The Exchanges

Q And is that true? Like, if we pay more attention to luck, or if you pay more attention to luck, could you in fact be luckier?

A That's absolutely what the research shows, and, and the study that, that really demonstrate this, they took, ah, two groups of people. One were self-identified lucky people, people who call themselves, hey, I tend to be pretty lucky, and people who said, no, I tend to be pretty unlucky in life. And they gave them a very simple task. The task was to look through the newspaper and simply count the number of images in the newspaper. And they said, if you do that, we'll give you 250 dollars as soon as you finish. Finish as quickly as possible. The unlucky people, again, self-identified unlucky people, finished in two and a half minutes. The lucky people finished in about 11 seconds. Why? Because when they flipped to page two, one of those images said, there are 43 images in this paper, collect your prize. So the unlucky people didn't even see the ad. Again, their reality was different. Their beliefs didn't let them see the totality of information. That eleven million bits of information, that bit of information didn't even get in. Whereas the lucky people, ah, bingo. And they went to collect their prize. Right? And so this is a classic hallmark trait of entrepreneurs. What, what, uh, Walter Isaacson called about Steve Jobs, he called it the reality distortion field. That entrepreneurs do, successful entrepreneurs, have this ability to see a reality that nobody else can see. They ca…

AI assessment note: “That's absolutely what the research shows, and, and the study that, that really demonstrate this”

Q Can you talk about what daily habits you put into place so you train your brain to find luck?

A Sure. So this is called entrepreneurial alertness, that you can literally create your own luck, and so there's a few things you can do, and these are traits common among entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs, it's funny, don't understand why everybody doesn't do this, but they're very common traits. So one of them is stretching beyond your comfort zone, and we can do this in all kinds of small ways. I think one of the best is to talk to people, right? You spread your luck surface area when you just talk to folks. I, on the flight here, uh, I, I just came from Barcelona. Talked for an hour and a half in the galleyway of, of the, the flight, right, where, you know, people buy the restrooms where they give out drinks. Talked to this lady for an hour and a half. Now we're friends, and we're, we're keeping in touch. Just, but I don't know what's going to come out of that, but That's something that I think before doing this research, I would not have done, and now I'm very open to. So, pushing yourself outside your comfort zone. Another thing we do is to express extreme amounts of gratitude. That you increase your entrepreneurial alertness when you become attuned to ways to thank people in your life. That even the small, Tina Selig taught me this at Stanford. She will, she has a big old stack of these thank you cards that she just whips off, you know, as soon as she can write, hey, thanks…

AI assessment note: “one of them is stretching beyond your comfort zone... Another thing we do is to express”

Q Do people ever push back on your research, and they're like, You must have never been any, through anything very hard because how could you say I couldn't have PTSD instead of having, you know, PTGD? Um, do you get that kind of pushback?

A I'm not, I'm not saying that. I would never say to somebody that they're not in pain. All pain is real. All pain is real. Um, the pushback I oftentimes hear is that are you telling people to lie to themselves? Are you, are we, are you telling me that I should gaslight myself and make up a different Truth, because you're saying that beliefs are just tools. I can make up whatever I want. And my response is, guess what? You're already gaslighting yourself. You are already lying to yourself. You're just lying to yourself with a limiting belief. So you could choose a different belief. Now, the whole point here, what is a limiting belief? What is a liberating belief? A limiting belief is a belief that saps motivation or causes suffering. A liberating belief is a belief that supplies motivation or eases suffering. And that's a choice. That's a choice. Even when it sounds crazy. So I never tell people to change their beliefs. I tell people to try on different beliefs. So what you're doing is, just like you try on a pair of glasses, and you say, ah, it doesn't fit my face, I don't like it, this is weird. Ok, let's try on a different pair of glasses. You're already ruining those glasses. That keyhole of attention, those 50 bits of information, that's already there. You just didn't choose it. Your society chose it. Your background chose it. Your history chose it. All these other things ch…

AI assessment note: “the pushback I oftentimes hear is that are you telling people to lie to themselves?”

Q to become more superhuman, well, then we kind of need bigger challenges, which might just be this AI in front of us, this tech in front of us, and if you could see it instead not as defeatist, but what if this is the opportunity? If, you know, whether you believe in God or not, but if God's like, all right, you're ready for the next level of the game.

A That is a real life hack, and I, I, I did, that was not my natural. I was kind of, Highly anxious, uh, kind of, you know, ran hot, and was that kind of person who repeated, oh, why does this happen to me? And, I mean, just today, right? Like, I, I was preparing some food, and it dropped on the floor. Ok, you're talking about, like, big AI challenges. I'm talking about, like, day-to-day as well. The food drops on the floor. Before, I'd be like, God, why does that happen to me? I'm late. I've got this interview with Cody. Now I say, alright, I have an opportunity to practice patience. Right? Like, I can find an opportunity here. Is it a fact? No, it's a belief. I choose to believe that there's something, and you can, you, I, I literally do this 10 times a day. With like, whenever something happens a little funny in my life that before would, would bring me down. And of course, you know, it takes a toll. It drains that battery throughout the day. The more you tell yourself, there it is again, or there it's, I used to do this with my ADHD. I was diagnosed with ADHD. And I used to constantly, every time I got a bit distracted or, you know, I'd say, there's my ADHD again. And now, you know, people my age, uh, we start saying that all my, my peers, oh, that's, you know, I'm, I'm, that's what happens when you get old, right? Like it's inevitable, right?

AI assessment note: “That is a real life hack, and I, I, I did, that was not my natural.”

Q say, will you do X, Y, and Z? You're like, no, I'm not telling them. I'm saying this is what we do. And I think it's really powerful. I also want to, ah, uncover one other thing that I, I found interesting from your research. Um, I hadn't ever heard the term before hedonic adaptation. Can you tell me what is hedonic adaptation and how could it ruin your focus?

A So hedonic adaptation is when our, um, our, our circumstances improve to a point where we no longer appreciate them. And so we need more and more and more and more. Uh, if you think about, for example, how today the middle class doesn't feel particularly well off, right? But if you compare the middle class today, the assets that they have, the color television, the, the, The iPhone, the, all the, the, you know, plumbing. If you look back two generations, certainly three generations, That, that, you know, the, the, the kings of France didn't have indoor plumbing, right? The kings of France didn't have, uh, uh, antibiotics, right? They were constantly had tooth decay and, and syphilis and all kinds of terrible things that even though they had all the money in the world, they didn't have the luxuries that we have today through modern medicine and all these things, but we have adapted. So we have so much more, but we don't feel any happier because of it. And so that's something to watch out for. Now that the antidote to that Is, again, beliefs. And beliefs powered through gratitude. And so taking that pause to realize that I'm alive. Like, I can breathe today. Like, that, that we keep thinking we, we need more to be happy. We, these things have to happen. But if we actually put things in perspective, and it's very difficult to do because we are so inundated with how terrible things…

AI assessment note: “hedonic adaptation is when our, um, our, our circumstances improve to a point”

Q You have lines that your family says continuously, and then you have lines that you guys do not say. Is that right?

A Well, we don't, nothing is enforced. It just has become kind of like a family mantra. I have a lot of mantras that I repeat to myself all the time as well. Uh, and that's something that's changed in my life quite a bit because I, I, I found this research around the power of prayer. And I, I, I stopped praying when I was six years old. I, I prayed what, when my family came to America a few years after they, they came here, they got scammed out of every penny they had. They literally like America, some American guy Saw that my parents barely spoke English, and he, he took every cent they had, and my family had to start over, and we had some really, really hard times, and that's, that's the last time I remember praying, and I remember it being very helpful. But then I got older, and I stopped being, believing in the supernatural, and I just didn't, I didn't find any, like, organized religion that really spoke to me, and so I stopped praying. And then, while I was doing this research, I came across this really difficult to ignore evidence around the power of prayer, and what blew my mind is that prayer works even without faith. That for, it turns out the biggest religious community in America today, the largest religious group are nuns, not the Catholic nuns, not N-U-N, N-O-N-E, people who don't affiliate with any religion, like I used to, used to be. And it turns out that those pe…

AI assessment note: “nothing is enforced. It just has become kind of like a family mantra.”