 Because it's not about me, that's selfish, you see. Trying to just, you know, become so happy, like that's, yeah, that's cheesy, that's like, that's not, and we really need to like take these measures to affect these people who have disadvantages in life. And I want to say first, like that type of sentiment, I understand it. I think we need to be super empathetic to that. Welcome to the revolution of one podcast where the revolution will not only be televised, but also individualized. This is TK Coleman and you're watching the revolution of one podcast. Today's guest is Joel Bein. Joel is a classically trained musician and conductor, and he is the founder of the New Orleans Chamber of Players. And he has an insatiable appetite for self-help and personal development. Today we're going to talk about the process of taking charge of your own life as a political act. Joel, welcome to the show. Thank you, my pleasure. Joel, we were talking about things we've done that have had a profound impact on our lives. One of the things you mentioned was the self-authoring course that you took, something along those lines. Tell me about that. Yeah, yeah, it's the self-authoring suite by Jordan Peterson. And often it goes under the radar in his whole world. I think it's the best thing he has to offer the world. And so it's basically a structured journaling program where you can write about your past, your present, and your future. And I completed this. I wrote about 50,000 words in total. And it probably took complete all of it. It took me over a year. But what was really impactful about it was two things. One, the idea of it took me just a few minutes a day to make it happen. This idea of non-zero days, of doing one thing a day to keep momentum going on a project. Because it can be really daunting on the onset to say, you're going to write about your entire autobiography. And that's going to take a lot of minutes. But it's like, actually what I did was I set a timer for 25 minutes a day, sometimes even five minutes a day just to make sure I got it in to have that momentum, that habit, and that routine in my day. And what do you do in the course? Like, what are you writing about? Yeah, so the past authoring component, he divides it up into seven, he calls it epochs, seven eras of your life. And then you write about six to eight impactful experiences you had within each era. And then you analyze it, and you go into depth about how you might have done it differently. And the word that I like to think about is externalization. You're getting all this information, this data that's rolling around your mind and subconscious about all the events in your life, and you're just writing about it. And you're getting it on onto the screen and clarifying it. So once I finished the past authoring, which I wrote the most for that one, 34,000 words took me three months of just doing those little sessions each day. But I finished it. And it felt just so relieving to get it all out and see it on paper and know, have a sense of cause and effect about how I got to where I am now. You actually did a, I believe, like a 30-day blogging challenge as well. Am I right? This is a separate thing from that. Tell me a little bit about that. Yeah, you inspired me, man. It was listening to you on Isaac Morehouse podcast three years ago. And then I decided to do that, and that actually turned into 60 days. And that's where I learned, that's where I developed that muscle to have the non-zero day muscle of doing one thing each day. And it changed everything for me. And there was also a sense of excitement and fulfillment just from the creative process of blogging. To say, hitting the publish button is one of the most satisfying feelings. And so it taught me to execute on a daily basis, and then it taught me about the power of creativity. And I ended up applying that to the self-authoring suite. I applied that to the podcast I started. I applied that to the classical music organization I started. All those principles went straight into all those. For those who might need a little background, the 30-day blogging challenge is basically where you say, every single day I'm gonna write a blog post and the one rule is by the end of the day I have to hit the publish button. So this isn't like journaling where you get to write something and if you look at it and you say, oh, this is too ugly to share with the world. You keep it to yourself. You've gotta make yourself available. You've gotta do what Seth Godin calls ship. You gotta ship it, right? And the idea is that it doesn't just create this discipline of having to show up and do something every day, but the idea is that your brain processes information differently when there's risk involved. I often say that if the risk involved in the learning process aren't real, the rewards aren't real either. The rewards aren't real either. You don't learn how to invest by playing with fake money. You gotta do the real thing. So writing every day and shipping, putting yourself out there, it gives you skin in the game, and you experience that with that 30-day challenge. Yeah, absolutely. And at first you're thinking, oh man, what is everyone gonna think about this? And then quickly you realize, oh, no one's gonna read this. Right? You're not even at that level, right? Yeah. But it's still, but you're still putting it out in the world and it's on my website. It's still out there. Yeah. And so there's a vulnerability there. Yeah, I mean, even something like that though, to write something and have the world respond to it by saying, I'm not interested. I'm gonna ignore you. That's a confrontation with reality that changes the way you look at the creative process entirely, right? It changes your relationship to your own ideas to take that kind of risk. And to take that kind of risk and realize I can be ignored, I can be misunderstood, and it doesn't kill me. I don't die. It's also liberating because then you realize, basically nobody on the planet really cares about you in one sense, right? Yeah. And so it's up to you to just live the life that you really wanna live and go about it doing it and people aren't really thinking about you. You're thinking about you all the time, but no one, I mean, you have friends and supporters, whatnot, but they have their own lives, right? And when you realize that everyone else is in the same boat with their own life, no one's really thinking about you. Just go do your thing and people will adapt to you. Yeah, you know, one of the things that interests me about you is that you have this interesting relationship between this musical background. You're a classically trained musician, but then you have this insatiable appetite for personal development, right? And you seem to be equally passionate about both. So you're hitting the creative process from both sides. I'm curious, like, how did this happen? Like, when did you go from being musician to being a podcaster and a blogger and a speaker and all these things? Yeah, I think that the sort of kindling of it was probably when I was 17 years old and that's when I really started, I had always, throughout my childhood, I'd always sort of maintain some sense of connection to myself. Yeah. I'm naturally introverted and that sort of introspective quality of philosophical quality. A lot of that died out, that flame through middle school, high school. I was kind of going through the motions like a lot of people do during those years. But then somehow I just started, I don't know if my frontal lobe started developing or something and I started thinking more. I was read Siddhartha by Herman Hess and then I was thinking about psychology more and then just this curiosity. It all starts with the curiosity and just starting to think about big ideas and the nature of the world and what are the problems in the world and why are there problems in the world? And then just keep on searching things out and then that all coincided with this revolution of the podcast world. And so that 10 years ago, I started listening to podcasts and really delving into philosophy, psychology and personal growth and realizing early that I really want to affect the most change or have the greatest impact. It starts with self. And so I've just kept on building off of this curiosity and that keeps on snowballing and I'm excited to see where it goes next. Yeah, if I really want to impact the world, it starts with self. Let me push back on that. A lot of people, they look out at the world around them and they say, oh man, but it's not about self, it's systems. There's so many corrupt systems that are affecting you and I. Political systems, like who's the senator? Who's the mayor? Who's the president? We're affected by so many things. How do you maintain this faith in your power as an individual, which is the belief I share, but when it seems to be challenged on all sides by things that are going on institutionally, systemically and so forth? Yeah, it's so hard because there's so many problems in the world that we can't even, I don't even think most people, including myself, have the bandwidth to even process on a moment-to-moment basis the number of problems that are happening at once. And so I think that ends up turning into this background noise of sort of apprehension and overwhelm about, man, there's so much and I guess I'll just go try to live a good life, but I can't really do too much, you know? But my response is we can, if your personal growth is like throwing a stone on a pond, that's gonna ripple in that pond as we all know, and it's a real effect. So we all know about the power of compounding interest in the financial sense. We know if I invest $500 a month for 40 years, I should be a millionaire, you know? Because the eighth wonder of the world is compound interest. But this is a principle, it's not just money, it's the principle of compounding which is the eighth wonder of the world. And this principle can be applied in different areas of life and that includes personal growth. And then you say, well, how does this working on yourself really affect all these systems? And my answer is it's a long game, first of all. It's a long game, but if you, and no one, I never really hear anyone talk about this, but I think it's important, which is playing the ultra long game of what's our 500, 5,000 year goal? We're not even gonna live it, but if we start thinking generationally about how can we starting with my sphere of control, which can then ripple out to my relationships, my community and the world at large, how can that over the course of time, how can that compounding effect play in our favor to literally construct and innovate a new world? Not try to fight back necessarily against these systems, but say we're gonna build a new world that over generations, enough people get on board with starting with self and this impacts people around. We raise our children better to have higher self-esteem and have more autonomy and critical thinking skills and all these things and over generations. That can produce incredible results, but we gotta actually be in it for the long game. I mean, you're a musician, do you think it's a lost art to view things like involvement in the arts or entrepreneurship as kind of like, yeah, that's fun or it's profitable, but it's not really relevant to changing the world. When we change the world, we gotta go into politics and that's our only option there, but the art stuff, that's great, but like artists don't really have an impact. Do you think thinking that way, seeing that as an option for making a difference is kind of a lost art? Yeah, I mean, I think we need to go back to that. I don't know if it's a lost art, if we've really had much of that in our history as a civilization, but yeah, the people who have done that, that's, I forget his name, but there was a doctor in the 1800s who realized that you should wash your hands before you do certain surgeries and all these doctors were saying, you were just basically excommunicating him and ostracizing him and he got so frustrated and he ended up, I think he ended up killing himself because he got so frustrated trying to tell everybody the truth and they wouldn't listen when, what if he had harnessed his entrepreneurial possibility and built a new hospital and had better results in the market because doctors would wash their hands? That's the way I think to go about it. I mean, even just using the theory of voice and exit, I mean, he had his impact by just even voicing that insight, right? He didn't have his impact by going to the voting booth and saying we're gonna elect someone that's gonna subscribe to my germ theory or whatever, but he voiced his opinion and you have to take your voice seriously enough to be able to do that. If you look at power as this kind of thing where it's like, well, it exists in that person over there, that person over here, but certainly not me, you don't really get to experience that power of finding your voice, using your voice, which is what you talked about when you were writing. Yeah, yeah. Power. Oftentimes that word, there's a connotation, you know? There's two different ways to think of that word. One is that there are these power structures that oppress, and then there's inner power. Yeah. Tell me a little bit about your podcast, what inspired you to start that? Yeah, I mean, I did one season of it, I'm not, season two is on hold, but I did 17 episodes and I was inspired by this very principle of exponential. So it's not a music podcast? No, it's completely personal growth. This precise principle of their compounding effect. And pursuing what makes you come alive, pursuing a life where you're thriving and flourishing and you are investing in yourself as an example for the world, and that is the best way to have an impact in the grand scheme of things. And you're gonna be happier because you start investing in yourself. And so it's an outgrowth of sort of 10 years of a lot of self-work in different areas, from journaling to health and fitness and therapy and these different areas, financial fitness and realizing that those were accumulating and compounding in my own growth. And I wanted to share that, hey, just start, just start, just start, meditate for one minute today. And you started, and then you can do again tomorrow. And maybe you do five minutes. And then all of a sudden, because you meditated, when your child is upset, then you have developed a muscle to pause and maybe have a better response in how you interact with your child because you're developing an inner muscle to pause. And there's these different ripple effects when you start engaging in these habits. You know, those ripple effects can be, they can be hard to place faith in because we kind of have this thing going on where we say, if I truly love something, I would respect it by doing it at the highest level. So if I think I wanna be a writer or if I think I love fitness, well, if I truly love those things, if I'm truly interested in how I'll have enough respect for them to run five miles a day, I'll have enough respect to go to the gym twice a day, every day, I'll have enough respect to write a book in a month. And this idea of a non-zero day, this idea of compound interest of starting small, it kind of feels like you're insulting what it is you say you love. And so to tell someone, hey, no, don't even try the whole run five miles a day thing. Just try to get off your couch every day and just walk outside. Well, that feels insulting to the idea of fitness. Well, don't worry about writing a book right now. Don't worry about that. Just every day, just maybe write a paragraph, you know? And I think there is this idea that if I start small, I'm gonna get stuck at small. When in reality, what leads to getting stuck is that not starting at all because I'm too afraid of starting small, you know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, you can't build a campfire by just starting with logs. You gotta have that kindling, right? Yeah. What was that kindling for you? I'm always intrigued by other people's path of self-discovery. I mean, how you ended up finding what it is that you want to do to make your mark in the world. I mean, questioning the nature of public schooling was big and saying, why does this exist? What are the impacts of this? And given that there's 15,000 hours that children are spending in these institutions and with very little autonomy, how does that affect the adult world? It's just a basic principle, you know, of development in any phase of life. If you learn to shoot a basketball with improper form at three feet away from the basketball hoop, then you're probably gonna impact your ability to hit a three-pointer. So it's like, well, how does the school experience, which 95% of our population is going through this experience, how is that affecting our adult world? So that really, that was like the big one that just started my curiosity train. And then that started going into, and then it started going into, now that I've identified some of these problems at the root of our world, then what is it that I can do? And that's when I realized that the sphere of control concept is actually the best way to go about. What do you mean by that, that sphere of control? Yeah, just this principle of what is it that you can do to maximize your personal power that we've been talking about? You know, with this big concept of the nature of public schooling, how is it that, and I can see that, somebody watching might say, well, that's a big disconnect. You're gonna meditate and then you're gonna solve this problem of the school system. And again, it's about the accumulation and the compounding of it. So if I can work on myself and become so connected to myself to go through five years of daily journaling and really get to know myself and develop this self-knowledge and really develop a sense of unconditional self-love and then how does that affect how I interact with the rest of the world? And then one of my goals is I wanna have a child at one day. How is it that all my personal growth that's gonna affect my ability to interact with my child in a nourishing way? And then how can I work to cultivate a life where I have the ability to unschool my child, for instance? And how is that gonna impact not only that child's life, but then what message am I sending people in my life that, hey, I'm doing this I'm not just saying, hey, I think the world needs to change like this, X, Y, Z and then not really living that. It's like that Gandhi quote, be the change you wish to see in the world and it's almost become a cliche. And we're like, oh yeah, that's nice. But like, wait, think about what that really means. Can you really live what you want the world to be? Yeah, it's funny, man, because I saw, I think it was Twitter or Facebook just yesterday, someone shared a quote that said, you wanna change the world? Go home and love your family. It's so easy to put it on the system because that kind of takes a certain measure of pressure off yourself, right? If it's on the system and not on my decision to go to the gym today, not on my decision to read something, to learn something new, to make adjustments and how I treat my coworkers or my family, well, now I just kinda get to sit back and be mad at who's in charge. And I get to say, well, somebody ought to do something about that without thinking that maybe I need to be that somebody, you know? It's a- Let me give you another basketball, because I know you like basketball metaphors. Yeah, I love it, yeah. But so when I was 11, I went to, I guess for like age 10 to 13, every summer I went to Williams College basketball camp. Shout out to Williams College basketball camp. I learned so much. And I remember this coach, you know, we're all like 10 year olds, 11 year olds, and he's teaching us about offensive strategy or whatnot. And he's saying, you know, say you're on offense and your teammate has the ball, he's the point guard, and you want the ball, right? Because every kid wants the ball. So how are you gonna persuade, in a sense, that a point guard to pass you the ball? And he said, if you want the ball, move away from it. Because the tendency for little kids is, let's go cluster around our teammate who has the ball. Hey, pass to me, pass to me. Yeah, yeah. But really, the more effective strategy to get the ball and to be an effective offense is to get yourself open, which might mean actually going away from the ball. And so I see that as analogous to this personal growth concept that we've been discussing. Whereas look at all these problems, look at all these problems, we gotta go attack these problems. The system, you know, fight back, the politics. What if we went around the obstacle? What if we did a cut, you know, and we start working on ourself and that's actually gonna be the more effective strategy. But Joe, isn't that cheesy, right? Isn't that motivational fluff? You ever heard that before? Anybody ever said that about that kind of talk? Yeah, yeah, I get that impulse. You know, I grew up, there was a popular skit on Saturday Night Live where the guy would basically sort of mock the motivational guru and he looked in the mirror and this was his response to every problem, no matter what was going on, like the world could be going to hell and he looked in the mirror and he'd say, I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and dog on it, people like me. And everyone would laugh, you know, because that was a staying, right? Like that was his mantra to like stay grounded and it was just this funny juxtaposition of like harsh reality, you know, a sort of naive optimism and I think that kind of image is what a lot of people have in mind when they hear people talk about personal development. They don't see personal development as a political act. They don't see it as something that has political ramification. What's a response to that? I know your analogy really touched on that, but what's a response to the cheesy objection, the motivational fluff objection, the yeah, that's all nice, but the world is screwed up objection? My first thought is to let it sink in because often we have these immediate impulses through something we hear that's unconventional or jarring and then we have an immediate, a part of us comes up and says that's ridiculous so that that part of us might be protecting us because if we really let it sink in then we might have to really start looking in the mirror and that can be uncomfortable. So I think that's what's going on. From a psychological standpoint, I would assert that that's what's going on oftentimes is there's this part of you that's trying, you know, it's trying to take care of you. It's trying to make sure that you're comfortable and safe and all these things and if we can, if we hear these types of concepts about personal power, what if it were true? Like what if it were the case that I'm right about this personal power thing? What would that mean for your life? What might you start doing? And how might you actually make your life happier? If you started doing some of this work? And, but the reality is, again, that's often gonna be really uncomfortable when we start looking in the closet about how, you know, how did my childhood affect me? And that tends to be something that's like, oh no, that's so silly, but like really just sink in and realize that you have a little inner child inside of you, we all do, you know? I think that's where the key to all this man is like, you have this little kid inside of you and can you say hello to him or her? And like that's the real work, but it takes courage to do that and it takes pausing to say, hmm, maybe this person, maybe, what if it were true that this personal power stuff can have an impact? And you know, I'm happy to continue to debate the legitimacy of it. Yeah. I'm always, you know, I'm, I love being a critical thinker because I'm just like, I'll entertain any idea. So if I'm wrong, I would love to know. But it's like, we've been beating this thing in terms of trying to continually change the world as a society by going into political realm. And it's like, when does Einstein's definition of insanity come into play here? Yeah. Where we keep on pounding the square peg in the round hole and it's like, let's just drill a new hole. Because we keep seeing these problems, we keep seeing these problems accumulate and maybe what I'm saying, what you're saying about personal power is the key because we've been doing a lot of the other stuff for a long time. And it's not an either or thing, right? It's, as it's been said many times before me, politics is a lagging indicator of what happens at the individual level. And you know, if people feel like crap about themselves, if people feel fundamentally powerless, that's going to be expressed at the voting booth. You know, every day someone has a concern about political manipulation, politicians, making some kind of false promise and seducing people to get their vote in exchange for this false promise. It's like, well, what makes people so vulnerable to that? It's a reflection of how we feel about our own power, our own concept of what we need to get ahead in life, what we need to be successful. And if that's all screwed up, then as we expand outward, you know, it's gonna be expressed, you know. I like your question, like, what if all this stuff is true? I have a, I have almost an opposite sounding one that I asked that kind of gets in the same direction and it's, who wins if you believe that, right? So when someone proposes an idea, suppose the idea is you don't have any power and that only the politicians have power and the only thing you get to do is show up and vote every once in a while. Who wins if you believe that? And if the answer to that question is someone other than you, then it might be worth it to just think about it a little bit longer, you know. Get a second opinion on that. Yeah, and then perhaps the counter argument to that is, well, it's not about, it's not about, it's about helping other people who are in need, you know, like that's an often, it's an ethic and a sentiment that I understand. We need to turn to these legislative efforts because it's not about me, that's selfish, you see. Trying to just, you know, become so happy, like that's, yeah, that's cheesy, that's not, and we really need to like take these measures to affect these people who have disadvantages in life. And I wanna say first, like that type of sentiment, I understand it. So I think we need to be super empathetic to that. That whenever, you know, every human action is in pursuit of human need. So people might think that the best tool to assist, you know, let's say poor people or, you know, what not, is to go to this legislative action. But I think the first thing we need to do if we wanna be persuasive or about the personal power concept is acknowledge that we're on the same team, that we both wanna see a world filled with love and harmony and that we don't wanna see anyone who's just struggling to survive and we don't wanna see that. And it's just a matter of having discussion about what's actually the best way to go about doing that and I think the best way is to turn inward. And if you start working on yourself, you put that oxygen mask on. Yeah. And again, that can be cliche, but really internalize that, put the oxygen mask on and what I've found in my personal life at least is the more that I've worked on myself, my sense of authenticity and real self-esteem and self-connection and then all of a sudden my empathy and generosity have been increasing even though I haven't been actively trying to. Because I realized, oh, it's actually even more enjoyable to live this life when I have empathy and generosity. But if you're sacrificing, if you're alienating yourself and denying parts of yourself and suppressing and not having the courage to look inside your internal landscape, then you don't have as much to give because you're cut off from yourself. And it's so important to look inward and to truly have a sense of radical acceptance for who you are and to shine some self-empathy, like a light of self-empathy into your internal landscape. Like this is the real work, the journaling work, the therapy work, meditation, all these things are coming to a sense of self-acceptance, of just being with yourself and befriending yourself and that's how you're gonna be able to extend those same principles to other people. I have one last question for you and the spirit of that same empathy you just referenced, somebody's watching this and they're saying, man, I'm ready to make changes and I wanna confront those demons and I wanna turn my life around, but I do feel very disadvantaged. I do feel very stuck. What's my non-zero step? What can I do? I think starting with where you are and having radical acceptance, radical, I mean the root word of radical is, well, root, it means root, radical, it means striking the root. So having complete acceptance of this is my situation right now. Because you can't really leave a place that you haven't accepted that you're there. Can't grow unless you know this is where I am. This are my circumstances. These were the cards that I was dealt and that, yes, the cards you were dealt, you did not choose. Most of us had very little choice in our lives the first 20 years. You didn't choose to be born. Your circumstances, there are such things as I talk about personal sphere control but there is the external world, there is external circumstances and it's not, everyone gets a different hand dealt to them. But having a sense of acceptance for that reality, this is the reality. And then when you said feel this advantage and what I would say is as a non-zero day step is go find a list of feelings because I don't recommend cnvc.org which is the center for non-demonic communication as a list of feelings. And oftentimes we tie up evaluations with feelings. So disadvantage is the word disadvantage is tying up feelings of say disappointment or frustration or appal or anger, sadness, shock. All these things are physiological, these are vocabulary for physiological sensations in our body. And disadvantage is describing a circumstance that's outside your body. So when we untangle that, then you start to empower yourself. Say, oh, I realize that I'm feeling this, you may be right here in my body, I'm feeling this jolt of agitation about this is my circumstance. Now you're starting to really practice conscious living and self-acceptance. And then you can start really harnessing your sense of your ability to respond to your situation and maybe you say, I'm gonna do, what's one thing I can do a day for 30 days? Can I set a timer for five minutes a day and just write whatever comes out? No filter, just write in a journal, I like typing, you can also do handwritten, but just write without filter and get to know yourself. And it might be terrifying, but then you can go back and say, I'm feeling terrified right now. And you start developing emotional intelligence and you develop routines and habits, this is the key. The non-zero day, five minutes a day, write and see what's going on in between your ears and get to know yourself and that's gonna pay a lot of dividends. Man, that's fantastic advice. I always like to pick people's brains for a good book to read, any book recommendation on either non-zero days or just the theme of taking charge of your life. I would say Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankel. And then, I mean, talk about the disadvantaged circumstances and developing your ability to choose your response in any given set of circumstances. When you read that book, you realize whatever your life is, you can start comparing that to his situation when he goes in depth about his experience in concentration camp in the Holocaust. And you realize that, oh, wow, maybe my life's not as bad. And then he was able to persevere and actually cultivate a meaning through his suffering that he did not choose to be in that situation. And he was just developing this volitional muscle to choose his attitude in those circumstances. And when you read that book, you realize, wow, if he can go through that and have that attitude, I can have an attitude in my circumstances. Joel, man, it's been good talking to you, man. I appreciate it. My pleasure. Yeah. If you'd like to follow today's guests, you can check them out at joelbuying.com. You can also follow him on Twitter at Joel underscore buying. Also, don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel for more episodes, youtube.com slash fee online. Be sure to check out our motivational Mondays videos on Instagram, instagram.com slash fee online and subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, Google Play and iTunes. See you next time.