Lawrence Yeo: The Inner Compass: Why External Success Can't Fix Internal Suffering; Money, Mastery, and the Courage to Trust Yourself

[Join our community at my Substack where we continue these conversations with deeper dives into the biggest lessons from each episode, plus my regular essays and behind-the-scenes thoughts: https://bogumilbaranowski.substack.com/]Lawrence Yeo is a former corporate finance professional turned writer-illustrator-philosopher who left investment banking to pursue creative storytelling full-time, creating the blog "More to That" and publishing a book, "The Inner Compass," exploring the intersection of self-understanding, money mindset, and authentic living.

This is his very first podcast interview discussing the new book!

3:00 - Lawrence shares his immigrant family's journey from middle-class comfort to poverty, revealing how parental presence created resilience despite financial hardship

6:00 - "Even though we were poor, I didn't feel poor" - the crucial distinction between circumstances and mindset in childhood poverty

9:00 - Career strategy: Using investment banking as a means to creative freedom, not an end goal - the importance of functional versus status-driven success

12:00 - The world's expectations layer onto our natural contentment, creating mental suffering amid physical comfort - a modern affliction

15:00 - Social referencing from infancy to adulthood: How we unconsciously look outward for safety cues instead of cultivating internal compass

18:00 - Distinguishing between knowledge (taught information) and understanding (gained through experience) - wisdom requires living it yourself

21:00 - Religious texts as compounded knowledge parallel: Our oldest personal stories shape us most through conditioning

24:00 - External success vs. inner turmoil: The asymmetry of attention - 0.1% validation moments vs. 99.9% daily reality

27:00 - Choosing your playing field: Why Lawrence quit music after realizing he didn't want to become like successful musicians in that space

30:00 - The invisible wealth test: Would you climb the mountain if you couldn't tell anyone you reached the top?

33:00 - Fork in the road framework: How repetition changes our relationship with certainty vs. curiosity over time

36:00 - Intuition as the gap between rationality's limits and life's biggest decisions (where you live, what you work on, who you're with)

39:00 - Inner compass metaphor: True North (intuition) held steady by the magnet of self-understanding against winds of conditioning

42:00 - Mastery vs. status: Committing to improvement for its own sake while accepting external inspiration from people whose character you admire

45:00 - The 100-hour blog post test: How Lawrence stress-tested his writing passion by removing all external validation

48:00 - Life as single-player game with multiplayer meaning.

51:00 - The paradox of meaningful relationships.

54:00 - Envy's anatomy.

60:00 - Success redefined.

Podcast Program – Disclosure Statement

Blue Infinitas Capital, LLC is a registered investment adviser and the opinions expressed by the Firm’s employees and podcast guests on this show are their own and do not reflect the opinions of Blue Infinitas Capital, LLC. All statements and opinions expressed are based upon information considered reliable although it should not be relied upon as such. Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice.

Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, inves