Transcript
00:00:00the paradox of self-awareness. So everyone understands that actions are more important
00:00:04than words, right? You are what you do, not what you say you'll do. And there's this line from
00:00:11Hamlet, thus conscience does make cowards of us all. And I never read any Shakespeare. I can barely
00:00:17remember even going through it in school, but I came across this line again and did a deep dive
00:00:22on what it means. Thus conscience does make cowards of us all. This line comes from Hamlet and it's
00:00:29usually misheard as an insult. It's as if Shakespeare is sort of sneering at morality,
00:00:37saying that ethics soften us or thought drains courage from the body. I don't think that's
00:00:44what's happening. Shakespeare isn't attacking goodness. He's pointing at self-awareness
00:00:50and naming its cost. It's in the to be or not to be soliloquy and Hamlet isn't really weighing life
00:00:59death. He's circling a more practical question. Why do humans hesitate to act even when action would
00:01:07clearly relieve their suffering? Like why do we endure situations we don't want? And why do we
00:01:12tolerate lives that we could in theory change? Well, pain isn't the only obstacle. Imagination is.
00:01:21And by conscience, Shakespeare means something closer to consciousness. It's the ability to think ahead,
00:01:28to judge ourselves, to simulate futures before they arrive. It's to see the consequences coming
00:01:35and experience them emotionally in advance. And unfortunately, that ability cuts both ways because
00:01:42the very capacity that makes you reflective and ethical and intelligent also makes you hesitant.
00:01:50We imagine worst case scenarios so vividly that we treat them as if they're already real.
00:01:56So courage isn't defeated by fear. It's defeated by simulation. We rehearse embarrassment,
00:02:05loss, rejection, and moral failure in advance. And then our bodies respond as if those things have
00:02:13already happened. Your heart rate rises, your muscles tighten. Avoidance feels sensible and inaction feels
00:02:20like safety. Hamlet describes what follows. Thought, he says, puzzles the will. Thought puzzles the will.
00:02:29Reflection drains us. Not because thinking is bad, but because it multiplies potential outcomes
00:02:35faster than our actions can deal with them, right? I think that's so cool. Thinking isn't bad itself,
00:02:42but it's able to generate more realities than our actions can solve. Animals don't suffer this,
00:02:48right? They just act when a threshold is crossed. Humans linger. And by the time that the moment to move
00:02:56arrives, we feel as if we've already lived through its inevitable failure. So we wait. This is the
00:03:04deeper psychological point that I think Shakespeare is making. And I'm aware that a guy that basically
00:03:10didn't read Shakespeare is just reverse engineering what I think he said. But I do think that this is
00:03:14a cool interpretation, right? Our intelligence doesn't just protect us. It also inhibits us.
00:03:21We learn quickly from mistakes that we make, but we almost never feel the cost of mistakes that we avoid.
00:03:29The humiliation of speaking and failing leaves a scar, but the decades-long erosion
00:03:34of never speaking leaves nothing that you can point to, which explains why people stay in the wrong job,
00:03:42the wrong relationship, the wrong version of themselves for years. Not because they don't
00:03:47know better, but because action demands stepping into an unrehearsed future.
00:03:53Hamlet names the real enemy, which is uncertainty, right? Not pain or effort, but just
00:04:00the unknown. Our minds would rather endure a familiar misery than gamble on an unfamiliar freedom. Even
00:04:09suffering becomes tolerable once it's predictable. But people would rather spend years in misery than
00:04:16risk a few days of pain. And this is why modern life, despite being safer than any previous era,
00:04:23often feels more paralysing, right? Because our nervous systems evolved to avoid death and lions,
00:04:29and now we use it to avoid embarrassment and misjudgment and reputational damage and identity
00:04:36fracture. And here's the final uncomfortable implication Shakespeare leaves hanging. Self-awareness is not a pure
00:04:45good, right? Beyond a certain point. Self-awareness actually inhibits agency. Less reflection can mean more peace. Less
00:04:54certainty can mean more movement. Less conscience can sometimes mean more life. Courage isn't about thinking
00:05:03clearly. It's about moving while things are still unclear. You know, there's that famous line, the unexamined life is not worth living. But a life can be deeply examined and still never left.
00:05:15lived. This paradox of self-awareness, the fact that the deeper you think, sometimes the less you're able to act. If your
00:05:24mind is able to generate realities more quickly than you are able to come up with solutions or move through them, you kind of have this
00:05:32weird cost benefit imbalance. Or maybe like a cost profit, your balance sheet is offset, where the overheads are higher than the
00:05:43revenue. And this sort of puts you in a negative equity in terms of your ability to move forward. And that can freeze you in place. You don't want to do
00:05:52something. Because you think, look at all the ways that could go wrong. And the more ways it could go wrong, the less ability I'm going to have to act.
00:06:01And what if this thing occurs and that thing occurs. And over time, conscience makes cowards of us all. It's weird because most people probably need to be more thoughtful. They need to spend more time, be less rash, act less impulsively. But there is a cohort of people that are the
00:06:09people that are the opposite. And the people like me and maybe you too. And they're the people who think more than they should, talk themselves out of more things than into them, and actually move more slowly. They get less done in life due to their thought
00:06:28And they're the people who think more than they should, talk themselves out of more things than into them, and actually move more slowly. They get less done in life due to their thought than more. Now, they'll make way fewer mistakes, and that's great. But again, the mistake of omission is different to the mistake of commission.
00:06:49And people make commission errors if they don't think enough. People make omission errors if they think too much. Like if you overthink, decide not to go up and speak to that girl that's been in the cafeteria at work for six months, she gets a boyfriend, would have been the perfect partner for you, and you decide to not make the move because you've talked yourself into and out of it so many times.
00:07:08Your mind's ability to show you what could go wrong is greater than your action's ability to fix it in reality. That is an omission error, but we don't see it in the same way because it's not as obvious.
00:07:19For instance, I chose to not bring a number of guests on this podcast in 2024. And maybe that's leaked out of me in a couple of other vlogs or whatever, but I didn't make a big song and dance about it. I basically never spoke about it.
00:07:36I'm never going to get credit for the things that I didn't do. And in the same way, you never pay a cost for the things that you don't do.
00:07:45I mean, look, if you leave a person to bleed out on the side of the street without calling the ambulance, that's a kind of omission error, but it's pretty obvious.
00:07:53A much more quiet omission error is I was scared of building the business because my mind taught me all of the different ways that stuff could go wrong.
00:08:00So I didn't do it. And I'll never know the pain of not fulfilling my dreams, but I avoided the pain of failure.
00:08:09And the pains of failure are much more prevalent in our mind than the pain of, fuck, what if this doesn't go well?
00:08:16So there's this great audiobook from Tony Robbins. It's 30 years old. George Mack sent it to me. I don't even know how to find it.
00:08:24I'll try and find it and put it in the links, but it's basically an hour and a half worksheet, Awaken the Giant Within.
00:08:29It's an audiobook. And all he does, it's basically one long exercise to try and front load the pain as much as possible.
00:08:37Look at what this situation you're in now has cost you in the past. Look at what it's costing you right now.
00:08:42And look at what it will cost you in the future. And he tries to get you to sit in the discomfort as much as possible.
00:08:47It's horrible, awful exercise. It's like the mental equivalent of an ice bath.
00:08:51And then he gets you to try and do the opposite. Look at what would have happened in the past if you'd made the change that you want to,
00:08:58that you think is right, if you'd improved this thing. Look at what would be happening now and look at what would happen in the future.
00:09:03And he tries to sort of get you to use, he calls it the pain and pleasure principle. Motivate your behavior through pain and pleasure.
00:09:10And the type of pain that you can front load with, look at what not starting this thing has cost you in the past and now in the future.
00:09:20You have to be much more conscious. Like the commission errors come naturally to us, but the omission errors are much more hidden.
00:09:26So you need to kind of, you need to do an exercise. You need to consciously bring omission errors in.
00:09:31Like, fuck, like I've always wanted to be a standup comedian. I've always just wanted to do, I've always, I want to do an open mic.
00:09:37I just really want to do an open mic. And you've put it off for decades. You never did it. You never closed that loop.
00:09:43And you might hate it. Here's the other thing. The thing that you're putting off from doing, you might absolutely hate.
00:09:48But at least once you realize whether you like it or you don't, you go up and speak to the girl in the cafeteria and find out she's got horrible breath and she's an asshole.
00:09:57There you go. Loop closed. You don't need to think about it.
00:09:58But the what if after the fact will kill you. But the what if before the fact is really hard to determine.
00:10:05So, yeah, I think this conscience does make cowards of us all.
00:10:10That is my year seven, fourth grade assessment of Shakespeare.
00:10:17Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
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