Transcript
00:00:00Here's 10 years of therapy summarized in one minute.
00:00:03Number one, no one is coming to save you.
00:00:06Being a functioning adult means realizing you are responsible
00:00:08for everything in your life, even if it wasn't your fault.
00:00:11Number two, strong boundaries make for good relationships.
00:00:14Weak boundaries make drama.
00:00:16Number three, many of your problems don't get fixed.
00:00:20You just learn how to live despite them.
00:00:22Number four, your mind lies to you all the time.
00:00:25It will tell you that the world is ending when it's not,
00:00:27that a mistake is fatal when it's not,
00:00:29that everyone is thinking about you
00:00:30and laughing about you when they're not.
00:00:32Learn how to tell your mind to shut the fuck up.
00:00:35Number five, stop trying to convince people to like you.
00:00:38The right people won't need to be convinced
00:00:40and everyone else is just gonna get very annoyed.
00:00:43Number six, sometimes the best thing you can do
00:00:46is let a dream die.
00:00:47No one likes to hear that, but it's true.
00:00:49And number seven, only a few people in your life
00:00:52are gonna matter in the long run.
00:00:53When you find them, treat them right,
00:00:55make time for them, keep them close and be grateful.
00:00:59- You know, sometimes when I put together stuff like that,
00:01:03like hearing you read that back to me,
00:01:08like the thought that comes to mind is like,
00:01:09how is this not taught in schools?
00:01:11Like how are we just, how is this not just part of-
00:01:14- Discover this at 34.
00:01:16- Right, like why do people have to listen to podcasts
00:01:20all day to like hear some of this stuff?
00:01:25- It just seems so fundamental, but it is interesting.
00:01:30One of the things that my perspective has shifted,
00:01:35I've been doing this for 17 years.
00:01:38- Too long.
00:01:39- Yeah, a long time.
00:01:41And when I look at things
00:01:45that I've either changed my mind about
00:01:47or changed my perspective on
00:01:49over the course of my career,
00:01:50I think one of the big ones is that early in my career,
00:01:53I really thought it was all about just like ideas,
00:01:56information, knowledge, right?
00:01:58It's like finding,
00:01:59there's like a few pieces of key knowledge
00:02:02that if you can kind of figure it out,
00:02:03if you can dig through enough psych studies
00:02:05and find the application,
00:02:07like it's just gonna be a key
00:02:08that unlocks all these areas of your life.
00:02:10And I think if you were a consumer
00:02:14of personal growth advice,
00:02:15like the experience you have often feels that way,
00:02:20but I don't think that's true.
00:02:22I think actually what is true
00:02:24is that there are just certain concepts, ideas,
00:02:28principles that are pretty obvious
00:02:33and we all kind of already know them,
00:02:35but we lose,
00:02:37it's extremely difficult to keep them
00:02:40in front of our base through day-to-day life.
00:02:43And so we need rituals and reminders consistently.
00:02:48And I actually think that for most of human history,
00:02:51I think religion was that mechanism of those reminders
00:02:55to like keep people like,
00:02:56hey, nobody's like, you're responsible for this.
00:02:59Hey, treat people well, that person matters.
00:03:01You know, like let go of the small stuff.
00:03:03But I think in our modern world,
00:03:09it's people, most people are losing that.
00:03:12And so you're almost seeing this like reinvention
00:03:16of those rituals online through like what you and I do
00:03:20through podcasts and Instagram and YouTube
00:03:23and all this stuff.
00:03:24And I do it as well, right?
00:03:26It's like, I've got my shows
00:03:27and I've got the channels I follow and the people I follow.
00:03:30And it's like, it's not that any individual piece
00:03:35of information is like changing my life,
00:03:38unlocking this whole area of my life.
00:03:40It's just like, oh yeah, it's a good reminder.
00:03:42- That's so true.
00:03:43I think because the modern world is filled with novelty,
00:03:46anything that we've seen before,
00:03:49we don't usually want to hear again.
00:03:50If you think, well, I already know that, even if you don't,
00:03:53even if there's 10 things that you basically just need
00:03:56to hear over and over again,
00:03:57what you need to do I think is play the game of novelty
00:04:02whilst just redelivering the same core message.
00:04:05And that's going to be anti-memetic
00:04:07and wholly unimpressive to people.
00:04:09This is the fucking clean your room thing again.
00:04:12This is the tell the truth thing again.
00:04:13Oh, a neediness, is it?
00:04:15And you go, okay, well, I can lie to you
00:04:20and create this sort of fugazi gas light thing
00:04:22where I say this new thing is the big unlock.
00:04:26Or I can just try to repackage stuff
00:04:30that is the existing concept.
00:04:32So it satisfies your desire for novelty
00:04:34and my own desire for novelty
00:04:36whilst reinforcing the principle that is most accurate.
00:04:39And that's really, I think, what a lot of the game is now.
00:04:43And we were talking before we got started.
00:04:44I think that very, very dense information,
00:04:49consumption and over-optimization
00:04:51is kind of dead in the water.
00:04:53And the alternative is reminding people stuff
00:04:58that they already know in a manner that just,
00:05:03you know how the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve works?
00:05:05It's spaced repetition.
00:05:06It's wacky flashcards and stuff work like that.
00:05:09Basically you need that, but with novelty added in
00:05:14so that people are just regularly reminded,
00:05:16oh, yeah, I just need to go for a walk and sleep more.
00:05:21Oh, right, yeah, I probably need to say how I feel
00:05:27to my partner when something upsets me.
00:05:29- One way I think about it sometimes
00:05:33is that a lot of this advice,
00:05:35it's almost like having a fire extinguisher in the room.
00:05:37You've probably had the experience where
00:05:41maybe you read something five years ago
00:05:45and you're like, yeah, it's obvious, I know that.
00:05:47And then something happens in your life, right?
00:05:50It's like you get dumped or somebody dies
00:05:53or you move across the world and you're like,
00:05:56suddenly you're like, oh my God,
00:05:57I need this so bad right now.
00:05:59- Well, one of the most embarrassing things is to realize
00:06:02that the problem you're facing was solved by something
00:06:04that you learned long ago.
00:06:06- Yes, but didn't appreciate it.
00:06:07- And then have to now go and relearn.
00:06:10You're like, oh, fuck.
00:06:11Or that you're now facing a problem
00:06:14that you faced in the past
00:06:15and that you not only learned something,
00:06:17but a specific type of pain that both me and you do,
00:06:19you go, oh, I wrote about this.
00:06:22I fucking wrote this thing.
00:06:24- Tell me about it, I can tell me about it.
00:06:26- Yeah, yeah.
00:06:27- So speaking of ascending the mountain
00:06:31and struggling to deal with fame,
00:06:33when my book took off,
00:06:35I went into a real identity crisis.
00:06:39I think I've talked to you about this before on the show,
00:06:40but I had that first year or two
00:06:43when my book was number one everywhere.
00:06:45It was like just all these crazy things happening.
00:06:48I felt super disoriented and like very lost
00:06:52and kind of went through a little bit of a depression,
00:06:55became like--
00:06:56- I got everything I ever wanted and it made me depressed.
00:06:58- Yeah, pretty much.
00:06:59And like massive imposter syndrome for a period of time
00:07:03and started saying yes to a bunch of things
00:07:06I didn't want to say yes to, right?
00:07:07And so then I ended up in this situation where I'm like,
00:07:10I feel trapped in my own career.
00:07:13I'm like obligated to do all these things for these people
00:07:16that I don't really want to be doing.
00:07:18I'm like stressed all the time, I'm anxious.
00:07:20My health's going to shit and it's--
00:07:22- I'm fat.
00:07:23- And I'm fat on top of everything else.
00:07:25(laughing)
00:07:27Just add insult to injury, fucking fat.
00:07:32And it's so funny 'cause I remember,
00:07:40when I was doing my film,
00:07:42we were doing a film on "The Son of God Are Not Giving a Fuck"
00:07:46and I hadn't really read the book since I wrote it.
00:07:48And so I went back, I'm like,
00:07:51well, I should probably read my book again.
00:07:52So I went back and I read, this was like 2018, 2019.
00:07:55I went back and it was like all the shit
00:07:57I'd been spending the last two years dealing with.
00:08:00It was like in my own book and I'm like,
00:08:02I'm fucking all of this up.
00:08:04I'm like, I'm saying yes to things I don't care about.
00:08:07I'm like overloading my life with all these distractions.
00:08:10I'm like not standing up for myself.
00:08:12I've like lost clarity on what I value.
00:08:14Like just like chapter by chapter by chapter,
00:08:16I'm choosing the wrong struggles.
00:08:18And I just, it was rough.
00:08:21It was really rough.
00:08:22I like, I had to really have like a heart to heart
00:08:26with myself of like, dude, whoa, get it together, man.
00:08:31- Yeah, it's like personal growth groundhog day.
00:08:33One thing that I think is kind of important.
00:08:39I understand how you can say, hey, look,
00:08:42it's a small bucket of principles, over optimization,
00:08:44thinking about your life too much, all of these things.
00:08:46Like you're majoring in the minors, et cetera, et cetera.
00:08:49That is true once you've been through it.
00:08:54Yes, it is not true before you've been through it.
00:08:57Breaking the rules of the game
00:08:59before you've learned how to play the game
00:09:01is not breaking the rules of the game and being an innovator
00:09:04or being some essentialized distiller of cool stuff.
00:09:08It's playing a different game.
00:09:10And this is why I highly recommend
00:09:13that people become totally obsessed
00:09:14with personal development and productivity
00:09:17and David Allen's getting things done
00:09:19and James Clear's atomic habits
00:09:20and Morgan Hessel's psychology of money
00:09:21and the subtle art of not giving a fuck
00:09:23for like probably between three and six years.
00:09:28And then once you've done that,
00:09:31you can sort of get your black belt, put it on and go, okay.
00:09:35Yeah, 95% of that was packaging.
00:09:40Here are the bits that really matter.
00:09:42And I'm now gonna spend the rest of time
00:09:44trying to just maintain that momentum
00:09:49and not over-complicate stuff.
00:09:50And maybe once a year, there'll be a novel insight,
00:09:54which is genuinely principled and fundamental
00:09:56that I just didn't know yet.
00:09:58But you can't get to that level
00:10:00without having gone through the first bit.
00:10:02And maybe it's just the case
00:10:04that the world of everybody went through the same,
00:10:09holy fuck, like this is novel.
00:10:12But talking about like choosing your struggles appropriately
00:10:15or even neediness and stuff like that,
00:10:17that was novel when it happened,
00:10:18but that area of cognitive real estate,
00:10:20that territory has now been,
00:10:21you know when you play a video game
00:10:23and the map's all fogged out?
00:10:25- Yeah.
00:10:26- And then after you've played it for a while,
00:10:28the areas get opened up.
00:10:29It's like, well, that area's opened up now.
00:10:32So assuming that you've gone through this process,
00:10:34previously it was kind of like humans were moving
00:10:38at the same level that technology developed.
00:10:41But if you start doing personal development now,
00:10:42there's so much technology that you can speed run
00:10:45all the way up to the top.
00:10:46Whereas for us, it's like, wow,
00:10:48telling the truth is something, this is revolutionary.
00:10:50Not that I've just discovered it, but it's just been said.
00:10:53- Yeah.
00:10:54- Right, this is groundbreaking research.
00:10:57But because there's so much to go through,
00:11:00and maybe it's just the case that the era that we're in
00:11:03had a formative hockey curve, like J-shaped thing,
00:11:08where, wow, there's a fucking ton of insight
00:11:12that's repackaged ancient wisdom for a secular world
00:11:14that's distilled down into good language that's memorable.
00:11:17I should, I'm learning this as it goes
00:11:19in a new book, in a new book, in a new book.
00:11:20And now we're at the stage where much of that territory
00:11:24that's important has been captured.
00:11:26- Yes.
00:11:26- And now, because everybody kind of started the race,
00:11:29whether you were 18 or 28 or 48,
00:11:33everybody started it kind of at the same time.
00:11:35And Peterson comes along, you and James, da, da, da, da.
00:11:38And you go, oh, wow, that's now all being done.
00:11:42So everybody has a degree of personal development fatigue,
00:11:46but that's not true if you're starting your journey.
00:11:48If you're like, hey, I'm a fat piece of shit.
00:11:50- Correct.
00:11:51- And I'm 25 and I've never done any of this.
00:11:52It's like lock in for the next six years.
00:11:54- Yes, absolutely.
00:11:55And then it is very much after that
00:11:58is it is just about maintaining the practice.
00:12:00- Correct.
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00:12:03when I first heard it.
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00:13:17Congratulations, you made it to the end of a clip
00:13:19and the full length episode is available right here.
00:13:22Go on.