January 26, 2025 • 35 mins
Harry shares an extreme personal experience in service to exploring the question: How can we act skillfully in unfamiliar circumstances?
Show notes:
- An introduction to Ambient Music by Jon Dale
- Spinning Away by John Cale & Brian Eno
- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
- Steve Jobs introduces the iPhone (YouTube)
- Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki
- Dunning–Kruger effect
- Robert Montoye - LinkedIn
- Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
- Extreme Ownership Academy
- The Informed Life episode 75: Hans Krueger on the Cycle of Emotions
- Waking Up app
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Jorge (00:00):
When you're faced with conditions that you can't
explain, or things that arechanging too fast in
unpredictable ways, you willlatch onto your existing mental
models in ways that might keepyou from seeing the situation
clearly.
(00:21):
You're listening to TractionHeroes.
Digging In to Get Results withHarry Max and Jorge Arango.
Harry, it's good to see you again.
Harry (00:34):
It's great to be here, Jorge.
It's nice to see you as well.
Jorge (00:37):
You were telling me earlier that it's a special day
for you.
Harry (00:40):
Yeah, today, on November eight, is what I call, my
Survival Thrival Day.
It's an annual celebration ofhaving survived being
effectively run over by a carwhen I was fifteen years old.
I was on a bicycle and I washeading down a mountain road,
Chautauqua Boulevard,specifically, in Pacific
(01:00):
Palisades, heading down to thecoast.
And there was a driver in afour-door Chevrolet going up
that road, and she veered intomy lane and hit me head on.
So I was pleaded into thebicycle.
She took the bicycle and I wentthe other way.
And so it resulted in a lot ofbroken bones and internal
(01:23):
injuries.
And ultimately, I ended up in ahospital for about six months
and then got out in a body castand took about two years to go
through the whole healingprocess.
But I celebrate today far morethan I celebrate my birthday
because not only did I surviveand it's special for that
reason, but I had some liketremendous insights and
(01:47):
realizations in that experience.
I had one of those crazy neardeath experiences.
And you read about these thingsand you hear about'em and you're
like,"Nah, that can't be true."And I had one, so I can't really
deny it.
And I was there, all broken up,laying on the street.
I didn't know where I was, and Isaw the light, right?
(02:07):
I saw this huge light.
And I started heading toward thelight.
And and I was like making my waydown the light,"Wondering wow,
this is really weird," thinkingto myself.
And then I heard this boomingvoice say,"It's not your time."
And I just snapped back into mybody at that moment and then I
(02:28):
could see myself from above andI could see all the people like
looking over me, and I couldsee, I looked through my own
eyes, I looked down at my hand,and I'm like,"Why are there
chicken bones sticking outta myhand?" And I'm like,"Oh, those
aren't chicken bones.
Those are my bones." I'm like,"Ew!" And then, it, then I'm
like,"How the heck did I gethere?
is this a bad dream?" I rememberhaving all these thoughts.
(02:53):
And I was like,"Okay, I,remember getting up and I had my
Captain Crunch..." And then, Ikinda walked through my day and
then I remember,"Oh, I got on mybike after my guitar lesson and
I went down Chautauqua and, ohshoot, I know what happened."
And right at that moment, thecacophony of all the noise
(03:15):
seeped in and I could hear thesirens now and I could hear all
the voices, and all the people,and all of a sudden, the pain
just rushed in.
And it was like this incrediblemoment of I was back in my body
as a human, broken up, lying onthe middle, lying in the road,
(03:38):
at night at five on a on t thatI'd ridden up and down many
times.
And sirens blaring and peopleall over, apparently a school
bus had passed and stopped withfriends of mine on it, weirdly.
But I survived.
And it was a rough, it was arough six months.
(03:59):
It was a lot of pain medicine,number of surgeries and stuff
like that.
But I had these incrediblerealizations as part of that
whole experience.
So I picked something to readtoday to share on that subject.
Weirdly, I didn't even make theconnection'cause I picked this
reading weeks ago.
But one of the things is whenyou're like a fifteen-year-old
(04:21):
boy, like, you're invincible.
And I wasn't invincible.
So the first thing, the firstkind of major realization, is
that everything I know is nottrue.
This sense of certainty that Ihave is completely false.
And, out of that came thisphilosophy, part of my way of
(04:43):
approaching the world, which isthat certainty that felt sense
that you're right is is anillusion and in fact it's the
enemy of truth.
And so, if you've ever workedclosely with me, I know you've
heard me say that, like somebodywill say,"I'm certain!" And I'll
look at them and I'll say,"Certainty's the enemy of
(05:03):
truth." It's like Heisenberg,right?
The closer you get right, theharder it is to tell how fast
it's going or which way it'sgoing or whatnot.
And the better sense you have ofhow fast it's going, the worse
the sense is that what the thingactually is.
I don't remember what thedetails of the Heisenberg
(05:24):
uncertainty principle are, butI've internalized them that way.
And the other thing was thisego-disassembling experience of
control and like having thesense of control completely
dismantled.
I mean, before the accident, Ithought I had some semblance of
(05:47):
control of things.
And after years of processingand reflecting on the accident,
I realized that control is acomplete illusion.
And it's just, a shroud in frontof you.
And, you can, think you havecontrol of things, but I often
say to people,"I just work here.
(06:09):
I'm not in charge of what'sgoing on." And yeah, sure I can,
influence my local sphere aroundme, but I don't think of it as
control at all.
Jorge (06:18):
That's amazing.
And I'm wondering if we shouldinclude like a trigger warning
for folks because the story isso visceral, right?
So shocking.
You were describing the accidentand I was here wincing.
I'm glad you survived,obviously.
(06:38):
And it feels like there arelearnings to be had here.
The story where my mindimmediately went, and I think it
has to do with control is aBrian Eno anecdote.
Brian Eno had, an accident whereI think he was crossing the
street in London and he was hitby a cab and he ended up,
(07:03):
bedridden as a result of thataccident.
And he had a friend come visitand gifted him a record of harp
music.
And this friend put on therecord as they were leaving and
(07:23):
after they left, Eno realizedthat one of the two channels in
the stereo had failed and thevolume was set much too low.
So he couldn't really hear themusic.
All he could hear was like thetwinkling of the harp.
And on top of that, it wasraining.
And I might be reading into it,but I think this is what
(07:46):
happened.
After an initial struggle withthe unsatisfying conditions of
the music, he settled into thesound.
And that is the genesis ofambient music.
He had this realization thatmusic could be...
(08:07):
I think the way that he talksabout it is music could serve a
similar role to perfume, whereit's kinda coloring the
environment.
If you decide to pay attentionto it, it's interesting, but you
can also let it just wash overyou and then it also serves a
function, right?
but the decision to explore thatas a possible space for music to
(08:28):
inhabit came as a result ofbeing bedridden and lacking the
ability to control theconditions under which the music
was being played back.
Harry (08:39):
Whoa.
That's amazing.
And, so funny, you had mentionedBrian Eno because of course, my
favorite song of all time isSpinning Away, a song that he
and I think Cage did.
I can't remember the title ofthe album, Upside Down or Inside
Out or...
Jorge (08:55):
John Cale.
Harry (08:57):
Yeah.
John Cale.
Sorry, my brain just had a brainfart.
Yeah, I love that.
And I own it.
I own the CD and I own thevinyl, and it was reissued.
I bought a version of it beforeit was reissued, but yeah.
Jorge (09:13):
We, didn't plan on this, but that is one of my favorite
songs as well, to the pointwhere I used to have the lyrics
to that song printed and tackedon a board in my office.
Harry (09:26):
No way.
Jorge (09:27):
Yeah.
Harry (09:28):
Unbelievable.
Jorge (09:30):
Maybe we should be playing that for your November
8th being reborn celebrationbecause it's a good song for
that too.
We won't get into it, but youmentioned that you have a
reading to share with us.
I'm really curious about that.
Harry (09:47):
Yeah, totally.
And I didn't do my homework, soI don't remember the author
because I didn't look it up, butwe'll have to, we'll have to add
that in.
But I won't tell you what thebook is until after I'm done, in
the spirit of what you did to melast time.
And it's not too long, here itgoes.
"The unprecedented isnecessarily unrecognizable.
(10:10):
When we encounter somethingunprecedented, we automatically
interpret it through the lensesof familiar categories, thereby
rendering invisible preciselythat which is unprecedented.
A classic example is the notionof the horseless carriage to
which people reverted whenconfronted with unprecedented
facts of the automobile.
(10:31):
"The tragic illustration is theencounter between the indigenous
people and the first Spanishconquerors when the Tainos" I
don't know if I'm pronouncingthat right"of the pre-Columbian
Caribbean islands, first laideye on the sweating, bearded
Spanish soldiers trudging acrossthe sand and their brocade and
armor, how could they possiblyhave recognized the meaning and
(10:53):
portent of that moment?
Unable to imagine their owndestruction, they'd reckon that
those strange creatures weregods and welcomed them with
intricate rituals ofhospitality.
"This is how the unprecedentedreliably confounds
understanding.
Existing lenses illuminate thefamiliar, thus obscuring the
(11:15):
original by turning theunprecedented into extensions of
the past.
This contributes to thenormalization of the abnormal,
which makes fighting theunprecedented even more of an
uphill climb.
"On a stormy night, some yearsago, our home was struck by
lightning, and I learned apowerful lesson in the
comprehension defying power ofan unprecedented.
(11:38):
Within moments of the strike,thick black smoke drifted up the
staircase and from the lowerlevel of the house and toward
the living room.
As we mobilized and called thefire department, I believe that
I had just a minute or two to dosomething useful before rushing
out to join the family.
"First, I ran upstairs andclosed all the bedroom doors to
protect them from smoke damage.
(11:59):
Next, I tore back downstairsinto the living room where I
gathered up all of our familyphoto albums as I could carry
them outside on a covered porchfor safety.
The smoke was just about toreach me, when the fire marshal
arrived to grab me by theshoulder and yank me out the
door.
We stood in the driving rain,where to my astonishment we
(12:20):
watched the house explode inflames.
"I learned many things from thefire, but amongst the most
important was theunrecognizability of the
unprecedented.
In that early phase of thecrisis, I could imagine our home
scarred by smoke damage, but Icould not imagine its
disappearance.
I grasped what was happeningthrough the lens of past
(12:43):
experience, envisioning adistressing but ultimately
manageable detour that wouldlead back to the status quo.
Unable to distinguish theunprecedented, all I could do
was to close doors to rooms thatwould no longer exist and seek
safety on a porch that was fadedto vanish.
I was blind to the conditionsthat were unprecedented in my
(13:03):
experience."
Jorge (13:06):
Wow, that is really heavy.
What is the book?
Harry (13:11):
So the book is Surveillance Capitalism, and
I'll have to look up the authorand I'm just embarrassed to say
I didn't prioritize that beforewe started our call.
I got distracted in otherthings.
But weirdly, this book wasreferred to me by Dennis
Allison, who invited me todinner with Brian Eno.
Jorge (13:33):
Oh, wow.
Okay.
Interesting.
Yeah, I think the name isShoshana Zuboff, the name of the
author.
And I have to say, I have notread Surveillance Capitalism.
It is on my reading pile.
But this is really interesting.
What drew you to that particularpassage in that book?
Harry (13:54):
You know, we hear the term"unprecedented" bandied
about in all sorts of contexts.
And I think it's one of thosewords that people just generally
don't actually know what itmeans or how to think about it.
And when I read this passage, Irealized that neither did I and
that the idea that theunprecedented effectively
(14:17):
eclipses our understandingbecause the only way...
I mean, by definition, the onlyway to understand what we're
observing or what we'reexperiencing is through lenses
of the past and patterns of thepast, that we don't have a way
of making of sense-making, ofmaking meaning out of what we're
(14:38):
experiencing and therefore we'relikely to fall prey to
limitations of whateverexperience or metaphor or
patterns or structures thatwe're relying on to try to
understand what's going on.
Jorge (14:52):
You know, in information architecture, one of the
founding maxims is thisstatement by Richard Saul Wurman
that you only understandsomething relative to something
you already understand.
And I've always taken that tomean that we construct our
mental models of the world basedon things we already know.
(15:15):
Let's think back, when SteveJobs introduced the iPhone, he
made the point to say that itwas a mobile phone, an internet
communicator, and a musicplayer, right?
He was trying to position thisnew device by relating it to
things that were already part ofpeople's daily lives.
I've always taken that maxim tobe about constructing mental
(15:38):
models.
But what you're saying here,which I think is a corollary to
that, is that the opposite isalso true.
When you're faced withconditions that you can't
explain, or things that arechanging too fast in
unpredictable ways, you willlatch onto your existing mental
(15:58):
models in ways that might keepyou from seeing the situation
clearly.
Harry (16:05):
That's exactly right.
And I think that's the...
just serendipitously, I thinkthat hearkens back to the story
that I told earlier, right?
There was just no way for me tomake sense of the experience
that I was having.
And even more so going forward,everything was different.
And so I celebrate today thisSurvival Day, I call it, as a
(16:30):
way of, honoring that completedislocation of understanding
from before to after.
It's described, there are two,from two different fields.
There are ways of maybe thinkingabout it.
One is as a Fermi level energytransition, state change between
(16:51):
electrons in an atom orsomething like that, where the
difference in energy levelsbetween electrons, when
something goes from one state toanother, there's no going back.
And another is througheducational development levels
or childhood development levelswhen kids are born and then as
(17:11):
they grow and develop, they gothrough these developmental
levels that are at least basedon what we understand today,
relatively predictable.
But the thing is, you can'timagine the new developmental
level and you can't comprehendthe one you were in before, but
you make sense of each newdevelopmental level through the
(17:32):
lens, largely unconscious of thepatterns and things that you've
learned from the previous one.
And so this idea of celebratingfor me what amounts to a type of
birthday is a way of honoringthe complete unknowability of
that transitional state andrecognizing that I can't
(17:54):
understand where I came from andI can't know where I'm going.
Jorge (17:58):
I think we're not in Kansas anymore, right?
Harry (18:01):
Yeah.
Jorge (18:03):
It's...
that's a little bit of whatyou're describing here.
And the very visceral image ofyou looking at your hands and
thinking that you were lookingat chicken bones because you had
never experienced seeing yourown bones outside of your body,
(18:26):
right?
Harry (18:27):
Yeah.
Weird.
Jorge (18:28):
It's,"We're not in Kansas anymore."
Harry (18:31):
Yeah, totally.
Jorge (18:33):
You know, an idea that comes to mind and, I was hoping
to actually read this text inone of our conversations, but
since we're talking about itnow, I might just bring it up,
is this notion of beginner'smind that is talked about in
Buddhism, right?
And by beginner's mind, he meanssomeone who is not an expert,
(18:54):
someone who is just gettingstarted, let's say in a craft,
like you're learning to paintwith water colors, right?
You're going to make a lot ofwhat we call rookie mistakes,
which is a way of saying you'reexploring the possibility space
of that medium somehow.
And Suzuki talks about thebeginner's mind, the kind of
(19:17):
mindset that you have whenyou're approaching a problem
without mental models, incontrast to what he calls the
expert mind.
And he says that in thebeginner's mind, there are many
possibilities, in the expert'smind there are few.
And both the reading and thestory you told contained
traumatic events that forcedindividuals, one of those
(19:40):
individuals being you, to reckonwith the fact that the things
that had worked for you up tonow were no longer useful for
making skillful predictionsabout what to do next or for
acting skillfully.
Harry (19:58):
Yeah.
Jorge (19:59):
And implicit in what you're saying here is that there
is value in being able to detachyourself from this expert's
mind, from this set of beliefs,particularly if you're facing
some kind of unprecedentedsituation like the ones that
you've described.
(20:19):
And now to turn it to practicalthings that our listeners might
do without having to incur insome traumatic experience, to
gain the benefits of beginner'smind.
Is there something that maybeyou've learned that could help
(20:40):
folks do that?
Harry (20:41):
I would say, and I'm learning this right as we speak,
so this is...
I'll make it real, that in everymoment, there's a degree of
unprecedented.
And the question to some extentis: how much is unprecedented?
And so the idea is that toconsciously apply the beginner's
(21:11):
mind is to maintain an awarenessthat there may be an
infinitesimally small amount ofthe unprecedented in every
moment, but there is some.
And can you keep in mind theaccordion or elastic nature of
this unprecedented, of thedegree of the unprecedented, to
(21:35):
always maintain a sense ofcuriosity, some degree of
curiosity in a state where it ishighly repetitive, highly
historically based, where, thesituation is almost a template
of what's happened in the past,the, degree of curiosity you
need is probably significantlylower.
(21:58):
But in a situation that is evenremotely novel or the context is
new, that degree of curiosityneeds to be much higher.
And in the more extreme sense ina situation that is truly
unprecedented, that is to say,where the percentage of what is
(22:23):
not, what you're not able todraw from previous experience in
a direct way to inform thepresent to predict the future,
that sense of curiosity needs tobe very high.
Jorge (22:36):
You're talking about assessing the degree of
unprecedented-ness.
I don't know if that's correctEnglish, right?
But how does one do that?
It feels to me like there is aDunning Kruger thing built into
this in that, almost bydefinition, if the situation is
unprecedented, you are not agood judge of what is going on,
(23:01):
and the degree to which it isunprecedented.
This person watches smoke comingout of the house and they are
not a good judge about what'sgonna happen next, right?
And rather than turning the knobon their curiosity, what they do
know is that there's someurgency in the situation.
And in there being urgency, theyresort to the things that have
worked for them in the past: going up and locking the doors. (23:25):
undefined
Are there ways to fostercuriosity under these conditions
of uncertainty where you're noteven a good judge of how much
uncertainty there is?
Harry (23:38):
I think there are probably some rules of thumb.
And I'm making this up as I go.
So I would say, in the examplefrom the reading with the house,
it's one thing to say,"Oh, I'veseen a fire before, and if
there's smoke, there's fire."It's another thing to say,"When
was the last time my house washit by lightning?" And if you
(23:59):
say,"Oh, never," that's a prettystrong signal for you don't
necessarily know what's coming,right?
I have no experience with thisas an event, versus I see a fire
on my stove and I recognize thatthis has happened before.
(24:21):
I've gotta snuff it out, notwith water, right?
I've gotta snuff it out eitherwith something, I need to cover
it with something that's notflammable, or I need to get a
fire extinguisher or baking sodaor something, right?
Those are situations where Ihave some personal experience
and some training in taking theobservational facts and
converting them to decisions andbehavior.
(24:43):
So I think there's a rule ofthumb there, which is when you
can say,"I've experienced thisdirectly and I've experienced
once or many times, and I ameither informed or well-trained
about how to respond to this."That is a low unprecedented
circumstance.
(25:03):
Versus,"Okay, I think I knowwhat's going on." An assumption
is an uncritically held belief.
I have assumptions about it.
If you ask yourself,"Do I reallyknow what's going on here?
Has this ever happened to mebefore?" When the answer is no,
the natural, the most effectiveresponse is detach and get
curious.
Jorge (25:25):
I am gonna read that back to you because I think that
there's something reallyimportant and valuable there.
I'm hearing two things.
One is being attuned...
somehow like being attuned toyour gut in that I would imagine
that the first reaction thereis,"Uh oh, that's not right."
(25:48):
Lightning strike followed byblack smoke is one of those, uh
oh moments, right?
So that's one thing, just being,being open to this kind of gut
level reaction that maybe youcan't quite comprehend at an
intellectual level, but that,something is not right.
And the other thing that I heardthere is having the wherewithal
(26:13):
to get your analytical mind toacknowledge that the causal
sequence that you've justwitnessed is not something that
you have witnessed before, notin the same way.
And to try to bring it home tofolks, because I would expect
(26:33):
that there's a lot of situationsin business where this kind of
thing happens, where your gutgoes,"Oh, that can't be good,"
right?
And then you immediately startlooking for explanations in ways
that you understand perhaps atthe expense of what is actually
in front of your eyes.
Harry (26:52):
This so vividly reminds me of an experience I had
driving on Highway 17.
Robert Montoye, who's anexecutive at IBM, I think at
research, was the lead chipdesigner at Hal Computer
Systems.
And I worked at Hal ComputerSystems in Campbell, California.
(27:13):
And we were driving on Highway17 and we heard this big bang
and saw what looked like anaccident in front of us.
But in the oncoming lanes,there's a cement divider, so
that the three lanes on our sideand the two lanes on the other,
not likely there was gonna beanything bad that happened.
(27:35):
But shortly after that big bang,a semi tire, a truck wheel, big,
tall, bounced across theoncoming lanes, over the cement
divider, bounced right in frontof our car and then kept going,
(27:57):
and then went off the road.
And without missing a beat,Robert turned to me and said,
"I've not encountered thisbefore." And I was just like
dumbstruck at both theexperience of it and the
presence of his reaction.
(28:19):
I, probably haven't thought ofthat experience since 1992 when
it happened.
Jorge (28:25):
That's amazing.
And I think that we might begiving listeners shivers talking
about all these trafficaccidents.
But lets, try to bring it to aclose at a practical place.
In hearing you describe thatstory yeah, that was my initial
reaction was to say,"Wow, thattakes a lot of presence of mind
(28:47):
to almost get into such a..."That would be a devastating
accident as well.
And having the presence of mindto formulate that question is
something that I suspect is amix of both kind of an innate
character, but also it might besomething that can be trained.
(29:10):
And, I don't know if you haveany, any recommendations for
folks to maybe get...
I think you talked about gettingyour ego out of the equation.
And again, short of being in anactual life-threatening
situation, what can folks do togain the presence of mind.
(29:34):
to inhabit that kind of space?
Maybe, something that you gotfrom your life altering
experience at fifteen.
Harry (29:43):
Practically speaking, the trick is to detach.
That's the first trick.
And I follow the instructions ofone of my mentors who says,"If
you want to detach, just quicklypicture yourself as if you're
looking at the top of your ownhead.
Can you see the top of your ownhead?" that practice immediately
removes you being associatedfrom your own emotions.
(30:06):
You can't look at the top ofyour own head with your
imagination and be associated inyour emotions at the same time,
according to him.
And I have found that to betrue.
And so when I need to pop out ofa situation and see it from
above, so to speak, that's thepractice that I engage in.
If you want to take thatfurther, it's martial arts
training of any sort.
Aikido is what I trained in, andnot well enough to do anything.
(30:30):
Certainly the only person I'mgonna hurt is myself.
And then, if I were to channelJocko Willink or Leif Babin from
the Extreme Ownership camp, theyhave an online course in how to
detach.
It's eighty bucks or something.
It's like a practices for...
(30:51):
I have not taken the course, I'mintending to because I'm
fascinated with that kind ofstuff.
But, I think those are threepractical things you can do.
Jorge (31:00):
Those are great.
I'm gonna, I'm gonna add acouple.
But first, I'm gonna riff onwhat you said about seeing
yourself from the top of yourhead.
What immediately came to mindthere is that folks who are
perhaps a bit younger than youand I who grew up with first
person shooter video games mightbe at an advantage here, because
one of the moves you can dothere is you can switch from the
(31:21):
first person view to this behindthe head view, right?
So may, maybe, keep that in mindthat you can do that.
IRL, right?
Like you, you can't likeenvision yourself, from the
third person point of view.
The one thing that I willsuggest there is establishing a
meditation practice.
(31:42):
There are apps that can helpyou.
I use and recommend the WakingUp app, but there are others,
Harry (31:50):
Me too, I use Waking Up.
Jorge (31:52):
I do twenty minutes every morning.
It's the first thing I do everyday before I start my day.
And part of the idea there,there's nothing mystical or
"spiritual" about it.
What it really is is an exercisein observing the workings of the
(32:16):
mind, Like we're so caught up,particularly those of us who
work in the let's call them likethe knowledge professions, we
tend to live so much in our headand we have this ongoing
chatter.
And I find meditation useful asa way to step back from that and
(32:39):
remind myself even the word"myself" is questionable in this
context, right?
but just take a step back andexperience consciousness at a
baseline level.
I can't say that I can do thiseffectively.
It's a practice, right?
Like it's called practice for areason.
But I have found that useful,and, just very specifically ways
(33:02):
in which I found it useful.
I used to be very reactive whensomething went wrong.
And I fortunately haven't hadanything as traumatic as the
experience as you describedhappen to me, but I have had,
obviously accidents, I've hadarguments with my spouse, or
getting upset at my kids orwhatever, right?
(33:23):
And the meditation practice hashelped me become more aware of
what's happening with my system.
I'll also say this, I recorded aconversation in my other
podcast, in The Informed Lifewith my friend Hans Krueger, who
has been studying thisphenomenon for a long time,
(33:46):
particularly from the TibetanBuddhist perspective.
And that episode of the show haspointers to ways of doing this
as well.
So my point is I find meditationuseful.
There are lots of practices inthat space that I think can help
with this as well.
Harry (34:06):
Yeah, I love the Waking Up app.
I'm terrible from the point ofview of doing it every day, but
I do find the practice helpsreinforce that sense of my
ability to look at things fromthe outside.
Jorge (34:20):
Harry, this has been awesome.
Catching up with you is alwaysfun, and especially on this
special date for you.
Do you have a name for it?
Harry (34:28):
I just call it Survival Day.
Yeah.
Jorge (34:32):
Well, happy Survival Day to you, my friend.
Harry (34:34):
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Narrator (34:41):
Thank you for listening to Traction Heroes
with Harry Max and Jorge Arango.
Check out the show notes attractionheroes.com.
And if you enjoyed the show,please leave us a rating in
Apple's podcasts app.
Thanks.
When you're faced with conditions that you can't
explain, or things that arechanging too fast in
unpredictable ways, you willlatch onto your existing mental
models in ways that might keepyou from seeing the situation
clearly.
(00:21):
You're listening to TractionHeroes.
Digging In to Get Results withHarry Max and Jorge Arango.
Harry, it's good to see you again.
Harry (00:34):
It's great to be here, Jorge.
It's nice to see you as well.
Jorge (00:37):
You were telling me earlier that it's a special day
for you.
Harry (00:40):
Yeah, today, on November eight, is what I call, my
Survival Thrival Day.
It's an annual celebration ofhaving survived being
effectively run over by a carwhen I was fifteen years old.
I was on a bicycle and I washeading down a mountain road,
Chautauqua Boulevard,specifically, in Pacific
(01:00):
Palisades, heading down to thecoast.
And there was a driver in afour-door Chevrolet going up
that road, and she veered intomy lane and hit me head on.
So I was pleaded into thebicycle.
She took the bicycle and I wentthe other way.
And so it resulted in a lot ofbroken bones and internal
(01:23):
injuries.
And ultimately, I ended up in ahospital for about six months
and then got out in a body castand took about two years to go
through the whole healingprocess.
But I celebrate today far morethan I celebrate my birthday
because not only did I surviveand it's special for that
reason, but I had some liketremendous insights and
(01:47):
realizations in that experience.
I had one of those crazy neardeath experiences.
And you read about these thingsand you hear about'em and you're
like,"Nah, that can't be true."And I had one, so I can't really
deny it.
And I was there, all broken up,laying on the street.
I didn't know where I was, and Isaw the light, right?
(02:07):
I saw this huge light.
And I started heading toward thelight.
And and I was like making my waydown the light,"Wondering wow,
this is really weird," thinkingto myself.
And then I heard this boomingvoice say,"It's not your time."
And I just snapped back into mybody at that moment and then I
(02:28):
could see myself from above andI could see all the people like
looking over me, and I couldsee, I looked through my own
eyes, I looked down at my hand,and I'm like,"Why are there
chicken bones sticking outta myhand?" And I'm like,"Oh, those
aren't chicken bones.
Those are my bones." I'm like,"Ew!" And then, it, then I'm
like,"How the heck did I gethere?
is this a bad dream?" I rememberhaving all these thoughts.
(02:53):
And I was like,"Okay, I,remember getting up and I had my
Captain Crunch..." And then, Ikinda walked through my day and
then I remember,"Oh, I got on mybike after my guitar lesson and
I went down Chautauqua and, ohshoot, I know what happened."
And right at that moment, thecacophony of all the noise
(03:15):
seeped in and I could hear thesirens now and I could hear all
the voices, and all the people,and all of a sudden, the pain
just rushed in.
And it was like this incrediblemoment of I was back in my body
as a human, broken up, lying onthe middle, lying in the road,
(03:38):
at night at five on a on t thatI'd ridden up and down many
times.
And sirens blaring and peopleall over, apparently a school
bus had passed and stopped withfriends of mine on it, weirdly.
But I survived.
And it was a rough, it was arough six months.
(03:59):
It was a lot of pain medicine,number of surgeries and stuff
like that.
But I had these incrediblerealizations as part of that
whole experience.
So I picked something to readtoday to share on that subject.
Weirdly, I didn't even make theconnection'cause I picked this
reading weeks ago.
But one of the things is whenyou're like a fifteen-year-old
(04:21):
boy, like, you're invincible.
And I wasn't invincible.
So the first thing, the firstkind of major realization, is
that everything I know is nottrue.
This sense of certainty that Ihave is completely false.
And, out of that came thisphilosophy, part of my way of
(04:43):
approaching the world, which isthat certainty that felt sense
that you're right is is anillusion and in fact it's the
enemy of truth.
And so, if you've ever workedclosely with me, I know you've
heard me say that, like somebodywill say,"I'm certain!" And I'll
look at them and I'll say,"Certainty's the enemy of
(05:03):
truth." It's like Heisenberg,right?
The closer you get right, theharder it is to tell how fast
it's going or which way it'sgoing or whatnot.
And the better sense you have ofhow fast it's going, the worse
the sense is that what the thingactually is.
I don't remember what thedetails of the Heisenberg
(05:24):
uncertainty principle are, butI've internalized them that way.
And the other thing was thisego-disassembling experience of
control and like having thesense of control completely
dismantled.
I mean, before the accident, Ithought I had some semblance of
(05:47):
control of things.
And after years of processingand reflecting on the accident,
I realized that control is acomplete illusion.
And it's just, a shroud in frontof you.
And, you can, think you havecontrol of things, but I often
say to people,"I just work here.
(06:09):
I'm not in charge of what'sgoing on." And yeah, sure I can,
influence my local sphere aroundme, but I don't think of it as
control at all.
Jorge (06:18):
That's amazing.
And I'm wondering if we shouldinclude like a trigger warning
for folks because the story isso visceral, right?
So shocking.
You were describing the accidentand I was here wincing.
I'm glad you survived,obviously.
(06:38):
And it feels like there arelearnings to be had here.
The story where my mindimmediately went, and I think it
has to do with control is aBrian Eno anecdote.
Brian Eno had, an accident whereI think he was crossing the
street in London and he was hitby a cab and he ended up,
(07:03):
bedridden as a result of thataccident.
And he had a friend come visitand gifted him a record of harp
music.
And this friend put on therecord as they were leaving and
(07:23):
after they left, Eno realizedthat one of the two channels in
the stereo had failed and thevolume was set much too low.
So he couldn't really hear themusic.
All he could hear was like thetwinkling of the harp.
And on top of that, it wasraining.
And I might be reading into it,but I think this is what
(07:46):
happened.
After an initial struggle withthe unsatisfying conditions of
the music, he settled into thesound.
And that is the genesis ofambient music.
He had this realization thatmusic could be...
(08:07):
I think the way that he talksabout it is music could serve a
similar role to perfume, whereit's kinda coloring the
environment.
If you decide to pay attentionto it, it's interesting, but you
can also let it just wash overyou and then it also serves a
function, right?
but the decision to explore thatas a possible space for music to
(08:28):
inhabit came as a result ofbeing bedridden and lacking the
ability to control theconditions under which the music
was being played back.
Harry (08:39):
Whoa.
That's amazing.
And, so funny, you had mentionedBrian Eno because of course, my
favorite song of all time isSpinning Away, a song that he
and I think Cage did.
I can't remember the title ofthe album, Upside Down or Inside
Out or...
Jorge (08:55):
John Cale.
Harry (08:57):
Yeah.
John Cale.
Sorry, my brain just had a brainfart.
Yeah, I love that.
And I own it.
I own the CD and I own thevinyl, and it was reissued.
I bought a version of it beforeit was reissued, but yeah.
Jorge (09:13):
We, didn't plan on this, but that is one of my favorite
songs as well, to the pointwhere I used to have the lyrics
to that song printed and tackedon a board in my office.
Harry (09:26):
No way.
Jorge (09:27):
Yeah.
Harry (09:28):
Unbelievable.
Jorge (09:30):
Maybe we should be playing that for your November
8th being reborn celebrationbecause it's a good song for
that too.
We won't get into it, but youmentioned that you have a
reading to share with us.
I'm really curious about that.
Harry (09:47):
Yeah, totally.
And I didn't do my homework, soI don't remember the author
because I didn't look it up, butwe'll have to, we'll have to add
that in.
But I won't tell you what thebook is until after I'm done, in
the spirit of what you did to melast time.
And it's not too long, here itgoes.
"The unprecedented isnecessarily unrecognizable.
(10:10):
When we encounter somethingunprecedented, we automatically
interpret it through the lensesof familiar categories, thereby
rendering invisible preciselythat which is unprecedented.
A classic example is the notionof the horseless carriage to
which people reverted whenconfronted with unprecedented
facts of the automobile.
(10:31):
"The tragic illustration is theencounter between the indigenous
people and the first Spanishconquerors when the Tainos" I
don't know if I'm pronouncingthat right"of the pre-Columbian
Caribbean islands, first laideye on the sweating, bearded
Spanish soldiers trudging acrossthe sand and their brocade and
armor, how could they possiblyhave recognized the meaning and
(10:53):
portent of that moment?
Unable to imagine their owndestruction, they'd reckon that
those strange creatures weregods and welcomed them with
intricate rituals ofhospitality.
"This is how the unprecedentedreliably confounds
understanding.
Existing lenses illuminate thefamiliar, thus obscuring the
(11:15):
original by turning theunprecedented into extensions of
the past.
This contributes to thenormalization of the abnormal,
which makes fighting theunprecedented even more of an
uphill climb.
"On a stormy night, some yearsago, our home was struck by
lightning, and I learned apowerful lesson in the
comprehension defying power ofan unprecedented.
(11:38):
Within moments of the strike,thick black smoke drifted up the
staircase and from the lowerlevel of the house and toward
the living room.
As we mobilized and called thefire department, I believe that
I had just a minute or two to dosomething useful before rushing
out to join the family.
"First, I ran upstairs andclosed all the bedroom doors to
protect them from smoke damage.
(11:59):
Next, I tore back downstairsinto the living room where I
gathered up all of our familyphoto albums as I could carry
them outside on a covered porchfor safety.
The smoke was just about toreach me, when the fire marshal
arrived to grab me by theshoulder and yank me out the
door.
We stood in the driving rain,where to my astonishment we
(12:20):
watched the house explode inflames.
"I learned many things from thefire, but amongst the most
important was theunrecognizability of the
unprecedented.
In that early phase of thecrisis, I could imagine our home
scarred by smoke damage, but Icould not imagine its
disappearance.
I grasped what was happeningthrough the lens of past
(12:43):
experience, envisioning adistressing but ultimately
manageable detour that wouldlead back to the status quo.
Unable to distinguish theunprecedented, all I could do
was to close doors to rooms thatwould no longer exist and seek
safety on a porch that was fadedto vanish.
I was blind to the conditionsthat were unprecedented in my
(13:03):
experience."
Jorge (13:06):
Wow, that is really heavy.
What is the book?
Harry (13:11):
So the book is Surveillance Capitalism, and
I'll have to look up the authorand I'm just embarrassed to say
I didn't prioritize that beforewe started our call.
I got distracted in otherthings.
But weirdly, this book wasreferred to me by Dennis
Allison, who invited me todinner with Brian Eno.
Jorge (13:33):
Oh, wow.
Okay.
Interesting.
Yeah, I think the name isShoshana Zuboff, the name of the
author.
And I have to say, I have notread Surveillance Capitalism.
It is on my reading pile.
But this is really interesting.
What drew you to that particularpassage in that book?
Harry (13:54):
You know, we hear the term"unprecedented" bandied
about in all sorts of contexts.
And I think it's one of thosewords that people just generally
don't actually know what itmeans or how to think about it.
And when I read this passage, Irealized that neither did I and
that the idea that theunprecedented effectively
(14:17):
eclipses our understandingbecause the only way...
I mean, by definition, the onlyway to understand what we're
observing or what we'reexperiencing is through lenses
of the past and patterns of thepast, that we don't have a way
of making of sense-making, ofmaking meaning out of what we're
(14:38):
experiencing and therefore we'relikely to fall prey to
limitations of whateverexperience or metaphor or
patterns or structures thatwe're relying on to try to
understand what's going on.
Jorge (14:52):
You know, in information architecture, one of the
founding maxims is thisstatement by Richard Saul Wurman
that you only understandsomething relative to something
you already understand.
And I've always taken that tomean that we construct our
mental models of the world basedon things we already know.
(15:15):
Let's think back, when SteveJobs introduced the iPhone, he
made the point to say that itwas a mobile phone, an internet
communicator, and a musicplayer, right?
He was trying to position thisnew device by relating it to
things that were already part ofpeople's daily lives.
I've always taken that maxim tobe about constructing mental
(15:38):
models.
But what you're saying here,which I think is a corollary to
that, is that the opposite isalso true.
When you're faced withconditions that you can't
explain, or things that arechanging too fast in
unpredictable ways, you willlatch onto your existing mental
(15:58):
models in ways that might keepyou from seeing the situation
clearly.
Harry (16:05):
That's exactly right.
And I think that's the...
just serendipitously, I thinkthat hearkens back to the story
that I told earlier, right?
There was just no way for me tomake sense of the experience
that I was having.
And even more so going forward,everything was different.
And so I celebrate today thisSurvival Day, I call it, as a
(16:30):
way of, honoring that completedislocation of understanding
from before to after.
It's described, there are two,from two different fields.
There are ways of maybe thinkingabout it.
One is as a Fermi level energytransition, state change between
(16:51):
electrons in an atom orsomething like that, where the
difference in energy levelsbetween electrons, when
something goes from one state toanother, there's no going back.
And another is througheducational development levels
or childhood development levelswhen kids are born and then as
(17:11):
they grow and develop, they gothrough these developmental
levels that are at least basedon what we understand today,
relatively predictable.
But the thing is, you can'timagine the new developmental
level and you can't comprehendthe one you were in before, but
you make sense of each newdevelopmental level through the
(17:32):
lens, largely unconscious of thepatterns and things that you've
learned from the previous one.
And so this idea of celebratingfor me what amounts to a type of
birthday is a way of honoringthe complete unknowability of
that transitional state andrecognizing that I can't
(17:54):
understand where I came from andI can't know where I'm going.
Jorge (17:58):
I think we're not in Kansas anymore, right?
Harry (18:01):
Yeah.
Jorge (18:03):
It's...
that's a little bit of whatyou're describing here.
And the very visceral image ofyou looking at your hands and
thinking that you were lookingat chicken bones because you had
never experienced seeing yourown bones outside of your body,
(18:26):
right?
Harry (18:27):
Yeah.
Weird.
Jorge (18:28):
It's,"We're not in Kansas anymore."
Harry (18:31):
Yeah, totally.
Jorge (18:33):
You know, an idea that comes to mind and, I was hoping
to actually read this text inone of our conversations, but
since we're talking about itnow, I might just bring it up,
is this notion of beginner'smind that is talked about in
Buddhism, right?
And by beginner's mind, he meanssomeone who is not an expert,
(18:54):
someone who is just gettingstarted, let's say in a craft,
like you're learning to paintwith water colors, right?
You're going to make a lot ofwhat we call rookie mistakes,
which is a way of saying you'reexploring the possibility space
of that medium somehow.
And Suzuki talks about thebeginner's mind, the kind of
(19:17):
mindset that you have whenyou're approaching a problem
without mental models, incontrast to what he calls the
expert mind.
And he says that in thebeginner's mind, there are many
possibilities, in the expert'smind there are few.
And both the reading and thestory you told contained
traumatic events that forcedindividuals, one of those
(19:40):
individuals being you, to reckonwith the fact that the things
that had worked for you up tonow were no longer useful for
making skillful predictionsabout what to do next or for
acting skillfully.
Harry (19:58):
Yeah.
Jorge (19:59):
And implicit in what you're saying here is that there
is value in being able to detachyourself from this expert's
mind, from this set of beliefs,particularly if you're facing
some kind of unprecedentedsituation like the ones that
you've described.
(20:19):
And now to turn it to practicalthings that our listeners might
do without having to incur insome traumatic experience, to
gain the benefits of beginner'smind.
Is there something that maybeyou've learned that could help
(20:40):
folks do that?
Harry (20:41):
I would say, and I'm learning this right as we speak,
so this is...
I'll make it real, that in everymoment, there's a degree of
unprecedented.
And the question to some extentis: how much is unprecedented?
And so the idea is that toconsciously apply the beginner's
(21:11):
mind is to maintain an awarenessthat there may be an
infinitesimally small amount ofthe unprecedented in every
moment, but there is some.
And can you keep in mind theaccordion or elastic nature of
this unprecedented, of thedegree of the unprecedented, to
(21:35):
always maintain a sense ofcuriosity, some degree of
curiosity in a state where it ishighly repetitive, highly
historically based, where, thesituation is almost a template
of what's happened in the past,the, degree of curiosity you
need is probably significantlylower.
(21:58):
But in a situation that is evenremotely novel or the context is
new, that degree of curiosityneeds to be much higher.
And in the more extreme sense ina situation that is truly
unprecedented, that is to say,where the percentage of what is
(22:23):
not, what you're not able todraw from previous experience in
a direct way to inform thepresent to predict the future,
that sense of curiosity needs tobe very high.
Jorge (22:36):
You're talking about assessing the degree of
unprecedented-ness.
I don't know if that's correctEnglish, right?
But how does one do that?
It feels to me like there is aDunning Kruger thing built into
this in that, almost bydefinition, if the situation is
unprecedented, you are not agood judge of what is going on,
(23:01):
and the degree to which it isunprecedented.
This person watches smoke comingout of the house and they are
not a good judge about what'sgonna happen next, right?
And rather than turning the knobon their curiosity, what they do
know is that there's someurgency in the situation.
And in there being urgency, theyresort to the things that have
worked for them in the past: going up and locking the doors. (23:25):
undefined
Are there ways to fostercuriosity under these conditions
of uncertainty where you're noteven a good judge of how much
uncertainty there is?
Harry (23:38):
I think there are probably some rules of thumb.
And I'm making this up as I go.
So I would say, in the examplefrom the reading with the house,
it's one thing to say,"Oh, I'veseen a fire before, and if
there's smoke, there's fire."It's another thing to say,"When
was the last time my house washit by lightning?" And if you
(23:59):
say,"Oh, never," that's a prettystrong signal for you don't
necessarily know what's coming,right?
I have no experience with thisas an event, versus I see a fire
on my stove and I recognize thatthis has happened before.
(24:21):
I've gotta snuff it out, notwith water, right?
I've gotta snuff it out eitherwith something, I need to cover
it with something that's notflammable, or I need to get a
fire extinguisher or baking sodaor something, right?
Those are situations where Ihave some personal experience
and some training in taking theobservational facts and
converting them to decisions andbehavior.
(24:43):
So I think there's a rule ofthumb there, which is when you
can say,"I've experienced thisdirectly and I've experienced
once or many times, and I ameither informed or well-trained
about how to respond to this."That is a low unprecedented
circumstance.
(25:03):
Versus,"Okay, I think I knowwhat's going on." An assumption
is an uncritically held belief.
I have assumptions about it.
If you ask yourself,"Do I reallyknow what's going on here?
Has this ever happened to mebefore?" When the answer is no,
the natural, the most effectiveresponse is detach and get
curious.
Jorge (25:25):
I am gonna read that back to you because I think that
there's something reallyimportant and valuable there.
I'm hearing two things.
One is being attuned...
somehow like being attuned toyour gut in that I would imagine
that the first reaction thereis,"Uh oh, that's not right."
(25:48):
Lightning strike followed byblack smoke is one of those, uh
oh moments, right?
So that's one thing, just being,being open to this kind of gut
level reaction that maybe youcan't quite comprehend at an
intellectual level, but that,something is not right.
And the other thing that I heardthere is having the wherewithal
(26:13):
to get your analytical mind toacknowledge that the causal
sequence that you've justwitnessed is not something that
you have witnessed before, notin the same way.
And to try to bring it home tofolks, because I would expect
(26:33):
that there's a lot of situationsin business where this kind of
thing happens, where your gutgoes,"Oh, that can't be good,"
right?
And then you immediately startlooking for explanations in ways
that you understand perhaps atthe expense of what is actually
in front of your eyes.
Harry (26:52):
This so vividly reminds me of an experience I had
driving on Highway 17.
Robert Montoye, who's anexecutive at IBM, I think at
research, was the lead chipdesigner at Hal Computer
Systems.
And I worked at Hal ComputerSystems in Campbell, California.
(27:13):
And we were driving on Highway17 and we heard this big bang
and saw what looked like anaccident in front of us.
But in the oncoming lanes,there's a cement divider, so
that the three lanes on our sideand the two lanes on the other,
not likely there was gonna beanything bad that happened.
(27:35):
But shortly after that big bang,a semi tire, a truck wheel, big,
tall, bounced across theoncoming lanes, over the cement
divider, bounced right in frontof our car and then kept going,
(27:57):
and then went off the road.
And without missing a beat,Robert turned to me and said,
"I've not encountered thisbefore." And I was just like
dumbstruck at both theexperience of it and the
presence of his reaction.
(28:19):
I, probably haven't thought ofthat experience since 1992 when
it happened.
Jorge (28:25):
That's amazing.
And I think that we might begiving listeners shivers talking
about all these trafficaccidents.
But lets, try to bring it to aclose at a practical place.
In hearing you describe thatstory yeah, that was my initial
reaction was to say,"Wow, thattakes a lot of presence of mind
(28:47):
to almost get into such a..."That would be a devastating
accident as well.
And having the presence of mindto formulate that question is
something that I suspect is amix of both kind of an innate
character, but also it might besomething that can be trained.
(29:10):
And, I don't know if you haveany, any recommendations for
folks to maybe get...
I think you talked about gettingyour ego out of the equation.
And again, short of being in anactual life-threatening
situation, what can folks do togain the presence of mind.
(29:34):
to inhabit that kind of space?
Maybe, something that you gotfrom your life altering
experience at fifteen.
Harry (29:43):
Practically speaking, the trick is to detach.
That's the first trick.
And I follow the instructions ofone of my mentors who says,"If
you want to detach, just quicklypicture yourself as if you're
looking at the top of your ownhead.
Can you see the top of your ownhead?" that practice immediately
removes you being associatedfrom your own emotions.
(30:06):
You can't look at the top ofyour own head with your
imagination and be associated inyour emotions at the same time,
according to him.
And I have found that to betrue.
And so when I need to pop out ofa situation and see it from
above, so to speak, that's thepractice that I engage in.
If you want to take thatfurther, it's martial arts
training of any sort.
Aikido is what I trained in, andnot well enough to do anything.
(30:30):
Certainly the only person I'mgonna hurt is myself.
And then, if I were to channelJocko Willink or Leif Babin from
the Extreme Ownership camp, theyhave an online course in how to
detach.
It's eighty bucks or something.
It's like a practices for...
(30:51):
I have not taken the course, I'mintending to because I'm
fascinated with that kind ofstuff.
But, I think those are threepractical things you can do.
Jorge (31:00):
Those are great.
I'm gonna, I'm gonna add acouple.
But first, I'm gonna riff onwhat you said about seeing
yourself from the top of yourhead.
What immediately came to mindthere is that folks who are
perhaps a bit younger than youand I who grew up with first
person shooter video games mightbe at an advantage here, because
one of the moves you can dothere is you can switch from the
(31:21):
first person view to this behindthe head view, right?
So may, maybe, keep that in mindthat you can do that.
IRL, right?
Like you, you can't likeenvision yourself, from the
third person point of view.
The one thing that I willsuggest there is establishing a
meditation practice.
(31:42):
There are apps that can helpyou.
I use and recommend the WakingUp app, but there are others,
Harry (31:50):
Me too, I use Waking Up.
Jorge (31:52):
I do twenty minutes every morning.
It's the first thing I do everyday before I start my day.
And part of the idea there,there's nothing mystical or
"spiritual" about it.
What it really is is an exercisein observing the workings of the
(32:16):
mind, Like we're so caught up,particularly those of us who
work in the let's call them likethe knowledge professions, we
tend to live so much in our headand we have this ongoing
chatter.
And I find meditation useful asa way to step back from that and
(32:39):
remind myself even the word"myself" is questionable in this
context, right?
but just take a step back andexperience consciousness at a
baseline level.
I can't say that I can do thiseffectively.
It's a practice, right?
Like it's called practice for areason.
But I have found that useful,and, just very specifically ways
(33:02):
in which I found it useful.
I used to be very reactive whensomething went wrong.
And I fortunately haven't hadanything as traumatic as the
experience as you describedhappen to me, but I have had,
obviously accidents, I've hadarguments with my spouse, or
getting upset at my kids orwhatever, right?
(33:23):
And the meditation practice hashelped me become more aware of
what's happening with my system.
I'll also say this, I recorded aconversation in my other
podcast, in The Informed Lifewith my friend Hans Krueger, who
has been studying thisphenomenon for a long time,
(33:46):
particularly from the TibetanBuddhist perspective.
And that episode of the show haspointers to ways of doing this
as well.
So my point is I find meditationuseful.
There are lots of practices inthat space that I think can help
with this as well.
Harry (34:06):
Yeah, I love the Waking Up app.
I'm terrible from the point ofview of doing it every day, but
I do find the practice helpsreinforce that sense of my
ability to look at things fromthe outside.
Jorge (34:20):
Harry, this has been awesome.
Catching up with you is alwaysfun, and especially on this
special date for you.
Do you have a name for it?
Harry (34:28):
I just call it Survival Day.
Yeah.
Jorge (34:32):
Well, happy Survival Day to you, my friend.
Harry (34:34):
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Narrator (34:41):
Thank you for listening to Traction Heroes
with Harry Max and Jorge Arango.
Check out the show notes attractionheroes.com.
And if you enjoyed the show,please leave us a rating in
Apple's podcasts app.
Thanks.
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