PNTV: True and False Magic by Phil Stutz

0:00Life is full of suffering, embrace reality. We live in a culture that tells us something must be wrong with you if you feel pain, uncertainty, and the need to continue to work hard. This book is as close as you're going to get to doing one-on-one coaching with Phil Stutz. That's a workout. And if we looked at my stack of notes, if I open that up to the second coaching session in 2017, nearly a decade ago, at the end of that session Phil told me something that completely changed my life. Can you kind of mumbled to himself, hey, you have a lot? Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes TV. It has been a while. In fact, it's been over five years since I've done a PNTV episode. I've been busy, created a new company called Heroic, check us out at heroic.us, in your iOS and Android app stores, etc. Got some new tattoos. I'll tell you about in the days and weeks and months ahead. Tell you about one of the tattoos and the fragility today as well in this episode. And we relaunched Philosopher's Notes.

1:03As you know, if you've been following along in 2018 years ago, I decided it would be fun to create 100 Philosopher's Notes on 100 of the best self-development books ever. Where I basically pull out the absolute best, most life-changing ideas from these great books. You know those sections, you asterix and underline and mark all up. I call them big ideas. I drop them into a Philosopher's Note, 6-page PDF, 20-minute MP3. I connect those ideas to other great books. And most importantly, I help you live the wisdom. Life-changing wisdom isn't life-changing unless you live it. You need to move from theory to practice, to mastery. We do that together today. That's my intention to help you show up. As your best, most heroic self for your family, community and world. That's what Philosopher's Notes is all about. I started with 100. We now have 750 notes that I have personally created.

2:03Moving toward a thousand. We'll see if I get all the way to 2500 over the next 25 years. God willing, longer chat. And we've relaunched these PNTVs, which is basically me inviting you into my virtual classroom. We've got the old school chalkboard. Let's go get to work. Helping you one more time. Move from theory to practice, to mastery together today so you can show up as your absolute best, most heroic self. Now, spend five years. I've read hundreds of books over those last five years. I created hundreds of Philosopher's Notes, which one of those notes should I start with for my relaunch edition? Well, it was actually an easy decision. I decided to start with the 750th note, which was a very special one for me. It is on True and False Magic by Phil Stutz. Phil Stutz, you may know, from the Netflix documentary Stutz, featuring him and another one of his clients named Jonah Hill.

3:03Now, Phil and I have been working together one-on-one, almost 500 sessions over the last nine plus years. Now, my notes in those sessions literally are some of my most prized possessions and they fill up two boxes. And as I was preparing for this PNTV, I kind of laughed because I pulled out the stack of notes. And this book is as close as you're going to get to doing one-on-one coaching with Phil Stutz. That's a workout. Those are my notes from awesome total workout. Nearly a decade of coaching with Phil. Page one of my first session with Phil nearly a decade ago, January 13, 2017. Boxes are fallen. Let's go. 2019, 2020, 2021. That's half of the year because I did two sessions a week for all of 2021 and all of there's actually three stacks from 2021.

4:04That's nuts. This is 2022 where I did another 100 sessions in a year, 2023, 2024, 2025. Just got to workout. Let's go. Now, I picked this book because Phil has had the deepest influence on me of anyone outside of my wife over the last decade and frankly over the course of my life. He has become my Yoda. I love him in this book again and his most recent one before this one called Lessons for Living or as close as we're going to get to one-on-one coaching if you don't have the opportunity to do so with him. Breathe in and have you from that workout. That's awesome. So true and false magic, a tools workbook, love the book, highly recommended. Here is the Philosopher's Note. You can get the Philosopher's Note for free. Check out the notes for this episode and you can get a direct link to get this note for free. Now as always, we've got five ideas that I'm excited to cover. More wisdom and less time style.

5:05Let's get to work. We got good news. We got bad news and then we got pain. We got uncertainty and we've got the need for constant work which is you may have known as a notice is part of the bad news. Pain, uncertainty, hard work, Phil tells us. Those are the three unavoidables of life. Everyone wants to avoid those things. Good luck. Unavoidables. But let's start with the good news. The good news is you have what Phil calls infinite potential. You have infinite potential. You have a life force within you that you can connect to higher forces via the tools that he has created in order to tap into that infinite potential. That's great, great news, right? Good news. Here's the bad news. That infinite potential exists just outside of your comfort zone. What Phil calls your safety zone. All right. Well, how does it feel when you leave your comfort zone?

6:09When you leave your comfort zone, how does it feel if you want to tap into your infinite potential? Little we buy definition. When you leave your comfort zone, it feels uncomfortable, right? All right. That's the bad news. Your infinite potential exists just on the other side of your comfort zone. Enter the three unavoidables of life. Pain, uncertainty, and the need for constant work. That's what we need to embrace if we want to activate our infinite potential. So good news. You've got infinite potential. You've got this life force within you. You can connect to higher forces by engaging in effective tools for living. That news is there are three unavoidables, pain, uncertainty, and the need for constant work. There's also something that Phil calls part X that part of you that's always chirping in the background, telling you what you can't do, et cetera. And then the other bad news I want to make sure that I mentioned here is you will never,

7:12ever, ever, ever get to a place where pain, uncertainty, and the need for constant work goes away. Phil says you will never be exonerated from those things. Now unfortunately more bad news. We live in a culture that tells us something must be wrong with you if you feel pain, uncertainty, and the need to continue to work hard. You're told that you should be able to do X, Y, and Z and feel great, right? Life should be easy. You shouldn't have to work so hard. You shouldn't feel so much pain. You shouldn't feel so much uncertainty in the world and in your life. And it's that story that you shouldn't feel that that is arguably creating the most distress and anxiety in your life. If you can embrace those three unavoidables, which is what Phil and Sussanly talks about why I love him so much, is I feel so aligned. This is Buddhism one-on-one. Life is full of suffering. Embrace that. Embrace reality. The Stoics talk about the same ideas. When we can embrace the challenges of reality, we can do something about it, which again

8:14brings us back to the good news. There are tools that we will discuss briefly on how to deal with pain, uncertainty, and the need for constant work. Of course, Phil talks about it throughout this book. His first book is called The Tools. Second book is called Coming Alive. And the third book is called Lessons for Living. We've got philosophers' notes on each of those. There you go. Now, with that, Praeloot, let's talk about pain. And we'll talk about the tool to deal with pain. Now, pain as Phil describes it is basically anything that you're feeling when you exit your comfort zone. Ah, how does that feel? It feels uncomfortable. It feels painful. You feel fear. You feel anxiety, whether it's just a little bit or a lot of bit, right? What do you do when you feel that pain? Most people, when they feel that pain, they want it to go away. Their story is something must be wrong with me. Something must be wrong with my life. Make it go away. Phil says, and he said this since his first book, in the Tools, his first book, which you

9:17wrote with Barry Michaels, bless you, Barry. The first tool is you got to reverse your desire. Instead of wanting all those challenges to go away and avoiding them, you need to reverse your desire and say, bring it on. And that is our tool. When you feel that discomfort, I want you to have the wisdom to know that that's an indication that you have an opportunity to grow. Make that a cue, a trigger, a prompt for you to lean in and approach that challenge rather than lean back and try to avoid it. Science is unequivocal on this. The healthiest among us in each of us at our healthiest moments approach our challenges. We face those painful obstacles as challenges, not as threats that we need to avoid. Your entire biochemistry changes when you can flip that switch and lean into your challenges. That's what we want to do with pain. That's the tool. Bring it on. I'm going to use this to get stronger. We're going to talk about the need for constant work and anti-fragility in a moment when we

10:19get to the fifth idea here. I'm going to talk about my tattoo, anti-fragility. But for now, I want you to think about that. Bring it on as your response to life's inevitable pain and uncertainty and need for work, such that you can tap into your infinite potential. The second unavoidable pain, uncertainty. We all want everything to be perfectly mapped out for us and we know that that's silly yet we still want it. We struggle with our ability to deal with uncertainty. Phil says, any philosophy that doesn't end in action is useless. Most people when faced with uncertainty did just want to step way back and figure it all out. Think about it, think about it, think about it, think about it. Phil says it's like a beach ball. A beach ball stays above the water, right? You push it down. What does it do? It wants to pop back up above the water. Phil says that's what we're like in our lives. We want to think and think and think, but we need to push that ball down into action. We need to do.

11:20And he says action drives creativity. You're never going to have it all figured out. You just need to be in the game. You need to do your best with what you believe to be the next best step. Get data, learn, and then adjust your decisions, adjust your action accordingly. A metaphor that he uses or story he likes to tell is like a donut shop. I don't know how many times he's told me this in those notes. A donut shop and he uses this story in the book to deal with uncertainty. He says, look, you can spend 15 years preparing to open a donut shop, doing all the research trying to figure out, well, how many glazed donuts, powdered donuts, sprinkled donuts, are people going to buy? He says you can learn more in 15 minutes of action. Open the donut shop. And of course, you need to do research and figure out what you're going to do in your life. But then take action. Open the donut shop. And in 15 minutes, you're going to see how many sprinkled donuts, powdered donuts, glazed donuts, are purchased. Then you adjust. You make different donuts. But if you spend 15 years and you never open the doors, you never get that data.

12:22So again, the way to deal with uncertainty, the tool is to take action, to be engaged with life, to take that next step forward. That's our tool for how to deal with uncertainty. There's a longer chat we can have than I'm going to say for now. But Phil has something called the instinct cycle, right? Where you have an instinct. You're faced with uncertainty. You don't know what to do. Phil says you need to slow down, tap into your life force, tap into those higher forces. In my work, as you know, if you follow along with heroic, I talk about the fundamentals all the time, eating, moving, sleeping, breathing, training your mind, right? Much that you can connect to that best version of yourself, such that you can have a clear intuition of what the next best step is. He says you've got to have clarity on your intuition. What feels right for you, both the rational and the intuitive, right? And then you've got to make a decision, and then you need to take action, and then you need to accept the consequences. And when you do that, not every decision is going to be right, obviously, right?

13:22So perfect. You learn from that and you take the next best action. You go like that. You're putting up. Ray Dalio uses the exact same spiraling up metaphor to capture his five step sequence to success. You have an ambitious goal, then you take action, and you fail, and you learn. You make new goals, new decisions, you take new action, you fail, you learn. You get better throughout life. But you can't do that if you want taking action. So again, in order to evolve, we need to be in the game. That's how we deal with uncertainty. The third unavoidable is the need for constant hard work. Now again, most people want to be exonerated from all these things. They want to get to a point where they can feel jokingly says, pack their suitcase and go on vacation for the rest of their life. No more pain, no more uncertainty. I don't need to work anymore. We need to get rid of that idea. And the way to deal with this is first to embrace reality. Realize nothing is wrong with you. You are not experiencing pain in your life because you're you.

14:24You're experiencing it because you're human. None of us are perfectly. We've all got plenty of things to work on. But the fact that you're challenged isn't because something is inherently wrong with you. It's because that's life. And again, when we embrace that, then we get to do what needs to get done right now. Now Phil's one of many tools he has in the book here is keep promises to yourself. That's how you deal with all of this at the end of the day. You're never going to be exonerated and you need to show up and do what you say you will do. It's the hallmark of good leadership when you're leading others. It's the hallmark of good leadership when you're leading yourself. Now in this context, this brings us to my tattoo. I got heroic, obviously on this arm. I got anti-fragile confidence over the last several years. I've been blessed to work with some of the most elite performers on the world in the world, special forces, operators in the military, noted in football, the European rider cup team, these great leaders and great teams who show up as their best. And I've been blessed to show up and help them forge what I call anti-fragility, which

15:26is a word that I got from Nassim Tauab and an idea that has been clarified by Phil, which was related to all of this. If you want to deal with the pain, uncertainty and hard work required of a good life to have true magic and not the false magic of what the world is telling us, get it quick, get it easy, et cetera. True magic is you know that you need to show up and do the work. And if we looked at my stack of notes, I don't know where my first year was, but whatever it was, if I open that up to the second coaching session in 2017, nearly a decade ago, at the end of that session, Phil told me something that completely changed my life. Phil, if you've seen the documentary Netflix documentary Stats, you know that he's just got an iconoclassic personality and he kind of mumbles to himself at times. And at the end of our session, he kind of mumbled to himself, hey, you have a lot of emotional stamina. He said, maybe, maybe the most I've seen. And I'm sitting there writing it down, I'm like, that's awesome. I have no idea what emotional stamina is, but that's awesome.

16:29Next coaching session, first question, what is emotional stamina? And he told me emotional stamina is your ability to handle life's inevitable pain and uncertainty and stay centered and stay grounded and stay moving forward. I said, well, I appreciate your kind words. And how do I get more of it? How do I cultivate more emotional stamina? And what he said, goosebumps changed my life. He said, this is how you get more emotional stamina. I now call this anti-fragile confidence. He said, the worse you feel, the more pain, the more uncertainty you're feeling in your life, the more committed you need to be to your protocol, the more you need to keep commitments you make to yourself, keep promises you make to yourself, you need to do that when you feel you're worst. I have full goosebumps right now. If you can do that, if when life hits you and you are feeling all of the pain and uncertainty outside of your comfort zone, if in those moments you can do what you do when you're at your best, which is what your protocol is, then everything changes.

17:33Then every time you say bring it on, your comfort zone expands and your infinite potential continues to expand, you can handle more and more of life's pressure. And instead of being fragile and breaking when life hits you, you move way past being resilient to being anti-fragile. And the pain, the uncertainty and all the other challenges that you may have wanted to avoid in the past become the catalyst, the trigger, the cue, the prompt for you to double down in your protocol, to show up as you're best when it matters most. That's how we forge anti-fragile confidence. We'll talk about this a lot throughout these PNTVs. We talk about it a lot in heroic, again, check out heroic for more on all of that. But this is ultimately how we cultivate that emotional stamina, how we cultivate that anti-fragile confidence, keeping promises to ourselves is how we deal with the need for constant hard work, such that we can handle the uncertainty, such that we can handle the pain, such that the bad news becomes good news because all of life's challenges become

18:36catalyst for our growth. That's the essence of true magic. And that is a very quick look at this great book. Absolutely love my Yoda Phil. And check out the book. Obviously, check out the notes. I've got links to the other notes, the tools coming alive. And then lessons for living will be featuring soon as well. But that's a quick look at this great book, Five Big Ideas. I'd like to end my notes by asking you a simple question. If we're going to move from theory to practice to mastery together today, I need you to take a second. Think about. I shared a lot. You're welcome. Fire hydrant. Let's go. But what's one idea that most jumped out and landed for you in our time together today? Think about that. And think about how you can apply that wisdom to your life today. That's how we move from theory to practice to mastery, such that we can close the gap between who are capable being, who are actually being, and we can show up as our best self. You do that day in and day out.

19:36You were a different person a week from now, a month from now, a year from now, a decade from now, and all that pain, all that uncertainty, all that hard work, becomes an opportunity for you to show up and be the person you aspire to be. And the things you used to complain about when you see them as the catalyst to your growth, how do those things be defined as? How do we describe those things as bad if they're the catalyst for our growth, et cetera, et cetera? I'm fired up. So happy to be back. Let's go. I've got a hundred of the best books I've read over the last two, three, four, five years that I haven't done TVs on, queued up and ready to go. So stay tuned, check out the next one, and hope you have a great day. I look forward to sharing more with you soon. See you. Hey, this is Brian. Thanks for spending a few minutes with me today. If you enjoyed it, please hit subscribe so that the best of the show keeps landing in your feed. Then head over to heroic.us, that's heroic.us, where you'll find the full library of wisdom

20:42I've created over the last 20 years, as well as the app, advanced training programs, coaching, and everything else we've built to help you optimize your life, actualize your potential, and live heroically. It is day one. We are all in. Let's go.