ATHLLC8869509512

00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)

00:00:02.360 | - Hello, and welcome to another episode of "All The Hacks,"

00:00:05.520 | a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel.

00:00:08.520 | I'm Chris Hutchins,

00:00:09.360 | and I'm excited to have Sunil Gupta back again

00:00:11.900 | to talk about the ancient wisdom of dharma

00:00:14.380 | and ways to incorporate simple

00:00:16.160 | and effective daily habits into your life

00:00:18.760 | so you can find success and joy in everything you do

00:00:21.800 | without sacrificing your professional ambition.

00:00:24.800 | Sunil is a good friend of mine

00:00:26.300 | who I met when he was building his startup Rise,

00:00:28.660 | but since then, he's run for Congress,

00:00:30.840 | co-founded the Gross National Happiness Center,

00:00:33.400 | and just released his latest book, "Everyday Dharma,"

00:00:36.080 | which was a fantastic read.

00:00:37.800 | So let's jump in right after this.

00:00:40.040 | Money can be stressful,

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00:02:05.400 | (upbeat music)

00:02:07.160 | Sunil, thank you for joining me again.

00:02:09.320 | - Chris, it's really good to be back.

00:02:11.060 | - So the whole book you wrote is based on Dharma,

00:02:13.560 | this concept that's a thousand years old or more

00:02:16.420 | from Indian religions and philosophies.

00:02:18.740 | So I am curious,

00:02:20.300 | what is it about this millennia-old concept of Dharma

00:02:23.080 | that you thought was so important

00:02:24.760 | that people today need to understand it

00:02:26.760 | and even practice it?

00:02:28.000 | - Dharma is a timeless solution to, I think,

00:02:31.080 | the emptiness that so many of us are feeling right now,

00:02:34.240 | especially at work.

00:02:35.720 | Most of us believe that the number one determiner

00:02:38.600 | for our mental health is our job.

00:02:41.300 | And yet very few people right now can actually say

00:02:43.840 | that they are enjoying their job

00:02:45.520 | on a day-to-day basis, it seems.

00:02:47.280 | And Dharma is really this way of how do we bring the joy back

00:02:51.600 | into what we do each day.

00:02:53.200 | - And what kind of impact do you think that could have

00:02:55.120 | on someone's life?

00:02:56.140 | Is it just being happy or does it go beyond that?

00:02:58.560 | - I think it's more than happiness, at least it is for me.

00:03:01.200 | It's about finding some meaning in what it is that we do.

00:03:05.520 | And I know meaning is a big word,

00:03:07.480 | but I think the way that I sort of look at it,

00:03:09.680 | and I think that when I go back

00:03:11.240 | and I look at the way that my ancestors

00:03:12.920 | would think about Dharma,

00:03:14.360 | there are sort of two kind of ways

00:03:16.040 | that we can look at success in life.

00:03:18.000 | There's outer success, which is wealth and its status

00:03:21.160 | and its fancy LinkedIn profiles.

00:03:23.280 | And then there's inner success, which is truly,

00:03:26.240 | are you enjoying what you do each day?

00:03:28.320 | And the point of Dharma isn't necessarily

00:03:31.000 | to shame outside success,

00:03:33.440 | or to shame the idea of wanting nice things

00:03:35.720 | or having a career that is ambitious

00:03:37.920 | that other people respect.

00:03:39.520 | What it is saying though, is that we can get all that stuff

00:03:43.160 | and still not feel inner success,

00:03:45.920 | which is really meaning and a sense of purpose in what we do.

00:03:49.080 | And I know that I've experienced that

00:03:50.760 | and Chris, you and I have had enough conversations

00:03:52.680 | to feel like you, I think to at least a certain degree

00:03:55.160 | have experienced that as well.

00:03:56.320 | Whereas like you were getting the outside rewards,

00:03:58.600 | you were in jobs that other people found to be interesting,

00:04:02.000 | but at the same time, it wasn't really lighting you up.

00:04:04.600 | And at a certain point in time,

00:04:05.920 | it can be very easy to be walking a path

00:04:09.880 | that doesn't actually feel like your own.

00:04:12.240 | The idea behind Dharma isn't to shun,

00:04:15.040 | again, the idea of wanting nice things

00:04:18.040 | or doing things that are really interesting,

00:04:20.340 | but it's more about beginning with inner success.

00:04:22.880 | What is it that actually lights you up

00:04:24.920 | and investing in that even when we are overwhelmed

00:04:28.880 | with other things in our life, right?

00:04:31.000 | And I think that's where I wanted to write a book

00:04:33.700 | that really challenged philosophy

00:04:36.360 | through the lens of today's day and age, right?

00:04:38.520 | Fast paced, overwhelmed, lots of comparison.

00:04:42.520 | How do we bring this concept of Dharma

00:04:44.200 | into what's happening today?

00:04:45.800 | - Yeah, it's funny.

00:04:46.760 | You talked about me and I look back

00:04:48.400 | and thought about my history and every job I've had,

00:04:51.060 | maybe until pretty recently,

00:04:52.740 | I just wasn't that excited about long-term.

00:04:55.500 | I thought, I don't think I could do this job forever.

00:04:58.180 | And in fact, part of the reason I've been so passionate

00:05:00.140 | about personal finance in my life

00:05:02.060 | was because I thought I need to save

00:05:03.960 | as much money as possible

00:05:05.380 | because I haven't found a job that lights me up sustainably.

00:05:08.620 | Any job would light me up for a period of time.

00:05:10.660 | Maybe it was six months, 12 months,

00:05:12.300 | but at some point I thought,

00:05:14.300 | wow, am I ever gonna find something

00:05:16.060 | that keeps me sustainably happy and excited?

00:05:19.400 | I don't know.

00:05:20.240 | And then through a series of trial and error,

00:05:22.040 | I kind of stumbled into a career now

00:05:24.760 | doing something I love

00:05:25.800 | that I genuinely think I could do forever.

00:05:27.960 | And it would have been great

00:05:29.000 | if there was a book that I could have read

00:05:31.040 | and realized what wasn't lighting me up

00:05:32.840 | and what I needed to be focused on.

00:05:34.440 | But I didn't have that book.

00:05:35.680 | I didn't have a time machine to find your book,

00:05:37.840 | but I have you now.

00:05:38.920 | And so I'd love to talk about it.

00:05:40.600 | In the book, you broke everything into eight practices.

00:05:43.160 | So I thought maybe we could run through a few of the ones

00:05:45.080 | that I thought were most relevant to this conversation.

00:05:47.540 | And obviously if people want all the practices,

00:05:49.780 | the book is out.

00:05:50.660 | You can definitely check it out.

00:05:51.900 | Highly recommend.

00:05:53.220 | But let's start at the beginning.

00:05:54.700 | The first one is Sukha.

00:05:56.140 | And it's all about uncovering your essence.

00:05:58.180 | And I figured that's a great place to start

00:06:00.020 | because a lot of us might have some idea

00:06:02.420 | of what we're good at or what we like to do,

00:06:04.500 | but they're not really sure how to put that into place.

00:06:07.100 | - Yeah.

00:06:07.920 | So Sukha is really about your essence, right?

00:06:11.540 | Uncovering your essence.

00:06:12.860 | And this is the way that my grandfather

00:06:14.780 | described dharma to me,

00:06:16.140 | which dharma has been called many different things.

00:06:18.380 | You'll find different definitions.

00:06:19.860 | I think one that comes closest is inner calling,

00:06:22.580 | but my grandfather called that your essence, right?

00:06:24.780 | We all have an essence.

00:06:25.980 | And the question is, are we expressing that?

00:06:28.900 | The key, I think though, Chris,

00:06:30.980 | and this is where I got it wrong for a lot of years,

00:06:33.340 | which is I always assumed that essence equals job title.

00:06:36.980 | My essence is to be a programmer.

00:06:39.060 | My essence is to be a product manager or to be a lawyer.

00:06:42.580 | Those are occupations, but they're not an essence.

00:06:45.780 | An essence is deeper than that.

00:06:47.380 | It's I enjoy helping people.

00:06:49.140 | I enjoy designing things from scratch.

00:06:51.320 | I enjoy assembling products

00:06:53.380 | or growing other people's careers.

00:06:55.340 | And the idea is that when you can come back to that essence,

00:06:58.140 | it opens up a universe of possibilities

00:07:00.140 | because there are always multiple ways

00:07:02.780 | to express that essence.

00:07:04.580 | And one of the stories in the book

00:07:06.380 | is about a nurse named Karen

00:07:08.300 | that really felt like her dharma was to be a writer.

00:07:11.520 | That's what she wanted to do.

00:07:12.500 | She wanted to write, but she couldn't afford to do that.

00:07:15.060 | She couldn't afford to quit her job

00:07:16.840 | and she had spent a lot of time

00:07:18.100 | investing in the profession of nursing.

00:07:20.140 | And she was actually doing pretty well as a nurse.

00:07:22.140 | So she was torn, like I think a lot of us are.

00:07:24.060 | She was showing up to the hospital, she was doing the work,

00:07:26.780 | but she wasn't emotionally connected

00:07:28.740 | to what she was doing every day.

00:07:30.220 | Eventually, the way that she ended up finding her dharma

00:07:32.620 | was not by quitting her job and becoming a writer.

00:07:35.160 | The way she found it initially was by patient paperwork.

00:07:38.860 | Literally while other nurses and doctors

00:07:40.800 | would fill out the clinical details

00:07:42.220 | of a patient form and hit print,

00:07:44.060 | she started to actually write about the patient.

00:07:46.620 | Who were they?

00:07:47.780 | What did they love?

00:07:49.140 | How did they spend their evenings?

00:07:50.660 | And what really mattered to them?

00:07:52.140 | And she would pour these details

00:07:53.680 | into these really clinical patient forms

00:07:55.980 | to the point that every single one of these forms

00:07:58.020 | almost turned into like a mini novel.

00:07:59.960 | And she would start to pass these forms around the hospital

00:08:02.280 | and they would get distributed by others

00:08:03.900 | because it really reminded them of the humanity

00:08:06.140 | of what it is that they do.

00:08:07.700 | Now, again, her profession was nurse.

00:08:10.340 | And that stayed the same.

00:08:11.640 | She didn't quit her job.

00:08:12.660 | She didn't make any type of lateral shift.

00:08:14.460 | But the essence of being a writer

00:08:16.620 | was something that she was now bringing

00:08:18.380 | into her day-to-day, right?

00:08:19.900 | And that's kind of the point of this first chapter of Sukha

00:08:22.520 | is if we can dig below the occupation mindset

00:08:25.900 | that so many of us have been put into

00:08:27.660 | and go deeper into the essence

00:08:29.820 | of what it is that you love.

00:08:31.340 | Ultimately, what is that thing

00:08:32.900 | that you feel like really embodies who you are,

00:08:36.100 | then you can start to find other ways

00:08:37.660 | to express what you do.

00:08:38.900 | And in the book, I offer some ways

00:08:40.980 | that we can start to get to that.

00:08:42.420 | And the metaphor that I love is Michelangelo

00:08:45.420 | would look at a block of marble

00:08:47.140 | and he would say the sculpture is already inside.

00:08:49.580 | I just need to chisel away the layers that are in its way.

00:08:52.460 | And I think dharma operates in very much the same way.

00:08:55.580 | I can almost guarantee for you and me

00:08:57.260 | and anybody who's listening right now,

00:08:58.980 | there is an essence that you've already been in touch with

00:09:01.300 | at some point in time, right?

00:09:02.580 | It could have been when you were a little kid,

00:09:03.700 | it could have been last week,

00:09:04.640 | but you've had brushes, incidents with this essence.

00:09:07.560 | It may be buried under deadlines, under drop-offs,

00:09:10.780 | under all the other things we have going on in our lives.

00:09:13.860 | And we can start to kind of chisel away those layers.

00:09:16.540 | One of the ways that we can do that

00:09:17.940 | is through good questions.

00:09:19.700 | I think good questions are an amazing way

00:09:21.980 | to come back to who we are.

00:09:23.680 | One of the questions that I love the most

00:09:25.300 | is what would you do for free?

00:09:27.300 | If compensation was not a factor,

00:09:29.740 | what is it that you would wanna spend your time doing anyway?

00:09:32.580 | And that's not to say that all of a sudden

00:09:34.500 | you can flip a switch and go work for free

00:09:36.260 | or that you should work for free.

00:09:37.860 | But if you can clearly answer that question, right?

00:09:40.460 | What's that thing that I would keep doing

00:09:42.100 | even if I wasn't getting paid?

00:09:44.060 | Now you're starting to get closer

00:09:45.680 | to this thing inside of you that wants to express itself

00:09:48.700 | no matter how the outside world reacts.

00:09:51.100 | There are a series of those types of questions in the book

00:09:53.160 | that help us get closer to that essence.

00:09:55.600 | - And these are the chisels, is that right?

00:09:57.880 | - These are the chisels, yeah.

00:09:59.260 | The other thing that I think is really interesting

00:10:00.980 | is what I call the bright spots chisel.

00:10:02.380 | And what I mean by that is in my career,

00:10:03.980 | I spend a lot of time writing, meeting with people

00:10:06.460 | who have succeeded at their highest levels.

00:10:08.700 | But I spend the other half of my time, I think,

00:10:10.380 | meeting with people who are miserable in their careers

00:10:13.420 | and helping them come to a place

00:10:15.140 | where they can actually do, I think, their best work,

00:10:17.740 | reach their potential.

00:10:18.700 | And one of the things that we spend a lot of time

00:10:20.580 | talking about is, all right, you don't like your job,

00:10:22.900 | but what are the moments,

00:10:24.460 | what are the bright spots right now in your day

00:10:27.460 | that you really, really do look forward to?

00:10:29.080 | I don't care how small they are.

00:10:30.780 | I don't care if they last for literally just a minute.

00:10:33.620 | But what are those little interactions in your day

00:10:36.020 | that are the bright moments?

00:10:38.340 | Because misery in a lot of ways can be a very useful tool.

00:10:42.820 | It can actually illuminate very clearly

00:10:45.420 | the parts of your world

00:10:47.140 | that you actually want to spend more time on.

00:10:49.180 | It can be a very useful way to get to the moments

00:10:51.300 | that actually bring us joy.

00:10:52.740 | And so by identifying these bright spots,

00:10:55.580 | you can start to see a pattern.

00:10:57.220 | For me, for example,

00:10:58.260 | when you and I got to know each other, Chris,

00:10:59.660 | I think I was a startup entrepreneur, right?

00:11:01.380 | I was working in tech and I'd spent most of the past 10 years

00:11:05.220 | really trying to make that work.

00:11:07.180 | And I guess to a certain degree, it was kind of working.

00:11:10.140 | I had a startup that had raised some money

00:11:11.980 | and it wasn't hitting a home run,

00:11:13.060 | but it was doing reasonably well.

00:11:14.580 | But I think the bigger thing was that

00:11:16.140 | I wasn't really enjoying being a startup founder,

00:11:19.040 | not nearly as much as I thought I was going to, right?

00:11:21.580 | I liked the idea of being a startup founder

00:11:23.780 | much more than I liked the act of being a startup founder.

00:11:26.980 | But the day-to-day of what I was doing and managing

00:11:29.860 | and trying to build a product and looking at growth charts

00:11:32.580 | and figuring out the metrics,

00:11:33.820 | I wasn't that into that, to be honest with you.

00:11:35.860 | But there was one part of my day

00:11:37.460 | that I always look forward to,

00:11:39.220 | and that was when I had a chance to hear customer stories.

00:11:42.520 | Anytime we had a health coaching business,

00:11:44.500 | we were helping people lose weight,

00:11:46.500 | then any time that I received an email

00:11:49.040 | or I got on the phone with a customer

00:11:50.540 | or I could hear some kind of story

00:11:52.660 | about how this was useful to them,

00:11:54.420 | what their life was like before,

00:11:56.100 | what it was like during, and what has changed,

00:11:58.540 | that to me wasn't just interesting or validating,

00:12:01.540 | it set me on fire.

00:12:03.940 | The idea of sharing that story,

00:12:05.460 | whether that be with teammates or whether that be

00:12:07.060 | in investors, I could feel literally my body come alive.

00:12:10.540 | And in the days when I had that moment

00:12:12.460 | where I could talk, where I could tell stories,

00:12:14.960 | I felt alive, and in the days that I didn't,

00:12:17.140 | I felt completely vapid and blank.

00:12:19.040 | So what that told me was, hey, in this job

00:12:22.260 | that I know is not for me,

00:12:24.220 | I've identified this act of storytelling

00:12:26.800 | that I really like.

00:12:28.260 | That's what convinced me to start sitting

00:12:29.900 | at my desk every morning before work to write.

00:12:33.020 | I'm like, if you like to tell stories,

00:12:34.580 | you can just write to a page.

00:12:36.140 | So I started to write every single morning.

00:12:38.580 | Those pages ultimately turned into blog posts

00:12:41.340 | and then turned into articles and now books.

00:12:43.500 | - It's interesting how we both went through this arc

00:12:46.100 | of startup founder.

00:12:47.660 | It felt like an identity that suited us,

00:12:50.180 | but also at the same time didn't.

00:12:52.020 | And here we are now both creating content

00:12:54.740 | as a future role, which is not what we originally intended.

00:12:57.940 | And in some ways both stumbled on it.

00:13:00.140 | When you talk about these questions to ask yourself,

00:13:02.420 | I'm curious if it's easier to ask yourself

00:13:05.620 | or to talk about it with a partner,

00:13:08.300 | talk about it with a family member or a friend.

00:13:10.600 | Do you think one method,

00:13:12.380 | or maybe it's different per person,

00:13:13.700 | but helps you uncover these things better?

00:13:15.740 | - That's a great question.

00:13:17.220 | Yeah, I think the last time we actually hung out,

00:13:18.800 | we were talking about our partners

00:13:20.140 | and how like we would be completely lost

00:13:21.820 | in our fricking lives without them, right?

00:13:23.580 | And I very much feel that way about Lina.

00:13:25.700 | I guess there's two things about that.

00:13:28.100 | One is that I have found it useful

00:13:30.780 | to spend some time thinking about things alone

00:13:33.820 | before I share with anybody, including Lina.

00:13:36.620 | And the reason for that is because

00:13:38.260 | when I come up with a new idea or a new concept,

00:13:40.660 | or I'm like, oh, you know,

00:13:41.500 | maybe this is something that I need to start doing

00:13:43.620 | or really focusing my time on,

00:13:45.040 | that idea is always like a newborn baby right out the gate.

00:13:48.980 | And if you share it too early with people,

00:13:51.520 | it might be a little too fragile, right?

00:13:53.620 | And so the way they respond to that

00:13:55.820 | might cut a little bit deeper

00:13:57.420 | than it might if you gave it a few days

00:13:59.380 | where you could reflect on it yourself, right?

00:14:01.180 | And build just maybe a little bit more conviction for it.

00:14:04.020 | Here's why I'm into it.

00:14:05.140 | And you can start to poke holes in it yourself.

00:14:07.620 | So for example, the idea of writing a book.

00:14:09.980 | Yeah, writing a book is not a great way to make money.

00:14:14.780 | I knew that, right?

00:14:16.220 | Writing a book is not a great way to necessarily,

00:14:19.340 | if you want to be known and get your content out there

00:14:22.820 | and get your ideas out there,

00:14:24.220 | you're much better off writing articles.

00:14:25.960 | And so when I started to think about writing a book,

00:14:30.060 | I'm like, all right,

00:14:30.900 | I'm gonna spend the next two to three years.

00:14:32.380 | Nobody is gonna really know what I'm working on.

00:14:34.900 | I'm not gonna be able to share it with anybody.

00:14:36.620 | There's a good chance

00:14:37.460 | that it's not going to make any money.

00:14:39.140 | There are all these sort of things in my head

00:14:40.420 | and I needed to spend some time myself writing about this

00:14:43.860 | before I kind of went out and shared it with anybody,

00:14:46.040 | including Lena.

00:14:46.940 | But then after I did, that's when I opened it up

00:14:49.500 | and I went to a few people that I really trusted

00:14:51.660 | and said, hey, what do you think about this?

00:14:54.180 | But again, I think spending a little bit of time alone

00:14:57.500 | in the book I call this non-productive wandering time

00:15:00.220 | and really sitting with that idea for a little bit,

00:15:03.160 | I think it really makes a lot of sense.

00:15:05.100 | - Even if I'm not actively trading all the time,

00:15:08.740 | I love learning and even just thinking

00:15:10.900 | about the markets and investing,

00:15:12.660 | which is why I'm really enjoying this new series

00:15:14.820 | called Mastering the Markets.

00:15:16.540 | The first episode with Ray Dalio is so good.

00:15:19.020 | He covers early mistakes, managing risks,

00:15:21.560 | how he tries to predict the markets, and a lot more.

00:15:24.140 | And the next three episodes are fantastic as well.

00:15:27.060 | You can find them all on Masterclass,

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00:17:35.060 | There's another hack I think might be useful here

00:17:37.500 | that I have found extremely valuable,

00:17:40.260 | which is as soon as I started to get more connected

00:17:42.580 | with my essence as a storyteller,

00:17:44.860 | all of a sudden, this world of options began to appear.

00:17:48.700 | It was like, oh, you could start a podcast,

00:17:50.260 | you could write a book, you could write articles,

00:17:52.220 | you could be on stage, stand-up comedy.

00:17:54.380 | There are all these different ways

00:17:55.980 | that you could express yourself as a storyteller.

00:17:57.940 | So then the question is, what do I do?

00:17:59.580 | Because that's too much stuff.

00:18:01.140 | I can't do all that.

00:18:03.040 | And so one of the tools in the book

00:18:04.940 | is what I call a Dharma deck,

00:18:06.780 | which is anytime something emotionally inspired me,

00:18:10.300 | I would literally write it down on an index card.

00:18:12.380 | Go take stand-up comedy class.

00:18:14.420 | Begin writing proposal for book.

00:18:16.940 | And I would, over time, have this almost stack

00:18:19.900 | of index cards that I felt like were all options,

00:18:22.900 | all ways for me to express this essence

00:18:24.900 | of being a storyteller.

00:18:26.080 | Then what I would do is about once a week,

00:18:28.420 | I would go to a quiet place or take a walk,

00:18:30.620 | and I would take that stack of index cards with me,

00:18:32.620 | and I would sort them from top to bottom.

00:18:35.220 | The ones that had the most emotional pull for me,

00:18:38.060 | the ones that were calling me the most,

00:18:40.100 | stayed at the top of the pack.

00:18:41.420 | The ones that didn't went to the bottom half of the pack.

00:18:43.260 | And what you notice over time is that

00:18:45.620 | there would probably be somewhere between one and three cards

00:18:49.820 | that will always just stay at the top of the pack.

00:18:52.360 | No matter what, it's like those are the ones

00:18:54.060 | that you don't wanna give up.

00:18:55.020 | And what I realized is writing a book

00:18:56.620 | definitely stayed at the top of the pack for me,

00:18:58.380 | and that's why I decided to pursue it.

00:19:00.300 | - I love this.

00:19:01.140 | It's funny 'cause I think back to my Dharma,

00:19:03.980 | which I haven't quite figured out, or my essence to say.

00:19:06.540 | I haven't done all the work.

00:19:08.660 | I've read the book, but haven't done the work.

00:19:10.320 | But storytelling is a similar one.

00:19:12.260 | I loved pitching a company.

00:19:13.940 | I loved recruiting employees,

00:19:15.640 | telling them why we're doing this, what we're doing.

00:19:17.820 | There are many hats you wear as a founder,

00:19:19.640 | but that one for me was particularly moving,

00:19:22.780 | which is funny 'cause now I'm similarly creating content

00:19:25.500 | down a different path.

00:19:26.420 | - This is what you're doing.

00:19:27.660 | - Back to your example with Karen the nurse,

00:19:30.660 | I'm curious, is there some percentage,

00:19:33.300 | and there's probably not an exact number,

00:19:35.500 | of your job that needs to be associated with your essence

00:19:39.420 | in order for it to work?

00:19:40.900 | So I think to her example,

00:19:42.220 | and if patient intake forms were 1% or 2% of her job,

00:19:46.260 | is that enough to sustain the other 98%, 99%

00:19:50.980 | that you maybe don't feel as connected with?

00:19:53.460 | - Such a great question, Chris,

00:19:54.620 | and I haven't been asked that question before.

00:19:56.340 | I don't know is the short answer.

00:19:58.780 | What I will say is the difference between 0% and 1%

00:20:03.780 | is like astronomical, right?

00:20:06.300 | Even having touch points with your dharma each day

00:20:10.260 | is, I think, something that can be

00:20:12.100 | a complete game changer for people.

00:20:14.460 | In the case of Karen, this patient paperwork, you're right.

00:20:17.580 | I mean, most of her time

00:20:18.760 | was probably spent talking to patients.

00:20:21.140 | Very few of it was actually spent

00:20:22.380 | writing these patient forms.

00:20:23.700 | The sense that I get from her and from the other stories

00:20:26.700 | that are like this, the assembly line worker

00:20:28.940 | who decided that they were gonna actually create

00:20:30.860 | a record label, once you start having

00:20:33.460 | this touch point every day,

00:20:35.780 | you start to embody this persona, right?

00:20:38.500 | So for Karen, she may have been doing things

00:20:41.420 | that had nothing to do with being a writer.

00:20:43.600 | She wasn't sitting down,

00:20:44.860 | and she wasn't actually doing these patient forms,

00:20:47.200 | but she was meeting with patients.

00:20:48.980 | One of the things that she was probably doing

00:20:50.500 | during that time is starting to think like a writer.

00:20:52.860 | I wanna hear your story,

00:20:54.060 | and so I wanna start asking you questions

00:20:55.820 | that go beneath the surface of the symptoms,

00:20:58.060 | and I wanna start learning more about your life.

00:20:59.940 | That was her persona as a writer.

00:21:01.980 | For me, same thing, storyteller, startup founder,

00:21:04.620 | two very different worlds,

00:21:05.820 | but when I started to connect with myself as a storyteller,

00:21:08.620 | I started to feel like a storyteller at work.

00:21:11.180 | In fact, one of the things that I did

00:21:13.180 | is I actually wrote on a piece of paper,

00:21:15.180 | "You are a storyteller," and I kept that in my pocket,

00:21:19.140 | and anytime I was in a place where I felt like,

00:21:22.020 | oh, I feel completely lost right now,

00:21:24.180 | or I feel like I'm not doing what I'm meant to do,

00:21:27.120 | I'd pull out this piece of paper,

00:21:28.260 | and I would remind myself, hey, you are a storyteller.

00:21:30.300 | Now, did that mean that I dropped everything

00:21:31.860 | I was doing and went and told stories?

00:21:33.060 | No, but what it did mean

00:21:34.500 | is that when I went into the next meeting,

00:21:36.900 | I could embody myself as a storyteller.

00:21:39.140 | I had this reminder of, yeah, this is who I am, right?

00:21:41.900 | This is what I do, and I'm expressing that

00:21:43.820 | in a way that feels maybe a little bit different

00:21:45.660 | than somebody who's writing novels or writing screenplays,

00:21:48.800 | but I can still embody myself as a storyteller,

00:21:51.940 | even if I'm doing something

00:21:52.980 | that's not completely related to it right now.

00:21:55.300 | - For people listening to this thinking,

00:21:56.980 | how do I take this essence of mine and embody it in my job,

00:22:00.820 | it doesn't actually always have to be in your role,

00:22:03.460 | and this makes me think of a particular person.

00:22:06.100 | My wife was at Lyft for 10 years,

00:22:07.940 | and there was a guy named Paul,

00:22:09.540 | and he always had all energy and could connect with people,

00:22:13.060 | and he volunteered and said,

00:22:14.940 | "Could I MC all hands for the company?

00:22:18.180 | "Could I be the person

00:22:19.240 | "that gets everyone excited for the meeting?

00:22:21.300 | "I don't need to do all the presentations,

00:22:22.840 | "but could I just run the all-hands meeting?"

00:22:25.580 | And for almost a decade, he ran the all-hands meeting,

00:22:29.700 | and I didn't work there,

00:22:31.340 | but I think I probably went to one or two meetings,

00:22:33.460 | but it was like he brought that energy,

00:22:35.120 | but that was 1%, 2%, 3% of his job.

00:22:38.140 | He had an entire other job,

00:22:39.940 | and so whether you're the person

00:22:42.060 | that might volunteer to work the booths

00:22:44.060 | at the conferences your company goes to,

00:22:46.780 | there are opportunities maybe outside of even your role

00:22:50.160 | at any company where you might be able to bring some of this

00:22:53.080 | and go from that zero to one,

00:22:54.820 | so I just encourage people to make it known to your manager

00:22:57.980 | what your thing you're trying to do is.

00:23:00.140 | There might be opportunities you aren't thinking of.

00:23:02.180 | - Totally, that's such a good point, man.

00:23:04.220 | Again, I think where we go to,

00:23:06.060 | and where I went to for a very long time is,

00:23:08.500 | well, I need to have a particular job

00:23:11.900 | in order to express this essence of mine, right?

00:23:14.620 | Again, storyteller, oh my gosh,

00:23:16.900 | like that has nothing to do with startup founders,

00:23:18.980 | so I need to quit that job

00:23:20.120 | and I need to go do something else,

00:23:21.180 | but no, I'm not gonna go quit that job.

00:23:22.820 | I have a team, and we raise a little bit of money,

00:23:24.860 | I have investors, I can't do that,

00:23:27.120 | but I can start to find ways to express that

00:23:29.700 | through what I'm doing.

00:23:30.800 | There's another story in the book about a woman

00:23:32.540 | who's a project manager inside a tech company,

00:23:34.980 | and she really wanted to be a teacher,

00:23:36.860 | and she talked to her husband about it.

00:23:38.660 | They really kind of went back and forth,

00:23:39.900 | and ultimately, they found financially,

00:23:41.220 | they could not make that work.

00:23:42.740 | They needed her healthcare insurance.

00:23:44.660 | She was earning a pretty good salary.

00:23:45.980 | They needed that to stay afloat.

00:23:47.300 | The family's based in Detroit,

00:23:48.700 | and so she was stuck in this moment where she was like,

00:23:50.500 | gosh, I wish that I could've rewound the clock

00:23:53.820 | 15 years before, and I could've gone down the path

00:23:56.580 | of becoming a teacher,

00:23:57.420 | because that would've made me really happy,

00:23:58.900 | and so every day, that's what was consuming her at work,

00:24:01.940 | but when she sat down with a mentor of hers,

00:24:04.820 | she was able to dig down to the essence

00:24:06.660 | of what it was about teaching

00:24:08.740 | that ultimately made her come alive,

00:24:10.660 | and what ultimately made her come alive

00:24:12.440 | was that she loved helping people grow.

00:24:15.380 | That's why she wanted to be up in front of a classroom.

00:24:17.540 | That's what she wanted to be doing, working with students.

00:24:19.540 | She wanted to be shaping the arc of people's careers,

00:24:22.660 | and so the question then became,

00:24:24.180 | obviously, teaching is a very clear way

00:24:26.140 | to express that.

00:24:27.100 | What are the many other ways out there

00:24:29.340 | that are ways to express that,

00:24:30.980 | and what she found is learning and development

00:24:33.060 | inside a technology company is actually one way to do that,

00:24:36.620 | so she started to throw her hat in the ring

00:24:38.440 | inside the same company for these opportunities

00:24:41.240 | that would allow her to take what she knew already

00:24:43.580 | about what the organization did

00:24:45.300 | and start to grow other people inside the company,

00:24:47.660 | and so she did and flourished,

00:24:49.900 | became a huge rising star inside the company,

00:24:52.860 | started to speak on stage about how to develop

00:24:55.380 | and grow other people.

00:24:56.580 | Her career completely bloomed,

00:24:57.820 | and she never had to leave the company.

00:24:59.660 | She never had to shift her industry.

00:25:01.380 | She didn't have to lose her salary

00:25:02.900 | or the healthcare insurance.

00:25:04.000 | What I love about your show, Chris,

00:25:05.320 | I know when I listen to your show,

00:25:06.360 | I feel stuck with something,

00:25:08.060 | and you offer a way to get unstuck,

00:25:10.460 | and that way is not necessarily always

00:25:13.380 | the most complex thing,

00:25:14.780 | which makes it beautiful, right?

00:25:16.020 | There's a lot of beauty in the simplicity of it.

00:25:18.660 | This might sound really simple,

00:25:20.840 | the idea of connecting with the fact

00:25:22.980 | that she wanted to help people grow

00:25:24.260 | doesn't seem like an earth-shattering insight,

00:25:26.420 | and that's the beauty of it.

00:25:27.260 | It doesn't have to be.

00:25:28.180 | There's something inside of you that you can connect with,

00:25:31.660 | and once you do,

00:25:33.340 | it just opens up all sorts of possibilities.

00:25:36.220 | You asked me for other tactics.

00:25:38.140 | There's another one that I really love,

00:25:39.660 | which is what I call the magazine aisle walk,

00:25:42.300 | and what I love to do is when I feel like

00:25:44.740 | I'm trying to explore what it is

00:25:46.420 | that makes me come alive, what's my essence,

00:25:48.420 | I'll go to a magazine aisle,

00:25:50.300 | whether that be in a bookstore or whether it be in an airport,

00:25:52.620 | and I'll literally very carefully slowly walk

00:25:54.940 | from one side of the magazine aisle to the other,

00:25:57.580 | and I will try to tune out what it is

00:26:00.540 | that I feel like I should be picking up.

00:26:02.660 | I should be picking up the Wall Street Journal

00:26:04.260 | 'cause I should be staying on top of the business news,

00:26:06.000 | or I should be picking up Harvard Business Review

00:26:07.860 | because I need to be staying on top

00:26:09.220 | of what's written in that,

00:26:10.060 | and I kind of tune that stuff out,

00:26:11.900 | and I emotionally connect to

00:26:13.500 | what's actually really pulling for me,

00:26:15.500 | what magazine covers are really grabbing my attention,

00:26:19.040 | and slowly, and it's a very slow exercise,

00:26:21.660 | one by one, I'll pull out the magazines

00:26:24.500 | that are really vying for my attention emotionally,

00:26:27.420 | and if I then lay those magazines out on a table,

00:26:30.060 | I'm like, oh, okay, it's pretty clear,

00:26:31.940 | and for me, when I started doing the magazine aisle walk,

00:26:34.300 | I was living in Detroit at the time,

00:26:36.100 | and I would literally go to this local library,

00:26:38.020 | and I would walk from one side

00:26:39.100 | of the magazine aisle to the other.

00:26:40.340 | Inevitably, it would end up being

00:26:42.300 | a combination of storytelling-oriented stuff,

00:26:45.140 | so it would be like script writing, movies, books,

00:26:48.460 | but the other that really surprised me was spirituality,

00:26:51.400 | and I've never really been a big spirituality guy,

00:26:55.340 | but I realized that there was a lot that was pulling at me,

00:26:59.220 | articles by Ram Dass, and Maria Popova,

00:27:01.780 | and Ryan Holiday even,

00:27:03.180 | the stuff that they were writing about,

00:27:05.060 | like Stoicism, philosophy, and spirituality

00:27:09.060 | was pulling me in a really deep way.

00:27:11.340 | One of the reasons I ended up writing this book

00:27:12.920 | is because I was like, wow,

00:27:14.340 | a combination of getting into this ancient philosophy,

00:27:17.820 | and also being able to tell stories

00:27:19.900 | that bring that to real life in the modern day,

00:27:21.880 | I couldn't think of a better way to spend my time.

00:27:24.040 | - Well, I'm very fortunate you have.

00:27:26.060 | We talked a lot about exercise to spend time on,

00:27:29.000 | time you spend on work, thinking about time,

00:27:31.680 | but I wanna move to prana,

00:27:33.960 | because it's not always about time,

00:27:36.220 | so maybe let's jump in here.

00:27:37.760 | - The definition of prana is this extraordinary energy,

00:27:41.000 | almost think of a tank of energy that all of us have,

00:27:43.880 | but we don't always know how to access that.

00:27:46.960 | One of the reasons for that

00:27:48.680 | is because when we think about investing in a project,

00:27:51.400 | or investing in an idea,

00:27:53.320 | the thing that we are so conditioned to think about

00:27:56.040 | is like time, right?

00:27:57.380 | How much time am I going to give something?

00:28:00.180 | And ultimately, what tends to matter most

00:28:04.520 | when we look at great projects that have come alive

00:28:07.320 | across all these different industries

00:28:09.080 | wasn't really time, but it was heart.

00:28:11.900 | How much heart did you really give that?

00:28:13.960 | That's why you see movies like The Clockwork Orange

00:28:16.500 | that were written in a few days, right?

00:28:18.520 | Great Gatsby, all these great works,

00:28:20.920 | they were written in a fraction of the amount of time

00:28:23.280 | that you might think, because all of a sudden,

00:28:25.040 | there was this creative burst of inspiration,

00:28:27.160 | and they were to sit down and just really bang it out.

00:28:30.000 | And that's proof that what we're really trying

00:28:31.960 | to optimize here for is heart, and not time.

00:28:35.720 | It's much better to be full-hearted with your dharma

00:28:39.600 | than it is to be fully scheduled.

00:28:41.260 | And the example that is very similar,

00:28:43.000 | I know you've had people talk about meditation on this show.

00:28:45.800 | I went and spent time at a monastery,

00:28:47.760 | and what I was surprised by,

00:28:49.280 | I guess I'm surprised now to have been surprised,

00:28:52.480 | but at the time, I expected that these monks

00:28:54.440 | were sitting around and meditating all day.

00:28:56.520 | And the truth is, they weren't.

00:28:58.000 | They were meditating for three or four hours a day,

00:29:00.840 | but the rest of that time was spent working the land,

00:29:03.960 | doing all the stuff that they needed to do,

00:29:05.680 | doing the duties that they needed

00:29:07.280 | in order to make the place actually function, right?

00:29:09.980 | But their life was dedicated to meditation,

00:29:13.000 | and the point being that just because

00:29:14.400 | you're dedicating your life to something,

00:29:15.920 | just 'cause you care about it,

00:29:17.360 | doesn't necessarily mean you're spending

00:29:18.880 | every waking hour doing that thing.

00:29:20.940 | What is more important is that you're finding ways

00:29:23.560 | to really bring your best prana,

00:29:25.720 | your best energy, and your best heart to those moments.

00:29:28.660 | So for me, writing for a half hour every morning

00:29:32.640 | is way, way better and produces much stronger

00:29:36.300 | long-term results than if I was actually spending

00:29:38.800 | two hours in the afternoon writing.

00:29:41.000 | It's just literally the degradation of my brain.

00:29:43.320 | And it's the degradation of my creative horsepower.

00:29:45.860 | I can sit down and I can write,

00:29:47.960 | but it's not gonna end up being any of the pearls

00:29:51.360 | that ultimately make it into the book.

00:29:52.920 | Like 99% of what I write ends up in a trash bin, right?

00:29:56.680 | And so what I'm looking for is like these little pearls,

00:30:00.600 | these piles of horseshit that I write each day,

00:30:03.160 | and it turns out that the little pearls

00:30:05.160 | are much more likely to appear

00:30:06.840 | in that half hour morning session

00:30:08.720 | than a two hour writing block in the afternoon, right?

00:30:11.200 | I know that about myself.

00:30:12.420 | And so for me, my dharma is to write and to tell stories,

00:30:16.020 | but it's not like I spend all day every day doing that.

00:30:18.440 | I've got kids, I've got other work that pays the bills.

00:30:21.180 | There's a lot of other things going on,

00:30:22.800 | but I have to make sure to have this commitment.

00:30:24.700 | The second thing about that then is

00:30:26.460 | how do we then condition ourselves

00:30:28.420 | so that we have the right energy at the right moment?

00:30:31.460 | And for me, this was sort of a big breakthrough,

00:30:33.540 | which is that I've always looked at rest and recovery

00:30:36.380 | as something that you did in long periods, right?

00:30:39.200 | So I would take myself to a breaking point.

00:30:42.540 | I would take myself to the red,

00:30:44.580 | and then I would say I need a vacation, right?

00:30:47.180 | And my wife and I, we would plan this.

00:30:48.620 | We'd be like, "Hey, we have this one week vacation

00:30:51.060 | "scheduled," and I would literally look at three months

00:30:53.700 | between now and then, and I'd kill myself, right?

00:30:56.780 | But the problem with that is I would literally return back

00:30:59.780 | from vacation with less gas in the tank

00:31:02.520 | than before that three month period even started, right?

00:31:04.780 | And the science kind of bears this out.

00:31:06.460 | Most people actually return from vacation

00:31:08.620 | and say they're more stressed one week after they return

00:31:12.260 | than one week before they left, right?

00:31:14.260 | Point being, vacations can be a wonderful thing.

00:31:16.780 | They're great for reconnecting with family

00:31:18.300 | and seeing new places and spending time with friends,

00:31:20.860 | but they're actually not as effective an instrument

00:31:24.340 | for dealing with burnout than we may assume.

00:31:27.220 | What tends to work much, much better

00:31:29.340 | is when you can actually have frequent focused recoveries

00:31:32.740 | throughout the day, every single day.

00:31:34.420 | In fact, like average high performers,

00:31:36.380 | whether it be in business or be in music

00:31:38.340 | or be in sports, they're taking somewhere

00:31:41.020 | around eight breaks every single day,

00:31:44.700 | about one an hour throughout a workday,

00:31:46.940 | which I know sounds extraordinary,

00:31:49.100 | but when I started to put this into practice,

00:31:52.080 | I used what I call the 55/5 model,

00:31:54.780 | which is like for every 55 minutes of work,

00:31:57.260 | I'm taking five minutes of focused recovery, right?

00:32:00.340 | And that five minutes can be doing anything,

00:32:02.340 | like literally anything.

00:32:03.500 | It can be sipping out a cup of coffee,

00:32:05.180 | it can be doing pushups, it can be taking a walk

00:32:07.100 | to the mailbox and back, like doing whatever it is

00:32:09.180 | you're doing, but you're not multitasking it.

00:32:11.340 | You don't have your phone with you when you're doing it

00:32:13.460 | and getting some quasi rest and quasi

00:32:15.820 | sort of work done at the same time.

00:32:17.420 | Those five minutes are deliberately nonproductive.

00:32:19.840 | You're focused on rest.

00:32:21.540 | And people have a very hard time with this.

00:32:24.100 | I know I did.

00:32:25.020 | And the reason for that is because, again,

00:32:27.460 | we're in a time-based model.

00:32:29.020 | We're shrinking the amount of productive time

00:32:31.760 | we have in our day.

00:32:32.600 | We already feel squeezed as is.

00:32:34.600 | If you're shrinking five minutes from every hour

00:32:36.900 | and you're working, let's say, nine hours a day,

00:32:39.340 | you're shrinking your schedule by 45 minutes,

00:32:41.660 | which is significant, right?

00:32:43.220 | We could use that 45 minutes.

00:32:44.580 | If you give this a shot, what I can almost promise you,

00:32:47.780 | based on experience from myself and from watching others

00:32:50.480 | put this into practice, is that five minutes

00:32:52.740 | is gonna make the other 55 minutes far more productive,

00:32:56.500 | far more effective, far more imaginative.

00:32:58.700 | You're gonna be far more collaborative.

00:33:00.100 | Like all the things that we associate with success,

00:33:02.720 | you will have more of that in the next 55 minutes

00:33:05.940 | than you did if you were just waiting

00:33:07.380 | to the end of the day to finally unload

00:33:10.020 | and burn yourself out because it's just clearly not working.

00:33:13.660 | - It's funny, as I read this and as you talk about it,

00:33:15.540 | I think about how Google has this speedy meetings feature

00:33:18.460 | where you can say, set these meetings to 25 minutes for,

00:33:21.060 | like a 30-minute meeting is now by default 25

00:33:23.300 | and an hour meeting is by default 50.

00:33:25.440 | But it takes the ability to turn the meeting off at 50

00:33:28.920 | because so often it's like,

00:33:30.500 | I know no one on this call scheduled the next 10 minutes

00:33:33.180 | so we could just run over.

00:33:34.700 | And then I was thinking about,

00:33:35.540 | I remember when I had a Zoom account that was free,

00:33:37.820 | there's that timer and it's like,

00:33:39.020 | this meeting is going to run out

00:33:40.500 | and we are going to turn it off.

00:33:41.860 | And I've been in meetings like that.

00:33:43.620 | So if anyone out there knows of a way

00:33:45.280 | that I could hack Google Calendar and Google Meet

00:33:48.100 | to just actually shut the meeting down at 50 minutes

00:33:51.100 | to force everyone to end,

00:33:52.820 | I would love to see that feature in action

00:33:54.900 | because I find it hard.

00:33:57.400 | I can schedule the five or 10-minute break,

00:33:59.400 | but it's really hard to actually take it.

00:34:01.180 | - You know, it's funny

00:34:02.020 | 'cause I'm on all these different platforms now

00:34:03.820 | for virtual stuff, right?

00:34:05.020 | And you are too.

00:34:05.840 | And I noticed on Microsoft Teams,

00:34:08.220 | when they set the meeting for a certain length,

00:34:10.220 | they will actually say five minutes left in the meeting

00:34:12.580 | and then they'll have a countdown timer.

00:34:13.900 | Now, I don't think it actually shuts off at that time,

00:34:16.600 | but the fact that there's actually

00:34:17.820 | a bit of a countdown timer,

00:34:18.940 | I do find to be somewhat helpful.

00:34:21.140 | It's like, hey, this is the meeting you called.

00:34:23.820 | These are the people whose schedule you're dealing with.

00:34:26.220 | Everybody is assuming this one thing,

00:34:27.980 | like let's put a little bit of a countdown timer

00:34:29.780 | in the last five minutes.

00:34:30.620 | I find that to be somewhat helpful.

00:34:31.500 | But I agree with you, man.

00:34:32.340 | I was the kind of guy who if I had two extra minutes

00:34:34.760 | in between meetings, I would go to my to-do list

00:34:36.820 | and I would like, what can I knock out quickly?

00:34:38.460 | And to be like a little bit of an energetic hit

00:34:40.820 | that I would get from that.

00:34:41.940 | But the problem was that throughout the day,

00:34:44.300 | like clockwork, I would end up slumping, right?

00:34:47.000 | At the end of the day, I was far less energized

00:34:49.760 | than I was at the beginning of the day, right?

00:34:52.100 | And that hurt because there were some times

00:34:54.700 | where there was key meetings,

00:34:56.220 | key moments that were in the afternoons.

00:34:58.140 | I remember when I was raising money even

00:34:59.820 | and I was out there pitching investors.

00:35:01.380 | Some meetings were in the morning when I was fresh,

00:35:03.060 | but there were a lot of meetings

00:35:03.900 | that were in the afternoon.

00:35:04.900 | I know that looking back, I would be far less compelling

00:35:07.740 | in those afternoon meetings than I was in the morning.

00:35:09.620 | And part of the reason for that is 'cause that morning,

00:35:11.340 | I was spent like grinding.

00:35:13.060 | And then I would walk straight into that meeting

00:35:14.620 | and I would take all the baggage from that grind.

00:35:16.380 | I would take no time to reset myself.

00:35:18.420 | Maybe if you look at people who like,

00:35:20.180 | if you've strapped for time, who do this very well,

00:35:23.300 | and they don't have five minutes,

00:35:25.340 | I think one of the most important things you can do

00:35:27.340 | is to provide some type of transition for yourself

00:35:30.120 | in between two big moments, right?

00:35:31.900 | And again, if you only have 30 seconds,

00:35:33.820 | even if you have 10 seconds,

00:35:35.380 | it is deliberately saying I'm going to be nonproductive

00:35:39.340 | for a period of time.

00:35:40.380 | And the difference between zero and 10 seconds,

00:35:42.880 | whether it's closing your eyes and taking a breath

00:35:45.140 | or literally getting up and stretching,

00:35:46.660 | doing something will be game-changing, right?

00:35:50.180 | If you're having these transitions throughout.

00:35:52.020 | - And it's different for everyone.

00:35:53.260 | For me, the afternoon meetings and the afternoon pitches

00:35:55.940 | were actually really great

00:35:57.700 | because I didn't have anything to worry about.

00:35:59.940 | If I go into a meeting at eight, all these things,

00:36:02.180 | what came in overnight?

00:36:03.200 | What emails do I have to respond to?

00:36:05.140 | But by the afternoon,

00:36:06.140 | I've been able to catch up on all the other stuff.

00:36:08.060 | So I think it really depends on a per person basis.

00:36:10.980 | Sometimes my wife asks,

00:36:12.500 | "Why were you up till two in the morning last night?"

00:36:14.820 | And because we have kids, we got to get up at six to seven.

00:36:17.700 | The kids are up, we're up.

00:36:19.100 | And I was like, well, I just had this bout of energy

00:36:21.940 | and I felt like I could get done in two hours

00:36:25.340 | what I would normally take 10 hours to do.

00:36:27.860 | But now the hard part is forcing yourself

00:36:29.980 | to use that time you saved to actually recover.

00:36:32.820 | But sometimes when I find this prana,

00:36:34.940 | I'm just, I'm like, let's capture it when it's there.

00:36:38.080 | And sometimes it surprises me.

00:36:39.740 | - That's a really good point, man.

00:36:40.780 | We can't always count on prana.

00:36:42.740 | It's tough to predict

00:36:44.060 | when your prana is going to be really high.

00:36:46.400 | There are patterns for sure.

00:36:48.060 | I remember when I was at the office day in and day out,

00:36:51.100 | I would try to work out in the middle of the day.

00:36:52.600 | We had a newborn at home.

00:36:54.260 | The mornings were very tough.

00:36:55.500 | And when I went home,

00:36:56.340 | I wanted to spend time with the family.

00:36:57.720 | So I try to work out at around 12 o'clock

00:37:00.280 | and then I would end up scheduling meetings at one o'clock,

00:37:03.940 | two o'clock, three o'clock, four o'clock.

00:37:05.940 | But what I found is that after I finished working out,

00:37:08.060 | I felt really good.

00:37:09.360 | I felt really creative and awesome.

00:37:11.380 | And I was like, all right,

00:37:12.520 | well, why am I scheduling a mundane meeting

00:37:15.340 | at one o'clock in that case?

00:37:17.560 | I should be scheduling a block of time,

00:37:19.340 | at least a half hour where I can get back from the gym

00:37:21.980 | and I can go to my desk

00:37:23.100 | and I actually can write down a few things

00:37:24.900 | that are really important, right?

00:37:26.100 | I can spend some time with doing like some deep work.

00:37:28.680 | And when I did that, that changed things as well.

00:37:30.600 | And it's a great point.

00:37:31.600 | Figure out where the pockets of your day are,

00:37:34.780 | where you tend to have your highest prana,

00:37:37.060 | but then also sometimes it'll just happen spontaneously.

00:37:40.140 | And when it does,

00:37:41.540 | try to give yourself enough flex where you can capture it.

00:37:43.920 | - I definitely do that a lot.

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00:40:24.460 | We talked a lot about breaks.

00:40:25.600 | There's one break that you referenced in the book

00:40:27.960 | that I thought was super interesting,

00:40:29.200 | and it's a worry break.

00:40:30.840 | - Yeah, so this one surprised me as well.

00:40:33.400 | I ran into a leader who had a sand timer on his desk.

00:40:37.560 | A lot of what I do for work is I go out

00:40:39.220 | and I study people who are at the top of their game

00:40:41.560 | and I try to unpack their habits.

00:40:43.360 | And in this case, what he had a reputation for

00:40:46.720 | was being very calm,

00:40:48.720 | even though he worked inside a very cutthroat culture.

00:40:51.440 | People loved working for him,

00:40:53.160 | and he had exceptional results.

00:40:55.200 | The board loved him, the rest of the C-suite loved him.

00:40:57.320 | So I wanted to figure out what it was.

00:40:59.440 | Was he naturally like this, or were there some hacks,

00:41:01.800 | some things that he put into practice?

00:41:03.400 | And I noticed a sand timer on his desk,

00:41:06.140 | and I asked him about it.

00:41:07.240 | And he said that what he would do

00:41:08.680 | is every time there was a worrying thought,

00:41:11.560 | something that was nagging at him,

00:41:13.200 | and it wouldn't go away,

00:41:14.920 | what he would do is he would go into his office

00:41:16.920 | and he would shut the door

00:41:18.040 | and he would take this five-minute timer

00:41:19.880 | and he would flip it over.

00:41:21.240 | And for five minutes,

00:41:22.560 | he would focus on nothing but that one worry.

00:41:24.800 | That's pretty interesting.

00:41:25.660 | What if it's something

00:41:26.500 | that you don't really have control over?

00:41:28.160 | He's like, "It doesn't matter.

00:41:29.080 | "I'll spend five minutes worrying about it anyway."

00:41:31.720 | And I was like, "Well, I gotta be honest with you.

00:41:33.380 | "This doesn't sound great to me.

00:41:34.820 | "It sounds like a recipe for anxiety

00:41:36.800 | "more than anything else."

00:41:38.380 | But as I dug deeper into it,

00:41:40.400 | what I realized is that there's a lot of science

00:41:42.760 | behind this practice of taking a worry break.

00:41:46.280 | And the reason for that is because

00:41:47.760 | when we have a worrying thought inside our head,

00:41:50.220 | what we tend to do, a lot of us,

00:41:52.120 | we'll tend to try to push it out or compartmentalize it

00:41:54.600 | and to basically say,

00:41:55.440 | "Hey, I don't have time for you right now.

00:41:56.740 | "I'm focusing on this other thing."

00:41:58.200 | When we push things out,

00:41:59.920 | what they tend to do is they tend to grow louder.

00:42:02.580 | So what started as a whisper will grow into a conversation

00:42:05.240 | and eventually it'll grow into a shout, right?

00:42:07.240 | It wants to be heard.

00:42:08.680 | It's kind of like kids in that way.

00:42:10.280 | Worrying thoughts want to be heard.

00:42:12.280 | And if they're not heard,

00:42:13.600 | they're gonna continue to get louder and louder.

00:42:15.420 | There's a saying in positive psychology

00:42:16.960 | that you may have heard,

00:42:17.800 | which is what you resist persists.

00:42:19.860 | Counterintuitively,

00:42:21.200 | while we may think we're doing ourselves a service

00:42:23.320 | by trying to push these thoughts out

00:42:25.280 | because they're not positive,

00:42:26.740 | we're actually giving them a lot more runway

00:42:29.120 | inside our head.

00:42:30.000 | They're actually becoming louder and louder.

00:42:31.280 | One of the things we can do is we can actually say,

00:42:33.100 | "All right, I'm going to give you a fixed amount of time.

00:42:36.360 | "I'm gonna sit down

00:42:37.560 | "and I'm gonna give this nagging worry

00:42:39.680 | "five minutes of my time.

00:42:41.060 | "For that five minutes, I'm gonna stay true to it.

00:42:42.680 | "I'm literally gonna do nothing but worry

00:42:44.420 | "about this one thing."

00:42:45.400 | And strangely enough,

00:42:47.060 | what will happen at the end of that five minutes

00:42:48.920 | is that it won't be that the worry went away.

00:42:51.600 | You may not have a problem for this.

00:42:52.960 | It might even be something you have control over.

00:42:55.200 | But what it will do in almost all cases I've noticed

00:42:58.320 | is it will actually turn the volume down on the worry, right?

00:43:01.780 | So that now you can actually get on

00:43:04.440 | with the other parts of your day

00:43:05.900 | because it felt heard, right?

00:43:07.640 | Because it wasn't something

00:43:08.780 | that you were trying to push out.

00:43:10.160 | You gave it its due time

00:43:11.720 | and now it settles a little bit more.

00:43:13.880 | - I love this.

00:43:14.720 | It's almost like you can exhaust the worrying

00:43:16.560 | where you're like,

00:43:17.400 | "Well, I don't have anything else to say to worry about it."

00:43:19.600 | And maybe the next time it goes away.

00:43:22.100 | So on a higher note

00:43:23.540 | than kind of worrying about the worst in the world,

00:43:25.620 | let's talk about kind of elevating things

00:43:28.660 | to be a little happier, a little more exciting.

00:43:30.740 | Let's talk about Leela.

00:43:31.820 | - So Leela, really think of it

00:43:33.180 | as the blend of work and play, right?

00:43:35.620 | And how do we start to think of work

00:43:38.980 | a little bit more like play?

00:43:40.700 | And it sounds probably cheesy, right?

00:43:44.040 | And I know the first time I thought of Leela

00:43:45.980 | and I started digging into this really ancient practice.

00:43:48.300 | I'm like, "Well, that sounds very lovely,

00:43:49.820 | "but doesn't sound quite practical, right?"

00:43:52.180 | You work hard and then you play hard.

00:43:53.860 | That's the mentality we've been brought into.

00:43:55.660 | But then I started to see these really top performers,

00:43:58.180 | people like Phil Jackson, NBA coach,

00:44:00.460 | but it was also a player

00:44:01.700 | who literally, as he was a player,

00:44:03.880 | wrote in his locker room on a piece of Scotch tape,

00:44:07.100 | "Make work your play and play your work."

00:44:09.980 | And that was the mentality

00:44:11.340 | that he brought into the NBA as a coach.

00:44:13.540 | And look at what he did.

00:44:14.900 | One of the most winningest coaches of all time.

00:44:17.460 | He raised greats like Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan.

00:44:20.860 | Those guys, when they talked about Phil Jackson,

00:44:23.380 | they would talk about that philosophy in particular,

00:44:25.780 | and they would say that is the thing

00:44:27.740 | that they ultimately ended up learning the most from him,

00:44:30.440 | which was to blur the lines between work and play.

00:44:32.820 | Because when you do,

00:44:34.420 | you can actually reach even more exceptional results.

00:44:36.900 | In all the concepts in the book,

00:44:38.280 | I really tried to find where it was echoed.

00:44:40.860 | These Eastern concepts that were over 1,000 years old,

00:44:43.700 | where, like, what was happening in the world of science

00:44:46.760 | and what has happened in the world of science

00:44:48.220 | that provides some grounding for these.

00:44:49.940 | And in all cases, I could find something.

00:44:52.180 | In this case, for Lila,

00:44:53.740 | it really came from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

00:44:55.940 | in his work around flow.

00:44:57.500 | If you look at the state of flow,

00:44:59.660 | what he was really talking about in many cases

00:45:02.280 | was being able to feel like even though you were working,

00:45:05.620 | there was a notion of play that was associated with it.

00:45:08.600 | One of the things that Csikszentmihalyi

00:45:10.260 | made a distinction of

00:45:11.180 | is people who tend to be exotelic versus autotelic.

00:45:15.060 | And exotelic means that they are focused purely on the goal,

00:45:18.220 | the result of the work they're doing.

00:45:20.520 | But the people who are autotelic

00:45:22.260 | were the people who were focused on the process

00:45:24.300 | and enjoying the point from here to there.

00:45:26.900 | And the assumption that I think a lot of us make

00:45:28.980 | is that the people who achieve the top of their game

00:45:31.420 | are exotelic by nature.

00:45:32.980 | By the way, we're a blend of all of them.

00:45:34.540 | We're not one or the other.

00:45:35.580 | We kind of tilt one side or the other.

00:45:37.960 | But the assumption that we, I think, make sometimes

00:45:40.300 | is that people who achieve the medals,

00:45:42.980 | people who get to the very, very top,

00:45:45.340 | are the ones who are exotelic, right?

00:45:47.580 | They're the ones who are focused on the prize.

00:45:49.460 | That's what they really want.

00:45:50.980 | And they will not rest until they get it.

00:45:53.140 | What Csikszentmihalyi, I think, did an exceptional job of

00:45:56.060 | in his body of work around flow

00:45:57.860 | was showing how there was just as many people out there

00:46:00.660 | who tended to tilt autotelic, right?

00:46:02.780 | Who tended to focus much more on enjoying the process,

00:46:06.300 | getting some joy out of that.

00:46:07.720 | Because when you got joy out of something,

00:46:09.780 | you wanted to keep doing it over and over again.

00:46:12.540 | So one of the techniques that we talk about in this chapter

00:46:15.620 | is what I call high quality habits.

00:46:17.260 | And the business that I had started before

00:46:19.140 | really focused on health habits.

00:46:20.860 | How do we build health habits into our life?

00:46:23.240 | One of the things I realized is

00:46:25.380 | when we were trying to get somebody to lose weight,

00:46:27.540 | and they loved bread and they loved pasta,

00:46:31.580 | but they decided to go on a carb-free diet,

00:46:34.720 | it would last for a short amount of time.

00:46:37.700 | And sometimes you would see people

00:46:39.060 | who got exceptional results quickly,

00:46:41.420 | but it very rarely lasted, right?

00:46:44.100 | Almost entirely on all cases that we studied,

00:46:46.540 | we work with tens of thousands of people,

00:46:48.500 | they would end up yo-yoing back

00:46:50.060 | to the condition they were in before.

00:46:51.900 | On the other hand, when we found people who adopted

00:46:54.060 | what I call a high quality habit,

00:46:55.540 | which is a habit that they want to do over and over again,

00:46:57.700 | they actually love the habit.

00:46:59.400 | For example, drinking two glasses of water

00:47:02.300 | before every meal, which is a habit

00:47:04.380 | that some people can get really into.

00:47:06.180 | It can be really fun.

00:47:07.220 | You can put little mixes into your water, electrolytes.

00:47:10.220 | You can have cool looking bottles.

00:47:11.780 | It can become part of your persona.

00:47:13.460 | And there's a lot of fun that can come from that.

00:47:15.000 | People who were able to adopt that habit,

00:47:17.200 | we saw end up having lasting results

00:47:20.260 | because they were eating less,

00:47:21.820 | they were having more energy throughout their day, right?

00:47:24.740 | And it was something that they just wanted to continue with.

00:47:26.980 | I think the same is true for our dharma.

00:47:28.620 | There are certain things

00:47:29.460 | that we want to bring into our lives

00:47:30.900 | that we're like, I don't really want to do that,

00:47:32.740 | but I feel like I should do that.

00:47:34.460 | And those habits very rarely stick.

00:47:36.580 | But on the other hand,

00:47:37.580 | finding something that you really enjoy doing,

00:47:40.100 | something that you want to do over and over again.

00:47:42.420 | I think it was Kevin Kelly, and I quote him in the book,

00:47:44.620 | and I always butcher his quote,

00:47:46.020 | but he's like, we spend so much time in our lives

00:47:49.460 | trying to figure out better ways to do tasks.

00:47:52.260 | What we need to be doing

00:47:53.480 | is we need to be spending time in our lives

00:47:56.100 | figuring out what tasks we want to do over and over again,

00:48:00.340 | because we actually love it.

00:48:02.260 | And when you can find those things,

00:48:04.160 | when you can find those habits,

00:48:05.780 | you're on a clear path to learning this line

00:48:07.780 | between work and play.

00:48:08.980 | - And in the health example,

00:48:10.380 | I'm sure cutting carbs would probably be more effective

00:48:13.860 | than just drinking two glasses of water.

00:48:15.460 | So- - In the short term, yeah.

00:48:17.060 | - In the short term.

00:48:17.900 | But I guess in the long term,

00:48:18.740 | if you bring it back, the water is more helpful.

00:48:20.820 | - Well, that's exactly what would happen.

00:48:22.340 | The platform that I started was called Rise.

00:48:24.800 | You're matched with a health coach.

00:48:26.020 | So you had one person that you were working with.

00:48:27.500 | And the number of people who had cut carbs

00:48:29.300 | and then gained it all back,

00:48:31.260 | it became like almost cliche to talk about,

00:48:33.720 | because it would happen all of the time.

00:48:35.680 | People who went on paleo and lost 30 pounds

00:48:39.860 | and they felt fantastic

00:48:41.620 | and then ended up gaining it all back.

00:48:43.740 | We saw that, I guess, way more often

00:48:46.340 | than the people who were actually able to keep it up.

00:48:48.020 | The point of this all isn't to knock on paleo.

00:48:50.320 | The point of it is if you're suffering

00:48:52.440 | as a result of paleo, right?

00:48:54.140 | If you really like carbs, it's something you enjoy,

00:48:57.660 | and you're denying yourself that,

00:49:00.240 | then that is not a high quality habit,

00:49:02.960 | because it's not something that you want to put on repeat.

00:49:05.900 | And so for that reason, it makes it much, much harder.

00:49:08.380 | It's a sick do.

00:49:09.220 | You're basically cashing in on your willpower

00:49:11.900 | every single day, which is a very hard thing to do.

00:49:14.300 | And it becomes even harder

00:49:16.160 | when you have other things going on in your life.

00:49:18.220 | You're busy, work picks up, things are happening at home.

00:49:21.860 | It becomes even harder to keep a high quality habit.

00:49:25.080 | On the other hand, something like water,

00:49:26.780 | again, to your point, it's not the kind of thing

00:49:28.500 | you're going to shed weight with very quickly,

00:49:30.340 | but it's the kind of thing

00:49:31.760 | that you can keep in place over time.

00:49:33.600 | So the people that we saw that not only lost the 20, 30 pounds

00:49:37.540 | that they were looking to lose,

00:49:39.260 | but actually kept it off,

00:49:41.020 | were the ones who adopted these really simple habits

00:49:43.840 | that they actually really wanted to put on repeat.

00:49:46.100 | - So dieting, sports,

00:49:47.980 | how does Leela fit into a more traditional workplace?

00:49:51.500 | - I think Leela fits into traditional workplaces

00:49:53.860 | when we can start to find the little things

00:49:55.860 | throughout the day that actually give us some joy

00:49:58.580 | and also help us find our dharma.

00:50:00.640 | So for me, for example, with the storytelling,

00:50:03.760 | finding little pockets, little moments of the day

00:50:06.220 | when I was actually sitting down

00:50:07.740 | and I was actually writing,

00:50:08.780 | just for five minutes every day, right?

00:50:10.540 | Five minute pockets throughout the day.

00:50:12.560 | I was sitting down and I was starting to spend some time

00:50:14.560 | actually writing these ideas, right?

00:50:16.580 | And there were these little pockets of joy.

00:50:18.060 | That was a habit that I want to put on repeat.

00:50:20.500 | The other one that I feel like is really helpful

00:50:22.540 | was when I talk about Toni Morrison,

00:50:24.460 | who is a single mom.

00:50:26.220 | She had two kids at home.

00:50:28.180 | She had a full-time job,

00:50:30.300 | but she really wanted to write.

00:50:32.420 | And for her, the high-quality habit

00:50:35.060 | started when she started waking up a half hour early

00:50:38.300 | before the kids were up,

00:50:39.820 | and she'd have her cup of coffee,

00:50:41.420 | and she'd watch the sunrise,

00:50:42.980 | and she would just brainstorm and daydream

00:50:45.100 | about the ideas that I would want to bring to life

00:50:47.460 | through a novel.

00:50:48.280 | She would really just start to write these ideas down.

00:50:51.000 | It's not like a book happened immediately,

00:50:53.040 | just the same way that if you were drinking water

00:50:55.240 | throughout the day every day,

00:50:56.720 | you're not gonna lose weight immediately.

00:50:58.400 | But those mornings, that high-quality habit,

00:51:01.080 | ended up being all the inspiration

00:51:03.120 | that she ended up turning into her books,

00:51:05.240 | became a Nobel Prize-winning author

00:51:07.020 | as a result of those mornings.

00:51:08.600 | So what is that thing for you

00:51:11.140 | that you feel like you enjoy so much?

00:51:13.760 | And again, it's not like something

00:51:14.920 | that you feel like you have to do,

00:51:16.480 | but you actually want to do.

00:51:18.320 | And how do you then start to build that into your day?

00:51:21.560 | In some small way, whether that be in the morning,

00:51:23.680 | whether that be sprinkled throughout your day,

00:51:25.720 | what's that thing that you feel like you can put on repeat?

00:51:28.360 | - It almost feels like if Sooka is finding your essence,

00:51:32.480 | Leela is bringing your essence into your daily routine

00:51:36.800 | so that it feels more like fun.

00:51:39.120 | - Well said, man, because I think that we talk a lot.

00:51:42.480 | Whenever I think there are conversations

00:51:44.600 | about purpose and meaning, sometimes we can tend to focus

00:51:48.280 | on finding what that thing is for you,

00:51:50.880 | and maybe not enough time talking about

00:51:53.200 | what it is that we need to do in order to fit this

00:51:56.800 | into a busy, overwhelmed, fast-paced, modern schedule.

00:52:01.360 | And I think Leela is one of those answers.

00:52:03.680 | - And I think it tees us up perfectly.

00:52:05.240 | I wanted to last talk about Kriya,

00:52:08.100 | which is that if you don't actually take action

00:52:10.320 | on all of this, what is there?

00:52:12.440 | So maybe let's close there.

00:52:14.360 | And we didn't hit on all of the principles.

00:52:16.800 | We didn't hit on, I don't even know how many rituals

00:52:19.040 | and tactics you put in the book, but there were so many.

00:52:21.480 | So obviously there'll be more

00:52:23.080 | that people need to go find elsewhere,

00:52:24.720 | but this felt like a good way to wrap it all up.

00:52:27.160 | - There's over 30 rituals in the book,

00:52:29.280 | and I look at this as, in some ways, like a menu.

00:52:31.880 | Like there are things that are going to work

00:52:33.520 | for some people, and there's things that are gonna work

00:52:35.080 | better for other people, but being able to test

00:52:37.200 | these different things in your life,

00:52:38.880 | I think are the ways, the paths that we can use

00:52:42.120 | to, I think, figure out what it is that makes us come alive

00:52:44.600 | and express that.

00:52:45.480 | With Kriya, with action, nothing happens

00:52:48.480 | unless we have movement, right?

00:52:50.040 | We can sit behind a desk and we can talk

00:52:51.720 | about purpose all day, but how do we put purpose into action?

00:52:54.720 | And the thing that I love about Kriya

00:52:57.360 | is that there are really some great tools today

00:53:01.160 | that I had to figure out.

00:53:03.160 | When I started to put them into practice myself,

00:53:05.080 | it really started to change things for me.

00:53:06.640 | And one example of that is the two-way door

00:53:09.200 | versus the one-way door.

00:53:10.640 | And you may have heard Jeff Bezos talk about this

00:53:13.360 | because he talked about it in a couple

00:53:14.760 | of his shareholder letters.

00:53:16.320 | But basically, the premise is that oftentimes,

00:53:19.000 | when we are thinking about a decision,

00:53:20.600 | taking action on something that we want to go do,

00:53:23.200 | it is very easy to confuse that as a one-way door,

00:53:28.200 | meaning that if you go through and it doesn't work,

00:53:32.440 | you're not gonna be able to come back through

00:53:34.640 | when it's actually a two-way door, right?

00:53:36.640 | You go through, doesn't work, you're able to come back

00:53:39.000 | to where you were before, right?

00:53:40.520 | You may have lost a little bit of time,

00:53:42.400 | but you probably gained a lot of information

00:53:44.240 | and a lot of experience along the way as well.

00:53:46.160 | But the bigger point is that oftentimes,

00:53:47.880 | we treat these decisions with such weight

00:53:49.960 | and with such gravity that if we do it,

00:53:52.520 | it's like we're walking into an abyss

00:53:54.240 | where we have to make it work when the reality is

00:53:56.800 | there will be other options.

00:53:58.040 | Other doors will open, plus you will always be able

00:54:00.480 | to walk back through.

00:54:01.320 | And so for me, running for office was that thing.

00:54:04.520 | I felt compelled for a while to move back

00:54:07.200 | to my hometown outside of Detroit and run for office.

00:54:10.480 | And I was really scared about it.

00:54:12.200 | And I was scared for a lot of reasons,

00:54:13.560 | but one of them was I felt like if I did that,

00:54:15.800 | I was gonna torpedo my career.

00:54:17.440 | I'd spent 10 years in Silicon Valley,

00:54:19.240 | I'd been working as a startup founder,

00:54:20.960 | I'd developed all these relationships,

00:54:22.560 | and I felt like I'd finally found a way

00:54:24.080 | to financially make a place like San Francisco work,

00:54:26.400 | and here I am, I'm gonna torpedo all that

00:54:28.200 | and move back to Detroit and run for office.

00:54:29.760 | But I really wanted to, I really wanted to get involved.

00:54:32.280 | But at the same time, I felt like it was gonna

00:54:34.160 | blow everything up.

00:54:35.240 | And it wasn't until I really started to think about it

00:54:37.560 | as like, hey, listen, this is not a one-way door.

00:54:40.880 | Like you go and you lose,

00:54:43.240 | there will be other doors that will open.

00:54:45.040 | And if they don't, for whatever reason,

00:54:46.600 | you will always be able to walk back through, right?

00:54:48.520 | And what you will have lost may be a little bit of time,

00:54:50.720 | but what you will have gained is a lot of wisdom.

00:54:52.280 | And you'll never regret not having done this thing

00:54:55.000 | that you were emotionally pulled to do.

00:54:56.920 | That is ultimately what got me through.

00:54:58.560 | It wasn't some burst of courage.

00:55:00.280 | People would always feel like that's a very gutsy thing

00:55:02.120 | to run for office and to leave everything behind

00:55:04.000 | and go do that and move your family to Detroit.

00:55:06.000 | And I was like, well, I thank you for saying that,

00:55:08.080 | but not really.

00:55:08.920 | For me, it really came down to this idea.

00:55:11.320 | I actually don't have a lot of courage here.

00:55:13.000 | I am very scared, but I'm also grounded in the idea

00:55:16.640 | that if this doesn't work,

00:55:18.340 | I'm not going to be in a place of complete pointlessness.

00:55:21.760 | I can come back through the door

00:55:23.280 | because it is a two-way door.

00:55:24.880 | I can always move back to Silicon Valley

00:55:26.440 | if that was what I chose to do.

00:55:27.760 | I can always go back into working into tech.

00:55:29.780 | It may take a little while to find something, but I will.

00:55:32.440 | I have to have some belief in that because it's true.

00:55:35.240 | Ultimately, the other thing that might happen

00:55:37.000 | is it may open up many other doors for me,

00:55:39.360 | which is kind of what happened.

00:55:40.660 | I went to Detroit.

00:55:41.800 | I gave it my all.

00:55:42.960 | I knocked on over 10,000 doors.

00:55:45.080 | Election results come back in and I lose.

00:55:47.900 | But as a result of that, everything had changed.

00:55:50.480 | I had learned so much about myself in that process.

00:55:54.340 | I learned about what I cared about.

00:55:56.320 | I learned about what I want to spend my days doing.

00:55:59.680 | At the end, I was like,

00:56:00.620 | I don't want to move back to Silicon Valley.

00:56:02.400 | I want to start getting on stage

00:56:03.920 | the way that I was during the campaign.

00:56:05.520 | I want to start speaking to audiences.

00:56:07.860 | I came up with the idea for a television show,

00:56:10.320 | which I'm now making with American Express.

00:56:12.640 | All that stuff happened when I was on the campaign

00:56:16.080 | and really as a result of doing that.

00:56:18.480 | So again, the thing that I would encourage

00:56:20.280 | anybody who's listening right now,

00:56:22.200 | take a decision in your life.

00:56:24.200 | Just take a decision that you're thinking about,

00:56:26.400 | something that maybe you're afraid to do,

00:56:28.560 | and ask yourself deep down,

00:56:30.320 | is this a one-way door or is this a two-way door?

00:56:33.440 | Because there are some one-way doors out there, right?

00:56:35.600 | But the vast majority of decisions out there

00:56:37.600 | are not one-way doors, they're two-way doors.

00:56:39.480 | And if it's a two-way door,

00:56:40.520 | the only thing I would say is,

00:56:41.480 | lower the bar a little bit, right?

00:56:43.680 | Don't feel like you need to have

00:56:45.480 | this abundance of courage or guts

00:56:47.560 | in order to go do this thing that you want to do.

00:56:50.340 | Instead, ground yourself in the fact

00:56:51.840 | that even if you do it and it doesn't work out,

00:56:54.020 | you're going to be okay.

00:56:55.080 | You can always walk back through.

00:56:56.520 | - I think far too many people think

00:56:58.080 | decisions are not reversible.

00:56:59.640 | And I watched a great talk on speed

00:57:02.520 | when it comes to building products and building companies.

00:57:05.160 | It's like, if a decision is reversible,

00:57:06.760 | just make the decision.

00:57:07.840 | Almost default to a decision

00:57:09.800 | and then you can come back to it later.

00:57:12.200 | But another tactic you mentioned that I really liked

00:57:14.520 | was to make a to-do less hard, less to overcome,

00:57:18.400 | make it a to-learn.

00:57:19.560 | Maybe share that a little bit.

00:57:20.880 | - I spent like so many people every January 1st

00:57:24.080 | coming up with, here are my to-do lists for the year,

00:57:26.000 | here are my big goals.

00:57:27.360 | And like many people, I would abandon that list,

00:57:30.040 | stop looking at it sometime in February.

00:57:32.280 | And what I found to be much more gripping

00:57:36.440 | and I think compelling for me

00:57:38.480 | was when I started to think of it less as a to-do list,

00:57:40.760 | but a to-learn list.

00:57:42.440 | What are the things

00:57:43.280 | that I actually want to learn how to do right now?

00:57:46.080 | Here's where I want to grow.

00:57:47.680 | And for me, even though it's a little bit hard,

00:57:51.040 | it makes it just far more exciting.

00:57:53.560 | For example, I wanted to learn

00:57:55.080 | how to develop a television show.

00:57:56.880 | And when I write that down, all of a sudden,

00:57:59.080 | it opens up all of these ways that I can do it.

00:58:02.120 | But I think the most important thing it does for me

00:58:04.240 | is it makes me less afraid to fail, right?

00:58:07.800 | Because we all know that failure is a wonderful teacher,

00:58:11.720 | right, and success can be a really lousy teacher.

00:58:14.240 | And so if my to-do list is,

00:58:16.960 | I need to have a show up and running

00:58:18.680 | by the end of the year,

00:58:19.720 | all of a sudden I'm like jammed with fear and insecurity

00:58:22.880 | to the point that I actually don't want

00:58:24.360 | to look at that goal anymore.

00:58:25.840 | But if my goal is to learn how to develop a show,

00:58:28.800 | then I know that I need to put myself out there,

00:58:30.680 | right, I know I need to actually start doing the work,

00:58:32.560 | I know I need to start meeting with people,

00:58:34.400 | I know I need to start getting into the nitty gritty

00:58:36.320 | of what it takes to actually pull something off

00:58:38.240 | in Hollywood, but it no longer makes me so afraid

00:58:42.000 | of going out there because I know I'm gonna probably

00:58:43.720 | fall on my ass a few times while I'm doing it,

00:58:45.960 | and that's okay because I'm actually satisfying

00:58:48.400 | this to learn objective,

00:58:50.040 | which is I wanna know how to create a television show.

00:58:53.280 | - It's funny, I think especially even going back

00:58:55.200 | to the beginning of this conversation

00:58:56.760 | on finding your essence,

00:58:58.480 | just learning more things can help you explore,

00:59:01.800 | and so I think back to one of the reasons

00:59:03.880 | I partnered with Masterclass was that I found it

00:59:06.240 | to be such a great tool to go watch videos,

00:59:08.880 | be like, I like storytelling, do I like stand-up comedy?

00:59:11.240 | Let's go learn what it takes

00:59:12.840 | to actually do this professionally.

00:59:14.040 | What, I don't think that's me.

00:59:15.360 | I like telling jokes, but I don't think it's a career,

00:59:17.200 | and so I think the more you can expose yourself

00:59:19.600 | to learning other things, the more you can come up

00:59:22.060 | with ideas of what ignites you and what doesn't,

00:59:24.680 | and it's so much easier.

00:59:26.320 | That would have been a much easier thing to do

00:59:28.560 | than do a stand-up routine, which is a loftier goal.

00:59:32.160 | Maybe I would learn more from it,

00:59:33.760 | but even just learning how the industry works

00:59:36.400 | was a much easier goal to accomplish

00:59:38.320 | from the safety of my own living room.

00:59:40.920 | - Yeah, yeah, totally.

00:59:42.440 | - So I feel like we didn't even brush the surface.

00:59:44.420 | There's a lot more there.

00:59:45.600 | Where can people get the rest?

00:59:47.720 | - Yeah, so the book is out.

00:59:49.280 | It literally just came out yesterday,

00:59:51.400 | and you can find it everywhere.

00:59:53.680 | It's on Amazon, it's on Barnes & Noble,

00:59:55.600 | wherever you get your books.

00:59:56.800 | It is available in print and audio as well,

00:59:59.440 | and it's called "Everyday Dharma."

01:00:01.100 | - Awesome.

01:00:01.940 | Did you do the audio, or who's reading it?

01:00:03.600 | - I did, I did the audio.

01:00:05.160 | And it's funny, I recorded it at this booth in Santa Monica,

01:00:08.040 | and a lot of what's inside the book

01:00:10.080 | are the stories of my ancestors.

01:00:12.680 | I tell the story of my grandfather

01:00:14.640 | in our first conversation about dharma,

01:00:16.640 | and it was just a bizarre experience, Chris.

01:00:18.280 | It's funny because I started to cry

01:00:20.480 | during the actual reading,

01:00:21.800 | and a sound engineer was kind of in my ear,

01:00:23.720 | and I got my headphones on,

01:00:24.800 | and I realized he's crying as I'm reading it as well.

01:00:27.760 | So if you hear me breaking up

01:00:29.280 | during the audible recording at a point,

01:00:30.960 | it's because I'm weeping.

01:00:32.360 | - Wow, I feel like now I gotta go back and listen

01:00:34.840 | to try to find those moments.

01:00:36.000 | But thank you so much for writing it.

01:00:37.920 | I love all the tactics.

01:00:39.480 | I think anyone listening to this show

01:00:41.960 | knows that one of my passions

01:00:43.760 | is not just learning about how to make change,

01:00:46.060 | but the specific actions and tactics,

01:00:47.920 | and in the case of your book, 30 plus rituals.

01:00:50.240 | So really loved that, really enjoyed the book.

01:00:52.980 | Thank you so much for sharing it,

01:00:54.440 | and joining me today.

01:00:55.520 | - Chris, this is awesome.

01:00:56.680 | Thank you.

01:00:57.520 | - I really hope you enjoyed this episode.

01:01:00.960 | Thank you so much for listening.

01:01:02.720 | If you haven't already left a rating

01:01:04.200 | and a review for the show in Apple Podcasts or Spotify,

01:01:07.600 | I would really appreciate it.

01:01:09.320 | And if you have any feedback on the show,

01:01:10.760 | questions for me, or just wanna say hi,

01:01:13.140 | I'm chris@allthehacks.com or @hutchins on Twitter.

01:01:17.440 | That's it for this week.

01:01:18.480 | I'll see you next week.

01:01:19.640 | (upbeat music)

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