The Exchanges

Q Are there any other questions that come to mind that you think are particularly revealing about people?

A What is the biggest obstacle you've ever had to overcome in your life? The follow-up there is, what resources Did you lean on overcome that obstacle? In other words, how did you overcome it? So people stop at what obstacle did you overcome? Where it becomes interesting psychologically is how did you overcome them? So going back to a really important interview question is, well, tell me the hardest thing you've ever overcome. And then what did you enlist? Did you go to other people? Do you have a network? What beliefs did you engage? It's really important to understand the method by which people overcome their obstacles. They have to rely on themselves, and this is what Tiger Woods was great at for a period of time. It's like, hey, here's, here's what his self-talk was. You got yourself into the, into this mess, now get yourself out of it. And that's the best version of Tiger. Obviously, we've seen some other versions of Tiger, but the best version of Tiger is Tiger telling himself, you got yourself into this mess, now get yourself out of it.

AI assessment note: “What is the biggest obstacle you've ever had to overcome in your life?”

Q I love that. What sort of things do you see with people at the top of their game in their environment that wouldn't necessarily appear with people who are not at that level? What's different about their environment?

A So there's a great book called the talent code, uh, by a friend of mine named Daniel Coyle. And what Daniel did is he did a deep dive into what he calls talent hotbeds. So he went to the places that seemed to produce 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 in a place in Texas that was turning out incredible musicians. And he was looking for the, he was looking for the commonalities, like these talent hotbeds. You know, if you think of, of Van Gogh 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 unforeseen. One of the, the, the common factors that produces disproportionate talent is what he identified with her too. One of them is called primal cues. Primal cues is that these places tend not to be 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 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…

AI assessment note: “these places tend not to be identified by wealth and comfort. They tend to be the opposite.”

Q audience in over 175 languages With AI lip sync and translation. Same voice, perfectly matched. If you're someone who communicates at scale, take a look. Your first three videos are free. Heygen.com. H-E-Y-G-E-N.com. How curated, important is shaping our environment? And I mean this in, in the sense of not only our physical environment, but our mental environment, the information that we consume, the people we let into our life.

A Incredible question. You know, there's this, there's a song by a, a band, an old band called Sister Hazel, uh, and the lyric goes, if you want to be somebody else, change your mind. And I, and I, I, I liked the band, but I loved that line. But, but the reality is the line is wrong. The reality is, if you want to be somebody else, change your environment. Now, why is this true? So there's this idea in psychology, it's called situated cognition. Situated cognition. And situated cognition conveys the idea that the human brain is constantly interacting with the environment around it on both conscious and unconscious levels. Primarily unconscious. So think of it this way. When we're hot, we sweat. But we don't choose to sweat. When we're cold, we get goosebumps. But we don't choose to get goosebumps. Um, the human brain interacts with the environment on an unconscious level. In fact, the unconscious interaction in the environment is the The primary vehicle of human conduct. And so, you know, in the book Atomic Habits, the author has this really beautiful, really beautiful line that's getting a lot of traction in the world these days. He says, we don't rise to the level of our goals, we shrink to the level of our systems. What does he mean by that? And what he means is, let's say that you aspire to greatness, but you're in a, in a school system, or a classroom, or a company, or on a …

AI assessment note: “The reality is, if you want to be somebody else, change your environment.”

Q You mentioned self-talk. Do positive affirmations work?

A They do. They work when they work, so long as they're not delusional. Now, why do they work? You know, people misunderstand the dynamic between cognition and language. People think that the words I use are a reflection of what I think, that I have a thought, and I use words, and that word describes my thought. That's not what actually happens. What actually happens, and it's a developmental thing, it happens early in life, language and thought are separate. Right? Like, like, they think of an infant, right? There's all this, they don't even have language yet, but then they start using words, you know, second, third, fourth year of life, and words are just random. But then words start to reflect thoughts, and then what happens is there's a blending, where language and cognition become the same thing. That's why certain words are charged with emotion. That's the beauty of a great lyric in music, or a great sequence of words. That's why in therapy, or even in coaching, you're trying to give people a language that's empowering. When we're young, developmentally, the language that others use becomes our own internal dialogue, typically the parents. So how our parents talk to us becomes how we talk to ourselves or our teachers or our coaches. And if that's not functional and healthy and directionally accretive to success, that becomes our self-talk. And then we talk to our kids that …

AI assessment note: “They do. They work when they work, so long as they're not delusional.”

Q Why do some people grab onto these basics and use them and get better at them and slightly better at them and keep doing them and some people don't?

A Yeah. You know, you're asking a question, you use, you say some people. I would say everybody. Now, why is that? Not to sort of over-psychologize this, but I do think that there's, there's a lesson in it. It's that if you go back to fundamental human motivation, like why do people do what they do? And in fact, one of the earliest psychological studies I did in, in sports psychology was I asked, I interviewed, uh, 200 golfers. Some on the PGA Tour, LPGA Tour, good amateurs, uh, regular amateurs. And the, the question was simple. It's, why do you play golf? And you'd think it's an easy question. Why do you play golf? But what emerged from that was probably one of the most profound insights into really into human motivation and, and golf just being sort of a petri dish for humanity. And what you realize is some people play for love of the game. I love golf. Some people play because they're competitive. I want to beat that other person. Some people play for money, but they use golf as a vehicle. To solve other things in their life. Well, if you extrapolate that and you, you ask doctors, you know, why'd you go into medicine? Lawyers, you know, why'd you go into law? You ask teachers, why'd you go into teaching? What you come to realize is people tend to bifurcate into two different camps. So, so going back to human motivation of why do people do what they do? People who have a maste…

AI assessment note: “People who have a mastery motivation, they engage in their craft or their task.”

Q How do we shift from a ego orientation to a mastery orientation? Can we just think our way into this?

A The answer is it depends. Some can and some can't. For the ones who can, I've had dramatic results both 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 by asking someone when they come and see me for, for the first time and 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. And you say, okay, well, here's the danger. Here's the reality, by the way, you can be or ego oriented and be successful. Uh, it's happened to 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. Cause 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 with an ego orientation. But generally speaking, what I'm trying to do is shift people back …

AI assessment note: “The answer is it depends. Some can and some can't.”

Q How do we shift from a ego orientation to a mastery orientation? Can we just think our way into this?

A The answer is it depends. Some can and some can't. For the ones who can, I've had dramatic results both 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 by asking someone when they come and see me for, for the first time and 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. And you say, okay, well, here's the danger. Here's the reality, by the way, you can be or ego oriented and be successful. Uh, it's happened to 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. Cause 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 with an ego orientation. But generally speaking, what I'm trying to do is shift people back …

AI assessment note: “The answer is it depends. Some can and some can't.”

Q So if I choose to become good at something, I'm going to be good at something. Like, what is one practical thing that people can take away from this to change in their life, to help them realize their potential?

A Right. So, but you know, the, the research on like, uh, you know, what the data shows on New Year's resolutions, right? Yeah. 95% of them are over by the end of February, and then the other four percent are over by the end of March. So the choice is just the beginning, right? I think the first thing to understand Is that we are all creatures of habit. As Albert Bandura said, behavior is a cause of behavior, right? Behavior is a cause of behavior. That the more you do something on a probability scale, the more likely you are to do the same thing. And so if you really want to get out of, you know, your situation, or you want to do it differently, there's, there's a couple things to think of. Number one, It's in the doing, not in the thinking or the saying, right? One of the things I always say to people is it, it really doesn't matter what you say. It doesn't matter what you feel. It doesn't matter what you believe. It just matters what you do, right? And taking that step, that action step, that behavioral step is a huge part of it. John Dewey, the American philosopher, beautiful, beautiful insight. He said, we don't think our way into a pattern of living. We live our way into a pattern of thought. I mean, just really think about that. We don't think our way into a pattern of living. We live our way into a pattern of thought. Now, what he meant by that is, you know, going back to…

AI assessment note: “Number one, It's in the doing, not in the thinking or the saying”

Q to flow for a second. Is that, I'm assuming that's common amongst all Top performers that people are fully present. How would you explain that to somebody, like, the fully present? What do I do when I'm in a meeting, and my mind starts thinking about picking up groceries, or the kids, or all of a sudden, I'm not fully present? How do I bring myself back to fully present?

A Like everything else, being present is a habit. And like any other habit or skill, you can practice it. So you can't just hope to call on, you know, on deep immersion. Or presence or flow if you're not in the active habit of being present. Ok, so it begs the question, what gets us out of the present moment? Well, it's distraction. It's attachment. And so, the good news for, for, you know, for anybody who wants to get better is a little bit of practice on a consistent basis goes a long way. So, for example, what do I do in my own life? Knowing as much about psychology as I do Every Friday, at the end of the day, I take 10 or 15 minutes and I ask myself a simple question. I say, What are my attachments that have attached themselves to me that are interrupting my thoughts that I didn't put there by conscious choice? And what am I thinking about that, that I didn't choose to think about? What am I feeling that I didn't choose to feel? And you come to realize is, is, as we go through the journey of life, just by default to the structure of the human brain, we attach to things, or things attached to us, actually. Goes back to the, to what Nietzsche said. You know, Nietzsche and Carl Jung both agree on this idea that we don't have ideas, ideas have us, right? We don't often choose to think or feel the way we feel. Things happen to us that govern our, you know, it's conditioning. It's …

AI assessment note: “Every Friday, at the end of the day, I take 10 or 15 minutes”

Q Uh, we always, I'm cognizant of the time here. We always end on the same question. What is success for you?

A For me, um, 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, twenty billion dollars or not, like, and, and so I don't vilify wealth. I love abundance and I love success, but like the values, 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 thirties. I had a PhD from a great university. I was a college professor, a best-selling book, and, and, and, and a real, a lot of success in the world of sports psychology. I had two houses and two jet skis and two Vespas that we'd 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. It was like, man, 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 Thoreau's, 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 buil…

AI assessment note: “I learned about myself that building out a big life doesn't work for me”

Q That's a beautiful way to end this. We always end with the same question though, which is what is success for you?

A Success for me is, I think, a little bit different because I was successful pretty young in life, you know. Uh, I had a, a, a real period of time. I graduated from Emory University, first in my classroom, top of my class. I was a young professor at Rollins College, the youngest professor at the time. I was one of the youngest to ever get tenure. I had a best-selling book. I was being celebrated by the, the sports world, Sports Illustrated. I had two jet skis. I had a house and an apartment. Materially, in the veneers of my life, I had one life, right? And I went to, I had my friends from, from undergrad, from the University of Florida, we had all gone to an Irish pub, and just catching up with each other in life. One of my friend's girlfriends, who's now his wife, and we're all still really, really close, she's like, you're killing it. I want you to, she's like, we're so proud of you. She goes, you must be so happy. And Shane, it was like one of those moments in the movie where you hear the record scratch, I was like, Oh my god, I'm not that happy.

AI assessment note: “Success for me is, I think, a little bit different because I was successful pretty young”

Q 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?

A Wow. Curveball 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, 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 a wall, 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, yeah, 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 and other t…

AI assessment note: “A lot of winning is knowing when to quit. It's knowing when to fold.”

Q 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?

A Wow. Curveball 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, 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 a wall, 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, yeah, 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 and other t…

AI assessment note: “A lot of winning is knowing when to quit. It's knowing when to get out”

Q 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 gain the strength and advantage that sort of comes from discipline?

A 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, 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 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 married. And, and so you, 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 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,…

AI assessment note: “where we looked at variable and malleable things, things like discipline”

Q 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?

A Great question. Yeah. Because one of the things that we know is people think of success and failure as opposite things, right? The The more I succeed, the less I fail. 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 skiing, 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 as 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 pull out some of the most, the greatest insights to come out of psychology, this would absolutely be one of them. It's, it's research on what are called achievement goals. Achievement goals explore the why, the human why. Why do you do what yo…

AI assessment note: “That's, that's the wrong question. The right question is how do I fail”

Q I like that a lot. I want to explore the role of environment in either, uh, Encouraging or adding friction to discipline. I think environment largely determines behavior in a lot of ways. Would you agree with that?

A Yeah, I think, I think the psychological 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 world-class, 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. But 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're, 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, Shane, and then the role of the environment. I said, what we're starting to realize is they're both more important than we think. They're both really important. And therein 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 w…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, I think, I think the psychological research would show that”

Q What are the questions you ask? How do you do that?

A Of all the variables that psychology measures, the two that I think are the most important are confidence and motivation, right? Confidence and motivation. People think it's intelligence, but it's actually not. So the story of intelligence is, um, you know, the way we define it is a very muddled story. So intelligence, this idea of IQ, which people still use as a marker of intelligence. IQ, meaning intellectual quotient, Started, I think it was in the late 1800 in France, and Alfred Binet, the French government said, hey listen, we need to be able to identify kids who are struggling in school, and if we can identify them early, we can do an intervention. That's all it was. So Alfred Binet went and did some studies, interviewed a bunch of people, and came with this intellectual quotient, said, you know, but if we measure here, these are the kids who will struggle in school. And when this research made its way to America, America did with it what Americans do. Let's commercialize it. So they started selling people on this idea that the higher IQ, the smarter you are. It's, it's undeniably false. Higher IQ doesn't mean you're smarter. And then if people went just maniacal and intelligence tests, which is a multi-billion dollar industry, and that's why it stayed alive to this day. The SATs and the ACT and, and educational testing systems, multi-billion dollar industry. That's the r…

AI assessment note: “Of all the variables that psychology measures, the two that I think are”

Q 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 gonna get us the outcome that we want.

A Best question I've been asked by an interview in an interviewer in my lifetime. Like, that's an awesome 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. When people try to force, force a result when they shouldn't, like, that's when, when you get stopped out, and the opposite's also true. So how do you know when to oppress an advantage? So number one, I'll say about Brady, don't forget a 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 Nicklaus, who's arguably the best of all time, Jack said, I was better if I was trailing, because what happens …

AI assessment note: “when you fail early, you start to recognize what a real opportunity looks like”

Q 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 gonna get us the outcome that we want.

A Best question I've been asked by an interview in an interviewer in my lifetime. Like, that's an awesome 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. When people try to force, force a result when they shouldn't, like, that's when, when you get stopped out, and the opposite's also true. So how do you know when to oppress an advantage? So number one, I'll say about Brady, don't forget a 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 Nicklaus, who's arguably the best of all time, Jack said, I was better if I was trailing, because what happens …

AI assessment note: “when you fail your fail early, you start to recognize what a real opportunity looks like”

Q 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, uh, 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 going to get us the outcome that we want.

A Best question I've been asked by an interview in an interviewer in my lifetime. Like, that's an awesome 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. When people try to force, force a result when they shouldn't, like, that's when, when you get stopped out, and the opposite's also true. So how do you know when to a press intervention? So number one, I'll say about Brady, don't forget a 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 i…

AI assessment note: “when you fail early, you start to recognize what a real opportunity looks like”

Q 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 develop resilience in our kids? And also importantly, how do we develop resilience in ourselves as adults?

A 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 happen before success. 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 Ayn Rand said about money. People say that, you know, money is the root of all evil. And Ayn Rand 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 is a real evil or evil exists and, you know, people use money as a mechanism to express their evil? A 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 on…

AI assessment note: “when failure is the norm, resilience becomes second nature”