Do you think we're in a crisis of purpose right now? I mean, I think it's pretty obvious that we are. I mean, it's embarrassing that I have a career, right? There should be no demand for my work.
Yeah, I think that in general, I think people would admit it. I think that, you know, who can say whether it's the first time it's ever happened, but I think people are more open to say that they either wanted to or missing it. So, but I think we've definitely seen the workplace change over the past few decades. We've definitely seen the decline in church membership over the past few decades.
We've definitely seen, you know, increased rates of loneliness and anxiety and depression. So, and I think there's a lot of and significant rise of sort of retreats and purpose, you know, events and things like that. Yeah, I, yeah. Well, yeah.
So I think it's safe to say yes. Where? What are the areas that have fallen away? You mentioned work, you mentioned church, community.
Yeah. These are things that perhaps 50 years ago, 100 years ago would have been more prevalent. Well, what's interesting is the what we've seen in the world, like people used to get their sense of purpose from church, you know, or things like that. We had bowling leagues and, you know, extracurricular activities where people have their friends group.
You socialize with your neighbors and work was a place you went to, to make a living. It wasn't supposed to be this end, it'll be all of everything. And as those things fell away, we started to put more and more pressure on the workplace to provide those things. And now we're looking for our work to provide our sense of purpose, to provide our sense of community, to provide our social life.
And now we're also saying that work should be the place that agrees with my politics. That never used to happen. And so, for better for worse, there's a tremendous amount of pressure on the workplace and leaders in the workplace to be able to successfully offer all of those things. And people are quitting their jobs because they're not getting those things.
And it never used to be a thing. I think also we're doing the same thing in our relationships. There's a correlation, which is, you know, you had your friends, you had your spouse or your girlfriend, your boyfriend, and you didn't expect your partner, your romantic partner to be able to provide everything. Be my rock, be my best friend, be my lover, be, you know, my stability, be the person.
And yet now we put overwhelming amounts of pressure on one person to be everything the same way we're putting overwhelming amounts of pressure on our workplaces to be everything. We're setting both up to fail, which I think leaves us in a malays and loss. So I think all of these weird, you know, concoctions are contributing to that sense of loss or looking. Interesting that it's not necessarily that we're applying more pressure just to work in relationships because of some pivot in culture, but that the previous other contributors have fallen away.
Yeah. And when there's less of a hedged market in that regard, you've got all of your money into a couple of stocks, one of the stocks being working and another one of the stocks being a partner. Yeah. And that's an amount of pressure that is going to be very difficult for them to fulfill.
And also not necessarily what they were entirely designed to fulfill. Yeah. It's one person kind of everything. Otherwise, we'd have no need for friends.
One person can be everything, one place can be everything. Now, having said that, we can't argue against it. It's the way the world. We can talk about how we got here.
That might be a little bit useful, kind of maybe not. You know, technology definitely played a role. You know, for me to get entertainment, there wasn't that much TV. I had to leave the house.
I went to now all of our entertainment is right at our fingertips on television or on our phones. I mean, there's no reason to leave the house. We're now at a point where you don't even have to go to the movies anymore because you can just wait a week or zero and start streaming whatever you want to watch. So there's no reason to leave the house.
How do you come to think about people deliberately cultivating meaning? In their life, is this a process that you can go through? Is this a... is it emergent or is it something that you can decide to try and achieve to cultivate?
No, no, no. You can definitely seek it out. I mean, you can definitely seek that. People find purpose many different ways.
Some will stumble upon it. There'll be a crisis. There'll be a realization. They'll survive something.
You know, you very often hear people who survive drug addiction or alcoholism or some sort of battle. Then devote their lives to helping other people overcome the thing that they overcame. That crisis gave them a sense of purpose. You know, people have families and it gives them a renewed sense of purpose to take care of a...
of other human beings. Leadership. When you find yourself responsible for the lives of others, you know, people find purpose in that too. You know, those are all...
I would be hesitant to tell people to wait for something like that because it may never happen, right? Or you may not learn the lesson if something does happen. And so the process of uncovering purpose is an objective process. Anyone can go through it.
Mine... my discovering of my purpose came through crisis. I lost my passion for my work. I owned a small business and I didn't want to go to work anymore.
I completely fell out of love. And I was very, very embarrassed because superficially everything looked good. I mean, I own business. I had good clients like, oh, Simon doesn't want to go to work, you know?
And so I kept it to myself, which is a stupid thing to do. Turns out when you're in a dark place and you don't tell anybody about it, it gets darker. That's sort of how it goes. And it wasn't until a friend of mine confronted me and said there's something wrong and you were not telling me.
And I came clean and it lifted a huge weight off my shoulders because now I did not feel alone in my pursuit of being lost. Because when you're lost and you keep it to yourself, you stay lost. And this is just we're human animals, like we need each other, right? And so when you're lost and you simply tell somebody I'm lost and they're willing to just hold your hand and make you not feel alone, even though the journey is still your own, the energy you have, the focus you have, the clarity you get, exponentially increases.
And that's what happened to me. And I now had the energy to find the problem and rediscover purpose. I made this discovery of this thing called the why. I'm more important than finding my own.
I figured out how to help others find theirs. I started helping my friends. Their friends asked me to help their friends. And before you knew it, people were asking me to talk about it and then I got an opportunity to write about it.
So there is a process to find your why. And I'm proud to be a part of that to help people find it. It's completely changed my life. Does this mean that going through a catastrophe or a low point is a gift in retrospect in a bizarre way?
Everybody I ever talked to who's learned a significant lesson from catastrophe or low points, we all are secretly grateful. Like, nobody wants to go through it again. Like, I hope I never go through anything like that again. It was awful, but I'm glad it happened.
You know, I think there are lessons to be learned and everything that goes wrong in our lives. And the question is, are you willing to learn those lessons? And for those who are, who are, who, who simply go through something awful, and by the way, it's all relative. A breakup could be the thing, you know?
I mean, it doesn't have to be something, you know, the world regards catastrophic, you know? But something that's, you know, losing a job. I mean, I think that challenges you emotionally. The question we have to ask ourselves is like, what can I learn from this?
And a part of that is accountability, you know? And I think that if you want to talk about, if you want to find purpose, you have to take accountability for your life. And what I mean by that is, like, no one can bestow it upon you. No one can just give you a purpose.
It is within you and it is there to be discovered, right? But at the same time, everything that happens to us in our lives, we have to say, okay, how did I contribute to this? How am I responding to this? How can I make this bad situation better?
What did I do to make this situation happen? And if it was just bad luck, then, and then we can all easily fall in and out of victimhood. And it plays its role if something bad happens. Like, it makes us feel better to be like, the world hates me, you know?
But at the same time, at some point, we take accountability for the life that we're living in the present. The past, we can't change. But we can be fully present to say, okay, what am I going to get? If this has happened, how can I grow from this?
And that's accountability. That's accountability. What else are the differences between the people who go through a bad time and learn lessons from it and in retrospect say, I don't want to do it again, but I'm glad it happened. And the people who go through a bad time and there's no alchemy out the other side of it.
I really do believe it's having people by our side that make us feel not alone as we go through it. I've talked about this before where, you know, the mistake we make as friends is we think we have to fix. Or offer advice to people who are going through something. You know, somebody's going through something horrible or break up.
They got fired, whatever, you know, whatever it is. Something went horribly wrong. And we, well intentioned say, well, you should do this, or why don't you just go get this? And, you know, a friend of mine who had a job at a company for most of his career, got fired, didn't see it coming.
And he went through this deep depression, and like most of the advice he got was just get another job and, you know, success is the biggest FU and, you know, you'll show them and they were well intentioned in their advice, but that's not what he needed. He needed somebody to just sit in the mud with him. And, you know, it was just by happenstance, you know, I was the first friend to come to me and be like, boy, that really hurts. That's all I said.
Like, that really hurts. That's really, this is really hard. And he goes, yeah. I was like, he's like, I said, don't worry about getting another job.
Just sit for a little bit. Like, yes, at some point you're going to have to, but not today, you know, we're in the loss. And that, that just being told it's okay to have a feeling as opposed to action, action, action, action, action, which is our default especially in the States, you know, in the West. Like, if you're not doing something, you're a loser, you know, and all it takes is one friend to say, I'll sit in the mud with you.
Amazingly, people know what they need. Amazingly, people know what they need. I was going through a hard time. I wasn't sure.
I wasn't my best self. I was in a bad place. And, friend called me up and said, how are you? And I started saying I'm in a bad place.
And this is what I'm feeling. And she started offering me advice, well intentioned. And I said, can you not? I don't want that.
Can you just let me tell you? I just need to get it out. And she's like, yeah, totally sorry, totally sorry. You can tell somebody what you need and you can be set.
You can be set. It doesn't ruin anything. At the same time, you can ask somebody as well. You know, so if somebody's like, I'm going through hell, you can say, do you want me to offer you advice?
Do you want me to give you some opinions? Or do you want me to just sit in the mud with you? And they'll be like, ah, just sit in the mud with me. Like, people know what they need.
And at the right time, they'll say, I think I'm ready now for that advice. Right? And so we, we, most of us are well intentioned where we either offer, you know, or if somebody's kidding us advice, we don't want it. We just sort of shut them out, which is also the wrong thing to do.
Just tell people. It goes back to communication. But at the end of the day, doing any of the stuff alone, and this is what we're getting to, you know, if one of these things happens, tell somebody. Tell somebody.
You don't need to have a best friend. You just need somebody who you can tell. You know, this is why there's a rise of therapy and things like that. That's a stranger that you can tell.
Sorry to get confident. You know, you know, the difference between a therapist and a friend is, you know, your friend never says, time's up. You know? This episode is brought to you by Ate Sleep.
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I head into Ate Sleep.com slash monomistem and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's EIGHTsleep.com slash monomistem and modernwisdom at checkout. I love that insight around the subtext of what somebody giving you advice is saying. And it's well-intentioned and they're really trying to help.
And it's the wrong thing. It's coming from a good place. They're saying, hey, my friends in trouble and I want to get them out of trouble. From an emotional standpoint, I think what your brain tells you is I'm not okay and my not okayness is making them not okay.
So they have to fix me. I can't be not okay because it's causing an impact over there. And even if there's a great scene in the Kardashians, my friend Charlie did an analysis of he compared Theo Von talking to Sean Strickland to the mother Kardashian talking to one of the daughter Kardashians. Sean Strickland's really, really struggling and Theo's response to him is, it's okay, man.
We don't need to talk. We can just sit here for a while if you want. That's close to saying let's say in the mud. The Kardashian interaction was, I need you to get over this, which was a denial in some ways of, well, it's not okay for you to not be okay.
You're not okay and this is making me not okay. So you need to subjugate how you're feeling in order to organize how I'm feeling. And varying degrees on that spectrum of trying to help people out. It makes it feel not valid and safe for you to have it.
I'm sad, but I can't be sad because if I'm sad that makes other people sad. I mean, feeling guilty for being sad is not healthy. No, if somebody gets stuck in something that's different. That becomes clinical.
If you remain depressed for too long, depression is normal. Like we all go through at some point and various degrees, it's temporary. But if we get stuck in something that's different. That's not what we're talking about.
But people do, we have to remember we're both rational and emotional animals. We have our neocortex, which is our homo sapien brain, rational analytical thought. And we are rational animals. We can think about things.
We can weigh pros and cons. We can have opinions and points of view. We can look at facts and data. But that neocortex is not responsible for behavior or our emotions.
And then you have that limbic brain, that mammalian brain that's responsible for all of our feelings, all of our behavior. No ability for language. And because we have both, they don't always work well together. And we often get the two confused and we forget that we are both, which is both an advantage, but it also produces stress and paradox.
And you have to meet emotions with emotions and facts with facts. And when somebody's an emotional state, facts are not the things you want to bring to the table. That won't help convincing somebody why they shouldn't be upset. Even if you're rationally right, you do with children.
It's the same with children. Nothing changes. Like kid spills in the milk. They start crying because they wanted the milk.
Stop crying. We'll get more milk. Stop crying. Or they lose their teddy bear.
It doesn't matter. We'll get another one. Factually all true. Rationally all true.
But that's not what we do. We say, oh, I know, I know you were looking forward to it. Oh, it's horrible. You lost it.
Oh, don't worry about it. I'm here for you. We meet emotion with emotion. We know how to do it for children.
We reinforce the fact that it's okay to have emotions. But for some reason, just because we get older, we think, oh, stop that. Right? And at the end of the day, if somebody is in an emotional state, you've got to meet emotion with emotion.
But you can do the facts later. I'll give you a silly little example. A friend of mine was in a performance. She's a performer.
And I went to see the show. It was easily the worst thing I've ever seen about. LAUGHTER It was awful. And I wish I could have walked out.
It was awful. But I stayed and I was supportive. At the end of the show, I waited in the lobby to meet the performers and see my friends. And she came out all excited.
She's still in makeup and costume. And the first thing she says is, what do you think? Now, I can't lie. I can't be like, it's amazing because that would be a flat out lie.
But at the same time, I also recognized that even though she knows I'm an honest broker, even though I know she wants my opinion, she's in an emotional state. She's jacked up on adrenaline. She just came off the stage. Now is not the time for rational.
Now is the time to meet emotion with emotion. And by the way, she's not depressed or unhappy. She's just jacked up high. So I said, oh my God, it was so amazing to see you on the stage.
True. This is the first time I've ever seen you on the stage. What a treat to come and support you. True.
And that was it. Oh my God, I get it, I get it, I get it, I get it. And she's off. Two days later, we talked.
The emotions have subsided. She's back in a rational state. I called her up and said, hey, you asked me what I thought. Do you want to know what I think?
She goes, I actually do. I go, great. This was awful. And she's like, you're right, you're right.
You're right. You're right. I'm heading out. A rational conversation about it.
She took none of it personally. If somebody comes off the stage and the first thing you said is like, I don't know, I think you could do better. Or that script. It's just going to hurt.
And we get it wrong all the time. And the lesson here is, it's bigger than meet emotion with emotion facts. It's bigger than that. It doesn't all have to be done in the moment.
You can play with time. So if somebody is going through something, just sit in the mud with them, you know, as they're going through it. Yeah, boy, this sucks. Oh, yeah.
I mean, I know what you're going through. Wow. You must be really hurting. I am.
Right? Two days later, three days later, you're like, hey, I was thinking about what you're going through with your relationship, whatever it is. Can I offer some thoughts? I always ask permission.
Can I offer some thinking, some ideas? The words are ready to give away that we're talking rational. Right? They go, yeah, actually you can.
There you go. Same thing I was going to say two days ago. And so we don't have to solve everything in the moment just because we had the thought. And this is where empathy kicks in.
Just because you're having the thought doesn't mean they're ready to hear it. And the whole idea is how do you be present for the person and give them the thing they need and the time that they need it. And that's being an empathetic human being. That's being situationally aware.
Right? So what am I playing with here? And if you're unsure, ask. Like I said, for the most part, people know what they need.
And if they say they don't know, they're going to say, I don't know. And then you say, well, why don't I try this and you can tell me how it feels. I'll offer some suggestions and if it doesn't feel right, I'll back off. It's you can have these negotiations.
And so the skills of human interaction. And this is just an annoying thing about being human. You know, cats are naturally good at being cats. They don't have to study.
They don't have to learn. They're just naturally good at it. Human beings are not naturally good at being human. We suck at it.
And again, it's because of that in your cortex. It's because we have the ability to overthink everything. Right? You can literally prevent yourself from sleeping because you were thinking about something that you cannot control until you wake up tomorrow.
It's madness, right? But we have that magical ability to overthink everything. And so it's really hard to be human. And we actually have to learn and practice and read and watch things and ask people to get better at being human.
And some people choose to be the best human beings they can be and they go on that journey. By the way, you'll never be a great human being. You'll never be perfect. You'll just be very degrees of good.
Some of us choose to go on that journey for both reasons. It feels good. It makes me a better version of myself. I like who I am more now than I did before and for others.
I am a better friend. I'm a better partner. I'm a better son. I'm a better father.
Whatever it is. Because I chose to go on this journey. And then it goes right back to what is a friend. Why do we need friends?
What is a friend? And I'm thinking a lot about friendship these days. We know that a lot of people are struggling with friendships these days. I think men are struggling more than women.
As I talk about this concept of friendship, women come up to me, but men come up to me like with much more sort of their rooting. And it doesn't matter how successful. It doesn't matter how old. I'm getting it from every age, every income bracket.
In fact, the more successful ones are struggling most. But how can we talk about friendship? We know what a romantic partner is. We know what a relationship at work is.
We have formal hierarchies. It helps us understand where we are in the pecking order. But what is a friend? Does every friend have to be a deep meaning for a relationship?
No, clearly. Do you want every friend to just be superficial fun? No, don't want that either. Do we have to make every fun friend a deep meaning?
Does every engage? No, of course not. So what is a friend? You have to have a definition of something before you know you can build it.
My definition of friend is the exact same definition I have for a romantic relationship and it's the exact same definition I have for community. A friendship is when two people agree to grow together. A relationship is when two people agree to grow together. A community is a group of people who agree to grow together.
And what that means is I will take myself on. I know you're taking yourself on. I'm going to ask you to help me and I'm going to be there to help you. And if we get this right, community, corporate culture, friendship, romantic relationship, if we get this right, whether we stay in this relationship for a short term or a long term, whether it is successful or not, whether we actually end up hating the relationship or hating the job, one thing we can say for sure is if we agree to this, we will come out of this, better versions of ourselves than we went in.
And so the success or failure of a relationship is not the point. Clearly we want relationships to succeed. But if they don't, you better have gotten something out of it and it goes full circle back to where we started, which is if you're going to go through shit, you might as well learn something. And if you start with that intention from the beginning and you say to the person, after you develop a relationship or rapport, you don't even know you don't have to say it, but it's nice to say things.
I'm a great believer in putting it all on the table. I really like you. I feel like I'm growing because of you. You teach me things.
You show me things. You hold me accountable when I screw up. I like that. And very believe you're probably going to get a response that says, you're doing the same for me and I really appreciate too.
Or, well, I'm glad you like it. I don't get that from you. You're going to get information. But I think that the pursuit of friendship is to find someone who's willing to grow with you.
Now, the big caveat is, are you willing to grow yourself? Are you willing to grow yourself? And I think where people get stuck when I'm, and this is the saddest part. I hear people tell me I have no close friends.
They have friends they hang out with, people they have a good time with, go out, play video games with whatever it is, you know, but they wouldn't call any of them to say I'm struggling. And so that's where the loneliness sets in. And there is some degree of accountability there, right? Where we can play the victim and the victim to be a victim means I'm not accountable.
That's what it is. It is being done to me. But I'm a passive player in this. And even if that's true, you still have a role in this thing called your life.
You're the actor in this play. You still have a role to play. And so even if things are being done to you, how you respond is you. How you respond to conflict is you.
You can choose to disengage. I've seen that happen professionally. I've seen that happen personally. Something goes haywire whether they deserve it or not.
And they choose to disengage screw this as opposed to learning how to have a confrontation, which doesn't mean coming and screaming and yelling and pointing. It means I'm saying I am struggling. There is a story that I'm telling myself. I don't know if it's true or not, but can I tell you my story?
And there's a great irony in it when you have a confrontation like that, which is your job is to help the other person feel safe, even though you feel that they're the oppressor. Okay, let's unpack that. Dia Khan, who is a BAFTA winning, I think she's an Emmy winning as well, a documentarian, grew up. She's a Muslim woman living in the UK.
She made some comments on the BBC that went viral about multicultural society. And she started getting trolled by the far right by the white white supremacists. It got so bad that the police advised her to stay away from open windows. The way the Dia responded was to move to the United States and try to get to know white supremacists.
She was at Charlottesville, not marching with them, but walking with them, big difference. And she offered them a safe space to feel heard. Now, this sounds insane. They should be giving her a safe space to feel heard.
Yeah, but that's never going to happen. And that's part of the problem. And I talked to Dia after George Floyd. I talked to her after January 6.
I talked to her after all of these big events. And she said to me, you're not going to like my answer, but in all the research that she's done with she had ease and white supremacists and all of it. In every circumstance, she says the victim has to go first. Because the quote unquote oppressor will never go first.
They will never do it. And so what she did, and she made a documentary called white rights meeting the enemy. You can go watch it happen. You can see it.
She doesn't agree with them. She doesn't affirm their beliefs, but she offers them a safe space to feel heard. And then over the course of time, something happens. You see the transformation.
They can no longer reconcile their racist points of view with the fact that I now trust this woman and consider her a friend and one by one they drop out of the movement. And so if there is a boss who is a bad boss or a friend who's a bad friend or a partner who's a bad partner, you can play the victim and you can wait and wait and wait for them to do the right thing, which should they? Yeah, they should. Yeah, it's your boss.
They should know better. They should be the one that comes and says, Hey, it's not working out. Let's come. We have a conversation.
All this tension. I'd like to lean into the tension. You're with a partner. I'd like to lean.
We've been tense for the past three weeks. I'd like to lean into it. Yeah, yeah, they should. They won't either because they don't care.
They don't know. They don't have the skills. They're embarrassed. They're afraid.
Who knows what the reasons are only a few times is because they hate you and they want to hurt you. Most of the times it's about the reason. Most of the times it's obliviousness, fear, lack of skills. And so yeah, you're the one has to go and this is where the accountability comes in.
You're gonna have to walk and be like, Hey, here's the story. I'm telling myself. I feel like you hate me. You don't say you hate me.
That's an accusation. I feel I feel like you hate me. And there's a few things and maybe I'm looking for the evidence because I'm really sensitive right now. But let me tell you the three things that make me feel like you hate me and I want to put it on the table because I don't want to hate you and I don't want us to fail.
And I don't know how to have this conversation, but I want to put it on the table. That is a human skill. And those are the skills we're lacking. Those are the skills we're lacking.
And the only reason to want to learn those skills is because we take accountability for the people that we are. I can't control anything in this world. I can't control how people treat me. I can't control world events.
I can't control politics. I can't control natural disasters. I have zero control over any of that. So I can sit around and wait for the world to look after me.
And sometimes I get lucky and sometimes I'll get unlucky. You know, things have gone my way by no talent of my own and things have gone badly. No matter how much I tried. Before we continue, I've been drinking AG one every morning for years now and it just got even better.
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You can't mix your logics, right? I love talking to like finance people. I love talking to bankers because when they make tons of money, they'll tell you it's because they're geniuses. And if they lose tons of money, they'll tell you it's because of the market conditions.
You can't mix your logics. You're either lucky and unlucky or you're a genius and idiot, but you can't mix the logics and the same goes with ourselves. I can't take all the credit when things go right. If I won't take some responsibility when things go wrong, I can either choose to say all my success is dumb luck and all of my failures are bad luck or I can say I work hard and I'm an idiot.
Right. I can't mix the logics. You can pick up the logic. You want to care.
But you can't mix them. And I think this is part of what we're saying, which is I can choose to go through life. Lucky or unlucky. It's a mode.
You can choose to just walk through life. You know, it's not a criticism or you can choose to say, no, no, no. I take responsibility that I in some way, shape or form contribute to the situation that I'm in and the feelings that I have. And even though I may not have been able to control the circumstances, I can control my reaction to those circumstances.
Did I go off the handle? Did I attack somebody personally? Did I attack them versus their behavior? We do that.
That one is the easiest one to fix on the most common one we make the common mistake we make. You're a liar versus you told me a lie. You attack someone's character, watch how they respond. They will come back with ferocity.
If you say you told me a lie, you can actually have a conversation about that. It's a behavior. You're a cheat. You cheated.
I'm not a cheat, but I did cheat. Like it's not my character. Remember, everybody thinks they're good. And this is the thing that I think people get wrong all the time, which is really fun.
And just have these little awarenesses. I'll give you a great example. So, do you remember the movie in Gloria Spaster? It's I never watched it.
Oh, it's one of the greatest films ever made. I mean, I cannot recommend it enough. Christoph Valtz who plays the Nazi plays the main Nazi. It put him on the map.
He was this obscure Austrian actor and then this movie made him an international star. I think he won an Oscar for it, actually. He's brilliant in it. He's chillingly brilliant.
How good he is in this Nazi role, right? And he's relaxed and he's got a sense of humor. He doesn't play this caricature of evil. You know, that's one of the reasons he's so chilling.
He's so good at it. So he was on a talk show when he was promoting the movie. And the host asks him, what did you have to do as an actor to play evil so effectively? And he's literally look, he's got this look of total confusion on his face.
He doesn't understand the question. He goes, what? And the host says again, you were so good. What did you have to source yourself from to play evil?
You were so scary. And he looks at the host and goes, he wasn't evil. And this is why he was so good at his role, because what he understood is no one thinks they're evil. Everyone thinks they're on the side of good.
Everyone thinks they're on the side of it. We look at our political discourse these days. It's fricking hilarious. Everybody's accusing each other of being evil and bad.
But both sides, if you talk to them, actually think that they're trying to do good. Both sides are on the side of good. And if you just remember that. That people think they're on the side of good.
Now, they may be misdirected that all of those things are still true, but everybody thinks they're on the side of good. If you just start with that basic knowledge, how we interact is very different. Where we no longer seek to criticize because you're evil. That's my judgment.
But I seek to understand where you're sourcing that good from. And curiosity is a great way to interact with human beings with whom we disagree. Isn't it interesting that we are better at giving advice to other people to me, ourselves? You know, a little bit of time spent refining our, are we in the advice, giving mode or in the listening mode?
You know, learning type of mindfulness gap and being able to sit with silence and all of this other stuff. That is a skill that I think most people can develop really well for a friend. I think so. That is a skill that I think most people will really struggle to develop themselves.
Yeah, I think that's true too. And you make a good point, which is, are you a good friend to yourself? My friend Rick, who's sort of this remarkable entrepreneur monk, not literally, but he's just one of the coolest sort of advice givers I know. I was talking about loneliness.
And I asked him point blank. Do you ever get lonely? Do you ever feel lonely? And he smiled and said, no, I'm always with myself.
He's cultivated such a beautiful relationship with himself that he allows himself to have all the things, all the feels. Do you know, Dry Creek, Dwayne? Do you know who that is? He's a rancher and wrangler from Wyoming.
Big beard permanently affixed with a cigar between his fingers. And I had one show, we were talking about something not too dissimilar. And he said, I like me. I'd buy me a beer.
Yeah. It's just such a simple way. I love that to put across. I'd buy me a beer.
And it took a long time, you know, he's in his 60s now. Yeah. And he's the sort of person he would want to be friends with. Yeah.
And if you're the kind of person who regularly makes promises and doesn't keep them to you. Yeah. If you're the sort of person who places the opinions of others over the opinion of yourself, you're an untrustworthy ally. You're a bad friend.
You're a bad friend. Yes. Yes. You're a bad friend.
You're a bad self friend. You're a bad friend. And I love that. When we say this is a beautiful, let's take that definition of self.
You know, let's add it to my definitions of two people who agree to grow together. I'm one person who agrees to to grow with myself. You know, I think that is beautiful. Do I think that I'm helping me?
Do I think that I'm helping me? And grace is something that we don't talk about. So keep yourself grace, you know, that it's OK to have it's OK to be sad. It's OK to be lonely.
It's OK to be angry. It's OK to have any feeling that you're having, you know, that just allow feelings to happen. Like things happen in the world. We have emotional responses.
It's OK. Like you only have to really ask for help or think you're unhealthy if you get stuck in one of those feelings for too long. But if you're generally having feelings and here's the best one, I learned this during lockdown. You can actually have two conflicting feelings simultaneously, simultaneously.
So for example, when, like, I can't get out of my entrepreneurial self. Like it's in my DNA. And, you know, as an entrepreneur and as a creative person, my happy place is chaos. Because creativity is finding order and chaos.
And in order for me to be creative, I got to have a little chaos, whether it's imposed upon me or I stir the pot myself, right? So when we went into lockdown and it destroyed my business, I mean, it blew it up, I was having a blast. I was having so much fun. Lots of problems to think.
Oh, my God, I had to reinvent the whole business from scratch. I mean, literally, I was like, I was and I was very embarrassed because there was death and there was uncertainty and there was pain all around me. And I kept it to myself because I how but at the same time, I realized I can have two feelings. I can be sad and I can mourn and I can have fun simultaneously, simultaneously.
And so I think sometimes we get embarrassed and we feel that we're having like, if I'm like right now, like life's great and my friend is really struggling. I'm embarrassed that I'm good when they're bad. No, I can be empathetic and be like, sit in the mud with me like, this is awful. Oh my God.
And if they say, how are you? I'm like, I'm great. I don't have to say, well, you know, it's OK. Like we can we can have both.
I can be upset about the world. I can be frustrated and uncertain and I can be excited and clear. All at the same time. And I think that's what we forget, which is as emotional animals.
The one thing that we can all agree on about emotions is they're messy. Sometimes they fire at the wrong time for the wrong reasons. Sometimes we have an emotion that doesn't quite match the situation. Sometimes we overdo it, sometimes we underdo it.
Multiple emotions and things like human beings are messy. That's part of what makes life fun. Like it's like somebody just gave you a big ball of twisted up string and said, OK, the job for your life is to do your best job on tangling this. And people who go through life and just allow life to happen to them.
They just walk on and holding the ball of string going, I don't even know where to start. This is too difficult. This is a twist of not. This is a mess.
What do you want me to do with this? It's unusable. Or there are some people who are like, all right, well, this is a freaking mess, but I'll start somewhere. This looks like it has promised up.
It didn't. All right, I'll try something else. And they're just spending their life trying to untangle the ball of string. And if you just get a little bit of untangled, not only does it give you confidence that you can get more entangled, but you serve as an inspiration to your friend.
Wow, you really are a different version of when I met you a bunch of years ago. Yeah. That's because I'm busy working on this tangled ball of string. I can help you with your words.
It's probably not the same as mine, but I can show you some of the things I tried and maybe they'll work for you. Let's have a look. Let's have a look. I wanted to give you a read an essay that I wrote last week that I thought might be interesting to you.
And it relates to something we've been talking about so far. Lots of people that consume work like yours, listen to shows like this. Many of them would identify something like an insecure overachiever. I think somebody that's very introspective, they ruminate, they like to improve themselves, they're growth minded, they're up with aiming.
And I think they sometimes focus on working hard, the almost appearance in work ethic would be the way that they approach life. So as a famous Victor Frankl quote, when a man can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure. Frankl is arguing that a lack of meaning causes people to seek temporary relief in superficial pursuits rather than addressing the underlying existential void. Perhaps for many, maybe even most people, this is a big issue.
But there is another group who suffer with the opposite problem. Frankl's inverse law. When a man can't find a deep sense of pleasure, they distract themselves with meaning. If ease, grace, joy and playfulness don't come easily to you.
One solution is to just ignore moment to moment happiness entirely and always pursue hard things. You become a world champion at winning the marshmallow test. You convince yourself that delayed gratification in perpetuity is noble because you struggle to ever feel grateful. TLDR, you prioritize meaning over happiness because happiness doesn't come easily to you.
As my friend Bill Perkins says, delayed gratification in the extreme results in no gratification or Alan Watts. If we are unduly absorbed in improving our lives, we may forget altogether to live them. Everyone is taught on the other side of this comfort is something valuable. We're told that worthwhile things are difficult to attain, because if they weren't difficult to attain, they wouldn't be worthwhile.
This is how non-valuable but difficult things get slipped into our desires without just noticing. Some people are hyper-responders to this instruction and go on to become workaholics and insecure overachievers. From the outside, this looks like you've transcended the shallow need for pleasure. But in reality, it's just cope to avoid facing the fact that you struggle to feel joy.
So instead, you perpetually promise yourself that happiness might finally come tomorrow, but like running toward the horizon, tomorrow never arrives. Congratulations, you've managed to subjugate your joy as a tribute to your work. Do not confuse humanless and fun-lacking seriousness with being sophisticated and caring about your pursuit. For Rose says, the price of anything is the amount of life that you exchange for it.
And by this logic, many of us are paying into a bank account that we never withdraw from. I think with this Olympic champion, the LeBron James is winning the marshmallow test. I wonder how many people are bypassing more simple day-to-day joy because it feels originally it was hard for them to access. And now it feels flimsy, unsophisticated.
This is the, I should be aiming for something higher than this. I wonder how many people can be fulfilled with much simpler pleasures than the ones that they're pursuing to lay gratification to try and achieve them. Yeah, I think it's very well said and very well written. Look, I think both are true, right?
At the end of the day, and you and I were talking about this off camera before we started, which is there's a paradox to being human, which is, and this is where this is where Maslov, his hierarchy of needs, Maslov got it wrong. And it speaks to what you're speaking about, right? Maslov's hierarchy of needs people, you know, the basic level of the triangle of the pyramid is food and shelter. Like we need food and shelter first, the third level up is relationships and then the top is self-actualization, right?
But he's wrong because Maslov made the classic mistake, which is he forgot that there's a paradox of being human, which is every moment of every day. We are both individuals and members of groups, every day. And every day we're confronted with small or big choices. Do I put myself first at the sacrifice of the group?
I put the group first at the sacrifice of myself and we can debate which one is supposed to do and answer both right near both wrong. It's a paradox because we have to be ourselves and pursue our own purpose, but we're also supposed to be social animals and contribute to the society, the family, the team that we're a part of. Go. And you're saying the same thing here, which is, and this is where Maslov got it wrong.
He only thought about as individuals. I've, right? As an individual on a desert island, you write food and shelter comes first, you know, relationships, I'll deal with that later. But can you imagine living a whole life for self-actualization?