How To Make Better Decisions (with way less uncertainty) - Joe Hudson - #1171

I want to talk about decision-making. Great. There's a line from Alex Hormozy that says, the life that you want is on the other side of a few hard decisions. And the reason that you're unhappy is because you're not making them. In your experience, how important is the skill of decision-making in guiding someone's life? It's everything. Like if you look at, let's say like the one of the things I talk about when I'm working with leaders who are like growing billion dollar companies is that your business is only two things. It's the relationships that are held in the business and the decisions that you make. Everything else can, it goes to those two things. There's some capital, there's potentially some IP, but those came from decisions that people made. So it is, for a business, it's the critical thing. And if you look at, I think it was founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, who said, for my next company, I want it to be the best decision-making company in the world. So after somebody grew the biggest company in the world, he then said, my next company is gonna be just really great at making decisions. That's how important it is for a company. But if you look at your life, well, what doesn't happen from a decision, right? Like if you're smoking cigarettes, if you are building a company, if you are getting married, who you're getting married to, how you stay married, how you fight, all these things are decisions that we make. I think for the framework purposes, I think it's really important to separate what, and this is the way I think about it. So it's, there's choices and there's decisions. So choices are just the things that you don't think about. Like right now you're sitting like this, you never thought about it. You just, right? And, or the first question, maybe you thought this is a great first question. Maybe you're like, is that the right first question? Or is that the other, is that the right first question? If you are just making choices, it means that you're not sitting there really spending time on it. And so I call that a choice and decisions is where you're really making, spending time on it. So knowing how to make great choices and great decisions is all of life. Like everything that you're going to end, when you're at your grave, it's going to be a series of decisions that you made. So I'd say super hypercritical. And if you can learn how to make great decisions, then you're going to make decisions that are going to make a great life. Can you train decisiveness or is it largely a personality trait? You can absolutely train decisiveness. I don't think it's a training, but it's a recognition. There's some recognitions that can happen that allow for decisiveness. So once you really understand what's happening behind decision-making, then you can, then decisiveness starts to flow from that. Like why, why is it hard for people to make decisions? Why are some decisions hard to make? Why are some choices like, I'm going to go to the grocery store. I took a left here. I'm calling my friend. Why we don't even think about those and why some are really difficult to make. And when you get that, when you understand that, then decisiveness becomes like, there'd be less and less decisions, more and more choices. And the choice and the, and the result is better and better. It feels to me like system one, system two thinking a bit from Daniel Kahneman, thinking fast and slow. So the system two is very deliberate and you sort of have to pay a lot of cognitive attention to it. And then, over time you train system two into system one and the sort of carefully thought decision becomes the, the default. Right. What types of people. Yeah. Tends to struggle with decisions the most. What's the avatar of the sorts of people who tend to be the most indecisive that have the toughest time when it comes to. Well, I'll give you like what humans, but most people in society would call them. And then I'll tell you like the thing that's underneath. Right. So it's going to be people who are perfectionists people who've been criticized a lot as children, people who, who were told that their value wasn't getting it right. And it's really important for them to get it right. And people who are like, have a tendency to be scared of consequences. Those are the people that are going to have a hard time making decisions that they're going to be long, prolonged SWOT analysis, you know, thinking, thinking, thinking, still thinking about it six months later. Should I marry them? Should I not marry them? That's, that's going to be what's behind it for them. How much is decision-making an emotional problem? And how much is it an informational problem? A hundred percent emotional problems. So that's not, that's not me. That is, that is a neurology. So if you read a book called Descartes air, 20, 2012, he wrote that, the emotional center of the brain is what makes decisions. So there are people who've had the emotional center of their brain damaged, and they cease to be able to make decisions. Their whole, their IQ stays the same, but their whole life falls apart because well, what color pen should I use? And 15 minutes later, they're still trying to figure out what color pen, or where am I going to have lunch, right? So there is just to be, because there's some neuroscientists in the audience, who's going to be, he's, he's going to quibble with me. So I'm going to, there is a place where the emotional center of the brain doesn't make the decision. Like if a snake comes at you and you jump away, then it bypasses that. But if you're trying to decide who to hire, if you're trying to decide what investment to make, no matter what your spreadsheet says, you're making a decision to feel a certain way. So if you think about your life and you say, how many decisions did I make to feel loved, to feel like, to feel valuable? How many decisions did I make to not feel like a failure, to not feel like a loser, to not feel dismissed, to not feel rejected? Right there is guaranteed 90% of your life. So that is actually how we make decisions. Neurologically speaking, that's how. so the idea that you're going to make a logical decision is absolute crap. It did like, it's a great idea and it's a, and it's great way to like justify emotional repression, but it's not true neurologically. So that's why I say it's a hundred percent an emotional decision where logic comes in is logic says, I'm going, I'm going to logically try to figure out how I'm going to feel if I make this decision or how I'm going to feel if I make this other decision. So a SWOT analysis of like where you should take your business, where you should invest a million dollars. And if I said to you, and let's say you're your number one modus operandi was like, was happiness. And I said, Hey, I guarantee, and you believe me, you'd be happier if you did this and you had that knowledge. There's the SWOT analysis goes away. It doesn't matter. Maybe your thing is like a meaning, like this will give you the most meaning. Okay. I'm going to do that thing, but whatever that thing is, you're going to do it. And all the logic is doing is trying to figure out how you're going to get to the emotional state. And so that's, that's just the neurological reality of it. And it, and it gives us the biggest clue on how to make great decisions. If you are scared to feel a certain thing, then a certain solution set in your decision-making is not available. To you. Why? If I'm scared to be a loser, I'm not going to be able to take the same kind of risk. So you and I know the guy at the bar who doesn't mind getting rejected, doesn't mind that feeling of rejection. They'll go and hit on 10 women and they will have options that the person who's scared of rejection. I don't want to feel that. And then I make a choice because I don't want to get rejected to not hit on those women. I have no choice. It's, and it's that in everything. I, I'm scared that my boss will yell at me and I will have to feel like a dweeb. I don't want to feel like a dweeb. So I'm not going to say the thing to my boss. And therefore that option is off the table. So that, that's, that's really what's going on behind decision-making. So if you can get to, Oh, I love, and this is going to sound weird to everybody, but like, I don't mind feeling rejected. Like that guy, like I'm good with that. Even like, I look forward to feeling rejected. I know that I'm, I'm winning if I have tried enough times, right? Just like a hurdler. Who's like, I know if I practice enough, if I do enough reps, it doesn't matter how many times I fail, I'm winning. Or if I say, Oh, I I'm okay. Feeling like a dweeb. I'm okay. Embarrassing myself. I'm okay. Not looking good for a moment. Then I can make really clear decisions because then I'm making decisions based on my principles, based on what's most important to me, not based on a fear of, of, of a consequence. Yeah. The, your value. So your option set gets constrained a lot. If you're not prepared to face a ton of emotions. Yeah. James business partner in new tonic used to work door to door, selling like gas for end power, which is like a utility company in the UK. And he needed, I think two more sales before the end of the week in order to hit his target and not lose his job. And he was getting all stressed about it. And he spoke to his. The team leader and the team leader said, what's your sales rate. Like how many doors do you need to knock on to get a sale? Yeah. He said at the moment it's one in 50. He says, okay, so if you do a hundred doors, you've hit your target. You just need to be rejected 98 times. If you're rejected 98 times, you've hit your target. Yeah. I always think about that frame. Yeah. I, so I have a, I have an even better, I had a, a barber. It still is my barber, but he doesn't give, haircuts to very many people anymore. And the reason is, is because we sitting and i was looking at his paintings and i'm like wow man you've got some amazing paintings he's like yeah i'm like well are you in any galleries he's like no and i was talking to him and i saw that fear of rejection i said hey i'll tell you what i'll do i'll give you i think it was one or two thousand dollars i'll give you two thousand dollars if you can get 50 rejections in the next 60 days two thousand dollars if you can get 50 rejections in the next 60 days okay he couldn't get 60 rejections he got two acceptances and so now he's making a living selling his art that's but the reframe was you're not failing you're winning yes yes right yes so that's a hack but the the the the deeper truth right so manipulative yeah it was it's totally was yeah yeah it totally was and for his own good and and and his art deserves to be out there and but that's the the thing is like he wasn't scared of making two thousand dollars he was scared of the feeling of failure it's a great frame how do you come to think about decision making then what are the component skills yeah so so the other thing to understand is like in that before i can go into that the the the the decision like back to decisions and choices so choices are often done because we have subconscious emotions that we don't want to feel never gets into consciousness right like so i'm going to smoke the cigarette so i don't have to feel the thing or i'm going to scroll so i don't have to feel the thing or i'm going to tell my wife i love her because that lets me feel the thing right so that's one set of like how do you how do you make good choices how do you make great decisions the thing to understand i noticed the thing that like unlocked this for me around making decisions was that every time i was making a decision i was in fear so if you are in fear your brain does certain things one of the things your brain does is it um goes black and white thinking like you become very binary should i take the job should i net take the job should i break up with the girl should i not break up with the girl it doesn't say oh i could talk to the girl and say this is what i need if we're going to stay together it doesn't say i could buy the car or i could lease the car or i could buy the car that's a different color or whatever so it doesn't see all the possibilities it narrows things down into black and white thinking the other thing that it fear does in the brain is that it creates a false end like okay so you make a bad decision so what like you get to make another one tomorrow and you get to make another one after that amazon is another another great example of amazon make decisions fast if you can if you can pull them back if you if you can't then okay take a minute make your decision reversible decision yeah exactly so so that's another one uh that that fear does to the brain and and so so that false end is like you don't see through the end like what's happening afterwards and so that's why most people think of decisions as like what do i do about this decision they don't think about decisions as a portfolio the way somebody who's running a hedge fund or in your stock account if you have one you're saying i don't need to get everything right i just need to be principled about what i buy because a majority of them will work out and so people are thinking this decision right now is really important instead of the portfolio of decisions that i'm going to make this year final decision i will ever make all right exactly so so and so that's what how do i make this decision i'm going to make this decision i'm going to make this year final decision i'm going to make this year final decision that's how we know that we're in fear now there's the the rare occasion where someone's like oh i'm just going to really think through this and i'm okay i've thought about it i've collected data this is what i'm going to do right that's pretty rare so most of the people are like oh my god i gotta make a decision what am i going to do it means there's just a tremendous amount of fear that's going on under the surface and so one of the things to learn is that the fear is of a consequence and if you go and you feel that consequence you're going to make a better decision so i'll give you an example of this my wife and i have been married now 27 years we've been married a long time but i've married i've been married to three or four different women all with her name right she's been very she's very different at 27 than she was at 37 than she was at 47 and and so there's been these moments in our life where the the the marriage is rough like what what are we doing and i'm scared to lose her so i'm i'm trying to make decisions to keep her but i'm abandoning myself by doing that i'm abandoning my principles so both of us have come up with this this method where we basically just mourn the marriage because what i'm scared of is that i'm going to lose her so i'm just going to assume i've lost her i'm going to feel all that stuff and then in feeling all that stuff i'm not scared of it anymore and then my response is okay this is who i am and i'm going to show up like that and she shows up as who she is and then we work out like how are we going to be together do we want to be together what's going to actually go on but that fear isn't there and this is like an age-old process so whether you are a stoic or a samurai or tibetan book of living or dying the way to overcome the over and over in slow motion again and again and then that they include like watching your own body decay oh yeah and stuff it's like even after you're dead you're thinking about it because because you're going past the false end oh right that's why it's critical interesting right it's the same thing if you're gonna if you're gonna like mourn your marriage you don't go to the moment of divorce you go to like and then i'm lonely after and i can't find a woman and then you know you do the whole thing and then and then and then and then and then and then i have a marriage again or then i'm you know whatever it is so so overcoming your fear that way is a really critical thing because if you're having a hard time making a decision it's not because you don't know what to do typically it's because you're scared of a consequence and the consequence you're scared of is an emotional consequence that is the episode like that's the that that's really lovely that's a great a great summary why is it fear why is that the emotion i understand that there's this sort of absolutist thinking uh i understand that creates a a type of constraint which will cause panic i also understand that if there's a kind of finality to things because you don't think that the life is going to continue beyond this decision and if you choose especially if you choose the wrong one or not yeah um but why fear like why is that the case why is that the emotion default yeah this is a because the identity is going to get messed with right so like who do i think i am i think that i am a very successful person it's important for me to be a successful person so taking this job is really important the things that are really important to us are the things that define us and our identity and so that's going to be a that's going to be where we're really important and in some way every time we're making a decision and we are in that fear-based decision-making process it teaches us exactly where we're not principled in being ourselves and so that's actually the antidote so for instance i have a set of principles that i make 80 of my decisions by and i make them that way the same way that like berkshire hathaway says this is what we invest in that it's not guesswork it's like these things have to be true for us to invest and i think right now they're sitting on like 230 billion dollars because nothing is true enough to invest in they're like it doesn't hit what we invest in so we're just holding cash right and that was the case maybe like three months ago i don't know where they are today and um and so it's the same thing if i'll make a decision based on a set of principles of who i want to be in the world and if i'm thinking about those principles the way i think about the principles are if i have five seven principles do the same thing and i'm going to do they do they get me where i want to go eighty percent of the time do they almost guarantee success over time not a single success but over time and do they solve eighty percent of my problems like can you give me an example of a principle it doesn't necessarily need to be one of yours yeah yeah absolutely um i'll give you a decision making principle we have our business which is whenever we're building something new we go to the thing we know the least amount about and we build it first give me an exam so if i'm going to build a car and i know how to build a car but i don't know how to build a catalytic converter most people will build the car then build the catalytic converter and then go oh shit the catalytic converter doesn't work inside this car i'm gonna have to rebuild part of the car i'll say let's build the catalytic converter first and now build the car around it because it's going to be a more efficient process why why is it a more efficient process why why do the hard thing first well because then i don't have to redo the car because i don't have to like how does that make how does that help with the decision like i suppose that's a principle but right in what way does that make the decision more likely to be right so if we're yeah so the so uh the decision that if we're in the decision of we're going to build out a podcast for the first time we're going to be more successful because we went to the thing we don't know and we've solved that first rather than do all the things we know right and solve that later okay uh can you give an example that's uh something from a personal life not a business oh yeah yeah so my i have a personal i have a personal this is actually the perfect one i have a personal uh principle so everything is an iteration so what that means is the same thing that i was teaching to the barber which is failure isn't a thing there's just i run experiments and i learn and then i keep on running experiments and i keep on learning and i keep on running experiments and then i learn if i do that instead of thinking i fail or i succeed i'm not going to be successful i'm just like constantly learning then i ultimately always succeed because i'm just running iterations until i figure the thing out and there's a lot of neurology on this there's there's something called the habenula and and it basically prevents us from failing inside of our brain and it's basically the part of our brain that's in all invertebrates i'm loosely speaking here that if a bear goes and fights for mating rights and they lose it stops them from going i'm going to go fight for mating rights again right now right like it it's it's the same thing in our brain that it's like when you're on a diet and you're like i'm going to be on this specific diet for a while and you're like great for like two weeks and then you eat that one piece of chocolate cake or whatever and then you're like fuck the diet and you're completely off but you just ate one chocolate cake like so what you just get back on the diet but we don't because that part of our brain is like we can't fail again in my world it's everything is an iteration so what's the experiment i'm going to try what's the next experiment i'm going to try what's the next experiment i'm going to try and they did this study with uh people who were i think it was like at the poverty line who lost weight successfully and all of them or not all of them but a grand percentage of them all were doing iterative mindset they were all saying i'm just running a series of experiments until i find something that works so for me everything is i'm trying so we run we do this in our business but i do this in life so i do something that goes horribly wrong i'm like great that was an iteration what's the next iteration or i'm like i have a big decision to make i'm like oh well just what's the simple iteration i'm going to do that yeah you've been at least in your business uh impressively prepared to put stock in shit that i've told you to do oh yeah and i'm like huh you listen to me i mean not just listen to me no just give me lip service or do the thing say that he wants to do the thing and genuinely want to do the thing and then encounter some practical fear or some emotional barrier like i've said hey i think you should do this i think we might have even talked about it last time on the podcast yeah you doing i wanted you to do basically the uh master coach critiques breakdowns emotionally of these things and these videos are ripping and you guys are doing like the you you fucked it on a few of the early ones yeah and had a couple of winners on the early ones and then changed it and changed it and now it's like yeah it's fucking awesome yeah it's really it's really it's really good yeah and that's and so that's what that's exactly it and so that's the way it is with everybody in the company anybody wants to try and experiment as long as it's like within brand go as a matter of fact we actually have a criteria everybody who works for us has to run depending on where they are three to five experiments on how to do their job differently every quarter wow so that's that's how deeply we take everything is an iteration and it allows you to make mistakes it allows you to learn it allows you not to care so much it allows you to have pace over getting it right most people will lose in life because they are trying to get it right rather than trying to keep a pace it's like forward progress is more important than getting things right i think the as you're explaining it i'm noticing what's coming up in me is a reduction in the sense of grandeur about and and pressure around decisions well i'm just moving forward you've removed the finality of this decision and also kind of baked into it that an experiment that doesn't prove the hypothesis isn't a failure you did still learn something which is that hypothesis was wrong and we continue and continue i'm sure you've heard and i'm never and i'm never done yes i'm just going to keep on learning and that's just one principle tell me if this sounds familiar you train regularly you eat reasonably well you feel fine and you're not feeling well and you're not feeling well and you're not feeling fine but you're just kind of going off vibes most people have absolutely no idea what's going on inside their body and that is why i partnered with function function gives you access to more than 160 advanced lab tests spanning hormones heart health kidney function and even detects early signals linked to more than 50 types of cancer to put that in perspective your typical annual physical might test 20 markers function runs over 160 it's huge best of all you test twice a year and everything lives inside of a simple dashboard so you track trends over time make sure you're moving in the right direction and you're not going to be able to do it again and again and this level of testing would usually cost thousands but with function it is 365 per year just one dollar a day to actually know what's happening inside of your body and right now you can get 25 off bringing it down to 340 bucks get the exact same blood panels that i use and save 25 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom that's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom uh have you heard of gps brain or the gps principle it's something not too dissimilar which is if you are trying to get to a destination following google maps when you miss the turn google maps doesn't judge itself or you for you missing the turn it just updates the route correct gps brain yeah it's cool yeah so a cool so there's this guy who was a i love this story this guy he was a surgeon and he was a dog trainer and so in dog training you have this little click that tells the dog you did it right and you go click click click and that just it's like a gps brain click click click click so he's working with this um dog his dog he's pretty successful but he loses his shit one day and just fucking yells at the dog doesn't do the clicker just yells at the dog and the dog like goes back like regresses horribly and so he's like oh crap like that's what happens when there's any kind of emotional content in in his assumption is either good or bad it's just like you did it right you didn't do right gps brain so he goes to his surgeon students and he's teaching them like how to tie tendons and stuff and there's like a six press six thing problem and he starts bringing a clicker instead of saying good job you got it right don't do that what are you doing here and he just clicks when they get it right and he improved the rate of their learning dramatically no way by having gps brain so that's another like okay if if everything is an iteration is a principle that gives me gps brain which is what it does then it helps me be more successful so now when i'm confronting a problem what do i do about this one of the principles i look at is everything's an iteration what if everything's an iteration what would that tell me to do and this is in service of trying to improve the quality and accuracy of decisions but also rid that fear get rid of that fear not just feeling it not just going to the like reductio ad absurdum of the kind of mental projection it's mostly this is who i want to be in the world do i want to be neurotically freaking out about each one of my decisions nah i don't really want to be that does this work as to make me successful yes it does is this like more comfortable and awesome yes it is cool that's a principle like i have another principle that is connection it's you know we have the connection course but it's a principle it means that if we bill somebody we we how do we build them with connection if i'm sitting here talking to you how do we actually build connection and over the years we've actually built connection if i run a course how do i make sure everybody feels like we're deeply connected with them and we really care about them because we do and how do we help them find connection and i have this video with ali abdal where i'm coaching him and we're having this moment where i was like oh you know i don't not sure if i mentioned it's one of my things i was just like okay let's go through all your business problem and look at it through the lens of connection what would make you feel more connected to yourself and others as a solution and you could see him come up with like multiple solutions to the problem because he's just looking through the lens of that principle right and so it's the same thing and so so now i have a decision to make let's say like do i go on the chris williamson podcast and i'm like everything's an iteration okay i don't give a shit if i pop blow this like why would i care okay that's a one that's a and connection well i i love being with chris this is something that makes me feel connected i'm gonna do it and i get to connect with a lot of people yeah okay and so i'll just go through my principles if i have a decision to make and i will it feels like i mean we haven't even got into the like the structure but this seems really interesting to me kind of the idea of engineering bravery or courage in a way that this is like improving your bravery to some degree it's increasing your preparedness to face scary things when people think about bravery and courage a lot of the time that's what it is so is bravery or courage are those words that factor into this at all it's so interesting because as you say it i'm like yeah that's true true, but it's, it's, but it's not, wasn't the thought process, right? So, so the thought process was what are the thing, how I can't control the outcome of a decision, but I can control how I want to be in that decision-making process. Am I proud of how I made that decision? That's the thing I can control. So it came from that. It came from like, I think of a portfolio of decisions. These principles are going to work and I'm going to be proud of them even if they don't work. And if they don't work, I'll iterate on the principles themselves. Right. You know that from the outside, somebody looking at you choosing to make decisions that are big or scary or difficult or whatever in that way would go, wow, that was brave. Right. Very courageous that you've chosen to do that. Right. So, so then, then, then what happens? So this is the cool thing. So then you start making decisions that way. And most of them are easy. You're like, okay, I'll make it. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. That makes sense. And then there's one where it's like, I don't want to fucking do that. There's nothing in me that wants to do that. But if I look at my principles, it's very clear, that's what I'm supposed to do. And you look and you say, well, shit, all I can say is that my principles work most of the fucking time and I can't come up with a better solution. So I'm going to do it even though I don't want to do it. And you do it and maybe it works. Most of the time it works. Occasionally it doesn't work, but every time you act on the principle, the courage, there's less and less courage required. Because you are positively reinforced that the principles work, which means you trust them more in future. That's one. And the other one is because you are being who you want to be. So there is an implicit reward, whether no matter how it works out. Yes. Yes. I'm showing up in the way that I want to. And if the choice was between showing up in the way that I want to and the decision going wrong and showing up in the way that I don't want to and the decision going right. A lot of the time people would actually prefer the former to the latter. I think Margaret Cho, if I have her name right, she had an early standup, like I'm saying how old I am, but she had an early, I think it was her first standup. And she was a comedian who had like an Asian sitcom and it failed. And her whole sitcom thing, basically this one woman show is it failed, but that's not what hurt. What hurt was is that I abandoned myself and then it failed. I would rather have been true to myself and fail than been fake and succeed. Have I taught you about audience capture before? Do you know this term? No, no. I detest how afflicted you are with not being on the internet. I require you to be more terminally online. Fucking infuriated. Okay. So audience capture is when a creator, typically on the internet, but I'm sure it's happened with newscasters and people in late night shows and more traditional media as well, begins to not create what they want to, but they create what they think that audience wants. So it's referred to as throwing red meat to the audience. I get it. Yeah. Very common and may have even been born out of the politics wing. If you're a political commentator, you know, you have your takes and your audience comes to you. Wow. That's an interesting take for the person that's on the left or the right or the whatever. And then after a while you realize, because you're looking at the popularity, maybe the play counts, the positive reinforcement that you get. When I talk in this way about this kind of subject from this lens, people seem to give me more positive reinforcement. And over time you like Pavlovianly condition yourself into this type of behavior. What's interesting about this is it's almost like a looking glass creator. Wow. Here. Yeah. Yeah. It's fucking cool. Yeah. I have a lot of thoughts here. Um, what you, the thing that's one interesting wrinkle is it's not what the creator knows the audience wants. It's what the creator thinks that the audience wants. Right. And people don't always know what they want. Right. Which is interesting. What's that Henry Ford line? If I asked the customer what he wanted, he would say a faster horse. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so that, that, that's, that's one interesting thing. And then you roll the clock forward a little bit, you know, roll the clock forward six months, one year, a couple of years. This creator is now out of touch with their taste, uh, because they haven't created something from themselves for a very long time. Yeah. They are kind of marionetted or puppeted by the audience, but their projection of the audience, which means they don't actually know what they want. They're just kind of trying to do something that they think that they want. Yeah. And this is the kind of pernicious thing. If the audience stops loving the work that you do, when you compromise yourself in order to serve them. Yeah. You will resent them so quickly because you say, how can you not love me? How can you not appreciate what I'm doing? Look at what I did for you. I even pushed myself to the side. Right. Right. I shunted myself to the side of my own work just to serve you. And I'm sure you got lots of things, but the one final bit on top. Yeah. Uh, Ethan Strauss wrote this fucking outstanding article and it's called criticism capture is more dangerous than audience capture. And he wrote it about three or four years ago. He's a sports reporter, but he thinks about audience dynamics and like, like creative dynamics too. What he basically said is he thinks that it's the criticisms, not the compliments that are more deranging to people. And when you see this, you actually realize that many people are criticism captured, not just audience captured. So there's two things going on. They protect themselves from the potential negative. They do it by being more inflammatory, by being more aggressive, by sort of like the, the guy outside that flares his lats outside of the night. Yeah. Or they do it by, uh, neutering themselves by sort of staying small and milk toast and, and always sitting on the fence and never actually staking it, claiming the ground. Maybe they do it by always caveating by always having some sort of equivocation before they speak so that every single potential negative permutation of what they were going to say is already being put out there. Uh, there was a lot of ways that they can do this, but, um, you see some people that are more, um, positive and then you see some people that are more negative reinforcement compelled and the perfect example. And I think that this is true. And it's the canonical example that's used by Ethan in his article about criticism capture. It's Jordan Peterson is very criticism captured and you see how warping and that man maybe had apart from perhaps like Trump and Tate, but whilst not being a Tatey and Trumpy and kind of individual, uh, a volume of criticism that almost no one in history has had to deal with right outside of like fucking leaders of countries. Right. Like that. And, um, who would be able to deal with that? Almost nobody. But I do think it's a fair comment to say that criticism did some fucking warping. So audience capture criticism capture some new ideas for you. Yeah. I love there's so much stuff. The first tangential thought I have is like, it, it, it also creates the creation of porn like entertainment. Oh, this is George Mack's idea. You run enough split tests and you end up with a porn website. Yeah. This is George. This is George's idea. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's brilliant. It's fucking wonderful. It's like, I'm going to, if you're red meeting your audience, I'm going to give them more and more emotional, like this is happening on our news and everything like that. I'm going to give them more and more emotional hotness and, but I'm going to desensitize them so much as I'm doing it that the, the only thing that's left is like hate and yeah. So most base. Yeah. The inflammatory. Yeah. Uh, so, so it's an interesting thing. It's like audience capture leading to, to the destruction of your audience, the pontification of everything and the destruction of your audience, which is like fascinating. Um, the second thought process that I had there is like, this isn't just creators. This is life. This is how people operate in a, in a, in a business with their boss. Then did I make them happy to her? Did I make the people around me pleasure and less pain? Yeah, exactly. And that's doesn't make good decisions. Like if they, at the end of the day, if you look at somebody who's been doing that, they either their business or their audience or their personhood has dropped off of a cliff somewhere along the line, whether that is in Jordan's case, uh, anxiety, like deep anxiety, or, um, you know, you become the person that you hate or you have the resentment. It doesn't actually lead to a successful life. But if you're principled, if you're saying, you know, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. And this is true for companies too. Somebody who's principled about what they're doing. It doesn't mean that they're not listening and they're not reacting, but if they're principled about what they're doing, if they're like, this is our brand and we don't stray from the brand, or this is what we're here to do. This is our mission. We're not strained from the mission. We might find 20 ways to get it done, but we're not saying these are our principles. Those people have much longer lasting success without the burnout too. And it's the same with a human in life. Like if you look at the 70 years old have done something significant and are happy, they're almost always have lived a pretty principled life. You might not agree with their principles, but they've lived a pretty principled life. Does this mean that we need to canonize our principles before we can start making good decisions? I don't think before, but it's super fricking useful. Yeah. So we have a, we have a course called the great decisions course and that is everyone needs to get ready to sign up for. Cause it's in January, January, January sells out usually in a day. Fuck. Yeah. Yeah. Well, okay. Get ready. Yeah. Um, yeah. Yeah. Does this mean, okay. Process component skills. That's one of it. Yeah. Decision-making does that mean that is that one of the first, things today i mean you're not going to stop making decisions you'll be like i'm going to put all decisions in a holding pattern right no no no including what pants i'm going to wear today up until the point at which i've done my principles yeah so one of the things you can do is just start looking at the decisions you made in the last year and say what are the principles i've actually lived by or am i proud of those and are they working might be a ugly reflection yeah for a lot of people it is but yeah so two main components of great decision making and great make making great choices is can i become comfortable with all sorts of emotions so that i have my my set of solutions available to me and the other one to the girl in the bar right and the other one is what are the principles that i want to live by that are going to lead me to success that are going to solve most of my problems for me if i just live by my principles and those two things are going to be incredibly like that's a huge portion of the work yeah that that's really i imagine that's going to be hugely disappointing to a lot of people that they were expecting to have some lovely framework for how to bypass having to feel things or having to face things it's like no no no no no no what's the flow chart that i follow in order to make sure that my decision doesn't require me to encounter any negative emotions yeah yeah so here's here's a here's the coolest thing this is one of the things i get to see in my work so much this and i and they're going to hate this even more but i'll give you the example that just happened recently my daughter is applying for colleges and she's like i don't know what to write the essay on the essay so important this is a big thing fear black and white thinking i can't do this i can't do that i'm just watching her say and i was like hey babe fuck them fuck what the colleges say fuck what everybody says fuck like what the fuck like who the fuck are them like be you what the fuck do you want and she's like what do you like what's going on why are you swearing exactly and i'm like i see how angry you are at this whole thing that you have to prove yourself to people like this is bullshit go get angry for me like and we have a thing in our house where anger is like so she gets out the tennis racket she gets the thing and i'm i'm like in nepal at this moment right and she's at home and oh you're doing this virtually i'm doing this virtually wonderful so you're uh cursing uh your other half too you're she doesn't do it in front of me okay and so she she's like okay yeah i got it i'm gonna go get angry and she calls me the next day she's like i've already written three essays i have all these ideas they're not quite good enough they're not what i want to be yet but i'm still writing this is great i have to get angry again and a dozen times during the decisions course easily in a decision they couldn't make and it was just an emotion that they needed to feel and the whole thing unlocks for them momentous just made one of my favorite products significantly better and fifty dollars cheaper they have reformulated their sleep packs with a better and more research-backed form of magnesium making the new formula even stronger than before i have taken these things every single night whether i'm at home or on the road and it does make a genuine difference the formula helps you to wind down fall asleep more quickly and stay asleep throughout the night with no melatonin so no sleep paralysis demons sitting at the foot of your bed plus it's nsf certified for sport meaning that it is third-party tested for dosage accuracy screen for heavy metals and banned substances with every result published on the momentous website best of all they've got a 30-day money-back guarantee so you can buy it completely risk-free use it for 29 nights and if you do not like it for any reason they will give you your money back plus they ship internationally right now you can get up to 35 off your first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to live momentous.com modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout that's l-i-v-e-m-o-m-e-n-t-o-u-s.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout what are the most common emotions that people encounter when it comes to that they're stuck with it is anger fear and grief sadness yeah sometimes helplessness yeah there's some of the really like hardcore decisions but the but the underneath that emotional content is like the identity breaking right so with my daughter there's like she had to let go of this identity of being the smart one of the straight a student of the one who can get anything she wants done done she had to say i'm gonna be myself and people can accept me or not accept me and that was her anger her anger was fuck you like i don't care if you judge me if it's if you're if your school can't see me go fuck yourself this keeps on sounding like bravery and courage like that's the word and maybe my conception of bravery is is tied up in in decisions more closely than it should be but like you hear that and you say hey this place is going to take me or it's not going to take me and i'm a 17 18 year old girl and you know it's a big deal and all of my friends are going to have things to say if i don't get into college or whatever yeah and i don't care i'm just going to do the me thing like that level of it from the outside it seems like self-assuredness confidence resilience bravery courage it's like all of these things wrapped up it doesn't feel like it in the moment i'm with you because i'm like yeah i guess yeah that's true i can't i can't deny it but in the moment when you're doing it it feels like i'm being honest so it doesn't feel like shit there is that moment of like oh my gosh because there is like that i'm stepping into a bigger room there's like oh my god i'm getting on stage and i'm doing this thing there is that that comes along with it so you feel the excitement but mostly you feel like honesty right because we we know what it feels like when we compromise ourselves it doesn't feel good like it like there's a way to say it takes a lot of courage and bravery to feel like you're compromising yourself that feels like far worse than feeling like you've done the right thing and been rejected alex has a line where he says fear is an inch deep and a mile wide that when that's so good hold on that's so good that's so good that is so freaking good yeah yeah yeah looking out over this massive lake and you know my god how am i ever going to be able it's so terrifying you go like oh it's a little splash that's right oh fuck right it wasn't that bad and i mean he he so i don't know how much you know about alex actually it would be wonderful to introduce you to at some point um he i i'm i i have enough internet to know who he is oh impressive wow he's broke it he's really reached escape velocity holy fuck i i i mean i geek out on business content so there's that and and uh i've actually really appreciate i appreciate how straightforward he is very much so so the straightforwardness i think um is one of the things that i appreciate about him and we were talking about maybe have a dinner or maybe it was on the pod about um the first time he had to make a really difficult decision and he'd done the will be son of a middle eastern father success right path yeah and then he realized that he wanted to start a gym and the middle east was he from iran yes you know i lived there why because my dad because you were in iran for when the revolution happened yeah and then that was when you left yeah yeah yeah holy shit yeah does that feel strange now watching so much of the world center around iran a place that you know you knew quite well yeah there's a grief in it for sure because like the people of iran are beautiful people like they were like an incredibly beautiful people so there's a lot of grief around that yeah so iranian father and and and with all of the accoutrements that come along uh culturally yeah um and yeah alex sort of tells this story i was on track to do this thing and then i move i start i start gyms and i have to tell my father and my you know all i've wanted to do is kind of impress my father at some point um and he says from the outside that looks like an incredibly brave decision but the way that alex made that for first decision was he drove across the country before he rang his dad he literally essentially went from coast to coast to put himself a few thousand kilometers away before he was prepared to pick up the phone and one of the things that i'm sure you'll resonate with is beautiful when you're faced with a difficult conversation or difficult decision or whatever especially conversation uh and you're worried about it and you're thinking about it and you're ruminating and thought looping about it and you're thinking about it and you're thinking about it and you're thinking about it and then you do it fear is an inch deep and a mile wide and you step in you realize it's not soon as you do that first one you go all right fucking who else is on the chopping block what else can i do here and you like you go from having i don't know uh being a bow hunter who's taking forever very carefully to wait to release the thing and as soon as you release it the bow sort of turns into a belt fed m140 machine gun and you're like um it's just interesting the with that and i think that you mentioned this before that there's kind of a breakthrough moment and then it kind of tumbles downhill but i get without spiraling off into that and also there's just to say this there's like also a long-term short-term effect on bravery because the fear has got that false end the other thing that's occurring is like if you're doing the thing that is true to you over time every time you will have a life that's true to you because the things that aren't true to you are going to be failures the things that are true for you are going to be successes like you're going to create a life that's organized around who you are instead of who you're pretending to be or who you're trying to be or who you want people to think you are and so short term making a decision that compromises might work to get your immediate need met but it's not going to work for creating a life that actually is suited for who you are essentially and like i think alex is a great example of this like he is like i am going to be me period as well as much as my consciousness knows who i am that's who i'm dedicated to and he's created a life that is for him that works for him well regardless of whether or not you like him or don't like him or i think even a maybe might be wrong you might tell me i'm wrong maybe a better example than alex is donald trump because it's somebody who has an obvious lot maybe an even more obvious uh number of reasons to not be the person that he's being uh if that makes sense yeah i see what you're saying right yeah like the price of being donald trump is quite high somebody else it's actually probably less triggering although maybe similarly triggering sam harris so i think a lot about sam harris when i think about this um people regularly accuse sam of uh flip-flopping on his beliefs of not being uh logically consistent in some way that they see that they think that he doesn't see whatever um but the reason that i've always had a good bit of faith that he is doing what he believes is that he pays an incredibly high price for the positions that he takes how many people do you know that are anti-trump but also anti-woke that are like anti-islam but also uh like nationalized health care that are from the left but are concerned about people coming across the board like it's a very non-fungible like unique construction right it's very idiosyncratic and i go okay and for each of those every time he goes on one side of the fence and then back over to the other he pisses off both sides right in order to arrive at that kind of outcome to me if you were just doing it in order to feed red meat or to like placate yourself for the world in some sort of a way you wouldn't choose that you wouldn't choose that you wouldn't choose that you those wouldn't be the decisions that you go for because it's like deranging right so you're everybody else is confused about what so if that makes sense the more the higher the price that someone pays for the positions that they hold and the less that you can predict what their next opinion is going to be basically if i if i know one of your opinions and can accurately predict everything else that you believe you're probably not a serious thinker right and uh i find that that's not necessarily the the case with those guys yeah i think that they're those are some extreme examples i i also see that there are people who are living you know regular lives that are saying i'm going to be true to myself and they end up with a life that's actually true to them and it doesn't it doesn't mean that they have to be like committed to something that pisses people off yeah yep yep yep but the bravery could show up in mundane and very boring normal ways everything exactly but there are going to be moments for those people where they are going to go i don't want to do it but it's not going to happen i don't want to do it i don't want to do it it's the right thing to do okay what else what else is there to say about breaking down those component skills that we haven't covered so far yeah this is the on the choice side of things that's really important is to slow down so this is where you get into the world of habits the underlying principle is that your identity is still at stake right so you still have to work through the identity piece but but the other piece is to really be able to slow down the process that's happening there and be present with it in one way or another so if you are um trying to quit coffee as an example because your coffee somehow you'd decide it is bad for you um what what you should do instead is reach for a new tonic uh yes sounds like a true investor um you have like a series of habits that are going to trigger that desire for the coffee it's going to be an unconscious reach for the coffee when you drink it can you actually be totally present what's the emotion that's happening before you drink the coffee that makes you want to drink the coffee that you get after the coffee to slowly unpack that experience and start noticing what you're avoiding or trying to run into so this is kind of unwinding current choices to become decisions yeah yeah yeah i would say making turning choices into conscious conscious choices yeah and and so that's a really important skill set if you want to change kind of the habitual choices that you're making which is there's lots of tricks and and james clear is amazing at what he writes for all the tips tips and tricks but one of the key ones on the emotional level because the decisions are being made emotionally is can i slow down and i'm not going to slow down and i'm not going to slow down and i'm not going to slow down and i'm not going to slow down and i'm not going to slow down and feel the stuff that i don't want to feel that drives me into some bad habits it comes back to awareness yes again yes interestingly yeah i mean i i can give you an example from my own life that because i've been fighting with health stuff for the last couple of years a lot of the time that's disrupted my sleep when i wake up on a morning if my body decides it wants to rip me awake at 3 a.m or 4 a.m or something and there is this story that i tell myself of oh well fuck like today's the day i'm going to sleep and i'm going to sleep and i'm going to sleep and i'm going to sleep is already going to be ruined and this is really really painful and i'm going to lie awake and i'm going to stare at the ceiling and this is super annoying and it's not going to suck and i'm not going to perform as well on the podcast and then maybe people are going to laugh where they don't like me and my whole life's going to fall apart and i get gluten intolerance and liver under a bridge and he's all going to go wrong and reaching for my phone and being distracting myself from that emotion yeah is now after a while your sleep has improved which has meant the fear's gone away but you're left with the fucking residue of the habit this is very strange situation where you're yes you're being puppeted by the coping mechanism of a emotion that you're no longer feeling right and that sticks about a lot of the time and there's now there'll be something else i'm doing i'm sure that is is the case i'm like well i've got to unwind this thing that i don't even need anymore that kind of maybe served a purpose to some degree or whatever and now i'm going to get rid of that and i'm sure there's some other shit that i'm doing right now that i probably should be pointing out too so like you end up if you're not careful i think and this is why people the sort of parito principle of to those who have everything more will be given and to those who have nothing more will be taken on matthew principle um the reason that it seems to suck so much for many people and the reason that spirals go down and spirals come up is that if you don't step in and consciously design your life if you're living it by default you will begin to like sedimentary rock accumulate these things over time and you're like where the fuck why have you got that habit it's like oh i don't know like 15 years ago this thing was happening and i did it and now i'm still puppeted by it even though that's gone does that make sense oh yeah totally yeah i think about this in a company structure all the time which is bureaucracy does not destroy itself you have to actively go in and destroy bureaucracy and what you're describing is the kind of an emotional bureaucracy oh it's so good it just like well i mean connor's line one of my favorites that he's given to me a gazillion times but he dropped yesterday one of my favorites is we try to control that which we cannot trust yeah yeah i yeah i love that one yeah it's like shit the first time he told me that i was like oh stop i was like just close the call i don't need to hear from you anymore i'm gonna go and like think about that i'm gonna think about that for the next couple of days uh yeah we try to control that which we cannot trust yeah and that's the bigger bureaucracy thing but to some degree that's also the emotions thing well so So, yeah. So let's take your, let's unpack your situation for a second. You're sitting in bed, waking up and your brain's doing da, da, da, da, da, da. What's the emotions underneath are probably sadness and helplessness. Probably some shame as well. Yeah. Yeah. And probably some shame. The shame is most likely the thing blocking you from feeling the sadness and the, so, and so a, a bureaucratic free mentality is I'm going to cry. I'm going to be scared. I'm going to go back to sleep. But no, before you can do that, you have to fill out this paperwork. It's called a phone and you need to like scroll on the phone for this bureaucracy. And then, okay, now you have to, well, you've been scrolling on your phone. You kind of feel like shit. So you need to, and you didn't get enough sleep. So now you need some caffeine and now, but that caffeine, it kind of makes you anxious. So you've got this bureaucratic thing that you have to go through just to get back to some level of normal. Yeah. You've accumulated, you've sort of piled this bunch on top. Okay. So yeah. Uh, choices, choices, making the, the, um, unconscious choices more conscious. That's one step. Yeah. Yeah. If, and feeling the emotions that are happening around bringing your awareness to the emotional experience around the choices and in all of them. So it's feeling the stuff that you don't want to feel, learning how to embrace, love the stuff that you don't want to that's, this is, I think the hardest part for people to really grok. So my story is emotional abandonment was like, I had an alcoholic father. I had an Al-Anon mom, my needs were not taken care of for a large part. Some were, and they did the best that they could, but a lot of them were not taken care of. And so when I was growing up, when I was like in my twenties, I was like, I'm going to be emotionally abandoned by everybody. Fuck you all. Like anytime I felt emotional abandonment, I would do one of two things. I would be like, fuck you. I don't need you anyhow, which created more people emotionally abandoned me, or I get needy, which would create more people getting like emotionally abandoned me. So, so I was recreating this situation. Once I learned that I could embrace emotional abandonment, right? So that feeling would come up and instead of trying to get rid of it by going, fuck you, or please come closer. And I was just like, oh, I can actually experience this. I can allow for this. I can allow that. I can allow this in my life. I don't need to run from it. Then I stopped doing this and I stopped doing this and people abandoned me, emotionally abandoned me a lot less. And when they do, I don't really mind because I get to have that experience again and learn more deeply from that experience and realize that, oh, their emotional abandonment doesn't hurt even half as much as me emotionally abandoning myself. And so then all of a sudden I'm like, oh, I can't wait to be emotionally abandoned again. Because I get that experience. I get to learn again, which is weird, but you had that moment. And when you have that moment with one of these emotions that you're like, this is, it's a ridiculous, what starts happening is you're like, oh, let's see where else, what other emotions I can love. And all of a sudden these patterns that have been ruling your life, like emotional abandonment start collapse, collapsing, because all you're trying to do is feel the thing that you couldn't feel as a kid, which was like, this fucking sucks. Like no one's here for me. That was the feeling I couldn't feel as a kid. Cause if I did my whole life would collapse. So I couldn't feel it then, but somewhere in my twenties, I learned to feel it. And then the pattern starts dissipating in my life. And so what you start seeing happening is when people start accepting these emotions, learning how to love and, and, and, and accept and say, oh, I can't wait to feel, I welcome this emotional experience. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You got to experience this in groundbreakers. You got to see what happened. All of a sudden, these patterns that are in their lives for decades, just start falling apart because It's fucking terrifying. Yeah. It's really destabilizing. Because their choices change because their, their decision-making changes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A quick aside. You probably heard me talk about Element before, and that's because I've started every single morning the same way for the last five years now, which is a cold glass of water with Element in it. Element is an electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. It's a science-backed, electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium. No sugar, no coloring, no artificial ingredients. It reduces muscle cramps and fatigue, supports brain function, and helps to regulate your appetite throughout the day. I genuinely notice the difference when I take it versus when I don't, which is why I don't shut up about it. And also why it's used by everyone from Dr. Andrew Huberman to Olympic athletes and FBI sniper teams, the good sniper teams, not the bad ones. Also, they have a no questions asked refund policy. So if you don't like it for any reason, they'll just give you your money back. Plus, they'll give offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of Elements' most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com slash modernwisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modernwisdom. Is there a category of decision that is markedly different? Some people may have problems with like, what am I even going to wear today? Or, you know, how am I going to have a conversation with this barista at the coffee shop? But for the most part, I think it's going to be bigger things. And when it comes to bigger things, am I going to stay in this relationship or not? Am I going to marry this person or not? Am I going to leave this job or not? Am I going to move to a new city or country or not? Is there anything different when it comes to that? Because it's less routine, right? Like you're not going, this is less of a reversible door, not necessarily a reversible door, but significant. Like, fuck, if you're going to like move back from a country, you picked up all of your possessions and you've gone over there and maybe there's financial implications and stuff, like things happening. And also how many times have you moved countries previously? Like show me the CV of how this has gone for you in the past. I don't know. I've never done it. I'm thinking about when people are facing the biggest decisions of their life, what they feel are the most impactful, the most momentous, the scariest, the grandest. How do you advise them to go through that? Well, there's a couple of things that I think are really important to see first, and then we can talk about the advice. So the, you started with the guy who was like, how do I talk to the barista? It doesn't matter if it's, how do I talk to the barista? If the decision is like as hard as it is to like, where do I move? It's because the identity is at stake. So that person probably has like social anxiety, some sort of version of that. And they're like, oh my God, like, am I going to be liked? Am I going to be like their whole identity of, I am a person who's not good with other people is at stake if they talk to the barista. Uh, the person who's like moving their whole identity is take from like more obvious reasons. Like I'm a, I'm a, I'm a British guy in England. Who's a party boy. I am a guy in Austin. Well, who, what the fuck is Austin? Who's going to like me? Right. So the identity starts in either case, that's like a really important piece to understand. The other thing to understand is that we have no idea what their big decisions are. We have no fucking idea what the big decisions are. So you could say my big decisions are, you know, I'm a big guy. I'm a big guy. I'm a big guy. I'm a big guy. And my big decision was to marry my wife, Tara. Well, how about the decision to meet my wife? I didn't make it. How about the first date? I wouldn't even gotten to getting married if I didn't have the first date decision. Right. So there's a whole bunch of little choices that I made along the way that allowed for the, for me to even be considering whether I am going to marry my wife. I think that's interesting. It's certainly true that there are some choices or decisions that we face that we don't realize what the future impact of them will be. But I would say that there is a certain category of decision or choice that we are going to make where we realize the likelihood of this being small. Isn't that great? Like this is probably going to be a big decision. So you have like type one decision errors that sneak up on you, but then the other kind probably don't evaporate quite as readily in the other day. It's unlikely that moving countries is not going to be a big decision. So I think that's a big decision. I think that's a big decision. Right. The reason to think about the fact that there's a whole bunch of decisions that led to this, that you had no thought over and maybe no control over is to get you, get the identity of you out of the way and make the big decision. Right. So the identity is that if you're having a big decision, the identity is like, oh my gosh, who am I going to be in this situation? You talked the other day about the Love Island thing, right? You couldn't see yourself the same way after the Love Island thing. You didn't choose for that to happen, but it had a massive stake in your identity. If you knew that that was potentially a potential for joining Love Island, you would have existential crisis Island. You would have been like, I have to make a choice. What am I going to do? I thought I was just going to get to wear swim shorts for a few weeks. Exactly. So the reason that is to start separating the personalness, start separating the identity. And that's the biggest thing about making a really big decision, whether it's the barista decision or the thing is to really start looking at who is it that I want to be? Or who even more profound is, what am I exactly? Like to really question that identity. So if I move to England and I have no friends, what does that mean about me? What is it that I'm scared of? Like who, who, how could I be proud of myself? Even if I have no friends in England, what, what essentially am I? And that question, I remember when that question hit me, that was a question I asked myself like 10 times a day for like a week. And I was like, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't What am I essentially? What am I essentially? It's an opportunity. Instead of seeing it as like, how do I make a great decision? Like a crack in the veneer of what you think you are, which means a crack in the veneer of the limitations you put on yourself gets to get opened up and you get to see yourself for who you are. Is it, do you, do you think about fear of change? Is that playing in? Cause most decisions will result in some kind of change. Yeah. I suppose, interestingly, uh, inaction, is also a decision, right? The decision to continue doing what's happening now. status quo anchoring bias inertia momentum thing that kind of carries us through and yeah well that's also kind of a decision it's just a decision to not change as opposed to a decision to change but i think about fear of change difference different things being different yeah is that is this got a role to play so i i just think it's like a higher order or lower order right so fear of change what's actually the behind the fear of change the fear of change is that unknown and what's behind the unknown i'm not going to be okay and i'm not going to be okay as identity so i'm scared that i the job situation is going to change okay cool i guarantee you the job situation is going to change but i also guarantee you that you are going to be better off because of it okay cool i don't i'm not scared of the change anymore i'm only scared of the change because of the potential negative repercussions on me it's an unknown thing that might be bad for me and it's the me that's the essential part of it so yeah i do but obviously there's a fear of change it's just a higher order it's like it's not the core of what you're dealing with understood yeah is there anything else to say on the difficult decision big grand decision no not much just it's a great opportunity i mean i've had some amazing that level of like if i have a client come to me and they're like i'm in a big transformation moment in my life like shit is changing i'm like yay because that's where the most growth is going to happen for a person and if you look at your own life and you say when did i grow the most as a human or decline the most because i didn't pay attention yes it's going to be those moments of transformation and so so i get excited for them they're huge opportunities so i'm aware i'm aware you get excited because because you are the cross-legged emotional equivalent of a navy seal drill sergeant right or like a particularly rough pt like you anyone that's ever worked with a trainer or being on a sports team or whatever and they've seen the strength and conditioning coach the strength and conditioning coach has got this unnerving grin on their face on the morning of one practice and they're like oh we're gonna have fun today that's the face you pull yeah that's the face you pull more than you should as you're staring it is because you're a bastard and you it's the i take pleasure in somebody else's discomfort if they're working hard or doing the thing and you you're like you're gonna face it like you're gonna face it so i drill sergeant it's the freedom on the other side that i am excited about yeah and also yeah it's kind of fun to watch mental torture emotional torture um okay are there any big indicators that somebody's about to make a terrible decision that you could see that somebody could see that somebody could see that somebody could sense inside of themselves where they're about to like oh i'm pointing in the wrong i'm really pointing in the wrong direction the reason i ask this is yes i think good yeah i think um expediting success is is great and what we want but avoiding failure like the um what's the warren buffett's two pieces of a trading advice uh number one is never lose money and number two is please read number one um that if you can go through life avoiding pitfalls that's a pretty fucking good start yeah and expediting success can come after rule number one yeah avoiding pitfalls so somebody is about to make a terrible decision what's going on so i think there needs to be a definition of like what does it mean to make a terrible decision right so most people think a terrible decision is a decision where they don't get what they want that's what they think a terrible decision is meaning like they're sitting there saying to themselves i want a girl no i want a cold frost that's not a terrible decision use something else i want a cigarette i want a cigarette i want a cigarette there we go i want a cigarette and they they and if they get the cigarette then they have made a successful decision that's what they're thinking right i want the girl did i get the girl i made a good decision i want i get the money i made a good decision i want the job did i get the job i made a good decision that is not what makes a good decision because the question is if i got the cigarette did the cigarette actually give me what i want over the next year month week decade if i got the girl did i get the thing right yesterday we talked about people be successful so that they can get the girl did i get the thing right yesterday we talked about people be successful so that they can get the choice is the only made so their choice of the transactional ones who only want them for their success yeah so so the the question is if you're thinking about it that way no i don't have a way to tell you if you're making a great choice or a bad choice i can tell you that the um more fear that's in the choice makes it less likely that you're going to get the thing you want right because if i'm coming to you with something that i want and i'm scared i'm not going to get it you're less likely to get the thing you want right because if i'm coming to you with something i'm less likely to give it to me i was wondering if you could donate to my cause yeah right isn't going to be as good as like hey i've got this great cost so the more fear that i have i'm probably going to not get the thing that i want the more fear that i'm running when i'm doing it not that fear is a bad thing it just means your fear is unprocessed yeah but but if you're looking at what's a good decision like a good decision is i want the cigarette but i'm i don't get it that is it's easy like if a person is compromising themselves to do the thing then they're making a horrible fucking decision right and how will you know if you're compromising yourself that is a hard question there is something in us that knows oh i just don't like how i am right now like it's it's and it is something that you become more and more sensitive to exactly what i was about to say yeah that's exactly where i was that there is a category of person maybe even a large majority of people who have suppressed that voice for so long that it's an entirely detrained muscle right they've atrophied that and even the lightest even you know the bicep curl of a cigarette is a weight that's too heavy for them to lift yeah they're not attenuated enough to that so let's say there's somebody who hasn't used that muscle for a long time for a long time and they're not attenuated enough to that so let's say there's atrophied they can't hear the voice particularly well yeah how would you start how would you begin to retrain the muscle yeah what i would say is look at the last week month two months and what's the one way in that time frame that you heard that you you felt this isn't the right thing to do and you did it anyway what's the thing or what's the thing that's creating resentment in your life why resentment because resentment means you've abandoned yourself right like uh if you ask me to do something i don't want to do it and then i do it enough times i'm going to resent you period right so if you look at a marriage and somebody resents the other marriage it means the other person in the marriage it means that they're doing shit that they don't they're not holding their boundary they're abandoned they've abandoned themselves because they're trying to make the other person happy you're trying to make them not angry you're trying to they're walking on eggshells or they're accepting themselves accepting some sort of criticism because it's just keeping the peace so resentment is a great way to look at it or just look back and go where's the ways that i don't feel like i was the person i wanted to be in the last week right and take your time with it because i think most people if they look at that fully it's it's it's quite a ego collapse i can imagine there's a certain category of person who constantly needs reassurance from others that their decisions are okay every single one of those moments of needing reassurance from others that their decisions are okay is a self-abandonment why uh how do you explain this um it's saying i don't know what's right for me which is a lie but you do which means i am literally giving my power over to you i'm i'm saying and i'm giving my happiness the responsibility for my happiness is yours now not mine which is an self-abandonment and i'm saying you know the answer for me when the truth is that i know the answer for myself all of that is some level of self-abandonment in other news have you ever noticed how some websites make it ridiculously easy to buy while some feel infinitely harder back in my day i had to walk 10 miles to the local store aren't you younger than me yeah but my dad got a dui anyway the reality is most businesses just get the website wrong and if your setup is messy you lose a ton of sales which is why i'm such a massive fan of shopify they power 10 percent all e-commerce in the united states including brands like gymshark skims aloe and newtonic because when it comes to converting browsers into buyers they are best in class their checkout's 36 better on average compared to other platforms and with shop pay can boost conversions by 50 so upgrade your business and get the exact same checkout that we use at newtonic with shopify you can sign up for a free trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to shopify.com slash modern wisdom that's shopify.com slash modern wisdom How do you split the difference between that and genuinely having a friend that is a good confidant that has a degree of expertise that knows you that is able to see things that you don't see you know that this would make a wonderful case for never listening to anybody ever about anything in your life no i i'm not ever saying don't listen to people i think listening to people is like where a tremendous amount of wisdom comes from i'm saying that if you're looking for their approval and there's is this okay big difference is this okay for me to do yeah yeah yeah like somehow or another it's like if you're saying if you can't say i feel good about doing this without like looking over to you and say is it all right that we do this then you know you're you're abandoning yourself how much of decisiveness do you think is learning to cope with increasing amounts of uncertainty yeah so without a doubt if you're if you are confident in your identity decisiveness increases dramatically people who have a very stable sense of self are far more decisive than people who don't there is also there's in business what you'll notice is that most ceos there's a tendency to start realizing that making decisions is better than getting decisions right making decisions is better than getting decisions right yes meaning if i have a choice between making 10 decisions a day and making them right making sure that they're right which i never perfectly do or making a hundred decisions a day and just getting them made the hundred decisions a day is a better choice and the reason is is because as soon as you make a decision then you're testing your thesis against reality if i'm sitting there going how do we market well let's make sure we market it best what's the thing and do all the data i have i'm not running any experiments i'm not actually going well what did the audience say okay what did i learn as soon as i make a decision then i run an experiment then i learn something then i can make another experiment then i can i'm interacting with the world and learning from the world immediately and so making the decision allows the action to happen so that the learning can occur and so i'm going to make the decision and i'm going to make the decision and i'm going to make the decision so it's the same in life is that making that decision is really important the thing that stops you from making the decision is again if your identity is in jeopardy so there's certain identities like if i have the identity of i'm an action guy then it's easy for me to be decisive by nature yeah but if i have the identity of i have to be right because every time i was wrong my parents criticized me for 20 years and made fun of me and like six years later i'm at dinner table and i'm still being told how i like made a mistake and i'm still being told how i like made a mistake from six years ago, then I'm going to be like, okay, I gotta, I gotta make this thing right because my identity is, is engaged. And so as people start to be really confident of like, this is who I am and I'm valuable just because I'm valuable, those people become far, far more decisive. And, and even more than that, it's like, there's less decisions and more choice because there's less fear because there's less, there's less identity at stake. Like what, like what, what, what do I have to worry about? George has this line. He says, I'd rather be high conviction and wrong than low conviction and right. Oh, fucking right. Absolutely. Yeah. Because I will learn I'm wrong a lot quicker. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'd rather be high conviction and wrong. I love this thought process that there's this, uh, test we use for gauging talent and, it's a, a test that has, uh, X, Y accesses that people think are not, uh, they think they're contrary when they're not contrary. And it's called paradox accesses. And so one of them is conviction. And one of them is openness. And most people think you can either be convicted and open, but this graph is basically saying you can be high and convicted, high and openness, low in both. Right. Why'd you place yourself on the graph? I, I test as a both very open and very convicted. Right. And, and, but I say, I say that because that actually makes it makes really good decisions, but that comes from a confidence in your identity, meaning I am totally happy to be wrong and that doesn't threaten who I am. So I love being open and I have high conviction because if I don't have high conviction, I don't take action. Yeah. Does regret play a role here with lots of people fear future potential regret so much so that they get stuck and paralyzed in the moment. Now I must transpose it from the future and start to feel it down in the present. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I see that for sure. The interesting thing that I noticed with a lot of people, and I think this is really useful for folks at home. Do you re will you regret? What you're imagining will happen more than you regret being indecisive for three months about whether to marry the woman or not. What's interesting is that the thing that people fear is often the thing that they are feeling and stuck in, in the moment of trying to make the decision. Like I'm really scared that if I marry her, I'm going to be stuck in the moment of trying to make the decision. You're stuck right now. Trying to make this decision for six months. I am really scared that I'm going to regret that I wasted my time. If I do this wrong, you're wasting your time right now and making this like decision for like three to six months, low conviction stew. Exactly. So, so what's amazing is that the oftentimes the thing that people are scared, the emotional consequences people are scared of are far, far less. They're one inch, but the shit you're stewing in right now is like 10 inches deep. Yeah. Yeah. To use Alex's. There's a line from Alain de Botton talking about leaving relationships. And he says, people are worried about leaving relationships because they're scared of being lonely. But what they don't realize is that exiting is the first step towards feeling connected. That the loneliness they fear is what they're already enduring. Exactly. That's exactly. That's oftentimes, the, the, the consequences that we're scared of in the decision is the thing that we're actually currently suffering. Yeah. And there's less at a velocity or an amplitude that's less than than we're currently dealing with. Well, there's also the opportunity for it to stop where there isn't any opportunity to stop unless you take the action. Yeah. And presumably less shame around what I am doing this to myself. Yeah. I'm choosing to, I'm like imprisoned inside of this and I know that not only am I the prisoner, but I'm also the captor that's holding the keys. And for some reason I refuse to put the key in the fucking lock and turn it and open the gate. Yeah. The other thing that's really interesting is I think people when they're in that deep indecisiveness, they really forget that they're being super self-abusive. There's a lot of self abuse in that. You have to get it right. Why? Why can't you get it wrong? What's the problem? You, you don't know. It's like, you're literally telling yourself, you have to get it right. You don't know. You don't know what's best for you. You don't like you can't. And whatever happens, you're not going to be able to work yourself out of it. You know that, right? Like you're not going to just be able to take it as a lesson and then like grow from it. It's going to destroy you forever. Like that's the, that's the subtext of being indecisive. Right. And so that level of knowledge are unrecognized. And when somebody actually sees it, it often can allow them to see like themselves in a way that allows them to be more decisive. Can you go just for a little bit, can you go full Joe Hudson, Connor Beaton crossover and apply as much pain as possible to people that are being indecisive? Like what, what are the costs that people apply pain, give them the gravitas of the situation? Like how important is this? And what is it that they what is it that the situation is costing them? If that's you, if they're continuing, if they continue to be indecisive, what does indecisiveness cost you? Yeah. Um, I think the thing I would say in that is some version of, I'm, I'm really sorry. You're depressed and that somehow or another, you think you need to be perfect to be valuable to be loved, to be worthy. And you, you don't. And if you could see yourself clearly for a moment, you would see that this decision isn't going to define you for who you are and that you're worthy of love, no matter what decision you make here. So make the one you're proud of. I would say something like that. What else is that to say? You dweeb. Yeah. Fucking idiot. How does this relate to assertiveness? Cause I imagine maybe not quite the same yeah yeah but the people pleasing the standing up for myself the saying what's true for me the the assertiveness i imagine people who have clicked on an episode about decision making to become better with their decisions yeah may also you like the you may also like this yeah yeah thing it's like you may also be interested in being more assertive yeah how do you come to think about assertiveness i'm not going to be audience shaped like what was i'm sorry what was it called audience captured yeah i'm not going to be audience captured like that i don't give a fuck that's right yeah fuck you i'm going to talk about fucking sushi exactly um i assertiveness i think can be so there's a difference between being assertive i would say and having agency i would say that if you do the work to be decisive you definitely feel like you have more agency agency doesn't happening to life yeah agency doesn't have to be assertive and i think those get confused a lot can you give me an example of a way that somebody is uh agentic but none not necessarily assertive yeah um uh like a great actor they're they say i'm going to be this kind of an actor i want and i'm committed to these kinds of roles and i'm going to do it and people accept me and i'm going to go for auditions but i'm not going to like create create my own role and and and get a uh whatever get directed and buy a script and produce the thing so that i can finally have the role that i want not some people would that would be called i would call that more assertive but but this person has agency they're saying i'm going to live the life that i want to live i want to be the person that i want to live i think there's an assertiveness that in some people's definition that goes along with aggression like i'm going to be the person that i want to be the person that i want to be like fundamentally and and i think for some people their nature is not that level of aggressiveness they don't have that fire imposition in that way yeah they don't have that fire but at the same time they're not going to compromise and i remember when i was in college there was a um right before i got kicked out of my first college um i was taking a class on herman hess and there was a german teacher and the german teacher uh lived through the berlin bombings and and he said when we were under the under the tunnels and the bombs were happening and people were yelling up top it was always the quiet non-macho man and the non-assertive type who went up and pulled them out of the of the bombing and it was always the bravado guy and the non-assertive type who went up and pulled them out of the bombing and it was always the bravado guy who didn't and so that to me would be the difference like one of them has assertiveness but they don't have the agency to be themselves are they inversely linked in your opinion more assertive people less agentic no not at all no right i think they're just not correlated right okay yeah but i do think there's a tremendous amount of people who are my experience is there's a tremendous amount of when you when you become when you get really good at decision making that you you it's a very high agency place well it's i would imagine it is difficult to be high agency and indecisive correct so even if decisiveness is it's uh necessary but not sufficient right perhaps to be agentic george is currently trying to get his conception he's got this fucking tricycle that he sent me a photo of the other day george george mack he's writing a book on agency he's going to be writing the definitive book on high agency and it'll come out at some point in the next year and a half and i've watched this guy craft this thing like watching like a david be carved out of a massive block of great do you know the story about david about how a number of other uh sculptors had tried their hand at that block of marble previously no i had no idea really cool so i've been to see it twice and i've taken the same tour and i just for me it's michelangelo yes okay because that also is yes true one of my favorite by the way one of my favorite symbols in the world it's beautiful god stretching out reaching for man and man's just not worth he's not i'm not gonna even fucking lift a finger for you bitch yeah it's so true well i actually got the guys to move that a tiny little bit because when you look at how close together it is we looked on the the painting and it was too close it was closer than it is in the painting because the whole point is that um even the ligament that was uh the way that the hand was shaped because there was a ton of dissections being done right by michelangelo and he realized the way that the ligament is when it's relaxed and when it when it is stretched but it was too fucking close i was like i i know that we've done all of this time in the studio and all this stuff i was like can we just move it like about two inches further apart um but no so michelangelo david uh this block of you know gargantuan block of marble have you ever seen it in person i have not a dude it is and because it's on a plinth it's a motherfucker plinth so it's already his foot's pretty much head height or maybe even higher and then he's eight feet tall maybe 10 feet tall maybe more massive massive maybe even more maybe like 12 feet tall he's a huge guy and with the proportions as well that were used to kind of accentuate that so much bigger hands by proportion longer arms longer legs by proportion yeah than you would have so it's long and tall and big at the same time anyway this block of marble had been a number of sculptors had had a crack at it previously and sort of started like it's too unwieldy to use it's gargantuan thing and um he was the one that went to go and do it and my favorite thing which i've said a gazillion times on the show but not for a while is uh the michelangelo effect two people in a relationship friendship intimate partnership see the best in each other and over time like michelangelo saw david in side the marble and he just removed that which was not david yeah and then david emerged i love that and it's the same thing that you know the best kinds of friendships and relationships are is i see in you the best parts of you and i'm going to help to bring that out i'm going to try and cut away all of this other stuff that isn't you i don't even think all that is necessary it's just seeing the other person like my experience is like that's the when we teach people coaching that is the core of what we teach see that see the wisdom see see them as who they actually are even if they can't see themselves listen to that part talk to that part that's all that's really required is to just see them as they essentially are and everything else takes care of itself how do people know the difference between the genuine embodied wisdom fueled intuition and something masquerading as into intuition impulsivity fear that i imagine many clever people that are two hours into a podcast about decision making will be afflicted with uh they've managed to cleverly contort and pretzel this thing actually oh that is my intuition speaking but it's not it's just a clever like confabulation of of what is actually fear or maybe it is impulsivity or coping or whatever is there a way to discern yeah the way in coaching relationship it is your capacity to understand yourself right so the more clearly you see yourself the more clearly you can see others like and and exactly the way i can't see myself is exactly the way i'm not going to be able to see you can we can you tell me about what your retreat was like that you did recently i've been real excited to learn about this are you do you mind talking about this i don't want to talk about this okay yeah there's a lot i mean i can go for a walk and i'll find out about find out i can tell you i can tell you like a broad thing but i can't yeah um yeah i've been ever since i was in my 20s i really got into uh the vedic sciences generally just as one of the avenues in which i've learned so i got into zen i got into herman hess i got into the vedic sciences and the vedic sciences have a part that's all about health and they have something called ayurvedic health and they have something that they do for longevity called panchakarma you could call it longevity you could call it health i'll call it health and it's basically like a reset where there's a very particular diet and they give you in this particular place where i went um they give you like six hours of treatments a day and they can be they're all sorts of crazy treatments and um and so i did it uh it was i've done it three years in a row now this is the most intense one that i've ever done i found a very intense place to go and it was an amazing emotional roller coaster which i haven't experienced in years so that was really cool to like watch my emotions do this thing yeah i imagine that sounds a little bit like a brazilian jiu-jitsu fourth degree black belt going i got twisted into a pretzel that's been a little while yeah i didn't think that that was gonna happen i remember what that feels like yeah and it was all through physical stuff so the the part that i enjoyed the most about it is that i was able to do a lot of things and i think that's what i'm most proud of about it is that they really disencourage discourage talking so everywhere there's room sign silence there's no phones in the cafeteria there's no talking in the cafeteria there's no that like you're basically alone quiet it's in a forest you know and so little like noble science adjacent noble silence adjacent yeah so i got to do a lot of meditation which made me really happy so i got to really observe the fuckery the craziness of basically i think the mood was mostly just a nervous system because there was a huge part of it is a nervous system reset or in their words it's like a vata reset and and so there was just this massive kind of for the six day period of just like wow holy crap i got to do things why am i got to do that i don't need to do anything why do i do like that kind of and i was and it was in this contrast between like absolute bliss and peace so i'm like oh this is amazing and then it just turned on and then it just turned off and they just turn back on because they're just like what happens when i do this what happens like do that right yeah and i got to experience by the way i got to experience the doctor having that facial expression he was a navy seal i'm gonna poke you in the thing and it's gonna make this stuff happen to you wonderful it makes me that's karmic for me to find that you're on the receiving end for once yeah i feel i i much prefer to be on the receiving end because that's where the freedom's on the receiving end on the other side of it so yeah yeah so and and and i there's no shortage of it you've met my wife but you haven't met my daughters there's no shortage of me met one very briefly i think she come from lacrosse she playing oh yeah okay so you met una yeah we did a podcast with her such a good podcast was it like was it something titled like what it's like to be joe hudson's daughter or some shit like that i can't i don't remember yeah okay you're not in the titles and i am i am i am horribly not on the internet again yeah afflicted with it uh dude i love you what a pleasure to be with you i love you a bit um people that are interested in this what should they go and look at where should they go uh we have the there's we have a couple podcasts on decision making that go into some depth on all of the things that we talked about and uh the decision great decisions course i will say it's only a five-week course but oftentimes it is an extremely intense course because you're going right into a lot of these emotions so just like know that that's what you're with care yeah that's know what you're getting into and that's it that begins at the start of january i think we sell it the very beginning of january like as a new year's resolution kind of thing when does that go live you got any idea like when the oh the you can get on you can get onto the waiting list and the waiting list gets a 24 hour early uh thing and you can get on the waiting list today and it usually sells out where the waiting within the waiting list yeah great uh connection course all of the other surf out of accomplishment podcast you're the best thank you all right pleasure see you next time my beauties dude that's a good one very your sausage mcmuffin with egg didn't change your receipt did the sausage mcmuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just five dollars only at mcdonald's for a limited time price and participation may vary promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing