#084 Life Lessons Deeper Dive 2024

[00:00:05] Hi everyone, welcome to How to Live, a podcast that explores ways to live a good life. I'm your host Sharad Lal. This is episode 84. We've assembled an extraordinary lineup of thinkers who are reimagining personal and professional growth.

[00:00:20] Oliver Berkman reframes time management, Anise explores midlife transitions, Joel discusses intuition, Sarah Jane Ho human interaction, Simon's insights on visual thinking, Nireal's strategies on focus, John Dyke's personal reinvention, Shine Happiness, Christina Wallace portfolio life, Matthew Dick's power of storytelling, Drew's humor at work and Nick personal transformation.

[00:00:47] It's more than a podcast. It's condensed wisdom from smart folks across the world. To our global community of 140 countries, thank you very much for your support. With your support, we're in the top 3% of all podcasts globally. Thank you. Now here's episode 84.

[00:01:06] There's nothing wrong with efficiency, but that efficiency is not ever going to be the way to achieve peace of mind with regard to time. You're never going to make yourself so efficient that you are doing all the things that you can think of that feel like they might need doing and then you can finally say, okay, now I'm in charge, now I'm in control.

[00:01:28] The simple reason for that is just that the supply of those things is effectively infinite. You can receive an infinite number of emails, you can have an infinite number of ambitions for things you'd like to do in your life or places you'd like to go. So there's no way to get through that supply. And in fact, what will happen is that all else being equal, if all you do to try to deal with a feeling of having too much to do is get more efficient, you will just get busier and more stressed.

[00:01:55] Being a digital nomad. It's the lifestyle where you can run your business from anywhere, you can travel whenever you like, wherever you like. And many people will tell you in that situation that the main problem that they face is loneliness because you get to travel the world not really with other people. And if you make friends, they tend to be more fleeting. There are all these different contexts where actually just about anything from dating to friendship to parenting, business, politics, just all sorts of things.

[00:02:24] Lots of things that give meaning to life in very different ways just require us to be doing things with other people at the same time. So actually, we don't want to have total freedom of choice. We want to have freedom of choice that is synchronized with other people.

[00:02:41] I asked them three questions. When have you seen me happiest? What do you come to me for? Where do I stand out against my peers? I took all of those answers and was able to construct a version of who I was and what I had to offer the world in a moment where I couldn't see myself.

[00:03:02] My priority was my children. It sounds crazy to say out loud, but I felt like I was letting down all of feminism. And then I had a moment in the middle of the night when I realized that I am still ambitious, but my ambition is now expressed in more ways than just my work.

[00:03:21] And that part of my ambition in setting up the relationship I have with my children. I want us to have this long, productive, beautiful relationship. And that starts with how we lay the groundwork when we're first getting to know each other, right?

[00:03:35] I have ambition that my marriage will not just become roommates who are trading off on a list of tasks during this era of parenting. And it's okay if that means that ambition is being directed in these other planes. It's just being repurposed.

[00:03:53] So if you're playing it safe in your own life, you are capping your upside and quite potentially putting yourself at risk. So failure, giving yourself permission to try things that might not work is what allows you to take some risks, which can give you the opportunity for some really big outcomes.

[00:04:14] It doesn't mean you risk your entire portfolio. If you allow yourself stability in some ways, then you intentionally go and take some risks in other ways. The correlation of these things allows this where the portfolio can protect you.

[00:04:32] She froze. She was supposed to guide me across. She was in front of me. She was paralyzed. I said, come on, let's go. Let's go. I tried to encourage her. She still wouldn't budge.

[00:04:41] And then my type A personality kicked in and I said, no, it doesn't matter. I'll get in front of you, hold on to my straps and I'll keep the blindfold on and I'll get us across. And I successfully got us across. She was all happy. Other people on the ground were clapping, but the facilitator was glaring at me. And when I came down, she said, what the hell was that about?

[00:05:04] You deprived your partner of the opportunity to find her own courage and you wanted to be a hero and you did get yourself across, but you didn't learn anything. That sent me into a lot of introspection and a deeper awareness of empowerment.

[00:05:21] The image that came to mind was a courage vampire. If someone around me can't step up, I'll step up to get it done. But that's just taking away their courage and feeding off of their lack of courage to boost my courage.

[00:05:39] If you're alone to ski or play tennis and you just do that all day nonstop, that's a really bad way to learn because your muscles are going to get tired very quickly and you're going to start learning really bad sloppy habits.

[00:05:51] So we want to limit the bouts of learning, maybe an hour to maybe an hour and 20 or something like that, depending on your skills, your own capabilities, and then have a break.

[00:06:01] There's some interesting data on different things you could do after that. Resting is important. Even having a little nap has been shown, particularly with cognitive learning to boost. Sleeping that night after learning is also very important.

[00:06:15] Sometimes some people will come up to me and say, Sarah-Jane, I have really bad etiquette because I'm too honest. This person doesn't quite understand what the spirit of etiquette is. People think that it's restricting, that it's limiting, that it's one big don't.

[00:06:29] And people think, oh, it means that I can't say what I really mean. But actually, it's the opposite. Etiquette is empowering. It's one big do. Etiquette lets you in a room identify somebody who's interesting or important to you and that you want to go over and initiate conversation with.

[00:06:44] It gives you the tools and confidence to do that. Etiquette also is able to give you the tools to know when you should end a conversation with that person instead of hanging on to their ear going on and on at them until they're sick of you by knowing when to elegantly end that conversation and how to end that conversation so that person's still interested in you and does want to follow up and meet you again.

[00:07:04] Etiquette lets you set boundaries, say no to things that you don't want to do. I'm not trying to be holier than thou and tell you how to be a better person. I'm not interested in that. How you want to live your life is up to you. But what I am giving you by etiquette is a skill set to be more popular, to be well-liked, to have more satisfying human connections and interactions and achieve ultimately a sense of belonging.

[00:07:29] People seldom argue over the problem. People only ever argue over the solution because they're usually looking at it through their lens and through their context. You bring people together by keeping context front and center, then you explore all the concepts.

[00:07:44] The very pursuit of pleasure, wanting, craving, lusting, desire, hunger is itself psychologically destabilizing. We say love hurts. There's a very famous song, love hurts. It's true because wanting something is uncomfortable. So the brain doesn't get us to do what feels good. The brain gets us to do what felt good.

[00:08:08] So what that means is that all human behavior is driven by a desire to escape discomfort. And if that is true, that means time management is pain management. Money management is pain management. Weight management is pain management. It's all pain management, which is the first step to becoming indistractable. It's called mastering internal triggers or they will become your master.

[00:08:37] And so instead of trying to escape the discomfort, a much better technique, according to Bogos, is to learn how to play the task. And you do that in two ways. One, you add constraints. By adding a constraint, you make it an environment for play.

[00:08:52] So when you can put a constraint around a difficult task, a time to place constraint, some other kind of constraints, right? That's the first step. The second thing you can do is to look for the variability, to delve into the mystery of that task.

[00:09:07] So for me, writing is really hard work, right? Every author knows that to write an original piece, to write a blog post, to write a script, it's really tough. All I want to do is watch something on YouTube or do anything but the task at hand.

[00:09:19] But when I can focus on the mystery behind what I'm writing, the uncertainty, the variability, that's when it becomes a game. And I don't have to enjoy it. It just has to sustain my attention long enough to allow me to do the task.

[00:09:33] So my advice to people who think about reinvention is don't see it as a failure. You're not reinventing because you've failed at something. See it as the next logical progression of you delivering what you're about in a way that will bring benefits to you.

[00:09:51] Tap into what you're going to do. Tap into what you're going to do. Tap into what you're going to do. Tap into what you were. Learn from people. Have an understanding of what you need to know and how you're going to plan that journey.

[00:10:00] But never overlook the fact that at the heart of it, it's you. One of the greatest enemies you can have is inertia. Because with inertia comes doubt and fear and negativity.

[00:10:12] So you have to keep putting a foot in front of another. You have to keep getting on that stage or getting back on the computer and emailing someone saying, do you like this draft? Have I got the messaging right this time? And that's important.

[00:10:25] Normally, people think of happiness as the big smile, the emoji, effusive enthusiasm. But I think the quieter forms of happiness include contentment, which is just being in appreciation of the current moment.

[00:10:39] Not wanting more, not pursuing, not chasing, right? And then this joy. And to me, joy is something that it comes from the soul. You feel a very deep connection internally. I feel like happiness is a very external thing. I eat an ice cream, I'm happy. But when I share that ice cream with my loved one, I feel joy because that connection is from the soul.

[00:11:03] Quite often, quite often we're in the middle of a story, but we don't see that we're in the middle of a story. So having that record also allows you to start to have clarity in your life. You start to see, oh, wow, like a year ago, I started doing this thing. And now today, it's actually completed. I did not know I've been on a journey, but now I can see the journey. Now I have a story to tell. But if we don't write it down and keep track of it, sometimes we don't even realize the huge sweeping arcs of our lives because we have no way of seeing them while we're experiencing them.

[00:11:33] I don't think audiences want lessons. What I think they want is to be entertained. And if they're entertained by my story and over the course of my story, I describe understanding, wisdom, knowledge that I've acquired, and they take something from that on their own without me forcing it upon them, that's the best example of how a story can help other people.

[00:11:57] There's 10 kind of comedy techniques that we teach for more influential communication. One of the nice ones is the comic triple, which is a variation of the rule of three. And essentially, the comic triple is the idea that you can create a list of three things, and you can make the third thing something unexpected. A lot of times it'll generate a laugh or a smile.

[00:12:15] So one of the examples that I used to do in stand-up is, as a kid, I used to like to take things apart and put them back together again. Things like clocks and radios and my parents' marriage, which never got that one back together.

[00:12:29] Parents' marriage is something unexpected, but still logically fits with taking apart, putting back together again.

[00:12:34] What's really nice about the comic triple as a technique is that it's very easy to recognize when it can be valuable.

[00:12:42] We come in perhaps because we think we have a drinking problem, but many times it is we have a thinking problem.

[00:12:48] We've been keeping things internally. We have not voiced it out, the issues, the challenges.

[00:12:52] I do an audit every night of my day, thinking through the whole day.

[00:12:56] Is there something on my mind? Is there something also that I said today?

[00:13:00] Did I upset someone? Did I send an email or a message to someone that isn't quite right?

[00:13:05] Do I have any feelings about something?

[00:13:07] And then before I go to bed, I make those amends.

[00:13:10] And if we do that with all our relationship and we make sure that we don't have any resentments about people,

[00:13:15] then there is no need for a drink.

[00:13:18] In all the noise, the deadlines, the meetings, the endless to-do lists,

[00:13:24] there's something deeper calling you.

[00:13:27] Your purpose.

[00:13:28] That thing that makes you feel alive.

[00:13:32] That makes your work matter.

[00:13:35] Cancel the noise for a moment.

[00:13:37] Get quiet.

[00:13:39] Listen to what truly matters to you.

[00:13:42] Because when you find that,

[00:13:45] when you really connect with your deeper purpose,

[00:13:49] you start to move forward.

[00:13:52] The fire inside you starts to light up.

[00:13:55] Here's to building a life greater than you ever imagined.

[00:14:00] I hope you enjoyed this episode.

[00:14:03] So much wisdom.

[00:14:05] Tomorrow is the first day of 2025.

[00:14:08] What's the one thing you can do to get 2025 to a great start?

[00:14:14] We've had a lot of inspiration from the folks who've appeared in today's podcast.

[00:14:18] What resonates most with you?

[00:14:21] The next episode will drop two weeks from now on January 14th.

[00:14:26] Join us for that.

[00:14:27] Till then, have a wonderful day ahead.

[00:14:30] Bye-bye.

[00:14:31] Bye-bye.

[00:14:31] Bye-bye.

[00:14:31] Bye-bye.

[00:14:31] Bye-bye.

[00:14:31] Bye-bye.

[00:14:31] Thank you.