We had a guest on this podcast, Jim Hollis, he's an 84-year-old, probably 85-year-old Jungian analyst on, and he just brilliant guy. He's written some really important books under Saturn's shadow and etc. And he said, you know, so he has a real kind of like suit up, show up, you know, get to work kind of mentality, but he also is a very reflective person and he said, you know, if there's one simple key to life, it's that one understand that most of our daily lives, our waking lives are in stimulus response, but that it's so critical to take 10 to 15 minutes each day to just get out of stimulus and response and either to just let stuff geyser up out of our unconscious, subconscious mind, or to just put some real thought to something that, you know, most everybody is in stimulus response.

I wonder these days with social media and so many things, filling the space between walking to the car or with the pro players that you work with, you know, I'm guessing the moment they're on the plane, they're on their phones and texting and all these things are wonderful technologies, but they fill all the space with stimulus response.

Yeah. They fill all the space with stimulus response. And you know, it's not unless you go to a place with no wifi accessibility that you suddenly realize like, wow, like in most of modern life, we're just constantly in this tennis or ping pong match with this trivial thing and that trivial thing.

And some of it's essential, but that there's no quote unquote space anymore. In many ways, my life is built around creating that space. And it's interesting, when I was playing chess, I experimented with studying chess from everywhere between 45 minutes a day to 16 hours a day to see where the sweet spot was.

And what I came to was about four and a half hours a day. But that four and a half hours a day was like a 10 out of 10, like fucking just on fire. And then the rest of the day became about cultivating those four and a half hours.

And my life today has that kind of rhythm as well. And, you know, training, like I've spent many years working with people who are just brilliant in the investment space has been a really interesting way because it's a great laboratory because people are very driven. They want to, they're all in, they're motivated, they'll take themselves on.

And it's a great place for me to, over the last couple decades, to like refine the art of training because I don't like solving for motivation. That's one thing. And I think part of that relates to that quirky dynamic from when I was seven that I described of always being the target and so never having, like not taking on my weaknesses that was outside of my conceptual scheme.

And so in many ways I don't, I haven't really had to struggle with motivation myself, for better or worse. And I love working with people, partnering with people who are all in, who want to take themselves on. I don't love having to motivate people. And so a great laboratory for me is with people who have all sorts of problems, who might be obstructed but who are all in.

And like you're working with world class investors and what, you know, they're grinding themselves out 14, 15, 16 hours a day. Doing less is a huge part of doing much more. And you start to see like they might be at, like if you think about a 10 out of 10 as being like in terms of like when they're at their very best creatively, they could slip from like a 10 to a 2 and not even notice.

And then you begin to cultivate an awareness of where one is in one's creative spectrum, right. And then you start to cultivate the art of stress and recovery and like amping oneself up and then releasing. And you see that the ability to turn it on is directly connected to the ability to turn it off, as you know.

If you walk into a fight gym and you study a bunch of fighters in the match, one great read you can make is looking at the depth of physiological relaxation when the guys aren't fighting. And you'll see who the highest level fighters are. The best guys, man, they can turn it on with wild intensity, but their bodies are so mellow when they're not going.

And then men, like they're so efficient. It's so, that oscillation, that range is so huge, right. But people don't cultivate the art of turning it off in order to learn how to turn it on. You know, for many, many years, decades, I've been practicing what I call now the MIQ process, most important question process.

And the essence of it is it's what I came to as the most potent way so far that I've found to train analysts or thinkers in mental arenas. You're training people in the art of discovering what matters most. If you look at, if you talk to like a great chess player actually looks at less than a lower level chess player, but they look at the right direction.

So you might think a great chess player, people often think like, oh yeah, I can calculate 50 moves deep, 100 moves deep. It's all irrelevant. Move two was inaccurate. So it was just all an illusion. The great chess players might look at much less, but they're looking in the most potent directions.

The lower level chess players are lost in a sea of complexity, right? So if you're working with like, let's say, a scientist or an investor or whatever, them straining their mind for what is the most important question, ideally to begin the practice toward the end of their workday with like a release, a recovery period with full intensity in a peak performance state, stretch one's mind for what matters most and then release it.

Release the workday completely. Don't work all night grinding yourself out at a low level. Release and then first thing in the morning waking up pre-input, return one's mind to the critical question and brainstorm on it. It's very powerful because you're opening up the, you're systematically opening the channel between the conscious and the unconscious mind.

You're feeding critical questions to the unconscious, which is processing overnight. And like, I know you know all this, like the consistency with which you come up with an insight in the morning is incredible. Interestingly, and you'll probably know why much more than me, improved dreamer call often happens simultaneously when one starts to have more and more insights about the MIQ in the morning, which is fascinating.

Then over time, you can have micro-manifestations of this throughout the day before going for a workout, before taking a walk, before taking a break, before taking a piss. Instead of going, when you're gonna go to the bathroom in the day, instead of like checking your phone while taking a piss, you pose yourself at MIQ, you release it.

You do not do anything but piss in the bathroom and breathe and then return to the question and you'll have an insight. Right, so you're learning to just oscillate between the conscious and unconscious states and you're opening up that channel and you're practicing stress and recovery. And then your physiological workouts are also stress and recovery all the time.

So you're building that theme in everything that you do. And you realize that like when you're at your very best for four or five hours a day, you're doing multiples of the work that you're doing if you're just grinding yourself at, you know, what I've called in the past a simmering six or whatever for 15 or 16 hours a day.

And so people can do so much more in less time. And my lifestyle is based on that. You know, I'm training very intensely physically and I'm doing really intense mental work and I oscillate between them in beautiful ways and I have a lot of empty space for reflection, for meditation, for like zoning my mind on what matters most.

It's about quality, not quantity. But it's so interesting how we live in this culture where just quantity is just consuming everyone.