and so discipline is just a habit of mind that evolves into a habit generally of behavior and so when you're trying to give someone more discipline one of the things that's really really important is right out of the gates is to change the actual Behavior because as as Albert bandora famously said you know behavior is a cause of behavior like the more you can get someone to do something the more likely it is to repeat so the reality
about discipline is the quicker you can get it infused into someone's habits the more likely it is they're going to sustain it through life if you're trying to change habits later in life you got to go all in and as soon as you're aware that you want to change them don't wait don't [Music] hesitate welcome to the knowledge project a podcast about mastering the best of what other people have already
figured out so you can apply their insights to your life I'm your host Shane Parish every Sunday I send out the brain food newsletter to over 600,000 people it's considered noise cancelling headphones for the internet and it's full of Timeless wisdom you can apply to life and work you can sign up for free at fs. blognews lter if you're listening to this you're missing out if you'd like
act access to the podcast before public release special episodes that don't appear anywhere else hand edited transcripts or you just want to support the show you love you can join at fs. blogers ship check out the show notes for a link in the first of a special two-part episode on the knowledge project celebrated performance psychologist Dr Gio valante calls on his vast experience working with some of the world's top
athletes and entrepreneurs to discuss how to develop discipline and resilience in work and life Dr Gio also offers his thoughts on the five ways to gain an advantage and win changing your habits the role your environment plays in discipline and how we can develop resilience in ourselves and our children he's regarded as one of the most successful performance coaches in the world and he's worked extensively with
golfers on the PGA and LPGA tours Olympic athletes and leading figures in NCAA football and the NFL where he served as the head performance coach of the Buffalo Bills he's also logged more than 5,000 hours coaching some of the most sophisticated investors in the world including hedge fund manager Steve con if you stick around at the end of the podcast I'm going to offer a mini reflection on the episode and some of
the lessons I took away and I'm going to add to them so you can take away even more it's time to listen and [Music] learn the knowledge project is sponsored by metalab for a decade metalab has helped some of the world's top companies and entrepreneurs build products that millions of people use every day you probably didn't realize it at the time but odds are you've used an app that
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today for under $50 at Aro press.com Shan and get 15% off exclusively for our listeners that's AER o p s.com Shan are you building a business well if you haven't already been asked by potential customers or investors about sock 2 ISO 27 o1 or Hippa compliance you likely will be soon achieving compliance can unlock major growth for your company and build a foundation of trust but can also be
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and win yeah that's that's an idea I put out into the world uh about a year maybe year and a half ago that seems to be getting a lot of attention you know it's it's rooted in in um my experiences first of all as a psychologist who studies cognition and cognitive abilities and belief systems um and then uh as a sports psychologist on the PGA tour for 15 years and and now someone who coaches quite a few people
uh in in in finance in the hedge fund space and so when we talk about the five ways to win you know you you start with someone on the PGA tour like who I I use a guy named Rory maroy as an example and Rory maroy is an example of just someone who's just talented and people recognize that in Rory like you know if you look at videos of Rory maor when he was 6 years old he has the same golf swing
today you know that he did when he was six years old it's just he rolled out of bed and knows how to swing a golf club and people who have prodigiousness in a particular domain or Arena that's how they experience it it's like I could just play there's this story about Eddie Van Halen and and his brother Alex Van Halen and Eddie Van Halen it's it's well known you know was a a musical prodigy
particularly on the guitar but what happened was uh as The Story Goes uh Eddie Van Halen had gotten drums for a Christmas gift and Alex had gotten the guitar and after they both were playing on their respective instruments for month uh you know Alex tells the story that Eddie picked up his guitar and started ripping on licks that that Alex had been trying to do for for weeks and he picked it up the the the the the the
neck and the Frets made sense and so that's what talent looks like it's just someone shows up it makes sense and they run with it but where it gets interesting from there you know if you look at the PGA tour in any given week There's 140 uh players that get to play in a given event every week and but Rory maroy doesn't win every week and so well how how does everyone else compete so
you're if you're in the world and and everyone recognizes often like that's just what talent looks like and and if you go into the markets you know great investors tend to have certain cluster of Trades it's you know they can remember every trade so memory is part of it um great analytical skills great logical skills they have typically great interpersonal skills where they know people and and so they know the markets
they can Benchmark against risk and risk-taking so they have all these cluster of of of skills and abilities well so the way it works is if you are not one of these people um who are just pure talent one of the ways that you can compete is just effort right through through you work through working harder right so you know I'm willing to not sleep a lot so I'm going to outwork you and maybe that's going to close the gap
um and through effort I can close the gap between myself and and sort of the Uber talented so you know we use the language of being Allin you know pot committed to your craft and what you often see at the tail end of the curve so if you move way out to the tail end of the curve to the top 100th of a percent of people and this is sort of domain Gnostic this is sort of the profile of excellence in any domain what
you see is this this blending of vocation and advocation you know what happens often in Psychology is is is psychologists will often say well you know you are not your work you know who you are and what you do are are separate things and it's a healthy thing to keep those separated and I understand the point right because we have a personal identity and a family identity and a professional identity but at the very
tail end of the curve what you see is typically a blending of vocation and avocation where work and hobby sort of fuse and like Kobe Bryant in basketball like the level of Allin he went Ronnie lot in football bod Miller in skiing Kelly Slater in surfing you know every SC every great scientist ever right you know try to try to tell John Nash or Albert Einstein or Isaac Newton that
they are not what they do and the reason I say that is because the second way to win is is hard work and effort but often it's accompanied by love of craft by you know so that the work doesn't feel like work so I give an example of of my friend Steve Cohen you know Steve Cohen has the reputation of being you know arguably one of the best traders of his generation I there's five or six iconic
investors and certainly Steve is in the conversation and anyone who's ever sat next to Steve they know it's like you know what he does and how he SE markets it's just you know I can't do that I can't go there uh and I've talked to I had dinner with Steve's high school friends and you know Steve got up from the table to go to the bathroom and they said hey Gio like like this is how he was in high school he was in charge of
the high school investing club and so like this this prodigiousness that gets accompanied by effort and I say that because over the course of 40 years you know assuming 250 trading days a year Steve Cohen 10,000 thousand trading days Steve took four days off and those four days are because he was in the hospital and it's not because he needed the money he's been Rich since he was in his you know early 30s it's it's
the habit of hard work because what happens uh with people who who who love to work is an inversion happens whereby you start to love the hard parts of the craft so for example great golfers so so I use golfers as an example everyone loves to hit the driver at the driving range because it goes far but if you paid attention to Tiger Woods during his run his epic run and you watched him
practice Tiger Woods would camp out over three- foot putts for hours so much so that if you went to the putting green out at eorth Country Club where he lived at the end of the day you would see the imprints where his feet were and the line that the ball tracked from where he was to the hole he would hit so many three-foot putts that it would burn the grass out and you look at his track
record he didn't win those 80s something events with his driver his statistics from three or four feet in in that's what wanted it was the love of doing the boring stuff and the equivalent in swimming is people who practice their flip turns right everyone wants to practice their stroke and all the fun stuff but like find time in the flip turn so the inversion that happens of people who are willing to outwork the
competition right and effort so we go to the five ways to win number one is Talent number two is work ethic it's like I'm you know I'm going to I'm going to close the gap by outworking people now where magic happens and I think people use Michael Jordan as an example is when you marry the two he's the best and he worked the hardest like now that's you know the most Talent you know
married with the most effort is is you know can become legendary now the third way to win is to have a differentiated perspective right to sort of see the world differently um and I'll give give an example of of a differentiated perspective I'll give a couple of examples I guess so now here we are in August and and it's a good time in a lot of parts of the world you know to go look at the night sky if if you're a
stargazer like you now's a good window but when I look up at the stars which I did with my my kids this weekend I I see the Big Dipper and Van go looked at the same stars and he saw staring KN right so the looked at thing is the same that's the objective but the subject interpretation the subjective experience is is is where people can separate themselves so for example if you look at college football look at three sort of
Hall of Fame coaches you've got Nick Sabin Urban Meyer and Steve sper Nick Sabin generally views football as as an arms race for talent just recruit the best character and the best athletes and stack your team with talent and then Coach the heck out of it so he's a wonderful coach no question about it but he and and Bill bich were really really early on profiling players and and knowing how to get the the best
players in the building so Talent you know recruiting is a way to win in college football but then get a guy like Steve sper if you look at the rankings of recruiting classes Steve would always make jokes like you know we never have the best recruiting class but why are we always winning well Steve spur yourself football is a game of space so he would recruit a quarterback had good decision-making and receivers and
essentially what he tells quarterbacks is you know the field is a multi-dimensional thing and here's the clock and just throw the ball into space and let the receiver run under it and it worked 10 SEC championships a national championship Hall of Fame well then you get a guy like Urban Meyer and Urban Meyer came into the college football scene and his success was I mean it was jarring how he would
take programs and how quickly they would win and on some level and I'm being a little bit simplistic here but but Urban Meer sees as a foot R sees it as a foot race it's a game of speed and so at every position if you're going to play for Urban Meyer you better love to run whether you're an offensive lineman defensive lineman quarter like you have to run so again you've got you've got three college football coaches one
seases a game of talent one sees it as a game of spacing one sees it as a game of speed they're they're all looking at the same game but it's a differentiated perspective and that differentiated perspective can really unlock a lot of different things if you ever read a book called go fast be good and have fun by bod Miller you can understand like how he was so successful but like he doesn't
look at skiing never looked at skiing as technique he just saw it as speed so essentially what he says is I put my skis on the hill and I just feel speed in my feet and like I just try to find the speed and whatever my body does it does that's a differentiated perspective and it happens in the markets right some people see it as you know if I could be faster to a trade some people see it as
as as a game of slugging and slugging is a statistic in in the markets where it's not how frequently you're right but it's how big your bets are when you're right right so so what you see oftentimes as investors is is their hit rate is is is high like they're right you know seven out of 10 times but they make every bre the every trade the same the same amount of money so that plays to their advantage well there are other investors
who say you know what I don't get it right a lot but I know a good idea when I see it and that ability to know a good idea and you size into that idea well that gives you outsized return so differentiated perspectives on the same job uh number four is process we talk about a rigorous disciplined process being religious about process even though Aristotle made the observation what did he say he said um
we are what we do every day you know therefore Excellence is not an act but a habit any Observer of the human condition has known this goes back to Freud's the idea of repetition compulsion you know the output of a human life is essentially the expression of of a repeated habits if you have consistency of process what it does is it guards against the natural variability of life and if you're making
mistakes you know where to look and so essentially having you know waking up at about the same time consistency in food consistency in exercise you know Pilots talk about a pre-flight checklist that way because what happens is any demanding job puts a premium on your cognitive abilities particularly memory and so when you get to the point where you're in cognitive overload and professional sports are cognitive overload um academics
cognitive overload markets cognitive overload well the degree to which you can Outsource this stuff to routine and and and and auto sort of go into Auto automaticity that creates space for actual decision making and quote unquote thinking and so process is is a way to get it Advantage so if you're not the smartest and there's a limit you know to your ability to work hard and you see things a little bit
differently but not too much differently but you know what I can design a life that has the wash rinse repeat of my life you know I can I can live that well that's an advantage I'll give an example whenever I would work with golfers on the PGA tour one of the things that that really really worked the T about 50 wins and so what's fascinating to me about about entering sports with a with a degree in
Psychology is psychology is largely theoretical and when you start applying a theory it's like I is it going to work the theory to practice bridge and so I I I I created what's called The Fearless golf routine and so prior to that what you would often see is golfers being reactive to the variability around them so they would feel differently if they're score was different they would feel differently if
they were paired with Tiger Woods or a marquee player versus a friend they would feel differently based on their world rankings so all the variability around them would change their psychology they would try harder at the Masters than they would at the John Deere or or like so so the status of a tournament so what what I found when I got to the PJ tour in 2002 were a group of people who were all competitive but
they actually didn't know what they were competing against so I would ask them like do you consider your this is part of my psychological study you consider yourself a competitive person they'd say absolutely I'd say okay who are you competing against and line up five golfers and you get five different answers well one of them would say I'm competing against people in my group the next one would
say I'm competing against myself you know the other ones would say I'm competing against the field but that's all variability and all of a sudden you would realize that that that there was no Constance in their life and so I created what's called The Fearless golf routine and I and I I would teach it to them it's here's what you do before you hit a shot here's you do with a shot and
here's what you do after called 20 seconds of greatness and by the way Urban Meyer coaches the same thing in football right seven seconds of greatness because that's about how long if an offensive lineman can hold a block if you can hold a play for you know three four five six seconds all the way through and repeat that essentially 60 or 70 times which is how many plays college football players get in a thing
like process is a way to win and I would often show them a shampoo bottle read the back of a shampoo ptle like lather wash rinse repeat so what do you do in the lead pick a Target make a Fearless swing at your target Let It Go and just keep wash rinse repeat a good process that's what wins over time right and then the final way to win is and this is true more in business the fifth ways you
hire effectively so if I don't have those other things but I'm I'm a good I read people well and I manage people well and I think you can look at someone like Ken Griffin I don't think anyone would tell you that Ken Griffin the founder of Citadel is like a a prodigious Trader but he's built a business system and a a business model that's the ultimate meritocracy and and you know you hire um to effectively compensate for
the deficiencies that you have and so you hire the best person at every position it's true in sports and you're an effective manager and and I guess there's a sixth way you get lucky and I'm holding up a book called The Luck factor it's it's it's a real thing you know you can assign it to randomness or some people really are more Lucky in life like you you you you flip a quarter
in a random number generator 5 million times and at the end of that five million flips you're going to get 5050 heads and tails but within those five million flips you're going to see patterns that seem to be causal you'll see heads heads heads heads heads heads heads for a 100 iterations and Tails for 100 iterations and then you'll see heads Tails heads Tails heads tails and the reality is there are some lives that
land on heads CU you know you're on the earth for 70 years and some people just get lucky so if like that's your path to winning it happens sometimes but so does the other side of the equation some people just you know on on the probability scale don't get lucky so I don't really include that in the five ways to win but like it happens sometimes that you know you're born in the right setup and life is a series of
of Tailwinds thank you for that detailed explanation I want to double click a little bit on discipline is discipline a matter of willpower like some people say I'm not very disciplined how do you coach somebody to be more disciplined or to to gain the strength and advantage that sort of comes from discipline great great question and an important one so the first thing that that people in
performance psychology or management you know either do or should do is you want to get really there are certain traits in the human condition that are fixed and there's some that are malleable in other words in fixed traits you're not going to change them and I think where people spend too much time is they they try to fix the unfixable you see this in marriages a lot right in in marriage counseling and in therapy
you know you marry someone and and and you want it to change and when you're on the other side of the table sometimes the answer is hey you know what you're married and and so you better be clear before you go in and what what you're going to be able to change and what you're not so fixed traits versus malleable traits and so when we look at something so so we look at fixed traits like personality by and large you're not
changing personality things like IQ I mean they they shift over time they tend to gradually um um move in a direction consistent with you know with with with family sort of uh IQ a fixed trait like IQ um things like memory you can improve your memory marginally but like things like that tend to have genetic components but where we looked at variable and malleable things things like discipline so you have to remember
the the the atmology of the of the word discipline is disciple what is a disciple well a disciple is a student so the actual idea of self-discipline is that you're a student of yourself right so we think of discipline uh you know in modern times as as really the way we equate it is like the ability for delayed gratification discipline is the ability to withhold gratification and stay in
the moment and and and and just you know run some process over time and not capitulate and you know Navy Seals right that in a very scary situation your training shows up and you're disciplined and that's all true however one of the things that is known about discipline is you can prime people for greater or Worse discipline and psychology would Define priming by setting up a series of conditions that's
going to increase the probability of a behavior and usually that's environmental can people become more disciplined 100% absolutely in fact William James who's one of my intellectual Heroes sort of the father of American psychology but if anyone's interested you can go look up William James's you know what are known as his maxims on habit and so it begs the question If you're trying to change
someone's habits and habits are one of the things that are changeable the problem is the longer that you've done a habit if it's a bad habit the harder it is to change right the old saying that ruts long traveled grow comfortable and so discipline is just a habit of mind that that that that evolves into a habit generally of behavior and so when you're trying to give someone more disciplined one of the
things that's really really important is right out of the gates is to change the actual Behavior because as as Albert bandura you know famously said you know behavior is a cause of behavior like the more you can get someone to do something the more likely it is to repeat um you know and consistent with that there's a Time Factor there's an age Factor You Know Carl marks said you know give me a
child to the age of seven and I'll give you a communist for life and we have these collo isms like you know you can't teach an old dog new tricks why why do these colloquialisms you know you live live in our conscious Collective Consciousness for S because they're largely true so the reality about discipline is the quicker you can get it infused into someone's habits the more likely it is they're going to sustain it
through life if you're trying to change habits later in life you got to go all in and as soon as you're aware that you want to change them don't wait don't hesitate and you know one of the other things that William James says he says is until the new habit is securely rooted in your life don't don't suffer an exception to occur in other words um like like just because you think you've got it beat
like you don't then reward yourself with pizza you know if your goal is to lose weight and you've gone a month of eating healthy and at the end of a month you're like oh I'm so proud of myself I'm going to reward myself with a pizza it's like you know it's like what happens after Alcoholics Anonymous you meet these people people and they're like yeah I'm a recovering alcoholic and you're like
wow recovering alcoholic when's the last time you've had a drink they're like oh I haven't had a drink in 20 years you're like how is it that you haven't had a drink in 20 years and you're still recovering well what they know is that that first drink brings in a whole cluster of behaviors and patterns that cluster together in in sort of these these neural networks uh that that first drink you know could lead to the to to to a bender
and so they really are recovering because 20 years later you still have to work hard to groove the new habit because the old cluster is is is often still in there so again if you're trying to get discipline which is really important number one you have to be a student of yourself number two once you decide what you want to be disciplined on you go all in number three there has to be a behavioral component to it not
just a psychological component and number four uh there's an everydayness to it right you actually have to sort of work at it every day day you know just because a habit gets entrenched in your life it doesn't mean that you've won once and for all you got you got to keep you got to keep working at it you got to keep sort of every a little a little a little bit every day is sort of the key
I like that a lot I want to explore the role of environment in either encouraging or adding friction to discipline I think environment largely determines behavior in a lot of ways would you agree with that yeah I think I think the psychological re research would show that you know Howard Gardner who's a developmental psychologist at Harvard who was the father of the the idea of multiple intelligence he's he's
just one of these sort of worldclass once in a generation Scholars you know he's he's one of the you know what happens in Academia is wherever you end up getting your your PhD they never let you you teach at the same institution because they call it academic inbreeding right so they they want ideas to sort of cross-pollinate Howard Gardner is one of the very few people he got an
undergraduate degree at Harvard Masters at Harvard PhD at Harvard and then taught at Harvard for 40 years like he's he's so special that they said we we're not going to let you go and he's another one of my intellectual Heroes and he said something at a conference once that blew my mind and said when you dissect the research on nature and nurture so you look at you know what we bring to the table as human beings that lead to
the behaviors you're talking about shame and then the role of the environment he said what we're starting to realize is they're both more important than we think they're both really important and there in lies the difficulty in shaping behavior when people call me and say hey can you help me my answer is always I don't know but what what I can do is we can look at ways of thinking um you know
ways of looking at solving the problem that can increase the probability of helping so I'll give an example I had a a school teacher call me one time say Hey listen it was a school teacher and a parent and said hey you know my son is he's a great kid and for some reason he keeps getting in trouble in school and it starting to affect him and he's getting a a label and a reputation as a
quote unquote bad kid and I've talked to him about it we've all talked to him he's he's he's not trying to get in trouble he's just is getting in trouble will you help is sure so I go to the school you have to understand the role of of the environment so another way psychologists really look at this you look at the individual and the environment around the individual because we know that the environment is
constantly imposing upon us both consciously and unconsciously and the term in Psychology we use it's called situated cognition situated cognition that that thinking happens in space and so go into this classroom uh take a seat in the back large just try to be invisible um and after a couple days I'm watching and what was happening is unbeknown to the teacher the teacher had sat this kid next to two of his best friends who he
developed a cluster of habits with outside of school of shenanigans and playfulness and not not mean spirited just playful and so what would happen is the teacher would be trying to teach and the best friend would lean over the kid would try he would really try and he was so naive that you know he would look and see what his best friend was scribbling and then he would get caught and then he
was in trouble and it kept happening and the solve there was was simple it was change the seating right so you know change the seating of the classroom the school move the kid to a different place and voila the behavior got better you you put the kid next to the teacher in the front row instead of in the back row middle and so a lot of times just changing the environment around the individual changes the behavior so you
don't need willpower I'll give I'll give a perfect example of that so you take an individual take a human being with with the greatest amount of willpower and self-discipline there is and you put them in a Cino and you cover the windows so there's no windows so they don't know what time it is and there's no clocks so once again you don't know what time it is then you pump that building full of
pure oxygen so it keeps them awake and alert so they natural triggers that make them tired they no longer get tired so there's no windows there's no clocks you pump oxygen into it you take their money and you exchange it uh for chips and then you give them free alcohol and then you play a certain kind of music and all of a sudden what is known on a probability level that if you can shape
the environment around the individual you can shape their behavior so often times these are the individuals that walk out of the casino at 5:00 A.M watching the sunrise and they're like what just happened like you know I just behaved in ways that's that that's not the real me that's not that's not who I am and the counterargument is well clearly it is because this is what you did and but what you realize is changing the
environment around an individual has such a powerful influence on the three biggies in Psychology the three biggies in Psychology are thoughts feelings and actions what you think how you feel and what you do you know if you wanna there's this great song by the band Sister Hazel you know they say if you want to be somebody else change your mind well that's not always true more often than not if you want to be
somebody else change your environment like change where you are um and by changing your environment and or the people around you all of a sudden the the way the dominoes start to fall is is you're a better version of yourself I I love that what sort of things do you see with people at the top of their game and their environment that wouldn't necessarily appear with people who are not at that level what's
different about their environment so there's a great book called The Talent Code uh by a friend of mine named Daniel Coyle and and what Daniel did is he did a deep dive into what he calls Talent hot bets so he went to the places that seemed to produ disproportionate Talent so he went to the areas in Russia that were turning out Champion tennis players and he went to South Korea where all these great female golfers were coming
from and he went to the Dominican Republic where they're turning out these incredible Young baseball players and a place in Texas that was turning out incredible musicians and he was looking for the he was looking for the commonalities like of these Talent hot beds you know if you think of of Van go and his group of artists like what was it about that time and space that was able to create so many great
Impressionists and what he uncovered was really interesting and and unforeseen one of the the the the common factors that produces disproportionate Talent is what he ident with two one of them is call Primal cues Primal cues is that these places tend not to be uh identified by wealth and comfort they tend to be the opposite they tend to be places where the signaling of the community is like you better find a way
to W make it work in other words if this doesn't work out for you like there's no plan B like your next best option isn't that good you know it's like growing up in a coal mining town it's like it's it's the old American Horatio Alger stories or John melon camp song it's like you you grow up in an environment and then all of a sudden that environment gives you an an opening and
an option and like you're going to shoot that Gap and these things get triggered in the brain in the body that are called Primal cues now it's not that your your your life is in danger but like this is high stake stuff and so what that does is it sharpens focus it allows the brain to to to to what's called myelinate to so that memory and skill develop the velocity of skill development happens
more quickly one of the test questions I used to put on the sports psychology exams for my college students I would say why is it that a golfer from uh from eorth country club or Olympia High School has never made it to the PJ tour and these are very affluent places where you go to the driving range and these kids have the best instructors in the world the most modern equipment brand new golf balls hitting off perfect grass and what
you see is they is this scenario dominates junior golf and junior tennis and Junior but as the development of trajectory goes the game tends to weed these people out because they don't have the resilience and the grit and the fortitude because they were the formative years happened in such comfort that when things get hard they don't know what to do with them so one of the profiles of of these Talent Hop Heads is
they tend to be places soccer like Brazilian Brazilian soccer is another example where you have to tend to gut it out and it's some version of natural selection where where where Innovation um and evolving your game knowing yourself and skill development are are at a premium so there's like a natural selection bias at the top for people who are resilient you can't make it there without being resilient how do
we as parents uh develop resilience in our kids and also importantly how do we develop resilience in ourselves as adults when we talk about like resilience and grit a lot of times people think that those are causal variables that they are the things that happened before success and and that's not untrue right they they they are but one of the things you have to understand or you ask the
question like what happens before resilience right it's like what an Rand said about money people say that you know money is the root of all evil and andrean flipped the question she said okay well what's at the root of all money right and and the answer is people right so is it that money's the RO of all evil or evil exists and you know people use money as a mechanism to express their evil bit of a circular
semantic argument but one of the things that's known about about um about resilience is it's it's it's critically important and and when you put it as a variable and psychological model it tends to wash out um you know things like you know ability or intelligence like it's more important uh in the course of the life cycle um right up there with delayed gratification which is another very
predictive variable so if you just marry if you're raising kids and you can sort of teach your kids uh to delay gratification and and to be able to withstand um sort of failure and hard things and have resilience like like that's a pretty good setup for long-term success but one of the things one of the terms we use in in Psychology it's called normative failure and the idea is that when failure is the norm resilience
becomes second nature and and there's a biological imperative to that so for example we know that you know when when boxers get hit over the course of time their bones calcify like like and strengthen if you look at any any environment ecosystem you know for example use Mount St Helens you know in the early 80s Mount St Helens had a massive volcano blew this this mountain to Smither it was a beautiful
ecosystem and if you go visit Mount St Helens you know 30 years later it's remarkable what it was was was you know 15 ft of Ash and everything seemed dead and now it's a flourishing thriving ecosystems um in the forestry services they now do controlled Burns because they know that it's really healthy for forests to go through fires and metaphorically that's really really true of the human condition in fact that's
captured in in in the Buddhist school of thought a little bit with with the with the symbol of um of the lotus flower right so the characteristic of the lotus flower is that it's you know it's it's it's the most beautiful thing it's a symbol of ultimate divine Beauty but the other characteristic of a lotus flower is that it only grows out of muuk like if you ever look at the the
flower floating on the water but you look down the the these things sort of emerge out of mck out of out of what what people would look at and say is is ugliness and I think in a psychological sense certainly that's that's true you know when in Psychology Eric Ericson who's a great developmental psychologist created the eight stages of life you know one of the things that he suggested is that that that to
overprotect your children is to Rob them of of their life U because you're making fragile people and so you shouldn't overprotect your children from the hard things in life and Jordan Peterson current psychologist says the same thing he says hey if your kids are taking risks intelligently for being smart while they're taking risks like you got to let it happen and so what happens is resilience actually tends to be born out
of learning what to do with failure and in in in in in my experience people call me usually I'm the last phone call Shane like you know if it's a golfer they've already fired their caddy and fired their swing instructor and sometimes it's the wife who will call me the wife will be like like I can't stand to be around him the dog can't stand to be around him the children can't stand he's just miserable
and what you realize is when life has Stripped Away all of these you know ego generally ego protective mechanisms and left you perfectly raw you know so I I mentioned Erikson Ericson uses sort of the yin-yang uh symbol that crisis and opportunity are synonymous that that that that they're not separate things that that in crisis you get essentially the same amount of opportunity anyone
who's been through a divorce you know knows that anyone who's lost a loved one knows that anyone who's ever had their life blown up and had to rebuild from nothing and hit quote unquote Rock Bottom knows exactly what I'm talking about you know no one ever no one would ever wish you to be blindsided in life and their life fall apart but when you actually are living in the room with and and in in in in in a therapeutic sense
or in a counseling or coaching sense with people whose lives have have been blown to Smither this happened often times during the pandemic it happens during Financial crises when people lose everything with Steve Jobs when he was when he was fired from Apple he you know in in in his uh Speech called stay hungry stay foolish he talks about the beautiful insights that began to happen because he was unencumbered by the
expectations of being an executive and so what happens is when you lose the baggage of of your your identity of your ego of yourself what fills in the space is the freedom to create and that freedom to create um is also the freedom to take risks and you know it's Janice Joplin you know freedom is just another word for Nothing Left to Lose so when life takes everything away from you you get that freedom back great success
great fulfillment great happiness in life often emerges from the mck from the MK of life from the failure from those those painful emotions that happen uh when we hit rock bottom and so when it comes to parenting it's this it's sort of paradoxical because you know in the early stages U you know of a country it's like well you every generation would say I want my kids to have it better than I did
because there was real suffering but you hit a Tipping Point whereby you know if you're still running that playbook in your middle class or upper middle class or wealthy you know one of one of the I'm working on two books right now the first one's called Rich and miserable the world of wealth and the world of abundance and the world of quote unquote success is also bued with a lot of anxiety and a lot of
depression a lot of drug abuse and in as much as I could tell you I celebrate abundance and I love success what I can also say is that handing it to your children making their lives too easy giving them a Glide path um and protecting them from taking risk creates fragility and if you send kids out into life out into the world fragile you have done them no service they are going to
have a lot of suffering when the world comes at them um the way that the world comes at everyone eventually and so you want to develop resilience in kids it's got to be some version of reality therapy like tell them the truth one of the things you see I I I've I see way too much of it and this is not just wealth this is sort of a modern phenomenon a lot of modern-day parenting has nothing to do with the kids it has
to do with vanity and so so when you see these moms or dads at the club whose kid steps out of line a little bit or is being a little bit silly the parent isn't yelling at the kid because they care about the kid's long-term development they're yelling at the kid because they themselves are embarrassed like it reflects badly on me as the parent and so what what looks like parenting is actually a vanity project
and by the way kids can spot that they feel it at every level and it's not a way to make them feel loved if you want kids to feel loved you have to spend a lot of time with them you have to tell them the truth you have to be able to do the hard work of parenting which is taking things away from them which is also by the way going to inconen inconvenience you as a parent the moment you'll know you've succeeded
as a parent is when your kid is able to look you and say hey like you know I I don't I don't need your help like I got it like I'm glad that you're there as a safety net if I need you but like I got this because what you want is self-reliance like like you know a little bit of autonomy where they believe in themselves like you the confidence that your kids need to have to be successful adults is
self-confidence it's belief that's rooted in their own ability to solve the hard problems in life and the only way and the only way they're going to get that is through trial and error like like that's not me saying that that's like deep amounts of Empirical research and social cognitive theory uh where where success the equation of success and failure the math of it is they have to do a lot of failing and then learn
how to succeed in the face of failure because then once that happens um the next time they hit failure their brain triggers into oh wait I know what to do with this moment because the last time I failed I kept persisting and I worked my way through it and then I succeeded and in fact I'm sorry for for talking so long on this shame but I'll tell you a really interesting study I took a bunch
of kids I think it was middle school kids but it might have been high school I think it was middle school kids and they showed them 20 math equations and they said okay how many of these problems do you think you could solve and every kid gave themselves a score and then the second thing they did is they asked the kids how confident are you and your ability to solve these problems and they got a confidence score
it's actually known as self-efficacy then they gave the kids the test and what they found is the kids that were more confident when they ran into problems they worked harder to solve those problems in other words if I'm confident in my ability to solve problems when I run into a difficult thing I just I keep working at it this is the persistence that you were talking about earlier so you keep reworking the
problem a lot of different ways and by working at it I solve it then I get to the next one kids who didn't have as much confidence gave up more quickly and by giving up more quickly they wouldn't get it right so what you realize and is that it wasn't the academic ability or the IQ or the standardized tests that foreshadowed the ultimate score it was the persistence in the face of adversity
how do you develop persistence in the face of adversity and failure you practice it as a kid Carol D who's an academic researcher talks about two kinds of feedback you give kids you can either praise kids for their intelligence or praise kids for their effort and and it's very known in the educational community that when kids are successful if you say hey I'm proud of you you worked really really hard on
that equation the next time they go to work at something they're going to try harder if you give them praise saying hey good job you're really really smart the next time they run into adversity essentially what their brain is going to say is well I have a fixed amount of intelligence and the smartness that I have isn't solving this well I'm just going to give up because I haven't been and praised for my effort and so one of
the best things you can do for your for your kids is to continually reinforce work ethic continually reinforce um that you know they have control over their success the degree to which they're willing to work hard I just want to take a minute here to reflect on this episode because Dr Gio left a profound impact on me and one of the things that I took away from this and I reflected on a lot I went for aot
of runs and I thought about and I sort of talked to other people about was the sources of Advantage now Dr Gio offered five sources of Advantage he said Talent effort differentiate process and be a talent collector so those are five if you go back in the episode he explains those I'm going to add to those because I've come up with more come up with 13 in total so those are five let's go to six six is
patience do you have more patience do you have the patient Pati to know that you're making progress without visible results a lack of patience changes the outcome often we know how to get what we want but what we do is we want it tomorrow we don't want it in 10 years we know how to get there in 10 years we just work hard we put our head down do what we're supposed to do but we don't want it so we we go for
shortcuts and that lack of patience changes the outcome ability to withstand pain that pain is not physical pain I mean it can be physical pain in terms of working out that's that's definitely something to consider but that pain is mental can you do something different can you be an outcast can you be the tall poppy can you stand out are you willing to differentiate yourself can you withstand Financial pain if you go
through a crisis the ability to take pain applies to every part of our life emotional pain physical pain do you crawl up into a ball or are you able to withstand that what can you do to improve the odds that you can withstand these things there's no time to prepare for crisis whether it's a relationship or Health crisis or financial crisis nobody says go home and in two weeks you're going to get this
you know this thing is coming so you got time to get ready you don't temperament this is something I talk about in my book clear thinking how do you manage the urges that get other people in trouble the emotional urges and impulses nine partner your partner at home partner at work these things matter if you have the right partner everything's on easy mode you bring all the baggage from your
relationship with you to work and you bring work into your relationship you better make sure you have the right partner that is a huge source of Advantage 10 energy that one's self-explanatory 11 curiosity again self-explanatory 12 I'm going to say luck but you can't really do anything about luck you can do most out of all of these so far you you can do a lot on each of them 13 is positioning are you in the right
position to play on easy mode are you playing on easy mode or are you playing on hard mode and the position you're in at the moment of the situation the moment of challenge the moment of circumstance that doesn't change the fact that there's going to be a moment doesn't change that you're going to get angry it doesn't change the fact you have to make a decision what it does change is how easy that decision is is
and everybody looks like a genius when they're in a good position and everybody looks like an idiot when they're in a bad position are you playing on easy mode are you playing on hard Moon I just thought I'd offer a little bit of insight into how I reflect on each of these episodes thank you thanks for listening and learning with us for complet list of episodes show notes transcripts and more go to
fs. Blog podcast or just Google the knowledge project the fernum street blog is also where you can learn more about my new book clear thinking turning ordinary moments into extraordinary results it's a transformative guide that hands you the tools to Master Your Fate sharpen your decision-making and set yourself up for unparalleled success learn more at fs. blog clear until next [Music] time