10 Hard Truths for People Who Are Done Making Excuses

0:00Hello, hello, real quick, before we get into the episode, a simple request, if you like this episode, if you like any of the episodes we put out every single week, we would absolutely love it. If you would share it with one friend, that's it. Just send them a text, send them an email, mention it next time you see them at the gym, let them know that they may also like chasing excellence. There's no better way for us to grow our crew here at the show than if folks like you who are already listening, share it with somebody who should be here. If you've got a friend who's not listening, please consider sending them this episode or any of your favorite episodes. We thank you in advance. Okay, let's get into it. Hello and welcome back to chasing excellence. How the heck are you buddy? I'm good, I'm very proud of you. We're in an episode just you and I for like six weeks. Is that true? Yeah, we've kicked off the year with a lot of, a lot of friends of the show, like guests. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is just kind of the first time I squeeze one out. I think we might do this week and next week just you and I.

1:00So excited about this. I missed you. I missed you. All right, so we got something fun this week. You posted something on Instagram some number of weeks ago. I don't know, maybe a month or two ago. You called 10 things that are hard to hear but true. It's a list for us. We've got 10 things, we're just going to talk through each one of these. I thought all of them are great. I'll give all 10 first just so folks can know kind of what's coming and then we're going to chip away at each one of them. So here's the list. Here are 10 things that are hard to hear but true. Number one, we need to work on changing us, not them. Number two, we complain a lot and it's not helping. Number three, our priorities are out of whack. Number four, the the story we tell ourselves isn't true. Number five, we feel like we are better or worse. We are not. Number six, we could be doing so much more. Number seven, we are not good at being objective. Number eight, being defensive is holding us back. Number nine, life isn't fair. Get over it. And number 10, more things won't make us happy. For example, the first thing, anything worth saying about where this list came from or

2:04why you put it together or it's funny as you're reading it. I'm actually like sort of doing the like I'm here. I'm trying to hear them for the first time again. So I'm playing the reactor. I'm trying to like how do I what emotions bring up to me and what I'm realizing is like whatever number six on through was basically just responding to my feelings. So it was like stop like yeah. So it's maybe I had that when I first wrote it in mind. Except for the last one. The last one kind of throws it in as the the carrot thing because I think that's the the thing that we all need to recognize as well. But I think it's it stems from being a leader and being a leader of myself first. That's really what it is like. I'm trying my darnest like I think most of us are here of trying to live a life as close to and that's great alignment as possible with what I feel is the best version of myself. I feel like we're all chasing what is the good life. And I think that we get really distracted from that a lot.

3:08This is more of a reminder to myself than anything else. And I use the like the pronoun like we in our like intentionally. I am not saying you and that's very much because I don't want people to think this is preachy. I'm not trying to be. This is as much for me as it is for anybody else. So if I feel like I can remind myself first these 10 principles and then bring these to my closest teams, right? We start off my family first actually I see before that, which then is Heather. She is the next co-founder of my life. Then it goes to our immediate family and then it goes to our teams here in the different businesses and then finally to the people that like all the good folks are listening to us now. And the members of the gym and the people you touch through the yeah love that. That's great. Okay, cool. Let's just jump into it because we've got 10 of them and we want to try to get to all of them inside of this episode. So number one, we need to work on changing us, not them.

4:10Well, it's so easy just we've we've talked about this a lot on this podcast to point fingers instead of pull thumbs. You know, it's a Jaco thing of extreme ownership is if we just thought of everything in terms of the way what am I doing to contribute to the situation positively or negatively? And they're so easy to think and point over the fence to your neighbor and go look how messy their backyard is. But it's so easy to look at anyone and you just hear it in conversations all the time. So I think one of the things that's helped me as a kid and you're the same but we grew up fairly introverted is when you're introvert you you become an observer and you observe kind of the way that people communicate and talk and what's on their mind and what they think about it. The unfortunate thing is I throw myself into this as well. We tend to do this. We tend to kind of go like if they could only be better, right? It's one of the things it's funny that we're talking about this. I just had a call with my head of marketing and one of the points that we are talking about was

5:16what is the biggest constraint on the business? What is the biggest obstacle that we need to solve? And we used to think it was X and now we think it is Y. And as he's saying this he goes and I just want to point out I totally agree with you and I am not a perfect human being that I have a tendency to point towards other people and just that level of awareness is so cool, right? And I realize that like it probably a lot of this resides with me. But my tendency is to say it's actually them. So as I'm saying them I want you to call me out and ask me is it me? Like it's just if we all had that level of vulnerability, right? And even in the conversations with ourselves when something's not going right with your wife going how am I contributing to this? How where am I falling shorts? Why doesn't my kid ever listen to me? Right, like that's such a good one.

6:17And it's their kids fault, right? Of course it's your kids fault. Why is your kid not listening to you? And we see this with like some of our coaches working with athletes. They're like well of course she got hurt. She never comes in and warms up. She comes into the class every like we're putting it on them that like instead of taking ownership responsibility. So that's our first one. That's again going back to the title of this whole thing. Hard to hear. Yeah, it reminds me of the Taylor Swift story that we've we've mentioned here before which is it was in one of the it was in some documentary and she was being filmed as the Grammy nominations were coming out. It was one of our albums that come out. So they were expecting her to get you know some number of Grammy nominations and she didn't get any. And she was on the phone with her manager or agent or somebody trying to make her feel better. And the easy thing in that scenario would be like why don't people respect the work that I did? Why don't they? Why didn't they see what what everybody else saw? Whatever. And Taylor Swift's response is we just need to make a better album, right? I love it.

7:17Oh, it's such a good story. And it's so easy to skip over because she's Taylor Swift and she's popular and whatever. But like the lesson inside of that is so wildly valuable. Don't worry about what other people judge as being a good album. Your job was to just make a better album than you did last time. Well, I love that. Right. And we can take that to obvious the obvious, right? You take that to every facet, right? It's not that your customers have bad taste. Right. It's not because you don't listen or they don't show up. Right. Yeah. Now it might be that there's a degree of truth to that. But there's also zero control in that, right? It's just a power to have that. Exactly, right? Yeah. So where is it that we can actually like we're trying to move it from the circle of concern to the circle of influence. You have no influence over them. You have all the influence over the way you come to the table every single day. So are you coming with all of your best self? And by the way, none of us are. This is the whole thing. We're always coming up short of our best selves.

8:18So why not just put the emphasis into us trying to edge up to be the better versions of us rather than them. It's even like trying to change people in period, right? Like why does my film the blank relative for wherever it eat better? It's like, well, maybe we just focus on us. It's not like that's not complacency. It's not not caring. It's putting things into like just recognize the areas that were not perfect. Yeah. Number two, we complain a lot and it's not helping. Yeah, this is so people who listen to this kind of know the jam, but it's we have a really kind of first principle, which is never why never complain, never make excuses. That's just completely ripped right from the words that John Wooden wrote down in his book. He has another one, which is never lie, steal, or cheat. And those are six things, like just never do those things. I think the first ones are just table stakes, right?

9:20So like, but this next one is hard. It's really hard not to complain for the same reasons that we did that we kind of listed above. It's so easy just to point the finger. And while this is so hard and fast into our culture, we even have, you know, we have the bracelets. I'm wearing it now, right? You still hear it all the time. And people, myself included, I think I do it more in my own head than out loud because I try to train the words a lot, Mark England stuff. But even when people are aware of how destructive negativity is, it's still the default. Like if you are not, this is kind of like the concept of drift, right? There is a current pulling on us. It is actually built into our biology to be negative. It is vital to our survival to be negative. Really important that we remember which berries kill us, then which tastes better, the really red strawberries,

10:22the ones with a little green on the top. That's not nearly as important that those seven over there will kill you or make you pee out of your butt for two days. So we're hardwired. Like same thing, like the rustling in the bush. Like if that, if we have to like, we have to default to as our ancestral past, that might be a big, big animal with huge claws that might see us as food. So be negative instead of like, I wonder if there's a little bunny rabbit that I could catch and have me have a meal out of. The default is the negative. So we're hardwired for it. It also doesn't serve us the way it did then when we were trying to use our DNA, our defaults are to stay alive. We're in survival all the time. The elements would kill us if we didn't. Now we don't. We were talking over whatever this is. I don't even know what this is. We're talking about technology. The air waves. The air waves. So we have to kind of, the punch line is that we have to override this default mechanism

11:25of complaining because blame and complain and remain the same. You remain the same. You are not growing. If you're not growing, you're not living a good life. Yeah, and I also, complaining a lot puts you in a state of stress. And we've talked before about what it is, the physical and emotional and mental ramifications of being inside of chronic stress. And complaining is like us signing up for more chronic stress. Right, stress is coming. You know, we've talked about that all the time. Stress is coming. We can't avoid it. We shouldn't try. But to sign up for more of it than we need is what it looks like to complain. Yeah, it's cool. So this kind of goes to the mapping of the hierarchy of mindset, right? Victims in the pessimist complaint. They're the complainers. Well, we know that that actually super detrimental to your health. Like to the point where yes, it creates more stress. Stress literally is a artery clogging. This is like literally will clog your arteries, which leads to, you know, the number one killer of the four horsemen of chronic disease with arthuscarosis.

12:30And that is as much a function of chronic stress, which you are loving what you're saying that, which you are voluntarily signing up for a talking to a member the other day whose son is a special forces. And she was talking to him about how she's stressed with her job. And his response was stress is a made up emotion. It's a manufacturer. It's not real. I think it is real. It just we've associated with things that aren't real. We say that's the boss asking you to get that project done. We responded to that as if it was being chased by the big furry animal with a big teeth and claws. And it's not. So in that sense, we are sort of not maybe making it up, but misattributing it. Two quotes and then we'll move on. The first is from Tony Robbins. He says that stress is the achiever word for fear, which I just love. And then the second one is probably my favorite. Seth Goden quote, which is the best way to complain is to make things better.

13:32How good is that? Right? The best way to complain is to make things better. We are brought to you this time around by momentous. I'll be honest when I first heard about a fiber supplement, I had exactly one thought that is for digestion, staying regular. It's not really my thing, but I was wrong. Fiber is one of the most significant drivers of gut health, which turns out to be directly connected to energy stability, recovery, focus, and mood. Once you understand that connection, fiber stops feeling like a basic supplement and starts feeling foundational. That's what momentous fiber plus is built around. It's a complete three in one formula, soluble fiber, insoluble fiber, and a prebiotic resistant starch designed to support gut health from start to finish. Find the right gut bacteria, improve digestion, stabilize, blood sugar, no spikes, no crashes, clean ingredients, science first formulation, NSF for sport certified because that's just what momentous does. If a product doesn't meet their standards, it just doesn't even come close to the shelves. Right now, momentous is offering you up to 35% off your first order with the promo code

14:33excellence. Live momentous.com is the website. Use the promo code excellence. Live momentous.com promo code excellence. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. This month, with International Women's Day on the calendar, I've been thinking a lot about my wife. I mean, I think about it all the time, but this month, specifically and especially, you know, one of those people, she's just really good at handling things quietly, completely without complaint. She shows up for our boys every single day, manages everything our family needs, and still somehow has energy left over for the people around her, myself, including. What I notice and love her for is how fully she gives to everyone else. What I notice less often is her letting herself be on the receiving end of that same care. And I think that that's true for a lot of women. They become so good at taking care of everyone else. That taking care of themselves starts to feel like a luxury. They don't have time for it. That's what BetterHelp is here for. BetterHelp connects you with a fully licensed therapist to help you find balance, set healthy boundaries, and invest in yourself the same way you invest in everyone else. With over 30,000 therapists and six million people served, through the world's largest online therapy platform,

15:34your emotional well-being matters, fine support, and feel lighter in therapy. Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com slash excellence. That's BetterHelpHELP.com slash excellence. The Bleacher Report app is your destination for sports. Right now, the NBA is heating up, March Manus is here, and MLB is almost back. Every day there's a new headline, a new highlight, a new moment you've got to see for yourself. That's why I stay locked in with the Bleacher Report app. For me, it's about staying connected to my sports. I can follow the teams I care about, get real-time scores, breaking news, and highlights all in one place. Download the Bleacher Report app today, so you never miss a moment. Next one, number three, our priorities are out of whack. It goes to a little bit of a reminder to self of when we've been sold something that I don't think is going to get us to where we actually want to go.

16:35Right. That's the material success that's the grind, the hustle, that the busyness, that the accolades, awards, and achievements, basically the whole like dopamine-filled culture, right? Is saying that this is what you should end. This is what you should chase. It's kind of the premise of this whole show, right? Man, we're saying that that's something worth questioning. We shouldn't just fall for it at face value, and just accept it because that's what society, teachers, parents, and everyone else has said, is what you should be prioritizing. I try and elevate this. I'm not saying your priorities out of whack in terms of whether you should have an apple or something else. I can't, you know, you get it. But it's like, we're not trying to figure out these really kind of like easy, like, which one's more important? We're trying to go with like the really default thing of like,

17:38what do you think your, you want your life to be about? Because then when you get started at that level, it's a decision tree all the way down. And then all these other ones that seemed really important go like, well, that doesn't even, that doesn't even enter the conversation at this point. Because I just had this great conversation with RCFO. You would think that RCFO would be all about making more money and a growing the business. He goes, it has to start with what you want. When you walk in here every day, what is the thing you want to feel? That's so awesome to come from a guy whose job is supposed to be, make the business more money, make sure you're on track for more growth. And it's not that. It's about health, not financial health, financial health plays a picture, but is not the end all be all. So I don't want to put this just in terms of like financial earnings. The idea behind this is question your wants and your desires.

18:40Where are those actually coming from? We've talked this before, but I think the healthiest counter to that is imagine yourself as your 80 year old self with just a few days or weeks left. What is it that you're going to wish that you had done? And this is just the the deathbed exercise. It's perspective in the present moments. So it requires a little bit of zooming out instead of just riding along the default wave. Yeah, I was thinking about, I was thinking about the fact that I don't know that a lot of people actually set their priorities. I think a lot of people grab at priorities based almost entirely on what they see other people grabbing at, right? As if there's this limited number and if they don't grab one, they're not going to get any at all. And I think the, and this is really just reiterating what you just said. I think the real work is to disentangle ourselves from everything that we were taught intentionally and unintentionally for the first 18 or 20 years of our lives and then

19:44be able to pick apart and choose with some more intention. What the one or two actual priorities might be. And then to act in accordance with them, of course, which is, you know, they're both hard. But I think that that's really the work for everybody is to first recognize, like you said, what priorities that I just pick up because I thought I was supposed to. So can I put those down? And then what actually matters to me? And then can I pick that up and then can I start making decisions in alignment with that? Can we start making decisions that are aligned with that? Like that's the whole idea that we're trying to do is align our, our align actions and values. So what do we actually value to your point? And I said picking up someone else's values because maybe we really value calmness as I do, right? That's one of my really strongest as I've thought about this more and more. It's one of my strong, I love calm. I hate drama. So it's an anti-vision thing, right?

20:44That we worked on a few months ago. So if I hate drama, if I hate gossip, if I hate toxicity, what do, what is the thing I actually want? I want peace of mind and I want calm. If that's the true sort of, I don't know if it's at North Star, but it's directionally correct. What are my priorities then? What are the things that, as you said, which should we be picking up? It's not things, and this has kind of got into the question of like the CFO thing. They're probably doing a fundraising round with a venture capital. It's probably not going to instill more calmness. Yep, that's for sure, right? Whereas, guess what? Every one of these business forums I'm in is telling me to do. Exactly that. Yeah. Because the priority is in calm, the priority is growth, growth, or the stated priority is growth, growth is growth, yeah, exactly. Yep, I think that's exactly it. Growth for growth, for growth's sake. Exactly. Number four, the story we are telling ourselves isn't true.

21:45Yeah, sort of tangential to that one, right? But here's even more so is we have so many unconscious biases. We have so many, the world that we are seeing, and the reality that is being presented to ourselves is not factual. Now, I'm not saying like we live in a matrix or something like that. We let there's no objective truth. Maybe I am, right? But what I'm saying is our reality is shaped by our beliefs. If you believe something, this goes into the frequency illusion and confirmation bias, recency bias, there are so many things that shape our reality. That's not the healthiest way to navigate life. Like we want to try and do is scrape away. I want to go through this thing with no biases. I want to be on discovery for actual truth. So you can imagine a situation where you and your wife are not seeing eye to eye on something.

22:45You guys are in a little bit of a tiff about something. You believe something happened that caused that. She believes something different, something else happened, that happened that we're both completely convicted in the stories that we're telling ourselves. Those stories do not serve us. So the more that we can pull away from these, the storytelling mechanism, or which our brain loves to operate on, which that's what we are as human beings. We are storytelling machines. We are trying to create a narrative, full of, you know, Jameson's words, full of villains and heroes and good and evil and triumphs and failures which we really do. We narrate this experience we're having. But the narration is fraught. It's not real. So if we are able to peel that back a little bit and see things more unbiased, your ability to then relate and have a deep,

23:47meaningful, loving, long-term relationship with your wife goes up exponentially. Like that is the health of these relationships is basically how little of that are you doing. Because if every time something happens, you're like, there she goes again. She's doing this thing, trying to control me or whatever it is. You know, why does she tell me to like, I don't know if the things are people to argue about, but that's, I use that as one of the examples. But it goes into everything, right? Right down to why we complain. Right down to, can we look at ourselves? How can we improve rather than the storytelling that it's my customers fault? It's the other side of the political spectrum. It is all of these stories that we tell ourselves which just are not true. It's becoming worse and worse isn't the old guide, but we've done enough of that. But the way that our infotainment is set up now, it is such confirmation bias. You know, the social network, the social dilemma movie, the entire premise is built off of this,

24:47which is people looking across the other side of the political spectrum and going, how can they not see this? How can they still believe what they believe? Why can't they see this? And the answer is, they are not seeing it. They literally aren't seeing it. So the story is completely different. So the more that we can pop up out of that a little bit and not do so much storytelling, but go kind of like in the first one, what am I doing to contribute to this? It helps us live a better life. I was certainly a more productive one. That's just just to make sure we don't go too long here and we can move on to the next one. We feel like we are better or worse, we are not. That seems related to the story. Yeah, storytelling at right. Yeah, because we like to tell ourselves those stories as well, right? And I'm certainly at fault for this in both senses. I feel like I'm constantly going back and forth between these two things and I can't see how it helps me at all. I've done forever.

25:48I told myself I was too young and I think very quickly I'm going to be starting to tell myself, I'm too old to want. Like I'm just, so what is it? You're neither. It's like an avocado. You've got like 15 minutes where it's perfect. It was already 33 years old. Three months and three years. It was Tuesday. And just Tuesday of 1989. That was the day that I was not too old to be young. But it's not this or that. You know, it's so easy to, I fall for this trap so much in my business. It's like no one can build this business the way I can. And then I'm like, I have no idea what I'm doing. I can't be the one that does this because I have no, you go from like, I'm the only one that knows how to do this to like complete imposter syndrome. Yes. And neither one of those serve us. It's like you don't need to be telling yourself that story. You are not as probably as good as you think you are.

26:50And you're definitely not as bad as you think you are sometimes. Yeah, what does that phrase? It's, you're not better than anybody and nobody's better than you. That's what it is. Right? It's, it's recognizing that there is that, there is that truth in the middle that you are not special, but you are worthy of what you have. Right? And recognizing that both of those things can be true at the same time. You know, I came across, I forget where I got this, but there is a certain character trait that's very common amongst successful entrepreneurs, which is that they have this crazy level of insecurity coupled with, I can do huge, amazing things. I think that's a hormosy thing. Yeah, that sounds right. Yeah. And you need both. Yeah, it's kind of that, but I don't know. I think if we got rid of that narrative, it would really benefit us all. Instead of trying to like, because what it does is, if I value calmness,

27:51which is, which ultimately is, what leads to peace of mind, the thing that pulls you away from either of those two things is judgment, right? And judgment is, am I better or am I worse? And you know, as Shakespeare has said, there is no good or bad, but thinking makes it so. So instead of trying to continually try to judge yourself against other people, like the worst way, at least judge yourself relative to where you were yesterday, but to judge yourself worse as other people, am I better or worse than them? It's going to do just that. It's going to rip you out of this beautiful state. And put you into a place where you are distracted and unable to bring your best self forward. And we talk about this in terms of athletics and peak performance all the time, which is a flow state is that one of open-mindedness, positivity, and non-judgment. Yep. Once you judge, it's like literally like, you're either in a lit room or a dark room. The room goes dark once you judge. You no longer get to see everything. I think there's also an element of like,

28:52finite games versus infinite games. And this one too. I think when we're either feeling like we are better or we are feeling like we are worse, what we're really doing is trying to assign a score to something that you can't really put a score on. But how else are we judging ourselves better or worse, except for this imaginary score card that we're holding in our back pocket? And so it's this recognition that we are almost never playing finite games, right? Finite games have rules and winners and losers and everybody knows what they're playing and there's a beginning and an end to them. But in almost every context where we have these feelings of like, I'm doing terrible or I'm the best, I'm the only person that can do this. We're really inside of an infinite game, which is, you know, it could be a business, it could be a relationship, it could be any number of things. And in infinite game, you play in order to keep playing the infinite game. And so therefore, there's no winners. There's no scoreboard at all. I think remembering better and worse are an attempt to create certainty

29:53in an environment where there is inherently no certainty. And our job is actually to get comfortable inside of the uncertainty. So we're not reaching for some false sense of, am I winning or am I losing? Because there's no winning and there's no losing. And if we can get our head around that idea, then we can free ourselves. I think a little bit occasionally from this narrative of, we're better or we're worse and all of the pendulum swinging between those two states. Where, instead, to your point, we can just live in the middle of it. We can stay calm, we can stay responsive and not reactive. Yeah, that's great. It's very much that. I, as you were laying that out, I kind of, I realized why we do this as well, right? We, as evolutionarily, we're hierarchal beings. Yeah, we need to know where we sit. Yeah, we need to know where we sit. So you get choice of mates and choice of meat. Like that's mates and meat, maybe. And that, again, is one of those things that was survival before, which isn't a part of today's world.

30:55So there is no, this idea like, I gotta try to rank myself at all times. Again, just doesn't serve us for where we are today. Number six, we could be doing so much more. I think this is my favorite one. We can. Right? That's it. We can. Like, I don't know. I just think that there's always, I think there's a reason that we have like chasing excellence, right? It's not be excellent. Right. It's like, go do, go try to do it. It's not more in terms of productivity. It's more impact. It's more respect to the priorities, right? Yeah, right. It's like, you set the right priority. Then we can say, what does more look like? What is the right more? You could be doing more to be a great dad. You could be doing more to be a great husband or person in your relationship. You could be doing more to be a great neighbor. You could be doing more to be a better, to take care of your body. You could be doing more to, and this is so what I don't want to do is like,

31:59this is in no way shape or form a nod towards perfectionism. Because what we can do so much more is so much more having grace with ourselves. Not be themselves up for not being perfect. Like, I've really loved which we kind of shaped this conversation around recently a little bit is that idea of Aristotle's soul. The soul is the best version of you. I love it. It's not in the religious sense, right? It's not your soul goes on to heaven or Rome's around the universe when we're gone. It's, your soul is, it's a part of you here on planet earth. And it represents the very, very best that you could possibly be. Well, we're all, we're all, that's agreed to three or a dozen short of that. We could be doing more, we could be doing more to be a better person. And that's really what it is. And as I just said, don't beat yourself up. Because beat yourself up is not in line with your best soul. So it's kind of this whole like, which if there is a new sort of like evolution to this chasing excellence, it is that, right?

33:01It's not only a fulfilled life, it is not only the good life, it is not only health in the five factors to create the freedom to be able to pursue those things. I have a hard time. I haven't seen it framed up better in terms of the highest arching objective of what we're trying to do and what it means to live a good meaningful life than to try to align yourself as close as possible today tomorrow and forever with the essence of your soul. So do more to get closer to that. Yeah. And I think about so many of the things we've already talked about and probably a few things that we will continue, we will talk about next. Like complaining or our priorities out of whack or the stories we're telling ourselves that aren't true or even the story that, hey, we are better or nope today. We're actually worse. All of those things are stealing from us, our time and our energy and our attention. And when they steal those things from us, we have less to give. We have less ability to do more that would put us closer in alignment

34:02with that higher sense of ourselves, right? And so it's like it's this every one of these things that we're talking about. And so, and we talk about it, you know, all the time. It's, and you already used this word once, which I love, which is distraction. They're all of them distract from our ability to take the moment that we're in and point ourselves towards the few things that actually do matter. And every time we, we get distracted and everything we look over there and we tell ourselves an unhelpful story. What we're really doing is we're just, we're taking our eye off the ball. And now we have to eventually reorient ourselves and take the energy it takes to do that and then start moving forward again. And it's this song and dance and this circle that we're continually doing. And the work is staying focused on the few things that matter. And everything we're talking about so far are the things that ultimately don't matter. Number seven, we are not good at being objective. Well, that's, yeah, we talked about stories, complaints, trying to work on people changing

35:05them instead of us. Those, those were all like, yeah, we're, we're the main characters in the movies of our lives. And we're going to see everything through that main character's point of view. That is not life. Like we are one of eight billion people, one of eight billion souls on this, this planet. Our view is not right. This kind of like surmises all of the things that we just talked about. That's what I was saying is women in the beginning, I was like the last of these sort of wrap on top of each other. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Like, oh, yeah, you think that, but guess what? Also, yeah, yeah. But you're not going to be objective. So yeah, that argument kind of falls on its face because you're coming to this with some sort of like bias that probably isn't real. So I think that the idea here is continuing to challenge ourselves. I really like what you said is we're sort of by default going to be distracted in order for us to pour our energy attention, time, resources, energy being the big one, right?

36:08Pour our energy and focus into the things that are really going to truly matter to us. A level of objective objectivity there is kind of key. Otherwise, we're going to be caught up in this distracted state and making decisions in this distracted state. So it requires us to zoom out and I think continually zooming out to try to take in as much of a picture as possible, you know, in the military that that acronym UDA, which is it starts with orient. The first thing before you make any, it goes like orient objective to side something, but they said the idea is before you decide anything, orient yourself, like where actually are you? Like zoom out a little bit. Yes. Like don't just like pull the trigger there, like wait a minute, are you where you need more context? And I think what we can kind of constantly do is like continually challenge ourselves to zoom out of this really, what's seemingly in the moment seems really urgent and important.

37:12And maybe this isn't like you're in the midst of a thing with your kids and you're, why aren't they listening to me? And you want to get emotional, you're frustrated, angry, whatever it is. Can we zoom out a little bit because if we don't, we are not going to bring our best self forward. And if we don't bring our best self forward, we don't get closer to the objective, which is a better, more meaningful loving relationship with your kids that also leads to them growing up to being the responsible adults that chase excellence, right? So it's a matter of not relying so much on the immediacy of the minute circumstances and emotions that you're feeling right now, but try to be a little bit more objective in this situation. Yeah. And speaking of looping back on, on our previous ones, I just struck me was if we get better at being objective, I think by virtue of that, we complain less because almost always

38:17complaining is fighting against the reality that has presented itself to us, right? Traffic, blah, blah, blah, traffic. It's always there. But if we can stay objective, we can say, well, if traffic is always here, then why didn't I leave 20 minutes earlier so that I wasn't 20 minutes late, right? So like, I think if we can continually remind our, we can totally try to be objective, I think some of these other things that we've talked about start to actually come in line, right? When we can be objective, we can probably see how trying to change somebody else is way less effective than trying to change ourselves, right, or something like that. Yeah. But your objective, if you can see if your prayer is out of whack. Exactly. But the story you're telling yourself, and I think the other thing I was thinking about as a better or worse as you were chatting, yeah, because I think, you know, we've already talked about today, but the idea of the realist inside of that mindset continuum, I think it can be really easy and push back on this, but I think it'd be really easy to think, well, the realist sees things 100% objectively all of the time, but I don't think that that's

39:18possible. I think it's probably a slightly better, slightly more nuanced definition of the realist is they strive to see things with objectivity, but still recognize that they will not always be able to accomplish that, right? And so just like just having that recognition of, I'm going to try really hard not to tell myself a story about something that's not true, that's not objective, but I still, in the main player inside of the movie in my head, and I need to recognize that as well. Yeah. Very well said, the realist is doing their, their darnness to not storytell, right? And, but they also recognize that there's probably going to be a story loop going where human beings were storytelling machines. What the optimists, the ones below that, the optimists, the pessimists and the victim do, is they are storytellers. They are creating a narrative. The realist realizes that there's a narrative going on, but they have a healthy dose of

40:21skepticism of whether that's actually true or not. It is the, you know, the wise old farmer that says, like, we'll see, he might be like bombed out that his son broke his leg, but he's also willing to like postpone whether this is good or bad. And if you think about, this is why we kind of shape it up on that continuum, the left hand side of the continuum, the victim, the pessimist and the optimist, those are the storytellers. Well, what does storytelling do? A good story creates drama. So what we're saying is on that side of the spectrum, you're creating drama. You are actually dramatic. You are mellow dramatic, like this is not the way that you actually want to navigate the life in the best possible way, what you want is calmness, peace of mind, truth, non-objectivity, so that you can do all the things which you said in the last instance was so great. So you can bring your best self, your attention and energy to the things that matter most.

41:23If you're caught up in the drama, you can't do that. Think of like a kid throwing a temper tantrum, like a toddler, or think of a, I have a preteen girl in middle school, think of the drama that they deal with. Like, are they actually navigating the most important parts of their life? Or they caught up in things that don't matter that much. The reason they caught up and things that don't matter much, is because the stories they're telling themselves in creating drama. So what the realist does is not, they are void of this part of humanity. It is, they recognize it's happening and they question it. They don't, it's curiosity over judgment. Yep. Number eight, being defensive is holding us back. No, it's not. That's okay. That's my response to that one, Ben. Yeah. I don't know. It's, it's just like so obvious, right? Like, if you are so set in your ways that you can't be open-minded, Ray Dalley, Bridgewater

42:28Capital, the most successful venture company ever wrote principles, the entire book is about remove, close-minded people from your life. That's really like the whole idea is that you want it, you want, the whole idea is growth happens in these loops, these loops happen when you are open to learning. If you are not open to learning, you don't have the loop. All you have is whether someone was successful or failure and there's no growth trajectory. Yep. It's kind of the same thing. Like, we need to stay, like, first off, like, hard but true. That's what this whole list is again, right? Hard to hear but true. We probably are more close-minded than we think. We probably are more defensive than we think we are. Again, it goes right back to the survival things of like if people thought we were wrong about things, we have no value. If you have no value, why are you part of the society? If you have no value to the society, kick you out into the wilderness and you get, you might have a big fuzzy thing with the clause. So it is. It comes down to like, all this goes back to our like paleolithic ancestral self, which

43:32is built up so much of our biology and so much of our self-wear is written so long ago. It's so long ago and it just isn't, while it's still a part of us, it doesn't serve us. So us staying close-minded and defending like our stance, like the same middle school daughter, Harley, she said to me before, she's like, sometimes I argue things even when I know that I'm wrong at them. And I just do it because I don't even know why I do it. Me too, Harley. I'll just like, yeah. I'll just keep going. It's like, yeah, that, like I'm so glad you're aware of that. Nope. I think of these like a sort of like intersecting loops, right? Calm is certainly one of them, the other C that's one of them as well as like curiosity. Curiosity is the antithesis of a fixed mindset, the antithesis of judgment, be curious not judgmental. I think that those are two really high level first principles that we should always just sort of ask ourselves, like when we get presented with anything, like, am, is

44:36it going to create more calm for me, value? I would ask myself, is it going to create more calm in my life or not? And am I being curious or judgmental in this situation? Talk to me a minute about the holding us back part of this, being defensive is holding us back. What do you think we, we protect ourselves by being defensive? So like I can, like the first part of it, I know where it comes from, but what is the cost of that in your mind other than, you know, you talked about growth already in that growth loop? But like, what do you mean by holding back? What do we actually lose by being defensive? So what we lose is growth and evolution, which is inherent to us living a good life. Like everybody, Arthur Brooks or the Dalai Lama or anybody, they've all talked about how learning and evolving is a necessary part, you know, even Stephen Covey is one of his four else, live, love, lead, learn, like learning, growing, evolving is one of the core endowments of a good life. So we want to learn growing of all, well, if we're judgmental, that's the antithesis

45:40of the growth loop, you know, in Carol Dweck's words, this would be fixed mindset versus growth mindset. Growth mindset is I'm open to being wrong. I want to identify as the learner. I want to be able to get better at this. So tell me and please give me the feedback, coach me, tell me where I can improve. Whereas the one that's being defensive is, no, you're wrong. No, you don't know what you're talking about. No, no, I got this figured out. Like no, it's, it's the opposite of humility, right? It's, it's a constant fixed mindset person, which is, I'm only going to put myself in situations where I know I will succeed. Well, if that's the case, what you are doing is you're avoiding challenge. If you avoid challenge, there is no growth. This is like organisms 101, like you have to be forced to adapt to something for an organism to change and grow. That makes me think back to the priorities. Again, again, we just keep looping back on itself. But like if the, your priority is to protect your ego, then being defensive makes sense,

46:43right? You want to protect that. That's a priority. I want to feel good about myself. Okay. What if you, you, you, you, you look at, it's their fault. Yeah. Exactly. And then yes, yeah. But if the priority is growth, if the priority is being a learner, then being defensive doesn't make sense because that's not in line with that priority. And again, it can't be something that you just pay lip service to because in the moment, if you say I want to be a learner, but in the moment where you get the opportunity to learn something the hard way and you resist it and you push it away, then that's not actually priority. It's just something that that's, you know, as we've talked about with values all the time, that's just a nice word you put in a poster on the wall, right? And so it's really important, I think, that we are honest with ourselves. And then when we are sure that we are right, that this is a real priority, that calmness is a priority, that being a learner is a priority, then we have to grid our teeth and we've got to hold our breath and we've got to get through the moments when our immediate reaction is to push away from those things or to push further away from those things because they're uncomfortable.

47:44Yeah, if we're pushing away from things that are uncomfortable, then there we have it, right? That's where we get to this. It's holding you back. Yep. Number where we at. Number nine, life isn't fair. Get over it. Get over it is something my mother has said to me since I can remember this is a phrase. Really? Yeah, she's amazing, but that's the answer to this one, that's why I put that in there. I had it in there and I shared it with her and she was like, you should, but get over it. Patch, we like that. Remind my kids of this a lot because what the kids will say is it's not fair, right? Bodhi got the bigger piece of pizza, that's not fair. Oh, yeah. Bodhi got to watch the iPad in the car ride while I was going to my tutor, that's not fair. Yep. How come this? That's not fair. This is just one of those like what you want versus what's reality, life, it's not fair. In fact, it's brutally, brutally unfair. It is so unfair that I grew up with the family.

48:48I grew up with in the town I grew up with with the peace and safety that I had. I never had to worry about getting beat up. I never had to worry about food on my table. I never had to worry about being abused as a kid. It is so unfair compared to the people that are growing up in atrocious circumstances. There's no fairness to that. There's no. And to try to like get the smaller things closer is an absurd practice. So once you recognize that there is no fairness to this thing, it actually creates a lot of freedom because you're not trying to create fairness, right? Because life should be fair is a story and it's a story that will never be true and therefore you will always be in tension with that story you are telling yourself. You will always be in a state of stress because you are waiting for something that will never happen. It's exactly right.

49:48If I was to say like maybe like give like a top five of the victim mindset, this isn't the top five. Absolutely. Which is like, this isn't fair. Why do I have to deal with this? Like why is this happening to me? Why do I have to change? Why can't I? And guess what? You're so right. This isn't fair. The biggest one I always think of is like, I can't imagine like to lose a baby or a toddler. Like to lose a child, right? That is so horrifically unfair. Yes. Yep, it is. But it's to lean into that isn't the helpful thing. Is it unfair? Yes, it is. Just yes. It is unfair. Like own that part of it. Yes. This was unfair. But there's no more story after that. It's not unfair. So it's not unfair again. It's not this is what ends up happening is you create the story loop. And then what happens is it becomes the reticular activation system, which you look for things

50:49that you believe are true. And now these things that were neutral are now unfair. And that's where it becomes detrimental. It's not that this thing happened as unfair. That sucks and that's true. But it's what comes downstream of that when you think that it's supposed to be fair. And you wait for fairness to introduce itself when what you're saying is, no, you have to actually sit in the discomfort of knowing that the unfairness will probably never resolve itself to the degree to which you wish it would. It's about taking it. It goes back to the beginning. It goes back to like, are we taking ownership of our lives, right? So there's, I've been through some, I've had so much blessings and so many, I couldn't have written a better life for myself. But there's things that I thought were, you know, if I'm looking back, I could have been like, that's so unfair and gotten pulled down into a rabbit hole, you know, from, you know, having a gym business that, you know, was shut down for three months.

51:51And I started to pay my employees for that time and I basically went bankrupt. That's kind of unfair. But that doesn't help. Like, once you get past the pity party for yourself, it's about the next thing. I broke three bones in my back and was essentially incapacitated, paralyzed for 11 days. It didn't even go to the bathroom for two weeks. If you prepared to tell yourself those stories, what is it that's on the other side of that? Yeah. And it's the same. We just need to, I'm not saying don't have a motion and don't be pissed and don't feel it fully. Do. Do. That allows you. Actually, it's better. That actually helps you get to the other side where now you can go. Okay. And now what? Right. And now what? It's not a balancing act. It's not like, and when's the good thing going to come now because this was, it's supposed to happen. Yeah. Some people just have lives that are horrific. They've been prisoners of war for five years and tortured like that's, but it doesn't help. It's different.

52:51It speaks a little bit to like the difference between being a victim and having a victim mindset. You can be a victim without having a victim mindset. Last one. More things won't make us happy. Happiness is not on the other sides of accolades, awards or achievements. It's certainly not on the other side of material things. Yet our biology is not programmed for that. Our biology, meaning the way your brain operates is going to tell you that lie. I really like it's Chris Williamson had said this the best way that I think I've heard it, which is, this is an unlearnable lesson. You can't learn this lesson unless you've gone through it. The way he says it is, only once you have the private jet and the mansion and the $10 million bank account, can you go, yeah, that didn't make me happy. And everyone that is on the climb trying to get there goes like you on grateful son of

53:54a bitch. It's only once you've gotten, it's an unlearnable lesson until you've actually achieved the thing. Nobody, like nobody can actually get there. I don't know if that's true, that's unlearnable because I think there's certain people that have done it, you know, have pushed off the, the more for more fulfillment, more possessions for more enjoyment, satisfaction, but it's, it's so tempting, right? And because it's, we all do it. It's the kind of goes back to like the growth for growth sake. And why it's built into our DNA is back in the day, it's part of our biology. It was a whole lot better to have six bushels of carrots going to the winter than it was to have one carrot. It was so much better to have five acres of land than one acre of land because the chance of you having a harvest and having food for the winter went up, it was so much better for you to have six servants than to be a servant.

54:54It was all built into our survival. Again, this is not the case anymore. We're not striving for our survival, but we think, meaning think, like the way we're wired, our, as you said, our software was written a million years ago. It is now hardwired into us. And it's really hard to override the hardware, the software, I don't know, I don't know the difference between those two. If you really better, if it was really hard to override the software, really hard to override the hardware, it would be, you can't overwrite hardware. There we go. Software. There we go. That's what we're trying to do here. We're trying to override the operating system that we are born with so that it is, it's an upgrade. Yeah. All right. That was fun. Ten things that are hard to hear, but true. I'm going to go through the list one more time just as a reminder. Number one, we need to work on changing us, not them. Number two, we complain a lot and it's not helping. Number three, our priorities are out of whack. Number four, the story we are telling ourselves isn't true.

55:56Number five, we feel like we are better or worse. We are not. Number six, we could be doing so much more. Number seven, we are not good at being objective. Number eight, being defensive is holding us back. Number nine, life isn't fair. Get over it. And number ten, more things won't make us happy. Thanks, Ben. That was fun. Thanks, Patrick. Thank you so very much for tuning into the show this week, two quick things before you go. If you want, even more from this episode, go check out the full five, three, one break down. We give you the five big ideas from the episode, three reflection questions to help you process it all. And one key takeaway that you can put into action right now, the link is in the show notes. The second thing, while you're there, check out the Chase Club. It's our premium membership where we include bonus content, add three episodes and a brand new Chase Tracker app. Check it out. ChasingExcellent. Don't email.