Conversation with Jean Moroney -- Setting and Achieving Goals in the Coming Year | Yaron Brook Show - Yaron Brook Show

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Speaker 1 (00:02):
A lot of them, photos of Widow Wattle and an
individual loss.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
This is the.

Speaker 1 (00:16):
Show, all right, everybody, welcome to your one book show
on this Monday, December eighth. And I am really really
pleased to have Jeane with me, Jeane Maroni, who's been
a frequent guest in the past, So welcome, Jean.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
Thank you your own. I always always fun to talk
with you.

Speaker 1 (00:38):
Good good, I'm looking forward to this one. And reminded everybody,
UH feel free to ask questions. Super chat is open
uh and uh Gin will be taking questions on the
topics we're going to cover today. But but just anything
you guys come up with, UH, generally in the realm

(01:01):
of Gene's expertise, which I think most of you're familiar with.

Speaker 3 (01:04):
Just to give you a quick.

Speaker 1 (01:07):
Run down, Gene teachers ambitious people with challenging goals how
to manage their minds so they make better decisions their
goals and motivate and focus their thoughts for action. And
she's the founder president of Thinking Directions. You can learn
more about the work, access resources, or join her programs

(01:29):
on her website think thinkingdirections dot com, thinkingdirections dot com. Great.
All right, well, you know this is I love this
season between kind of Thanksgiving and Christmas is a great time.
I think things seem to slow down a little bit

(01:50):
and a lot more time to plan and to think.
It's and it's perfect for like getting you going for
next year and thinking about next year, thinking about what
worked and what didn't work during the previous year, kind
of setting yourself up for for the next year. So
what's the importance of if you were doing that, of

(02:13):
kind of setting setting goals in advance of thinking through
spending a lot of time on really thinking through where
you are and in life generally or in your career
or whatever it happens to be.

Speaker 2 (02:26):
Yes, well, I think long term goals are really essential
to happiness. You know, this is not the most obvious
case of this is a central purpose which integrates your life,
but all long range goals are really the source of
the deepest the deepest joy you get is from the
things that you build and you see as a results

(02:50):
of your life and of your choice and of your
having in effect created something out of your own imagination
as to how the world is going to be or
how your life is going to be, the environment you're
going to give your kids, or whatever it is. And
there's really nothing more gratifying than being able to look

(03:10):
back over the last ten years or twenty years and say, wow,
that was an idea in my mind and look what
I've done.

Speaker 1 (03:17):
Yep. So I mean, obviously achieving those goals is something essential,
necessary for happiness. But there are lots of people out
there that seem to achieve those goals, like you know,
I know, I know people Silicon Valley. They take companies

(03:38):
public and they make a lot of money and the
companies do well. So it's not just about the money.
And that might happen when they're very young even and
they kind of lose it. They lose focus, they lose
the sense of purpose. So kids, they've achieved amazing things,

(04:00):
and yet they don't achieve the happiness that one assumes
that they will. You know what's going.

Speaker 2 (04:05):
On, right, It's necessary for happiness, but not sufficient. Right,
there's no substitute for a rational morality. If you think
of like the Zappos founder, the story of his life
where he died in a fire, you know, after his
life went completely crazy after he sold out. He didn't

(04:27):
have any compass. Now, sometimes I think entrepreneurs do have
a compass while they're building the business, because they really
do have a creative rational goal, of creative rational, real
world goal and they take that as the whole thing
and that you know, that that guides them and because
it's rational, they do well. But in order to then

(04:50):
set what the next goal is, you need something like
you need a rational philosophy. You need to have rational goals.
It's only rational goals that can really bring you joy.
And to really get happiness you have you need to
have integrated goals. And that's not possible if they're rational.
That's not possible unless you understand the principles of rationality
and you understand why they're needed for happiness.

Speaker 1 (05:14):
So does that mean I mean, it can mean that
you have to be an objectivist to you know, to
be successful in life. We know plenty of people successful
who are not. So what is what is it that
really is needed for them?

Speaker 2 (05:31):
Well that I mean, I actually think the people who
are successful, and there are lots of people who are
i would say successful and happy who are not objectivists.
And if you talk with them, they do have an
implicitly rational philosophy and they are probably you know, they
may have some talk around the edges, like they may

(05:53):
pay lip service to religion in some respects, and to
the extent that they take any of that seriously, they
will not be happy, right, They will be compartmentalized in
any area where they accept subjectivism. I mean, Hank Reardon
is the dramatic, you know, the fictional dramatization of this, right,

(06:14):
I mean, he was essentially a happy guy as long
as he didn't have to think about his family.

Speaker 1 (06:20):
Yes, a long home, he didn't go home, right, yeah,
I mean, and it was dramatic.

Speaker 2 (06:25):
But but but this is real. And if if they've
pushed that off to the edges sufficiently, they can it
can be not an actual big part of their lives.
I do think that that puts an upper limit on
how much achievement you can have. I mean, I don't
think that people with really huge achievements can be also
hugely happy if they don't have a pretty logical, explicit

(06:51):
philosophy and if they don't understand something about selfishness. Altruism
is a killer if you are committed to altruism. And
I've spent you know, I've spent thirty five years trying
to get altruism out of myself. Even a small amount

(07:12):
of altruism will make you miserable. And so the other
thing I think you need to keep in mind is
that the fact that people say they're happy and they
put smiles on their faces doesn't mean you really need
to look behind the scenes where you can't look because
it's private.

Speaker 1 (07:28):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (07:29):
Yeah, So does that answer your question? Because oh, I
got one other answer to your question.

Speaker 1 (07:35):
Yeah, So the.

Speaker 2 (07:36):
Other answer your question I have is the common sense
way that I think people stay rational is that they
stay value oriented. And that's something that's the way I
would put it, which is that you always think in
terms of the value you want to create instead of
the threat you want to avoid or the you know,
you're always thinking in terms of the positive you want

(07:56):
to create. And to the extent that you do that consistently, again,
if you're always on a creation premise, those are going
to be consistent and you will be essentially rational. And
that is you know, in self help books and things,
there is an implicit value orientation some of the self

(08:17):
help books, but they also have a lot of garbage,
which to the extent you let the garbage in, it's
going to undercut.

Speaker 1 (08:26):
I mean this is why this seems to be a
flavor of the weak self help book because people do them,
they get some benefit from it, but it doesn't actually,
it doesn't actually cure them. It doesn't really move them forward.
So they're looking for the next gimmick.

Speaker 2 (08:42):
Yeah, and that's actually part of the problem. That's something
I had to figure out for myself, is that they
are looking for something that is going to cure them.
And that is part of the problem. If you think
that you're broken and you need to be fixed, this
is a permanent problem with being happy. And you know,

(09:02):
I haven't finished reading Teras Smith's book on Egoism without Permission,
but she makes this incredibly important point in that book.
She says that in effect, your commitment to your happiness
is the authority for ethics, right, and that the reason
that you need ethics is because you're committed to happiness,

(09:23):
and therefore you need a moral code, which you know,
I hadn't heard it explain that way before. It was
really really, I mean, this is an original point that
I really appreciate terror pointing out. And if you don't
have that idea, you can have something that's telling you

(09:46):
that you're not good enough. Like, if you have an
idea of morality that's separate from happiness, you can still
be saying, well, you know, I'm not happy because I'm
not being moral enough, or it's all right that I'm
not happy because this is the right thing to do.
There there will be some kind of conflict between those
two things. And if you think that you are like

(10:09):
broken and need to be fixed, you're putting morality above happiness.
The truth is that you can be rational at whatever
whatever psychology you have. You can be rational now and
you can improve. And so pride is moral ambitions is
so you can improve. So you can be rational now
and you can increase your skills and your abilities, and

(10:31):
that's the source of happiness.

Speaker 1 (10:33):
So you say you don't have to solve all your
psychological problems.

Speaker 2 (10:40):
Yes, before you can be happy, right right, it's actually
the process of solving them is a happy process and
should be a happy process. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (10:52):
Interesting. So as we set goals for next year, as
we set goals generally, what's the most you know, what
can we expect to be successful? That is, what are
the predictors of actually being successful or at attaining those goals?

Speaker 2 (11:12):
Yeah, Well, the most important thing is your degree of
desire for them. This is really true. The more passionate
you are about the goal, the more likely it is
you're going to keep going until you get it. And
if you have a goal that's do it or die trying,
you'll keep working on it, you know, over decades. Now,

(11:35):
that's actually not such a satisfying answer. I mean, I
think that's true, but it's not such a satisfying answer
because that limits you a little bit by what your
current values are and what your current motivation is. And
so one of the things that I've worked on. So
the second thing that is a predictor is do you

(11:56):
have a process whereby you can pursue the goal with
the motivation you have and build the strength of your
passion for it as you go. I think that is
really critical because if it's an all a long range goal,
if it's a year or two years or three years,
you're going to need to put in a lot of effort.
And the way I look at it is you have

(12:18):
to make sure that the process by which you're pursuing
the goal is paying off as it goes, so you're
getting some joy along the way, so you're reinforcing that
value you're seeing the benefit, you're getting excited about it,
you're building momentum, and that's what gets you to keep going.
So like if we were talking about entrepreneurs, this is
one of the reasons they need a minimum viable product.

(12:40):
They need a proof that there's actually a market and
that they can make this thing and you know, and
at least provide some value and then they can iterate
and make it bigger and bigger and bigger. And the
same thing is true the way I teach it, I
call it played evolution. You take the biggest goal, you
take the absolute biggest goal. You can take a thirty
year goal, and you need to be able to figure

(13:01):
out what you're going to do in this two week period. Yep,
you can actually do in two weeks that you are
morally certain you can do, want to do and will
do in the next two weeks. And when you can
bring it in that short and I think two weeks
is actually a magic number. If you can bring it
into that short then you can actually do it. Then

(13:24):
it's just an issue of figuring out how do I
put in the time. And if you have motivational problems,
solving the motivational problems on something that you can do
for something that has a really big payoff, So you're
willing to put in the effort to solve any motivational
problems you have so then you can grow your values.

Speaker 1 (13:45):
So make sure that it's you're really passionate about it,
and then break it down into kind of bits that
you can be equally passionate about each one of them.
That a shorteduation that you can in actually achieve in
the short run and get that satisfaction so that you
can keep the motivation going.

Speaker 2 (14:05):
Yes, and there's sometimes you can do that just because
of your existing knowledge and values, and sometimes you need
a process to help you figure that out. That's that's
that's what I teach.

Speaker 1 (14:16):
That's like my the process.

Speaker 2 (14:18):
You know, that's the kind of thing that I teach.
That's the kind of thing I coach people on because
it's not I mean, it took me fifteen years to
develop that process. It's you can figure it out yourself.

Speaker 1 (14:29):
I did.

Speaker 2 (14:31):
And you know, like the lean process, like the Lean
Startup by Eric Rice is a book of it for startups,
and I would say that's a very similar process, but
it's in entrepreneurial And then you know, experiments. It's a
similar process or in writing, where you do drafts, you
figure out, you figure it out, and you iterate. There
is one process that's out there, but sometimes figuring it

(14:52):
out for your particular goal takes a little bit of creativity.

Speaker 3 (14:55):
Yeah, and how ambitious do you think those goals should be?

Speaker 2 (15:03):
I think the sky's the limit.

Speaker 3 (15:05):
I think generally scary, isn't it.

Speaker 1 (15:07):
I mean, that's super scary.

Speaker 2 (15:09):
It is scary because when you set a goal, it
means that you could fail, and if you don't put
in the work, you will fail and you will feel guilty.
When you set a goal, it's very exciting and you
get it's like you get some happiness on credit. You know,
you get some of the pleasure of having achieved the
goal because you set it and you imagine what it

(15:30):
will be like, and it's really I mean, it's really
pleasurable to imagine, right. But then if you decide if
you then drop that goal, then there's some real mourning
associated with it because you know that you've blasted those
expectations and it's very painful. And I think that's why

(15:51):
people are afraid to set goals, because they've set them
without setting them realistically in some way, or they've set
them without being committed and so they've dropped them. And
so the the problem is not how ambitious your goal is,
it's I are you? Are? You? Do you have a

(16:12):
process that you can be confident that you will stay
at it? And if not, then you should set a
less ambitious goal and learn a process where you can
stay at it, and then the sky's the limit.

Speaker 1 (16:25):
So uh So, if you set a simple goal, is
that like a step towards the bigger goal, like like
you described earlier, that's what I That's what I still have.
You still have that ambitious goal out there. You're just
taking steps.

Speaker 2 (16:41):
And you're not as committed to it.

Speaker 1 (16:43):
Right.

Speaker 2 (16:43):
The thing you really wind up committing to is the
shorter term thing that that you can commit to. I
think that's a big part of it is that. And
then the other thing is that when you said, like,
let let me give an example here, I mean this
personal example of I assume it's all right, you know
I I basically went into psychopistemology. I was interested in understanding,

(17:07):
in fact, how do you think what is the interaction
between the conscious mind and the automatic functions of memory
and affict right, and for cognition, and I was not
interested in emotional stuff. In fact, the first let's see,

(17:28):
so the first wasn't until about eight or so years
into my business, I suddenly realized, you know, I'm talking
a lot about overload, but I should say something about
emotional overload. You know, that might make sense, right, And
then and then it like opened up, and I realized,
you can't really understand a thinking process without understanding how

(17:50):
emotions work and how to manage them. That's actually a
really important part of the process. I had a total
blinder on. I had no idea this was part of it.
And in a sense that my goal has widened as
a result of that, and it's gone down channels that
I didn't expect it to go because I was following
my nose. And so one of the things you need
to be open to when you set a long range

(18:11):
goal is that you need to be willing to have
it be somewhat flexible. You know, you set a long
range direction, but then you actually don't know what exactly
is possible, and and so you need to be able
to go a little more abstract, like I'm interested in
how the mind works. Okay, managing emotions. That's part of
how the mind works. It's all right, you know, it's

(18:31):
like the umbrella got a little bigger. That's okay, But
then the goal also got a little harder because I'm
now working on thinking, feeling, and action. I'm interested in
all three of them. So okay, it changed the scope,
but it didn't change the overall direction. And it didn't
mean that I didn't see progress. It did change the
you know, sometimes this changes the timeline. So that's the

(18:55):
other thing that you need is is you know, you
never have to continue a long term goal. But a
coach who's been very helpful to me, a woman named
brook Steal. One of the things she says is she
says it in a subjectivist way. So she says, so,
I right to give up on the goal, but you
need to like your reasons. And so for example, if
you if you've actually decided you were more interested in
this other area, well that's an excellent reason to change

(19:19):
your goal.

Speaker 3 (19:20):
So it's not so much as giving up.

Speaker 1 (19:22):
It's giving up in the particular goal, but it's not
giving up on ambitious.

Speaker 2 (19:25):
Goals exactly right, right, And it's figuring out what you
care about the most or having your values changed, or
going to a new phase. I mean, I think every
ten years or so you do need to make a shift.
I bet you've seen. I mean you've I know you've
seen shifts in your career every ten or ten years
or fifteen years or so.

Speaker 1 (19:45):
Right, No, absolutely, And once I went had a conversation
with actually the venture capitalists who gave the money to
zepp Us to make up us.

Speaker 2 (19:54):
Really yeah, Okay, so.

Speaker 1 (19:56):
Don Valentine who was like a legendary adventure capitalist for
Sequoia Capital, and he basically said, he said, every ten years,
you should change what you do. Every ten you know,
you gotta you gotta refresh, you gotta do something different,
because it it just you need. You need to stay ambitious,

(20:17):
you need to stay curious and flexible. And once you
go over ten years and the same thing you kind
of too much said in it set in a in
a given pattern.

Speaker 2 (20:29):
Yeah you're not growing anymore. Yeah, you're not growing anymore.
Too much of it is just same old, same old.
And that's I mean, I do think that that's you know,
it's interesting. Pride is one of the virtues, and it's
moral ambitiousness. But I actually think you need ambitiousness across
the board. I think that, you know, continuous self improvement,
not just that you're getting better morally, but that you're

(20:52):
you're actually developing skill and it it almost doesn't matter
where you're developing skill, but you need to continually be
doing that.

Speaker 1 (21:00):
Yeah, in every aspect of your life. I mean, why
would you want to be mediocre and anything? You know,
in a part of your life you want to keep
pushing yourself and being ambitious.

Speaker 2 (21:09):
You need to choose.

Speaker 1 (21:10):
Because you know you can't do everything.

Speaker 2 (21:12):
You can't do everything all at once. You can do
you can do something in every area, but usually serially,
not in parallel, and and you do need to keep
I mean, you know, it's a classic thing, right, Older
people have trouble with technology. It's because they've automatized all
the earlier technology and it actually gets harder. You have
to de automatize something and automatize something new, and it

(21:34):
is it's not a piece of cake to do that.
I think us older people, I will put myself in
that category, got a little bit of a hard time
for this, but it is, you know, and then is
that your priority? Right? You know, Well, at a certain point.
It does need to be your priority, because otherwise the
world just passes you by. Right.

Speaker 1 (21:55):
I think it's easier for us than previous generations because
we've lived through many, many to chnological changes. It's it's
something we've had to do constantly as we grew up,
and so just a continuation. Whereas if you think about
people before computers and after computers, I mean, that's a
big it's a big change.

Speaker 2 (22:14):
But I do. I mean, I see a huge gulf
between me and the digital natives because oh my god,
I am a paper kind of girl, and I don't
function if you don't. If I don't have I don't
have paper and pencil, I am not. I am not functional,
and that's becoming.

Speaker 1 (22:30):
You know, I'm done with paper for the most part.
But yeah, I I congratulate. Yeah, no, but you know,
there's no question young people can do stuff when their
computers can do stuff with technology that I can't and
I don't, and I you know, the area is where
I'm ambitious when it comes to technology and areas where
I'm not exactly there's only so much times you have.

Speaker 2 (22:52):
Yeah, and then you delegate the other stuff.

Speaker 1 (22:54):
Right, Yeah, But how he was telling us he's still programming.

Speaker 2 (22:58):
Yes, well he's doggedly determined in that regard.

Speaker 1 (23:03):
That's pretty good. I haven't programmed in forty years, I
think thirty years. It's been a long time.

Speaker 4 (23:10):
So setting ambitious goals really really important and you need
to keep at it, you know.

Speaker 3 (23:20):
Do you see people who have kind of given up
on that?

Speaker 1 (23:22):
And and and what happens you know when when people
do give up on setting ambitious goals.

Speaker 2 (23:30):
Well, I mean the people who were attracted to my
stuff are mostly not people who have given up.

Speaker 1 (23:37):
Yep. And Howry says he doesn't admit it, though, I
guess the programming let it slip.

Speaker 2 (23:54):
So the thing I would say is, so I think
you see this as a as a stereo type of
the person who you know, I mean, think of like
the stereotype of like a pack rat. Right. This person is,
you know, has given up on even just having a
house that's livable. Right. I'm thinking about the you know,

(24:16):
the crazy shows they have where the people have all
this stuff that digging out their houses. It's basically it's
a garbage dump in their house. You know, they've really
given up even just having a normal life, which is
just a tragedy. Now that's an extreme case of that, Yeah,
but you I mean in these places. But I think
it's a dramatic example because if that happens, the person

(24:38):
has a smaller and smaller existence. Literally, I mean, like
the space in their house gets filled up and there's
only this much room that they can even move in.
It's I mean, it's a tragic situation, But I think
people do that in their lives too. I think about, like,
for example, some people that I've actually been able to help,

(24:59):
But I'm thinking of one person who was really feeling
locked in on his job because he wasn't getting interesting work,
and eventually, by talking with him out and having to
figure out what he wanted, he actually talked to his
boss and they figured out something he could do where

(25:20):
he didn't have to go get a new job, and
that he was doing something he really wanted to do.
But he had been locked in for years. I mean
it was something in like ten years that he'd been
locked in doing things that he didn't want to do.
More and more unhappy with his job, you know, you
become miserable. Yeah, and you and part of the problem
with this kind of thing is it's totally threat oriented,

(25:41):
you're only seeing what's wrong with your life. That means
that you keep avoiding threats. That's why it gets smaller
and smaller and smaller, and you start thinking that's the
way the world is. And this is how people develop
a MALEVL and universe premise is that they have some
bad situation that they don't know how to deal with.
So they were French, and then some other bad things

(26:02):
come up, so they were trench from that, and before
you know it, they live such a small life that
they they don't even realize the world is open to them.
And that's one of the reasons why I think continual
growth is so important. It's part of what forces you.
Forces is not the right word, but it's one of
the ways you keep recommitting to values and recommitting to

(26:24):
finding the way forward as opposed to withdrawing.

Speaker 1 (26:28):
How do you get people to overcome the fear factor,
because I mean that clearly is what drags people down.
You know, they're faith to leave their job because maybe
they won't find an you on, or they're faie to
talk to their boss because maybe you'll take it the
wrong way. Fear seems to be a driving emotion that
holds people back and reduces their ambition.

Speaker 2 (26:52):
Well, only if they're emotionalists. I mean, that's actually something
that I think people don't realize. Why what a subjectivist
age we're in. People do think fear is what's holding
them back. But fear is just an emotion. It's an
alert that there's something that is a threat to you,
something that you don't want to have happen. And that

(27:14):
is just a value in disguise. It means there's something
you're longing for. And the solution to fear is to
actually face the fears. The worst thing you can do
is to just say, well, that's a fear and I
need to avoid it. That is the absolute worst thing
you do. You need to face it and figure out,
first of all, is it actually true. Like in this

(27:36):
case I was telling you about, once this guy actually
talked to his boss. A lot of his fears were
not true, but it took courage to actually figure out
what he wanted and to start fighting for his values.
But any fear, anything you're afraid of, the actual cause
of that fear is some value that is threatened, but

(27:59):
it takes extra steps to figure out what the value is.
The fear just points you at the threat. It does
not point you at the value, whereas you know, love
points you at the value you're thinking about. You love
your wife, points you write at the value you think of.
Desire for something you want points you write at what
you want to desire. Pride, it's like you it points
you directly to what you're proud about. But that's not

(28:21):
true of the threat oriented emotions. And so the critical
skill that you need to learn is first of all,
the fact that you feel this doesn't mean it's true.
And the fact that you feel this doesn't mean that
this is the fundamental motivation. The fundamentalization is always a value,
and that's what you need to go find out. And

(28:42):
you know a lot of times people talk about this.
Right when the worst happens, they suddenly stop feeling fear
and they start dealing with the problem. Oh no, what
if I have cancer? It's going to be the end
of the world. And you know, they don't get the
destin and finally they find out they have cancer and
then it's like, Okay, what am I going to do? Yeah,
it's like you don't feel once you the problem is
here if you if you look at it, you can

(29:04):
you know, some people are delusional and they pretend that
they don't have it. But if you say, yeah, oh
my god, I got to do it. Once you say
oh my god, yeah this is a threat, what are
you going to do about it? Right? This, this is
what propels you into action, But you need to actually
look at it and know. You know. The other problem
with a threat is it just tells you something you
want to avoid. There are three hundred and sixty degrees

(29:27):
away from a threat, which one of those is towards
something you actually want. You don't know until you figure
out what is the value that's threatened. And that's that's
the mistake people make. They just work to avoid the
threat instead of figuring out, well, what do I really want?
And sometimes you need to deal with the fear. I mean,
I think that's what I don't like the term self

(29:49):
discipline because it has the word discipline in it, which
basically means corporal punishment. Right, I mean, that's what discipline is,
is it? I mean that's I mean at a logically, that's.

Speaker 1 (30:01):
Where it comes That's where it comes from.

Speaker 2 (30:02):
Okay, But you do need to be able to do
things that are scary, unpleasant, uh, frustrating. You need to
be able to do things like that and and manage
all those emotions in order to get to the other
side to learn a skill sometimes. And so you can't

(30:25):
be afraid of fear and you can't be in love
with pleasure. Right, you need to actually be set on
rational goals and on achieving in the world. You need
to have a reality focus. There's no alternative, there's no
happy alternative.

Speaker 1 (30:44):
So I mean this makes you know, coverage, you're pretty
important virtue in this context.

Speaker 2 (30:49):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, if you're if you're filled with fear,
courage is the courage is the too pursue. And of
course it's an aspect of integrity and what it's integrity,
it's loyalty and action to your convictions and values. You've
got to figure out what your values are and what

(31:10):
do you what do you believe is true and then
start figuring out how to get those values based on
facts as you.

Speaker 1 (31:17):
You know, sits back to you got to you got
to be rational.

Speaker 2 (31:21):
Yeah right, right, and that and that it's not so
much you have to be rationalist, is that the virtue
of rationality is guidance through this very difficult what can
be a very difficult process. It's it's it's your it's
your life preserver, it's the thing to hold on to.
When you don't know what to do, you say, well,

(31:41):
this is an honest step, or well, this is my
value and I'm going to fight for it, or well
this is what I think is true even though no
one else does, or you know, I'm going through the virtues.
I don't know if that's painfully obvious or not, but yep,
you grab onto a virtue and you say, well, I
can tell this seems to be an act of this virtue,

(32:05):
so it must be. It must be all right, right,
let me try that, right?

Speaker 1 (32:10):
So is it is the is the risk that people
perceive for going out and getting achieving the goals? Is
that related time ambitious the goals are? So I think
people afraid of ambitious goals because they think they're riskier.
There's there's a lot more and risk here I assume,
is you know, possibility of failure.

Speaker 2 (32:34):
Yes, And let's put it this way. Ambitious goals take
a lot more effort and you'll get a lot more
opportunities to just give up and throw up your hands.
So there's a sense that they're riskier if you don't
trust yourself to see them through. And that's why I

(32:56):
think self esteem comes up in such a big issue,
because there is an issue of trusting yourself, and that's
not something you don't do that by decree. That's not
something you say, well, I'm a worthy person, therefore I
should go set this big goal. I mean that actually
has to do with how do you feel about yourself
and do your trust yourself to take the actions? And

(33:16):
if you don't know, it's finding out how to trust
yourself is actually part of the process. I think this
is another reason to set goals per se. Not necessarily
the most ambitious goals, but something that's relatively ambitious. You know,
an ambitious goal for you, for not you personally your own,
but for a person is a goal that you don't
have the skills to achieve. So like for me, I'm

(33:39):
learning to play tennis, right, Okay, I've been learning to
play tennis. We're getting close to ten years here, it's
definitely more than seven years. And I'm terrible. I mean
I am terrible. I now have good form, and I'm terrible,
But like I never was athletic as a kid. Yeah,

(34:02):
and it turns out I don't have. Like I played
tennis with Peter Schwartz and I asked him what he
thought my problem was. He says, you don't have the
killer instinct. It's like, I'm totally non competitive. Turns out
you kind of need to be competitive if you're playing.

Speaker 3 (34:16):
A games competitive sports.

Speaker 2 (34:18):
Yes, yeah, if the other person hits involved, I think
as good as I stop and look at it, say wow,
really good head like like I don't have. I'm really
working on that. Actually I really want that killer instinct.
But this is you know, this is at the edge
of my skill level here, and it's actually part of
the reason it's fun. But I'm actively looking at like

(34:43):
like this is actually a real thing I'm thinking about.
Is how do you manage yourself? And I'm very interested
in it because you need to manage yourself in real time.
You need to manage your emotions. There's like a mental
set you need. I play way better when I'm taking lessons.
I've gotten actually pretty good at lessons. And you know
I've I do I've I mean, I've had to learn

(35:03):
everything you own. I've had to learn everything, including how
to run like that. You're gonna laugh about this, but
at a certain point. After I've been injured several times,
I got my my chiropractor recommend I get footwork drills.
So I said to my tennis coach, I need footwork drills.

(35:25):
So he gave me some footwork drills, including some running,
and then after he watched me doing them one time,
he said, Okay, you need to take bigger steps when
you're running. It turns out I ran like this. It
turns out you run much faster if you take bigger steps.
You get faster immediately. It's amazing how much faster you

(35:47):
get if you take long steps. Like this is the
level of knowledge I had about athletics, right. But I'll
tell you it was a complete victory. And I love
running now. I mean I would never go on a run,
but I love running around the tennis court and taking
these big steps and I'm like, wow, look at how

(36:08):
fast I am now I take these big steps. So
it is an ambitious goal for me. It wouldn't be
an ambitious goal for someone else. And yet I getting
tremendous pleasure as I learn each little piece of it.
And I do occasionally win games. Now. I don't win
sets particularly, but I do occasionally.

Speaker 3 (36:27):
You win a game once in all, that's good.

Speaker 1 (36:29):
That's good. I haven't played tennis in years and years
and years decades.

Speaker 2 (36:32):
Probably Okay, you could probably cream me, but anyway.

Speaker 1 (36:36):
Yeah, I would swing once and hit the ball and
my back would.

Speaker 3 (36:43):
So I would be out.

Speaker 1 (36:46):
So yeah, I was fairly good once a long, long
time ago.

Speaker 2 (36:52):
So I guess the reason I was saying that is
that you can set goals like at part of the
way that you kind of get into a virtuous cycle
is you set goals that are at the right level.
Now you know something that is ambitious and that you're
going to need to grow into it, but it has
some pleasure along the way. So like from the very

(37:14):
first lesson in tennis I had where I literally only
made contact with the ball about five percent of the time. Yea,
that's our best guess. But when I did hit it,
it read whack and I thought that was fun and
I was completely solved.

Speaker 1 (37:33):
No, but it's so important that ambition doesn't mean that
you have to be the best tennis player in the world.
Ambition just means it's in your context.

Speaker 2 (37:41):
Yes, right, it's in your context because it's you who's growing,
and it's you who's going to get the pleasure and
the pride and the confidence from that growth, and that's
what's going to set up a virtuous cycle. And it's
absolutely true that playing tennis has actually helped me in
other you know, you know, it has a bleeding out effect.

(38:04):
Any goal you set that you start getting this virtuous
cycle going, is going to bleed off into other things.
There's a lot there are a lot more areas of
fitness that I'm stronger in now, of course because of tennis,
and also mental things, you know. So I mean there
is a I mean that's partly because of my interest
in psychology, and it's a very mental game. But it's

(38:27):
not a coincidence. It all. It all feeds onto everything else.

Speaker 1 (38:32):
It sounds like though, when you talk about failing to
achieve a goal, it's almost it's always that you give up.
I mean, there could be external factors that you know,
make your goal. Businesses go under in spite of the
best efforts of founders and people who look at them.

Speaker 2 (38:53):
Yes, right, So there is also a contextual element to it.
Let's see if I can, let me try to give
an example here, because because part of the thing is
how you frame the success and so for example, there's
sometimes when you can't you can't, like in the case

(39:15):
of tennis, unless say, suppose I got a back injury
so that I was like medically not able to play
tennis anymore. Obviously I wouldn't continue with my tennis goal
because it would not be in my rational self interest
injure myself, and just as it wouldn't be in your
rational self interest to play tennis right now. And but

(39:39):
I wouldn't call that a failure so much because I
had success all along the way. I mean, when I
look at all the things I've learned from trying to
learn tennis, It's true, you know, my goal is to
become a four point zero tennis player. It's not clear
I'm actually even really a two point five tennis player.
This is a very imbicious goal, right If I stay

(40:00):
healthy enough, I will probably eventually get there. I don't
see any obvious reason why I can't. But there could
be something that would make me decide that that, for example,
that I should switch to a different sport, or that
I should you know, and then it would be a
different like say, a different fitness goal, let's say. And

(40:22):
so the point there is that you sometimes need to
go more abstract in order to course correct, but it's
still a course correction of some kind, and that's the
way I would look at it. I would look at
it as a course correction. So like a business that
you know, this really happens in businesses that you you
need to do a lot of experiments every iteration, like

(40:44):
the minimum viable product as judgment. You know, it's an
experiment to try to see because you think that this
is going to work, and you think this is the
way to get to your goal, and you need the
real life feedback. You actually cannot predict the future. So
whenever you set a twenty year agal, it has to
be with a contextual proviso that you know, given what

(41:09):
I think is true, but bearing on new facts that
are going to come that they are going to come up,
I'm going to need to adjust course based on new facts.
And it's not a failure if you actually put out
a product, and or particularly one where you've made the
decision this is the minimum viable product. We're going to
try to get proof of concept here. If you don't

(41:30):
get proof of concept that is, that is not a failure.
That is a very important data point which is very
good you did early so that you didn't throw a
whole lot of money away before you figured out that
this is not a viable concept.

Speaker 1 (41:47):
Sure, but it might mean the end of your business.
So in that sense, in that sense, it could be
a failure. So I'm not sure. I'm not sure failure
should have that negative of a connotation in that context, right.

Speaker 2 (42:02):
Right, I think that's right, And and so, and this
is true of all investments.

Speaker 1 (42:06):
Right.

Speaker 2 (42:06):
You can put in the money because you think it's
going to pay off. You do not have omnissions. You
can't predict the future. But and so, I you know,
it's interesting. I think I need to figure out how
to say this exactly because it's feeling like I'm doing
weasel words here to try to say it's not a failure,

(42:29):
so it is a bad thing. Let's let's let's definitely
establish that if the business goes out of business is
a bad thing. If you lose your investment money, it's
a bad thing.

Speaker 1 (42:36):
Well, investment's a little different. But if if if you know,
if you're a founder and you start a business, hire people,
and you've you've got a great idea and for whatever reason,
competitives you didn't see coming eyes the technology you just
you know, the business doesn't work. It fails, right, And
I think, I think failure is not a bad would

(42:57):
I think I think failures would if we understand it
within the context.

Speaker 2 (43:03):
So tell me what you're thinking, because I think this
is very interesting and I want to hear it.

Speaker 3 (43:09):
I mean, you know, uh, you can.

Speaker 1 (43:13):
You can fail it stuff all the time. And if
you learn from that failure, and if you use that
failure to grow in some ways, then you as a
person grow. Even if this particular venture, this particular goal
is not achieved, or this particular you know value is

(43:35):
not attained, the bigger value you you.

Speaker 3 (43:39):
Can grow as a consequence of it.

Speaker 1 (43:41):
So you know, every time SpaceX sends up a rocket
and it blows up mid a, people are you know,
it's a failure. It was supposed to go into a
oh bit. But it's a failure that allows them to grow.

Speaker 3 (43:57):
It's a failure that allows for bigger success.

Speaker 1 (43:59):
And the your context. And if the context ultimately is
your life, then you are growing by learning.

Speaker 3 (44:07):
From the failures you engage in.

Speaker 1 (44:08):
And almost every successful entrepreneur out there has failed.

Speaker 2 (44:13):
Yes right, yes, yes I could. I I agree with that.
Everything you said and listening to you also clarified what
I was trying to get at. So I agree with
you about failure and that the idea that you don't
fail unless you stop trying, I think you're right. I
think that's not a good way to put it. The

(44:33):
point is you need to make sure if you fail,
it was totally worth it. And all of the cases
you are because you learn from them. Because you did
that what in your judgment was the best thing, because
you gave it your all, you have no regrets about it.
The failure is totally worth it, and it's not it
doesn't have the it doesn't have the pain associated with

(44:57):
it when it's just you didn't actually try. When you
don't try and it fails, it's like it's the guilt
and the shame and the and the grief are huge
and there's no nothing redeeming. Whereas when you gave it
your all and it's really you got you learn something

(45:17):
about reality as a result of it, it feels completely different.
It's not it's still painful, let's let's let's be clear,
but it's a clean pain and.

Speaker 1 (45:26):
You can grow out of it. You can you can.

Speaker 2 (45:29):
Grow out of it, and it's part of the way
you figure out that this risk that it's worth taking.
This risk is that you're it's worth it because you
you actually you know what you're going to get if
you fail in a certain way. That's actually part of
the calculus, as when you make a commitment and that
what what what gives you the certainty to be able

(45:51):
to take action and make that commitment. It has considered
the failure option.

Speaker 1 (45:57):
It's interesting that that coaches you know, that embrace that
embrace the idea of failure to grow. You know that
failures is kind of a is part of the process
and the cultures that reject that. So if you look
at the US is generally your Silicon valley is generally
a culture where if somebody has failed, okay, well what

(46:17):
what what are you going to do now? Is kind
of the attitude, whereas in Europe, you fail, okay, well,
obviously you're not meant to be an entrepreneur. You know,
you better get an eight to five job. And that's
why it's a big part of why entrepreneur entrepreneurship in
Europe is much much much smaller, much much less impactful

(46:39):
than it is in the US, because there you get
one failure and if you get one shot, and if
you fail at that one shot, you're out. You know,
nobody will give you money, your family will walk, you know.
It's just it's you're label the failure, whereas in the
US it's never been the case. It's it's always been Okay,
what next, next?

Speaker 2 (47:00):
Yes, right, right? Learning, go on, tie on and go on.

Speaker 1 (47:04):
Yeah, So it's interesting how this gets inculcated into cultures
kind of the different attitudes.

Speaker 2 (47:10):
Yeah, huh, I didn't know that, but that makes a
lot of sense.

Speaker 1 (47:15):
And the and the and what next doesn't have to
be the same pursuing exactly the same goal, you know,
so it's not like you're you're you're trying to do
the same thing. You might be trying to do something different,
but you've learned from the experience and you're building on it.

Speaker 2 (47:31):
And these things shape you, right, I mean success shapes you,
Failure shapes you.

Speaker 1 (47:37):
My favorite story is built is Steve Jobs, Who's my hero.

Speaker 3 (47:41):
Who's my hero generally?

Speaker 1 (47:43):
Right? But but fire from Apple, you know, starts a
computer company called Next doesn't go anywhere, but in the meantime, starts,
you know, buyas this company called Pixar that happens to
change movies in a big way and then returns to
Apple and makes it the most successful company in history.
And you know, so that Awk is just to Me

(48:05):
is a great example of that and how he goes
and he talks about how he grew through the process.

Speaker 2 (48:13):
Yeah, I'm sure you've read Becoming Steve Jobs.

Speaker 1 (48:17):
No, oh god.

Speaker 2 (48:20):
It's a biography by someone who loved him, unlike the
authorized biography, and it specifically talks about the metamorphosis he
went through during the years at Next where he went
from being not a good CEO to being what he
was at Apple when he returned, and the things he learned.
And it's a really interesting book. It's totally worth reading.

(48:45):
Becoming Steve Jobs.

Speaker 1 (48:46):
Good, I'll definitely get it. Yeah, yeah, So, you know,
some people feel like I feel like I think it's
the right thing. They can't achieve the goals, or they
can't achieve certain goals, or they they set themselves up
with very limited possibilities right in advance, even young people,

(49:06):
which is tragic, you know, And and so they're very
you know, very narrow. How do you how do you
get how do you get out of that.

Speaker 2 (49:19):
Well, Uh, I think it's important to realize you can't
get somebody else out of that. But if they come
to you for help, the place to look is something
that they already want. Right. The way that you build

(49:41):
stronger values is by starting with whatever values you have now.
And that is not always obvious, right, But as I said,
any fear you have is a value in disguise, and
so the first way you can help someone like that
is help them figure out what it is they actually like,
you know. So the practice I learned, well, I've kind

(50:05):
of turned it into a tactic, but celebration in mourning.
There are tactics out there. I learned this from Martin Seligman.
He called it a gratitude process, but I call it.
I just call it three good things because it's three
good things that happened yesterday. It's basically a celebration process,
is what I would say. It's actually even better. Lindzenzer, who's,

(50:28):
you know, the head coach for my thinking Lab, she
does three good things that I did yesterday. So there's
a really selfish it's got pride in there. And one
thing if you do this every day. What Seligman said
is that this is one of the he's kind of
leading the positive psychology movement, and this is one of

(50:49):
the things that they did with undergraduates and experiments that
actually had an impact on their happiness. And the reason
it had an impact is because they liked it so
much they kept doing it after the experiment is over.
So six months later they were happier because they've been
doing this every day for six months. And I think
that that's you know that that is part of what

(51:09):
you need to do. You need to actually start celebrating.
And actually they can be as small as you want. That.
That's part of the rule of the three good things
is find three good things from yesterday, and it doesn't
matter how small they were. You know, I didn't break
any glasses, you know, yay, you know, I'm just making

(51:31):
something up now. I should actually break something yesterday, something
that's not one of my three good things from yesterday.
But I have other good things from yesterday. But it
gets you in the habit of actually seen what you
did that you think is good, or what happened that
you think is good, because it really is. You know,

(51:52):
they you know, they are all kinds of trite things
about well, you can look at the glasses half full
or half empty. But there is an issue of what
are you looking for? There is an issue of what
is your mental set. Are you looking for values or
are you focused just on threats? And the emotions you
have when you focus on values are love, desire, joy, pride, gratitude.

(52:19):
Let's see, there's some others that I'm just going out
of my mind. There's also grief, right, Grief is actually
a value oriented emotion. So the flip side of celebration
is morning. And I think the other thing that you
need to do to try to get out of this
really narrow thing is if there is something you've lost,

(52:41):
so an opportunity that you really you didn't take or
that you screwed up or whatever, it is actually really
looking at that and seeing why you care that you
lost that and understanding what are the values you lost.
This is another way of honoring your values and of
getting clear on your values. Both celebration and mourning are

(53:02):
values clarification exercises, and it's one of the things you do,
you know, when you lose a family member. I mean,
I've lost both my parents now, and the process of
mourning is you actually get clearer on they why they
were such an important part of your life. I love
both my parents. I'm very fortunate, and I learned things

(53:24):
about them, and I learned things about what was wonderful
about them that I literally was not aware of when
they were alive. And it took that contrast of losing
them and being sad and actually looking at what is
it I'm missing and realizing, wow, you know mom always
did that or Dad always did that, and I didn't

(53:44):
even know how much I appreciated that at the time,
and get you actually understand these things, and then once
you understand the things you care about, you can then
fight for them in the present. And that's what awareness
is the first step, and it's a general process. If
you really, if you're closed in, you need to be

(54:05):
general with yourself and just open up and start actually
understanding your values. And once you start paying attention to
your values, you'll also start wanting to act to gain
and keep them, and then you can start setting a
little bit bigger goal and a little bigger goal.

Speaker 1 (54:22):
So what would make a goal an irrational goal as
compared to irrational one.

Speaker 2 (54:31):
Well, I mean there're the easy cases where the justification
for it is something completely irrational. So there are all
kinds of secondhanded goals. Like some people want money because
as a social comparison thing, Right, I want to have
more money than those other people, because I want to
be a big shot or whatever it is. Right, that's

(54:51):
a terrible reason for wanting money. And so any anything,
anything that involves secondhandedness, if the goal is set for
a secondhanded reason, it is an interrational goal and it
is going to bite you in the butt if you
go after it. Now, the thing that's confusing about that

(55:12):
is that you can have a goal that has part
In fact, any goal that you can achieve, it has
got to have some rational element. So like take making
a really big business, making a business really succeed. No
one can actually make a business succeed without being somewhat
focused on reality. You need to actually produce things on

(55:33):
a schedule for an amount that people will pay, right,
I mean, there are a lot of facts there that
and values involved that have to be addressed or else
you will not make money. But you could have a
really wrong reason for doing that. And if if that's
the case, you won't get the pleasure out of it.
And if that's the case, one of the things that

(55:54):
you need to do is you need to untangle the
rational part of the goal, which is usually a creation goal,
from the irrational part, which is like to impress people,
or or maybe it's something like so because I never
want to feel unsafe again, which is not possible. That's
like impossible. Right, life is risky, I mean where life

(56:17):
is a process of continuous action because if you stop
the action, you die, You literally die, right, So there
is no such thing as safety. And so if that's which,
if you've built in something that's impossible into the goal,
even if it seems like the concrete that you're trying
to get is possible, if you've loaded it with a

(56:41):
reason that's impossible, or a payoff that you're expecting that
it's impossible, or in irrational justification, that would make it
an irrational goal. And there's you can't necessarily tell that
from the outside. That's something that you have to figure
out from the inside. And the way you figure it
out is you wint it having ambivalence about your goal,

(57:02):
because if you have any if you have any irrational
motivation built into it, you will be pulled in a
couple of different directions. It won't be all aligned around
one thing.

Speaker 1 (57:14):
How do you know if you've set a goal that's
really impossible. Well, like, if you set a goal in
tennis to be I don't know how the eating system goes.

Speaker 2 (57:30):
But yeah, well let's be to be world champion.

Speaker 1 (57:33):
That would be ridiculous, but you know, to be much
better than you can be.

Speaker 2 (57:38):
Right, Well, let's say professional level. Right, for me to
be professional level at you know, sixty two? Right, Okay,
I mean, this is not going to happen. So the
person you have to convince that it is logically possible
is yourself, right, I do not think I could convince

(58:03):
myself that's logically possible just from what I know about
anatomy and and things like that. Right, it might have
been potentially possible if I'd set that goal when I
was fourteen. I really don't know. I really don't know.
Maybe it would have needed to have been eight, you know.

(58:24):
I mean it's not clear to me how early you
need to start developing some of these skills before you
know that, I'll never have the kind of coordination that
I would have if I had been sports oriented at
a younger age. I really don't know. But like, but
let's take something like I have a goal which I

(58:46):
think probably a lot of people think is totally impossible,
which is to have a ten million dollar business, meaning
ten million dollar revenue a year. And now that is
a very long range goal your own. I am.

Speaker 1 (59:02):
This is that's a lot of money.

Speaker 2 (59:05):
That's a lot of money. And to say that I'm
nowhere close there is such an understatement. I mean, it's
it is. It is a little bit ridiculous to even
say it out loud. But the reason that I actually
have that, and I have it, and it's I don't
have it as like a committed thing where I have
a plan to get to it, but I have a

(59:26):
commitment to figure out how to really make money and
build a scalable business. I really do have that commitment
and I am actively working on that. And the reason
I don't think it's crazy is because of this coach
that I mentioned, Brookes Deal. She has a business that's
made fifty million dollars a year. Well, and so there's

(59:48):
it's a life coach business, and and she talks about
how she set this goal. She's actually made one hundred
million dollars actually, and she's made enough money at this
point she said, what would she set next a billion dollars.
That was ridiculous. She wasn't interested in a billion dollars.
So she says she isn't setting a billion dollar goals.
She's moving on to other goals. But I mean, that's

(01:00:11):
wildly exciting and that would have, you know, tremendous impact.
It's like that's it's like really opened up my horizons
to think, Wow, that might be possible. Now I have
a ton of things I need to work on to
be able to do that. Like my attitude toward money
isn't good, you know, in the same way I don't
have the killer instinct in tennis, I don't have the

(01:00:31):
competitive instinct in business, and I need that in order
to make some money. And so I'm literally working on
some of these values and I may never get there,
And it might be that it is in fact, maybe
i'll it, maybe that I'll die trying, or it may
be that in ten years, when I have solved a

(01:00:54):
lot of business problem, I also decide that I'm not
actually that interested in business, and so I don't want
to learn the additional business skills to do that. But
I don't see any reason in principle that I couldn't
do that, and you know, assuming that I live long enough,
and assuming that I live, assuming that I live for
at least twenty or thirty years or something like that.

(01:01:19):
So I don't think that's an impossible goal. But you see,
I have some basis. It is not an arbitrary goal.
I have some basis for believing it's positive possible. It's
so it's exactly the possible probable issue that there needs
to be some evidence that this could be done, and
there can't be any evidence that it's impossible. And so

(01:01:43):
let's let's get another example of something that might be impossible,
or can we or does this answer the question?

Speaker 1 (01:01:50):
Or am I I think so? No? I think that's good.

Speaker 2 (01:01:53):
This is why you can't do any How does anyone
survive with the objectivist ethics and epistemology? I don't know
how they serve five your own without it?

Speaker 1 (01:02:01):
Yeah, without it.

Speaker 2 (01:02:02):
I don't know how to say.

Speaker 1 (01:02:04):
One hundred thousand years without it.

Speaker 2 (01:02:06):
I know those poor people.

Speaker 1 (01:02:13):
You must have. That's some of it implicit in some ways.

Speaker 2 (01:02:16):
Yes, that is it?

Speaker 1 (01:02:18):
Yes, Yeah, okay, so we've got a bunch of questions.
Maybe we should shift to questions just to make sure
you don't let's see you did want to, we want to?
You want to say something about your website, Phoebe January one,
anything like that. You want to, you want to, you

(01:02:38):
want to pitch.

Speaker 2 (01:02:40):
So this if you're if you if you have goals
and you want to get some help actually working on
them and getting them achieved in twenty twenty six, I
have coaching programs for that. So I have a coaching
program called Launch that's actually going to start January tenth.
It runs for eight weeks and it's a group coaching program,
and I coach people to set the goals so they

(01:03:00):
can actually get it. Could be a ten year goal,
but you want to achieve something major within that eight weeks,
and we will. I will coach you till you figure
out something that will move objectively, move you toward your
long term goal and get you some momentum. And if
you're curious about this, I have a freebie. I'm running
a freebee on January first. It's called motivating steady work

(01:03:22):
on a major goal. And that's part of what you need.
If you've got a long range goal, you've got to
be able to work on it consistently, even when you
don't feel like it, and that's what I'm going to
be talking about on January first. So if you go
to my website, thinkingdirections dot com, so that's thinking, like
using your brain directions like north, south, east and east
and west, and there's more than one of them. So

(01:03:44):
thinkingdirections dot Com. There's a sign up for the freebie
and you know, lots of other stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:03:50):
And assume that's all virtue. That's all over all.

Speaker 1 (01:03:53):
Zoom over zoom okay, all zoom yep excellent. And then
we should also mentioned that we are going to be
at Rand's Day weekend Objective's confidence.

Speaker 3 (01:04:07):
Yes, and what are you going to be talking about?

Speaker 2 (01:04:10):
I'm going to be talking on self esteem, reliance on
the power to think. It's going to be really interesting.
It's a I've been thinking a lot about that topic
and thinking about ein RAN's line that self esteem is
reliance on the power to your power to think is
so exactly true. It's it's such an important idea. Nobody

(01:04:33):
else has that idea. Nobody else has that idea. That's
what I'm going to be talking about. What about you?
What are you talking about your own.

Speaker 3 (01:04:40):
I'm talking about you know, trade.

Speaker 1 (01:04:42):
It sounds so much more boring than your topic, the
history of free trade and tariffs and all that fun stuff.
So a little bit of economics and history. There's some
really interesting American history there.

Speaker 2 (01:04:57):
Yeah, that sounds good. I mean, it will be fascinating.
The one you gave last year was absolutely fascinating. It
was great. I mean, I thought it was a really
fun conference.

Speaker 1 (01:05:05):
It's you.

Speaker 2 (01:05:05):
It's a little smaller conference.

Speaker 1 (01:05:06):
Yeah, I know, it's a lot of fun.

Speaker 2 (01:05:08):
It's in Florida.

Speaker 1 (01:05:10):
It's in February, in late January, early February, so you
don't want to be anywhere else in the world in
late January early February, Floid is the place to be
because the weather's perfect, the sunshines. And yeah, so if
you guys still want to if you guys want to
sign up, and you should, and you should come. And

(01:05:32):
again it's small, so it's intimate, so you get more
time to talk to one another and to the speakers,
all hanging out and we're gonna have Don and Peter
Schwartz and Shoshana Milgrim and Ellen Canna and of course
Harry Bence Warner will be there. Go to RAN's Day
Con so RMS Day Con Dot THEBVH dot com. Now

(01:05:58):
that is a terrible U r L. Whoever does the
marketing for this, they need a better, like something short
and simple, right ranscon dot com, you know that would
be good.

Speaker 2 (01:06:11):
Hey, I can give you an easy thing for people
who want Yeah. Uh, we own Harry and I own
TF publication zones ransday dot com. If you go to
rans day dot com, it tells what ramsay is and
at the bottom is a link to the rams day.

Speaker 1 (01:06:32):
Dot com. Because then the bottom of the page, because
the BVH is like it blows the crow and everything
else out of the water. So it's impossible. Uh, Toby
says he's in the UK. I mean nobody wants to
be in the UK in late January. Get on a
plane the cheap flights to Florida and come on over.

(01:06:55):
I don't think it's going to be streamed.

Speaker 2 (01:06:57):
No, it's not going to be streamed. We had someone
come from the Canary Islands last year. You got no
excuse ex.

Speaker 3 (01:07:04):
And the Canary Island the weather is good in late January.

Speaker 1 (01:07:07):
So but the UK, I know what the weather's like
in the UK in late January, right, not good? All right?
So we have questions you can still ask questions, so
feel free to ask questions and jump in. And if
you want to just support the show, you can use
the sticker feature.

Speaker 3 (01:07:26):
But questions are good because that way we get content.

Speaker 1 (01:07:29):
This is good, yes, all right, So this is fifty
dollars molten Splendor. I love his handle, molten Splendor. That's great.
So here's his question. He says, I had a great
career for forty five years.

Speaker 3 (01:07:46):
I'm now tired.

Speaker 1 (01:07:47):
I'm passionately engaged in collecting and researching a specific genre
of hot glass. I'm a terrible read of nonfiction. My
mind wanders. Any tips on how to become a better
reader of nonfiction, Well.

Speaker 2 (01:08:07):
I would suggest you get some nonfiction on this genre
of art glass that you're interested in. So the way
to develop any skill is to have a selfish value
for developing it. So that's the first thing. Probably it's
this stuff that you're reading about. So here's the second thing.

(01:08:27):
This is something I actually just learned from a book
called The Practicing Mind, which I just recommended on my
website yesterday. If you're trying to develop a new skill,
you need a practice that you can do that is easy,
and the four key words are simple, short, small, and slow.

(01:08:55):
So keep it simple, short, small, and slow. I got
this from the practicing mind. I knew about keep it simple, sweetie,
but I didn't know about keep it simple, short, small,
and slow. So let's explain what that might be for
reading nonfiction. So the whole issue is you need retention, right.

(01:09:15):
Retention is the key thing you're going for. So a
simple way to improve your retention might be to read
a page and write one sentence of something you learned.
And that might be also. And if that's too much,

(01:09:37):
then well let's stipulate. If that's not too much, that's
small enough. Right. It has to be small enough that
you could say, read that page and then set back
and say what did I get from that page? And
if that's not tall enough, if you can't do that,
then make it smaller. Take a paragraph and say what
did I get from that? And it's okay to say

(01:09:57):
I didn't get anything from that that was boring. So
this is very important. I'm just gonna this is people
think that they should have to read every paragraph of
a book because someone said it was on a topic
that they should read. Books have to be interesting. If
the book is not interesting, you don't have to read it.

(01:10:18):
So this is a So here's a short test for
whether I'm trying to come up with something that's simple, small, short,
and slow. Here's a short test. Is this interesting or not?
And if it's not interesting, you don't have to read it.
If it's mildly interesting or you think it should be interesting,

(01:10:42):
name why it's interesting. Now that will slow you down.
But if you can name why this is interesting, why
you care, that will make you more curious about the
next paragraph. Now you might not need to do this
on every paragraph. You may need to once a page
say what did I learn? Was it interesting? Or what

(01:11:04):
would make it interesting? And answer those questions for yourself.
And that will help you figure out if you should
even be reading this book. And if you are reading
this book, it should help you retain it. So I
just made that up as a process. The point is
you need something something like that where you're going to
actually practice and have that be your test of success.

(01:11:24):
Your test of success is not what you got out
of the whole book. Your test is did you do
that three times while you were reading today or something
like that. I did this actually with tennis. I was
this is the example that's in the article that I
wrote yesterday. You know, terrible, Like I'm playing a game
with Harry and I'm terrible. I'm just terrible, And I'm like,
why can't I do what I do in my coaching session,

(01:11:48):
And I said, I need something simple, short, small and slow,
and so I said, okay, I'm just going to try
to do a split step whenever he hits the ball.
This is a particular thing you do in tennis. I
can try to demonstrate it, but you basically you jump
up and with your feet apart, and this puts you

(01:12:09):
in a position so that you can then move in
the direction of where the ball goes. And you do
it when the other person hits the ball, which is
just before you're going to find out is it going
to your left or your right? And so it gets
you ready. And it turns out it's quite hard for
me to actually do that, to actually like, stop whatever
I'm doing, pay enough attention so I can see that
he's about to hit the ball, get in position so

(01:12:30):
I can do a split step when he hits the ball.
My game got much better immediately when I did that.
But I tested my success not on whether I hit
the ball or whether I got the point, but whether
I did the split step, and I focused on and
this is the other thing from that book, I do
observe correct, So I just focused on did I do

(01:12:52):
the split step? And if I did, yay? And if
I didn't, why not? Oh I need to look a
little earlier, and I got better at it. So that's
what That's the kind of thing you need to be
more specific, I need to actually talk to you about
why it's hard to read the nonfiction.

Speaker 1 (01:13:13):
Great, thanks Moulton. Harry has a comment. Please repeat the
idea of finding the value behind the fear based emotion.
I find it so powerful.

Speaker 2 (01:13:27):
Okay, hey, you should find the fear behind the fear
based emotion. I guess he wants maybe we could give
an example. What's something someone might be afraid of.

Speaker 3 (01:13:44):
Well, they're failing, yeah, but we.

Speaker 2 (01:13:48):
Need an actual goal that they would be, that they
would be that they would have a concrete fear about. Well,
so let's take Moulton. Let's take Moulton's example. Suppause he's
afraid he's going to spend all this time reading this
book and he's not going to get anything out of it.
He's not going to have learned anything. It's going to

(01:14:09):
be a total waste of time. He's going to be
bored out of his mind. It's like, I don't want
to read this book. It's going to be terrible. Right,
He's all kinds of thread oriented emotions about it. So
just so, one of the things you can do to
turn around a thread or ated emotion is you can
just ineffect rant about it, like I just did. I
just made up a rant for our friend. Right, But

(01:14:32):
the rant has in it the seeds of the value,
so like it's going to be boring. Okay, so you
really want to be intellectually stimulated. That gives you. Intellectual
stimulation is a deep rational value. So that actually gives
you a way to say, well, what is that. That's
actually one of the reasons I suggested Milton, ask was
it interesting? Or how could it be interesting? You can

(01:14:55):
figure out why it might be interesting to you. That
will make a big differen and you're being able to
take in information and you can find out that that's
what you care about. Because when you rant about the problem,
you're worried about being bored or I'm going to waste
all this time. Well, okay, so the thing you want
is you want to get banged for your buck, right,

(01:15:18):
you want to actually get a payoff. Well so, and
the payoff is in some kind of understanding. Well, that's
also the thing that I had just suggested is also
related to that, because I put in the question do
you know what did I take from this? This is
a known thing. The tactic that I've taught, actually the

(01:15:41):
first tactic that I ever taught something called condensation where
you I learned it from Peter Schwartz at the Objective's
Graduate Center. And it's you extract the main points and
theme from a piece of writing. And this is an
incredible study technique. If you to write, you read a

(01:16:01):
paragraph or you read a section and you try to
name in one sentence what the point of that is.
It's incredible study technique. It absolutely I mean I have
done this for all of OPAR and I know o
PAR very well. As a result, it's an incredibly helpful tactic.
It really helps with understanding. Now you might not know
that offhand, but if you know that what you want
is something that helps you retain material, you can then

(01:16:24):
go look on the internet for strategies. You know, at
Locke has a book how to study, and it has
this kind of thing in it too. I mean, this
is not a completely alien strategy that you're getting from me,
and it's not the only strategy. So the first step
in turning the threat oriented the fear or the fear

(01:16:47):
based emotion is putting into words what are you afraid of?
Explain what you're afraid of, and then look at what
exactly you're afraid of and see if you can name, Well,
what does that mean? I want? You usually want the
opposite of it, but it's something concrete. It's more concrete
than just the emotion tends to be a little bit
vague and abstract.

Speaker 1 (01:17:08):
How you suggest public with the fear of public speaking?

Speaker 2 (01:17:12):
Yes, well, people are afraid of public speaking for different reasons.

Speaker 1 (01:17:15):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:17:17):
Some people are afraid that they're going to be They're
going to look stupid. Some people are afraid that they're
going to be they're not going to have anything to say.
So you in order to solve the fear of public speaking,
you need to actually name what are you afraid of?
And some of them turn out to be cameras. Right,

(01:17:41):
I'm afraid that I won't get my point across. Well,
you definitely won't get your point across if you don't
do the public speaking for sure, right you have zero
chance of getting your point across if you don't try.
And it's very helpful to put that into perspective because it,
you know, sometimes you've got kind of a false contrast
in the back your mind, and making it explicit makes

(01:18:04):
you see what your actual choices are.

Speaker 1 (01:18:09):
I thank you, Harry. Let's see Andrew rand wrote a
letter that she did wrote in a letter that she
did love herself, albeit it is a different feeling than
love she had for others. What's gene view on the

(01:18:29):
nature of self love? Is it synonymous with self esteem?

Speaker 2 (01:18:38):
I haven't thought about that. I don't think it's synonymous
with self esteem because I think self esteem has a
lot to do with your capacity to act in the world,
and self love is about you being a good person,
which is you know, related to self esteem. But when

(01:19:00):
I think self love, I think taking delight in myself,
and it's a lot more like romance in the sense
of I'm really glad I exist, and I look, I've
done this, and I've done this, and yay me, And

(01:19:21):
there's there's a kind of celebration involved in self love.
Whereas self esteem is a little bit more solid and
forward looking and feed on the ground. How's that for
an answer?

Speaker 1 (01:19:39):
I mean, I think they're right. I think I think
that's basically right. I mean, we can probably if you
think about it more, I think you'll probably find the answer. Sure,
Andrew though a scoundrel, Brandon's essay on Pleasure and Pain
in Virtue of Selfishness is critical for former religionists or

(01:20:00):
to integrate objectivism. How does one convert from negative emotional
purposes sadness and guilt to positive joy?

Speaker 2 (01:20:10):
Okay, I'm going to take I'm going to take the question.
I'm not entirely sure how it relates to the art Menia,
but you know, I mean, I'm rand I've ran edit
of the publication that that came in. I'm not surprised
you've got some value from it. There. So the first

(01:20:30):
thing with any emotion, so there's you don't change. Your
goal should not be to change your emotions. Right, If
your focus is on I want to feel a certain way,
that is an emotionalist goal. And I don't mean that
to give you like to make you feel bad. I'm
giving that to you because you're interested in objectivism and

(01:20:51):
you recognize that emotionalism is self destructive. Part of the
problem you can get into when it's our confusion and
that people have about setting happiness as the purpose of
life is that they then set emotions as goals, positive
emotions as goals, And that does not follow if happiness

(01:21:11):
is your purpose, your goals need to be rational. They
need to be objective things that you can achieve in reality,
and emotions are not objective. They are transient experiences that
you have. What they are, and the way to think
about them, which is very important, is that they are alerts.

(01:21:35):
You think of them as alerts. You do not have
an emotion unless some value, some value of yours, something
that you care about deeply. And I mean here when
I use the word value, I mean in the philosophical sense,
something rational, something is in fact good for human life.
When you have an emotion, there is some value of

(01:21:56):
yours that is at stake, meaning your action right now
is going to determine whether you gain or keep that
or lose it or harm it. And the reason that
it's so important to introspect emotions is that the emotion
won't necessarily tell you what that value is. You need

(01:22:16):
to introspect the emotion to figure out what is the
value at stake right now. And that is very very
situational specific. And you know your emotions change really quickly.
I mean, what's its stake changes as things unfold. So
so each of the emotions. The way I teach this
I a I have classes on this too one and

(01:22:41):
I have a tactic I call introspection one oh one.
The way I teach it is you need to well, okay,
I teach it several ways. Let me just say what
it is. You need to figure out which basic family
of emotion it is. The ones you mentioned, the ones

(01:23:02):
that were mentioned the question were basic families. Each basic family,
like anger or anger and gratitude is a family, or
joy and grief are a family. Or desire and aversion
or a family. Each basic family has a signature evaluation
associated with it. So anger and gratitude are about other people.
Anger is the other person did something that was bad.

(01:23:23):
Gratitude is they did something was good for me, bad
bad for me, or good for me. That's what anger
and gratitude are, whereas joy and grief are I gained
a value or I lost a value. Desire and aversion
is I mean they're in a certain sense that the
most big desire is something this is if I acted
to get this, it would be good. And aversion is

(01:23:46):
if I acted to get this, it would be bad.
So don't do that.

Speaker 1 (01:23:50):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (01:23:52):
So you need to figure out what you do is
you take the emotion, you know what the generalized evaluation is,
and then you figure out concretely in this situation, what
are the pieces like who's if you're angry, who's the
person and what do they didn't do that was bad?
Or if you're feeling grief, what is the thing you lost?

(01:24:14):
And you need to go Sometimes you need to go
one level deeper. You get to the value and then
say why is that important to me? Why is that
important to me? You need to go more abstract because,
for example, if you lost something like I did something
the other day that I really wish I hadn't done,

(01:24:38):
and when I introspected it because I really felt guilty
about it, it was professionalism. You know, I really wanted professionalism,
and so you can't get back what happened last week
where you acted unprofessionally. But if you sit there and
you say, gee, professionalism really matters to me. What can

(01:24:59):
I do to become more professional? Now? How can I
act now to be more professional? What that does is
that shifts things, that makes professionalism a higher value to you.
You take an action now, Like you know, I sent
an apology, I actually took some steps to learn from it.

(01:25:20):
I actually put some things in place so that I
wouldn't do that again. And this was for me, right,
This is to develop my value of professionalism. This is
not because I owe other people in apology. This is
part of my pursuing my values, and that's what heals
all wounds. It's the identifying the value that is in

(01:25:42):
fact underlying that emotion and then pursuing that value that
shifts everything. As soon as you start pursuing the value.
As soon as you put yourself in that mindset, you
start feeling desire and confidence. As soon as you start
getting it, you start feeling pride, and that's what shifts
the emotions. But that is a byproduct of your acting

(01:26:05):
to gain and keep values. So whatever emotion you have,
it's an alert to some value at stake, and the
important the rational responsibility there is to figure out what
is the value, and how do I act to gain
and keep it now and sometimes you have to go
more abstract. Sometimes you have to go more abstract to

(01:26:26):
be able to do that.

Speaker 1 (01:26:28):
Good Richard, it just says you mentioned the issue of
putting morality above happiness. Would you elaborate on that.

Speaker 2 (01:26:41):
Well, I just got this from Tara's book, but I
think the way she put it and which really resonated
for me, is, you know, one of the things that
brought me to objectivism was I had a strong sense
of morality of good and bad. I really believed in

(01:27:02):
right and wrong and good and bad, and I was
going to be good and right, and so I RAN's
moral confidence was one of her big attractions to me,
and the moral confidence of the characters, and at the
Shrug that was, you know, one of the big things
that I resonated with, the moral certainty, and so that

(01:27:27):
came first for me, and I had a whole lot
of altruism baked in. I mean, that's why. I mean
I've told this story. But you know, unlike the vast
majority of hardcore objectivists, it took seven years between the
time I read out the Shrug at the time I
decided she was right, I mean really right, yes, and

(01:27:48):
that's that's not a typical that's not a typical case.
And I the thing that I had to be convinced
on is that altruism is wrong in principle, and that's
what I figured out seven years later. But the part

(01:28:08):
of I need to do what's right was stronger, and
uh a lot of the things that I figured out
over time. I was very focused on doing what was right,
and I saw then when I wasn't happy, so like
I had a big problem with a duty premise. And
when I started my business, I you know, I actually

(01:28:29):
really got myself sick by working too hard because I
thought that was the right thing to do. And I
just made myself work and it didn't matter how I felt.
This was before I started, before I started talking about
emotional overload, and I really I had to learn this
stuff the hard way. This is one of the reasons

(01:28:50):
I know so much. If you want to find someone
who is a good teacher, find someone who really had
lived its Yeah, I mean, it's really it's ridiculous anyway.
And not only did I do it the hard way,
but I liked that I was doing hard stuff that
actually turns out to be also slightly a misconception if

(01:29:12):
you pick a goal because it's hard, I mean, don't
rule out the goal because it's hard, but don't pick
it because it's hard. That's you know, pick it because
you're interested in it. It's not a feature that it's
hard anyway, that's an aside. So the thing is that
I would then say, oh, I'm not happy, so I

(01:29:32):
must be doing something wrong. What am I doing wrong?
And I would analyze it that way, and then I'd
figure out what the right thing to do was, and
then I'd find out that I wasn't happy again, and
in effect, happiness didn't have a high enough a standing
in my psychology. I mean, I was pro happiness. I
definitely was on board that happiness was, you know, the

(01:29:55):
purpose of life and that I should be happy and
all this stuff, but it wasn't an operation and factor
in my deciding what was the right thing to do.
The right thing to do is what I saw, it
was the right thing to do, and to hell with
how I feel. That was basically I mean, this was
this was now a long time ago. That was basically
what my attitude was. And to completely get that out
of my psychology has you know, I figured out it

(01:30:18):
was wrong and then I but then to get it
out of your psychology is not the easiest thing in
the world. So what this line of Tara's did for
me was, well, it tied in with the article that
ein Ran wrote who was the final authority in ethics?

(01:30:38):
Which is, you know, Q and A from one of
the old back issues. I think it's probably in the
virtue of selfishness too, uh, where she she says that
question is mistaken because there's there is no who, there
is no God, there is no authority in ethics. And
so you know, Tara's line is a little twist on

(01:31:01):
that that it's your commitment to happiness which gives ethics
its authority. I mean that just completely makes it be
about you and your life, and it sets the hierarchy
right right that you do need to So this is
something that again I've learned the hard way, that you

(01:31:22):
need to set goals and pursue them in a way
so that there's pleasure as you go, there's payoffs so
along the way. I mean I've known that for years,
I've coached people on that, and yet I saw that
as a practical issue, and I think Tara turned it
into a moral issue. The pleasure along the way has

(01:31:44):
got to be a given that's got to be factored
into your plans, because happiness is the purpose of your life.
And it's not good if you aren't seeing the connection
to your happiness. And that's not happiness. It's sometime twenty
years in the future happiness. I mean, I guess I
give two talks onhappiness, but I really you know, happiness
is an ongoing state where, in effect, you are achieving

(01:32:06):
your values values plural, meaning that your values are consistent
and you can kind of achieve them all at once.

Speaker 1 (01:32:13):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:32:14):
That's so that's the kind of switch through that I
got from Terra's uh introduction to her.

Speaker 1 (01:32:21):
Book Good Let's see Fendhoppas says, if annoyed is an emotion,
what is a psychopistemological response to it? I see it
as I had an expectation and it's being ignored the disrespected.

(01:32:42):
Also as an on a meeting you at okon twenty five.

Speaker 2 (01:32:46):
Likewise, so annoyed is in the anger family. So this
is the way I would analyze it. So it's a
mild form of anger. Somebody done you wrong. It was
a small wrong, but some he done you wrong? Okay,
So one of the things, can you repeat what he said?

Speaker 1 (01:33:07):
I had an expectation and it's being ignored or disrespected.

Speaker 2 (01:33:12):
Okay, Right, So the concrete expectation you had is the
critical thing. What were you expecting that was the value
that was ignored or disrespect That's what you need to identify.
Like so for example, just just a little example, you're

(01:33:35):
going out of an old fashioned store that does not
have electric doors, and the person in front of you
lets the door fall so that it kind of, you know,
instead of just holding it for two seconds so that
you can get your hand on it, so that it's
a little easier to go out the door. Now, that
would be a small enough item to feel annoyed, and

(01:33:56):
there is an expectation there. There's an expectation of, you know,
just a little bit of support, a little bit of goodwill,
a little bit of situational awareness that there's someone right
behind them, and benevolence, right, and so naming that this
is you know, I just named four things that I

(01:34:17):
would be wishing for and would feel annoyed that I
hadn't gotten if that happened. So then the question is
what can I do so I'm feeling a lack right,
I'm actually there's a little grief in there that I
didn't get. Benevolence, support, situational awareness. Okay, we'll just use

(01:34:37):
those three. Those are values of mine which have like
they feel like I'm not getting these values. So what
do you do? Increase your situational awareness? Make sure you
hold the door for the next person. Pause and pause,

(01:34:58):
and tell yourself that it doesn't matter they don't support you,
because you've got your back. I mean, there are little
things you can do in that moment which will in
effect completely change your mood. And I mean it seems
a little over the top for just being annoyed because
a person didn't hold the door, but I needed an example.

(01:35:21):
But the point is that you can do that, and
that's what you do. You know, the fact that another
person misbehaved doesn't when you process that emotion. First of all,
in some cases you may conclude that they didn't misbehave,
But assuming they did misbehave, that doesn't mean that they're
then going to apologize or make resptitution. That's not what

(01:35:44):
it's about. It's about you understanding your values and understanding
that you can get your values no matter what other
people do and like for example, I mean this happens
like with businesses, which we've been talking about. Businesses, you
try to try to sell your product to someone and
they don't buy it. Well, it doesn't you know, that's

(01:36:05):
not the end of the world. As long as you
have a product that some people want, you can sell
it to other people. You need some but any customers.
You don't have to have this particular customer. You don't
have to have this particular person giving you support. You
don't have to have this particular person be someone with
situational awareness. But it does mean you now know that,

(01:36:25):
like if you're trying to figure out who you're going
to date, you like someone who is generous, benevolent, and
has situational awareness. I'm just making this up. You understand
your values a little bit more. I think I've really
beat that example as far as it can be done.

Speaker 1 (01:36:42):
I think it's dead. I think it's good. I think
it's good. Piegupta says would love to hear Gene's thoughts
on tips for the crisis of meaning.

Speaker 2 (01:36:59):
I don't don't exactly know what he means by that
the crisis of meaning.

Speaker 1 (01:37:04):
So this is the idea that you that you know
with the death of religion, if you will, people don't
know what the meaning of life is, the purpose of
life is, and young people today all twining to nihilism
because they don't see meaning in life. It's it's yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:37:29):
Okay, all right, then I do understand that I didn't
recognize it. Under that I don't. So the first thing
is what gives meaning to life? Your central purpose is
what is the fundamental thing that gives meaning to your life?
Is your central purpose. That's the thing that's directly under control,
under your control. Now, I do think important relationships give

(01:37:52):
meaning to life too. You know, there's a Victor Frankel's book,
man Search for Meaning, which if you haven't read, everyone
should read this book. He's a concentration camp survivor and
he writes about his experience in the concentration camp. He's
a psychologist, and what he observed is that the people

(01:38:14):
who survived were the people who found meaning. And there
were three things that there were three kinds. There were
people like him. He was trying to reproduce a book
manuscript that he had just finished before he was captured,
and he didn't want to lose his book, so he
was like getting a little pieces of paper and writing
on it. So he had a career purpose. He saw

(01:38:38):
people who made their whole purpose keeping a loved one alive,
and then when that loved person one died, they died
like the next day. They'd been strong and then they.

Speaker 1 (01:38:50):
Just lost it.

Speaker 2 (01:38:51):
And then he saw people who used religion. They would
meet and have I don't I'm sorry, I don't know
the Jewish ceremony, but where there are various Jewish ceremonies
that they would do daily, where they would meet and
they would do them, and that was how they kept
their meaning alive. And I think this is exactly like
self esteem and pseudo self esteem. I think religion is

(01:39:13):
a source of pseudo meaning, and that the real rational
source of meaning, that the one that is entirely independent
and under your control, is central purpose. And so that's
one of the reasons why as central purpose is indispensable
in life. And I'll get to what do we do
for these poor kids, because I do think there's a
big issue with the young generation. And then I think

(01:39:39):
that relationships are kind of an intermediate case because you
can have completely independent relation, independent meaning morally independent, first
handed relationships and they do give meaning to your life.
And when the person dies, it's devastating. And I mean,
you know, it's one thing for your parents, but when
you lose a love one. I think of people I

(01:40:01):
know who have lost a loved one and it's devastating.
And you know, it takes this huge source of meaning
o their lives. And that is understandable that person was
an irreplaceable value. I mean, I'm randon Frank O'Connor is
you know, of course an example of that. So, so
the first thing you need to understand is what puts
meaning into a life. The main thing that is under
your volitional control is central purpose. So then what about

(01:40:25):
these poor kids? Is I actually think you know, we
you know, Adam Reed likes to call it the disminding
of progressive education, but I think the worst effect of
progressive education is the destruction of valuing. That was the
lasting impact of progressive education on me was the value

(01:40:49):
the muddling up and the confusion over values and not
having clear values. And and I do think that that
is a problem. To the little extent that I know,
I think that that's what the cause of this problem is.
It's so it's partly literal of conceptual skills because of

(01:41:11):
the education, but it's also values that they have, you know,
even things like this, you know, participation awards and all
these other things. There's because there is no developing of

(01:41:34):
individual valuing and you're caring about it's just things that
you do and everybody is equal. The the the leveling
that they go after, it really does confuse people's valuing system.
And so how do we recover on that? I mean,

(01:41:54):
I think it gets back to the question you asked earlier.
You've got to find something that the kid or if
the kid wants help. The place to start is something
that they actually want, anything that they want that is,
you know, got any kind of objectivity to it is

(01:42:16):
the place to start and start building that. And I
do think people are very resilient. I totally think that
this is a solvet that this that these individuals, if
they're reached, can be inspired and pulled out of that.
But it is a big problem. It is a big problem.

(01:42:37):
I'm not minimizing it.

Speaker 1 (01:42:38):
At all, Richard. Richard says, I told him, I told
a psychiatrist that psychology needs a philosophy. He applied that
every philosopher has a psychology that influences the philosophy any thoughts.

Speaker 2 (01:43:03):
The causal Read the last chapter of Opark ideas, philosophy
is the driver of history and philosophy is the driver
of psychology. For sure. That was This is one of
the reasons I left psychology graduate school with the masters
is that it was totally clear to me that the

(01:43:25):
way that people were even thinking about how to study
psychology was entirely driven by their philosophical views, and they
didn't know that that was a total blinder. And I
do think Einran's philosophy is in the process of revolutionizing psychology.

(01:43:48):
I mean, that's there's several of us working on that problem,
and I think it radically simplifies the whole science of psychology.
I think that. So I don't know what else to
say to that.

Speaker 1 (01:44:02):
Yeah, Usbud asks, could Edmund Dante from the Count of
Monte Cristo have chosen to live a happy life by
leaving everything behind after escaping or was revenge necessary?

Speaker 2 (01:44:18):
Well, revenge I don't think is a rational goal. I mean,
do you think it's a rational goal you're own? I'm
really curious, But I don't think super satisfying. No, it's
not actually, I mean it is in fiction, but in
real life it's not.

Speaker 1 (01:44:32):
Right, well, only in the sense of justice, right, So
revenge is a form of justice, and seeing bad people
get away with bad.

Speaker 2 (01:44:44):
Stuff is demoralizing.

Speaker 1 (01:44:48):
And seeing that bad people, you know, get what they
deserve is life affirming. It's it's there is justice in it.
So it's why we respond positively to revenge fiction because
we're seeing that in action. Now, to make that your

(01:45:10):
central purpose in life, which is what in a sense
the key figure countermartest crystal, that is problematic, particularly if
it takes a long time and it's divoting from everything
any other value, because then it becomes But that's it's
essentially justice, and justice is important. So I do think
I do think it's positive.

Speaker 2 (01:45:30):
That's very interesting because that really clarifies my point of view,
which I don't think is the same as your point
of view.

Speaker 1 (01:45:39):
I mean, it's not Harry says Era that Iran lowed
the idea that he went after revenge and you could
see that because it's in the context of his life.
It's a negative.

Speaker 2 (01:45:51):
Well not only that, but it's so you know, the
other thing that I ran said is it's more important
reward the good than it is to punish the bad.

Speaker 1 (01:45:58):
Sure, but that doesn't mean it's not important to punish
the bad.

Speaker 2 (01:46:02):
It doesn't mean it's not important to punish the bad.
But he did it at the expense of his life, right,
He did it at the expense of having a life
that created something. So I don't think punishment could be
a central purpose in the sense that I think a
central purpose does need to be a create something you
create in the world. The the other thing, I mean,

(01:46:30):
there's also the other thing about revenge per se. I'm
going to think about this because I haven't thought about revenge.

Speaker 1 (01:46:38):
Has to live. He has to live a lie. He
has to put it on all our pretense, right, which is.

Speaker 2 (01:46:45):
A dead giveaway that this couldn't be the right thing
to do.

Speaker 3 (01:46:48):
But well, so does a spy, right, so can you?

Speaker 1 (01:46:52):
He is a spy and immoral, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:47:00):
So, I mean, I do think that it may be
that in order to be a spy you can't be
a completely integrated characters. So let's put it this way.
If you were in like suppose a civil war started
in this country and you decided that you one of

(01:47:22):
us decided that what we needed to do was to
be a spy in order to you know, save Western civilization. Right.
You might in an emergency decide to do that, but
it would destroy part of your soul. It would destroy

(01:47:43):
part of your soul. You you know, the double entry
bookkeeping will is it is a problem, and you have
to do it knowing you may never be First off,
you'll be killed if you're discovered, but also you may
not be able to recover psychologically from them. Now you could,
I think it would have to be an emergency situation.
I think in a war situation you might decide this

(01:48:06):
is what I'm going to do, and the same thing
with you know, some other really destructive purpose. In a
war situation, you might actually really decide going after destruction
is the right thing to do, because it's it is,
it is really not a normal situation. But I I

(01:48:31):
don't think that you could be psychologically whole and therefore
happy with that profession.

Speaker 1 (01:48:37):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:48:39):
And it might be a good fit for someone who
you know, it might be a good fit at a
certain time for someone that I mean, I don't know.
It's it's a little outside of my range of expertise.

Speaker 3 (01:48:52):
That's interesting to think about it.

Speaker 1 (01:48:54):
Could you be a CIA agent, Could you be almost
SUD agent and still be have a healthy psychology, have
a healthy life, be happy?

Speaker 2 (01:49:03):
Well, yeah, a compartments compartmentalization does not work, is so yes,
it would absolutely be required because I mean so I
actually have a little bit of experience with this in
the sense that I worked on classified work sure that
I still cannot tell anyone about. And we actually had

(01:49:24):
some conversations about this with some of us who were
in this program because it actually was an issued like
you having a conversation with your mother or your father
or something, and the wall would come up. I can't
talk about that, and it was not fun. It was

(01:49:44):
not fun. And this is you know, this is a
moral project for you know that for the USA government
doing rational work, and yet it had to be compartmentalized
because I couldn't talk about it with certain people. So
I do think there's psychological harm, but you know, I
don't know selative. There's a little speculative.

Speaker 1 (01:50:06):
But I want to say that there's a lot of
things that you don't talk to other people about for
who I do reasons.

Speaker 2 (01:50:13):
The the but usually you do it because you don't
want to.

Speaker 1 (01:50:19):
But but why do you want to talk about something
classified with somebody. If it's classified, if you fully integrate it,
if you fully understand the the the importance of keeping
it classified, then you don't want to talk about it.

Speaker 2 (01:50:34):
Oh. I think that's a little idealistic, because you know, here,
this is I'm working forty hours a week on this program,
and you know, and it's it's interesting work and I'm
learning things and I'm having successes and I can't share
it with the people I love. Yeah, it's it's you know,

(01:50:54):
it's it actually does affect the relationships a little bit
because you have to put in a distance. So so,
but this is not an important This is not like
a center of the page issue that I want to argue.
So it's okay with me. So absolutely, but it's fun
to talk about.

Speaker 1 (01:51:13):
Absolutely. Right. Oh, here's a big one. What is your
assessment of Seguine Freud and called jung.

Speaker 2 (01:51:21):
Uh? So, I'm essentially ignorant. Okay, So I didn't study
clinical psychology. I was in experimental psychology. And what I
know about Freud I know from reading objectivism and sounds

(01:51:44):
pretty irrational.

Speaker 1 (01:51:45):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:51:47):
The thing that some people want to make sure he
gets credit for is that he got the idea that
you could talk to people and help them with their
psychological problems, although I wonder if he actually did help
people with their psychological problems. I think the big problem
from what I can tell with Freud is that he,
you know, he made up this crazy theory about what
was going on outside of outside of to explain experiences

(01:52:13):
and that and and everybody has followed that up. They've
all got their crazy theory about that that they're all
very over complicated in my and and just totally arbitrary.
And Jung, you know, was basically a Freudian who came
up with his own somewhat crazy theory. Now, Jung, I know,
has at least one observation that I think is true,

(01:52:36):
which is the thing that drives you crazy the most
in like people you love, is something you don't like
about yourself. He calls it like the shadows self stuff.
But you know, he's got this crazy theory about it.
So the general thing, I would say this is true
for almost every psychologist. You need to look and see

(01:52:58):
what the observations are and see if you think the
observations are true. But throw and in some cases there
will be practical insights related to the observations, but the
theory is essentially garbage. The theory is and it's very
important not to let the theory into your head because

(01:53:19):
it's it's destructive, it's all deterministic and uh ah will
actually create more problems than it solves.

Speaker 1 (01:53:34):
Have you seen the movie Aliens?

Speaker 2 (01:53:37):
I have not seen the movie Aliens.

Speaker 1 (01:53:40):
Yes, because this is a question about the hero and
Aliens chaws what we're gonna have to skip it this time.
Let's see Lincoln asks, how does one stay motivated on

(01:54:03):
your professional goals when faced with personal challenges? Should they
be addressed first before focusing on work.

Speaker 2 (01:54:15):
I don't think that this is the kind of thing
that has a you know, a cookbook solution, right, generally speaking,
when you're in some kind of you know, conflict where
you think you should be doing work, but you're just
completely distracted, Like, let's just make up something. You're having

(01:54:38):
trouble in your marriage and you're worried about you know,
maybe you're going to get divorced or whatever. Right, yep,
you know, some real big issue that's on your mind, right,
or someone in your family is sick. Right. If you're
in that kind of emotional You're feeling multiple emotions. They're

(01:55:02):
pulling you in multiple directions for action. The most important
thing for you to do is to pause and figure
out all the values at stake. You need to introspect
those emotions and remember the emotions. The emotions feel like
they tell you what you should do. Emotions can't tell

(01:55:23):
you what to do. They are alerts to some value
at stake, and you need your rational mind, your logical
reasoning mind to figure out what those values are and
what the situation is. You need, in effect, like situational
awareness in this moment, and you can't get that in
that emotional state. You need to take, in effect a

(01:55:44):
time out to do some introspective work to get a
little bit of distance and figure out what the values are.
And it can go both ways, like you can decide, look,
I need to take a couple of days off to
take care of my personal stuff. Or like suppose suppose
you're you have a very important role at work and

(01:56:06):
there's a huge deadline coming up, and you could decide, no,
I really need to keep work here. I'm going to
need to concentrate on work during work. I'm going to
need to do this after hours and it is possible
to do that. You're not going to be as efficient
as as efficient as normally and it does. There is

(01:56:27):
a certain skill involved. It's I call it a sprint.
It's when you do work knowing that you're going to
be experiencing a kind of a low level of frustration
and discomfort in doing it, but you kind of say, yes,
I accept that, I'm not going to suppress that, and

(01:56:48):
this is very important. You kind of get your head
around the fact that doing this work is actually what
you rationally think is more important, and you do that
without suppressing the other stuff, and you can actually do
work under really quite stressful situations. But it's a skill,
it's a learnable skill. But the big point is what

(01:57:10):
you do in that moment depends on your values, your skills.
That's why you need to stop and actually do the
introspection and assess the situation and then make a decision
about what you're going to do now and the take
what you want to pay for it is very relevant here. Right,

(01:57:31):
you might decide to do the work and it might
have a bad effect on the relationship. You might decide
to take time off from work to work on the relationship.
It might have a bad effect on work when you're
in a bad situation. Part of what you need to
do is you need to face the reality that these
two things are in conflict, and you're going to choose

(01:57:51):
the one that you think is in your rational self
interest and you recognize the other one is less important
and could be harmed. And that is the decision that
you're making. And doing that with your eyes open is
not fun. It's not pleasant, but it is an act
of integrity, and it also insulates you, or inoculates you,

(01:58:14):
as a better word, so that if something bad does happen,
you have, you know, kind of the moral certainty that
you did what you thought was right and that you
had accepted that this consequence might happen. It still is painful,
but it going in with your eyes open is the
critical thing. Eyes open to the values, all right.

Speaker 1 (01:58:39):
Lincoln also asks, let's see, this is a long question.
What are the best strategies for balancing career ambitions and
family personal goals? For context, I'm a college student studying
finance wants to work in the tech VC factor as
my career, but I'm worried that will conflict with my

(01:58:59):
goals having a family, which I find just as important
to me. I don't want to sacrifice the opportunity to
work on and invest in disruptive technologies for a nine
to five job. But the tech hustle culture feels hostile
to the lifestyle that involves having a family and being

(01:59:20):
involved with your kids lives. Most of the kids of
tech employees were more raised by nannies instead of their
own parents because they were so focused on work they
would rather hear another pitch deck than see their kids
baseball game.

Speaker 2 (01:59:40):
So, you know, it's good to know that you care
about both of these things, and this means you're going
to need to develop some skills, right, You're going to
need to develop incredible skills so that you can work
very productively during your productive hours and that you can

(02:00:00):
put in place things that you can carve out time
for your kids. You know this is there are entrepreneurs
who completely successfully do this, and it takes it takes skills,
and so if you want both, this is an example
of another example of take what you want and pay
for it. You need to recognize that you're going to

(02:00:22):
go in there and you're going to need to work
out the third way and you're going to need to
find some role models. You've got some anti role models. Sure,
of course, there are people who have totally screwed this up.
That's that's not hard to find. But there are positive
role models, you know. I think of one of my

(02:00:44):
good friends from MIT. His father was in the music business,
and you know, there were a lot of screwed up
people in the music business. But his family, my friend's family,
you know, husband, wife, two kids, absolute loving, happy family,

(02:01:06):
totally stable. I mean, he was a role model for
all kinds of people. He was unusual, but he was
a role model. And I'm sure you can find if
you this is worth actually researching research uh uh, you
know tech people or you know, entrepreneurs who really figured

(02:01:29):
out how to how to prioritize a family and have
a great family. You know, it's a solvable you know,
if something matters to you, the assumption needs to be
that it's a solvable problem. Now, if you know this,
this is a very specific thing. That which because this
fellow is still a college student, right, he's not actually

(02:01:50):
in the situation, and I assume he doesn't actually have
a family yet.

Speaker 1 (02:01:53):
If he's you know, now would I think he's I
think he's he's got I mean, I think he's got
to gofriend that they're planning to get married.

Speaker 2 (02:02:01):
Great, that's wonderful. Right. So I have more of a
pep talk than I have an answer, because I think
the answer is going to be very specific. And of
course the other thing too is that as he gets involved.

(02:02:23):
Right when they talk about the hustle culture, some people
treat it as you just have to work like I did, right,
like the way I worked when I first worked, I
just worked. You know, you have to do this and
it doesn't matter how you feel. Well, you actually get
a hell of a lot more done if you take

(02:02:45):
the whole context of that the work has to pay
off as you go that you need to figure out
how to work efficiently during this time because you're not
going to spend twelve hours to do something that if
you really work efficiently, you can do in six hours.
And that you put boundary, and then you need to
figure out how to put on social boundaries. So there
are a lot of skills involved, yep. And the way

(02:03:05):
that you develop the skills is by first knowing that
this is what you want and then second putting your
brain on that. I realized it's a generic answer.

Speaker 1 (02:03:14):
But oh it's good.

Speaker 2 (02:03:15):
The devil is in the details on these things, and
it is I totally believe that that's possible.

Speaker 1 (02:03:22):
Okay, string A Bell asks elo Jean, how does one
stay committed to a goal? I find an individual can
start out strong, but eventually something knocks them off track.

Speaker 2 (02:03:36):
So I think the most common reason people get knocked
off track is because they haven't figured out how to
make sure that they're building in results as they go,
and they're not actually seeing progress. Because if you see progress,
you get more excited and you get more motivation. And
so I think that this is the people envision the
goal and say, well, it's ten thousand steps, let's get going,

(02:03:59):
and they do the first one hundred and ninety seven
steps and then they say, damn it, one hundred and
ninety seven steps. This is you know, this is like
what is this? Two percent of the way? There is
my math? Correct? Damn it? You know I have I'm
waiting all this effort. I Oh my god, what am
I gonna get there? Ari, Well, I've got to keep
going And they do another one hundred and twenty steps

(02:04:21):
and it's like, oh my god, can I keep going?
You can't have a goal that's a ten thousand steps
until you get a payoff and I actually think that,
I mean I actually have I use the term step
for something that you can do in less than two hours,
and I use the term a key results for something
you can do in less than two weeks, and the

(02:04:41):
term objective for something that takes like one to three
months something like that. And you need a different kind
of payoff in each of those. Like a task, you
don't actually need to see progress toward the goal, but
there needs to be some pleasure in it, like you've
got to finish something, or you got to enjoy it,
or something like if you have to play music to

(02:05:02):
enjoy it. Okay, that's what you do for the task.
For the two week key result, you got to see
this is moving me toward my goal. I'm getting some
of the value out of the goal. And if you
do that to see if you can make it so
that you keep pulling this back, so it's a two
week key result that you're actually like, wow, hey, I'm
making progress, and then a two month objective where hey,

(02:05:24):
I've got a real result I can show people, and
you keep iterating to do that. The momentum builds, and
you get more and more passionate about the goal as
you go. The thing that kills passion is that you
don't you don't actually uh, you don't actually see results,
and you don't the goal is just something that is

(02:05:46):
only in your imagination, and the only way you feed
the value of the goal is in imagination. You've got
to feed it with actual real world results, because that
is how you program values. It's action, action that achieves
the achieves a value, what strengthens the.

Speaker 1 (02:06:02):
Value, thanks Stringa Bell, Jacob. Can there be a misalignment
between you rational goals and your personality that is insurmountable?
For example, a goal requiring extreme extraversion and you aren't.

Speaker 2 (02:06:24):
So I think personality you should think of personalities just
the things that you have skills at that you're comfortable with,
and like extraversion, you know, chatting up people and having
public speaking for example, these are learnable skills. These are
absolutely learnable skills. Now it may be the case that

(02:06:48):
I mean, like you know, there's there may be temperament
issues here like that people there some people test out
as introverts and is a fairly stable characteristic versus a
introverts the thing that introverts find when they do social
tasks is they get tired faster. Well, the reason they
get tired faster is because it requires more active monitoring

(02:07:10):
and more you know, it's not a totally automatized, familiar
skill that has values. But if it's important enough, you
can make it be a bigger skill. And if it's
not pleasurable, if you can't make the extroverted work pleasurable,
then you'll find some way to adjust that goal a
little bit so that it has less of that and

(02:07:32):
it has more of whatever it is that you do
find pleasurable. So, for example, I don't think introverts have
trouble doing zoom calls, whereas public speaking, where they actually
have people that they need to talk to in person,
that's more tiring. You may be able to achieve the
same thing that allegedly takes an extroverted skill, but you

(02:07:53):
may be able to find a way that is more
adapted to your introverted capabilities. But you don't have to.
You can You can develop any skill you want. I
think that that is the important attitude to have. If
some people can do it, they actually have a lot
of people can do it. It's a learnable skill. It's not deterministic, okay.

Speaker 1 (02:08:17):
Hugh McKenzie asks any thoughts on token economies. This is
are the effective that is rewarding desired behavior with tokens
which can be exchanged for other reinforces.

Speaker 2 (02:08:33):
So this is a new one on me. But generally speaking,
if this would be a secondhanded economy, meaning that someone
decides what behavior should be reinforced, and they try to
teach treat the people like animals by giving them rewards
for things that they want them to do. So I

(02:08:54):
am not in favor of such a thing, and I
think it is true that x eternal rewards. Is it
if you are passive and you choose what you do
based on what other people want you to do, and
you get your pleasure from rewards that other people give you,

(02:09:14):
that is that is a secondhanded life. It puts you
completely at the mercy of other people. It makes you
a victim or a you know, wanting to have power
over the people. It's for the birds if you choose

(02:09:35):
to pursue values because they are important to you. This
stuff is all real irrelevant, So rests the question here is.

Speaker 3 (02:09:47):
I think you did, but then how would you treat.

Speaker 1 (02:09:53):
I don't know, different bonus schemes at work which are
very similar or like stock options. You know, you you
make a lot of money if if if this is successful.

Speaker 3 (02:10:05):
I mean those do have a motivating factor for people.

Speaker 1 (02:10:08):
It's they're not neutral, right.

Speaker 2 (02:10:10):
Well, part of what you're trying to do here is
you're trying to align the person's self interest with the
businesses self interest.

Speaker 1 (02:10:17):
Right, yeah, and.

Speaker 2 (02:10:21):
The but how do I say this? So so one
thing I didn't say, So I will make clear that
I did not say that external rewards don't work in
a lot of cases. They do work in a lot

(02:10:43):
of cases. And something like that where you align the
like you the bonuses are aligned with the company's goals.
A person could be doing that for secondhand reason, for
first of.

Speaker 1 (02:11:00):
All, but there is an option of fust standard reason.

Speaker 2 (02:11:03):
There is an option of firsthand reason. Because part of
what this does is this like grabs your attention, says, hey,
this is what the company goal is, and this is
how we're trying to get the company goal. And this
is your part in trying to get the company goal.
And this is you know, you actually really see and
if you are smart and you want to get that

(02:11:25):
money you really figure out how to get the company
to be successful. Now that assumes that the company is
managed rationally, and that this bonus system is rational, and
they have a clear idea, that they have a rational goal,
and they have a clear idea of how you're actually
contributing to it. Now, I think that is actually I

(02:11:45):
think there's some very clever people at some companies that
really do figure that out. And I think it's some companies.
It's it becomes a game and people game the system
and it totally backfires because they do the thing to
get at the bonus, not to make the company successful.
So yeah, so it could be rational.

Speaker 1 (02:12:08):
But so this is Adam says. As Ignman wrote, valued
deprivation is general to the whole of our culture. This
minding is specific to the progressive anti philosophy of education.
Of course, the whole of the culture is reflected in education.

(02:12:29):
Please comment, how true? What?

Speaker 2 (02:12:35):
What can I say?

Speaker 1 (02:12:38):
She agrees with you? Adam?

Speaker 2 (02:12:43):
Was that Adam reide? Okay?

Speaker 1 (02:12:45):
All right? All right? Uh P Grouptor asks unambition. Is
it a trait one embodies or a trait of one's goals?
Is it a virtue? How does it relate to Russian
of productiveness.

Speaker 2 (02:13:02):
Okay, it's not a trait if you trait normally is
used to mean something that's like a part of you.
I think it's a characteristic of a goal, and so
it's it's a goal is ambitious if it is something
that is a little beyond your skill level, that would
be that would be what that would make a goal

(02:13:25):
an ambitious goal. As far as whether it's a virtue
or not, this is what we were talking about. I
think pride is a virtue, right. Moral ambitiousness is a virtue,
and I think because growth is rational and so important
to life, I think ambitiousness is also, I think, and
I think it would be generally under the heading of pride.

(02:13:45):
But it's a little broader than moral ambitiousness. It's it's
self improvement in any area. Is it's going to help
grow your skills, give you more capabilities, make you more
able to succeed in the world.

Speaker 3 (02:14:03):
And she has how does it relate to rationality or productiveness?

Speaker 2 (02:14:07):
Oh? So, so it relates to productiveness because it definitely
relates to goals. I'd say ambitiousness is an issue of
your goals, right, What is it that you're trying to
do goals are you set the goal of what you
want to achieve in the future, and then you act
to gain to create that out in the world. And

(02:14:31):
so it's built into productiveness. I mean, you can be
productive without being ambitious in the sense that you can
you know, like a janitor. Right that ein Ran uses
the example of a janitor as being kind of at
the bottom of the pyramid of ability. Right, But if

(02:14:53):
you sweep the floor every day, that is a productive undertaking,
that is actually something that needs to be done that
does contribute you know, you get paid for that, right,
But there's no growth involved in that, and there's no
learning involved in that. Although there could be an ambitious
janitor who's always figuring out the better way to clean
things and what's the better products. So you could imagine

(02:15:14):
an ambitious genitor. I don't want to knock janitors. So
it's not inherent in productiveness, but it is inherent in
you know, any kind of large scale productive achievement, let's
put it that way. And it's inherent in a central purpose,
right if you have so in that sense, it is

(02:15:34):
inherent in the virtue of productiveness. If you have a
central purpose this is a long range goal. By definition,
you can't achieve it right now. It's going to require
a sustained effort over a long time. So it is
an ambitious goal just by its very nature. Now, how
does it relate to rationality? Well, in the same way
goals relate to rationality. They need to be based on reality.

(02:15:57):
They need to be based on standards of what is
good for human life. So it's the standard by which
you or the means by which you vet everything that
you do, and you make sure that that the goal
is set in some kind of a reasonable way.

Speaker 1 (02:16:18):
So Noack says A big fan of Gene, I really
recommend people check out her services. Thank you, Mary Ellen,
says Gene. Thanks so much for the recommendation of the
book The Practicing Mind I've vetted about.

Speaker 3 (02:16:33):
I've had about half of it and I love it.

Speaker 2 (02:16:35):
Yes, it's a short read, and it really was a
delight when I discovered this couple of weeks ago.

Speaker 1 (02:16:43):
All Right, his Bozz's multi prong question. You can choose
what you want to answer this because there's a lot here.
How can parents of toddler's meet ex seed career goals?
What roles will humans have if AI, robotics take most jobs,
you'll take on New York City, Bitcoin, Trump, and musk.

Speaker 2 (02:17:06):
All right, let's take the first. Let's just kind of
do them in order. I'll just tell you what I
can about them. Okay, toddler's and a career.

Speaker 1 (02:17:12):
Is that a career goal?

Speaker 3 (02:17:14):
Meet to exceed career goals? I mean that's the question
you did before. I think yeah, I.

Speaker 2 (02:17:21):
Mean I think so. I mean presumably if you have
a toddler and you have a career goal, you have
figured out you know who, you figured out who is
taking care of the toddler when you're working, right, So

(02:17:41):
part of it is being incredibly efficient at work. I mean,
this is something I've coached people on, is how do
you make sure that you get out of work at
six o'clock or whatever it is, whatever is the reasonable
time since you actually get home for dinner and you know,
to spend the time with the kid before or the
kid needs to go to sleep. That takes that's a skill.

(02:18:03):
That's setting a boundary. You need to be able to
say no to people because people will come into your
office ten minutes before you plan to leave, and you
need to be able to You need social skills to
be able to do that. You also need productivity skills
because you need to be able to finish things up
at the end of the day and not see an
email and then say, oh, why don't I just quickly
answer that and have you know, forty five minutes go

(02:18:25):
by that you know, there's there's there's real self awareness
and real very conscious decision making and prioritization required to
be able to put those boundaries on work at home
and to make sure that you are ultra productive during work.

(02:18:46):
But this is so I'm going to sing the same song.
It's learnable skills. And then I also think that celebration, right,
is because if you're working hard and you got a
two year old. Now I did not have We did
not have children, so I don't have first experience of this,

(02:19:06):
but I've had some experience with two year olds and
they are a lot of fun, right, And so make
sure that you actually really enjoy that experience with the kid.
And that also is going to take discipline, because you're
going to be tired and you're going to need to
actually learn how to you know, get in the zone
and have a good report and also still have boundaries

(02:19:28):
with the kid because you don't want to spoil the
kid because you don't spend time with it. You know,
you're going to need to learn a lot of skills
and it is going to be worth it. Every skill
you learn is going to improve your relationship with your children,
relationship with your spouse, and your productivity at work.

Speaker 1 (02:19:45):
Right Andrew asks, aside from the obvious, why can losing
a parent be so grief inducing? What are some keys
to recovering from that grief?

Speaker 2 (02:20:00):
I don't know why we need to go aside from
the obvious. I think the obvious is obvious and is real.
So and I just want to say, I don't mind
talking about some of Boaz his other things, but but
let me stay on this one on the grip, say on, yeah,
so so, so here is the one thing that is

(02:20:23):
aside from the obvious. I really experienced this when I
lost my father. He had been watching out for me
my whole life, my whole life, and then he wasn't there.

(02:20:45):
And you cannot be aware of that. You cannot make
the differentiation, you know, I mean maybe if someone had
maybe my telling you this. You know, some young people
who still have their father can say, oh, that's true.
My father is doing that for me, and that's right.
If he's gone, he won't be and you may be

(02:21:07):
able to visualize it. I don't know, but a lot
of times the things that you know about the value
of your parents is because of the differentiations that you
saw and so you were able to conceptualize them. So
like when I went to camp for I went to
overnight camp, and I never felt homesick except the one

(02:21:29):
year that my mother was in the hospital. My mother
almost died that summer, actually, and thank goodness she didn't,
because I would have been in camp, you know, in Maine,
you know, so and you know, my world was out
of whack because I literally this is what I was.
This is like, this is like my seventh year of camp.

(02:21:53):
Prior to that, my mother or my father had written
me a letter every day that I was at camp.
But because my mother was sick, I didn't do that,
and I it was missing and it was really a
big It really shook me up. But I had that.
You know, sometimes you're able to conceptualize things because the
world gave you the differentiation. There is no differentiation of

(02:22:19):
Dad not looking out for me until he dies, and
then get that differentiation and you can see it, and
they are going to be things like that that you
took them for granted. There's a sense in which your
parents create the universe that you live in. They literally
created the house, they set up the house, they set

(02:22:40):
the ground rules, and you know this is something as
as you age you discover there are things that you
take for granted that other people don't. I mean, like,
to take an example, in my household, it was pretty
normal to yell at each other. That doesn't bother me.

(02:23:02):
But it turns out that in a lot of households,
this is like not done. This is not done, and
it's like a really big deal. If you raise your
white and I'm like, what, what's your problem? And you
know this is and this is the kind of thing
that you kind of have to get out of it
to be able to see. And that's one of the

(02:23:22):
things that is the not obvious part of why losing
your parents' heart is that there are a whole bunch
of things like this that you discover and it takes
work to actually name them, which gets to what can
you do about it? Put the time into conscious mourning
m o U r ni ng. This means that you

(02:23:44):
literally spend say a half hour a day. I would
do it in journaling, in you know, writing in a journal.
I mean the process that I recommend is something I
call an empathy bath. It's in my Thinker's Toolkit, which
is a little you know, the twenty dollars pdf you
can get from me. And you go through your emotions

(02:24:05):
and why do I feel this about the parent that
you lost? Right, And you do that each day or
then one day you maybe reminisce about them, and then
you go through, you introspect your emotions and what do
they mean? And if you do this proactively, if you
spend some time every day doing this, you will work

(02:24:28):
through all the issues gradually and you'll get some very deep,
very deep insights. You will feel closer. I mean, there
are certain ways in which I feel closer to my
mother now than I did before she died. I mean
I actually after she died, I got an appreciation for

(02:24:48):
her independence and her judgment that I just didn't have
when she was alive. And I got an appreciation for
something that I was totally oblivious to, is how she
actually care communities where she went, which I still am
benefiting from. Actually, and It's a long story, but and

(02:25:08):
part of how you deal with the mourning is by
loving the parent and learning the ways in which you
love the parent very explicitly, so that when that parent
crosses your mind, what you feel is love for them,
and love for what you learn from them, and love
for what you got for them, and love for how
you've taken that and put it into your life now.

(02:25:32):
And that is part of what heals the loss.

Speaker 1 (02:25:40):
Neil. I've struggled in school and haven't been able to
advance my job. I'm in my early thirties and not
having felt success, my mind has a hard time trying
new things. I avoid many opportunities due to the fear
of failing.

Speaker 2 (02:26:00):
Advice, well, uh, I heard all the things that are bad,
but I didn't hear something that you actually want to do.
And that is the critical thing. What do you what
do you kind of wish you could do, and why

(02:26:20):
do you wish it right? And part of you know
you don't wish for something unless you've got some capabilities
in that area. They may be very meager, but you
can't even envision doing something without some awareness of the
means whereby it can be achieved. And so you've got

(02:26:42):
to start with what you want. The more you focus
on the problems, the difficulties, the past difficulties that that
I mean, that will suck you in into a vicious
cycle of despair. It will absolutely stop you even from
naming what it is that you'd like to do. So

(02:27:04):
if so, it's a little hard. I mean, obviously you've
got three sentences in this question, and I'm I hate
people who psychologize, right, so this is I'm not going
to make a statement about what's going on with you.
And if you're really feeling down, I would start with
the three good things that I mentioned earlier in the call.
Start writing three good things and make it be three

(02:27:26):
things I achieved yesterday, and start actually noticing what you
are doing right and what you like about what you're
doing right, and use that to help you start seeing
what it is that you want to do more of,
because it's that's where it's going to start. It's going
to start with something that you want and then the

(02:27:50):
you know, probably one of the basic skills is the
value orientation. This is something that I teach, right, I mean,
I'm not the only person who tea but this is
the this is the kind of thing I teach, maintaining
that value orientation, maintaining a focus on this is what
I'm going for. Yes, this is an obstacle. What am

(02:28:11):
I going to do about this obstacle? Because I want
that maintaining that, how do I get that? Okay, so
there's an issue here. Let's figure out a way around
that to get what I want to maintain that positive
for looking attitude. That is a skill. But the but
the short version of it is, every time you have

(02:28:31):
a threat oriented emotion fear, anger, guilt, despair, frustration, introspect it,
identify the values at stake. Try to go after those values.

Speaker 1 (02:28:44):
Thanks Neil, friend, Harper says, great episode. You are my
favorite guest.

Speaker 2 (02:28:50):
Oh that's sweet, thank you.

Speaker 1 (02:28:53):
Andrews says, my reference to Brandon's essay on pleasure was
in contrast to the arbitrary value of pain from religion.
I know a few serious Jews who want to feel
guilty and sadness is proof of virtue, and they do.

Speaker 2 (02:29:07):
That's so sad. Yeah, that's so sad.

Speaker 1 (02:29:10):
So prevalent though. All right, Lincoln, any tips on developing
intrinsic motivations when working a lot of my motivations to
work to work hard are external for example, good class grades,
money for my job.

Speaker 3 (02:29:28):
This won't be effective in.

Speaker 1 (02:29:29):
The workplace, especially at a startup where there are no
a's and the monetary payoff is delayed. Great interview, by
the way.

Speaker 2 (02:29:40):
Thank you, So throw out the term intrinsic motivation. What
you want is you want passion for the work you're doing.
So the word you want is passion. So like, suppose
you're taking a class and you're taking it because it's
a required course and you want to get an A
because you want to get into whatever pro you want
to get into. You got to find something interesting about

(02:30:03):
this class and or about this topic, and suppose you
have to write a paper for it. You need to,
you know, actually start looking for what interests you and
building up that interest. And that would be if it's
a subject, right, Like the way you get passionate about

(02:30:24):
a subject is you learn more about it and you
do your own firsthand integration of it and you say, well,
how will this help me? Like you have real goals, right,
so how is this going to help me with a goal?
Sometimes that takes creative thinking, but you know, if you ask,
like if you ask Lisa van dam She can tell
you how any piece of literature can help you with

(02:30:44):
your goals. So if you have to read literature, you
can figure that out. You can figure out a connection.
Or if you're studying history, you can figure out a
connection that's and that work that you do to connect
it to your actual goals that will make it more interesting.
So that's how you can do with a top topic. Now,
suppose you have to learn, like you have to take
a math class. There it's a skill and they're what

(02:31:06):
you want to do is you want to try to
figure out what is the basic thing you're learning and
get good at it, because when you get good at
a skill, you like it more because you know it's
like it's there's an efficacy involved there and so there
it's probably the kisss where you need to find out.
Like with calculus, I'm just making up something I haven't
thought about calculus in a long time, so I'm not

(02:31:30):
sure this is going to work. But something I never
did so is do as I say, not as I do.
But you know, there are a lot of things I
would do differently if I knew then what I know now.
Just as an example, when I was in college, they
would let us have a cheat sheet so we could

(02:31:52):
bring in, you know, what all the integrals were or whatever,
so that you didn't have to memorize them. I'll tell
you you'll be way better at calculus if you memorize
all the basic ones. Memorize and gets that you can
use them without having to look them up. That'll make
everything easier. And so choosing something that you can learn

(02:32:17):
that's a building block that's going to make it be
easier and make it easier to add on and easier
to remember other things makes a big difference. I was
a tutor to make some money when I first started
my business. I actually tutored a couple of kids in
my building who were in like first grade, second grade,

(02:32:37):
and the older boys having such trouble in math, and
I was helping him this homework, and I realized he
didn't understand. He didn't have memorized the single digit edition
facts or the single digit multiplication facts. So his mother
and I decided over the summer, she gave him a
page of edition facts, single digit single digit addition facts,
subtraction facts, multiplication and division, and he drilled that over

(02:33:01):
the summer. He did a page of each of those
every day for the whole summer. He went to the
top of his class in math the next year. So
there's always something. So if you really want to have
passion for the subject, it's going to be knowledge and values.
Deepen your knowledge connected to your values. Deepen your skill

(02:33:22):
and connect it to your values. That's what I would say.

Speaker 1 (02:33:27):
All right, this is the last question, also from Lincoln.
One hundred percent agree on making sure can handle young
kids before having them. My parents have friends with a
couple of twenty years the junior. We have two who
have a little two year old toddler who I have
had the chance to spend time with and babysit with.

(02:33:49):
My girlfriend and the adults out of town. Super informative
to us ahead of time before marriage and children. No
question there, Thanks Lincoln, great well, Thanks Geen. Almost three
hours that was that was fun. Yeah, I appreciate it.

(02:34:11):
Thanks you guys, Thanks all the super chatters. That was great.
Thanks you a.

Speaker 2 (02:34:15):
Question interesting questions. Yeah, absolutely put me on my toes.
And thanks for the discussion your own. You know, when
I got a little stopped, I threw it back at
you and we had a good discussion.

Speaker 1 (02:34:26):
What I'm here for. Uh, It was good. Well, we'll
talk about revenge another time.

Speaker 2 (02:34:33):
We'll talk about revenge. Maybe maybe at Rams Day we'll
talk about revenge. I'll think about it between now and then.

Speaker 1 (02:34:39):
Good. All right, everybody have a I'll be I'll see
all you guys tomorrow for a new show and i'll
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Conversation with Jean Moroney -- Setting and Achieving Goals in the Coming Year | Yaron Brook Show

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Conversation with Jean Moroney -- Setting and Achieving Goals in the Coming Year | Yaron Brook Show