so at the end of the day what I'm always telling people both matter like you can be intrinsically motivated and like the praise and the recognition but the order has to be love of craft and then like it has to be you have to love what you're doing and then enjoy the things that come with it because when the order flips uh invariably it's uh it's going to be a [Music] problem [Music] welcome to the knowledge project a
podcast about mastering the best of what other people have already figured out so you can apply their insides 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 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. blog membership check out the show notes for a link this is the second of a special two-part episode of the knowledge project featuring performance psychologist Dr Gio Valiant if you
haven't listened already go back and check out the first portion of our interview in episode 179 either at the phom street blog or wherever you usually listen to the knowledge project Gio is regarded as one of the most successful performance coaches in the world and he's worked exclusively with golfers on the PGA and LPGA tours Olympic athletes and leading figures in the NCAA football NFL where he served as the head
performance coach of the Buffalo Bills he's also more than 5,000 hours coaching some of the most sophisticated investors in the world including billionaire hedge fund manager Steven Con on this episode we continue our conversation beginning with his thoughts on failure and the fear that holds us back from making the most of our talent Gio also discusses the shift from an ego orientation to a
Mastery mindset common misperceptions about success and failure what we learn from success and how we learn when it's time to cut our losses and move on to a different challenge it's time to listen and 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
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them Shane sent you make an exceptionally delicious cup of coffee in less than a minute with the Aero press coffee maker it's the only coffee press out there that uses a patented 3in1 Brew technology and because it's so unique so is the flavor not only does it taste incredible but I love the smooth full-bodied finish that other coffee makers can't give you best of all you can pack it in your bag when you travel
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today for under $50 atero press.com Shan and get 15% off exclusively for our listeners that's a 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 271 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 timec consuming and tedious vanta can
help vanta automates up to 90% of compliance work getting you audit ready in weeks and saving you significant costs and Vantage scales with your business helping you enter new markets and land bigger deals and earn Customer Loyalty listeners get $1,000 off vanta when they go to v.com knowledge that's V n.com snowledge the direction I want to go after that is sort of in Failure I mean often the reason we don't
try things is because we don't want to fail so we don't build these muscles because we're not failing what happens when fear sort of like takes hold of us like what does the world look like how is it different and how does it shape what we're about to do and how do we get out of that great question yeah because one of the things that we know is people think of success and failure is opposite things right
that the more I succeed the less I failure I fail but that's really sort of a modern conception of success and failure the fact of the matter is failure is woven into the fabric of success it's not how do you avoid failure that's that's the wrong question the right question is how do I fail or how should I fail in ways that lead to the type of skill development and belief system that allow me to succeed long
term so it's how do we fail like in snow scheme you want to teach kids how to fall so they don't get injured um you want to teach students how to keep trying and pushing themselves as hard they can and the question is what do they do with the failure now here's where it gets fascinating if you want to anticipate how someone is going to react to failure you shouldn't address or attack how they react to failure what
you should actually do is try to go on a time machine and go back to the beginning and you ask them why do you do what you do this is this is if you were to ask me to to to to pull out some of the most the the greatest insights to come out of psychology this would absolutely be one of them it's it's it's research on what are called achievement goals achievement goals explore the why the human why why do you do what you do
what you after you know you ask a thousand people this question huge data sets what you come to find is these thousands of people all of a sudden they tend to bucket into one of one of two categories which either a Mastery orientation or an ego orientation and these two different orientations as to why people do what they do tend to be very predictive of of all timate success and here's why so a Mastery orientation here's the answer
people with a Mastery orientation typically give why do I do what I do well I'm curious about it it's I do it because I I I love the I'm intrinsically motivated I love to solve the problems I love the work of the practice I find it you know inherently interesting like I think about it all the time this is what I was talking about earlier ear about the blending of vocation and advocation
you know you go back to the why and so what you'll often see in the game of golf even happens with students in school right it's you know why do kids love to learn because learning is fun why do kids you know go on the golf course want to play until the sun has set and they're out there all night because it's an amazing sport it's super fun it's it's it's it's just a fascinating you get lost in the in the game so at what
point in in educational development do kids you know start to dislike school happens around third grade what happens in third grade we start giving kids grades so what happens is there's a shift from a Mastery orientation to what's called an ego orientation the ego orientation when you ask people with an ego orientation hey why do you do what you do what you'll often see is well I like to beat other people or I want to
prove something I need to prove myself to other people or it's some version of image management like you're trying to show show off and and prove yourself to other people right so imagine you know Shane give give me a domain of functioning or or or an AR or an area that's interesting to you so so so give me any Arena or domain business business is a great example certain people go into business because they want to make
a lot of money like it's just it they I want to make a lot of money so that's their driving force other people go into business um and they find that business is fascinating certain components of business motivation you know business management organizing people Innovation um product Innovation research and development what happens is when when you get lost in in in in the problem solving of it all like the Steve
Jobs and and and what it leads to his deeper cognitive processing more creative problem solving but here's the key thing the key thing when Mastery oriented individuals fail the reaction is curiosity it's it's what it's what um um Thomas Edison said you know when asked hey you know what was it like to fail a thousand times he said he was reported a thing the light bulb was not an invention with a thousand failures it
was an invention that simply required a thousand steps you know Tiger Woods when when you watch the way he handled career and his approach to it it was a purely Mastery oriented uh mindset it was you know get a little bit better every day like make better mistakes conversely what you see out of an ego oriented individual in business when they fail they feel embarrassment now I now just I want you to pause here
for a minute two individuals everything else being equal same education same ability um same training same everything one of them goes at their craft or at their domain or at their career from a place of I I I love to learn I love to problem solve I I go into depth with these things and and I largely do it I don't really I'm not engaged in image management the second individual goes in competing against other people caring
about over caring about what people think success is only defined by that which is palpable or tangible like they're playing for trophies then you fail because if you're if you're living you're trying to get at the tail end of the curve you're going to fail and you react with embarrassment when we talk about the toxic emotions embarrassment is is depends on the person but it's one of the two most painful psychological
experiences a person can have humiliation is second only behind grief the type of grief that comes when you lose a loved one when you lose a child which is like a throw switch in the brain which shuts everything down the the biological mechanisms in the brain from like when a parent loses a child they're so strong that you're just you shut down and you're not going to think your way out of it like it's
unbelievable right behind that is humiliation and so what happens is when people feel embarrassed their their their brain starts create send signals where they create cortisol stress uh epinephrine adrenaline nor epinephrine their perceptions change so rather so when you're embarrassed rather than than see opportunity all you see is threat right so all of a sudden there's a there's a distortion of reality and so all of a
sudden when all you see is threat you stop taking risks now it becomes some version of avoiding the pain that comes from embarrassment so so like all of sudden why is everyone walking around underperforming relative their ability largely it's because people live their lives trying to avoid embarrassment now why is that because they approach life from an ego orientation imagine if Shane if every time you failed bigger small I
were to come up and smack you on the hand well the brain is going to process that as pain and the part of the brain the amydala that processes Pleasure and Pain it doesn't distinguish whether it's physical pain or psychological pain it's just pleasure pain so now the brain equates failure with pain well all of a sudden the brain then anticipates the next time you're in a risk-taking situation or you're going to put your
ideas into the arena of a mer a meritocracy of your company or like you think you can help but if every time that happens someone makes you feel embarrassed or gosh even if they don't make you feel embarrassed you make yourself feel embarrassed because the reason you're doing it is is you want people to like you you're going to run away from that feeling and all of a sudden you're you're on this time
equation and the wash rinse repeat of your life is essentially avoiding embarrassment so you're taking no risks and 20 years goes by like that and you look back and you're like where did the time go and everyone else is wondering boy I really thought that that person you know could have been better and you're like you know what I thought I could have been better and it happens at such an unconscious level that that
people are unaware of it and it's even true in acting and it's even true in sports like golf where you know actors they have to make an impression on the audience but if you talk to the best they're not doing it um uh to impress other people they're doing it for the moment they're doing it for the performance they're doing it for the psychological Freedom that comes with the delivery and so the number one agreement I have with anyone whoever
wants to work with me is is I tell them is you have to promise me that you're going to take embarrassment out of the equation because I can't make you great if you're willing to react with embarrassment because the brain will anticipate embarrassment it'll put you into a psychological straight jacket that will forever restrict your ability to have creative problem solving to have deep cognitive processing it affects
memory it affects all the things that lead to success is that why even Elite athletes uh often don't practice especially in team sports things they're bad at because they don't want their teammates to see them failing and they're embarrassed happens all the time I have an NBA player who in practice would shoot call it like 85% from the free throw line and in games would shoot somewhere you know
in the 50% range and it was all because he cared what people thought of him you know in sports we call it having rabbit ears you know it's impression management and this often happens in Hollywood where people start to believe their own press um um and and there's actually a psychological shift that happens believe it or not because people get great at these things because of the master because they love them but all it
takes is a few iterations of of people telling you you're great or I give you money in fact there's a great book called Born to Run which talks about what happen if you look at what happened to the Record Times in marathoning is when Nike entered the equation and started rewarding Runners with contracts the speeds went down because people stopped love they stopped running for the love of The Craft and they started
Ed running for the incentive for the reward itself and what is known is that incentives uh are demotivating they undermine the intrinsic motivation that lead to Greatness there's this great little Parable where there's an old man with a garden and and and and one day he wakes up and his garden is torn to bits and he doesn't know why and so a week later he you know he puts his garden back together week later he go his guard
goes out and the garden's torn up again he doesn't know what's happening so on a Saturday wakes up early and he goes out he learns that the neighborhood kids were playing football and they the they were running right through his garden and and so he said what am I going to do here and one day he called the kids over said kids come here he goes everyone come here so I'm so thankful that you're using my yard to
play in he goes it gives me great joy to give you such great joy he said everyone I want you to come over here and the kids did and he gave all of them $5 said here's $5 um that's how thankful I am and the kid said thanks mister and they went went back to the game and the next week the kids played their football and they came the old man gave them $5 and after a couple of months kids played their football and they rushed through
the game and they came and they said where's where's our $5 he said oh I'm sorry kids he goes I don't I don't have any more money to give you he goes but you're welcome to play as much as you want and as the parable goes of course that was the end of football that the kids stopped playing because what happened is the shift they started out playing because it was fun and eventually you're playing for the money
and there's some version of that and everywhere in life whether it's praise whether it's the approval of other people whether it's the need for Glory or whether it's money when you do a thing only for the outcome and you lose the love of the craft the Love of the Game you're not going to be any good at it so at the end of the day what I'm always telling people both matter like you can be intrinsically motivated and
like the praise and the recognition but the order has to be love of craft and then like it has to be you have to love what you're doing and then enjoy the things that come with it because when the order flips uh invariably it's uh it's going to be a problem and so this this shift from Mastery to Ego is a real thing and it's a real problem for professional athletes unless they figure it out and they shift back to the
Mastery orientation um and they're willing to kick embarrassment you know out of the equation you know for good how do we shift from a ego orientation to a Mastery orientation can we just think our way into this the answer is it depends some can and some can't for the ones who can I've had dramatic results both uh in the markets you know with with with with portfolio managers in the hedge fund world uh and with with
professional athletes and it begins with the why and I always start uh by asking someone when they come and see me for the first time tell me tell me why you do what you do and I look and they they write it all and go deeper I say keep going and then I say okay well let's look at your reasons and then you lay it out and you map it out you say well here's the danger here's the reality by the way you could be or ego oriented and
be successful uh it's happens in the NBA a lot but here's the thing the only way to be ego oriented and be successful is you better never lose your confidence because what we know is confidence is a variable sometimes we're more confident than others if you're ego oriented and you lose your confidence that's where the embarrassment comes into play that's where you're screwed so that's why athletes often surround
themselves with like entourages essentially what they're saying is you know keep telling me how great I am because confidence is so important um that I need it so that's that's the only way to win within an ego orientation but generally speaking what I'm trying to do is shift people back to a Mastery orientation and so you lay out the characteristics of a Mastery orientation and it determines how you practice and
and it determin the most important thing that you do believe it or not is you help people correct the reactions to failure and who they listen to so one of the characteristics of an ego orientation is you care what people think about you and like who is they like that's the thing it's like I'm wondering I worry about what they're going to think who's they what you re you realize most people are walking
around essentially it's what we call in Psych it's called a personal Fable that they you know we are all the stars of of you know Shakespeare life is a stage you know upon we like but most people are the actors in their own play but we over index for how much people care about you know about us like we think that people are thinking about us all the time and we want to make a good impression on them and it could be the media it could
be the writers and reporters it could be the critics it could be your your friends it could be the the the crowds mostly in business it's management it's like I care what what my managers think of me what what my boss thinks of me people don't pay too much attention to forming opinions of other people tends to be just a quick reaction that they're careless about and they care even less about the words they use and so when you
go around life caring too much what people think about you and you actually like internalize and you let it affect your decision making it's a recipe for for just a bad life with no happiness so what I'll say is let's pick three people maybe four who you're going to give the power who you're going to actually listen to who you know love you and care about you who are accurate observers and who will tell you the
truth and if you're willing to solicit the truth from those people in your circle in your community you have to use people as your mirror so you need feedback from people you just have to be intentional about who those people are who are going to be your mirrors and in fact that's one of the key predictors of success are both for kids and adults is you know who are you surrounding yourself by who who
are you using to populate your ego I'm sorry your your Eco system so what I'll do with people is we'll intentionally pick here's who you're willing to listen to okay number one number two we're going to pre-act in other words when you fail how are you going to react because what we know is the toxic emotions that kill us are a function of how we react so if you fail you can react one of five ways embarrassment the type of pain that
comes with embarrassment will flood the brain and flood the body with these with these chemicals that will ensure underperformance okay well second way to do with failure anger people fail and they just they rage and they get angry over the course of time that's pain so now you're also conditioning yourself for underperformance by reacting with with anger too much third way to react acceptance I failed it I accept it and
move on no harm no foul then we start getting into the elevating emotions humor now this is really hard for competitive-minded people to wrap their minds around but if you can hit a bad shot in golf or if you can fail at some particular thing and your reaction is is you accept it but then you laugh you're like that was terrible that like it was so bad it's funny and well I did everything right in the process you know
bad luck and and you can find a way to infuse humor into your failure one of the things that happens is your body doesn't react with the toxic emotions or toxic chemical epinephrine norepinephrine cortisol and and it often leads to more joy and more abundance I'll give a quick example I had a golfer on the PGA tour who was over for 210 he had he had gone for like seven or eight years and never won on the PGA
tour and so one of the things we started do is replace his reactions and so uh and I remember I'll never forget he said to me he said so what you're telling me is you want me to suck and enjoy it I'll never forget the moment the the the the first week you know he started accepting bad shots instead of beating himself up and then you started to see more psychological freedom in his actually his cough swing and then he came out and
he won the second week so seven years no WIS over for 215 and he won 15 days later and that's a function of the reaction and I'll never forget a moment he was playing badly and he was out on the golf course and I saw him and his caddy laughing because they and one of the things things we know in Psychology is sense of humor is one of the greatest tells of of of psychological health and well-being one of the keys to
psychological health is to be able to laugh at things that are funny and that's one of the think the problems of the modern times are people have lost their sense of humor and you know Freud wrote about wit being critically important because life is so painful and so difficult you have to find a way to find things funny if you're going to survive in this world and so the way we shift people back to Mastery Shane is we
get clarity on the why so they're doing it for the right reasons we make sure that we're clear about how they're reacting to criticism whose opinions they care about we make sure that life is not a vanity project that the reason that they're doing it is not to impress other people and then we're intentional about how they're reacting so that life is not only a vanity project it's also not an exercise and self-abuse that
they're accepting of their mistakes forgiving of themselves and others and then what you start to see is there's more joy in the work there's more psychological Freedom there's better risk-taking and ultimately better results and as I explain it I you can see it's just a causal chain the way the dominoes fall and they end up on the scoreboard but it goes all the way back to the fundamental question of why do
you do what you do I love that answer and thank you for so much detail on that I want to sort of explore failure and success we often think that we can only learn from failure we can fail ourselves we can watch other people fail and we can learn from that I want to take a different approach to that question what can we learn from success wow curve bom me let me let me tell you how performance psychology thinks of
that number one you have to Define what success is like what do we mean by quote unquote success right number one number two on the one hand persistence and resilience and grit are critically important to succeed in other words powering through failure and the idea of keeping at something and and and working your way but here's the other part of the equation no one wants to talk about a lot of winning is
knowing when to quit it's knowing when to get out of a Bad Bet knowing when not to beat your head over awall like in poker for example it's knowing when to fold it's in the markets knowing a bad trade and cutting your losses you know because what happens is you see at the tail end of the curve most people at the tail end of the curve have a puritanical work ethic and their answer their whole lives
has always been no I'm not winning just work hard you see this with kids in high school they outwork everyone they get to College they outwork everyone but if you go to the tail end of the curve and you take all these people and then you lay them on a distribution what you come to realize they're all they all work hard and they're all persistent so then where's the advantage if you commoditize effort and resilience and persistence
along with Talent all these other things then then where's the advantage well the advantage then is knowing believe it or not like like how to take breaks how to rest where are the places that you think you're best you know it's it's it's it's you know if you look at uh Harald blooms it's called the um taxonomy of higher order thinking at the tippity top of it it's it's it's you know there's
knowledge there's knowing things and right above knowledge the next sophisticated level of learning is called comprehension it's to understand what you know and then above comprehension is what's called application it's like okay here's what I know and I understand I can apply it to my life in real ways we we know this in school sometimes kids will be great test takers but like they don't apply it in their real life so what are
they really learning then above application is analysis analysis to be able to break a problem apart into its finite components and then above that is what's called synthesis the ability to recombine it and put it back together right so knowledge comprehension application analysis synthesis but at the tippity top of the pyramid is Judgment that's why our legal system judges it's the ability to infuse and integrate knowledge comprehension
application analysis and synthesis and ultimately make good decisions right what what we call inferential intelligence to be a good decision maker I remember one time a few years ago I was up in Buffalo New York meeting with a guy named sha mcder was the head coach of the Buffalo Bills sha mcder is an unbelievable human being he was 70 and 0 as a high school wrestler like do you know how hard it is to be at 70 at
anything so it' be 70 and0 in high school wrestling I think in Pennsylvania which is one of the most competitive places in the world for wrestling and he ends up becoming you know an incredibly good high uh NFL coach under consideration of coach of the year he helped break a 17-year playoff slump for the Buffalo Bills they're now in the playoffs seven years in a row this is Shawn mcder so any I was up in Buffalo
meeting with Sean after Buffalo I flew to Dallas Texas spent two days with a guy named Jordan spe Jordan spe is gonna be a Hall of Fame golfer he's already got the records just matter when they induct him and I flew from there to Greenwich Connecticut or Sanford Connecticut I spent two days with a guy named Steve Co who's hedge fund manager who's now the owner of the Mets who's known in the world that's just you know
there's a great article you know Steve Cohen always wins wins in the markets he wins in the art world he wins in just a winner his horse won the Kentucky Derby just a brilliant guy and I remember walking with Steve after these other days and I'll never forget this she I said oh my God this is the same conversation I just had at the tail end of the curve successful people are generally having the same conversations
different parlaments different language you know you you have to know different things in the markets versus engineering versus Academia ver versus a particular sport so there is domain expertise but the human beings if you take away the domain expertise what you come to realize it's the consistent application of the basic principles it's it's Aristotelian in nature if you want to if you want to aggregate every success book
ever written go read nick uh Aristotle's nicoman ethics like there's not a whole lot happening that that Aristotle you know didn't already write about nican ethics you see number one believe it or not is humility the best in the world readily acknowledge that they don't know now I'm not saying so they're humble but there's also a little arrogance right there's conviction there's belief that that what I'm doing is right I believe
in my path but underneath that is the humility um and the recognition that that they don't know which is why the Second Step it's a never-ending series of problem solving and tesing and risk-taking so they're willing to try a bunch of different things until they get it right which is oh by the way why they're Mastery oriented because they know they're going to fail but they refuse to they refuse to react to
failure with embarrassment they react to failure like Thomas Edison with more curiosity Elon Musk is a perfect example of that in in mods Tiger Woods was a perfect how many times did Tiger Woods changed his golf swing every expert was was saying you should never do this you have the greatest golf swing in the history of the game but it was this it was governed by this idea of Kaizen which is continual Improvement every day
willing to fail and so to you know you're constantly evolving Jack Nicholas by the way was exactly the same way Ben Hogan was the same way so anyway so what you see is humility you see the ability to you're you're you're an example of this Shane I mean look at what you've built uh you're putting yourself out there uh to test ideas You're vulnerable in taking risk every day that people are
going to criticize you and like that takes courage right you know Peter Buck the guitarist of RM played a whole album on a mandolin you know in the first take you know RM could have been kept keep making the same music and just print a lot of money but like no the next thing you see and William James talked about this he talked about having a bit of a vision and this is the beautiful thing about being a snowflake
about humanity is none of us are the same like every one of us is differentiated in a particular way and so the ability you in golf we say the ability to play the shot that you see to build what you see to trust your own Vision your own eye again Elon Musk is I think a really great modern living example of that is you know the things he's doing are the things that he set out to do a long time ago and like and
he's he's being additive to humanity in countless ways and you see this with with really with great leaders think Nelson Mandela mahat mandhi you know the ability uh to to lead people in a manner that is not like the Machiavellian view of politics you know politics can be a nasty business but to stand out there and put your ideas out there and to preach love and and and and to preach non-resistance and to live it like what
a contribution to humanity I think like believe it or not in the world of pop like Taylor Swift don't underestimate the power of these Global influencers and the impact you know the brain has these things called mirror neurons that fire when we watch people do something and so you've got a world of young women looking at these female role models and so the mirror neurons that fire that we're all a little bit monkey see monkey
do so what do the best of the best do they're really intentional about what they look at they control their focus and and sort of who they put in their world so that the mirrors and the feedback they get is accountable well they'll say things like Hey listen I want you to hold me accountable uh for what I do work ethic uh is unequivocal they always feel in a rush you know elon's Elon musk's father said about him
like yeah he's behind on his timelines you know he's still behind and so what you'll see is is the best of the best are always working at a feverish Cadence like they're always trying to play catchup but again if you ask them they're not Workaholics you see it with people in the kitchen the culinary arts you see it with musicians you see it with people who love to do landscap aping you know at the height of The
Human Condition are what are called flow States and flow states are when we get in the zone and so you know flow states are governed by you see the the the loss of time that hours pass by and you're like oh my God where did time go um it's the transformation of time there's an effortlessness to it um hard things sometimes feel easy and what you realize is is flow states are the Hallmark of of people who are great at what they do
they get lost in what what they do and so if you're listening to this you should ask yourself what do I do where I lose track at times is it reading a book is it being in conversation is it a dinner party is it time with my children is it swimming and whatever that thing is so long as it's healthy and so long as you're not saying well it's you know doing heroin or meth right if you're doing something healthy and it's
characterized by by a feeling of elation and and you lose track of time and it's effortless do more of it that's what you can learn from success and the one final thing I'll say is the the the asterisk next to it is it's really hard to let all those things you know humility curiosity work ethic you know surrounding yourself by great people taking risks it's hard to create a world for yourself where those things get
fertilized if you're populating yourself with people who judge you and criticize you and who who um are who suppress your psychological Freedom um who who make you feel self-conscious and and or who are in your life headwinds you know I've watched athletes who go home men and women and you marry the wrong person and that person is not on board with the vision or or or at the very least they're they're you they
don't have to be fully supportive but when you when you marry someone or if you have a someone in a boss or who's who get their satisfaction out of your failure or who can't feel happy with themselves unless you're failing all the other things get relegated to insignificance when there's a feature of your life typically in the form of a person or an institutional headwind where there's a bias against your
success um that you don't recognize when you have a blind spot so you really have to change your aperture and go to 30,000 feet and say okay am I set up for Success yeah then you ask the people you trust hey you know how do how do I seem to you like audit your have other people audit you good okay if that's the case throw yourself Allin deep immersion in the thing you love to do lose track of time and and find the hardest problem
there are and set out to solve them and then when you come out of the the Flow State and you look up you're like man that's the body of work I did wow it didn't feel like that but the body of work that's what's going to stand the test of time one thing that the best seem to be able to do and I think we hit on this in that answer is two things stood out there they know when to walk away they know when to fold
it they know when to you know just okay it's over move on next one they're able to to move on but they also know when to push their advantage and I'm thinking Tom Brady right he was the ultimate sort of quarterback he would take the check down but he also knew when to push it down the field how do we learn when to how do we learn to cultivate those skills in ourselves how do we know when to push and how do we know when you know
what this just isn't G to get us the outcome that we want best question I've been asked by an interview in an interviewer in my lifetime like that's an awesome aome question that nobody ever asks it's the question for anyone who's trying to be successful sustainably successful when do you press how do you know when to press both in golf and the markets the the the Paradox is there
sometimes you got to let it happen and sometimes you got to make it happen and when people try to force force a result when they shouldn't like that's when when you get stopped out and the opposite also true so how do you know when to oppress an advantage number one I'll say about Brady don't forget lot of failure early and so what happens is when you fail your fail early you start to recognize what a real opportunity
looks like and then oh by the way when that opportunity um presents itself there's a lot of fuel to make it happen you're like oh like you should you know it's Mark Wahlberg in acting it's like you're letting me into this club okay there ain't no way I'm giving up my advantage so it becomes this Relentless you know one of the things about Tiger Woods that's so remarkable is is he's the only golfer and I mean this in the
history of the game who's ever played better with a lead so even Jack Nicholas who's arguably the best of all time Jack said I was better if I was trailing because what happens is when you're when you're chasing you know you play with nothing to lose you're able to be Fearless so so that's a real Advantage as being the underdog Tiger Woods is the only one who is the favorite every week and would start with a lead and and then
extend that lead blew the world away and and to this day it blows that because how do you do that how do you like that's why Greyhounds in dog racing are always chasing a rabbit the psychological Mech even in in running you have somebody who's pacing you right because we know the brain works in ways where having something to Chase is the way to get the best out of yourself well how did Tiger Woods do
that when he was in the lead the one being chased well he was playing against history so even when he was leading the tournament he was still trailing Jack necklace so he benchmarked he would index his thinking to the fact that he hadn't caught Jack he was in his mind always chasing so it begs the question when you talk about judgment is knowing when to what an advantage looks like and when and how to press your advantage and
when patience uh when the situation calls to do nothing and here's one way to assess it evaluate your why because what happens is when people press an advantage incorrectly it's usually out of impatience it's usually out of frustration it's happening right now in the markets there's not a lot of volatility in the marketplace right now and and you're on the your mandate as an investor is to return well 10% right you
say that's your number and you're only up 5% and there's no way to make money in your strategy all of a sudden it's like well I've gotta I'm GNA press whatever Advantage I have that's a low probability Advantage but you're going to force a little Advantage you're G to make a mistake and then you're going to lose your job so number one is you have to question what's underneath the desire so let's talk talk about desire for a
minute which we haven't talked about which what we need to talk about if you look at the Human Condition look at all the major religious Traditions one of the universalities of the human condition is desire and every school of thought has found a way to try to deal with it so for example you look at Christian Catholicism how does Catholicism deal with desire well too much desire leads to um you you'll wreck
your life and everyone else's right it can lead to real problems the desire so Catholics punish it with guilt what do the haen say say well you know if you want it it's a good thing you satiate that desire if you haveen an it scratch it and we know that that leads to overindulgence to sloppy life you know typically a drug habit in one way or the other you know you sex you're going to have an addiction you're going to blow
your life up if you're a hedonist Buddhist and Hindu say desire is the key thing that leads to suffering right so if I want this pen the moment that I want the thing that I can't have I feel a state of suffering so all human suffering comes from from desire and so and so the way to happiness is to remove all desire to ex to get rid of all your worldly possessions and to sit in observation of yourself and so happiness
is to want nothing so the universality of The Human Condition is desire but what we know is that that desire is the thing that leads to all the cognitive biases that that that almost all of the mistakes people make in life is a function that they want a particular outcome come they want a particular thing the good of it is desire as Ann Rand AR articulates right as as Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations when he
talks about free markets he says that that the desire leads to Innovation Innovation leads to to competition which eventually leads to the best product in the market which is what elevates the Human Condition and that's why proponents of capitalism and free markets you can just see it in modern day like the world moves because because individuals innovate in involved whether it's Bill Gates Steve Jobs Jeff Bezos
has created $ 800 billion do of wealth for other people you know you see the way free markets work they're a function of desire and that's what Freud called sublimation if you sublimate and channel desire uh into Evolution it's what creates great works of art architecture right andrean writes about this in in Fountain Head so desire channeled properly can lead to some of the highest highs uh in the ele the best expression
of The Human Condition the problem is the downside of Desire left unchecked leads to the kinds of behaviors that are duplicitous that desire run a mck we all become a worst version of ourselves this happened in Tiger Woods like don't forget the same desire that fueled arguably the greatest body of work in the history of sports the fuel that burned inside him you saw it come out in his celebrations there's a lot of want in
there but that's the same desire that when it got channeled the wrong way that led to the bad decisions that you know led to the blew up his marriage that led to you know to him getting these injuries and harming himself and he wouldn't stop practicing so he'd get injured he played the US Open on a broken leg and won and so you have to go back to the first order variable which in his case is desire to to to answer
the question and if you look the causal chain the way the Domino's fall in decisionmaking which is a cognitive act not an emotional one you have to understand what are the the the the the variables that have led to you wanting to push your advantage and so essentially in modern day analytics you're running probabilities you know if if if if you have a trading strategy and the numbers say that you have an
advantage you know the old saying that if you don't know who the sucker at the table is you're the sucker and that's true in all games in the achievement domains where there's a scoreboard and there's competition and so you have to find a way to map your advantages and know in the moment whether you have an advantage and if you do how much risk are you how much risk are you willing to take and what losses
are you willing to tolerate and then the psychological component under that is can you handle losses well and if you can't if you're the sort of person who's going to say you know if I lose this much money on this trade it's going to meaningfully affect what I do in the future future that's your tell so one of the things we do even though we try to ARB Out The Human Condition from decision making you know as Antonio
deasio writes in um in in in in searching for Spinosa you know he says like when you look at people with localized brain damage who have no ability to feel emotions their decision making is not good when human beings get localized brain damage where they can't feel emotion their decision making is not better it's wor in fact so if you look at someone like you know I guess an enlightened individual they are not
without emotion they have refined their emotional reactions in a way that elevates their senses so you know you want to push the advantage you have to evolve to a level where you're some version of a complete human being where you know yourself right the socratic dictum of Nai sutron know yourself and know others comp licated games require complexity of thought you know life at the tail end of the curve does not lend
itself to simplistic thinking you have to have complexity of thought though the decision is final you know the decision yes or no is binary and and sometimes you know you you engage as what I call Caveman golf like seab ball hit ball um you know don't over complicate it uh and and be decisive in your decisions uh we always I'm consider of the time here we always end on the same question what is success for you for me uh back of the
napkin top of Mind stuff Shane for me personally and listen I I always preach middle class values because I think they work in life um whether you're worth you know 20 billion dollars or not like and and so I don't vilify wealth I love abundance and I love success but like the values tend middle class values tend to work in life because they keep you humble and they keep you happy um but for me I learned about myself something
that I think it's really valuable to learn I had a lot of success pretty early like in my early 30s I PhD from a great University was a college professor a bestselling book and and and and a real lot of success in the world of sports psychology two houses and two jet skis and two vasas that we cruise around town in and I remember one of my friends said to me he said oh man he said you know
you must be so happy and then it was like you know you hear the scratch of the record Z it's like I'm not that happy and I learned about myself that stuff doesn't matter to me like more things you know I was an example of Henry David throws you know you start by owning your possessions and eventually your possessions own you I learned about myself that building out a big life doesn't work for me though it works for
some so I don't script that in my clients you build whatever life you want to build what I learned for myself it's what it's what the actor Mike Myers Mike Myers who you know know who end up writing doing Austin Powers beautiful thinker great comedian in an interview he talked about what he called no money fun no money fun he said when I was a kid we would sit out by the airport my dad and I and we'd watch the planes land
he said because we had no money he said and we would watch the planes land and we would guess what kind of plane they were and then we'd go to the lake and we would skip stones and we would watch Cars and guess what color they were he said we grew up with not a lot of money he goes but I was always happy and here's the line he said he said my dad was good at no money fun we always had fun and things didn't
cost a lot of money and what I learned about myself Shane is the things I love to do I love to hit golf balls it's therapeutic for me I can do that at the driving range doesn't cost any money five bucks for a bucket of balls I love books books don't cost me any money I get them free as an academic I have free access to libraries books don't cost me any money I love working out working out and being physically fit doesn't cost a
lot of money I love the Human Condition I love talking to people and learning about them particularly people I'm fascinated by the tail end of the curve all four of those things cost very little to know money so what I learned about myself of the things that I love to do they tend to be active there's active engagement is the profile of my happiness it's not passive it's not lazily sitting on a beach getting
drunk it tends to be either task oriented Hitting off balls working out reading books or people oriented which is I'm asking questions about how people do what they do you know about their own happiness about their their own failure about the uniqueness of their experiences what are called crystallizing experiences the insights they have their insecurities and so uh the profile of my happiness is is exactly that I'm very
cognizant you know that we get if we're lucky call it 80 years in life you know for the first dozen of them you're not really or first five of them you're not really conscious or conscientious the last bunch of them there's no physical Vigor and and objective time turns into subjective time which Mean Time speeds up and so for me it's it's cliche but it's it's making sure that I'm present for every moment of it even and
especially the pain people ask me what do I do when I'm afraid stare at it like go eyeball to eyeball with the fear because if you run away if you allow life to bully you you're not present for the moment you're checked out and so the type of Courage required to be present for every moment of your life oh by the way that's what Tiger Woods does oh by the way that's what Steve Cohen does oh by the way that's what Steve Jobs did
even on his deathbed and you look at the ugliness of The Human Condition the narrative in politics the the way people treat people well that's been happening since the beginning of time The Human Condition has never been polanish but if you could find a way to be realistic but directionally positive to celebrate the positive to be optimistic to continue to be kind to yourself and to be kind to
people you know in times when you have no reason to be grateful to say thank you when you don't have a lot of resources but you help other people like there's a bit of a formula there that generally leads to a good life we talk about the qualia of your experience not the quantifiable what have you accumulated or the record it's the it's the qualia how does your life feel and so when you ask what happiness to me is I always
have my hand on the pulse of the quality of my experience and I'm spending time with people that I find interesting and they're not always the most successful sometimes they're just really interesting you know the mechanic that fixed my car is a genius my opinion people go into that garage with their cars every day and nobody knows that they're entering a place with a remarkable human being like a lot of
times on Friday afternoons I sit with him with a sixpack of beer and he tells me the stories of his life growing up in the Deep South um guy can f can fix plane it fix any engine on Earth and nobody knows that they're going to a mechanic every day who could do anything and he's interesting and so for me to spend time uh with remarkable human beings who teach me at every return that's those are the things that if my
life is populated with those things I feel like I'm I'm being successful that's a great answer I want to thank you so much for one of the most amazing interviews I think I've ever been a part of hey man you set the table to to to invite the best ideas out of people and I think that's why we all love you so much so thank [Music] you thanks for listening and learning with us for a complete list of episodes
show notes transcripts and more go to fs. Blog podcast or just Google the knowledge project The Front 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. blogle until next [Music] time