The Exchanges

Q I love the idea of having that. Do most people tell other people about it? Like Kobe has sort of like made this famous, but I would imagine that most people just sort of like keep it to themselves.

A They do. Even Kobe, we created it in 2004. He didn't tell the world about it until 2009 when he won the world championship, when they, or when they won the NBA championship, even Beyonce with Sasha fierce, Sasha fierce, wasn't revealed to the world really until 2008 when she was retiring her. No one is going to go to the press conference after the game and say, oh, my alter ego. So, and so crushed it today. It, these are all creative mechanisms that we do to help us pursue the things that are difficult or challenging. It's not just one concept and one idea of we're only doing it to help us get past, you know, some sort of traumas, or it's also an extremely playful thing. There's many different reasons why someone might be employing the, the, the alter ego, but at the end of the day, it comes back to the quote that I share all the time from Cary Grant, the Hollywood golden era actor who was, uh, grew up in Bristol, England. Um, Was challenged throughout his life with say some mental health and some depression and stuff, but he wanted to make it to Hollywood. And he had this vision in his mind of being debonair and charismatic. And so he built Cary Grant. That's not his original name. And at the end of his career, he was getting interviewed. And he said, I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until I finally became that person or he became me. But at some point we met. And tha…

AI assessment note: “They do. Even Kobe, we created it in 2004. He didn't tell the world”

Q I want to go back to like the 19 different deeks. Do the best in the world at sports or business get really, really, really good at the basics? And then part of what makes them the best is their ability not to get bored With doing the simple things in a world that's attracted to the highlight reel, the.

A I would actually change that and say it's not their ability to not get bored. It's for them to attack the boring things with an intention of understanding that that's what will separate them from everybody else. I see even though in the world of, of business, you know, especially nowadays where Everything is a highlight reel on, you know, Instagram or Twitter or LinkedIn. And that is just not the case. Um, there's so much of the work that we all do behind the scenes. Like if you want to win, you've got to know how to execute. And it's in the execution that so many people break. They just don't want to do the things. Everyone wants the noun without the verb. They want the best selling book, but they don't want to do the work of writing For the bestselling book. Cause it's, it's a painful process as someone who's written it. It's, it challenged me.

AI assessment note: “it's not their ability to not get bored. It's for them to attack the boring”

Q So it's interesting as you were saying that, uh, you know, patience doesn't mean passive. And I think often we conflate patience with doing nothing and I don't think they're the same. What's your, what do you think?

A Yeah. And I am one of the first persons to, to beat The, the hustle drum with people like, Hey, when you're just starting out with something, you gotta hustle. Like you gotta focus your energy and, and work hard at that thing. But then for many people, it becomes their identity. Oh, I'm someone who can do that. And then they get trapped inside of it. Whereas, um, in the world of building a business to a certain level, or even building your, uh, sporting skills or any sort of skills, there becomes a time of maintenance. That kind of gets baked into that process, and if you only are always hustling, that means you're typically going to add more, add more, add more. More is the enemy to peak performance. Adding more to something, doing more things, having 17 more new ways of doing a breakaway deke on a hockey goalie is not going to make you better. In fact, some hockey trivia, the, the best The best goal scorer on breakaways in the history of the NHL had two moves. Every single goalie in the NHL knew his two moves, but he could execute those two moves better than every single goalie could possibly save him. So going back to the whole patience thing is there's an element of thinking time. And I, I think that so many people would observe someone who's trying to be patient in their thinking about a strategy or a way of doing something as them being, um, they're lazy with it or they'r…

AI assessment note: “going back to the whole patience thing is there's an element of thinking time”

Q easy, right? So you can gravitate towards hope. And I'm just sort of thinking about this out loud in relation to the conversation. But courage to figure it out means I can't, like hope doesn't play a role, right? Like it's the courage to take the first step that matters. And then I don't care if it goes left or right. I'll just like course correct as I go along.

A And think about this too, Shane, to your, your great point about courage for the outcome. It's also very egoic. For you and I to even think that we even know what the outcome is going to be in the future anyway. Like, don't forget the things that you're wanting right now are coming from your current level of identity and how you view and see yourself. But the more that you push yourself into challenging situations, you do tough stuff, you pick up hard things, you have hard conversations with people, that's changing your level of ability Which is going to change how you view and see yourself. And because the way that you view and see yourself is different, it's going to open up different ideas around what it is that you want. And so now your vision is constantly changing as you're evolving and iterating. And so like what you think you wanted. Three months ago, six months ago. If you're a person that is challenging yourself, it's going to change that vision. It might crystallize it better, great, better clarity. You're going to figure out what you don't want.

AI assessment note: “to your, your great point about courage for the outcome. It's also very egoic”

Q make it your default behavior. You've been working with thousands of people who Perform consistently across sports and business. What did they do differently about their environment to maximize success? And I'm using the term success very broadly in terms of performance, not success as in like, what are they doing to improve their physical performance, their mental performance there? What is, what are the environments look like? What's different?

A Well, one that can't be ignored is the luck of where they were born. It just can't be underestimated how critical that is to the success factor of someone. So these are choices that they didn't even make. It was just, they got lucky being where they are. So statistically speaking, the best size of city or town to live in To develop your sporting skillset is around a quarter of a million people, because at a quarter of a million people, the level of competition can be well above average in that, in that area. The quality of coaches that you could get now increases over that of a 100,000 person, uh, city. And, um, so it's, it's that kind of sweet spot of size. Now that's inside of now a culture that would be maybe valuing that type of sport. So in Canada, hockey, quarter of a million person city, you're going to get good coaching. But if in Canada, you were trying to play and become very good at rugby, Maybe not that there's that side of things. There's many factors outside of ourselves because we want to index towards me. Like what made me do this?

AI assessment note: “best size of city or town to live in To develop your sporting skillset”

Q Where does that fear of inaction come from?

A One is cultural. Definitely cultural influences from your, your, whether it's your childhood. I'm not a therapist. I don't do that kind of work with people, but ideas that people have about what the taking action is going to mean or the negative responses that they had when they were younger. That really created a strong narrative about how bad it is to go and take action on something. And then again, it's the fear of losing the hope. Cause if I always live in inaction, but I still have my hope of like doing it, I'm not gonna lose that. That warm feeling that I have about daydreaming about that thing. And I'm not confronted with the realities. And then the fear of uncertainty is another thing. Will I lose the money if I invested it this way into my business? And will I lose my time? And oh, geez, what else am I going to be missing out on if I actually stay committed to this one thing and become very myopic in, in trying to channel my energies towards that? And I always try to like to flip that with people and, and say that, You have no idea the version of you that's waiting for you on the other side of being committed because the side of you that you're going to meet that only stays in the area of interested is going to be the very same version of you that you're experiencing right now. But the person that becomes committed, it's a forcing function on your skills. It's a forcin…

AI assessment note: “One is cultural. Definitely cultural influences from your, your, whether it's your childhood.”

Q that's a good place to start. That's a very open-ended question, but people come to you and they come to you with a need and that need is performance. I need to perform. I need to get the best out of myself, whether it's in two days or in two weeks or consistently over a period of time. Now, what, like, how do we do that? What does that mean?

A Okay. So for the long-term, From my experience, uh, the quality of your mentors and the people that you have around you plays a massive role in you not stepping in stupid more than you need to. Um, I've been a byproduct of mentorship. I'm a big believer in apprenticeship. I think it's one of the things that's been lost nowadays because so many people want to create the perception of Immediate success as fast as possible. And it's the fast food world that we live in and drive through wins and things like that. But apprenticeship for me has opened up, you know, a very large chunk of the doors of opportunity for me because their Rolodex was better than mine. Um, they'd already done it. So I'd say in the longterm, that long view of how can I get around high quality, high value people? Cause typically they're going to carry with them high value ideas or Or philosophies or paradigms that are going to be better than mine. I think that's one thing that I would always look at first is the under appreciation of environment and how that plays way more on your success than you, because we come in, right? Like Shane, you, you, you read amazing, um, ideas and amazing books and we index a lot to making myself better. And it's, so it's a me thing. As opposed to how can I design an environment around me? That's going to make it a lot easier and grease that slide. And, uh, and so that's the one …

AI assessment note: “So for the long-term... the quality of your mentors and the people that you have around you”

Q Is hope the difference between interested and committed then?

A Yeah, great question. It would play a part. It would play a part. And then some of those other things that get in the way there between interesting commitment or the things that you had brought up earlier, you know, whether it's the fear of rejection, the fear of losing face somehow, the fear of testing your skills. Cause we think we're kind of good at something and maybe we're not. I'll give you an example. Well, I'm trying to scale a software company with two co-founders for people in the coaching space. And, um, I love putting myself back into that, what I call the field of play constantly because I want to test myself. Okay. Todd, you can give this advice very good to other people, but how good are you at following product market fit methodology? How good are you at, you know, defining a specific target market to get traction inside of and sticking with it? Like, so for me, going back to that whole, like that fear of not taking action, um, I have a real fear of inaction because I want to test myself.

AI assessment note: “It would play a part. It would play a part.”

Q Is that fear that prevents us from doing that?

A Well, from my experience, one of the major things that causes that Shane is the, um, the lack of admitting to yourself what it is that you actually want. So many people that have come to me And they feel stuck or they feel maybe they built a business that, um, has trapped them in some way and it's, um, they're trying to figure it out and they're kind of delaying on taking some of the actions that they know they should be doing. I'll just ask them, did you accidentally build this business? We, we, we make these assumptions that, you know, We sat down and we said, I'm going to build that business right there. And it was such a smart intention. I'm an accidental entrepreneur. A lot of people I think have gotten themselves through just great action into a corner, but it's not really what they want. I think that the reason that many people would have levels of dissatisfaction or They aren't maybe taking the inspired action that they're supposed to be taking is because it's not what they actually want. And they're, and they know that. And I think most people really don't sit down and be really honest with themselves about what it is that they truly want to be doing. And one of the reasons that they don't is because if you Shane were to actually pursue the thing you want and start taking action on it, you're losing the excuse of hope. I think hope is a double-edged sword like everythi…

AI assessment note: “one of the major things that causes that Shane is the, um, the lack of admitting”