Warum Scheitern ein Privileg ist

0:00In 2008, the editor in chief of the Gilman News uh published a poem called Drowsy. Okay. Do you remember this? >> [snorts] >> Barely. I'll uh I'll give you a little bit of it. >> Yeah. You're sore. Can't take it anymore. Your forearms cramped from typing. Are you hungry? Or is it just another excuse to stop? You won't.

0:25You can't. This poem reads like someone trying to out-grind exhaustion. And it seems like since a young age you've always had this level of deep discipline, realizing that hard work is the goal. If hard work is the goal, what is the path to getting there? I think it is the path.

0:50So, I think the point of it is that the process itself, like the thing that you do every day, if you can measure success by how closely you emulate the path that you want to follow, then rather than winning once every 2 years, once every decade, when you achieve whatever, you know, destination you're quote walking towards, then you can win every day because and really every moment, as long as you're staying on that path. And so, I think I think that's how I think about work.

1:20That's wild that you found that poem. >> [laughter] >> You had a few others in there. One was called Ice Cream about a girl who you saw eating ice cream >> [laughter] >> and it made you sad. Seems on brand. Yeah, I think we also found some old yearbook photos. Um it's pretty entertaining, but um Hopefully didn't find Never mind. Well, we had a Luigi, whatever the the shooter is. He was valedictorian of uh many years after me. Really?

1:45>> Yeah, Gilman. Huh. That's [laughter] fascinating. Were you >> Apparently just turned out some very sad guys. Were you valedictorian of your class? >> No, I wasn't. Gotcha. Okay. I was top 10%. Hm. On work, uh today you preach discipline and consistency, but also sustainability. How do you know if you're working too hard? So, too hard such a hard concept to like like I would be like what is too hard even mean? Um I think that you have a rate of output that occurs over a period of time and if the rate of output decreases kind of precipitously at some point, then you know you're not being effective anymore.

2:26And so like on a micro level even hour to hour throughout a day, you know, your output will go down and then you have to sleep at some point. Uh then you wake up and then your output goes up again. And so I think like the idea of being burned out like I don't think anyone's like people don't burn out when they're playing video games. Not really. I mean some maybe some people, but like for the most part you can like kind of keep doing it. Um and I think that burnout just means that you're the reward for the work that you're doing has either you have habituated to that reward, so you've gotten used to it, so it no longer really rewards you anymore.

3:00Um or the cadence of that reward, which is meaningful, has continued to extend in terms of how frequently you get rewarded, which are both two different ways of basically saying the same thing, which is just you're not getting out of it what you wanted to get out of it. Um and so I think that is when people quote get burned out. I don't think it has anything to do with the amount of work that you're doing. So, I think the it's it's about it's about what's happening around you while you're working rather than the work itself. Cuz there are like if we like I like looking at things across like many thousands of years. And so the even the idea of a 40-hour work week is a pretty modern invention. And if you look at, you know, even a few hundred years ago, people just worked every day. And it wasn't like oh my god, that guy's so hardcore. It's just like he just worked every day because there was that was just kind of the expectation and you just like had to live and had to survive and if he had enough to eat for a day off, he could probably do that if he wanted to. And so I think about that a lot, which is like a lot of these confines are self-inflicted. And I think laddering up the belief set to like, does this serve me?

4:06And so the idea of like, you know, how do you develop work ethic? I think the big thing is like I don't really doesn't like it's not really developing work ethic, it's just it's doing the things that you have been rewarded for doing in the past and removing things that you don't enjoy as much. And then it gets easier to do more because you enjoy doing the thing you're doing. Now, let me clear, I don't like there's overhead. Of course, there's things that I do that I don't enjoy doing, but there's food that you eat that you don't immediately like, but maybe you like dessert and that's like so it's really just like again, it's a cadence of reinforcement. It's like how many times am I being reinforced over a period of time?

4:39And maybe if anything, the thing that gets developed is that you develop a history of being rewarded for delaying gratification over a period of time. But you know, it's like it's like it's weird. I like I get I get I get a lot I get a lot of I mean even like the intro that you gave. It's like I get a lot of press if you could call it that or or like flowers for having, you know, huge work ethic, but like I don't it just doesn't feel and this isn't like, oh I do I do what I love. I'm miserable all the time. Like it's plenty of times I'm miserable for extended periods of time. I just like don't really know what else I would do.

5:19And so it work is just kind of like my default setting. And so people are like, oh my god, that guy works 7 days a week on it, you know, on end on end on end and it's like, yeah, but it's like so have many people. I'll give you a different frame to like contextualize this. So, um so we have a team here, we have an advisory practice and um you know, for the team to spend all day with clients in person, it's like, oh my god, this is exhausting and we have to present and all that kind of stuff.

5:45And I was like, well, I mean, teachers present in front of groups all day, every day, all the time, and it's not like a big deal. It's just like that's just how it is. And so, just reframing something that we see as the big thing as something that somebody else in a different context does all the time, um is probably the most regular practice that I do, which is like, how can I In what universe would this not be hard? In what universe would this be normal?

6:10And well, then I'll just live in that universe. Make sense? Yeah. That's kind of how I think about it. I guess to go off what you're saying, uh I think it's common sentiment preached online, like the I wake up at 4:00, stop working at 10:00 p.m. Um and I guess what what I'm curious is, it seems like you believe that people have throughout history worked for extended periods of time, but is that on mentally strenuous tasks necessarily? Because I I think of this podcast, for instance, and you might get diminishing returns, but if I recorded 10 podcasts in a day or 20 podcasts in a day, um I'm probably going to do it differently than how I would do it if I were doing one in a day. You might put different types of energy, um it might be more passive, uh you might be a little less active listening. So, do you believe that you can still build that muscle of working for like mentally strenuous tasks?

7:07>> Absolutely. Really? No question. No hesitation. Even even for writing, like you've like gone like 16 hours. >> Absolutely. Really? Absolutely. And do you have any advice for building that metric? Doing it more. Hm. Like I mean, 100% is repetition. It's volume. Like what you just like fundamentally, if we if we describe a behavior set within a given condition, then it's a skill that we can develop. And we develop skills through modeling, and we develop through role-playing.

7:38With other basically seeing what other people do, and then doing it ourselves. And so, like doesn't matter what you're trying to learn. If you like And it's just that there are some skills that people like people think reading, people think math, people think like public speaking, like these are all skills. But it's like in what way does is does podcasting not fall into that category? In what way does having a conversation not fall into that category? Of course it does. And so, I I don't see it as any different. The only thing is that you want to have some sort of feedback loops so you can know you're getting better.

8:03But even just the fact of just like after every podcast if you had 5 minutes you're like, okay, what did I do well? What can I do better? And then the next day reviewing all the podcasts and then doing it again, like eventually you would no longer get fatigued from it because you'd also again you'd habituate. And so, for that one podcast if you only do one a month you're probably going to have, you know, your adrenals will will dump while while you're having the podcast, you have, you know, anxiety or your heart rate goes up, you start sweating. But if you do it all the time, then it no longer creates an adrenal response because you were just accustomed to doing it. And so, I mean, my goal is just to uh go through the habituation cycle as fast as humanly possible.

8:39So, I just get used to it. But like I'll do a consulting day um for 12 straight hours. And I do it I I I'm pretty fresh at the end. I enjoy doing it. I like doing it. And so, and I'm not saying that like that was this how I've always been. It's just like I've done it over time. And, you know, answering questions even ad hoc. It's like, how can you answer questions? It's like, well, you know, when I had I'll tell you two different stories.

9:08So, when I give my first public speech that wasn't in high school uh when I was in high school I was really nervous because um I didn't know the subject matter that well cuz it was, you know, Civil War whatever, right? Or you know, pro or con affirmative action, whatever. You know, put you have to make some debate. Fast forward, I get on stage. My first stage I ever spoke on as a business person had 1,200 people in the audience. First stage ever. And I remember as I was walking up on stage I was like, why am I not nervous right now? It was like very weird. I was like I should be nervous. Why I not nervous? I've been nervous all the other times I've spoken."

9:39And so, I thought about it and it was I have been doing eight public speaking things a day for years because at my gym, I had a I had a microphone, same headset, big speakers that I could I could hear myself on. And I had a bunch of adults in a room that I had to tell what to do. And I did that every single hour on the hour, 8 hours a day, and then I started the business on top of that. And so, I'd done that for years. And so, when I got up on stage, I was like, "Oh, I'm just telling another group of people while I have a headset on about something that I already know about."

10:07And so, that was kind of the making where you start to have it, you know, domain generalizations. Like, "Okay, something I did here also applies over here." And so, it doesn't need to be a big deal. And so, that kind of pattern recognition of like, "What other time have I done something like this that it wasn't a big deal? Why can't I just use that as the frame of reference for how I'm going to think about what I'm doing right now?" That's a really good answer. Um Thanks. Real quick, if you're business owner and you're not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift.

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