The Exchanges

Q And not only that, it takes willpower to make good decisions. It doesn't take a lot of willpower to follow a schedule. Right? Because you've been taught our whole life, like, look at your calendar, follow the rules.

A Decision-making energy is a finite resource, and you know, there's that great book called Willpower by John Tierney, and it's a finite resource. When it's gone, it's gone, and there's only two ways to replenish it, which is sleep and glucose, which is why at the front of the supermarket, after making the decision between 30 kinds of salsa and 12 kinds of eggs, you know, you got a wall full of sugar. That's why it's there, because your decision-making energy is low. You know, when Leslie and I got married, we got the, you know, we go to the department store, we get the tells on gun, we get to choose which kind of glasses do you want, honey? Which kind of plates? And at the end of the day, you're exhausted. You're choosing 300 dollar ice buckets that you'll never use because your decision-making energy is zapped. When I wrote the happiness equation, I did a study, and I found out by my own research that we were making around 300 decisions a day. So by route, anything that you routinize, am I using that word right? I don't know. Anything that you put into a system, Enables you to have more cognitive load available for the rest of the day.

AI assessment note: “Anything that you put into a system, Enables you to have more cognitive load”

Q discipline and you've created guardrails in the environment, so you've created an artificial environment where it's hard for you to violate that discipline even when you don't feel like it. Right? So when you don't, you've taken when you're strongest and when you have discipline and you've turned that in to an environment that will carry you Even when you're not disciplined. Well, because now the friction is so high.

A I was walking here an hour ago down the street. There's a church just down the street from us here in Ottawa, and it says on the front of the church, tweet others the way you want to be tweeted. I don't know if you saw it. It's just down the street from you. And I was like, oh my God, that's hilarious. I'm going to take a picture and post it on Twitter. And I was like, well, then I'll have to download the Twitter app. And then when I download the Twitter app, it's going to ask for my password. And it's going to send a code to my email, which I'm going to have to log into Forget it.

AI assessment note: “I'll have to download the Twitter app. And then when I download”

Q Yeah, your bubble. I guess that was what everybody called it, right?

A Yeah, if you were lucky enough to have a bubble, and if you were lucky enough to be bubbling with, you know, you've got kids, you've got, uh, you know, a staff that you work with at Farnham Street, you have places that you are connecting with people, not everybody has that, and so, uh, we turn to our devices, we turn to our screens, and we get there, What we get there masquerades as deep, deeper social connection than it actually is. So what we are calling friends and what we were calling likes and what we were calling comments, you know, our brains are looking for a deeper connection than I think what we can find online. And there's a lot of research to support that. The classic being, how do you feel after spending an hour on social media?

AI assessment note: “Yeah, if you were lucky enough to have a bubble”

Q Because I was thinking in my head as you were saying that, I was like, wait, doesn't, doesn't forcing your kids to, like, fulfill their obligations and do all this, build more resilience?

A I don't know. That's a good question. I started Beavers. I quit Beavers. I started Cubs. I quit Cubs. I did soccer. I quit soccer. I was the smallest. I was the tiniest. I was the puniest. I was the nerdiest. I broke my glasses. Like, I just was, like, a terrible mess at most of these sports, so she let me quit. Quit them. And, and maybe Shane, that's partly why I have taken longer to develop a resilience muscle in myself. Maybe that's why when I got divorced in my late twenties and lost my friend through suicide in that same time period, I struggled for years to get back up and out of that thing. I lost weight. I couldn't sleep. I lost 50 pounds. It wasn't like I rebounded. I'm not some exemplar model of like, look at me. I'm like, you know, Mr. Teflon, and I just rebounded. No. I suffer. I was in therapy twice a week for years, right? So maybe some of that softness was ingrained in me, and I took, it took me hard, it was harder for me to get tough, and I'm, I'm, I'm mentioning that because I also now worry about that for my own kids. You know, my wife will, like, put three pillows in their little beds, and I'll be like, three pillows? Like, you're making these kids too soft. They're a No kid should have more than one pillow. Like, I'm using that as an example, but it's more like, how do we, when we're giving our kids a lot, make sure that they also have the muscles to, to reb…

AI assessment note: “maybe Shane, that's partly why I have taken longer to develop a resilience muscle”

Q What are the counterbalances to anxiety? And then I sort of want to dive into also resilience. Have we become more or less resilient as, um, coming through the pandemic and going through this experience?

A Yeah. There's a lot there. Anxiety. Resilience. And you and I were talking before we started recording about how, you know, both of us can feel anxious at times. Um, Uh, I believe it's 18% of people will say that they have a form of anxiety. I mentioned in college students it's even higher, one in three. I know for me, like, before I go to bed, Shane, honestly, what I do is I grab a cue card on my, like, downstairs table before I get up to bed, and I grab a marker, and I force myself to just simply make a prioritized list of three things I'm going to do the next day. So, like, in my pocket right now, as I sit here, I have, like, the thing I wrote for today, right? Like, the, go to the gym, right? That's my basement. Uh, have lunch with my publicist and have this podcast with you. There's three, and that's all I can do. I force it to down to three, I leave it on the downstairs table, and then when I go to bed at night, and when I come downstairs the next morning, I put it in my pocket, and that somehow manages to relieve some anxiety the night before. In the morning, when I wake up, I don't think we talked about this last time, I do a two-minute morning practice. So I grab a pen, piece of paper, or that yellow journal right behind you, and I simply write down three statements that Pull anxiety out of me. Right? They are, I will let go of I am grateful for, and I will focus on. T…

AI assessment note: “Those three statements act as a two minute investment in lowering my anxiety”

Q Did you go to marriage counseling? Did you try like, how did this conversation flow? Was it like.

A Well, so one thing I don't talk about very often is that there was somebody else in her life. So I don't talk about that very often out of respect to her, but there was somebody else that she did have some emotions for. And so, um, there was that presence and that person also, um, had emotions and Uh, for her, and was also in a relationship. So it was really two relationships ending at once so that they could be together. Uh, doing so, I think, as carefully and tactfully and, and positively as possible, but I knew that there was, she had emotions elsewhere, and so it wasn't a choice, really, and, um, I also, despite thinking to myself so strongly and seriously, like, I want this to work. We just bought a house. We're about to have kids. Like, this is it. I'm in my, I'm in my late twenties, and, like, this is what I'm supposed to do, right? Like, buy a house. Get married. Have kids. Like, isn't that the model? So when all that cracked open, we did not pursue marriage counseling, and I don't remember why, if we explored that or not. We went to the divorce, uh, lawyer, and he's like, well, why don't you make a list of everything you guys own and just write a name beside it all, and we did that in one night, because it was like we didn't own anything. Like, the hardest thing to split was, like, who gets the wedding album, and I was like, I don't want that. So she's like, oh, that'd…

AI assessment note: “we did not pursue marriage counseling, and I don't remember why”

Q I want to come to that, but hold on, we're like, there's three questions that I, I've already got three rabbit holes here. The first one is sort of, do you still have thin skin? You mentioned that earlier.

A Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so part of the reason I wrote that book was because I had found that I was suffering from anxious thoughts for days when I got, for example, a nasty email. And after one of my speeches, a guy ran up to me and said, Neil, Neil, Neil, what's wrong with my son? He graduated from Uh, he was a high school valedictorian. He graduated from Duke. He was the top of his class. And on his first day of work, his boss sent him an email, you know, kind of saying, you gotta do this better. And he, he, he called me crying from his bed saying he's not going back to work tomorrow. And when I heard that story, I didn't say, oh my gosh, like, you know, uh, you know, can you believe what a failure's son is? I actually recognized myself in the story. Like, I was like, oh, yeah, that's a piece of work. So, The whole nature of the books I write is really like most self-help authors, and you know this, you're writing for yourself, right? And so when I put in practices in that book, like Two Minute Mornings, right, I talk a lot about journaling, I talk about dot dot dot yet, adding a little sliver of light after you hear the door click in the frame. I, when I'm at my best, use those models and systems to have thicker skin than I used to, and I, so I would say, yes, I've improved on that, but do I have Thin skin. It's not a yes or no, black or white. I, I, I'm sure I could sti…

AI assessment note: “I would say, yes, I've improved on that, but do I have Thin skin.”

Q Why do you think it was number one? Why do you think it resonated so much with people?

A The weirdest advice, or the weirdest compliment I ever got, two things, two, you know how people say stuff about your own work, and then sometimes they say stuff that helps you see it in a different way? Mark Manson once said this to me on my podcast, he's like, you know, when someone wrote this about my subtle art not giving a fuck, it made me realize what I was doing, right? So two compliments stuck out for me, Shane. One is, this is the only self-help book I've ever bought that doesn't tell me what to do. It shows me how to do it. Like, I'm not saying, oh, sit around your dinner table every night and write down this stuff on a piece of paper. I don't say that once. I'm talking about the virtues of getting, uh, mud or paneer before it's all out of paneer. You know what I mean? I have, so then you can start to see your own life that way. And the second compliment I got that resonated with me was, my eight-year-old son never reads anything, but he read your book. And so I think there's something to reading and books in general that I'm always scratching at, which is, I'm trying to expand the size of the pie. My writing veers slightly different than yours. Like, I'm aiming for the big fat mass. I want the most accessible writing possible because I want the widest possible market. Um, and when I get non-readers to read, that to me is a sign of the book's success. Non-readers read…

AI assessment note: “I want the most accessible writing possible because I want the widest possible market.”

Q Do I want to stop at 10 reps, or should I do 11?

A See what I'm saying? It never ends. And so, I came up with this model as a way to simplify decision making because, as I'm sure you know, decision making energy is a finite resource. When it's gone, it's gone. A lot of research on this in the book Willpower. John Tierney, I think, if I'm getting the author right. They say when you're done with your, with your decision-making energy, there's only two ways to replenish it. Number one is sleep, and number two is glucose, or anything that turns into glucose in your body. So at the front of the supermarket, after you've chosen between 12 kinds of eggs and 10 kinds of salsa, there's a wall full of sugar, which people are too low resilience to say no to. So, how does this two-by-two work? I argue that every single decision you make in your life takes a certain amount of time, that's one axis, and takes a certain level of importance. That's the other. It's different, I should notice, than the, uh, um, time versus urgency model that Stephen Covey has in the seven habits of highly effective people, for anyone that may know that. I'm saying time versus importance. What do you do in the lowest, uh, quadrant? When it's a low time and a low importance decision, my argument is you need to automate that decision. So, I wear the same exact clothes whenever I do media or speeches. Like, I literally have 10 of the same socks, 10 of the same jeans…

AI assessment note: “See what I'm saying? It never ends. And so, I came up with this model”

Q I think as, as people are listening, they're probably thinking, but I'm too busy to go walk in nature. I'm too busy to, like, my life is so frantic. I feel like, um, I'm barely keeping up with everything as it is. How would you respond to that?

A I think those people are lying to themselves, and I think that, and I, and I, and I'm guilty of that statement as well. So for example, I, I, I often say this one line, and when I give speeches, I say, Everybody should be reading 20 pages of fiction from a real book to open or close your day. There's research, uh, in 2011 in the Annual Review of Psychology that shows that that's what opens up your mirror neurons, um, parts of your brain responsible for empathy, compassion, understanding, you know. There's a famous Game of Thrones quotes called, a reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one. You know, and so we know the power of reading. They've done MRI scans at Emory University. They show that your language centers open up. But how, no one starts and finishes their day with reading, Shane, and when they, when I ask them why, they say, I don't got the time. And then I tell them straight to their face, you're lying, ma'am or sir, because according to the University of California, the average person reads a 100,000 words per day today. It's called Instagram comments, Twitter feeds, blog rolls, news headlines, texts, alerts, and notifications, and the average knowledge worker receives a 147 emails today. So I'm not saying add 20 pages of fiction to your to-do list. I'm saying subtract Excise. 20 pages of the garbage that you're currently re…

AI assessment note: “I think those people are lying to themselves, and I think that, and I'm guilty”

Q Why do you think it was number one? Why do you think it resonated so much with people?

A The weirdest advice, or the weirdest compliment I ever got, two things, two, you know how people say stuff about your own work, and then sometimes they say stuff that helps you see it in a different way? Mark Manson once said this to me on my podcast, he's like, you know, when someone wrote this about my subtle art not giving a fuck, it made me realize what I was doing, right? So, two compliments stuck out for me, Shane. One is, this is the only self-help book I've ever bought that doesn't tell me what to do. It shows me how to do it. Like, I'm not saying, oh, sit around your dinner table every night and write down this stuff on a piece of paper. I don't say that once. I'm talking about the virtues of getting, uh, mud or paneer before it's all out of paneer. You know what I mean? I have, so then you can start to see your own life that way. And the second compliment I got that resonated with me was, my eight-year-old son never reads anything, but he read your book. And so I think there's something to reading and books in general that I'm always scratching at, which is, I'm trying to expand the size of the pie. My writing veers slightly different than yours, like I'm aiming for the big fat mass. I want the most accessible writing possible because I want the widest possible market. Um, and when I get non-readers to read, that to me is a sign of the book's success. Non-readers read…

AI assessment note: “I want the most accessible writing possible because I want the widest possible market.”

Q Well, it's so interesting. Well, I mean, I've had body issues my whole life. Like taking off my shirt and running has been something I've actually built up to and like worked towards. How do you end up going on a nude beach?

A So I relate deeply to that. I relate deeply to body issues. I was the only brown kid in my class. I was the smallest kid in my class. I've got skinny wrists. I've got skinny Uh, ankles. I had thick Coke bottle glasses in a school where I was the only one of a different color and no one else had glasses. Nevermind, you know, the buck teeth and all that. So I've had body issues my whole life too. And you know what? I would guess most people watching or listening to this too can relate to that. Well, I heard an old Brian Chesky quote, and I know you're a fan of his. And he said that when they evaluated what actually created memorable experiences on vacation at Airbnb. So founder and CEO of Airbnb was talking about They did an analysis on what actually creates a memorable vacation. Well, it's when you do something inside your comfort zone, Shane. So I was like, wait a minute, I can just do that. Like, I can just do that without going on vacation. You could go on a vacation and sit in coffee shops and sit in a luxe resort and have no fond memories of your wonderful trip to Jackson Hole, or you could stay in your hometown and go to somewhere you've never been before that feels like a big lurch. And you will remember it forever because you pushed yourself. It's your climbing up the cliff thing, right? But, but what was happening, what was happening for us was it was a way to grow outs…

AI assessment note: “it was a way to grow outside of our comfort zone”

Q So, ah, there's a good way of flipping this around, right? Um, that takes a lot of confidence to do this. What's the relationship between confidence and happiness?

A Yeah. Right. Absolutely. And I think there is a relationship there. Absolutely. Um, first I just want to say for anyone that's wrestling with body issues like me and Jane and Probably most people. I think that's most people, Shane. I don't think it's out of there. I really highly want to recommend the picture book, Bodies Are Cool by Tyler Feder. F-E-D-E -R. It is a wonderful book for all ages. We read to our kids probably once a week. So there's a, just a book record on body issues. Just beautiful. Confidence. Takes confidence to, to go to a new beach. Uh, or maybe not caring, right? But, but here's the thing. I think that life is a river. It's a river, and there's rapids in it, and confidence gives you a way to paddle through. If you think about it like a two by two matrix, um, one axis, that's called the bottom axis, is your opinion of yourself, low or high. The, uh, that's the x-axis. The y-axis is Ah, on the left side, and it's, ah, your opinion of others. It can be low or high as well. Well, if you're in the bottom left quadrant chain, and we're all in all of these quadrants some of the time, I just want to say that up front, it's not like you just live in one place. If you're low opinion of yourself, and your low opinion of others, you're in the bottom left quadrant, and you would be, I would declare you to be cynical. Cynical. On his last episode of The Tonight Show, Co…

AI assessment note: “If you think about it like a two by two matrix”