you as a leader right there’s actually millions of people that follow you right that listen to you that respect what you say and they may truly follow your lead I mean clearly they follow your lead we saw this with with the the launch of or the release what’s it called when a book comes out when my book came out yeah you had kind of predicted everything that was gonna happen to a tee of like yeah people when we talk about this book it’s gonna be people go and buy it that’s good it and so people clearly follow you and and listen to what you say as a leader and I don’t know if you perceive yourself that way but you are a leader two questions one where do you think you fall short and two and more important where are you trying to lead people yeah these are good uh so I haven’t thought of myself as a leader but I think that two terms sometimes get used interchangeably and I view them as very different so as a leader if I’m looking through that lens of myself I think I’m very good at affecting national conversations and steering the attention of groups to one thing for sustained periods of time I think I’m very good at that and helping people to prioritize if I were to view myself as a manager I think I have many deficiencies and one of them would be and this has been a help and a hinderence as many things are impatience I have extremely high standards and hold myself to just a ridiculous degree of expectation for perfection which of course it leads to a lot of problems we’ve talked about earlier but on the flip side I get a lot done in part I think because that is is a driver that can also damage relationships very quickly and it can in a management environment caused hurt feelings and people do not put forth their best because they feel like they are being criticized and not lauded for their successes and in part that is because as an athlete I really and hopefully this doesn’t sound weird I don’t really care if it sounds weird actually in sports and in business my general feeling was and I remember mentor early on said something like this to me he said don’t tell me about the good stuff the good stuff takes care of itself just tell me about the bad stuff and that’s always been my personal policy for myself but that does not always translate well to team environments so that that I think is my my my homework that and and deficit that I’ve been working hard to correct for the last few years is getting better at managing people who do not necessarily conform to that mindset at all times which I think can be a big problem when it’s when it’s out of control but that would be the biggest deficit but if we’re if we’re defining leader as someone who can put forth a vision or an objective or catalyze a movement and move attention in people in one direction I feel like I’m quite good at it at mitigating the risk of that and because for instance people think that the haters this is a very popular word on the internet and not all critics are haters of course important to be able to take criticism and feedback but many people who are thrust into a position where they have the opportunity to lead people virtually on their on the internet which is a huge responsibility and I take it extremely seriously worried about say their detractors causing problems it’s not the detractors in my experience that can do the most damage it’s the die-hard fans who get the message wrong who get the directive and misinterpreted that that is where you have to do damage control and to think ahead so I think I think I’m quite good at that as far as where I’m leading people if I’m leading them anywhere I’ve always I shouldn’t say always but for the last at least five years thought of my goal as creating a benevolent army of super learners effectively who can teach in turn ten additional people each the same skill set so to propagate a toolkit that enables people to be elite problem solvers instead of accidental haphazard problem creators is it has been my goal for at least the last five years explicitly teaching people how to learn so they can teach people how to learn that’s right and part of learning is problem-solving so you buy by definition getting people who are good at dissecting problems testing assumptions that’s where I’m leading people yeah that’s that’s solid I mean that’s obviously a really positive thing I always talk about the fact that you know I want to help people learn how to learn I talk about that all the time and I’ve said that before on the podcast well teach people how to not not what to think but how to think and obviously I’m not the same scale that you are in terms of volume of masses of people but there’s definitely some people out there that I think are following me in some way that might be a strong word but I was thinking that what I’m trying to get people to do if you’re following me I’m really trying to get you to follow yourself and lead yourself I don’t you know lead yourself okay you see it my path that’s cool my path was good I like my path now forge your path you know figure out where you want to go how you’re gonna get how you’re gonna get stronger how you gonna get faster how you’re gonna get smarter how you’re gonna get how you’re gonna get better and I always think that those answers work best when they don’t come from somebody else but when they come from yourself absolutely and I think also the teaching people how to learn enabling my audience to learn how to learn and when I say that I mean ten hundred times faster than would be expected in a lot of domains that’s only one leg of the stool so let’s say there are three legs the other two would be teaching them to dissect and manage fear and then the third leg would be teaching them to be emotionally aware and resilient and that I think is covered largely by stoicism if you take it as a practice and not as something to passively ingest yeah and I just talked about stoicism on my last podcast because somebody hit me up on Twitter and says do you practice stoicism and I was like no I just said no cuz yeah I pretty terse on Twitter and and the guy kind of wrote back I don’t want to say you he’s offended and I don’t want to rehash the whole story because I just talked about on the last podcast but nearly said behave well you know what’s wrong with stoicism and I never wrote back I’m like man there’s nothing wrong with stoicism I I get it but for me to say that I practice it or even that I learned it from studying the agents is not true I didn’t go to Princeton you know I didn’t study when I was in high school I wasn’t an overachiever I was an underachiever I was a I was a troublemaker so I didn’t learn anything about stoicism until much later in my life my roots are my beliefs aren’t founded on what I read they’re founded on what I lived and it’s just it does it make sense yeah when I look at it own people have always asked me are you gonna do Marcus Aurelius I’m gonna do Marcus Aurelius on the podcast and and really all I be saying is like look Marcus Aurelius said this thousands of years before I did awesome and but I I would love this be all educated but it wasn’t I was just I went down the path that I went down and experienced the things that I experienced in my life and I came to the same conclusions that these ancients came to so it’s an interesting dynamic no it is and I think it’s worth noting also that if you find anyone who is consistently good at operating at a high level in stressful environments the tools are the same exactly I mean if you read one of my favorite books Musashi historical fiction fantastic book it’s all the same shit you read that stoicism stoicism Seneca was my real introduction but that didn’t come into my life until 2004 so it was after graduation for those of you that want me to do Musashi on this podcast I’m not gonna do it not gonna do Musashi enough to tell you why and if you’ve read it you know you can’t you gotta go through Musashi to get to the end you’ve got to go through the whole thing to get the end it is one of the best rewards in all of literature to get to the end and the end this is a what’s a how many pages of musashi’s 900 say it’s it’s a massive book and it’s and you have to read the whole thing and it’s all good but it all comes and it’s literally I think in my copy because I always laugh about this it is 2 or 3 pages from the end of the whole book is where you get to the end of Musashi where you go yeah that just happened yes other pay office all the payoff is so good and the oh and I’m not gonna do it on your cuz I obviously I have to give away to pay off and so I’m not gonna do that and you have to go and read Musashi it’s it’s awesome and the ending is just as good as it gets its as good as it gets and it’s historical fiction but that happened oh yeah that’s documented oh yeah and it doesn’t get any better so read Musashi for yourself people maybe I’ll give us like a one-year lead done and then I’ll do it one year the Soudan 100 maybe we’ll do give people enough heads up episode 100 we’ll go back and do massaging if and I’ll give up a spoiler alert at the beginning cuz massage is good when you get to the end goal yeah is that kind of like the matrix what’s that if they’re like a spoiler at the end of the matrix Oh does it kind of like I don’t know man I gotta watch more movies echo Charles movies highly recommend babe involves a piggy like a jogger did you watch that a bunch of times you got some same story yeah I do so I tend to when I write books so that I don’t feel isolated I will generally I write late at night that’s what I do I synthesis so I can do research and in a reason zone but I’ll do my writing generally between 11:00 p m and 5:00 a m and so that I don’t feel like I’m sitting in a cave by myself I will generally listen to the same track or same album over and over again for a given book that’s how I focus and then I’ll have a movie playing on mute in the background so that I feel like there are other people in the room now at one point I was like all right I’ve seen the Bourne Identity five thousand times I don’t see it anymore I’ve seen because I was for the first book I’ve seen Sean of dead which is a comedy six thousand times I don’t wanna watch that anymore so I’ll just say I’ll just watch it on repeat so I might watch a movie five times a night okay that’s good Amazon Prime and I pull it up in the first movie that gets displayed is babe bad a little pig and farmer Hoggett and I put it on and I was like oh this is hilarious this is all right well I’ll pick a real movie after this and I was like good this is a fine film the renegade duck anyway uh so yeah yeah babe I don’t think you’d actually like I think you’d be disgusted with my recommendation but I don’t watch enough I don’t watch a lot of movies I think you’d like narcos which is a miniseries I’ve heard of that Pablo Escobar right I think I’ve heard about that one I just then you’re then you’re jumping into what like 30 hours of content that is on yeah you’re looking at about 20 yes then you’re in the vortex you know what you know what I want to watch that like when I’m 78 I’ll watch the narcos put that on my list
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