bill Bernett is and this other guy who's like some Stanford professors uh and basically the idea is that you imagine your life three to five years in the future if you continue to down your current path and you write out what it would look like then you go back back to day one back to today and and you imagine your life 3 to 5 years from now if you had to take a completely different path and then you go back and then you imagine your life 3 to 5 years from now if you had to take a completely different path but Money Was No Object and you didn't care about what people thought of you and that just gives you sort of this Divergent thinking that most people just never do and I I personally enjoy like doing that exercise every year and then converting it into a okay what does my 12- month celebration look like 12 months from now what would I like to be celebrating in the different Realms of Life Health work relationships Joy those are the four that I like personally sure and now I've got some goals written down and there's so much evidence that says that people who write down goals people who have goals are way more productive than people who don't and people who write them down are even way more productive than people who don't write them down so step one figure out what your goals are and just write them down step two I find it super helpful to just convert all of those goals into what is the action I have to take each week so so if you're for example trying to write a book it might be a daily action of writing for 2 hours a day or a thousand words or whatever the thing might be in my case I'm trying to get fit and so weight training three times three times a week is the habit or the system I'm trying to develop um and then number three is putting all those things in the calendar oh and then if they're in the calendar and you can turn and you can make yourself the sort of person that does what's in the calendar honestly that is like 95% of all of all of the world's productivity advice condensed into three things figure out where you want to go turn it into and figure out how you're going to get there and then just put it in the calendar and do the thing when it comes around with a fresh year coming what would you recommend people stop doing like what's a what's like a a destructive habit that you would say to get rid of a really big one that holds everyone back is overthinking um so much research from this book around procrastination was realizing that procrastination is primarily an emotional problem um there is some sort of kind of fear of looking bad fear of failure self-doubt uh the mind starts to weave all these stories about how we're not good enough to do this particular thing and you know I've interviewed a couple of kind of procrast professors in procrastination who've done all the research about this and their their whole thing is like you've just got to find a way to cut through the [ __ ] that the mind will present present to you and just make a start on the thing and often procrastination is a problem with getting started because once we get started the means that we'll just continue going it's way harder to objects in motion tend to continue exactly new's first law yeah we talk about that in chapter four of the book um so recognizing that has has really helped me recognize that when the mind is getting in the way the best thing I can do is just get started with the thing and then the mind has a habit of just sort of getting out of the way but if people can stop overthinking and stop letting this fear of self-doubt and failure and stuff get in the way getting in the way of living their best life I would love that I would love for that to happen all right last question what's something you feel like the stoics can teach a person who wants Feelgood productivity yeah I think the the main one I always come back to is the dichotomy of control um epic teas is it yeah um you know there are some things that are within our control and there are other things that are not within our control and any amount of worrying about the things that are not within our control is usually worry that it's wasted and I think a big part of feel-good productivity is find a way to control the things that you can control you know a huge part of what drives intrinsic motivation is the sense of autonomy sense of control the sense that we have power over what we're doing and some people are like well you know I don't have any control over what my boss tells me to do I like okay you might not have control over the specific thing you have to do but you might have control over how you choose to approach it you have control over the process can you find a way to make it more interesting can you find a way to speed it up can you find a way to slow it down can you find a way to I don't know add music in the background to make it more interesting there is always control that we can take in basically every situation even in situations where we feel like we have none and there's that quote from Victor Frankl where he's you know in aitz and is sort of surrounded by you know the German concentration camps and everything um and even in those in that scenario where he's got he and his fellow inmates have no control over anything at all at least they re retain control over their own mind yes and over the how they choose to approach the the situation so even in the most extreme of situations we can find the things that we can control and we can focus on controlling those and I think that's such a nice idea from stoicism that I I always come back to no it's very well said I I my productivity advice from the STS would be a question mark sh says you have to ask yourself every moment is this essential he says because most of what we do and say is not essential and he says when you eliminate the inessential you get the double benefit of doing the essential things better and so when I think about how I'm able to do what I do it's there's the things that I don't do that I've stopped doing or that I have delegated someone to do or that I have brought on a team to scale being able to do and when you get rid of the wasted movements or the wasted thoughts or you stop chasing the things that don't matter or move the needle you find that actually I mean it takes a lot of energy to be great at something but it's less than people think you know what I mean like I think maybe someone would assume that like a writer writes 10 hours a day but it's like two m you know what I mean um you think that you know an athlete is practicing and lifting weights and training all the time but you know they're also taking long naps during the day and you know what and they and they built a lifestyle where someone's cooking for them and the team takes them from place like they've also eliminated so much of what is inessential that just concentrated burst of the essential thing allows them to be best in the world at what they do absolutely and yeah I just wanted to say thank you so much for all your advice and tips and stuff over the last three plus years of of this book coming together well the book is great and I think it's going to crush fingers crossed but that's not a thing I can control so I'm not going think about it but it already did crush the way to think about it is that it already did crush and that it exists it exists that would be that would be more satisfying if this was the actual book this is the advanced read copy that we've sent away they're deliberately uh very flaccid unfortunately but uh it doesn't have the satisfying crud of a uh or thud of a um of a hard cover but it exists and so literally every person that reads it even if that's seven people and three of them are related to you it's all extra true it's all extra nice sweet man well thanks thank you all right so that's it for this week's episode of Deep dive thank you so much for watching or listening all the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are going to be linked down in the video description or in the show notes depending on where you're watching or listening to this if you're listening to this on a podcast platform then do please leave us a review on the iTunes Store it really helps other people discover the podcast or if you're watching this in full HD or 4k on YouTube then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode that would be awesome and if you enjoyed this episode you might like to check out this episode here as well which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode so thanks for watching uh do hit the Subscribe button if you aren't already and I'll see you next time bye-bye