 Welcome to the show, Shane. Great to have you. Thanks, agent. John, I'm glad to be here. Now, when we think about clear thinking, many of us think about the most important decisions in our life, marriage, career, where to live. But it's actually the ordinary moments that matter a lot when it comes to clear thinking. And why is that, Shane? Well, you can think about this in a couple of ways. One way is when you think about who to marry or where to live or what career to have, you know you're making a decision. And it's a big decision. Generally speaking, you tend to be directionally correct. You're rational. You're thinking about it. You're thinking through different permutations and combinations. And, you know, you don't always get it right, but you pretty much do, right? Things change, and maybe things don't work out the way you want, but you get those decisions pretty well right. But it doesn't matter if you choose the best career, if you don't show up and work your ass off every day. It doesn't matter if you choose the best partner, you make that one decision. You choose the best partner. This person's perfect for you. But if you don't put in the work and you're not in the trenches with them, you're going to wake up to divorce papers. But we don't think of those little moments that sort of like can multiply these big decisions by zero as decisions. Like if you were to walk into the average house in the United States or Canada and you see a couple arguing over the dishwasher, who loads the dishwasher a certain way, right? A common sort of thing that people get into. If I were to tap people on the shoulder in that moment and be like, hey, you're choosing to pour water or gasoline onto this situation right now. What do you want to do? 999 out of 1,000 people would be like, oh, I didn't realize that was what was happening. I'm going to choose to put water on this situation because this isn't a big deal. Nobody cares. I don't want to escalate this. And so these little moments, these ordinary moments that we unconsciously make decisions in, we don't know we're making a decision. And those have the ability to undo all of these big decisions where we think we're making this decision. Oh, man, I picked the right partner. I'm set. No, you got to put work into that every day. You can't just coast on that. It's in those moments where life really begins, right? We've worked so hard to get to this point where we get to make this decision about moving forward. And then we think that's it. Well, that's where this is, as you mentioned it, if we're choosing that person, will the work in building this relationship is going to begin? If we're now choosing a different path in a career, this is the path that we've chosen that we have to make right. And so how we show up is going to determine whether or not that was the right decision to make. And we were going through the defaults, which we're about to get to. And the one line that stuck out to me was that if we're making these decisions through being pulled emotionally, it's almost like we're going through life on hard mode. Now, who wants to choose that, right? So let's go ahead and dive into the book a bit and get into what these blind spots or defaults are that cloud and muddy the waters in order for us to think more clearly. So the way to think about this is we're animals. And we share a lot in common with animals. So we're biologically hardwired to be territorial and self-preserving and ritualistic and hierarchical. We can't get out of that. We can't eliminate these things. You can't pull out a pencil and erase them and be like, oh, I'm not going to be self-preserving. No, there's a lot of evolution behind this. The difference between us and other animals is we have the ability to pause and reason before we respond. We're not just instinctual. But if we don't use that ability, we're no better off than an animal in the wild. And we're going to react without reasoning. And so there's four sort of like defaults that I organize in the book around you're emotional, you're ego-driven, you're sort of social and inertia. And these things tend to create these situations either in combination or alone, where we're less likely to reason before responding. If you, a common scenario, you're at a meeting, one of your colleagues who's in competition for you for a promotion slightly says something passive aggressive. Well, what do you do? I mean, again, water or gasoline, you're making a choice, but you don't know you're making a choice. You're like, what are you doing right now? My ego comes out, my emotion comes out, and what do I do? Well, now I'm going to escalate the situation. And so we end up in these little situations all the time. And they primarily surround emotion and ego. When you're angry, do you make good decisions? No. That's why one of the core tenets of Alcoholics Anonymous is halt, right? Hungry, angry, lonely, tired. If you are one of these things, you are likely to make a really bad decision. And I think we're the same way, but ego, let's take territorial. Animals are territorial. So we think of a wolf running around and peeing on trees and marking its territory or a dog doing the same thing. But for us, our territory is our identity, how we see ourselves, how we want other people to see us. And that doesn't mean that that's an accurate representation of what's actually happening. But when somebody treads on that, or somebody pushes on that, well, now we're going to respond just like crossing that invisible border of an animal peeing, the wolf is going to respond, well, we respond the same way. And what do we do in that moment? We don't make the situation better at all. We often make it much worse. I love it in that equating identity to territory makes so much sense. And for us in our clients, we make all of them go through a process of identifying when they're in a heightened emotional state. Because when you realize that you're in a heightened emotional state, it's already too late. You've already been triggered. You're already then setting up in one of these defaults, whether it's your ego or an emotional default, or the social default. But if you can understand the things that put you in that heightened emotional state, you can begin to navigate those. You can prepare yourself if you're walking into a situation that is going to trigger you, or you can avoid it. So you don't have to worry about that. But once they all get that idea of what their body does, how it reacts to that stimulation, they become aware all of a sudden of, oh, this is where I get myself in trouble. And then of course, it always comes down to, as you mentioned, one of these identities, the ego default, the emotional default, social default, and the inertia default. So I think it would be great for us now to go in and go through each one of these and define them. So before we do that, I want to bring it back just a little bit. One of the key ideas in the book is that we think of decisions as being rational in the moment and making the best choice at the moment of the decision. One of the key ideas that I sort of talk about is the position you're in at the moment you decide determines the options you have available. And we've talked about this a little bit, right? So if I'm hungry, angry, lonely, tired, I'm not going to make a good decision. When I come home and we're arguing about the dishwasher, what position am I in? What kind of day have I had to make that happen? Well, I'm giving my partner or my spouse the worst part of myself because I had a long day, right? This stuff never happens early in the morning. It always happens late at night. This sort of dawned on me the other day. One of my kids came home and he handed me this poor mark on one of his exams. And he walks by like a teenager. He thrusts it in my face because he knows I need to sign it. And he's like, I did my best. It's upside down. So I know it's bad. I flip it over and I'm like, whoa, right? And he just goes by and I'm like, okay, now is not the time to have this conversation with him because I played sports as a kid. I don't know if you guys did, but most of my friends who played sports who quit, they always quit in the car ride home. It was always the parents pressuring, talking about things at the wrong moment. So I was like, I'm gonna wait. I waited things for his emotions to dissipate because I didn't want to pour gas on this. I want to water here. And then we talked later on that night. I think it might have been the next morning, but I was like, okay, let's talk about what does it mean to do your best? How do you describe this to me? And he's like, well, when I sat down, I read every question carefully. I went through the whole test. I did all my stuff and I'm like, oh, that's really interesting. You took the same approach that most adults take the decision making. At the moment of the decision, I did my best. But what you neglected to think about was the position you were in at the moment you sat down to write your test. Did you eat a healthy breakfast? No. Did you sleep the night before? No, I stayed up late. Did you study? No, I stayed up late because I was cramming. So I didn't study in the two or three days before like I should have. And because I woke up late, I was cranky and got into a fight with my brother on the way out the door. Well, did you really put yourself in the best position possible? Did you really do your best? All of those things are within your control, and they all determine what happens in that moment. So if you do all of those things, and I'll bring this back to the defaults, right? So if you're angry at the moment that you're making a decision, you're not going to make the best decision possible. Well, there's ways to avoid being angry in the first place. And we know what a lot of those things are. So emotion, ego, social inertia, inertia is sort of like your habits. They just continue whatever you've done, if it's working reasonably well, because changing your habits would admit that you're not getting the results you want. You don't want to admit that to yourself. That's a hard ego hit. Social. I follow best practices. I can't get fired. Well, of course, but if you do what everybody else is doing, you're going to get, by definition, you are going to get the same results that everybody else is getting. You have to create advantageous divergence or positive deviance. You have to go against the crowd at certain moments and be willing to look like an idiot. And that fear, again, comes back to ego, right? A lot of this comes back to ego. We don't want to look like an idiot. What if I'm wrong? What if I do something different and I get in trouble? And a lot of organizations don't encourage this experimentation with people, because if you do something different and you get worse results, well, you're the fool for doing something different. But if we look at Evolution again, which we've talked about a little bit, I mean, it all works through deviation. That is literally how we've all got here. And so it's fascinating to me that these things are so powerful. And we're triggered by the same things emotionally when our ego gets triggered or our anger or sort of fear. We don't make our best decisions in these moments. We have to get out of that state of being and into a better state. But it's not just recognizing, oh, I'm angry in this moment. What are the things, the practical steps that I can take? It's about how do I avoid being angry in the first place? How do I put myself in a position to deal with what's going to happen? And if possible, how do you lengthen the time between the decision being made and being in that state? Because many of us in these moments don't even realize we're making a decision. It's unconscious to us. So there is no gap. It's just happening. The anger outburst, the ego is wounded. The social pressure is handing you the drink or telling you to do this thing because everyone else is doing it. And at that point, you're not even prepared to create the space to make the better decision. Totally. So in the book, we talk about things like safeguards, where it's like, how do I prevent this from happening in the first place? And if I can't prevent it, how do I deal with it when it happens? And one of the things that we talk about that has been life changing to a lot of people who've read an early copy of the book is automatic rules for success, which is basically having the best version of yourself pre-decide what you will do in certain situations. But it has to be a rule. So we've been taught, our entire life, you need to follow the rules. I used to get polygraphed on this stuff. Like, this is like, you have to follow the rules. You can't break the rules. Speed limit 60, you got to go 60. You show up on time, you do all the things that you're told to do. And so all these rules were programmed to follow. But we've never thought about, how do I switch this around and use those rules to my advantage? How do I create an environment, an artificial environment where my own rules are helping me? So you talked about drinks and social pressure. This is one that a lot of people feel or desserts another one, right? You're trying to eat healthy. And so common scenarios are like, I'm going out to dinner with some friends. I don't want to have dessert. But now, every time this happens, I have to make a choice. And that choice, I'm relying on willpower. And eventually, everybody loses the battle with willpower. And that choice is, I'm not going to have dessert. Because I've thought of it as a choice. But what if we create a rule? And our rule is, I just don't eat dessert. That's my rule. My dessert once a year on Christmas, whatever you want it to be. But my rule is, I don't eat dessert. Well, now when you're in the exact same situation with your friends, you're out, you just have to follow your rule. But more importantly, when you tell them, it's your rule, they won't push back because we've been taught not to push back on rules. And so if you just simply say, my rule is, I don't need dessert, you might have to do it twice, but they'll stop pushing it on you. That social pressure will be so much less. And you'll be able to do the things that you want to do. Your desired behavior will become your default behavior. And this is so powerful. Another example of how this has impacted people is working out every day. I don't know, but you guys, I don't like working out a lot of my friends, don't like working out either. A lot of them love working out. Those people, this rule is not for you, but work out every day. So about two or three years ago, during COVID, I was struggling to do these two or three time a week workouts. And what I found was, I was listening to this voice in my head, which is like, oh my God, you've had a long day. You have so much to do tonight. There's a million emails to reply to. Why don't we skip working out today? And we'll do extra tomorrow. And that little lie, right? I started negotiating with myself. I'm like, yeah, totally. You're right. That sounds great. Why don't we skip today? And I'll do an extra 20 minutes tomorrow. Tomorrow rolls around and that little voice is like, oh man, I got you yesterday. I'm going to get you today. And so I just created this rule and I was like, you know what, I'm just going to work out every day and see what happens. And that doesn't mean I have time for a 90 minute workout every day or even 60 minutes. So I reduce the duration or scope of what I'm doing, but I do it every day. It might mean I go to the gym and do squats. It might mean I just go for a little run. I do something that sweats every single day. And since I've done that, it's been so powerful because that little voice in my head doesn't say, should we work out today? You've got a lot to do. It's like, how do I fit this in? And what is the duration and scope of how I fit it in? And that conversation helps the best version of me get what I want out of life. And these things are just so powerful, right? I have all these little automatic rules. Like if I'm out with business colleagues, I stop drinking at nine o'clock. Nothing good happens at nine with people that aren't your friends. I invest in an index fund every month. I don't have meetings usually until 12 o'clock in the day. Why? Because my rule is I don't have meetings. I mean, there's violations of that rule on occasion, but I want the best time of my day, which for me is the morning reserved for the biggest opportunity that I have, not opportunity. One of the reasons that we don't focus and we don't get the outcomes we want is that we don't have the time for our prayer. We're always searching for this time. Oh, I know what's really important, but I don't have time to do it. Well, it's like, well, why don't we block off time every day? And I know a lot of people are probably listening to this going, oh, wouldn't it be nice to be able to block off till noon? Well, I started doing this when I worked at an intelligence agency. I didn't block off till noon because that would have been impossible. First, I started with 15 minutes and I just gradually expanded it. You look at my calendar. I was going out six months, but I was booking a meeting with myself six months out. And I'm like, okay, from 830 to 9 every day, I don't have meetings. So I start booking and then I would go from 830 to 930. And I would gradually just increase the time the further I got in that calendar. And then lo and behold, when this time ran, came around, I'm like, oh, I got this free time and I can start doing these things that I really know I need to focus on, but I don't have to find the time so that my outcome started to improve. And then we started to do it as a team because I'm like, well, if this works for me, I bet you it works for other people. And with it being a rule, you don't have to draw on your willpower and decision-making. Each and every time someone goes to try to schedule a meeting with you, each and every time someone pushes back on your morning. Yeah, totally. So I get this idea from Daniel Komen. I was in his penthouse in New York and we were chatting and his phone rang and he took the phone. And towards the end of it, he was like, my rule is, I don't say yes on the phone. I'll get back to you tomorrow. And I was like, that sounds really powerful. Tell me about that. He didn't think of how to apply this to all these broad situations, but he hated saying yes on the phone because he often felt the social pressure to go along with whatever the person was. Do you want to meet for coffee tomorrow? Well, no, I don't want to meet for coffee, but you don't want to say that because you don't want to push back on people. Do you want to talk at my event? No, I don't want to talk at your event. And so he had all of these people coming inbound to him, asking him to do stuff that he really didn't want to do. And his way to dissipate the situation was like, my rule is I just don't say yes on the spot. I'll get back to you tomorrow. And he's like, it's so funny because I went from saying yes about 90% of the time to saying yes about 10% of the time by inserting, what did we do? We inserted this pause, the space between stimulus and response. So we took something that we know exists, stimulus response, and we've inserted through an artificial environment through a safeguard, we've inserted a way to pause. And we can do this at work too. There's so many other practical examples of this. If you think of one of the common scenarios at work is like, let's get together in a room and we're going to solve this problem. Well, first we got to figure out what the problem is. You go into this room, you get 15 or 12 or even eight type A people, somebody throws out a problem and they're like, here's the problem. And then everybody's like, oh, that sounds reasonably correct. And then what does everybody do? You jump into solution space. Right. How do we solve this problem? But nobody's actually paused and thought like, is this really the problem? And this is why we often solve the wrong problem. So how do you create a safeguard around this? Well, it's talking to Randall Stuttman years ago and he's like, you can have a firewall between these two things. And the firewall is we'll have two separate meetings. And they can, you know, you would regularly book this meeting for an hour and now you can do it twice for 30 minutes. And that firewall gives you the pause often overnight to think and reason rather than just react and respond. And what else happens? People give you better information because there's a lot of people who don't think that quickly on their feet or don't want to speak up at a meeting or don't want to say anything that goes against what everybody else is saying because they're worried about that social pressure. They have fear around it again, right? And so you end up with better information. And then by letting it sit overnight, you're also allowing a bit of rationality to creep in into your body because it's like you wake up the next day and you're like, oh, you know, I don't think that really was the problem. But last night at five o'clock when I was trying to get home and I was trying to get the kids hungry, you know, I was thinking all the groceries and the list of things I had to do. That sounded like the problem. But you know, this morning at eight o'clock through fresh eyes, no, I don't, you know, it's, it's kind of the problem, but it's not really the problem. If you do not isolate those points, you begin building a narrative in your mind of what the problem actually is. And then you're coming up with a solution for a problem that's not, that a lot of times isn't the problem by being more isolated in your thinking and more focused of what this meeting is going to be about, then everyone can contribute. But your cognitive processes are now are narrowed and they're focused on certain aspects that everyone can, and hopefully through that meeting, get more of a 360 high resolution view of what that problem is so that you can then have another meeting of, okay, now that we've talked about what it is, let's go over solutions. And in having an opportunity to discuss multiple different solutions to that problem keeps us from building out that narrative because the way we think is a narrative form. And so by putting in solutions, we start, we immediately go to, well, what that problem is going to be, if this is going to be the solution, it's not proper thinking, it's narrative. You know, it's not clear thinking, right? And so the idea is to sort of allow space, create natural pauses that don't impact the outcome. I mean, I worked in operations, right? Speed matters. But just breaking up those two meetings and waiting a night, which you can do 99.9% of the time, allows you to get clarity, get to a better decision, get to a better outcome. It doesn't mean you're going to be perfect every time. I don't want the illusion that we're going to be perfect. But it does mean we're going to be better than what we would have been otherwise. And there's sort of like a lot of these safeguards that we can put in place that just allow us to be clearer thinkers. And instead of recognizing when you're angry, which we also talk about in the book and what to do, it's more like, let's put a lot of effort into how do we avoid that situation to begin with? How do we structure an environment to be conducive so that that happens less frequently? So now that I'm exercising willpower, I need to recognize it a lot less frequently. And when it does happen, what do I do about it? Well, automatic rules for success, take care of that because I just need to follow my rule. And so it doesn't matter that I'm angry. I'm still in my head, the default, I'm hardwired to follow rules. So even though I'm angry, I'm going to be like, oh, my rule is this. I don't talk bad about people. Maybe that's my rule. I don't talk for other people. That's a great rule to have at the office. I don't ever speak for other people. And I think it's just so important to think through the problems from a very different lens. Everything I read on decision making and clear thinking is like, fill out these spreadsheets and do these decisions. And it's because professor, and I love professors, so please, if anybody's listening and you're a professor, don't take this the wrong way. But you overcomplicate things and people in the real world don't really do that stuff. Right? And you need to make it complicated because you need a whole class that's like 13 weeks and 50 hours. And funding and tenure. Yeah, anyone funding, anyone tenure. And the more complicated it is, you're the only one who understands it. You're the expert. There's a lot of recognition here. So I took a different approach, which is like, how do people think clearly in the real world? Why is it that some people are consistently better at getting better outcomes than other people? And is there a pattern that I can ascertain to those people? And the two things that really struck out for clear thinking are they position themselves well. So they're never out of position. They're never forced by circumstances into doing something they don't want to do. They manage their defaults. They do it through rituals and safeguards. And then they think independently. But you can't really think independently if you're not in the right position. Right. And you can't think independently if the situation is thinking for you or your defaults are thinking for you. So let's talk about rituals because this is something that's definitely changed my life. And I know for many of our coaching clients, their day starts with notifications and things to do for other people and inboxes. And they don't have rituals. But when we look at top performers, so if you're watching the US Open, there's breathing going on before that second serve, after they faulted on the first one, why they're emotional, the points on the line, like they need to get this in. So we can build rituals. They don't have to be day long events, hour long events, but they are a space for that pause that we're talking about. Unfortunately, as you were saying with a lot of professors, we have a default preference for action. We want to move. We want to move fast. We want action when in actuality, that action can work against us and creating rituals in your life can create the space and the pause necessary to start thinking clearly. I just want to add to that really quickly as well. I've also seen that for a lot of our clients, they're living life and being reactive to what's going on around them. And that being reactive then sets them up to be triggered and then they start recognizing these patterns, which is why they come to us. It's like, I'm seeing this pattern. It's now affecting my life. I need to break it. So for us, it's to move them to a position where they can be proactive in their day and how they're going to be handling that. And when you meet somebody who operates in that manner, you can see the rules that they have set up in their life so that they can be proactive rather than reactive. So to answer AJ's question, then go ahead, Shane, and clarify that for me. Yeah. So many thoughts on this, right? We're programmed to think in terms of speed, but not velocity. And the difference between the two is velocity has a vector. So velocity is speed towards a destination where I can run around in a circle and I'm going fast, but I'm really not going anywhere. And so once you start thinking in terms of speed towards target, towards destination, towards outcome, it changes things a little bit, right? What outcome am I running towards? Is this outcome worth wanting? That's a different question. And you can use rituals as a way that the best version of yourself, another form of safeguard, right? You can use the rituals, the best version of yourself once you follow them, and it becomes ingrained. I did this with my kids. They were sort of homeschooled during COVID to the extent that that was even possible. And then they switched schools after that, and they started getting homework again. So they hadn't had homework for a while. And I don't know about everybody else's kids, but my kids hated the idea of coming home after school and doing homework, right? So it was a battle. And we would do it at a different time every day, right? And during this time, right, they paid attention all day in class. They're young. That's hard on them. It's really a struggle. And they have 90 minutes of homework. So they don't go to a school where it's like, here, read this little 10-sentence book, and that's your homework. It's like, no, they got legit studying homework, test exams. And so they come home, and it was just big power struggle. And I was like, why don't we just create a ritual around this? You come home, you get a space. It's about 40 minutes for them to come home on the bus. They get a space. They can decompress. They can do their thing. They come home, they shower, and then they come down to the table, and they start doing their homework, the dining room table. And it took about a month to install this ritual. And every day, I would have to like, I wouldn't say force them, but remind them of what they wanted to do. And the way that we came up with this is super powerful for adults, too. It was like, what would the best version of yourself do? What would you want A pluses? What would an A plus student do in this situation? Well, they would come home and do this. What would the best version of yourself do? Same thing. Okay, why don't we try that and see how it works. So after a month of doing this consistently every day, and consistency is the key, and I want to come back to consistent in a second. I left. So I'm always home for the kids after school, but I wanted to see what would happen if for a few days, nobody was there. They came home, they showered, they went downstairs, and they did their homework. The ritual had taken over where willpower failed. They didn't need discipline. They didn't need willpower. They just followed the ritual. We're biological creatures. This is what we do. We follow the ritual. We follow the culture of the organization. We follow the instinct. The problem is, most of us are inconsistent. And consistency is the key to so much in life. It's like we're Sisyphus, right? We roll the boulder halfway up the hill, and we're like, you know, there's a lot of work. I'm going to come back to this next week. And what we leave and what happens to the boulder, it falls down. You think about learning a language, Duolingo. I've had hundreds of people I know sign up for Duolingo, and man, they're advocates for like two weeks. And then all of a sudden, they skip a day. Then all of a sudden, they skip another day. And then all of a sudden, they're no further ahead than they were. What happened? Consistency matters. You need to be consistent. You need to do just a little bit every day towards your goals. So the way to identify the rituals that are super important to you, or the ones that are getting in the way, and I had this thing, and I didn't come up with this. I forget who came up with it. I don't want anybody to think it's me. I don't actually come up with most of these ideas. I get them from other people. But imagine a film crew following you around all day, and they're not documenting your life. They're documenting the life you want to have, the success you want to have. What would they see? What would you not want them to see? And then you start acting like the person who gets that success would act. The person that achieves success, maybe they don't wake up in the morning and check their phone and let other people use their day. Maybe they're more conscious about how they spend their time. Maybe they avoid all these things that I'm wasting my time on. And the biggest thing that we sort of miss is we often focus on things outside of our control, or again, going back to the gas or water on a situation. When we pour gas on a situation, we have to repair that relationship. And all the time that we spend focusing on things we don't control, fixing relationships because we reacted without reasoning, all that time comes to the expense of velocity, which is direction and speed. And it doesn't matter how fast you're going, but if you go inch by inch, even centimeter by centimeter, but you can pound that result day after day, week after week, month after month, you're going to reach your destination. And we don't often realize how we signal to other people and then they reflexively signal back to us. And in a lot of these negative rituals, we don't recognize that we're not only impacting our decisions, but we're impacting our team members' decisions. We're impacting our spouse's decisions. We're impacting our children's decisions. So one of my coaching clients was saying to me, I'd love to spend more time with my family. So I was like, well, let's walk through your day. What's going on? He has two companies, he's busy. And then I'm like, well, what do you do after dinner? That's a great time to spend with your family. And he's like, well, actually what happens is, I got to catch up on work for my side business. So I go back in the office and I'm answering some emails. And then every once in a while, I'll watch some YouTube videos and I'll get sucked in. And then what do you know, the kids are already in bed and my life is exhausted. I'm like, okay, well, that seems like prime family time. So let's go through the last four days of emails that you sent between six and six in the morning. And he went through the emails and I was like, well, was that something that could be handled at 9pm from your team member? Was that something that really needed a response? Was that person going to reply to that email at 10 o'clock at night? No. Okay. So we have a negative ritual here. We're ritualistically answering emails at a time that a better ritual for you would be spending that with your family and creating more time in the morning to just bang out those emails. Well, that also gets you out of your office, which you've admitted has a screen and all of a sudden you're watching stuff you didn't mean to watch and you're surfing things you didn't mean to surf. So we don't recognize that he's also stressing his team because now they're getting emails at 9 o'clock at night and they're like, I want to be with my family. Like, what do I do? I got to respond to this. And then they're conditioning him that everything needs a response. So they're going to rapidly respond back to him. And it's a vicious cycle that's not only impacting your decision making and you're not thinking clearly, but now your team members aren't thinking clearly. And you want to talk about affecting velocity. Well, if no one in the group is thinking clearly, we're moving fast. We got a lot of speed, but we're not going in the right direction. Totally. And as you're saying that, you know, it also ties to the ego default. One of the reasons that we do this is almost signaling to other people unconsciously. I don't think anybody consciously does it. But unconsciously, we're important. We're important at work. You know, what are we taught as people were taught that, you know, you need to contribute to your family. You need to do that. That's important. I'm contributing to the family when I do this. But this is the lie that we're telling ourselves like going for a walk with your partner and your kids every night, a ritual after dinner, even if it's like 15 or 20 minutes. I find I get the best information from the kids when we go for walks. There's no eye contact. There's nothing else to do. There's no screens anywhere. The kids just, it's phenomenal. The amount of stuff that they'll tell you in those moments, but we're fed. Oh, I got to check my phone. Why am I checking my phone? Well, I'm important. I'm so important that I have to check my phone. There's signaling involved in it. And I don't think it's conscious. I think it's sort of unconscious. And this goes to another idea we talk about in the book, which is sort of like making the invisible visible. So we have all this stuff going on under the hood. And how do we surface that? And how do we live more consciously? How do we get to the life that we want? We sort of talked about that a little bit in terms of getting, you know, making sure that we're going towards the destination we want and living life in a way that creates that environment, that system that we want to get towards. Yeah. And certainly, having these rules set up also allows you to create that velocity moving in the right direction. So you have focus on those goals. There are rules set up in order to be successful to reach those goals. And the usual things that become distractions that take us off of our focus, they don't have that opportunity to affect us. There, we now get to those when everything else is in place. And we're able to deal with those in a way that doesn't take away from well-being and satisfaction in life, where normally those things will. I mean, the culture that we're in is that in order to have a very stress-free life, you need to be laid back. Well, laid back puts you in a position to be reactive to everything, which has the opposite effect. You're now a slave to everyone else's issues, all the distractions that are around us with technology. It makes it difficult to get any traction, a momentum towards our goals. That needs to be, and this is why having an understanding of what is the best version of yourself and how it is that best version work towards its goals, and what are the processes that we need to put in place in order to stay focused and handle everything else? Because once those rules are set up, that's where your stress-free life is. You can be relaxed, you can go through your rituals, you can wake up excited every day for the rituals that you've created that you enjoy engaging in because they get you to where you want to be going. Yeah, I think one of the questions that people need to ask themselves annually, if not even more frequently, is where I'm going, where I actually want to go, where society has told me to go. Often, if you go to any retirement home or you pick up, I think it was Carl Pilmer who did this book, Lessons for the Living, from people near the end of their life, and the number one consistent thing in there was, if I could go back, I would spend more time on these things that society tells me is not the most important thing. And one of the stories in the book is sort of, who do we know that got money, power, and success and achieved all of those things? And then at the end of his life, he wanted to do over. Ephraines or Scrooge, the story has been around for a long time. Why did he want money, power, and success? Society told him those things were important, and he got all of those things. But the way that he achieved those things was mutually exclusive from living a life of meaning. So at the end of his life, he just wanted to go back and do it all over again. And I feel like conscious living and being proactive is not just proactive about moving toward the destination. It's proactive about, am I going toward the right destination? And I want to do that consciously because where you think you want to go when you're 20 is a lot different than where you want to go when you're 50. And so just checking in with yourself, which is like, yes, it's important to be proactive about moving towards that goal. But do I really have the right goal? Is this my goal or is this somebody else's goal? And I think that those, I do this yearly. So I usually go away. It's often in December, and it's like one night or two nights. And I sort of like, just do a check in with myself. And this is one of the questions that I asked myself, right? Am I going to the right place? Am I working towards the right goals? I think for many, the struggle with hearing that pause is then pause so long you get to worry. And you can't think clearly, again, you're on the other side of all the options. And am I making the right one? Am I going to regret this? So how can we avoid a pause turning into worry and again, ruining our chances of thinking clearly? Yeah, I think one of the concepts we talk about in the book is sort of ASAP or ALAP. And you can make a decision right away. If it's sort of a two-way door and there's low consequences, the cost of failure is really low, you can just make that decision on the spot. You go to the grocery store, they don't have your toothpaste. I mean, you don't have to ruminate over this very long. You just pick up a new brand. If it doesn't work, it's like $2, or it's like $10 now. It used to be like $2 a couple of years ago. And the cost of undoing that decision is really low. Something like a TV, and I noticed this with friends, they would spend weeks ruminating over a TV. If you ascribed minimum wage to their time, they actually paid for the TV in research. Double triple. And so I came up with the concept like ASAP, ALAP, and how do you know it's as late as possible? Well, I came up with the idea of flop. First lost opportunity, stop flop or no. So you stop gathering useful information, first lost opportunity, or you know what to do. Those three situations, that's when you make a decision. But you don't ruminate in the meantime. You just let things percolate. So you don't obsess. And what happens is we start obsessing over these decisions. And so why is it that we end up doing this? And then we end up with 50 decisions in our head. And what happens when we do that, we get emotional. Because we got all these threads. These are all like little processing threads running in our head. What do we want to do in that moment? I don't know if everybody else is like me, but it's like, I got to get this off my plate. I'm just going to decide what do we do when we just decide. I'm just trying to check a box. I'm not trying to get towards the best outcome now. This TV, this dishwash, you know, like you just start going through these decisions and you're in the messy middle almost, right? Like you sort of, you're not being forced to make a decision. You don't have all the information and you're not thinking clearly. So how do we avoid all this stuff? Well, half of those decisions can be made right on the spot. So you don't have 50 threads. You might be able to have like eight or nine at one time, but most of us have like 50 and they're just ongoing, make the invisible visible, write stuff down, right? Like don't try to remember your grocery list. Just take out your iPhone and keep a note or sticky. I use stickies a lot. But I think it's so important to sort of think about how do we avoid analysis paralysis? And one of the other ways we do that is we know what matters. We know what destination we're going to go to. And we have the concept in the book of sort of like picking the most important thing and everybody's like, Oh, that sounds great. How do you actually do that? Right? And so we use stickies and the concept of like battling it out, right? And it doesn't mean that there's only one thing that matters. But if you're forced to choose, which thing matters the most and stickies, you just sort of battle them like you hold up two sticky notes together and you're like, this one I value more than the other. You write down all the things and then you pick up another one and you compare it against the one in your hand that matters the most. And at the end of the day, you're left with one. And now you know instinctively, maybe not quite rationally, you know, you're not thinking totally through it, but you have an instinct about, this is the most important thing. And then you can check that instinct, which is like, is that really true? Yeah, that is. Okay. Now I know the most doesn't mean it's the only thing. But now I know what to focus on, what to optimize for, how to be proactive about going to get that. And I can communicate it to my team at work. So if I'm not around, everybody else knows what's the most important thing so they can make decisions without me, which is also scary, right? One of the the ego reasons that we don't do this is, you know, we don't want people making decisions without us. We want to feel really valuable. As much as I don't want to be a micro manager, I really like it when you come to me and like I tell you what to do. And I feel good about myself. But then we reach the ceiling of brute force, there's only so much of that we can do. And it ends up putting this invisible ceiling on us that we don't know we have. And my friend, Brent, be sure explain that concept to me, which is, you know, we only have so much time in a day, we're trying to create leverage with that time. If you're micromanaging every detail, every process, every decision goes to you. Well, that's going to consume all your time. And so now you're less leverageable than you otherwise could be. And I want to leverage things. I mean, I value time a lot. I want to outsource things that I don't have to do. I want people who are better at that thing to do it than me. Yeah, people who, people specialize in like all the stuff that you're doing, either in life or at work, you want them to do it, they're going to get better outcomes. And you sort of have to learn to sort of step back and let go and let other people take the spotlight. And that's really hard to do, but it's so powerful. I think we often feel action is enough. And it feels good to take action. So one of the classic examples is some of our clients are dating, and they'll go on tons of dates, just constantly going on dates. And they're like, I can't find the one. And I'm like, okay, well, explain to me what the one looks like. Tall, attractive, enjoys fun. Okay, well, that's half the globe. So you're just going to keep doing this action for the next 20 years. Like that's not at all a clear goal for you. But oh, I'm going on dates. I'm doing the right things that society says and it feels good to take this action. But it just takes you further from the actual goal that you have. I've been that guy going on a lot of dates, right? Because you want to meet people and you think you're going to have this instant spark. And sometimes it actually works out that way. And a lot of times, you know, you build this and we live in a world where you go home and you like swipe right as soon as you get back. It's like, Oh, that was a good date. 10 years ago, we would be having a second day tomorrow. You know, but now I'm like, well, who else liked me while I was out on this day? Oh, well, stimulus response of getting this feedback. And then your friends are always asking you, well, did you go on any dates lately? Right? So there's this social pressure to be like, Oh, I went on a few and then you tell your stories and then they feel better about being married because you, you know, you tell the story about the time a husband showed up on your date or all this crazy stuff happened. And they're like, Oh, feel, yeah, that sucks. And everybody gets a good laugh out of it. And then you go on your other hundred first dates and you're just hoping for the one at, yeah, there might be one person out there, but you're going to have to go on like a million dates to get to that person or luck out and just totally by chance. The flip side of that is like, if you're a little more conscious about it at the start, you can massively cut down that filter. All of that time can be invested into a second date with somebody where you're like, yeah, that could go somewhere. And you're not really losing time and you're increasing your velocity because it's like, often people are nervous on the first day. Absolutely. Often people aren't really themselves. They're positioning, right? They're posturing. They've got a mask on. They want to be on their best behavior. And so if you really want to get to know somebody and you think that, Oh, that was pretty good. Like I could have a conversation with this person again, instead of going back on your dating app and being like, Oh, here's the six other dates I can line up tonight. You sort of like, Oh, why don't we do this again? Why don't we do that tomorrow? And then you can start building something. It's also been a lot of the Hollywood movie magic where people are waiting for this serendipitous moment where there's these significant events that encapsulate and consume them emotionally. They're like, this has to be it. And the reality is if that's going on, this is probably the last place that you should be because you're not thinking clearly and not just Hollywood. You know, you ask your friends how they found each other and oftentimes they will fantasize a little bit. Your memory shifts towards, well, it was a special moment because this is my person. This is my partner. This is my spouse. You don't just say, Oh, they were the fourth swipe that night and I just ended up hanging out with them the next day. Can you imagine? It's like, Oh, my real date didn't show up. And so I booked another one and like, this is how we had a love meeting. Here we are. Back to that Hollywood thing. It's like we're expecting to show up on these dates and there's like this light from the heavens shining on this person and the world suddenly pauses and we're like, Oh my God, I just met my soulmate. And that happens. I totally believe in love at first sight and meeting your soulmate. I just don't think it's the most common scenario. It's not the best goal for everyone to shoot for by any means. Yeah. Well, then you show up and you're disappointed if that's what you're expecting. You're sort of like, Oh, this person is not that. And you discount the fact that you could probably build a lot of meaningful relationships with people, whether it turns into love or it's just a really good friendship. But you discount it when it's not what you want to see. Whether it's dates or whether it's mistakes, a lot of data is available to us based on past actions. You take your Daniel Kahneman example. I'm sure he learned a lot of yeses or not right for him in order to reach the conclusion that I have to create that rule. So how do we take the data from our mistakes and use them effectively to think more clearly into the future? Well, one way to do that is a decision journal. We have a template online if anybody's interested, which is like fs.blog slash dj for decision journal. And what you're really doing is it's really hard to calibrate your decisions without either feeling pain in terms of Daniel Kahneman waking up and having to travel and give a talk, maybe that he didn't want to give. And that's pain, right? So that pain triggers a reflection. You do it enough and you're like, wait, what am I doing here? I don't want to be doing this. But for most of us, we can just write down, like, here's what we knew. Here's what we thought would happen. Here's how I thought it would play out. Here are the variables, the situation. And then you go back and you don't have to share this with anybody. Often you can even shred it after you write it, but you sort of write it down and you do it with your handwriting. It's really important that you don't do it on a computer because you don't want to convince yourself that somebody else wrote it and you will. But when you go back and you look at it, you're like, oh, I missed this, right? Or often we get directionally correct outcomes, but for the wrong reason, which is luck. We don't really quite understand why we got it right and our reasoning didn't make sense. But that helps us calibrate and that helps us learn from the data, right? We know what the outcome is at that point. We know how things played out. The other way to do it is sort of what we talked about earlier, use a film crew or work backwards, right? One of my favorite things for data is imagining myself when I'm 90 and I'm sort of like, I think it'll be like 120, but I'm like on my deathbed. And I'm sort of like last breath at the hospital. I'm surrounded by people and I'm unconscious, but I can hear everybody talking. And it's like, what are they saying about me? And are they saying the things that I want them to be saying or not? How this helps with data is like, am I living my life in a way that is going to engender those people to say those things or not? Or am I doing it like Ebenezer Scrooge where I'm living my life in a way to maximize for these variables, but I'm doing it mutually exclusive from what actually matters to me. And that data can help you change. And I had a near-death experience a couple years ago. That was a turning point, right? Because I'm like, I thought I was going to die. Felt like I was going to die. I had booked a flight to the States because I live in Canada and I was going to plot my credit card down at a hospital if I could get out of bed and sort of be like fix me. And I remember just lying there in bed going like, wow, if this is it, how would I have changed the last year of my life? What would I have done differently? And can I use that if I somehow come out of this, which looked pretty bleak at the time, could I use that information to live a more meaningful life? And we don't have to do this, we can just do this thought experiment. You don't actually have to nearly die to get this information. And I was like, you know what, I'm actually doing most of the things that I want to be doing. There's a few tweaks here and there that I sort of changed after, but that was really good feedback. And it comes back again, pause. Am I going towards the right destination? Or am I running in circles? And I'm running in circles because somebody told me to run in circles. And if you want to run in circles, that's great. Just be conscious about it and don't fool yourself into thinking that that's what you want, if it's not what you want. It's a beautiful exercise. Hopefully, many of us won't have to go through a near-death experience to get there. But a very valuable lesson in that reflection. Johnny and I are so thankful you joined us. We love asking every guest what their X-factor is. What do you think makes you unique and extraordinary, Shane? I don't know if I feel like I'm unique and extraordinary. I was thinking about this a little bit before. I feel like I'm just this dude who lucked out with a platform. And to the extent that that platform is valuable, I want to share other people's ideas and insights. And I want to make opportunity more equal than it currently is by making high-quality information accessible to everybody else. And if I can do that, I think I've left the world a better place. Well, you've certainly done it consistently and we appreciate it. Where can our listeners find out more about all of your great work and this new upcoming book? Yeah, the book on Amazon or anywhere books are sold, clear thinking, turning ordinary moments into extraordinary outcomes. I see John has a hard cover there. You can find me online at FS.blog. Email me your favorite section of the book at Shane at FS.blog. I don't respond to every email, but I definitely read every email. The last person, the last email I got was page 113 changed my life. So I want to know what page impacts you and what page makes a difference for you. Well, it's a great book. It's very easy to make your way through with all these great concepts and I'm excited to see the emails that our listeners send your way, Shane. Oh, thank you. Thanks, AJ. Thanks, John.