We all want two things that can seem at odds with each other: to be our own person and to belong. We want to stand apart from the crowd, but we also want to be connected to it. When that balance gets out of whack, we either lose ourselves in tribalism or drift into isolation.

My guest today says many of the problems in modern life stem from our inability to hold these two impulses in tension. His name is Luke Burgis, and he’s the author of The One and the 99: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion. Today on the show, Luke explains how becoming a true individual can give you the strength to be a part of a community. We discuss the difference between a solid self and a pseudo self — and what role families and rites of passage can play in moving us toward one or the other — why modern politics feels like a dysfunctional family, the dangers of performative religion, and much more.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Luke’s previous appearances on the AoM podcast:
  • Episode #714: Why Do We Want What We Want?
  • Episode #910: Thick Desires, Political Atheism, and Living an Anti-Mimetic Life
• The True Believer by Eric Hoffer
• Education of a Wandering Man by Louis L’Amour
• AoM Podcast #1,025: The Life and Legacy of Louis L’Amour
• AoM article with L’Amour’s weekly to-do lists
• AoM article and podcast about C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man and the idea of objective value
• The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich
• The Quest for Community by Robert Nisbet
• AoM Podcast #847: Overdoing Democracy
• AoM Podcast #1,010: How to Resist Group Anxiety and Become a Differentiated Self
• AoM Article: Becoming a Well-Differentiated Leader
• Dying Breed article: A New Kind of Monasticism — The Power of Community to Shape the Soul
• The Rule of St. Benedict

Connect With Luke Burgis

• Luke’s website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Transcript Coming Soon

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Life rarely unfolds according to plan. A relationship implodes. A move or job change doesn’t work out. Or you simply fail in a goal you’ve set for yourself.

My guest has spent almost two decades researching and field-testing how to get back on track when smaller slip-ups and larger upheavals knock you off course. His name is Steve Kamb, and he’s the founder of Nerd Fitness and the author of How to Try Again: An Approachable Guide to Navigating Chaos and Making Change THAT STICKS. Today on the show, Steve shares practical principles for dealing with life’s frustrating and demoralizing setbacks. We discuss why sometimes the best move is to pause rather than push harder, how to accept reality without resigning yourself to it, why treating change as an experiment can help you beat paralysis and take action, why you should treat consistency with your goals the way you do showering, and more.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Steve’s previous appearances on the AoM podcast:
  • Episode #42: Level Up Your Life With Nerd Fitness & Steve Kamb
  • Episode #170: Level Up Your Life
• Steve’s AoM guest posts:
  • Don’t Be That Guy: The Taxonomy of Lousy Male Friends
  • How Superheroes, Movies, and Video Games Taught Me to Conquer Fear
• Nerd Fitness
• Museum of Failure
• Sunday Firesides: Good Times Are Not Around the Corner (And That’s Great News!)
• Sunday Firesides: Treat Life Like an Experiment
• “Lightning Fields” by the Killers

Connect With Steve Kamb

• Steve’s website
• Steve on IG
• Steve on LinkedIn
• Steve on Substack

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. Life rarely unfolds according to plan. A relationship implodes, a move or job change doesn’t work out, or you simply fail in a goal you’ve set for yourself. My guest has spent almost two decades researching and field testing how to get back on track when smaller slip-ups and larger upheavals knock you off course.

His name is Steve Kamb and he’s the founder of Nerd Fitness and the author of How to Try Again: an Approachable Guide to Navigating Chaos and Making Change That Sticks. In today’s show, Steve shares practical principles for dealing with life’s frustrating and demoralizing setbacks. We discuss why sometimes the best move is to pause rather than push harder. How to accept reality without resigning yourself to it. Why treating change as an experiment can help you be paralysis and take action. Why you should treat consistency with your goals the way you do showering and more after the show is over, check out our show notes at a om is slash try again. All right, Steve Kamb, welcome back to the show.

Steve Kamb:

Gosh, Brett, it’s so good to be here. You gave me an opportunity back in, I think it was 2010, to write a guest post for Art of Manliness. And I spent months writing that guest post, and that was the biggest opportunity that had ever come my way when I started Nerd Fitness. So thank you for that opportunity. 16 years later and I’m just honored to be back on the podcast.

Brett McKay:

Well, you’re very welcome and thank you for writing that article. So yeah, Steve, you’re the founder of Nerd Fitness. It started off as a blog, started about the same time we started AoM, back in 2008. Nerd Fitness has since turned into a coaching company. You do fitness coaching and nutrition coaching for people. But yeah, that article “Don’t Be That Guy: The Taxonomy of Lousy Male Friends,” published in 2010. We still reshare that. We reshare articles, so from our archives on our X feed and on Facebook, and every time we reshare that, it still gets a ton of traffic. It’s timeless, it’s evergreen.

Steve Kamb:

That makes me so happy. And also you don’t want to be that guy.

Brett McKay:

You don’t want to be that guy. Yeah. So thank you for sharing that, allowing us to publish that article. And then we’ve had you on the podcast before. You’re one of my early podcasts. 2013 was the last time we had you on episode number 42.

Steve Kamb:

Whoa.

Brett McKay:

So it’s been a long time. 13 years ago you were on the show to talk about your book Level Up Your Life, and you got a new book out and since that time we both have gotten old. We’re in our forties now. And your new book, How to Try Again: An Approachable Guide to Navigating Chaos and Making Change That Sticks is all about how to get back in the saddle when life derails the goals you have for yourself. And this book was born out of your own experience having to get back in the saddle big time because in 2023 you got bucked the heck out of life’s saddle. What happened in 2023?

Steve Kamb:

Yeah, well, so interestingly, I said I started Nerd Fitness at this point 17 years ago, and I had an idea in 2023 like, hey, we’re really good at helping people succeed not with more discipline when they fail or struggle but with more compassion. And we help people get back on track. We help them respond or restart on their fitness journey after a failure. And that was the premise and the idea that I thought I was going to be writing a book around said, I have all this experience. I have an amazing team at Nerd Fitness. I have almost two decades of experience helping busy people navigate a chaotic life. And that was the book I started to write. And then about a year later, my life took a few left turns. It started with a skin cancer diagnosis that kind of shook me and made me realize like, oh, I am in fact mortal…

Brett McKay:

You got the good kind of skin cancer. I mean, no, cancer is good, but it’s the one that you can just cut off at the dermatologist’s office.

Steve Kamb:

Yeah, don’t worry, it’s the good one. Which was interesting. And it was in my scalp, so they did have to scoop it out and then they had to sew my head shut and keep an eye on that wound for a few months I think. So that was step one, step two, like you Brett, we can both relate to this thanks to things like ChatGPT and the way that Google changes us. Content creators and writers kind of ran into, I guess steer to ship into an iceberg unbeknownst to us, which was people don’t click through to websites anymore. And I watched as Nerd Fitness my company, over a handful of months and years, we lost a good 80% of our traffic, not because we did anything differently, but because of just the way that society interacts with websites and large language models hoovering up all of our content and spitting out answers. So that was super fun to try to navigate.

Brett McKay:

We had that same thing happen to us. So yeah, we can commiserate.

Steve Kamb:

And then I went through an amicable but heartbreaking and life-changing divorce and all of a sudden I’m writing this book about how to navigate a chaotic life and how to pick yourself up and how to try again differently, how to try with compassion, how to try with different strategies that will actually help. And then I went through the most tumultuous years of my life and the book evolved. I had to go back to my publisher and say, Hey, kind of going through something, going to need a little bit more time, but I think it’s going to make for a better book that’s going to help more people in different ways. And fortunately, they were very supportive of this, and the book ended up becoming the book that I needed to read myself. So it started as a, Hey, we’re really good at this. We have a team. We have a system and strategies that help real regular busy people navigate chaotic lives. And then it became a much bigger idea and a lot more kind of philosophical about, hey, life is not going to go the way that you expect. Here’s how we can navigate that together.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so let’s talk about how to deal with failure. When you don’t reach a goal or when your life just goes off kilter, it feels bad because it’s a failure. We feel like a failure. But you highlight that this idea of thinking of ourselves as being a failure is relatively new. Walk us through how the meaning of failure has changed over time and how that history can change the way we look at failure.

Steve Kamb:

So very early on in the book, I have a whole chapter dedicated to failure. I thought, Hey, most people are going to pick up a book called How to Try Again after something has gone wrong or they’re not succeeding in the way they want to. And like you said, we feel bad. Failure hurts. And I’m not going to say like, oh, failure is always a blessing in disguise. Sometimes failure just sucks. And when we feel and when we have these experiences where we have failed, we decide that we and our identity, we are now failures. The good news, that’s not actually true. We are humans who failed at something. And I did some research into failure. I spoke to a professor of failure from Stevens University, her name is Dr. Theresa McPhail, which is just the perfect, perfect last name. She literally teaches a class on failure.

And then I took a trip to the Museum of Failure and I studied the origins of the definition of the word failure and something that really jumped out at me through my research way back in the 1820s, I think Noah Webster, Webster’s Dictionary, Noah defined failure as a breaking or becoming insolvent. It was something that happened 30 years later after Webster had passed away, but his dictionary endured. The new definition of failure became something like it’s a weakness in a man’s character. And all of a sudden failure went from something that happened to us to something that we were, and I posit and think we would be much better off if we returned to that original definition or that definition that Webster had in his 1820s dictionary. That failure is something that happens. It’s not the end of the world. It sucks, especially when you’re going through it.

And in those moments, and I’m not going to say like I said, oh, something great will come from this maybe, but at the same time it’s something that happened. There is a lesson that we can learn from it, and we are not failures. We are humans who failed at something. Once we can get wrapper heads around that, then we can start to kind of pick through the rubble and say, alright, that happened. Give yourself a hug and be like, I’m part of the most common club on the planet and humanity. What do we do next?

Brett McKay:

Yeah, because when you identify yourself as a failure, it just makes you feel incapacitated. You feel like why even try? But if you think, well, okay, this thing happened to me, but it’s not the entirety of who I am, then you feel like, okay, okay, there’s something I can do to fix it. You mentioned you visited the Museum of Failure. What did you learn about failure from that visit?

Steve Kamb:

Well, two things. One, it’s a traveling museum by Dr. Samuel West. And I flew up to New York City and then was supposed to go to the museum with a friend, but he bailed. So we actually failed to make it to the Museum of Failure on time. We had to go the next day. So I walked into this museum and it’s full of the best and the most interesting failures and frauds and flops in history. And what surprised me was how many of the world’s most successful companies were well represented there. I mean, Microsoft, Apple, Nintendo, those were all there in addition to some failures that maybe were understandable like Hooters Airline or other inventions that were the hula chair. Okay, maybe this idea wasn’t fully baked. But the thing that really jumped out at me is the final exhibit. As you’re walking out of the Museum of Failure, there is this kaleidoscope of Post-it notes on the wall and they encourage you to write down your failures and place it up on the wall alongside everybody else’s.

And for somebody that is struggling with something, we often, maybe you’re the head of a household and you keep your failure down because you want to come across as the strong. You’re the strong foundation of your family or your business or whatever. There’s a lot of shame and guilt that we feel when we’re failures and we cram it down. And I think we’d be much better off like this wall here when write down your failures and add it to the wall and you see, oh, failed businesses or failed marriages or something deeply personal to somebody that they wrote in that wall, it makes you realize that you’re not actually that unique. And I mean that in the best way possible. Somebody has failed in the way that you have failed that before. You’re not that unique. And also failure makes you part of this never ending list of people who have failed, which has gone back since the beginning of time.

Since humans have had the opportunity to fail, we have failed. So when we add our failure to that wall or we talk about it with others, it kind of removes some of the power it has over us. It took me months, maybe over a year, I think it was at least maybe 18 months before I finally shared my personal struggles with my audience and the support I got in return was mind blowing. And that’s what gave me the confidence to tell my story on page two of my book, it took me 14 drafts I think before I finally added my story to my book because I wanted other people to feel okay sharing their failures and not beating themselves up because something didn’t go the way they expected it to.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so everyone fails. Even the big dogs fail with billions of dollars of funding. They can have big giant flops, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, what was it, Pepsi? Clear, big flop that didn’t work out. So if they can fail New Coke. Yeah, New Coke…

Steve Kamb:

Crystal Pepsi.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, crystal Pepsi. Yeah. Or the Arch Deluxe. Remember the Arch Deluxe?

Steve Kamb:

I think that was in there too. Yep.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. And then the other thing too, it teaches you that with anything you decide to do, failure could be an option and just accept that and as soon as you do things get a little more copacetic. And then the other thing you talk about in reframing failure, I think another reason why people don’t like to fail, and you talk about this in the book, is when you fail, you think, well now I’m going back to square one. You argue like, no, that’s not the case. If you fail at something, you don’t automatically have to start from scratch.

Steve Kamb:

Yeah. The good news is square one doesn’t actually exist. So here’s an example. Let’s say a year ago you signed up to go to the gym and you went to the gym for two weeks and then life happened and you fell off the wagon and every month you’ve been paying your monthly gym membership and you feel like a failure and you’re like, oh gosh, I have to go all the way back to square one the next time I walk into this gym. That feels really daunting. The good news is that you’ve already accomplished so many of the steps between you and exercise. It’s not just I’m at the gym, but rather you already had to find the gym, you had to sign up for the gym, you had to figure out where to park, you had to figure out how the equipment worked, you had to figure out how to navigate the locker room.

You had to figure out which workout you were going to do. So although you might be starting over with regards to how much weight you can lift or how fast you can run, you’ve already taken care of the first 90% of those steps. So when you start over, you get to bring the knowledge of every one of those past failures with you. You get to stand on those shoulders and we actually get to be thankful for the fact that we failed in certain ways in the past. We can learn from all of that and bring it with us for our next attempt. It might allow us to succeed a little bit further or maybe have a dramatic success because we’ve already done so much of the hard work and learned some really tough lessons on what doesn’t work for us in the past.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Reminds me of a line from a song from my favorite band and everyone knows what I’m about to say because everyone knows what my favorite band is. It’s The Killers. So they got this song called Lightning Fields from their 2020 album, Imploding the Mirage, it’s their best album, my favorite album. And there’s this line that goes, don’t beat yourself up. You’ve laid good ground. I think that captures that idea perfectly.

Steve Kamb:

I love that. I love The Killers too.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, Killers are great. Alright, so let’s talk about this framework you developed that you’ve used with Nerd Fitness clients to handle setbacks and that you used and dealing with your own setbacks. It’s an acronym. It’s packed, PACT, and it stands for pause, accept, change, try. So let’s talk about pause first. Whenever we’re facing a hurdle or a setback, our first inclination is often to do more like, okay, I got to do something to get over this thing, but how can doing more actually make things worse for us?

Steve Kamb:

Y’all know the saying, if at first you don’t succeed, try again maybe. But if you’re trying to succeed at something, that’s the wrong thing. And how are you defining success? If you try again in the same way, you’ll probably just fail again in the same way. So the first step, I think so many of us kind of get on this loop or just keep running around this wheel of, all right, I failed at couch to 5K or going to the gym or journaling each morning, all right, I failed. I’ll try again next month. And then you just do the same thing again except now you are beating yourself up even more because you couldn’t follow through with it. You’re going to end up in the same spot. So the first step I want people to take on this journey is pause. We think when we’re not making progress, we’re falling further behind and that’s bad.

And we humans, we love progress. The problem is the opposite of progress is not stagnation, it’s not staying where we are. The opposite of progress is regress, it’s making things worse. So when we think about things from this perspective, having a pause and saying, wait a second, am I actually doing the right thing? Am I heading down the right path? Am I progressing or am I trying to progress in the way that I’m actually interested in progressing? The good news is there are so many different ways to change, and if you keep trying to do the one that you don’t like, you’re just kind of spinning your wheels, you’re swimming in the wrong direction, you are using so much energy to do something along the wrong path when the next step is actually, instead of just putting your head down and going further or faster in the same direction, it’s pausing, taking a breath, looking at your surroundings and saying, is this working for me? I think a lot of us kind of skip that step.

Brett McKay:

You actually use a story of this guy named Brett Archibald who literally swam in the wrong direction and it made things worse for him. Tell us about this guy.

Steve Kamb:

Yeah, this is one of the craziest stories I’ve ever stumbled across. So I fell in love with this idea of treading water being actually heroic. And again, when the alternatives are drowning or swimming in the wrong direction, treading water is actually a pretty darn good option. Second only to swimming in the right direction. So this story is about this guy. His name’s Brett on a 50th birthday celebration with all of his friends and they are on a boat sailing through the some straits, I think in the Philippines. And he got some food poisoning from eating a bad calzone the day before. So it’s two in the morning. He’s on this boat where they’re getting ready to head out to a specific island, and he’s got so much food poisoning that he runs up to the deck to throw up over the side of the boat.

And the boat was so rough that he literally falls over the side of the boat, falls, I think it’s 15, maybe 20 feet into the water, and it’s two in the morning so nobody sees him and he pops his head up and he tries to yell, but there’s nobody awake. There’s the captain who’s busy driving the boat and everybody else is asleep. So Brett does what anybody thinks they should do in this moment. He’s like, all right, well, I guess I’m going to start swimming. So he starts swimming, pole kick, breathe, pole kick, breathe, and he does this for a handful of hours until the sun comes up and he can finally take a look at his surroundings and he realizes that there’s still nothing in any direction and he takes stock of what’s on him, and he reaches in his pocket and he pulls out the little cardboard key card holder from his hotel stay the night before.

He rips off a tiny corner and he drops it on the top of the water and notices as the current sends it in the exact opposite direction. He was swimming, unbeknownst to Brett, he had been swimming against the current for hours, wasting energy, trying to make things better when the reality was he was actually making things worse. So as soon as he does this, he realizes like, okay, this is not what I need to be doing. I don’t know when I’m going to be rescued if at all. My only plan I have right now is to do the bare minimum and tread water long enough, not because I believe I’ll be rescued, but rather I’m going to tread long enough to keep going. And every hour of treading water reminds me that, Hey, I’ve already done it for this long. I can probably do it for another one. And I don’t want to spoil a story. The good news is he does eventually get rescued, but that story of him trying so hard to do one thing and realizing that he was actually making a lot of things worse has stuck with me ever since.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I mean even in wilderness survival, if you get lost in the woods, the thing they tell you is just stop and stay where you’re at because our natural inclination, I got to get out of here, I got to find my, you’re just going to get more lost that way. And I think it’s applicable to when our goals go sideways because let’s say it’s a fitness goal and it doesn’t shake out well, we think, well, I’m just going to try harder on this thing that I was doing. Instead, what would be helpful is just like pause, stop. Is this the thing I should actually be doing? Is there something else I could be doing? Maybe I hire a coach to get their input. But that pause is what allows you to make those decisions.

Steve Kamb:

Not only that, but I think if we don’t pause, there is some part of us that think there is comfort in just continuing to do the thing that we have been doing, even though we know it’s not working for us. Oh, we sign up for a dating app and we swiped right a hundred times and it didn’t work. It is trying to date with your same cheesy pickup lines. If it’s not working, that’s probably not a good strategy. Maybe having a friend look at your profile and work through like, Hey, what is working and not working here? Same thing with maybe you’re applying for a new job, just firing a hundred more resumes into the void of LinkedIn or whatever. If it’s not working before, it’s probably not going to work this time. You need to pause and take a look at the picture and say, I need to do something different, which is so hard because then we have to admit to ourselves that what we’ve been doing isn’t working.

And we spent all of that time on that when we could have been doing something else. But there’s this great quote from CS Lewis who says something like, once you realize you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing it about face and walking back towards where you came so that you can get on the right road. He says, the next correct step is backwards. I think there’s a step in between there, which is pausing, stop moving forward and turning around and accessing your situation so that you can have the bandwidth and the clarity to say, oh, what I’m doing isn’t working. I know I don’t go back to square one because I get to carry all of these past experiences with me. Cool. I can now adjust my path and try something different, and I might be able to get there slightly faster because of all the changes and challenges I went through in the past.

Brett McKay:

And you also talk about the pause can come in handy if life just throws you a curve ball. Let’s say a loved one gets sick or there’s a death in the family and it just requires you to spend time in that area of your life. Our natural inclination is like, well, I’m going to take care of my family, my sick loved one, and I’m going to keep doing all this stuff and more and more stuff when the better approach because that’s just going to burn you out. The better approach would just be pause and just tell yourself, I’m just going to tread water here for the next couple months, maybe year, and I’m going to take the foot off the gas so I can focus on this one thing. And then you tell yourself like, okay, I’m not going to be making progress I want, but I’ve got all this experience in the past and I can take that with me when I can pick things back up again. But for now, I just got to tread water.

Steve Kamb:

Like I said, treading water can be heroic. I mean, I’m a guy that owns a health and fitness company and I spent the last six years treading water with my own fitness and it was so needed. I’m trying to write this book. I’m navigating a business that is reinventing itself. My personal life has irrevocably changed. All of these things are happening at the same time, I didn’t also need to add onto this, Hey, you’re not doing your prescribed workout. You’re not doing all of the things. I think we have a tendency to beat ourselves up when we can’t juggle all of the chainsaws that we’re trying to juggle and we just keep thinking like, God, if I just had it together a little more, or if I was just more disciplined. And the reality is it’s not a motivation problem, it’s a resources problem. We’re asking so much of ourselves and sometimes strategically half-assing your goals or strategically your workout is like an amazing place to be when the alternative is to give up and drown or again, bring out energy swimming in the wrong direction.

For me it was, I’m going to go to the gym and do one exercise and while I’m traveling, I’m going to have one healthy meal a day. I wasn’t trying to win, I was just trying to not lose. And I knew if I could do that today, it gave me a chance to get to tomorrow. And if I could get to tomorrow, I don’t know how long I’m going to need to tread water, but I can do it for a really, really long time. And for me, only recently after finishing this book and finally having a little bit of a gap in my schedule, did I rejoin a commercial gym? Actually working now with a Matt from Nerd Fitness who is now coaching me to work on my fitness. And the great news is I’m not going, I don’t have to go all the way back to a start. I’m not having to start from zero, even though we know there’s no square one, I have been doing a bare minimum for long enough that I can get right into that gym and get on track moving forward with some progress pretty quickly. And that’s due to the fact that I was able to tread water for a long time.

Brett McKay:

Alright. Let’s talk about A for accept. Instead of accepting problems, you argue that we typically avoid them. What does avoidance often look like?

Steve Kamb:

I think when I see and deal with avoidance personally and when we see it with coaching clients and community members at Nerd Fitness, we do one of two things. One is we kick the can down the road and we love the word until or we kind of drown it out and let’s talk about that first one. So I’ll share an example. There is this amazing podcast called Chasing Scratch, and it’s about these two guys named Mike and Eli who are college buddies trying to get to scratch golf, which is shooting even par or better on average, which is a really challenging goal. And I’ve known them for years. They’ve been working with Matt from Nerd Fitness and Mike kept coming to Matt and saying, oh, I’m so sorry I couldn’t get to my workout today. My kid got sick or I couldn’t make it because this work meeting went long, but next week things should get back to normal and the next week something else would happen.

And he kept saying, but then I’ll get back to normal. And Matt finally had a conversation with Mike and said, Mike, I’m worried there is this normal that you think is just around the corner. That normal’s not coming back. In Mike’s mind, normal was predictable, normal was routine, and Mike’s normal was anything. But the podcast had become an unexpected success. His co-host Eli ended up having to have a hip surgery. His kid was growing up, he was taking on extra work so that he could focus on the podcast and leave his corporate job. So there was nothing normal about his life. Normal had left the building. And once he accepted this of like, Hey, I keep trying to expect something is going to be different in the future, I’m avoiding my actual reality today in all of its messiness. And the sooner I accept the fact that I can’t do it all, that my life is messy, only then could they finally start to do something about it.

Instead of a structured workout plan three days per week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, it was, Mike, what do we have time for today? Great, let’s do that first thing in the morning before your kid wakes up. It might be 15 minutes. Cool, those 15 minutes are better than the perfect workout routine that Mike was hoping to be able to do next week. So I think a lot of us avoid the reality of our current situation because this reality is kind of scary. The fact that we can’t do it all or that there is some aspect of our life that isn’t going the way that we want it to, it’s really easy to just kind of cram that down and not deal with it. And the sooner we can accept that this is actually what’s happening, this is the situation I find myself in, these are the struggles and pain points, the sooner I can have that uncomfortable conversation with my spouse or my boss about how I’m struggling, the sooner we can have those things, then we can finally start to make smarter decisions about what we’re actually going to prioritize, where we need boundaries, how to navigate whatever that next step might look like for us.

Brett McKay:

And I think the way you described acceptance there, it’s not resignation because I think a lot of guys in the here acceptance, it means, well, I just got to resign myself to this situation. There’s nothing I can do. It’s like, no, what acceptance is just looking at the bare bones reality facts. And once you see how crappy things are, then you can start doing something about it. It’s like Apollo 13, they had to accept the fact we’re in this little tin can thousands of miles from earth with these limited supplies, and we got to make a filter out of it, and they had to accept that fact and then work with those constraints.

Steve Kamb:

We’re not doing ourselves any favor when we think or feel badly that life is anything other than what it is right now. And all dog eating too much grass and throwing up in the carpet, kid getting sick, navigating fertility issues, whatever it may be, these are things that are so real and honest. And the sooner we can look at those with clear eyes, the more likely we can then say like, Hey, we’re trying, but also this is our reality. What can we do about it?

Brett McKay:

And even when people accept there are problems in their life, they sometimes just kind of do it passively instead of as a step toward action. They’re just thinking, I’m just going to hope for the best. Things will just turn out better, just magically. Well, maybe that might happen, but probably not.

Steve Kamb:

Yeah, there’s some researcher, I think her name is Dr. Keta Weingarten, who refers to this as unreasonable hope. And it’s just this concept that, oh, things should get better because I want them to get better. They should, and I’ll just wait for them to get better. And that’s not how this works. They might not get better or they might require very specific action for things to get better. So the sooner we can accept and look at the absurdity of our life and say, yep, this is happening and it’s not cool, and I’m really unhappy about this and here’s what I can do about it.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Alright, so that’s accept. Let’s move to change. So we’ve paused, taken a break from what we’re doing to assess things. We’ve accepted our situation, now we got to figure out, okay, what can we change to prevent the failure in the future or to overcome it? How do you figure out what you need to change when trying to overcome a setback?

Steve Kamb:

I think that the step one is to picture your favorite literary detective. It could be Sherlock Holmes, Nancy Drew. For me growing up, it was Encyclopedia Brown. Oh man.

Brett McKay:

Encyclopedia Brown. Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Kamb:

He would solve mysteries in his neighborhood for I think it was like 25 cents, 25 cents a case. And then he would come home from school or on summer break and sit down at the dinner table and his dad, who was the chief police of Ida, would then spill his guts about whatever case he couldn’t solve. And by the end of dinner or later on, Encyclopedia Brown, this young kid would have solved it. So I dunno what that says about the dad that he couldn’t handle this and was just telling all of the details to his son. But I think there’s something interesting and fun about looking at life and looking at our past attempts like a curious detective, and you can picture the board game clue as well, like, oh, that’s really interesting. Oh, you think you’re a failure because you couldn’t stick with your workout.

It’s like, oh, that’s really interesting. I missed my workout this morning. Not because I’m a failure, but because I was up super late last night scrolling on my phone because I just felt like I had to disassociate from a really stressful day. Okay, why was the day stressful? Oh, I actually don’t like my job and I had to go pick up my kid from school. There was behavioral issues and then I had to forgot to take the food out of the freezer in time to defrost it, so then I couldn’t cook dinner, whatever it may be. So many times, as I said earlier, what we think is a motivation problem is often a resources problem. So if we can look with curiosity and not judgment, imagine we are detectives and we see the chalk outline of our past attempts to try to make a specific change. We can look at that and say like, oh, okay. Turns out it was for these specific reasons, actually two steps removed from I’m not motivated. It’s actually so much deeper than that. Once we can finally start to put those pieces in place and solve that crime, we can then decide, okay, now that we’ve paused and accepted our reality and we know why we failed in the past, we can change something this time and do something differently.

Brett McKay:

And when you do make a change, it doesn’t have to be a wholesale change of the whole entire thing. It could just be one small variable.

Steve Kamb:

Yeah, there’s that great quote from Charlie Munger. It’s show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome. I think when we’re deciding what to change, we can think about this scientists, we’ve been running experiments with our clients for, I’d say we’ve been doing this program for eight years now, nine years. And it’s been really liberating for our clients to be able to say, Hey, I know this is not how you’ve done things in the past, but you came to us because you want things to be different. And if you want different outcomes you need, we need to try something differently. Let’s try this as an experiment. And when you look at things this way, it adds some lightness to it. It removes this pressure of, gosh, I have to do this for the rest of my life. What if it doesn’t work? Whatever. We can look at it like curious scientists, we take all of the data that we learned from our detective work and say, interesting.

Okay, I have a hypothesis that if I were to follow this new workout program or try join this hiking club, I will be more interested in exercise by the end of it. Or I’ve been trying toxic dieting, I’ve been trying to cut out carbs for the past decade off and on, and it turns out I love carbs. Maybe there is a different experiment I can conduct where I still get to eat carbs and try to have success in a different way. So as we call it, the zoom in, zoom out method. So you zoom out and set the experiment and then you zoom in and just focus on conducting the experiment. You don’t worry about the end goal, you don’t worry about whether or not it’s giving you the results you want. We are simply conducting the experiment and at the end of those 30 days or six weeks, we can then zoom out and say, one, did we get the result that we expected?

It might be what we expected or not, but neither one is good or bad. It’s an experiment. And then we can decide, did we enjoy the experiment? Would we like to keep doing it or do we need to make a change or adjust a variable and create a different experiment and make that change and kind of rerun that process. But when we think about things in this experimental mindset, it removes so much of the judgment that we put on the plate and the expectations we kind of put in our shoulders to suddenly have it all figured out.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I’ve done that in my own life with my own training. One experiment I ran and I still continue today, I wanted to get more steps in because I sit down a lot for my work. And so I decided when I wake up early, I started waking up early in my forties, like five o’clock. Not on purpose, it just happened. I decided, you know what? I’m just going to take a walk around the block during that time, and I think you and I, we’ve actually had a phone call on one of my early morning walks and it started out as an experiment and I was like, I’ll just do this for a month and see how it goes. And turns out I really like it and I’ve been doing it now for years. Every morning, go for a walk at 5:30, 6 o’clock in the morning and it worked.

But there’s other things I’ve tried. I’m like, I’m not going to do that anymore. Didn’t work out for me. So yeah, I like that idea. Just any change you make, you don’t have to make a full hearted commitment. Just approach it like an experiment and see how it goes for a few weeks. And if it works, great, if it doesn’t, no harm, no foul in getting rid of it. Let’s talk about the T for try. So you’ve come up with something that you want to change in your life that you want to make an improvement on, but a lot of people still don’t actually try the thing they came up with. What’s holding people back from trying things?

Steve Kamb:

I think first of all, you’re in good company. If you’re like, I need the perfect plan. I should do some more research. I got to do more research to make sure I have the perfect plan or the most optimized diet that I have to follow, and I just need to keep working on this. I tell a few fun stories in the book. One is about George Lucas and him trying to write the screenplay for Star Wars and just how terrible early drafts of it were. And I think it was Francis Ford Coppola got a chance to read an early draft and said, I think the term he used was, this is gobbledygook. I don’t know what this is and it’s a disaster. But he needed to get something down on the page. And then I also tell the story of Winston Churchill. We know him as the Prime Minister and as a war correspondent back in the earlier days, and then as a soldier in World War I, I believe, and in between World War I and World War II, he decides he wants to become a painter.

And he tells this funny story about how he was terrified of where to put his first brushstroke on his canvas. He called it the towering canvas. And he was afraid with a silent veto because what if he put it in the wrong spot? Fortunately, his wife invited over a neighbor who was a painter, and she just walked up to him and said, give me the big brush. And she just grabbed it and just started throwing paint up on the canvas. And this is when Churchill realized like, oh, the canvas couldn’t hit back, it couldn’t fight back, and suddenly the spell had been broken. Oh, I can just do this imperfectly, and that’s okay. The term that I thought up was start ugly. I’m like, oh, this idea of starting ugly gives you permission to get out of your own way and just get started. And then I stumbled across a book called Start Ugly by David. I believe that’s his name. But we’re so afraid often that we’re going to do it incorrectly, that we never start at all. And I think we need to instead give ourselves permission or rather challenge ourselves to start incorrectly and to do things imperfectly and to start ugly because only then can we finally get good at it.

Brett McKay:

So that idea that things have to be perfect, that holds it back a lot of people, but just kind of like, you know what? The first one’s going to suck. Richard Grier, he’s one of the CEOs at Huckberry, he’s got this saying, you always throw out the first pancake whenever you’re making pancakes. It’s like the first one’s always the worst. You always throw it out. So yeah, just do something and accept that it’s probably going to be bad. And then with time as you do it more and more, you’re going to get better and better and better at it.

Steve Kamb:

Yeah, well, not just that, but there is a specific way that you can get better. And I think about this from a ready, fire, aim sequence of things. And in the book I talk about standup comedians specifically and what we see on stage or what we see on Netflix, what we see at a comedy special, we see the finished product and we think like, oh, that was really funny. What we don’t realize is the hundreds of sets that that comedian has performed slowly tinkering with that specific joke, that pause, that funny aside that they just thought up. All of that has been tested like scientists in a laboratory on Tuesday nights and small clubs around the world. The way I think of this as comedians don’t tell jokes because they’re funny, they tell a joke until it becomes funny. And writers don’t write when they have an idea. Professional writers write until they find a good idea. So much of this is, I am going to try this thing and start ugly, and then based on the feedback that the world is giving me or the audience is giving me, or my readers are giving me and how I’m feeling about this, I can make this project slightly better over time and create this pretty amazing thing at the end. But it’s going to come with a bunch of tiny adjustments along the way based on feedback that we’re getting throughout the process.

Brett McKay:

And another thing you talk about that holds people back from trying the thing that they’ve decided they’re going to do to initiate some change in their life, they might think, well, this isn’t how you’re supposed to do it, or This isn’t the most optimized way to do it, and it’s not what the guru says I should be doing. And you say, that doesn’t matter. Just do what works for you. And if it seems kind of silly or okay. And then also it’s okay to not try things that everyone’s saying you should do because you’re just like, you know what? I don’t like doing that. I’m not going to do that. So when it comes to fitness, if someone says, man, bro, you got to do CrossFit. That’s the best thing. Well, if you don’t like that, don’t do CrossFit. It’s better for you to be physically active doing something you enjoy. You’re more likely to stick with doing that thing.

Steve Kamb:

And nothing makes my heart hurt more than seeing somebody that is like, okay, I’m finally working up the courage to exercise. And they go to a bootcamp class with their super fit friends, and this class is full of really fit people and the instructor is yelling motivational platitudes, and this person finishes that class and thinks, gosh, if that’s what it takes to get healthy, man, I’m out. I do not want to do that. This is not for me. The reality is there are so many different ways to get healthy. There are so many different paths to success. The best workout is the one that you actually do the best diet is the one that you can actually follow most of the time. In the book I talk about, Neil Stevenson is the author of Snow Crash and a bunch of other unbelievable science fiction books.

And he talks about how he’s a terrible correspondent because he needs four hours of uninterrupted time to write his books. And if he had two hour blocks, it is not nearly the same as one four hour uninterrupted block. Somebody might read that and think, gosh, I don’t have, there’s no way. I have a young kid, I work from home. I’m in calls. There’s no way I could ever write or succeed the way that he is, therefore I’m just never going to be a writer. But then you hear about Agatha Christie who wrote 60 plus detective novels and has sold billions of literally over a billion copies of her books and short stories. And she tells a story in her autobiography about how her friends never knew when she wrote because she would just steal away for bits and spurts like a dog with a bone, I think she said.

And she would write for 20 minutes here or there. She didn’t have a dedicated writing room, and that’s how she wrote her books. So both of those paths worked, but they worked for the right person because they found what worked for them. And I think that’s the step that a lot of us miss. We see the celebrity, we see the Instagram influencer telling us about the perfect morning protocol, and we forget to ask the question one, do I want that two, does this fit into my reality and what am I not accepting about my current situation? And once I do those things, then you can finally decide like, Hey, this is the path that I want to try and the things I want to do for myself.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I think those influencers can be helpful if you just approach them as like a buffet. It’s like, well, that thing looks interesting. I’m going to try that. And you don’t have to do it exactly the way they do it, but you try it out and see if it works for you. But yeah, if you just decide, I got to do exactly what this person does, that’s not going to work out. Alright, so that’s packed. So pause, accept, change, try. Let’s talk about some of the things that get in the way. So if we do experience failure, some of the mental roadblocks that prevent us from getting back in the saddle and makes things harder for herself, and one of these things is the doom loop. What’s the doom loop and how does that get in the way of us trying? Again,

Steve Kamb:

The doom loop is the most common pitfall I see people falling into when they’re, they’re trying to make some sort of behavior change. It generally starts with step one is feeling less than step two is identifying, we see something on Instagram, we see, we read an inspiring biography, we watch a documentary or whatever, and we then get irrationally excited and think this is the thing that is going to solve all of my problems, and then I will finally feel enough. And then we go all in on that thing. Everybody does it on January 1st, new year, new me, I’m all in. I’m changing everything about myself, let alone set aside the fact that we’ve never been able to, as the Twitter quote, it was something like, all of my future plans require me to display a level of discipline I’ve never once exhibited in my entire life.

The challenge here is when we go all in on something, the reality is like all or nothing generally is all then nothing. You go all in, life happens and then you say, oh, that didn’t work. Okay, I have to stop because life is too busy right now. I will try again a year from now. So we go back around the loop back to the beginning where we are again, not enough, except we now heap on some more failure and struggle and guilt because we couldn’t follow through with it until we find that next thing again. That gets us irrationally excited. Maybe this will be the thing. And we either go around that loop or we just kind of give up and say like, oh, change is not for me.

Brett McKay:

So how do you escape that doom loop?

Steve Kamb:

There’s a few tactics. I think one step one is when it comes to feeling not enough, we’ve all tried tough love repeatedly. I think we have enough of that in our lives, and I spent a lot of this book and a lot of the years writing this book, diving really deeply into self-compassion. Specifically Kristen Neff’s work on self-compassion and realizing a tough love you think is what kind of got you here. That’s probably not the case. And beating yourself up is not a great strategy for getting yourself out of this loop. Let’s try self-compassion instead. And that means allowing ourselves to have the thoughts that we have and not beating ourselves because we have them. Our thoughts are thinking themselves. It’s not generally not under our control, which thoughts pop in, but we can start to put some distance between us and those thoughts. We can notice a name, those thoughts or those patterns as they’re starting to happen.

We can give a name to that voice in our heads. For those of us like myself that feel like they have that inner monologue. When you add some distance, maybe some humor to that voice and realize that you are not your thoughts, it kind of gives you some of that ability to move back through that pact loop again, which is pause maybe, is this thought helping me? Is it true? What am I not accepting about? The situation? Change would be, Hey, do I want to turn up the volume on this thought or turn the volume down on the thought? And then to try based on what is happening in these loops and these thoughts, what would I like to try to do differently moving forward? So there is, like I said, you’re going to put some distance between you and those thoughts we’re going to practice.

And then before we even get on the loop again, I like to think of that scene from the fellowship of the ring where they’re at the prancing pony and Aragorn is talking to Frodo and Aragorn says, are you frightened? And he’s asking Frodo about the ring wraiths that are chasing after them. And Frodo says, yeah, I’m frightened. And Aragorn says, not nearly enough. I know what hunts you. And I think about that line a lot. When people join our coaching program, we ask them right up front like, what are you worried about? And more often than not, they’re saying, Hey, I have a hunch that a few weeks from now when the motivation wears off, I’m going to fall back into this doom loop. I’m going to fall back into all or nothing thinking I’m going to retreat to old patterns. And when we can identify those things upfront, it might make us change the expectation we have.

It might change the type of exercise we’re interested in trying. It might change how many changes we’re willing to make, and we can start to accept and predict, Hey, we’re at that moment. We’re three weeks in. I know that voice in your head is telling you to stick your head in the sand and ghost. What if we tried something differently? What if we did the bare minimum today and we counted that as a win? What if we shifted into tread water, whatever it may be, we are just essentially looking for tiny tactics to have a better relationship and conversation with that voice in our heads or that little person that sits on our shoulder that tells us to give up or to quit or to stop doing what we’re doing.

Brett McKay:

I want to talk about in this talking about my favorite chapter in the book, and it was how to keep doing the thing. And what you do is you provide all these tried and true tactics to successfully keep plotting along with whatever thing you’re doing. So you decide to make this change in your life. How do you keep with it so you don’t … the saddle as frequently? What are some of your favorite ones? There’s like eight of them. What are some of your favorite ones from those? How to keep doing the thing? Tactics?

Steve Kamb:

Yeah, so this chapter is built around Albert Bandura’s research into self-efficacy, which is essentially just belief in yourself that you’re able to make change and do things differently. Yeah, I think it’s eight might be 10 tactics in there. There are a few that I love more than others. I think the one that honestly has changed my life more than anything is being willing to half-ass the thing. I don’t know what the thing is that you’ve picked. It might be training or trying to write your first novel or read a large novel, whatever it may be. And I think being willing to strategically half-ass, that thing is one of the greatest, most important life skills you can develop. And it can be done with a simple question change. Instead of asking, do I have time for my workout today? It’s reframing it as what workout do I have time for?

And that might be five minutes in the morning before you pick up your newborn from his or her crib. It might be going for a walk after work with your spouse and saying, that was my workout for today. I checked the box that was good enough and accepting that, yeah, it might not be the full blown, I did the full workout. I went to the gym for an hour and a half. But man, it is so much better to strategically be able to say, Hey, I did what I was capable of doing today. And that’s a huge win. The other one, this one is going to sound so simple, and yet it’s one of the best predictors we’ve seen or I’ve seen over 17 years of writing for nerd fitness, and I think I call it the shower theory or the shower principle. Let’s say you wake up in the morning and normally every day after your morning walk, Brett, you take a shower and you get ready to go to work, but this morning you woke up late because the alarm didn’t go off and your kid threw up in the middle of the night, so you have to navigate that.

Now the dog’s eating the throw up and all of a sudden your morning is just completely blown out and you splash some water on your face and you drag. You bring the kid to the doctor and based on that, you failed at taking your morning shower. Do you have to start downloading shower podcasts? Do you need to start studying the shower habits of celebrities? Do you need to write in your shower journal about how you failed? Are you going to try again showering next month? No, you just missed your shower this morning because of life. Cool. Just take your shower the next day and move on. When we find that people are willing to allow themselves to miss a day and then just do it the next day, that is one of the best predictors we’ve seen for success compared to people who miss that day of their workout or diet, and then they feel so badly that they stick their head in the sand or they go off the rails and then they don’t want to talk to their coach, or they beat themselves up so much that they then crave eating more of the thing that they’re beating themselves up for having eaten.

So much of this is essentially just negotiating with our own brains and saying, how do we do this thing slightly more often than not for a long enough time that we can see change and stick with it for a long enough period of time?

Brett McKay:

Those two are my favorites too. I use those all the time with my fitness in particular, if I’m having my day’s busy and I don’t have time for a full 45 minute workout, it’s like, what can I do to half-ass this thing and get in a 15 minute workout? And that usually means just like, I’m not going to do this accessory work and I’m just going to do one hard set of each of the main lifts, and then if I miss a day, say, I can’t even get a workout in. I remember early on in my fitness journey, if I missed a day, I was like, oh, geez, I’m a failure. Why am I even going to try? It’s like, ah, whatever. It’s okay. I’ll just get it in the next time. Nothing’s not much. Change is going to happen in a workout or even if you mess up on your nutrition, you just pick out on the weekend, you’re not going to gain any fat from a single day of bad eating. You’ll look heavier. You have a lot of water and glycogen. It’s not fat, so just like the next day it’s like, all right, I’ll just get back on the saddle. It’s going to be fine.

Steve Kamb:

Yeah, it’s never the one missed day. It’s always that missed day that turns into a week or a month of self-loathing and making more unhealthy choices that send you down the wrong path because you beat yourself up from missing that one day.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. But yeah, like you said, there’s a lot more in there. Some of them are just get a quick win is a good one. Make things fun, actually enjoy the thing you’re doing, make it necessary, and you go into detail on how to do that. My favorite chapter, I really love that a lot. I use a lot of those tactics in my own life. Well, Steve, this has been a great conversation. There’s a lot more we could talk about. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Steve Kamb:

Yeah, it’s super simple. The book is called How to Try Again, so you can go to howtotryagain.com, and then I’m on every platform, Steve Kamb, S-T-E-V-E-K-A-M-B, stevekamb.com for my newsletter. I’m on the various social platforms @SteveKamb, so pretty easy to find. I’m so proud of this book. It took a lot out of me and I lived a lifetime while writing it, so I hope you consider checking it out. It’s probably the thing I’m most proud of. It took a lot to get it across the finish line, but I’m really glad I did. 

Brett McKay:

Alright. Well, Steve Kamb, thanks so much for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Steve Kamb:

Thanks for the opportunity.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Steve Kamb. He’s the author of the book How to Try Again. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

You want to get more things done in life. So you become an early riser, buy a planner, and download a to-do list app. You maintain inbox zero by answering email the minute it lands in your inbox. You stay busy from the second your feet hit the floor until you rest your weary head on your pillow at night.

But somehow the pile of stuff you need to do keeps growing, and you’re not making any real progress on your projects and goals.

What’s going on?

Well, chances are you’ve got a bottleneck somewhere in your system.

About a decade ago, I read a weird book called The Goal by a physicist named Eliyahu Goldratt that explores this problem. It’s a weird book because it’s a business book written as a novel about a plant manager racing to save a failing factory before corporate shuts it down.

I hadn’t thought much about The Goal until it recently came up in my conversation with David Epstein about Inside the Box. The book argues that constraints are inevitable and can either serve you or hold you back, depending on how you manage them.

Epstein talks about The Goal because Goldratt’s main idea centers on an ill-managed constraint. Goldratt argues that any project or task in life is really just a system consisting of a chain of steps, and that chain can only move as fast as its slowest link. There’s always one step that’s slower than the others, causing work to pile up behind it. Goldratt called that step the bottleneck.

You can optimize every other part of the system, but unless you address the bottleneck, things won’t speed up and output won’t increase. The bottleneck sets the pace for everything else.

Goldratt illustrates this dynamic through the example of a Boy Scout hike.

Your Bottleneck in Life Is a Hiking Scout Named Herbie

Picture a Scout troop walking single file down a narrow trail. The goal is to get the whole troop to camp as fast as possible, together.

Problem is, the kids don’t all walk at the same speed. There’s one slow kid somewhere in the middle of the line (Goldratt calls him Herbie), and even if the kid up front double-times it, the line as a whole can only move as fast as Herbie. The kid in front, who’s hauling it, disappears down the trail while a big gap opens up in front of Herbie. Behind him, the rest of the troop bunches up and starts stepping on each other’s heels. The kid up front has to stop and wait multiple times on the hike so Herbie and the boys behind him can catch up. Speeding up the front of the line doesn’t help and just makes the problem worse.

The only way to get the troop to camp faster together is to deal with Herbie.

The boys redistribute items from Herbie’s pack to the other scouts, which allows Herbie to walk a little faster. But he’s still slower than the other boys, so they also move him to the front, organizing the entire line around him. The rest of the troop falls in behind Herbie, eliminating the gaps and bunching that plagued the hike. 

While having Herbie up front slows down the faster hikers, it keeps everyone synchronized, ensuring that the troop stays together and moves effectively as a single, steady unit.

Every system in your life runs like that hike. Your home improvement projects, your work schedule, your finances, and your fitness. Each one consists of a chain of steps, and the whole chain moves only as fast as its slowest link. Speed up any step that isn’t the slow one, and you don’t get anywhere. Instead, you just pile up a bigger mess. So instead of doing more, you need to go hunting for your Herbie and find a way to deal with it.

This is what Goldratt called “The Theory of Constraints” and you can sum it up this way:

1. Identify the bottleneck.
2. Improve it where possible.
3. Organize the rest of the system around it.
4. Stop wasting effort optimizing things that aren’t the constraint.

Now let’s take a look at how finding and addressing bottlenecks in different areas of your life can help you enhance your effectiveness.

Addressing Bottlenecks in Your Fitness

You bought a program from some shredded dude on Instagram. You’re doing the work, but not seeing any progress. What’s going on? Well, you’re sleeping five and a half hours a night. Your body does most of its repair and muscle-building while you’re unconscious to the world, so if you’re shorting yourself there, it won’t matter how dialed-in your program is. Sleep is your bottleneck. Fix the sleep, and your workouts will start paying off.

Here’s another example. You want to incorporate the shoulder press in your routine so you can develop those man antlers. But if your shoulders are too stiff to get a bar overhead in a straight line, no amount of pressing volume is going to fix your press. You can add sets for a year and stay stuck. Tight shoulders are your bottleneck. To overcome it, spend fifteen minutes before your workout doing mobility work to loosen those shoulders up.

Addressing Bottlenecks in Your Finances

You want to get ahead financially. So you spend all Saturday comparing index funds over a 0.03% difference in fees. You’ve optimized your portfolio, but you’re still not growing that net worth as fast as you’d like.

What’s the bottleneck?

Well, you’re carrying a credit card balance at 24% interest. That 24% is costing you more every month than any fund will ever make you. There’s no investment on the planet that reliably beats a guaranteed 24% return by paying off the balance completely. That credit card balance is your financial bottleneck. So before you optimize your portfolio, throw everything you’ve got at the constraint. Pay off the card. Then go find the next bottleneck, which for a lot of people is the fact that they’ve got no cash cushion at all, so the first surprise expense sends them right back to the card. You can fix that bottleneck by starting an emergency fund.

Addressing Bottlenecks in Your Home

You’re trying to manage your home like an Aristotelian householder, but you notice that there are some pile-ups occurring that are really mucking things up. Take the kitchen. By dinner, the sink is full and dishes are sprawled all over your counter. You don’t have any space to prepare the meal.

Where’s the Herbie, here?

Ah, the dishwasher is still loaded with clean dishes from yesterday that nobody put away, so there’s nowhere to put the dirty ones. The full dishwasher is the bottleneck. Set up a system so that your kids empty it first thing every morning. Now you’ve got a place to put the dirty dishes, and a clean working space to get dinner on the table.

Let’s take a look at the morning scramble to school and work. If everybody’s fed and dressed, but you’re standing at the door for ten minutes every single day because nobody can find their shoes, the shoes are the bottleneck. Establish a system so that shoes are kept in a certain place each night so they can always be found. Bottleneck solved.

Is there a home project you and the Mrs. want to do but keep putting off again and again? There’s probably a Herbie causing the recurrent postponement. Maybe you’re finally going to finish the basement. You’ve researched flooring options, picked paint colors, priced out furniture, and bookmarked a dozen YouTube tutorials. But before any of that can happen, an electrician needs to come move an outlet. Until that appointment gets made, the entire project is stuck. Scheduling that electrician is the bottleneck. Stop comparing paint swatches and make the call.

Releasing the Bottleneck

The trick to finding the Herbies in your life is to look for areas where things are backing up. Ask yourself, “What’s the one thing that, if fixed, would make everything else faster or easier?”

Once you spot a bottleneck, address it quickly, and you’ll start to see progress pick up.

Solving one bottleneck doesn’t end the job, though. Fix the slowest link, and whatever was second-slowest becomes your new bottleneck. That’s the final step in Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints: go find the next bottleneck and work on that one.

You’ll probably get a lot more done dealing with that one slow link than you ever did trying to speed up everything else.

To learn more about how you can use constraints to your advantage, listen to our podcast with David Epstein:  

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

When Ernest Hemingway was working on the manuscript of a book about his safari in Africa, he played with a passage (which he later deleted) that listed all the things he loved and loved to do. He began with seeing, hearing, eating, drinking, sleeping, and reading; looking at pictures, cities, oceans, fishes, and fighting; thinking and observing; being in boats and battles or on saddle horses with “guns between your legs.”

The list continued down the page:

To watch the snow, rain, grass, tents, winds, changes of season . . . To talk, to come back and see your children, one woman, another woman, various women, but only one woman really, some friends, speed, animals . . . courage, co-ordination, the migration of fishes, many rivers, fishing, forests, fields, all birds that fly, dogs, roads, all good writing, all good painting, the principles of revolution, the practice of revolution, the Christian theory of anarchy, the seasonal variation of the Gulf Stream, its monthly variation, the trade winds, counter currents, the Spanish bull ring, cafes, wines, the Prado, Pamplona, Navarra, Santiago de Compostella, Sheridan, Casper, Wyoming, Michigan, Florida, Arkansas, Montana.

Still not feeling he had encapsulated the things of life that filled his heart, he made another attempt:

To stay in places and to leave, to trust, to distrust, to no longer believe and believe again, to care about fishes, the different winds, the changes of the seasons, to see what happens, to be out in boats, to sit in the saddle, to watch the snow come, to watch it go, to hear rain on the tent, to know where I can find what I want.

In reference to the above, Hemingway’s biographer, Carlos Baker, comments: “What he really wanted was a total immersion in the sensuous experience of living. The lists were nothing more than verbal talismans to help him achieve such an end.”

Hemingway had a zeal for making the most of life, not only in his professional vocation, but in his leisure time as well. Papa always wanted to be where the action was, not just as a spectator but as a participant; he wanted to experience what the world had to offer firsthand, with all five senses. In this he certainly succeeded, becoming not only a war correspondent and writer of classic novels, but a hunter, fisherman, sailor, amateur boxer and bullfighter, and world traveler. Few others in modern history have seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched so much.

How’d he do it all?

As discussed previously, it was a strict daily writing routine that kept up his output of words.

What may be surprising to learn about Hemingway’s life, however, is that the same disciplined approach he took to his job, was what allowed him to have so much fun outside of it.

Hemingway’s Approach to the “Challenge of Enjoyment” 

I suppose the most remarkable thing about Ernest is that he has found time to do the things most men only dream about. He has had the courage, the initiative, the time, the enjoyment to travel, to digest it all, to write, to create it, in a sense. —A. E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir

Papa embraced what he called “the fiesta concept of life.” He was always seeking after excitement and adventure and looking to have a “hell of a good time.” Hemingway’s friend, A. E. Hotchner, “had never seen anyone with such an aura of fun and well-being. He radiated it and everyone [around him] responded.” He was always looking forward to what was around the corner, and began each day with high expectations for what it would bring. In fact, he typically stood on the balls of his feet, like a boxer, seemingly ever ready to move, to fight, to leap into action, to go.

To get at the fun he so relished, we popularly imagine Hemingway taking a loose, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants, party-on kind of approach to life.

But as Hotchner explains, Papa’s philosophy of leisure was actually the opposite of spontaneous:

Ernest’s confidence in the unending order of good times was founded on a very disciplined point of view toward the hours of his days and weeks. Each day was a challenge of enjoyment, and he would plan it out as a field general plans a campaign.

Hemingway felt that “good times should be orchestrated and not left to the uncertainties of chance,” Hotchner writes, and he “planned fun as seriously as work, for he considered them of equal importance to Well-Being.”

The gusto with which Hemingway attacked his “leisure” time not only created incredible adventures for himself, but for those who enjoyed the exhilaration of being pulled into his orbit. As one friend remembered, “He generated excitement because he was so intense about everything, about writing and boxing, about good food and drink. Everything we did took on a new importance when he was with us.”

The fact that Hemingway rigorously planned out his good times, Hotchner adds, “did not mean that there was no flexibility.” A visit to Paris that was supposed to be a two-day trip, could turn into a two-month stay. But it did mean that Hemingway, whether at home or on vacation, had a detailed idea of what he wanted to do each day — the places he wanted to visit, the people he wanted to see, the activities he wanted to partake of, the restaurants and bars in which he wanted to eat and drink. As Hotchner observes, each day “was set up carefully before it dawned or, at the very latest, at its dawning.”

Plan for Good Times

Hemingway wanted a life filled with excitement, drama, and real interest, and understood that those qualities wouldn’t just happen — they had to be intentionally planned for and created.

It’s a secret to good livin’ that commonly goes unrecognized. Even those who plan out their work days, don’t think of planning out their leisure time. Folks head into the weekend without any idea of what they’d like to do with it, and end up piddling around the house, surrendering to the inertia of television, and feeling restless come Monday that they let another 48 hours of potential fun slip away. Or they take trips without a real itinerary in mind, spend the days a little aimlessly, and return home feeling like they could have made more of their rare vacation time.

Plotting your “off hours” can help you make much more out of them.

It doesn’t mean scheduling out each hour of your evenings or weekends, nor carrying around a clipboard of activities on your vacation and continually checking your watch to keep yourself moving between them. It doesn’t rule out flexibility, changing plans, and taking unforeseen detours. It doesn’t even necessarily require planning too far ahead.

Rather, it’s as simple as having an idea for an activity you want to do and a new restaurant you want to try before the weekend starts. For example, at our weekly family meeting, the McKays try to pick one microadventure to do on Friday evening or Saturday. We’ve found that without this preset plan, we tend to fritter away the weekend without doing much of anything.

Planning your leisure time is also as simple as spending 20 minutes each night you’re on vacation looking at travel sites or books and deciding on a few activities you’d like to do the next day. That way in the morning, you’re ready to hit the ground running.

It’s also a matter of planning those trips, period. Turning those “We ought to do that someday” thoughts into reality.

It’s worth generating a list of all the things you love and love to do, just as Hemingway once did. Then think about how to get more of them in your life more frequently. Then create a plan to make it happen.

Don’t leave your good times to chance.  

As Hemingway said, “Never regretted anything I ever did. Only regret things I didn’t do.”

With our archives 4,000 articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in 2018.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Back in 2019, David Epstein joined me to talk about his book Range and why generalists often thrive in a specialized world. Now he’s back with a new book that explores a seemingly opposite idea: the power of constraints. In Inside the Box, David argues that limits — deadlines, boundaries, and even setbacks — are often the very things that spark creativity, sharpen focus, and help us actually get meaningful work done.

Today on the show, David shares how, in a world of endless freedom and options, constraints might actually be the thing you need most. He shares the surprising true story behind the creation of the periodic table, explains how a broken arm changed the course of his own life, and explores why giving people too much leeway can actually kill innovation. We discuss what Pixar did right that doomed companies like General Magic got wrong, why brainstorming sessions are usually ineffective, how to identify the bottlenecks holding back your work and life, and why learning to settle for “good enough” may be the key to getting more great things done.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• David’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #512 — Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
• Pixar’s Tin Toy
• AoM Article: Curing Your Restlessness — Limiting Your Choices
• The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
• David’s This American Life Episode: “Something Only I Can See”
• AoM Article: Via Negativa — Adding to Your Life By Subtracting

Connect With David Epstein

• David’s website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page

Download this episode

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice

Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. Back in 2019, David Epstein joined me to talk about his book Range and why generalists often thrive in a specialized world. Now he’s back with a new book that explores a seemingly opposite idea, the power of constraints. In Inside the Box, David argues that limits, deadlines, boundaries, and even setbacks are often the very things that spark creativity, sharpen focus, and help us actually get meaningful work done. Today in the show, David shares how in a world of endless freedom and options, constraints might actually be the thing you need most. He shares the surprising true story behind the creation of the periodic table, explains how a broken arm changed the course of his own life and explores why giving people too much leeway can actually kill innovation. We discussed what Pixar did right, that doom companies like General Magic got wrong, why brainstorming sessions are usually ineffective. How to identify the bottlenecks, holding back your work in life and why learning to settle for good enough may be the key to getting more great things done. After the show’s over. Check at our show notes at aom.is/constraints. All right, David Epstein, welcome back to the show.

David Epstein:

Thank you so much for having me back.

Brett McKay:

So we had you on the show back in 2019 to talk about your book Range, which is all about being a generalist, the power of being a generalist and not focusing only on one thing. You got a new book out, it’s called Inside the Box, and this book is about the power of constraints to accomplishing things, getting things done. How are these two ideas connected, this idea of being a generalist and also embracing constraints? How are they related?

David Epstein:

Yeah, as I know on the face of it, it can seem contradictory from one book to the next, but it’s kind of responsive to a question I was getting from a lot of readers after Range, which was, all right, I’ve got these diverse experiences, this broad toolbox now what I am having trouble deciding where to focus, and I put myself in that same boat. And so there’s a hefty dose of me-search in this book. So it’s really about how you channel all those ideas, all those experiences into achievement and actually get something done. And again, hefty dose of me-search. I have been terrible in the past at putting useful boundaries around my own work. So that’s one reason why it’s been so long. It’s like six to seven years between all my books, but what I learned in this book actually gave me a totally new process. And so now I think if I write more books, I could probably do them in about half the time I did in the past. 

Brett McKay:

Well let’s dig into the ideas of this book. I thought it was really interesting. What I love about your writing in general, what you do is you find these great case studies from history that cuts across domains, sports, business, arts, technology to show these principles that you’re highlighting in the book. You start off the book with two stories that show how constraints can help us do big things. The first guy you talk about is this Dmitri Mendeleev. He’s the guy who created the periodic table that we’ve all seen in our chemistry classes in high school. What’s the usual story about how he came up with that idea?

David Epstein:

Yeah, the usual story is that he was in the winter of 1869. He was looking for an order for all the elements, the chemical building blocks of the universe, and he worked for three sleepless days and senses something but couldn’t find it. And finally he falls asleep and he drifts off into the most impactful nap in human history. And he dreams about the elements sort of swirling around and they snap together in this grid where as you move across it, the chemical and physical properties of the elements repeat periodically, which is how it got the name periodic table. And it’s not just a poster that hangs in classrooms, it actually pointed the way to where new elements would be. So gaps in the table showed us where to look for new materials and motivated the underlying search for atoms. So what was the cause of this order? So that’s the typical story that it’s this incredible kind of dead end. And then in a dream he sees this vision and just wakes up and writes it down.

Brett McKay:

What’s the real story though?

David Epstein:

Yeah, the real story. So by the way, that’s the story that I learned in college chemistry. It’s in Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep. It’s there to show the power of our brains freed from reality, but the real story is completely different. So that dream story absolutely did not happen. What really happened was that Mendeleev had a publishing contract for a two volume intro to chemistry textbook, and he had only gotten eight of the then 63 known elements into volume one. So he had to get the other 55 into volume two, and he had to do it in a way that was logical for beginners. And you realized he couldn’t continue the way he had been describing one element at a time. So he had to start looking for groups or families where he could describe a representative, family member and then sort of by analogy teach about the rest of the group. And it was in doing that, that he started looking at the chemical world in terms of families and found these groupings that actually had a much greater underlying meaning. He was absolutely not looking for a fundamental law of nature, he was looking for an organizational scheme for his textbook, but that channeled his experimental thinking to start looking in a totally different way that nobody ever had.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so he had two constraints there. So one was that he needed to organize in a way that made sense for a beginner. That was one constraint. The other one he had a deadline, a book deadline that was the second deadline.

David Epstein:

Straight to space constraints of time, and there were other constraints even beyond that. Yeah, yeah.

Brett McKay:

See that shows how once you have this tight constraint, it can get you to think in different ways to actually do something pretty remarkable. You also talk about how a broken arm, your broken arm in eighth grade changed the trajectory of your life and even helped you become a master memorizer. What happened there?

David Epstein:

Yeah, so I was like a crack head for sports when I was a kid. That was the sun around which my world orbited and football, basketball, baseball, the usual and playing I could throw. I had a really strong throwing arm. And so I was playing quarterback in some schoolyard football one day in eighth grade. And as the quarterback, instead of having kickoff, you just throw off as far as you can down to the other side and my arm snapped on the follow through of a throw. Nobody hit me. It was touch football and it just snapped in a spiral. So pretty crazy injury. In fact, nobody believed it was broken because I hadn’t been hit. And I could feel my hand in places where it wasn’t because I was rotating my shoulder, but it was totally separated. I’ve only seen this happen once before. One other time, by the way, major league baseball pitcher and he had to have his arm amputated, but we’ll never know the exact cause because whatever break happened, the evidence for some bone weakness or something was then gone.

But it led to these interesting things where in school we had these French tests I had to take every week where you had to follow along with a recording of a native speaker on a worksheet that had the transcript except then there’d be blanks and you had to catch them and fill them in. And I was okay, I was mediocre at this. And then once I broke my arm, I couldn’t use my writing hand. It was strapped to my body for months. And so I realized I had to start memorizing the words and then go back and write them all down slowly at once with my left hand. And so the way I started doing that was using sports related mnemonic devices. I would hear a word and then I would attach it to some sports fact or memory or image in my mind. And I started acing these things.

And so I started using these kinds of mnemonic devices, which we now know are key to improving your memory all over the place because I couldn’t write quickly enough to remember things and I still use it to this day. I can memorize an hour long keynote word for word in a few days because I used mnemonic devices. And decades later I would come across one of the most famous studies of memory improvement ever done where an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon was taken from being able to memorize seven digits to 80 digits. And surprise surprise, he too was using sports related mnemonic devices to remember things. So it made me a better student. And because I couldn’t play contact sports for a year, I started running. And long story short, I ended up being a college runner and a university record holder and all these things just, I never would’ve even tried the sport. And that’s what got me interested in physiology, which got me into writing because I was a science writer for Sports Illustrated is just all these things I never would’ve tried if I hadn’t been forced. And sometimes that’s what useful constraints do. They launch you into productive experimentation because the low friction path is blocked.

Brett McKay:

But see, that’s counterintuitive because I think oftentimes we think in order to be creative, accomplish big things, you got to get rid of the constraints. With the idea of the dream, well, you just let your subconscious percolate on it, there’s no constraints there and it’ll just magically spit out this idea. But as you’ve shown that’s not the case, and you highlight this one company that I’m sure a lot of people have never heard of that shows what happens when you have no constraints. You just give everyone in the company or the organization free reign to do whatever they want. This company was called General Magic. What was General Magic and how did having too much money, too much creative license doom the company?

David Epstein:

Yeah, I like to think of it as the most important company nobody’s heard of and not important because of what they ended up doing, but because of the people that came out of it. But this was a company that starting in really the late eighties and then the early nineties was essentially building the iPhone and the internet didn’t exist. 15% of American households had computers at all, and they had so much buzz. It was founded by several of the designers of the original Apple Macintosh. This other visionary guy from Apple named Marc Porat became the CEO. And they absolutely had the vision of what was coming in communications technology over the next half century Porat for his 1976 PhD dissertation at Stanford. It was titled The Information Economy. He coined that term and when I was reading it in research, absolutely eerie, I mean he saw what was coming, the promise and the problems, misinformation, inequality, all this stuff.

But the vision was so compelling. He was basically sketching a thin glass rectangle with no protruding buttons and a touchscreen with rectangular apps in 1989. And the vision was so obviously right that Goldman Sachs took them public in the first so-called concept IPO, where they went public just with an idea, not a product to make this personal communicator. And Porat said the goal of raising so much money was to create heaven for engineers where they were totally free. What more could anyone ask for? He said, and I think the answer was a little less freedom because the company turned into a disaster. They had so much talent and so many resources they could do anything. And so they did. Every time someone had a good idea, they did it and the project got bigger and bigger and it became less and less coherent and they missed deadlines.

And when they finally shipped something, it was a 200 page manual, nobody was really sure what they were supposed to do with it. There was one guy who I think this interview was emblematic of the place where this was an engineer named Steve Perlman whose job was to make a calendar function, and he wrote it to go from 1904 to 2096 and checked it in and thinks he’s done. Then one of the leaders comes to him and says, Steve, you got to make this thing go back farther in case people write historical apps. So he makes it go back to year one, checks it in, then another team comes to him, Steve, why are you starting with this arbitrary religious context of year one? You got to make it go back to the beginning of astronomical time. So he checks it out again and writes a calendar function to go from the big bang into the future, and it ends up taking months when it would’ve been four lines of code if they just left it the way he originally had it. But because they could do all this stuff they did. And so the refrain when I was interviewing former employees from General Magic was I just couldn’t figure out what not to do.

Brett McKay:

This story reminded me of John Boyd. He was a fighter pilot who’s had a big impact on military thinking. He came up with the OODA Loop, if you’ve heard of that.

David Epstein:

Yeah, absolutely.

Brett McKay:

But there was a period where he was working with the Air Force when they were redesigning one of the fighter jets. And Boyd was really big on maneuverability, like a jet needed to be highly maneuverable so you could get in position on your enemy. And to do that, it had to be small, lightweight, et cetera. But what ended up happening is this project was a project by committee and you had all these corporate interests who wanted a, we want to get all of our technology in this thing as much as possible. And they kept on adding and adding and adding to it. And of course it’s the government say almost an unlimited budget. They just kept adding stuff to it and they kind of created this thing that was sort of an albatross. And Boyd was like, no, we got to strip this down and make something more efficient. But yeah, that’s another example of when you have no constraints on anything, things actually can get worse.

David Epstein:

That really resonates. There’s actually not long ago, the Wall Street Journal did a front page story on why the US had gone from being the world’s leader in naval ship building to being such a laggard that we’re trying to outsource it. And basically that was the story. It was that there’s so many cool things that could go on that we never stop making design changes. And so the thing never gets done, and good designers often use a principle called design freeze where you say, okay, we’re going to this point, this date, and then we’re stopping no more changes, and then we’re testing it. We can’t just change endlessly and you stop and you regroup and you collect your lessons. And I think there’s a whole bunch of that in history and in a lot of government projects. When I was reading about some of the history of government works, there was one phase under defense secretary Robert McNamara, who’s the defense secretary during Vietnam where people would talk about paper wars. There was like, they had so much stuff like paper moving all the time on projects that it’s like nobody ever had a point to stop and figure out what it was they had decided to do because they were always changing all the specifications.

Brett McKay:

I imagine this is only going to get worse with artificial intelligence or LLMs because you can just generate new stuff.

David Epstein:

Oh man. 

Brett McKay:

You’re doing the vibe coding, right? You’re like, oh, it would be cool if you had this feature. Here’s prompt. I got the feature. 

David Epstein:

Now the promise is incredible, but it has never been easier to do too much. And I’ve been seeing this with, so for the last year, just to kind of educate myself, I spent a bunch of time with one particular AI company that helps other companies implement AI. And one of the things I saw is that a lot of companies said, oh, we need AI, right? It’s really alluring. Our competitors have it. And so they implement and it sprawls and it turns into what researchers are now calling work slop where you just generate this insane volume of stuff that never gets finished or just piles up at some bottleneck. Whereas the organizations that I think are having a better run of it start by mapping the jobs to be done or defining a problem and then saying, how does the tool fit this problem? So they lead with the problem instead of leading with the technology and having these sprawling implementations just so much easier for people to start an infinite number of things that they will never finish now. And I think that’s a real challenge and why we’re not seeing in many cases the expected productivity benefits, even while adoption has been really rapid

Brett McKay:

And you highlight research why we have this tendency to keep adding and adding and adding when we don’t have constraints, we actually have a natural bias towards that when we’re given a choice to make something better. Humans typically like to add things, and so yeah, addition can be good sometimes, but what is it about addition that tends to muck things up? I think we talked about one of them, you just get the slop sort of stuff, but what else is going on there?

David Epstein:

Yeah, I mean, you’re right about that. This appears to be a hardwired bias. So there are these series of studies that show that people will overlook solutions that involve subtraction even if they’re obviously better, cheaper, easier, et cetera. And it’s actually called subtraction, neglect bias. So in one of the fun studies, this researcher at the University of Virginia named Leidy Klotz and his colleagues, he gave people this Lego structure and they were supposed to bolster it, so it would balance a masonry brick over the head of a storm trooper action figure, and they could add as many pieces as they wanted, but they had to pay to add pieces. And still most people added pieces and paid when just taking away one piece would’ve solved it instantly because we’re just not programmed to look for subtraction unless someone tells us to do that. And so we pile more things on than can get done.

And typically that leads to work becoming extremely fragmented, which leads to people starting to multitask more. And that gives a feeling of increased productivity. But we actually know that multitasking, since it’s not really possible, you actually have to toggle between things and your brain has to drop one and pick up the other. And every time you do, there’s a cost. And when you’re doing it a lot during a day, the cost compounds. And so you end up doing everything in a mediocre way and modern work is insidious at this, adding more to our plate, more obligations, more dashboards, more meetings, all these things. And they cause people’s attention to be really fragmented, which makes them both worse at what they’re doing, less likely to have their priorities straight for what they’re actually working on. And we now know from physiological measures much more stressed.

Brett McKay:

And I imagine it also adds complexity. The more things you add, absolutely. The more different ways things can interact and they might not interact in the way that you planned on it interacting.

David Epstein:

That’s a great point. And we underestimate that complexity systematically. So this is the famous Brooks’ Law about software projects where if you add people to a project that’s already late, you’ll make it even more late because we underestimate the costs of assimilating people and the coordination costs between people and all these sorts of things. So yeah, complexity, steals clarity. I think of that famous story about Steve Jobs where when he was kicked out of Apple, and then we came back in the late nineties, Apple was making, people don’t probably don’t remember this much, but at the time they had tons of different models of computers. They were making printers, they were making servers, they were making this thing called the Newton. They were just making a ton of stuff. And he comes back and says, what nobody knows, we have no priorities. And so he draws a two by two grid on a whiteboard on one side it says consumer and pro, and on the other it’s portable and desktop. We’re going to have four products. That’s it. Everything else is canceled. And people complained, right, because it canceled things they were working on, but it lent to tremendous clarity to what they were actually doing and saved the company. I mean, they were basically dead about to die before that.

Brett McKay:

And I mean, this not only applies to work life, but it applies to people’s personal lives as well. Our tendency is just to keep piling on stuff. Our kids do more and more activities or we take on more and more responsibilities with organizations we belong to. We want to do more and more vacations when sometimes the answer is just like, you know what? We’re not going to do those things this year. We just need the buffer or the bandwidth to just relax and focus on other things.

David Epstein:

Yeah, man, proactively choosing when to choose. So saying, what are the things we’re not going to do is hugely important, but I think we often push that kind of decision away because it feels limiting. So I think we’re often trying to escape situations that really force us to ruthlessly clarify our priorities because whether it’s productivity tools or just being human and not wanting to face our limited time, that I think we do a lot of things that help give us the illusion that we can get everything done on some time span, but in fact, you need to face up to our mortality and prioritize ruthlessly.

Brett McKay:

So a counter example you gave to General Magic of an organization that put constraints on themselves proactively so they could get stuff done is Pixar. How did Pixar work within constraints to eventually make Toy Story, which would go on to revolutionize animated filmmaking?

David Epstein:

Yeah, I liked using Pixar because their vision was created at the same time as General Magic and unfolded over about the same period basically. But unlike General Magic, so Ed Catmull who led Pixar for many, many years and was the co-founder, he also in the mid seventies decided he wanted make the first fully computer animated feature film. Initially he wanted to be a Disney animator, but he wasn’t that great of a drawer, so a little bit of a problem. And on route to making the first computer animated feature film, which was Toy Story, instead of jumping straight from big idea to big execution like General Magic did, he was relentless. He and his colleagues were relentless about defining what is the next tiny step, okay, here’s the big vision, but what is the next tiny tiny step? They were always making estimates of how many pixels will we need, how many polygons will we need?

Where’s the technology now? How far does that mean it needs to go to get there? Okay, we’re not there yet, so we’re going to work on all these proximate problems. And so it almost seems like when I was spending time with Ed, you’d almost seem like a killjoy in a sense. Yes, we have this great vision, but we can’t rush toward it. And so he was always keeping things as small as possible for as long as possible. And that continued even once Pixar started making movies where they let directors stay with a tiny team in story development for years, simplifying the core of a story because it’s easy to make changes then, and the costs only explode once you move into production. And so they really prioritize staying as small as possible, as long as humanly possible.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, it’s amazing the difference between General Magic and Pixar. Pixar worked within the technology. They had General Magic, got a little head on their skis a little too forward on their skis. So I mean, it’s funny, you can look at Toy Story. The first animated video or film that Pixar did was this thing called Tin Toy. It was about this little toy figure, and it was like the precursor to Toy Story. It was made in 1988, and it was only five minutes long, and it actually looks pretty good. I’ll put a clip of it in the show notes. But they had to work with the processing power that they had at the time, all that stuff. And so it had to be really short. And then they built on that to the point where they can make a full length featured film.

David Epstein:

Those shorts, by the way, I don’t know if people remember, but if you went to Pixar movies in theaters, there were often shorts, five, 10 minutes that would run before the main film. And they used those as their little labs test new animation techniques, test new story techniques. So they were constantly doing things in this really, really small way, even though they had big ideas, they were always looking for ways, what is the smallest possible way we can try this thing out?

Brett McKay:

So it seems like they had a process established in order to avoid that bloat and to maintain those creative constraints.

David Epstein:

And they had a bunch of important rules that were always changing because the staff were changing, the environment was changing. But to go back to that calendar story that I told about General Magic, where it just got bigger and bigger and bigger, even though it was not important, ed told me about something at Pixar. They called the beautifully shaded penny problem where directors are, animators are super conscientious and they want to get all the details. And so they would be obsessing over the shading on a penny that would be in the background of some scene that viewer would never even notice, and they’d be working away on that for weeks and ignoring main characters that still need to be animated. And so they came up with a system, here’s high tech system, popsicle sticks velcroed to a board where each popsicle stick represented the amount of work that one animator could do in one week. And if the director wanted those animators to keep working on that penny, then he had to start taking popsicle sticks away from some other character that needed to be animated. And so again, it was a way to visualize the priorities and force them to be ruthless and General Magic had nothing like that. So they had all these minor priorities competing with major priorities and nobody differentiating them. And so I think Ed and his team were great about that, about forcing people into situations where they had to really clarify their priorities.

Brett McKay:

I imagine everyone’s experienced that shading of the penny problem in an organization. There’s always a group of people or an individual that gets like, okay, this little tiny thing is the most important thing, and it takes up like 80% of the time.

David Epstein:

You get tunnel vision, tunnel vision on those things, especially when it’s your thing. And you don’t see how it connects to the bigger strategy. 

Brett McKay:

You got to kill your darlings sometimes. You also highlight another organization that used constraints very effectively to put out a great product. And you actually had an experience with this organization, This American life, the famous NPR radio show with Ira Glass, famous for their driveway moments where they have these shows you’re listening to in your car, and then you get to your driveway and you want to keep listening. What did this American life do with constraints to create those driveway moments shows?

David Epstein:

Yeah, again, like Pixar, I think they had this system that I came to think of as putting bumpers in a bowling alley where you’re not telling someone exactly what to do, but you’re keeping them trundling in the right direction. And I had a story pitch accepted by them, and I had to write a 35 minute radio script. The story was about a woman with two rare diseases of fat and muscle wasting, and she identified one of them in an Olympic medalist sprinter who had fat wasting and explosive muscle growth and felt like they shared some physiological mechanism she turned out to be right. So I’m supposed to write a 35 minute script on this, and I’ve never written one second for radio before. And so I go in, I try to write a script, and we do some interviewing. And the way it works is you do a read through where people get together in a room and Ira Glass is holding a stopwatch, timing it, and you have your producer there, you I’m reading the narration and the producer’s hitting play on the audio anytime it comes to an interview that we want to cut in.

And so it’s sort of listening to a rough draft, and at the end people get to say what they’re confused about. And in my case, people were confused about a lot because I was used to writing a lot of scientific detail. And in a magazine story, people can stop and go back over that, but when it’s flying by in audio, that’s much more difficult. So people were confused and I was seven minutes over length. So they identified all these points of confusion and you are obligated in their process to fix them, but they don’t tell you how. They’re not going to tell you how you have to do it, but you have to do it. You can’t come back without having addressed people’s confusions. You can’t argue and say, no, I think that was clear. If one of ’em says it’s confusing, you have to deal with it.

And then you come back for the next read through, and every time you do it, there’s a new person who’s never heard any of the material before and that person gets to say what they were confused by. And then you do that over and over and over until a new person comes in and says, nah, I got it all. That was all really clear, and you’re not allowed to go on until you’ve satisfied that. And it was an amazing process because it made a complete rookie like me, like a total radio novice look like a seasoned veteran because it just highlighted for me all the points where I had to do problem solving. And once the problems to be solved is made clear to you, it kind of empowers you to go off and be creative and do your thing. Yeah,

Brett McKay:

I mean it’s interesting about that they didn’t solve the problem for you. They gave you the constraints and then you had to figure out how to solve it.

David Epstein:

So it didn’t feel oppressive because it was hard editing. At the time, I was working at ProPublica as an investigative reporter, and when I tried to bring this system over to ProPublica for the writers and they were like, no, no one editor is too much. Nevermind this crazy process. So I mean, it’s really intensive and hard because your impulses, you want to go, I did a great job. I think I want them to just love it, and they come and say, I was lost on this or that. But also you feel like you have a ton of agency, they’re telling you things to do, but it’s really up to you to then spread your wings as a problem solver within that. And so it’s actually kind of a gift to have someone, well define a problem for you and then unleash you on solving it.

Brett McKay:

How long did that whole process take you to refine your piece for This American Life?

David Epstein:

Gosh, I mean, it dragged over months.

Brett McKay:

Oh dang, I was thinking maybe like a week or something. 

David Epstein:

No, no, no. So there are a few reasons for that though, because Ira’s attention was at a premium. So there were a lot of different stories going through this process at once. And mine didn’t have a time peg in the news or anything, so there was no need to brush the read-throughs. But also since I was brand new in radio, there were some cases where somebody highlighted some confusion and I realized that the way to fix it was I had to go do some more interviewing, and that often meant lining up schedules and recording and all these things. So it went on and again, it was a 35 minute piece and I was seven minutes over on the first draft. So that necessitated a serious reorganization, but a major reason why it took a long time was just there’s a whole bunch of these in process at any one time. And so you can’t just say, tomorrow I’m doing a read through, you sort of have to get Ira’s attention scheduled.

Brett McKay:

Did that process going through that, did that change your writing at all?

David Epstein:

It did change my writing. I think for one, it made me a lot more likely to look for a naive reader and say, what’s confusing you here? Not one of my own editors who has a lot of similar knowledge in some ways to what I have. It also led me to simplify. I think I had a tendency if I find some scientific, before I was a writer, I was training to be a scientist and I switched careers. And I have a tendency if I think some aspect of science is really interesting to want to get it in no matter what, just get it in. Cause I think it’s really interesting. And I had to cut so much scientific stuff that I thought was interesting from that This American Life piece. And yet the piece turned out amazing. It had probably the best response of anything I’ve ever worked on, maybe along with my previous book. And so I think it showed me that the reader or listener doesn’t know what’s not there. And so what you have to make sure is that the stuff that is there is interesting and really clear. And so I think it made me much more aggressive in cutting back in the interest of clarity.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, this story, it made me like, okay, I need to be better about my editing. My wife edits all of my writing, and sometimes she’ll be like, I’m confused here. I’m like, well, why are you confused? It makes perfect sense in my head. What are you talking about? And she’ll be like, well, it could be confusing to a reader and it would be better if you rework these sentences like this. And I’m like, okay, yeah, that is better.

David Epstein:

There you go. Yeah.

Brett McKay:

Well, let’s talk about the idea of bottlenecks because you highlight a book that I read a long time ago and I forgot about, but I still think about it. I still think about the ideas. This book is called The Goal. It’s all about thinking about our problems and looking for bottlenecks. So the big idea is if you want to be more productive in anything, whether it’s work, I mean this focuses on manufacturing and work, but I think it’s applicable to your personal life as well. You got to look for bottlenecks. Tell us more about this idea in this book. 

David Epstein:

Yeah, this book is bizarre by the way, but fascinating. And it was written by this physicist named Eliyahu M. Goldratt, who was studying the behavior of atoms and crystals when a friend of his with a small chicken coop building business asked him to help increase production. And the friend had been hiring new help, but it wasn’t increasing the number of coops they were producing. And so gold rats studied the process and found that that’s because no matter how fast some steps in the assembly process were working, they just piled up at the single slowest step, what he called the bottleneck. And so he ended up moving one worker from a fast step to the slowest step, and it increased overall production by threefold. And this became the core of his idea, what he called the theory of constraints, that every system is limited by its single slowest step or bottleneck.

And so he writes this book, The Goal to try to explain the idea, it’s a business novel where this plant manager is facing shutdown and his Jedi-like physics professor shows up and gives him these Socratic lessons. And he starts to see the whole world in bottlenecks where he takes his son’s Boy Scout troop on a hiking trip and realizes some of the kids are really fast, but this kid, Herbie is really slow and the whole group can only move at the speed of Herbie. So he decides to redistribute the weight from pack, so the fast kids have more, and Herbie has less, and suddenly the whole group is moving faster, and it’s a strange book, and yet it sold 10 million copies. And Jeff Bezos forced all his executives to read it and hosted a full day book club on it. And it just became a phenomenon. But the core idea is really simple. It’s that the constraint, the system constraint shows you where to focus because if you apply energy somewhere else, it doesn’t change the outcome of the overall system because that’s all limited by the single least effective step. And it turned out to become one of the most impactful ideas in management and even spread into personal improvement as well.

Brett McKay:

When we don’t have the output that we want, we typically think, well, we just need to input more. We got to do more and more, and then we’ll get more output. But if there’s a bottleneck somewhere, you can keep putting in more and more input, but the output is going to stay the same. It’s all getting held up at that bottleneck. And so instead of adding more, just remove that bottleneck or somehow widen the bottleneck.

David Epstein:

So the bottleneck shows you where to focus. It’s the highest leverage place to apply energy. In some cases, it’s the only place with any leverage that will make a difference if you apply any energy. But yeah, and so I think it’s a really effective, I dunno if we should get into those stories, but really effective for personal improvement as well. I tell the story of an athlete who applied it, the book, tell us about that. Okay. It also really resonated with my own athletic journey. So the story I tell in the book is about this swimmer named Sheila Taormina. She was at the University of Georgia, and in 1992, it goes to the Olympic trials, tries to make the team the 200 meter freestyle, doesn’t make it isn’t close retires. But then for one of her last classes at University of Georgia, she takes management 5 77 in which she learns about the theory of constraints and decides to do a class project on using it to create a plan to drop three seconds in the 200 meter freestyle.

And so she looks for, she audits her training. And what’s her bottleneck? Well, she determines it’s strength and power. She’s five foot two, which is really small for an elite swimmer. She has an incredible aerobic engine, world-class, and all her coaches have her working on is aerobic endurance and not her strength and power. So she’s continuing to feed the thing that is not limiting her that she already has. So with this class plan, she decides to unretire find a new coach who will work with her on strength and power, and four years later she makes the Olympic team and then is part of the relay team that wins an Olympic gold medal. It’s crazy. If you Google her, you’ll see pictures of her with the other three women in the relay, and she’s about a foot shorter than them. And so she retires after this now as an Olympic champion and then just concerned about her health, she comes out of retirement and starts doing triathlons.

And now she has this new view on training to look for what is her actual limiting factor. And she wins the US National Championship, triathlon goes to the Olympics, finishes sixth, goes to the next Olympics in triathlon retires again, unretires again, takes up fencing and horse jumping and goes to the Olympics. In modern pentathlon, she’s the only woman ever to have competed in four summer Olympics in three different sports. And she was about to retire if she hadn’t learned about the theory of constraints in a management class. So I thought it was an amazing story, and it was very similar to my less illustrious, but I was also a college athlete, not at the level, but had a very similar story where my bottleneck was my ability to recover from workouts. And once I realized that I was an 800 meter runner and scheduled class over one workout a week, so I’d have an excuse not to show up, I improved like rocket fuel. I became a university record holder. I went from walk-on to university record holder by targeting the thing that was limiting me. 

Brett McKay:

I think it’s a big takeaway. Well, let’s talk about constraints to make collaboration more effective. So I think all of us have worked in a group, we might’ve done brainstorming sessions. We have those meetings where we’re all just throwing out ideas. And we have probably all experienced, those meetings are not very productive. Why don’t traditional brainstorm sessions work usually?

David Epstein:

Yeah, there are a few reasons. So there was some psychologists recently did an international survey of known creativity myths where things that we know are not true from research and the top two mistaken beliefs where people are most creative when they’re most free. And that brainstorming is the best way to come up with lots of creative ideas. And it doesn’t work for a few reasons. One is because it’s too open-ended and people don’t tend to come up with creative ideas when something is really open-ended much better, giving them a specific problem almost no matter what it is. And they’ll come up with more creative ideas. But also people tend to be confused by the norms of brainstorming. So there’ll be conflicting norms like say whatever comes to mind, but also don’t criticize. Those things can be quite mutually exclusive. And there’s a lot of what’s called production blocking, where people who might have something interesting to say won’t share it because they’re embarrassed or they’re not that eloquent or because of the person who spoke before them. So there’s a term called HPPO would be a highest paid person’s opinion. And once that person shares their opinion in a group, other opinions will tend to coalesce around it, not because it’s a better opinion, just because they’re the highest paid. And so there are all these factors that sort of make the norms of the situation unclear for people. So much so that brain writing works much better where if people are allowed to write ideas separately before they come together and evaluate them.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so that’s a constraint you can put in. Instead of having vocal brainstorm sessions, have everyone write a memo of ideas they have and then they submit it to the group

David Epstein:

First. Yeah, separate it. And really trying to keep sort of equal social norms. So the best team, this shows up in all sorts of research, like Google did all this internal research on it, but in other places that the best teams for problem solving are those that have relatively equal conversational turn taking, not in every task they’re doing, but over the course of a day. So you need to be really careful to put certain constraints in place to make sure that happens. So at Pixar for example, they banned Steve Jobs from certain meetings because they were worried about that HPPO effect. They knew his larger than life persona that his opinion would carry too much weight. And then other people wouldn’t share some of the important things because not every person who has value to add is super eloquent. And so you have to be careful about making everyone feel like they’re going to have a turn. But again, also because you want to give a specific problem, if it’s too open-ended, people do not come up with creative ideas. Yeah.

Brett McKay:

Well, that’s the point I want to talk about you highlight in the book is this idea of settling for good enough that it can help you get more great things done. What’s going on there?

David Epstein:

Yeah, the last chapter gets kind of more personal philosophical, and a major idea in it is called satisficing, which is a word that’s a combination of satisfy and suffice and was coined by Herbert Simon, whose work is sprinkled throughout the book. And he was trained as a political scientist, but he won the highest award in computer science. He was a founder of ai. He won the highest award in psychology and he won the Nobel Prize in economics. And one of his major ideas was Satisficing, where humans do not conform to the rational actor model of classical economics where we evaluate all the options and make the best decision because we have limited cognitive bandwidth, we can’t evaluate all the options, we can’t predict all the repercussions of our decisions. And so what Simon argued is that we should proactively satisfy, we should set good enough rules for our decisions, and when they’re met, make the decision and never look back because the opposite.

If you’re not a satisfier, then the opposite end of the spectrum is what’s called a maximizer who really does try to evaluate every possible option and make the best decision. Maybe we’d call it an optimizer today. And it turns out that in psychological research, it’s almost always bad to be a maximizer. They’re less satisfied with their decisions, less satisfied with their lives, more prone to regret, often prefer reversible decisions, even though it leads them to not really commit one way or the other. And so I think it’s really important in this world of seemingly infinite choice, whether you’re buying a dishwasher or looking for a date to set certain good enough parameters, and maybe things will go way beyond that, but once they’re hit, make the decision and move on, and it gives you the possibility of being satisfied.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I’ve noticed in my life some people have, they have a constitution or a temperament to be maximizers or satisficers. I imagine if you’re naturally a maximizer, you have to be a lot more intentional or proactive about putting those good enough constraints on yourself.

David Epstein:

Oh yeah. I mean, because I think I have maximizing tendencies for sure. And so setting down these rules ahead of time of what’s good enough for this decision has been really helpful for me. Even in fact, when I started a newsletter, I was reading Simon’s work, and it was very much because I had just had this very successful book and I felt a little paralyzed. I’m like, if I do anything else, it has to be as good at this or better. And so the newsletter was a case where I said, okay, if a book has to be a nine or 10, if I get a newsletter post to six and a half, maybe it’ll fly past that on the first draft maybe. But if I’m confident that it’s at six and a half, I’m sending it. And that became a really important satisficing exercise for me to kind of tamp down some of my maximization. But as maybe it sounds like silly or I don’t know, just weird. But I proactively make satisficing calls, like if I’m trying to buy something and here are the three things I needed to do, that’s the job I want to hire it for. Once I see those three things, I’m done looking. I’m not reading every single review. And that’s been really helpful for me.

Brett McKay:

When do you think maximizing is beneficial or is it ever beneficial?

David Epstein:

It’s a good question because Simon, I mean, he did all these things where he wore one kind of beret only and one color of socks. And he said, you only need three pairs of clothes, one in your body, one in the closet right away and one in the wash. And he at the same breakfast every day, lived in the same house for 46 years. And what he was saying was, look, this freed up my cognitive bandwidth to focus on the things that were really important, like his research. And so I think there are things where he famously said, the best is the enemy of the good. And I think it’s almost always good to be a satisfier in terms of making progress. But I think there are also cases where once you have enough experience to know the kind of things, the ways that you want to spend your time, that it can be okay to be more of a maximizer in trying to craft your work life so that you’re spending more of the time working on something that you think is ideal, basically.

And again, I think aiming for perfection is way too much, but being okay with dithering more on that and saying, how can I really work my way towards spending my time working on things that I think are really important? And again, not that you have to jump to that immediately, but over the course of a working career, not just necessarily saying this is kind of a good enough thing, but once you get to good enough thinking about, well, could I go a little farther? So I think it’s okay to do that, but again, I think it should be done in steps as opposed to maximization right from the beginning.

Brett McKay:

Well, David, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

David Epstein:

Davidepstein.com has links to the book and my free newsletter, all that kind of stuff.

Brett McKay:

You’re on Substack now, right?

David Epstein:

I’m on Substack, yep. And there’s a link for that on my website for all that stuff. And there’s some free sort of tip sheets related to Inside the Box on the site also. 

Brett McKay:

Well fantastic. David Epstein, thanks for your time, it’s been a pleasure.

David Epstein:

Pleasure’s mine.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was David Epstein. He’s the author of the book Inside the Box. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can learn more information about his work at his website, davidepstein.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/constraints. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Several weeks ago, I was seized by an inexplicable urge to buy a globe for my home office. Don’t know where it came from. I had been sitting at my desk, ruminating on an article, when I looked around, noticed my lack of a globe, and thought: I need a globe.

On a lark, I posted a note on Substack confessing my inexplicable urge to buy a globe for my home office. I called it the male urge to own a globe. Half-joking, but also very serious. The note went Substack viral. Tons of guys chimed in: Yes. Same. I’ve wanted one for years. My grandfather had one. Globes are cool as hell.

Seeing the universal male desire to own a globe ratcheted up my own. As the founder of the Art of Manliness, I had to live up to this masculine imperative. It was Girardian mimetic globe desire.

On that very same day that I scribbled my memo about men and globes on Substack Notes, I was watching The Firm (also a great 90s Dad Novel) during my Zone 2 cardio session. There’s a scene where Tom Cruise, playing the young hotshot law grad Mitch McDeere, is setting up his office. Next to his desk, amidst shelves of leather-bound legal case books, sits a large, handsome globe.

That cemented it. This was a sign. I needed to get a globe. That day. Immediately. Resistance was futile.

So I went on eBay and bought a globe.

Follow me on Substack Notes; it’s the only kind of “social media” I personally interact with, because it’s fun instead of being soul-destroying and productive of the urge to repeatedly jam a fork in your eye.

Specifically, I tracked down the exact globe I’d had as a kid in the 1980s. A sepia-toned one with topographically raised mountain ranges that you can run your fingers over. The USSR and other Soviet Bloc countries are on there. So is Zaire.

My globe now sits on a table in my office and looks majestic.

My globe. It fits very well with the other handsome furnishings in my home office.

What a rush.

This whole experience left me with the question: What makes a globe so damn appealing? Especially to men?

So I dug into the history of globes. Combining that history with my knowledge of the male psyche based on my own experience as a man and nearly 20 years researching, thinking, and writing about manliness, I’ve developed a few speculative theories about men and globes.

Here is my report.

A Brief History of the Globe

Globes are ancient. The Greeks figured out the Earth was round by the 3rd century B.C., and an ancient Greek dude named Crates of Mallus is credited with making the first terrestrial globe around 150 B.C. When he moved to Rome, he showed the Romans his cool invention, and the Romans started making globes. Sadly, none of those ancient globes survived. There’s a famous 2nd-century Roman sculpture called “Farnese Atlas” that depicts the titan Atlas hoisting a celestial globe (a globe of the stars) on his shoulders. There’s your first masculine-globe combo in the West.

The Middle Ages were a fallow period for European globe-making, but Islamic and Chinese scholars kept the craft alive. The earliest surviving terrestrial globe, the Erdapfel — German for “Earth Apple” — was built in 1492 by Martin Behaim in Nuremberg. (Conspicuously, it has no Americas. Columbus was just then setting sail on the ocean blue.) From that point forward, globe-making exploded in Europe with the Age of Exploration. Globes were useful things to have when you were charting the watery sphere we call home. Every major voyage produced new data, which meant globes needed to be regularly updated and new ones released.

Thanks to their association with exploration and conquest, globes became a symbol of power and wealth among the European hoity-toity. Even rich families who didn’t have anything to do with sea exploration wanted a globe in their homes.

The Netherlands became the epicenter of the globe manufacturing industry, beginning in the late 16th century. Workshops in Amsterdam run by a few artisan families were churning out matched pairs of terrestrial and celestial globes for the libraries of European nobility.

A gentleman’s pocket globe

In the 18th century, the English took the baton in globe making and made them more scientific. Instead of being seen as ornamental pieces that you would keep in your home to signal your wealth and status, the globe was seen as a mathematical instrument. Gentlemen of letters and science would often keep a “pocket globe” in their coat pockets that they could whip out when pondering geography.

Industrialization and mass production in the 19th and 20th centuries allowed the globe to become a staple in middle-class homes and schools in America. Spinning the globe and stopping it with your finger to see where you’d live in the future became a rite of passage for bored children.

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, globes experienced a decline in the West thanks to Google Maps. Why have a physical globe when you can see a high-resolution globe on your screen for free? Also, globes are bulky and expensive to ship, so a lot of cash-strapped schools gave up on buying new globes to save money. Globes moved from being a democratic tool of learning and curiosity back to being sophistication-signaling ornaments in well-to-do homes.

Why Famous Men Posed with Globes

If you look at portraits of powerful men from the past four centuries, you’ll notice that there’s often a globe in the picture. European royalty during the Age of Empires would hold globes to symbolize their global dominion. Democratic leaders like Teddy Roosevelt posed with globes to project their influence on international affairs. Shipping magnates and corporate CEOs would pose with globes to symbolize the worldwide reach of their enterprises.

This globe portraiture descends directly from a type of portraiture in which ancient and medieval royalty would be depicted holding an orb with a cross on top of it. This orb was called a globus cruciger. Monarchs held these during coronation ceremonies. It signified dominion over the temporal world. When painters started swapping the globus cruciger for an actual terrestrial globe sometime in the 16th century, the symbolism stayed the same. I rule the world! Such a power move.

By the mid-20th century, the globe had taken on a slightly different meaning. It conveyed global strategizing. During World War II, the Office of Strategic Services commissioned a pair of enormous 50-inch globes for FDR and Churchill (often called “Churchill Globes”) so the two men could see the war as a single, planet-spanning theater. There are photos of Churchill bent over his globe, calipers in hand, measuring distances between continents. The globe gave him an astronaut’s perspective of World War decades before the first astronaut.

So What’s the Appeal of Globes to Men?

Alright. So globes have been a symbol of power and a tool for exploration and strategizing. These two ideas, I think, can explain the male urge to own a globe. Here are my two speculative theories as to how:

Theory One: Testosterone. Some studies have shown that men, on average, score higher on tests of spatial navigation, mental rotation, and route-learning, and have a higher desire to explore unknown territories than women. And these differences are often attributed to the higher testosterone levels in men. These conclusions are nuanced, and there’s probably more going on than just testosterone that results in these differences, but testosterone does seem to play a role. Even when women receive testosterone supplementation, they often see a rise in their spatial scores and their desire to explore new places.

So maybe the fact that men have more testosterone than women explains the male pull to globes, which fire the imagination for charting a course and journeying somewhere new.

Theory Two: The King Archetype. In his book, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, the Jungian analyst Robert Moore argued that the mature masculine psyche organizes itself around four archetypes. Of them, the King is the one concerned with order, stewardship, and the blessing of one’s realm. The King doesn’t conquer for the sake of conquest. That’s the Tyrant, the King’s shadow. The mature King surveys his domain so he can tend it. He keeps a wide view so he can act with prudence and justice.

While I’m skeptical of Jungian archetypes (I may need to write an article about this one day), I do think that, when used in moderation, they can be helpful prompts for reflection. Perhaps a globe in a man’s office is a subtle invocation of that Jungian King archetype. It’s a moral reminder to a man to think of the whole, to establish and maintain order, and to use power with justice and mercy.

Theory Three: Globes Just Look Cool. Maybe it’s the T, or maybe it’s the King archetype existing in our Jungian collective consciousness that can explain the male urge to own a globe. Even if those theories don’t explain the urge, I think my final one can: globes just look cool. You get to see the Earth in its totality — as the Blue Marble in space that it is — right in your own home. You can find ones that are a bit more artistic. They’re in sepia tones. They make you feel like you’re Indiana Jones flying a plane with a red line tracing your path as you make your way to archeological adventures around the world. And that feels cool.

So my 1980s globe sits here in my office. I’m looking at it right now. Seems like it has always been there. Every so often, I go and trace my fingers across its bumpy face and look for old Cold War-era countries that no longer exist. I’ll even give it a spin and let my finger stop it on a random spot. Usually, it’s the Pacific Ocean. I hope that doesn’t mean I’m going to end up a castaway like Louis Zamperini.

Why do I love this thing? Maybe it’s the testosterone. Maybe it’s the King archetype. Maybe I just want to feel like Indiana Jones for thirty seconds between emails. Whatever it is, I’m glad I acted on the male urge to own a globe.

Go wander over to eBay and search for “globe.” You’ll find one that will satisfy your own urge.

Impetus virilis globum possidendi.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Discipline is essential to every success in life. It establishes the stable, well-ordered ground that allows an individual to set and achieve goals. It prevents the ensnaring, vice-filled traps that torpedo advancement. It creates the consistent habits that forward progress. And it develops the authority that influences others. 

As behavioral analyst Chase Hughes shared on the podcast, when an individual not only puts on a good face in public, but is truly disciplined in their private life, they project confidence and competence. Whether or not you’re disciplined when the metaphorical cameras are off is something you can’t help but exude and that others instinctively pick up on. People intuitively trust and follow individuals who embody discipline and reflexively take a step back from those who don’t.

Chase defines discipline “as the ability to prioritize the needs of your future self ahead of your own.”

If you’re a college student, and you stay up all night drinking even though you have exams the next day, that’s a failure on the discipline front. As Chase observes, you’ll wake up the next morning thinking, “‘I can’t believe I did that.’ And [you’ll be] mad at your past tense self because you didn’t have concern for your future self.”

If, on the other hand, you spend the night studying and hit the hay early so you’re well-rested for exams the next day, you’re taking care of your future self, and leveling up in your discipline.

As an encouragement to prioritize your long-term aims over your short-term desires, Chase advises thinking of yourself as your own butler.

While few people can afford a full-time, live-in manservant, your present self can act as a butler to your future self. 

When, in the evening, you do things like pack what you need in your backpack or briefcase and set out your clothes for the next day, you serve as a butler to your future self, who, the next morning, will really appreciate the fact that his past tense self set up his present tense self for success. 

Chase described how this works regarding his own evening routine:

I’m about to go to bed, and I’ll be sticking one of those little Keurig coffee cup pods into the coffee maker and sticking a coffee mug there, ready for the next morning. And out loud, I’ll say, ‘Man, Chase is gonna love this.’ So I will continuously speak about my future self in a way that I am prioritizing his needs, and I will talk about him in the future.

When you develop a relationship between your present self and your future self, where the former serves the latter, you arrive at a point, Chase says, “where you’re looking forward in time with concern and looking backward in time with gratitude.” You develop a more holistic, integrated character.

By prioritizing the needs of your future self by becoming your own butler, you build the discipline that allows you to act, lead, and move forward in the way you desire; you build the discipline that grants you greater freedom, which, at the end of the day, is the ultimate luxury!

For more insights on how getting your stuff together will not only improve your personal life but increase your influence, listen to our podcast with Chase Hughes:

With our archives 4,000 articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in May 2023.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

While we often think of life as linear, my guest’s own life, along with a decade of research, has taught him that it’s anything but. In his latest book, What to Make of a Life, Jim Collins unpacks the cyclical pattern life actually unfolds in, and how to navigate it. He explains how we all go through periods of “fog” — times of disorientation and uncertainty — at least three times: in youth, after a life-changing “cliff” event, and as we move through midlife into older age. We find our way out of these fogs by what Jim calls coming into “frame” — aligning what you’re built to do with what you actually do in a way that feels enlivening and meaningful. And Jim unpacks the three elements that help you find, and re-find, this frame over the course of your life.

Along the way, Jim shares case studies of these principles at work, and we explore the role of luck, the inevitability of drudgery (even in work you love), and how to keep your inner fire lit over the long haul.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Good to Great by Jim Collins
• All Rise: The Remarkable Journey of Alan Page by Bill McGrane
• Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society by John W. Gardner
• Sunday Firesides: You Never Know How Many Chapters Are Still to Come
• Sunday Firesides: Do the Right Thing, for Right Now
• AoM Article: The 5 Best AoM Podcast Episodes on Finding Meaning and Purpose
• AoM series on finding your life’s vocation

Connect With Jim Collins

• Jim’s website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

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Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. While we often think of life as linear, my guest’s own life, along with a decade of research, has taught him that it’s anything but. In his latest book, What to Make of a Life, Jim Collins unpacks how the cyclical pattern of life actually unfolds and how to navigate it. He explains how we all go through periods of fog, times of disorientation and uncertainty, at least three times in youth after a life-changing cliff event. And as we move through midlife into older age, we find our way out of these fogs by what Jim calls coming into frame, aligning what you’re built to do with what you actually do in a way that feels enlivening and meaningful. And Jim unpacks the three elements that help you find and refine this frame over the course of your life along the way. Jim shares case studies of these principles at work and we explore the role of luck, the inevitability of drudgery even in work you love, and how to keep your inner fire lit over the long haul. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/Collins. All right, Jim Collins, welcome to the show.

Jim Collins:

I am really happy to be here with you, Brett. 

Brett McKay:

So you’ve made a career for yourself researching about what makes good companies great. I’m sure a lot of our listeners have read your book Good to Great, and other ones as well. In your latest book, What to Make of a Life, you apply that same intellectual rigor you’ve used to analyze companies to figure out what makes an individual’s life feel meaningful. What kickstarted this project?

Jim Collins:

Well, so first, even though it looks like a departure, it is a wonderful extension from my prior work — one thing that is a thread that goes all the way back even to my earlier work is the focus and real interest in what people do and how people navigate. When I look back at what I have as themes in my what makes great companies tick work such as in Good to Great, I’ve always been fascinated with people and with leaders as people, entrepreneurs, as people, and by the sheer human drama of starting and building some of the most audacious and amazing companies in the world. And that interest in people has always been there. Companies don’t build themselves, people build companies. So my interest in people has been a pretty consistent theme in looking through that lens. But this project, of course, as you know, really takes a look at the lens of an entire life rather than say the development of a company.

And the seeds of this actually predate Good to Great by a long time. Three basic seeds. The first when I was young and I realized that my father would never be a father, as you know, the opening line of the book is my first big cliff in life came quite young when I lost my father while he was still alive. And what I meant by that is that I was a kid who was trying to figure out my way in the world and I had this shattering realization when I tried to establish a relationship with my father that he could never really be a father. He could never really be there for me as a father. That when I went down to visit him in New Mexico when I was in early high school and he was living in an adobe hut with a dirt floor, and I went down on Thanksgiving and brought a turkey in hopes that we would cook this turkey and some father-son relationship would ignite mysteriously in my mind.

By the end of the weekend, I realized that he was never really going to take an interest in me. And so when I got back on that Greyhound bus that I’d ridden down to New Mexico on the way back north through Colorado where my mom had brought us, after my parents had separated and divorced, I realized I was heading out into the fog of life really. I mean, I had no idea how to go about life, what to do with this one amazing gift of a single life to live. I had no male role models, no framework, no guidance. I just had no idea how to do this right. What do you do? What to make of a life? So that was the first seed. And then the second seed came a few years after that when my wife Joanne, who was a world champion athlete, she won the Hawaii Ironman in 1985 and she had the premature end of her athletic career due to an injury, a hamstring injury that simply would not heal.

And one day she said to me as she was beginning to accept the brutal fact that her athletic career would be over that phase of her life as an elite professional athlete would be taken from her. She said to me at the breakfast table one day, just almost a gasp, I feel like I’m dying. And this was a really deep seed for me. I had no answer. It just sliced through me. And it really planted a seed of like, wow, how do you come at life if life as you knew it is all of a sudden radically changed or different than what it was before? And you have to rethink this whole question again. And then a third seed came a little bit after that. Each of these seeds were separated by about a decade. What a wonderful wise man and mentor by the name of John Gardner who wrote a book called Self-Renewal.

He was a wise man at Stanford when I was teaching there. He got me really interested in the question of why do some people remain incredibly well renewed over the long arc of a life so that they’re able to continually answer these questions of life as they go through midlife and then into the later decades such that those are really vibrant and fire filled. And these three seeds sat inside me gestating until I reached this point about 13 years ago when I realized I wanted to do a big research project on what became really the title of the book, what to make of a life. But it is really a question and we have to answer it three times. One like that kid, that shattered kid, what to make of a life when you’re emerging from the fog of youth and you’re trying to find your way in the world.

Second time when you go through a cliff event, an event that changes your life and you have to reconsider and now answer the question again, well now what to make of a life. And then at least a third time later when we’re heading into midpoint and after, well now when I’m looking at whatever years and decades remain, well now what to make of a life so that those decades are as fire filled as our younger years and that our younger selves need not tower over our older selves. And all that came together ultimately in doing this 10 year research project that led to the book.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, this took 10 years to write and like you did with your other books, you amassed a team. I think you had like 28 people working on this. And you’re looking for examples of individuals who might have an insight about what makes life, what do they do to navigate the fog or cliffs or how to transition from midlife into the second half of life. And like you did in your other books, you find these individuals and then you start comparing and contrasting. If we compare these lives, just like if we compare companies, what lessons can we extract? And what you and your team found is that the people who seem to discover a calling or a project in a life that gave them significant meaning and were able to maybe maintain that for their entire life or maybe find new ones even after the first one sort of fizzled out. They often had three things in common. And the first one is they found work that they were deeply encoded for. What do you mean by that?

Jim Collins:

Yes. So Brett, you’re right in this framing of it. So the way I kind of look at it is that all of us have a set of encodings, which were kind of these durable capacities of our intrinsic construction that are awaiting discovery through the experiences of life. I like to think of it as they’re like a constellation of stars, but it’s except as a constellation of encodings inside us. And that what happens is that as life unfolds, if you think about it, when your life is what I like to describe as in frame, it’s like looking through a window frame and you can only see a portion of that constellation, but you’re capturing a portion of that constellation or a big bright set of some of your marvelous encodings or shining through the window, which is different than a time when you’re out of frame and there’s not really many shining through the window.

So one of my favorite examples of that in the book is John Glenn and Gordon Cooper, a pair of test pilots and fighter pilots and astronauts. They were two of the first to orbit the earth, for example. And so if you take John Glenn, he’s kind of emerging through life. He’s coming out of the fog of youth, he goes off to the local college and he’s kind of out a frame, not a lot of encodings coming through the window. His parents hoping he might become a doctor or maybe come back to the family business or something like that, but nothing really clicked that much. Sports didn’t work that well for him. He was very energetic and very hardworking, but hadn’t really clicked yet. And then there was this moment when he was younger, by the way, his father had put him on an airplane and let him have a flight that somebody was offering some flights in this plane that they saw parked on the side of the road and just dabbled let him go up in this feel of being in the airplane, sort of stayed with John Glenn.

And then he happened across one of these luck events, a card that was put on the physics department bulletin board, and it said that I think it was the Department of Commerce, but some government agency was offering to pay for people to get their pilot’s license. And so John Glenn got really excited about this and convinced his parents to let him do it and goes off and as soon as he starts flying aircraft, the whole window frame shifts and he has these intrinsic capacities for flying. He just has a feel for the aircraft. He can wear it like a glove. He’s really good at making decisions at times of great speed and great danger. I mean, he became a fighter pilot and I’m fairly confident that if somebody is flying behind me in a jet as I’m in a fighter jet and that person is trying to knock me out of the sky, I’m reasonably confident that my heart rate will go up with great sort of anxiety and fear.

But he was always able to remain calm and clear and to be able to make really good decisions at really high speeds in moments of tremendous danger where the consequences of making a bad decision could be the end of everything. Then the next instant and all of a sudden these encodings he had for being a fighter pilot and a test pilot and then later an astronaut just popped into frame and now he is clicked in frame in a way that’s very different than when say he was trying to figure out how to do chemistry classes and things like that. Gordon Cooper, who’s the other test pilot in this, described it as that flying was his truest element that when he was in the cockpit, when he was even in the space capsule, piloting it back to earth after a total power failure, remaining calm and making brilliant decisions as everything seems to be falling apart, just so perfectly suited them and captured these encodings. Yes, they trained, but that intrinsic construction was there. And so at times of life what we’d find is that you could look across the arc of a life and there are times when people are sort of out of frame and there are times when they’re in frame, in frame meaning they’re hitting a big bright set of their encodings and things click very much into place, very natural.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so encodings are innate talents, innate interests. It’s the thing that you would just do and you lose track of time and you just get so engrossed and you couldn’t see yourself doing anything else. And that could be a lot of things for Glen, it was flying planes, but for an individual could be teaching or art. I mean even managing or analyzing data can be that for some people it’s going to be different for every single person.

Jim Collins:

Yes, exactly. And in fact, one of the things that I really want to highlight about this is two things. First of all, in this study we have people from all different walks of life where we have writers, we have scientists, we have actors, we have rock musicians, we have surgeons, we have political leaders, we have football players, we have skaters, we have architects and all these people. The interesting thing is that the thing that worked for them was when they clicked into frame with a set of encodings that fit really well with what they were doing, but it was different things for different people. But then here’s something I really want to highlight for folks is that it’s never too late to discover a set of wonderful encodings. We have a pair of writers in this study, Barbara Tuchman and Toni Morrison, and both went on to have these really wonderful writing careers and one writing history and one writing novels. Interestingly, they didn’t click into frame and really discover their encodings for being writers until they were essentially heading into midlife. They were in their forties. And so John Glenn and Gordon Cooper found it early, but there are others who don’t maybe find it until a bit later. They’re always there to discover, which is a very uplifting finding. The other piece is that there’s many possibilities. There isn’t just one thing you could do in a life that would be in frame. There could be many possibilities in a life of what you could do in frame.

Brett McKay:

A great example of that, someone who found their encoding and got in frame with that encoding is Dwight Eisenhower. My wife wrote an article for our newsletter. It was called, “You Never Know How Many Chapters Are Still to Come.” And it was inspired by this Eisenhower biography she was reading, and you get to page 172, and Eisenhower is already 52 years old. He’d missed out on combat in World War I. He’d been a good staff officer, but he just hadn’t had a very remarkable career. And he feels like, well, this is pretty much as far as I’ll go. He feels like his life has largely run its course. But in this biography there’s still 600 pages left because starting on page 172, that’s when World War II starts, and then Eisenhower becomes Supreme Allied Commander. And then after the war, he’s president of Columbia and then president of the United States. Most of his highest moments in life happened in his fifties and sixties because that’s the period in his life where his encodings for things like administrative work and strategic planning, managing the social aspect of military campaigns and politics, that’s when it came into frame.

Jim Collins:

I love you bringing in that article and I congratulate your wife on writing it. I think by the way, it’s also a wonderful title and it really resonates with the people that we studied because the interesting thing is that at any given point in time in their lives, they couldn’t have necessarily seen what was coming next. And one of my favorite little data points that’s analogous to this in the study is Benjamin Franklin. And if you ask a simple question, if you take the major biographies of Benjamin Franklin and you ask what percentage of the book remains when Franklin turns age 60 and the average across the major biographies is 53%, which means that imagine coming at life with the idea that when you hit age 60, more than half, more than half of what might be most interesting and creative and impactful and meaningful has yet to be written.

Although he didn’t know that he was going to be involved in writing the Declaration of Independence and helping to bring forth the Constitution and end up as our greatest diplomat to France during the Revolutionary War, he didn’t know any of that when he was 60. And I think that’s one of the things that has just been so interesting about this study because I’m looking across the entire arc of these lies up to cliffs, through cliffs after cliffs and the incredible sense of what may still lay ahead and it’s not done until it’s done. Some of the things that some of the people in our study did way late as one of the most uplifting aspects of the entire study, you really don’t know. 52 is really, really young.

Brett McKay:

And some individuals, they find it early on, you highlight some individuals like that where they had this knack for whatever and this sort of intrinsic drive and motivation to do that thing. And it came into frame early on, the stars aligned for them to be able to display those encodings and really get engrossed in it. You might have these encodings and it might take until your fifties before you’re able to really hit that frame and be able to really express them. So we have these encodings, is it possible to have more than one thing that we’re encoded for?

Jim Collins:

Yeah, I think this is really one of the most uplifting findings from the study. And first, let me just put a little context for people who are listening about how we did the study and then come into this and we’ll maybe talk about a couple people that really show how different the frames can be even in a single life. And what we did in this study was to look at pairs of people who were on a similar trajectory and then they each hit a cliff event. A cliff event is where you go through this event where your life changes in some very significant way that forces you to make really big decisions about what comes next one way or another. And sometimes it’s even the end of your life as you knew it before, and some really, really significant way that end. It can either be by choice or it can be by imposition, but it may not be entirely up to you whether you go through the cliff, John Glenn and Gordon Cooper, for example, at age 42, each of them came to the conclusion that it was time to leave behind their careers as right stuff astronauts and test pilots and so forth and move on to a next phase of life.

But they had half their life to go, right? So they faced this question of what would come next? One of my favorite people in this study, well, they’re all kind of favorite people, but one really wonderful illustration of this is Alan Page. He was number 88 on the Minnesota Vikings “purple people eaters” defensive line. He and Carl Eller were the two football players in that number 88 and 81. They played in the same four Super Bowls together, and they both had amazing lives after their NFL careers and did really remarkable and creative and really beautiful things with their lives. Alan Page for instance, he made a shift from playing football to moving into the study of law. And it’s interesting how his interest in law actually predated his years as a star football player. He was so encoded for football that he was the first defensive player in NFL history to be named league MVP by the Associated Press as a defensive player.

I mean that’s pretty encoded for the sport of football, but you would think, well, how could anything be as much in frame as that? And he discovers that he loves the law, he loves the questions, he loves the cerebral thinking, and it’s a really different world than football. And the seeds of it go all the way back. He was a kid and he loved watching Perry Mason on TV and he thought, well, that looks like a pretty interesting way to spend time. And that seed stayed within him, and as he got towards the end of his NFL career, he began taking law classes and so forth. Anyways, after his NFL career, he ends up as a Supreme Court justice in the state of Minnesota. And one of my favorite images is there’s a biography of him called All Rise, and the cover of that biography shows him prominently in his justice ropes.

And there’s a smaller photo behind that photo of him in his football outfit. And it shows that as amazing as the football was, he had found a second frame in law that was just as fire filled just as he was amazingly encoded for. Now, here’s the interesting thing. What does terrifying quarterbacks and writing cerebral judicial opinions share in common in their encodings? Probably almost nothing. And so what that shows is that within any given person, it’s not that the legal encodings weren’t there, it’s that when he is playing football, they’re not called upon. Then the frame of his life shifts and now the frame is looking at a different set of encodings in the same person. The beauty of this is suggests to anyone that’s listening. We go through these things in life, particularly in a disruptive world, the world of change or maybe your entire career gets wiped out by AI or whatever happens. And you sort of think, well, I was in frame, could I find another frame? And the answer from this study by looking at people going through cliffs is the answer is yes. You can find more than one frame in a life. I don’t know how many you can find, but it’s multiples and we will likely get to the end of our lives without having discovered all of the possible frames that could be incredibly fulfilling for us.

Brett McKay:

That’s really a cool story. I love that Alan Page story. It also reminded me of Steve Young, the quarterback. He also, he studied law while he was still playing football because I think football players, athletes, they’re very cognizant of the fact that they’ve got a timeframe on their career. A built-in cliff. So they had to make plans for it. And so Steve Young studied law and think he parlayed that after his career, he did I guess some VC funding and some legal stuff. So I mean, how do you manage that? So you might find this encoding young in life or maybe in your twenties and thirties that’s in frame, you’re able to express it, but then you might have to think about, okay, well do I have other encodings? And how do you figure that out and then maybe kindle them a little bit so when the time comes, when it’s time to do something else, you’re able to tap into that.

Jim Collins:

Well, I think first of all, let me just highlight from the research that there’s two ways that these cliffs can happen or multiple ways, but two big buckets. One are the cliffs you can see coming. These are the ones where you can see a change in your world that’s inevitable and it’s going to affect you. It could be something where, I mean it’s built in cliff being in athletics or built in cliff, being a test pilot or built in cliff, being in certain walks of life where you know that is going to come to an end. So there are cases where we can see the cliff coming, but there are other kinds of cliffs and these hit us in a very different way. These are the ones that we can’t see coming. These are the ones that they come as a shocking event in our lives and we can’t prepare for them because we can’t predict them.

It could come in a form of a tragedy. For example, two of the women in our study, their husbands, they were going along with their lives and their husbands died unexpectedly. One in a plane crash, one from a heart attack. And in both of those cases, their husbands had served in Congress. So not only did they have to face the unexpected cliff of losing the love of their life and having the fog of grief and the pain of that and the loneliness of that, but then on top of that they were put into their husband’s seats or they chose to step into their husband’s seats in Congress because there was this thing that makes that possible if your spouse dies in Congress, that you can go and serve in their seat. And they had never planned to be in Congress.

It was never part of their life plan at all. And all of a sudden, dang, their life is completely different than what was shortly before that. And so first, I think that if you have a cliff that you can see coming, you can begin to kind of make steps for it ahead of time. Alan Page started taking his law classes while he was still playing football. John Glenn became a senator in his second frame and he started getting interested in that relatively early. And he would go sit in the Senate gallery in Congress and he would watch legislative proceedings while he is still serving in active duty and sort of feeding that so he could eventually, he knew that his active duty part of life and his astronaut part of life would come to an end and he was sowing seeds, if you will. But then there are other cases like Curtis Collins and Marion Pittman Allen with this shocking change in their life.

And we have other cases in the study where just came totally out of the blue. And there you can be really left reeling and have to go through a very, very thick fog. And these can be personal, these can be diseased, these can be just shocking turns and hopefully your life doesn’t have one of those, but you live long enough. The odds are some sort of shocking, unexpected cliff is got a good probability of happening. So lemme just pause there for a moment because with that context, maybe we can explore a little bit of what happens when people go through cliffs, how they go into the fog, how they get out of it, how they find themselves to a new frame and so forth.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, let’s talk about, let’s say you hit this cliff. I think you did a good job of describing these cliffs. You found everyone encountered a cliff at some point. You can’t go through life without encountering some sort of cliff. And so the ones that you know are coming, maybe you’re an athlete or you’re in a career where there’s a timeframe or you see that, okay, my industry is going to go in this direction. I got to start looking at other things. Maybe you’re a stay at home parent and your kids are going off to college. You can start doing things, planting seeds, looking for those different you might have that might be able to come into frame afterwards. But what about the shocking ones? What do you do there? You don’t even know it’s coming. How do you figure out what do I do with this thing that I’m in now?

Jim Collins:

So one thing I want to share with people, because it really is for me, one of the crucial findings in the study that has given me a lot of compassion for people and maybe self-compassion for my own times of whether it be post cliff or just navigating a foggy terrain of life and fog is are these times when you go through a period of being lost, confused, disoriented, befuddled, you feel like you might be wandering, you’re uncertain, the fog diss descends and you can’t see clearly. So you can be in one phase of life where things are really clear, this is what I’m doing, this is how my life is working. And then bang, life can change on you. Or even if you see the cliff coming, it still might be disorienting when it’s over because you’ve been so focused on what you’re doing prior to the cliff.

So these periods of fog, the interesting thing to me is everyone had them. There can be the fog of youth. I certainly had some fog of youth, certainly my twenties were a fog of youth. Some people who had really amazing overall lives in this study had a fog of youth. And there can be a fog of success, which is a very strange one, but where success catches you off guard and it sends you into a befuddling fog. There’s the fog of disappointment, thought life was going to go one direction or was going to work a certain way. It doesn’t, doesn’t meet your expectations, hopes or desires. And there’s the fog of disappointment. There can be the fog of retirement. This is a really big one because retirement’s actually a cliff. And then finally in the wake of cliffs, we found fog as a very prevalent pattern. And what that says to me is that first of all, fog is not a defect if you go through a period of fog. You’re right in there with the people in our study who had in the end quite remarkable arcs of lives, but they still had to go through periods of fog. And it might take you a while to get to the other side of the fog. When you’re in the fog, it can feel befuddling, uncertain, lost, reeling. But it’s not a character defect. It’s not something that you look at and say there’s something wrong with you. It’s to be expected.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I think everyone’s experienced that or will experience it sometime. I mean it happens. I think it happens in life. You get laid off from a job suddenly I don’t have a job anymore. It’s like, what do I do now? What’s my next move? I can see this happening in retirement. And then the solution to this, once you find yourself in the fog, and again, this could last years for someone who the last years decade even, but what they do, the people who successfully navigate out of the fog, they do something called simplex stepping. What’s that?

Jim Collins:

Yeah. So this was very interesting to look at because when you’re in the fog, there can be this real desire, I just got to get out of the fog. So you just want to do something big and bold and leap because you just want to be out of the fog. But that can just throw you right off another cliff. If you can’t see clearly and you leap, how do you know you’re not just leaping off a cliff and if you just sit still, well the fog’s just going to sit there with you. So how do you get out of this? And what we found is a thing that we call simplex stepping. So imagine you’re in the fog and you can’t really see what’s on the other side. You don’t know what it’s going to look like weeks or months or years down the road.

You’re just in the fog and you look around yourself and you say, I don’t have a plan. I don’t know where it’s going to go. I don’t know what the end result’s going to be. What do I do? Well, what the people in our study did was they just kind of looked around themselves and said, well, what’s the next best step? All I’m going to have is I can only see maybe three feet in front of me, but if the possible steps I could take, this one looks like the best, so I’m just going to take that one, then I’m going to reset. I’m going to look around again. And then, okay, I’ll take this step. And they iterate in these small steps. And once I take that step, I look again and take the next one.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I can see this. How does it apply to a listener who might be going through this? Let’s say they got laid off from a job or maybe their career is changing. They’re like, I’m in this fog. What do I do next? The simplex stepping is just do the next best thing. It might be making a lunch appointment with a colleague that’s in a field that you’re interested in. Tell me about the field. And then maybe you start applying for jobs in that field or doing a little bit of consulting work for that thing or maybe taking a class. It’s just little small things that are low stakes that don’t require a lot of investment. So even if it doesn’t work out, okay, I tried, but I can go do something else. And then little by little you’ll figure out what your next encoding is and how you can put that into frame.

Jim Collins:

That’s a really good description, Brett, because it is that very much little by little, and essentially what’s happening is you’re kind of kicking the frame to the side a little bit as you take those small steps and you begin to get clues or something clicks into place. And the really amazing thing to me is how unplanned the path was for many of the people as they got through the fog. It’s not that they were in the fog and they said, well, I know what the answer is on the other side. And they just have to figure out how to get there. They actually really didn’t know what was on the other side. And so that sense of just being able to say, I can take steps. I can take what looks like good next best steps, even though I don’t know where they’re going, is a tremendous relief. Because if you feel you can only take steps if you know where they’re going, at least to me, that would feel paralyzing when I don’t know where I’m going.

Brett McKay:

Okay, I think we did a good job of covering this idea of cliffs. We’re all going to hit. They can come in different ways. You might know the cliff’s coming, it could come to you as a surprise. And then when you hit a cliff, you’re going to experience fog. And if you feel befuddled and just confused and you can’t figure things out, that is completely normal. It could last a long time, but there’s things you can do, do the simplex stepping, just do the next best thing essentially. And you’ll figure it out. You’ll get through the fog. I want to circle back to this idea of frame and figuring out what your frame is. We talked about encodings, and so those encodings are those innate interest talents that we have that just light us up.

But there’s other elements to being in frame versus know your encodings, discover them, but to do the work that you feel like you’re meant to do, you got to pay the bills. So you have this. One thing you found is that these people who were able to find meaningful work or a meaningful project, they’re able to figure out how to do that in a way that allowed them to not make their focus so much on the money, but the money allowed them to do the thing that they were encoded to do. And you call this flipping the arrow of money. What does that look like?

Jim Collins:

So let’s just maybe put a little framework around this for everyone that’s listening, what it fully means to be in frame. So one, there’s being in frame with your encodings. The second is that you are willing to flip the arrow of money and are able to flip the marrow of money to do it. And then third is that it really feeds and focuses your inner fire. So when you have all three of those, you’re fully fully in frame. So this part about flipping the arrow of money, there’s a very practical part of this, which is how did they fund it? And I’m going to talk about the philosophical part very briefly. You already hit it. I don’t need to overstate it or over belabor it, but essentially it’s this look, is the purpose of work to make money or is the purpose of money to be able to fund your work where your work is defined as doing what I’m encoded for?

And that really feeds my fire with great excellence. And for the people in our study, it was the arrow flip — it’s that the purpose is for money to fuel doing what I’m encoded for and feeds the fire. That’s the direction of the arrow. But then the question is how did they do it? And so we had this research team meeting where I said, well, and then they figured out how they could get paid for it. My team just kind of had this wonderful irreverent revolt in the research team meeting, and they said, that’s just way too simplistic. We have to really better understand how they actually did it because not all of them were able to have a salary doing it. And nobody necessarily came in and just wrote them a check to do it. How do they make it happen? And so we were able to kind of strip away and ask the question, how did they fund their work?

And it turns out there were these 12 different ways that they could draw upon to do it. I don’t need to go through all 12 in our conversation, but they were in a range of things. Sometimes it was they had the help of a spouse for a period of time while they say they got a portion of their career going, or maybe they cross funded where they were doing like Robert Plant was laying tarmac while he was also getting his singing career going, which then eventually led of course to Led Zeppelin. Or you could have, for example, you could get education and training that would then lead to being able to do what you’re about. And that education and training can come in many ways, not just traditional education. The government paid for John Glenn to learn how to fly. There’s a lot of different ways that they drew upon resources to be able to pursue what it was that they were encoded for.

And they had some combination of these 12 streams. But one of them that’s really big is this is the idea of creating a flywheel of some kind. And a flywheel is the idea that you sort of have what you really feel the fire to do and you’re encoded for. And one part of the flywheel is doing that in the world, making the music, acting, writing your books, playing football, whatever it happens to be. One part of that. And then the other side of the flywheel is how you convert doing that into some kind of fuel that you can put back to the top of the flywheel to make the flywheel go around yet again, our albums start doing well or people will start reading the books, or I’m doing better as a football player, or I’m getting more opportunity to the test pilot, whatever. But because you’ve started with what you’re really encoded for and feel the fire four, the cycle is reinforcing.

I do more of that and then that leads to more fuel to do more of it, which leads to me doing it even better, which leads to even more fuel to do more of it further still, whether it’s a creative flywheel, a business flywheel could be a social cause flywheel. Once you have a flywheel effect going in some form, it starts to be a very powerful thing. I would imagine that when you started your podcast for example, there were early clicks on the flywheel, and then over a period of time it became exactly that. The more that you did it and did it really well, that created more opportunities for fuel to put back into this thing that you’re encoded for and feel the fire for to make the flywheel go further. That’s the flywheel effect. Yeah,

Brett McKay:

I can see that in my career. I mean, it started off as a blog and then it picked up steam, and then because it picked up steam, we were getting money. I was able to like, oh, I’m going to start a podcast. And the podcast started picking up steam and I was able to do other things as well. And the thing is, I wasn’t able to do this thing full time right away. I had to do a couple of years of legal work while doing the blog and the podcast on the side until I could do it full. So sometimes you have to do something that’s not connected to the thing you’re encoded for in order to move toward the thing you’re encoded for.

Jim Collins:

Yes, I think that really is true. And the critical thing is to be expending some of your very best energy, a big portion of your life on that which feeds the fire and that really you’re encoded for. And then the economic question, sometimes it might be a very direct kind of economics for it. Your albums sell or you get paid to do it or the government pays you to fly or whatever it happens to be. There can be a direct economics source, but there can be other cases where it’s like, no, I have other sources of funding including where I might be working or what I’m doing that will allow me to feed it. Toni Morrison, the writer, she worked full time as an editor, which wasn’t writing. It was editing, and her writing was ultimately her real thing. She did that for quite a number of years, even when she started writing to essentially allow her to put her energies into the writing. The writing was on one side, but it didn’t make any money at first at all. And her editing job is what kept her going while she got her writing flywheel going.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I think TS Eliot, he was a banker or a bank teller or something like that. And I know Philip Glass, the composer, he was a plumber in New York City.

Jim Collins:

Really? How about that? 

Brett McKay:

So I mean, you could listen to a Philip Glass concert in New York on Saturday night, and then the next Monday morning, Philip Glass shows up at a monkey wrench to fix your sink.

Jim Collins:

Well, of course maybe he was also in frame with that too. I think that’s actually a really important thing I just want to share, is that being in frame doesn’t have to be something that’s grandiose at all and super visible to the world, or even in the classic sense of making albums or anything like that. I got an email from a former professor of mine who read an early version of the book, and he was one of my early professors in my life, had a big impact in a couple of key ways in my thinking. And he’d grown up on, I think Belgium. And he sent me this story about a person in his life that he knew when he was a kid who laid cobblestones. And this person was in our parlance here completely in frame with laying cobblestones. And he took such pride and created such beautiful sets of cobblestones that you could walk around the city streets and he could point out, and then you could begin to see which of the cobblestone sections were his, because they were laid down with a different level of beauty, if you will, in those cobblestones on the streets, and people are going by on their carriages and walking on them or whatever.

But he could point to those and he could feel those, and he felt that when he was making ’em. And so you would look at that and say, well, that’s just as much in frame, right? He is doing a beautiful job with the cobblestones and he’s totally in frame making them the best cobblestones they can be. And it’s not necessarily something you think of as like a Led Zeppelin album, but for him it’s absolutely in frame. And I think you can be in frame doing lots of things. You can be in frame as a high school coach. You can be in frame as a firefighter, you can be in frame in military service. There’s so many ways to be beautifully, beautifully in frame.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Alright, so we talked about finding your own framings. We talked about flipping the arrow of money. The third element of people who find that frame or what you call their hedgehog is they learn how to focus the fire. What does that look like?

Jim Collins:

Yeah, so this is really an important idea because what we found is that they would go through these phases in life where there would be a really big thing that they would focus as much of their energy on as they could. So we call it a hedgehog because the idea that the fox knows many things and the hedgehog knows one big thing. And what it means to be in hedgehog mode is for a period of time, I’m not just dabbling in this. I’m really channeling the energy, the intensity, the fire that I have into this for a sustained period of time. And when you do that, the fire can show up. It doesn’t necessarily mean always. Part of it can be that you just really love doing it and that of course will feed the fire, but it also could just be something that you’re just going to stay with this, with the fire focused on it until something really important is done. And if it’s something that you really have true inner fire for, then a very interesting thing happens. You never really want to stop doing it unless you have to.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. And then you also talk about when you have this fire and it’s focused, even when there is what you call the stress and drudgery tax, you’re willing to pay that tax.

Jim Collins:

Yeah. The truth is, even if you’re doing something that feeds the fire and they truly love, as was true for people in our study when they were really in frame, but no matter how much you’re into doing it, what we observed is there’s this thing called the stress and drudgery tax. Everybody pays it. You never get out of it. I don’t know how big of a tax you have to pay before it becomes too much, but there’s always some. So for example, I.M. Pei, the great architect, I mean, you would think by the time that he’s in his seventies and he’s won every architectural award imaginable and he has some of the most famous buildings in the world, and his career is fully established, that at some point somebody with that much stature and success and the flywheel going wouldn’t have to pay the tax.

But when he did the Louvre pyramid in his seventies, there’s these stories of people still spitting at his feet in the streets because a lot of people were upset in France with the Louvre pyramid at first before it was accepted, he was dealing with these cultural committees. It was very stressful. And he always described, well, even he kept architecting into his nineties, but he always had this phase at the beginning of a project that would be sort of stressful and not really sure what the design was. And he would even describe it as, it’s traumatic for my wife. I can’t sleep. He has to go through the stress and drudgery of figuring out what the design is. And every person in the study had some permutation of paying the stress and drudgery tax. I have yet to escape it. I imagine you have the stress and drudgery tax, and in a certain way I find it a bit of a relief because you would maybe have this idealistic view that, well, if I just get everything in place, I can live without the stress and drudgery tax, and I actually find it good news to know that nobody escapes it so I can more easily accept my own stress and drudgery tax.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, no, I think we can all see that. I mean, I’m thinking of it as you were talking, I was thinking of an example of say someone who’s really, their encoding is maybe leadership in church as an example. Well, there’s a stress and drudgery tax there. You have to deal with committees and people being upset over decisions you made. There’s a lot of stress there, and it can happen at work. You’re really passionate about your work that you do. But then, okay, I got to do these papers and forms and I got to deal with managers micromanaging. And if that’s what you’re encoded for, that’s the price you got to pay.

Jim Collins:

That’s right. And there’s one of my, I think I use it in the stress and drudgery section. It was Grace Hopper, one of my favorite examples of this. So she was the one who pioneered essentially software subroutines and so forth. She was there on the very first computer of the Mark one and dedicated her life to advancing the cause of standard languages. And she wrote the first compiler and so forth, and she worked a lot in organizations. She was in academics and then went into industry. And she also spent a big chunk of her life in the Navy and working in these big bureaucracies. And she said, for my entire life, I had to deal with the fact that people are allergic to change. So as much as she loved her computers and her software and getting all of that done, she had to deal with bureaucratic resistance. She had to deal with resistance to change to get new things adopted. And that tax never went away, never stopped her. She just kept right on going. But the tax was always there.

Brett McKay:

The tax was always there. Well, something you talk about, and I think this is really important, I’m glad you did talk about this in the book, is how much luck plays a role and whether we get into frame or not. So I’m thinking about John Glenn. I mean, the thing was he was born at the right time. He was born while aviation was just getting started. So he hit the prime of his life when jet test piloting was going on. And then the NASA program, the Apollo program went on. I imagine if he was born two decades later, he might’ve missed that frame. 

Jim Collins:

Well he wouldn’t have been the first to orbit Earth.

Brett McKay:

Right. 

Jim Collins:

So to me, it’s a really interesting area to explore, which is why we actually ended up spending quite a number of pages on it, which is this question of what is the role of these luck events and how people’s lives unfold? And there’s two parts of it is one is there’s the luck, and then there’s what they do with the luck, which is the return on luck. But the luck, man, it’s just amazing how many serendipitous type events happen. The story of how Jimmy Page got his first guitar is living in one end of London as a kid, he is like 10 years old or something, and his parents move across town and they move into a new house. And mysteriously, the only thing that was left behind by the previous owners in this entire house was a guitar just mysteriously, there’s just this guitar.

And then he hears Elvis coming over the radio and Baby Let’s Play House. And he’s wondering if I can replicate those chords. And there’s this guitar and there’s a lot of steps in there, but essentially, well, what would’ve happened if Jimmy Page had been born in Iowa rather than just down the street from people like Eric Clapton and the session musicians that were all gathering just up the road in London and right at the beginning of the whole blues rock thing and hadn’t had a guitar at his house that was mysteriously left. They’re like, would Jimmy Page have become Jimmy Page, the great guitarist and founding member of Led Zeppelin? And the answer is probably not if he’d been born in Iowa or Delhi or Helsinki or wherever. But here’s the beauty of this is that as we discussed earlier, if he hadn’t found that frame, he might’ve found a different frame. The beauty is that there’s other frames to discover, but the twists and turns of life are amazing. I still find myself thinking about those three types of luck in there. There’s the what luck. There’s the who, luck people that intersect with your life. And then there’s just the zeitgeist luck. You were talking earlier about when you started your podcast, the zeitgeist was on your side.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, for sure. I started it before podcasting was really a thing, and it was completely just random. I didn’t have any grand strategy. I was just like, I want to talk to authors that write books that I enjoy. I got an early start and then podcasting became this huge thing, and now everyone has a podcast. I imagine if I tried to start a podcast now, it wouldn’t have been as successful. The competition is just so much more fierce. But I got lucky and I did that whole return on it. I tried to take advantage of that lucky event that I had in my life and make the most of it.

Jim Collins:

Yeah, exactly. And you put exactly the point on it, which is that when we . . . well, let me just back up a little bit about this notion of return on luck, because that concept, I share a lot of credit. Well, really much of the credit goes to a co-author I had on a previous book called Great By Choice, and that was with my colleague Morton Hansen. And Morton and I we’re studying companies, but we were studying companies in really turbulent industries and we’re studying the entrepreneurs who built some of the most successful companies in really chaotic, turbulent, rapidly changing disruptive environments. And we were comparing them to other companies that didn’t do as well in those same environments and asking what was different. And Morton had this idea of like, well, we ought to really see if we can define and quantify the role of luck because these are environments that have a lot of luck in them and see if there’s any difference.

Were the successful companies luckier, successful entrepreneurs? Were they luckier? And we were able to define a lock event as something you didn’t cause it’s something you didn’t make happen, it just happened. The second is, it has potentially significant consequence, good or bad. And the third is it came in some significant weight as a surprise. . . and what Morton and I were able to do is to then be able to analyze enough luck events across the histories of these companies to ask a simple question. Were the more successful entrepreneurs and companies that they built luckier than the others? And the answer was no. They didn’t get more good luck, and they didn’t get less bad luck. They didn’t get bigger spikes of luck. They didn’t get better timing of luck. What they got is exactly what you described, Brett, which is that when the luck events came, they made more of those luck events and it was the return on luck. That was the real differentiating variable. If they were lucky. Everybody is, at some level you have good luck, bad luck, all of that. It’s what they did with the luck that they got.

And that is then carried over into this study where we can see that over and over again. There’s a lot of luck that happens, good and bad. But what they do with the luck is what really become these kind of separating moments. What we call the not all time in life is equal moments. The moments where there are real inflection points.

Brett McKay:

So I think we’ve done a really good job capturing this idea of frame. You’re doing the thing that you just feel like you’re meant to do and you couldn’t imagine yourself doing anything else, or at least one of many possibilities. So you got to find your encodings, those sort of innate talents and interests. Find out how you’re going to fund that encoding and then really focus that fire. You’re going to hit cliffs. They might be coming. They could be surprised. There’s going to be fog after that. 

Jim Collins:

Step out of the fog.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Simplex step out of the fog. But let’s talk about the elder, the second half of life. I think there’s this idea that as we get older into retirement, that you’re naturally going to start losing your fire to take on ambitious or meaningful projects, and all you’re going to do is just go on cruises and read mystery novels and that’s it. I’m done. But you found that there’s a lot of people who did some of their best work, and it might not be great creative work or business work, but even just something that’s really impactful in the world or in their community when they’re in their seventies, their eighties and their nineties. Any examples of those individuals that stand out and what were they doing differently from the people who might not have done that? 

Jim Collins:

Well, I think one of the truly most uplifting findings in all of this is what people in this study did well past the midpoint of their lives in their fifties, sixties, sometimes even their seventies, eighties, even nineties. We mentioned earlier in the conversation about Benjamin Franklin, right? 53% of the pages in a biography were after the age of 60, but we could go through others. You have, for example, some of Robert Plant’s greatest music coming late in life. Most of his Grammy nominations and awards come in his fifties and sixties when he does these amazing bluegrass album with Alice Kraus. And that doesn’t happen when he’s young. It happens when he’s down the road. I.M. Pei doing the Louvre pyramid in his seventies. Toni Morrison didn’t publish Beloved until 56 and didn’t get to Jazz, one of her most spectacular creations in my view, until her early sixties, and then just continued right on doing spectacular work.

And we can go through sort of case after case where remarkable things happened late. And what I kind of stand back with is they would’ve rejected the idea that their younger self has to tower over their older self. And that as I looked at these lives, it was maybe the other way around in a number of cases, but certainly it wasn’t the tyranny of youth over our older selves. The evidence from this project convinces me that much of our great creative steps in life can easily happen well past the midpoint and maybe the most spectacular parts of our life to come well past the midpoint.

Brett McKay:

And you talk about reasons why that might be is one is you’re just more familiar with yourself. You know what your encodings are probably, and by the time you’re 70 or 80, the different ones you might have, you have all this experience that you can draw upon that you didn’t have when you were in your twenties, and you also just have more skill. You might not have that, what is that fluid knowledge where you can think fast on your feet, but you got that crystallized knowledge, this reservoir of wisdom that you can call upon that can help you make better decisions and figure out what is the thing I need to do with the time I got left?

Jim Collins:

Yes. I also think that you can do spectacular creative things that you’d never done before, and this is where you can begin to discover when the frame shifts and you do things that are almost like drawing upon things that had always been there, but now you’re amplifying them in ways that are almost like a whole new arena. And so I love this idea that it’s not necessarily going to be derivative things you do. They could be entirely new things that you do.

Brett McKay:

So be open to that. Don’t think, okay, I did this when I was younger, so I’m going to stick to this. There could be new things that I can discover.

Jim Collins:

Or you might go back to things you did earlier, but do them in a reimagined way for those who know Led Zeppelin. I love how Robert Plant will go back and he isn’t repeating like Black dog or rambling on in just a classic Zeppelin way. He will bring forth in bluegrass or with a different orchestra from a different part of the world or Arabian music or whatever and bring it all together and create a whole new reimagined version of Black dog, black dog in Bluegrass as a duet with Alison Kraus. It’s still black dog, but it’s not still black dog. And that ability to kind of circle back to something that might’ve been earlier, but then to do it in a new and completely reimagined way, that process is part of how we saw the creative efforts happening for many of our people over the course of their lives.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. I love that section was really inspiring for me. In my forties. I’m seeing the second half of life, and it’s good to know that I can still have projects that light me up.

Jim Collins:

Well, let me just put it this way, Brett, when you hit 60, you’ll have finished your warmup.

Brett McKay:

Okay. That’s good to know. Yeah. You never know how many more chapters are still to come.

Jim Collins:

That’s right.

Brett McKay:

Well, Jim, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Jim Collins:

Probably the best place is our website, just simply jimcollins.com and there they can learn about the classic work and they can learn about the new work.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well, Jim Collins, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Jim Collins:

It has been a real pleasure. Brett.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Jim Collins. He’s the author of the book, What to Make of A Life. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, jimcollins.com. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

When people visit a therapist’s office for help with their depression, they often don’t find the relief they’re seeking. That’s because much of the counsel that is traditionally given doesn’t offer the context people need to make sense of and preserve their mental well-being.

Here to share these missing pieces of perspective and strategy is Dr. Scott Eilers, a clinical psychologist and the author of The Light Between the Leaves: 6 Truths Your Therapist Won’t Tell You About Healing Depression and Trauma. Today on the show, Scott shares why the world of psychology doesn’t always offer the most useful explanations for why people can sometimes feel alienated from their own lives. We then talk about insights Scott has gleaned from science, nature, and lived experience as to the mindset shifts and habits that can help you stay sharp, steady, and engaged in life — whether you’re struggling with chronic depression, or just adrift in a low-grade funk.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM series on depression
• AoM Podcast #741: The Exercise Prescription for Depression and Anxiety
• AoM article and podcast on Rick Hanson’s method of “hardwiring happiness”

Connect With Scott Eilers

• Scott’s website
• Scott’s YouTube channel
• Scott on IG
• Scott on FB

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Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. When people visit a therapist’s office for help with their depression, they often don’t find the relief they’re seeking. That’s because much of the counsel that is traditionally given doesn’t offer the context people need to make sense of and preserve their mental wellbeing. Here to share these missing pieces of perspective and strategies is Dr. Scott Eilers, the clinical psychologist and the author of the book The Light Between the Leaves: Six Truths Your Therapist Won’t Tell You About Healing Depression and Trauma. Today on the show, Scott shares why the world of psychology doesn’t always offer the most useful explanations for why people can sometimes feel alienated from their own lives. We then talk about insights Scott has gleaned from science, nature, and lived experience as to the mindset shifts and habits that can help you stay sharp, steady, and engaged in life. Whether you’re struggling with chronic depression or just adrift in a low grade funk. After the show’s over, check at our show notes at aom.is/leaves. All right, Scott Eilers, welcome to the show.

Dr. Scott Eilers:

Thanks so much for having me, Brett. I am very excited to be here. I’ve been getting value out of listening to your podcast for a long time, and I’m excited to be able to hopefully give back a little bit.

Brett McKay:

Well, thanks for listening. I appreciate it. So you are a clinical psychologist who specializes in helping people with conditions like bipolar disorder and severe depression, severe anxiety. You got a new book out called The Light Between the Leaves. Basically, you share insights from your career, but also from your own life. You talk about in the book, you began your career as a psychologist because you were trying to seek treatment for your own depression. Can you walk us through your history with depression?

Dr. Scott Eilers:

Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly right. The first time I distinctly remember feeling a deep sense of depression was in seventh grade. I think that probably wasn’t actually the first time I experienced it, but you know how childhood memories are. They can be a little bit foggy. I know I was never exactly what you would call a happy child, but there was one distinct moment. I will never forget it, and it just came out of absolutely nowhere. This was in swimming class. So I’m in a swimming pool with my buddies in school, and all of a sudden I noticed I just didn’t feel any happiness. And it wasn’t even like I was bored or disinterested. It was, it was gone. My ability to connect with anything resembling a positive emotion was just shut down and it came out of nowhere and it didn’t seem to be about anything.

I felt like someone I loved had just died, but nothing had happened. And I was baffled and scared, and I remember I kind of crawled out of the pool and just sat on the edge with my head in my hands and I could hardly even talk. And my friends were like, did something happen? What’s wrong? And I didn’t even know how to answer them. And I remember I just went home and just laid in bed all day and I had no idea what was happening at the time. Only with the benefit of hindsight am I able to say, oh, that was a depressive episode, and it didn’t go away that day. It lasted quite a while. That first one lasted for weeks. And then at some point, I don’t necessarily remember exactly when or why it went away and I felt good again, and I wanted to go to school and I wanted to see my friends.

I wanted to do sports and do stuff. And I was like, okay, that was weird. I’m glad that’s over with. Little did I know I was going to be experiencing those on and off for the next 30 years. And that’s what’s been going on since is typically there’s no rhyme or reason to it. And this is how it is for most people with a cyclical mood disorder. So like major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, it means we experience these things in episodes or in waves, and so you’ll have periods of time where your symptoms hit you very hard. They don’t have to be triggered by anything. That’s a common misconception. People will say, what are you depressed about? And there’s not always an answer to that question, but as an individual who does deal with chronic depression, there are simply periods of time in my life where I become pretty much unable to feel good about anything.

And for most of my life, I would be very non-functional during those periods disabled by them basically until I started to learn some tricks to stay functional and to navigate them basically. And yeah, as you mentioned in the intro, that’s the main reason I got interested in the field that I did. I thought now that I know, okay, this is a mental illness, I should probably study this. And if I can also do that for a living, hey, I can fix my own problems and help other people. And every time I’d get started in undergrad, getting my bachelor’s, master’s, doctorate, started working in the field and I kept waiting for the moment when I was going to start to hear stuff that would help me because that’s always been my barometer. Would this skill, knowledge, piece of information, whatever it is, would this have helped me at my lowest and about 90% probably of what I learned in my professional education and in my training did not pass that litmus test.

And then I was done. I was fully licensed, I was independent, and I still felt like I wouldn’t know how to help me if 15-year-old me walked through my doors Right now, I wouldn’t know what to do with that guy. So I’ve sought out a lot of other just information and strategies since that time because I realized the field I work in does not have the answers to my questions, not all of them anyway. And that’s when I started working on things like researching and writing and creating social media content because I figured maybe I’m not the only person who feels this way. And that’s kind of the brief summary of my journey with depression and how it relates to my career.

Brett McKay:

Well, there’s a lot to unpack there. The first thing I want to unpack and point out is this idea that your depression wasn’t caused by something like you said, I think it’s a common misconception people have about depression. It’s like, well, if you’re depressed, did you lose your job? Or did you have a traumatic childhood? And you talk about your childhood was pretty happy, no abuse or anything like that. But you nonetheless still had these depressive episodes. Do we know what causes that? Why are some people prone to depression like you experienced?

Dr. Scott Eilers:

Yeah, that’s a fantastic question. And really quick, I want to mention what you said about people asking why you’re depressed. Our terminology in psychology or in mental health, I honestly think probably needs a revamp. The same thing happens with anxiety, by the way. So depression and anxiety are diagnoses, major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder. However, they’re also emotions and they’re emotions that every human being is acquainted with. Everyone knows what it feels like to be depressed or to be anxious. It’s just that people who don’t have a chronic mood disorder or chronic anxiety disorder only experience those emotions when they’re triggered by an event or a stressor or a problem. And so I think what that results in is a lot of people think they understand these things better than they do. Yeah, they think about, man, yeah, I lost a job and I was horribly depressed for a while, and then I got another job and it got better.

And so then they conclude if depressed people would just get jobs, they wouldn’t be depressed anymore. What cured my depression? And I don’t think there’s any malicious intent there. I think this is just a person not realizing that this same word is being used to describe two very different things and thinking that what worked for them, what also worked for someone who is chronically depressed. Unfortunately, while employment can be one of many, many things that can help with depression, it is most certainly not a cure all. But your question then was basically then what is this? Why does this happen to people? And that’s been one of my big disappointments in my field honestly, is that we don’t really know. We know some of the causes, some of the time there definitely appears to be some chemical or biological component to it. There are two neurotransmitters or brain chemicals that facilitate communication between your neurons or your brain cells.

Actually three really that seem to be implicated in many people’s depression. And they are dopamine. And that’s sort of like your reward chemical. So dopamine is the neurotransmitter that is used to produce feelings of joy or achievement or accomplishment. So you build something or you get a good grade on a test and you look at what you’ve done and you say, yeah, I did a good job at that. And you get that good feeling, right? That’s dopamine. Serotonin is usually a little bit more associated with anxiety, but it has some implications with depression as well. And serotonin is a neurotransmitter that makes you feel calm, relaxed, peaceful, at ease. It gives you that kind of just life is good. I’m pretty content kind of feeling. And then norepinephrine is more about regulating your physical functioning. So it helps you with energy, it helps you have an appetite, it helps you fall asleep at night, wake up in the morning.

And we do appear to see some disruptions in the functioning of these neurotransmitters in many individuals with depression. And that’s where psychiatric medication often plays a role in managing these conditions. But the exact functioning and makeup of those neurotransmitters seems to vary a lot from person to person. And there seem to be some individuals with depression who don’t really respond well to any medication which kind of makes people think is it not chemical in this person’s case? So it’s really, really difficult to pin down unfortunately. And that’s why we still to this day don’t have a foolproof like blueprint. We don’t have a treatment protocol that has a 95% success rate. The way a surgical procedure might have are most effective treatments for depression. And I would say there’s three, by the way, therapy, medication and physical activity, they’re about equal in terms of efficacy, but all three of those, generally speaking, have efficacy rates of about 60%.

So there’s a large number of people, a large proportion of the treatment seeking population that for one reason or another, don’t respond to one of those treatments. And my theory, well, I have multiple theories on that, but what I think that means as far as the causes of depression is I don’t think there is one. I think that at the risk of overcomplicating matters, what we currently call depression probably is more than one thing. If we really fully understood it, I think we would see this as a cluster of similar looking conditions that we’ve lumped together. But that’s purely a theory. I have no data to back that up.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, so it sounds like there might be a genetic component to this. Essentially the wiring you were born with makes you predisposed to that. In my life, I’ve had a couple of those more traditional depressive episodes and they were precipitated by stressful events. But sometimes I just get into these funks for no reason at all. And I think it’s because I just have this ingrained tendency to focus on the negative, and I’ve gotten a good handle on it over the years, but I think I’ll always have a disposition that’s more melancholic than average. And so I don’t think of myself as someone who struggles with depression, but it’s like I’m part of that cluster of similar things.

Dr. Scott Eilers:

Well, to your point there another factor that a lot of people, including myself think play a role is just simply a person’s personality. Some of us are just more prone to maybe bigger feelings in general. We know that emotional intensity varies from person to person. Some people just feel all feelings, pleasant and unpleasant, more strongly than others. Some of us are obviously more pessimistic and more cynical than others, and that’s just kind of the way we’re built or the way we’re wired. Some of us are more social than others, and while that’s not inherently a good or a bad thing, something else I see a lot, and I would very much say this has been a piece of my story is some of us are just our natural personality types that we’re born with that don’t really change, at least at their core throughout our lives.

Some of us are just a better fit for the world than others. And I seem to have a personality type that just doesn’t gel real well with society or at least most of mainstream society. And that’s an experience I had a lot growing up, especially when you’re with people your own age, the vast majority of your day, if you’re kind of in introverted, quiet, pessimistic, cynical, naturally kind of moody type person, a lot of times people aren’t real excited to be around you and you have a hard time, maybe especially in K through 12 years, maybe seeing the purpose of what you’re doing, not necessarily seeing how the things you’re spending the majority of your time on play in with bigger picture life goals or just anything that feels good or fulfills, you get pretty jaded and burnt out pretty fast. And so I feel like another piece of it for me, it’s like, yeah, as you said in the intro, I would not lay claim to have had an unusually difficult life.

I think that would be dishonest for me to say that at least in terms of events, like things that have happened in my life, but I’ve just never really felt like I belonged here in a super easy, natural way. And it frankly takes me a lot of mental effort to do things that I think come naturally for most people. Things like going to school, holding down a job, keeping friends. I have to work really, really hard at these things, and I have to reframe a lot of my natural thoughts and reactions because they tend to skew very quickly towards nihilism. Honestly, why am I even doing any of this? What does any of this even matter? And I’ve learned that if I don’t keep those in check, I pretty quickly just stop doing stuff and that gets dark pretty quickly. So I think there very much is just a personality component to it as well. And in particular, how does that personality interact with the world and with the way society is built, I think most of us probably see that some people just have a personality that’s naturally a better fit for sort of the norms of society and the expectations that get placed upon you. And for some of us, it just takes a lot more mental and sometimes physical effort to achieve those same outcomes.

Brett McKay:

So you mentioned you spent 10 years getting an education, you got your master’s, your doctorate in psychology, and then you didn’t find the answers that you were hoping you’d find. What do you think is going on there? Is it the way that traditional psychotherapy approaches treating people with depression that’s causing the problem, or is it just what you talked about? Depression is caused by a whole bunch of different stuff so no one really knows and you’re just kind of throwing spaghetti on the wall?

Dr. Scott Eilers:

Yeah, I think there’s a lot. I’ll give you kind of a broad overview here. I have a few different theories. One is definitely what you just said, and this is not unique to depression, by the way. I think this is many mental health conditions, but I think they’re far more varied and complicated than we currently recognize them to be. We see these clusters of symptoms and we say these people have fairly similar symptoms, so they probably have the same thing. I’m just not convinced that that’s the case. What I describe as depression, I’ve done real deep dives on my YouTube channel, for example, explaining all my symptoms, and there’ll be people that are like, I also have depression, but this doesn’t sound like me. So then is that even really the same thing? Are we calling some relatively similar things the same thing? And if so, treating them the same and possibly doing people a disservice.

So that’s one is I don’t think we fully understand what we’re dealing with. I think probably the biggest issue though is professional mental health is kind of at an odd crossroads where we’re a young field. I mean really a hundred years old, that’s nothing for a scientific discipline. And we’re at this odd place where we’re trying to respect the work of people pioneers in the field, people like Sigmund Freud, Carl Rogers, and then we’re also trying to become a more hard science through empirical research and double blind studies and our history and our data. I don’t think they sync up real well. So to give you an example, a really, really popular form of therapy or therapeutic orientation is what’s called person-centered or humanistic therapy. And there’s going to be people who are mad at me when I explain it this way. This is a super, super quick overview, but a large part of a person-centered therapy practice is the idea that the client, the person seeking therapy basically knows what they need to do, that they have the ability to kind of self-actualize and basically solve their own problems through having time and focus and support and reflection from the therapist to essentially just enable them to think out loud in the therapy session.

That would never have worked for me. I very much did not have the answers, no amount of me sharing how I felt was going to accomplish anything. That’s all I did. I spent 10 years basically wallowing and ruminating and telling anyone who would listen how I felt. Obviously they weren’t trained therapists, but I don’t think that was the limiting factor. I needed help. I needed direction, I needed strategy, I needed guidance. And these are things that we are somewhat discouraged from providing as professional therapists, and there’s a degree of wisdom in that. I don’t know what job a person should do. I don’t know what house they should live in. I don’t necessarily know which of these people they’re dating should they commit to, but there are things we know about mental health, and I get very frustrated when therapists refuse to acknowledge that we know roughly how a person needs to sleep more or less.

There’s a little bit of individual variation in that, but we know on average a person who’s getting about eight hours of pretty high quality sleep at around the same time every night is going to enjoy better mental health than a comparative person who isn’t doing that. We know we know. No, no, this is critical. That regular physical activity is literally equivalent in reducing symptoms of depression and anxiety to regular weekly therapy or psychiatric medication, like top of the line treatments, exercise matches it, and in some areas beats it. And yet there are so few therapists who will even ask a depressed person, what’s your physical activity level? Obviously I know that’s a little bit of a chicken or the egg thing. It’s hard to get anyone to work out regularly. It’s really hard to get a depressed person to work out regularly. I do understand that, but we’re not even having those conversations.

We’re not even planting those seeds. We’re not even asking those questions. It’s this very client-led process in so many cases, and that fundamental idea that this client has the ability to self-regulate and self-actualize and figure out their own answers, I’m sure it is true for some people. I can tell you it wasn’t true for me and it’s not true for the majority of the people I serve. These are people who are on the bottom of life looking up at everybody else, and they are lost and they are miserable and they are stuck and they don’t know what to do. They need way, way more than a sounding board in order to help them move forward. That’s what I think is probably the biggest issue in my field.

Brett McKay:

One question I had for you, and I’ve had to grapple with this as well. So this idea of depression might not necessarily be caused by something you just have, you’re predisposed to it. I mean, understanding that I can see can help you, okay, well, this is how I am and now there’s things I have to do to manage it, mitigate that, and we’re going to talk about some of those things that people can do. Exercise. I want to dive deeper into that for sure. But also I’ve experienced that when I think, man, this is just who I am, that even gets more depressing where you’re just like, ah, you kind of go in this death spiral. I was like, why do I have to do all this stuff just to be functional? So how do you avoid that, do you think?

Dr. Scott Eilers:

That’s a really good question. For me, a big part of it has been prioritizing because really there’s only two reasons a mammal does anything. They’re engaging in an activity because they’re either trying to move towards a desired outcome or away from an undesired outcome. That’s motivation. That’s all of human motivation can be boiled down into one of those two categories. And I think this answer might expand a little bit even beyond mental illness, but it has a lot of implications for chronic mental illness. If we accept that premise and say basically everything worthwhile that I can do either makes me feel more good or less bad, then it simply becomes a question of, well then what are my highest conviction actions? What are the things I can do that are going to move the needle the most? I think it’s really critical to think of that not just in the present moment, but as more of a cumulative outcome throughout your life.

What got me stuck for a long time is I tried to cope with depression by doing things that felt good in the moment. Some of those were blatantly unhealthy things like impulsive spending or substance abuse. Some were things that don’t necessarily appear unhealthy on the surface. I used to play a lot of video games. I don’t really believe there’s any direct harm in doing so. The problem is most of the things that feel best when you do them do nothing beyond that moment, they give you this big rush of acute pleasure and then they’re over and you’re back to square one. And so for a long time I was trying to treat air quotes, my depression by just doing lots of things that felt good, and I always just felt like I was chasing something I could never hold onto. And a big perspective shift for me was thinking of how I allocate my time and my energy and my attention, not just what would feel best right now, but trying to measure those things in terms of cumulative impact.

So like this morning when I woke up, well, I don’t work out instantly when I wake up, but I work out in the mornings, so I have a decision to make. I could spend 30 minutes playing a game on my phone or 30 minutes exercising. Now I like exercise more than most people, and yet even I will not make the claim that those 30 minutes of my life will feel better if I’m working out than if I’m playing a video game. At least not from a mental or emotional stimulation perspective. No, the game wins, but the exercise pays off again and again and again. I will feel good all day long from getting a workout in the morning. I will not feel good all day long from playing a video game for 30 minutes in the morning. In fact, I probably won’t even remember that I did it.

It’s just a downtime activity. And when I started thinking of my life in that way, when I started thinking of cumulative impact, that completely changed my framework. And once I realized these are high value activities because they produce not only some amount of joy right now, but future joy, I started to see everything in that realm, taking care of my nutrition, taking care of my sleep, taking care of my physical health, investing in relationships that matter to me. I really started to view all these things as almost like the equivalent of a financial investment. And metaphorically, if I somehow came into $5,000 today, the most pleasurable thing I could do with that $5,000 today is spend it. But I’d spend it on a bunch of stupid stuff I don’t even need. Whereas if I invested it, I get money for the rest of my life from that, from compound interest.

And I think that the activities or the strategies that help manage a chronic mental illness, I think of those as the equivalent of investments. And once you realize that that thing you’re doing isn’t just going to make you feel good right now, it’s going to make you feel good over and over and over again. You start to anticipate that reward. You start to anticipate that outcome and it actually becomes a more pleasurable experience. It becomes more enjoyable because you see the value in it at this phase of my life where I’m at my goal that the thing that feels best to me is basically to just keep my system as close to 100% as possible, as close to 100% of the time as possible. And being near that benchmark feels better to me than anything I can do just as an acute activity. In other words, I find it more enjoyable to do things that make it feel good to be me than to do things that feel good because again, I’m inclined in that same direction you are.

I’m not the guy who opens his eyes and hears birds chirping and says, God, I’m happy to be alive. I have to work for that. It doesn’t come naturally to me, but I have found that I can get there. If I take excellent care of myself and my mental health, I can live that way. And that does more for me than any hobby, any activity, any recreational thing could. So once you start to see kind of the proof of that, that’s when that least for me. I don’t know if this is a thing that works for all people or if this is just an idiosyncratic Scott thing, but once I really saw that starting to work, that’s when the switch flipped and I’m like, this is the top priority. And I don’t approach it as a grudging grueling, oh, I have to do all my mental health stuff today. It’s like, this is what I need to do to feel my best and that is my goal. And so there’s really not much else to think about. Once you get to that point. 

Brett McKay:

So in this book, The Light Between the Leaves, it’s called that because what you do to figure out strategies or philosophies to help you manage your depression is that you look back at your life when you were the happiest. And a lot of the time you’re either at your family’s cabin in northern Minnesota or your grandparents’ farm, and you started thinking about those experiences and what they taught you, some metaphors that you observed from them that gave you insight on life. And the first lesson you talk about you got from your family’s cabin in Minnesota. What insight did you get from the isolation of your family’s cabin about how the mind works when we’re depressed?

Dr. Scott Eilers:

Yeah, that’s interesting because, so this cabin was on a peninsula between two lakes, and so there’s only one road in and out, and it ended a few houses beyond ours. And being in very rural northern Minnesota, this is a poorly maintained, it was like a forest road basically. And so there were quite a few times when we were there that we were stuck because if there were snow, mud, fallen tree, you can’t get anywhere if this road is blocked. And every time that would happen, the whole vibe would just change because even a very, very pleasant and wonderful place can feel like a prison if you’re trapped inside of it, especially if you can’t access anything that you need. And I remember those vibe shifts when we were kind of stranded there growing up. And I remember looking back on that first depressive episode that I mentioned earlier, it had a very similar feeling where it’s like I felt trapped inside of my own mind, and I knew that there were good things out there.

Like I said, I was swimming, which I loved with my friends, who I really liked. There was good stuff right there in front of me, but it felt like there was some kind of gap or barrier between me and all that stuff. And even though I knew it still existed, I couldn’t access it. And that was the exact same thing that would happen when that road was blocked. Like the hospital still existed, the grocery store still existed, but we can’t get there. We can’t access them. And I noticed that especially in my worst depressive episodes, I would feel further and further away from the world. I could feel myself withdrawing inside of myself, if that makes sense. And I don’t always find that an unpleasant place to be. I like thinking I often enjoy being in conversation with myself again, I’m a more introverted person, so that’s kind of my comfort zone, but not when I’m depressed.

When I’m depressed, it becomes a dark, abusive, scary place to be, but I can’t get out. I find it hard to engage with people. I find it hard to do things. And that I think was the biggest lesson there is that if you can’t access anything else, if you’re trapped within yourself, you cannot fix that problem by having good things outside of you. And that goes back to our earlier point. You don’t fix depression by just having a really good life. And if you could, I don’t think these aren’t people I claim to know, so I’m kind of speaking out of ignorance here, but you see celebrities, you see famous people who would appear at least to a naive observer like me on the outside looking in to have all of the things in life that most people want. They have respect and they have financial security, and they have time and freedom to chase their goals.

And yet these people, some of them struggle with depression and addiction and even suicide in some cases. And without knowing them, I can only conclude they had those things, but maybe they weren’t really able to feel them. Maybe they were trapped inside of their own minds, trapped inside of themselves and not able to access any of that goodness that they theoretically could touch in their own lives. And maybe that’s just me self inserting into their story, but I know that’s how I felt during those episodes. And that’s why I mean this kind of goes basically that my proposed solution to that problem is what I just said before you asked this question, which is that which I mentioned as being analogous to maintaining that road, your ability to care for your own mind. That’s the road connecting you to the rest of the world. And if that road gets blocked, if that road falls into disrepair, it doesn’t matter who or what you have because if you can’t feel any of it, it won’t be able to touch your depression and you will be miserable.

Brett McKay:

And so yeah, the things you can do to maintain that road to the cabin of your mind, like you said, that self-care stuff, getting enough sleep is a good one. Not too much sleep. Sometimes when you’re depressed you don’t want to do with sleep. So seven to eight hours of sleep eating. And then we talked about exercise. I want to talk about this. This is something you talk a lot about and your big proponent of exercise as a, we’ll call it a treatment for depression. What is it about exercise that makes it such an effective way to alleviate or keep your depression in check?

Dr. Scott Eilers:

Yeah, I think it’s so effective because it is multifactorial, and that goes back to our conversation earlier that depression in and of itself is likely multifactorial and therefore just any one thing is probably not going to be the answer for a person. But exercise really is more than one thing if you break it down to its core elements. So we know that there are neurochemical changes that occur when a person gets regular physical activity that are very, very similar to the changes that occur when a person is taking an antidepressant medication, for example. So there very much is a chemical component with exercise, but there’s also an achievement component. We know that if a person sets goals and then achieves those goals or even works toward those goals, that facilitates the release of dopamine. Now, sometimes depression blocks that, but if you have tangible proof, and that’s one of the things I love about exercise is you can track it, you can have data, you can have metrics.

Your depression can make you say, well, am I really doing a good job? But if you can prove like, no, I am getting stronger, I’m getting faster, my endurance is going up, my flexibility is going up, whatever your goals are. If you have data that says, no, I have demonstrable evidence that I am in fact achieving my goals, it’s pretty hard for your depression to argue against that. In many cases, physical activity is often something we do with other people. You take a class, you maybe play a sport, or even just joining a gym, even if you don’t talk to ’em, just depression is so isolating. And this is one thing I emphasize to people is even just being in a place where people can help with those feelings of isolation, even if you don’t talk to ’em, just doing something and then looking around your environment and seeing there are other people here doing what I am doing gives you a little bit of a sense of connection to other people and to the world in general that depression can often take away from us.

Many forms of physical activity can become hobbies, and so they are inherently pleasurable activities in and of themselves. When I say exercise, you don’t have to run or do weight training. Certainly you can, those things count. You could take up hunting, which might involve a lot of walking or fly fishing in a stream where you have to walk a mile against a current. There’s no reason it has to be an isolated thing that isn’t also fun or enjoyable. So I don’t believe in any magic bullets, but I would say if you asked me what is the single most impactful thing you have ever done for your own mental health, easy answer. It is getting into regular physical activity, which I really didn’t start doing until I was in my early twenties. That was the single biggest shift I experienced in my mental health. It did not fix everything.

It was not the cure. But that was a huge turning point for me where I did start to feel like I think I am actually turning the tide and winning this battle and maybe feeling okay more often than I feel miserable. And so it would be my highest conviction recommendation for anyone struggling with their mental health. It also, one more thing, I can’t even, there’s so much good it does. It’s hard to even remember it all. It also improves cognitive performance. So if you think like executive functioning focus, concentration, memory, organization, time management, it literally makes your brain work better because your brain uses blood and oxygen to do its job. And improving your cardiovascular fitness increases the amount of blood and oxygen that are available to your brain. We know that depression and many mental health conditions, they give you that brain fog, they make you feel slower, dumber, frankly. You get more forgetful. You need to take breaks more often. So it can help you get some of your efficacy back, some of your edge back. It makes you more effective at work, at school, in social situations. It’s hard to even give a full overview of everything physical activity does for your brain and your mood, but it is one of, if not the most powerful tools in our toolbox, in my opinion, and so underutilized in therapy. Yeah,

Brett McKay:

I agree with you. Exercise has been a game changer for me and with all these self-care things, with the sleep, the eating right, exercising, you talk about this, one of the things they do is they help your prefrontal cortex and your prefrontal cortex. I’m sure people have heard this sort of like the manager of your brain, it’s executive function. And one of the problems I noticed whenever I get into my funks is my prefrontal cortex is basically checked out and my brain does whatever it wants to do. And so I will go down this sort of negativity spiral, but when I’m living right, I’m exercising, getting enough sleep, not stressed out, that prefrontal cortex is there. Whenever I notice myself slipping into a funk, it can kick in and be like, oh, hey, we’re going to stop this now. We’re not going down that path. I’ve noticed that as well.

Dr. Scott Eilers:

Yeah, it’s exactly that. So one of the most important jobs of your prefrontal cortex is emotion regulation. So your emotions are generated in your midbrain and they’re managed in your prefrontal cortex. So there’s a little bit of a communication process that happens there. So your brain makes a feeling then tries to figure out what to do with the feeling. And so your ability to regulate your own emotions, which is to put ’em into context, figure out this feels like a catastrophe. Is it, am I overreacting? What would be a skillful response to this thing I’m feeling that will help me feel it less and not screw up my life? These are all prefrontal cortex tasks. And when your prefrontal cortex is functioning properly, sometimes you won’t even notice that you’re managing your emotions. I’ve made the metaphor as a big former gamer, anyone who’s played any realtime strategies games will get this.

It’s kind of like having anti-air turrets in your base. It will defend you from attacks that you don’t even know you’re under because it will just work and it will take the edge off those big scary feelings. Sometimes it’ll make you irritated instead of angry, stressed, instead of anxious, moody instead of depressed. It takes some of the edge off. It repackages things into a more manageable, more palatable form. And that’s why taking care of that road, taking care of your brain is so important because you will start to win some of your battles without even realizing you are fighting them. Some of your problems will seem as if they have magically disappeared and you won’t even know where they’ve gone. And the truth is they haven’t actually disappeared. Your brain is just finally managing them the way it’s able to when it is properly cared for. And then your emotions don’t require constant babysitting from you to deal with them, which is I think a place we’d all like to get to.

Brett McKay:

And going back to exercise, like you said earlier about as effective as psychotherapy and medication, but it’s not that expensive. You can go out and take a walk or jog that’s free. And unlike with medication where there can be negative side effects like loss of libido, the side effects of exercise are all positive.

Dr. Scott Eilers:

That’s true. And there’s two other areas where exercise actually wins out over therapy and medication. One is the onset of relief. So if you look at therapy and medication, average amount of time it takes to start feeling better in either of those treatment conditions is four to six weeks. And so those first few weeks of trying a new maybe get a placebo effect of like, oh, I’m feeling better in therapy or on this medication, but they haven’t actually really started to do anything yet. Whereas with exercise it’s two to four weeks. And so you potentially feel better more quickly with exercise than with therapy or medication. The other area where exercise wins is lower symptom relapse rates. So now that might be a little bit misleading because that might simply be because it’s easier to maintain. But if you get on an antidepressant medication, and by the way, I’m just going to give a brief side here.

I’m in no way against medication. This is not an anti-medication conversation, but this is just the truth. If a person’s on a medication and the medication makes them feel better, they basically have two choices, get off the medication later and feel the way they used to feel or stay on it forever. And I don’t know that either of those are super appealing, whereas with physical activity, you should keep doing it forever. It’s good for you, it’s a beneficial thing to maintain. And so we see lower symptom relapse rates with exercise than with therapy or medication probably because people keep doing it. It’s not like it’s magically, I don’t want to overstate my case. It’s not like fixing your brain structure or anything. It’s continuing to work because ideally you’re continuing to do it. And most people don’t want to be on medication for the rest of their life.

Most people probably also don’t want to be in therapy for the rest of their life. That’s not necessarily feasible. But we can stay physically active for our entire lives. And in fact we should. And there are other reasons I, I’m only approaching this from the mental health angle. Obviously it goes without saying that there are tremendous physical health benefits for staying physically active as well. But I’m saying even if you only looked at the mental health side of things, it’s still a pretty compelling argument. And there is a strong case to be made that that is the most effective treatment, at least for mood and anxiety disorders. If you look at other things, maybe not so much, but for what we’re talking about, you could make a pretty compelling case that it’s the gold standard.

Brett McKay:

Alright, let’s talk about another lesson that stood out to me. And it’s the idea that envy is ignorance. And you got this lesson while you were fishing in the lake by your family’s cabin and you and your sister had only caught little fish, but one day you caught this big monster fish and that got you thinking about what else might be lying in the dark depths that you couldn’t see at the bottom of the lake. And you compare that to how people, especially people with depression, because they have that stronger than average negativity bias, they feel like they’re just, they’re more screwed up than everyone else and they envy that other people seem to have better lives and that just puts them into more of a funk, but they can’t see to the bottom of other people’s lives you couldn’t see to the bottom of the lake.

Dr. Scott Eilers:

Yeah, that’s kind of a metaphor I’ve used to understand other people’s lives. Now, especially as a therapist, I often obviously am privy to some of those deep dark secrets. And that’s just reinforced the idea that everybody has them because many of the people I work with, you would never think there’s anything going on based on their family, their careers, their attire, their appearance. And so it’s just an important reminder for me that everybody’s got stuff. Everybody’s got darkness. You can’t see, and you may not ever know what it is, but don’t ever let yourself think it’s not there because that’s going to draw you to some really problematic conclusions about your own life. And this is not the most eloquent way to say it, but I said it this way in the book, everything that sucks about being you, but you don’t know what sucks about being somebody else, but something does, I guarantee you, something does. You just don’t know what it’s, and you got to remember that there is something so that you don’t end up just feeling despair and hopelessness about your own own life just because everything that sucks about being you.

Brett McKay:

And so any tactics that you found, I mean you talked about this idea of identify, locate and pursue to overcome this tendency. Can you walk us through that?

Dr. Scott Eilers:

Yeah, so that’s about recognizing what do you have in your own life that is already good because with that negativity bias, it is so easy for us to fixate on what we don’t have and on what we see in other people’s lives and identify, locate, and pursue, which is kind of a blueprint I use to help us really see and appreciate what we do already have. All of my therapy clients want something that another one of my therapy clients has and isn’t happy with. I’ll have a client who has a big family but has no time to herself, no free time. And she’s like, I just wish I had time to think and could just go on a vacation whenever I want and didn’t have to arrange all these things. And then I have a client who can’t have kids and she has all of that.

She has the freedom and the time and the money, but she just wants more people to share it with. And it’s like so often I see that where I’ll have two people thinking that the solution to all their problems is a thing that somebody else I know has and isn’t happy with. And what that has led me to believe is there’s no certain configuration of life that’s going to make you happy or not happy. And the biggest dividing line is the extent to which people are able to appreciate what they do have and accept what they don’t. There’s no way to put a life together where you get all the stuff you just don’t like kids versus time. I know I made that example already, but it’s hard to have a big family and a lot of free time. You kind of got to go one or the other there, or time versus money is another one.

Some people I guess have careers where they can make a great amount of money, not working a ton, but for most of us, we either got to pick, do I want to be able to achieve my financial dreams by working more or harder than most people or do I want to appreciate the fact that while money is tight, I have more free time, I have more autonomy, I have more flexibility. And so that I think is the biggest difference is not do you have all the stuff, but are you able to pull the joy out of what you do have and practice some acceptance of the fact that the things you don’t have, if you were to pursue them, you’d lose some of what you do have. Ultimately, once we get to adulthood, we’re all busy. We all have limited resources. Almost every move you can make is a lateral move.

Very rarely can you do something that just makes every part of your life better. And it’s usually, I could trade a little bit of this for a little bit of that and that makes one thing better and one thing worse, which is actually better. And I see people just constantly doing that, just trading and then being like, oh, I didn’t like that. I should go back. It kind of reminds me of people I know someone who kept moving back and forth from the city to the country. They’d live out in the country and they’d be like, I love the space, I love the nature, but I feel isolated. Then they move in the city and they’re like, this is cool. I got people around me. This is vibrant, this is exciting, but I feel confined, I feel trapped. My space is too small. And they just go back and forth for decades and it’s like, how do you not see what this is? There’s no perfect solution here. There’s pros and cons to each and you got to just pick one. And I think that’s how most things in our life work, to be honest. And it’s so easy to end up chasing something that just doesn’t exist, some perfect idealized solution.

Brett McKay:

This reminds me, we’ve had Rick Hanson on the podcast talk about this idea of hard wiring, happiness, and the big takeaway I got from him was, when you do experience those good things, first off, recognize, be open to those good things in your life and they could be small things and time with your kids a good morning just even you have a house you’re alive and really focus on that and soak it in and think, yeah, things are actually good. They’re not as bad as I think they are. I think that’s a useful practice to kind of, it’s basically counting your blessings essentially. And it sounds cliche, but it’s cliche. It works if you do it. So let’s talk about another lesson and this lesson that stood out to me was called Pull the weeds, and this is about an invasive species of plant and also some muscles that were in the lake near your family’s cabin that you got a lesson. I think we talked about this a little bit earlier about how things that look pretty or good and may not be that bad can actually crowd out the things that are better for you to manage your depression.

Dr. Scott Eilers:

Yeah, exactly. The muscles in particular is a perfect example because yeah, so they’re an invasive species. They’re not supposed to be in that lake. This is the same lake we were talking about before. But what’s interesting about them is they have a filtering effect on the water, and so they actually make the water more clear. And I loved how clear, I remember when I was a kid, there weren’t mus in there and I actually wish I was like, I wish, I hope we get zebra mussels because then the water will be even more clear to look like the ocean. And my dad was a big environmentalist and he was always like, no, you don’t want invasive species. I never understood, I get it. If they’re poisonous or carnivorous, if there’s direct harm, yeah, I get we don’t want that. But if all it does is make the water clearer, if it’s a flower that grows in a field and looks beautiful, what’s the harm in that?

But what I eventually came to understand is there’s direct harm and there’s indirect harm. And the reason that a lot of invasive species are undesirable, even if they don’t do anything, even if they’re not killing other native species, is they take up space, they take up resources. A flower that’s not supposed to be in a certain ecosystem still requires soil, still requires water, and it’s taking that from something that does need to be there. And that flower, while it may be beautiful, doesn’t necessarily provide any value to that ecosystem because it’s not part of the food chain there. The animals might not eat it. It’s just a pretty waste of space basically. And I think there are so many things in our lives that essentially function that way that are invasive species and that are basically pretty wastes of space. The biggest one for me personally was video games.

I really enjoyed video games and I think that they can be a great hobby for a lot of people, but what I noticed in my own life is that I enjoyed video games so much that everything else in my life kind of came second. And all these fundamental mental health behaviors that we’re talking about here today, those are things that I had to try to grudgingly jam into my day because I wanted to have several hours a day available for leisure time. Now, again, for me that was gaming. For some people that’s going to be binge watching your favorite shows doing whatever on social media. This could be anything, but I think it’s really, really important for us to all keep an eye out for what are the things in our lives that aren’t actually providing value to our ecosystem. They might be metaphorically beautiful, meaning this feels really good when you do it, and that’s fine.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t have those things, but you want to be mindful of how much space they’re taking up. Because as a therapist and a coach, one of the biggest things I hear from people when I try to give them guidance is like, I don’t have time. And don’t get me wrong. I know we’re all busy. I know that this life requires a lot out of us. If you really look at even just the amount of time most of us have to work to make a living, it’s a lot. And so I’m not trying to push back on that, as in you have 10 hours of free time a day, but the people who tell me they don’t have time to work out or to get eight hours of sleep, when we really look at their day, there’s usually several hours a day for most of them where they’re doing something that just produces acute pleasure.

And again, it’s okay to have a little bit of that, but if that becomes a cornerstone of your routine, if that becomes a thing you need, if that becomes a thing you prioritize over actual health, necessary behaviors and becomes a reason why you don’t do them, then your ecosystem is out of balance and your life has started to, or maybe has been taken over an invasive species by a thing that is growing unchecked and uncontained. And that can eventually take over your life, even if it’s not something with a physiological addictive element to it. Like drugs, for example. I personally, I identify as a video game addict. I believe that was an addiction to me. And even once I got to a point in life where I had a career and a family, obviously I wasn’t playing games eight hours a day. It wasn’t physically possible, but even when it was something that was only a couple hours, it was the only thing I really looked forward to because it felt so much better to me than everything else I did.

And so work and taking care of myself and even family to a degree, they started to feel obligatory. They started to feel like the things I had to get through to get to the part of my life that I really wanted to get to. And I hated that. I found that to be a miserable and unacceptable perspective for me. It’s like a full removal. I played games with my son and that’s, it was something I had to really pull out by the weeds. And a short while after doing that, I realized that I was starting to rediscover the joy that used to only come from games in the other parts of my life, in my work, in my family, in my relationships, even in things like working out and going to bed on time. Those started to feel good to me because they weren’t constantly being compared to this artificial source of stimulation and joy that provided me with this incredible audio visual experience that nothing consistent in a person’s regular day-to-day life can really replicate. And so it was basically addition by subtraction. My life got better by taking away something that I loved because it raised the average enjoyment of everything else that I did by comparison.

Brett McKay:

Alright, this last lesson I want to talk about, and it’s keep the water flowing, and you got this lesson from some backwater. What lesson did this backwater in the river teach you about depression?

Dr. Scott Eilers:

So that one, yeah, that one was a stream by my parents’ house and it was a pretty small stream, so there were places where there was no water flowing. And it’s interesting because a stream that has water flowing usually is very beautiful. It’s this clean, pristine looking water. But then you’ll see these little pools where the water doesn’t flow and it’s completely different. These plant matter and even dead fish, they start to decay in there and gases build up. They smell horrible, the water looks brown and disgusting, and this is the same body of water. So I look at these same two things that have very different properties, and the only difference between them that creates that different outcome is that one moves and one doesn’t move. And that is also something I have noticed in my own life is when there are periods of my life, when I’m stagnant, when I don’t really have a thing that I’m working on or moving towards, that gets dark quickly for me, that’s when I start to fall into those patterns of kind of hopelessness and nihilism and why am I even here?

What am I even doing any of this for? And when I have any goal to work towards, even if it’s not, I talk to people about uppercase P and lowercase PE purpose, uppercase P is like, why am I here as a human being lowercase P is like, it’s not something that helps all of humanity, but it’s something that’s meaningful to you. And as long as I have something that I am moving towards in life that gives me the internal feeling of a flowing stream of things are getting cleared out and cleansed, and I feel like I’m moving in a good direction. But when I hit those patches of life where I can’t find that and I lack that, I just feel stuck. I feel muddy. I feel gross. And so the lesson for me in that has been to try to always have something to be moving towards. It doesn’t always have to be something grandiose. It doesn’t always have to be something that benefits all of humanity, but just something that’s meaningful to you. And when you achieve that, move the goalpost again and find something else. Because I think we all need that sense of achievement or that sense of purpose to feel like our lives are meaningful or worth living. And if we don’t have that, things are going to get bad pretty quickly.

Brett McKay:

Okay. So yeah, find a hobby,

Dr. Scott Eilers:

Basically. Yeah.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. That’s basically it. And make sure the hobby doesn’t become one of those invasive species. Hobbies, like video games..

Dr. Scott Eilers:

Exactly. 

Brett McKay:

I mean, you have a nice list here. Working out can be a hobby in of itself. That’s my big hobby. Of course, reading. My family likes to backpack. I enjoy that. So yeah, find stuff you like to do, stuff that helps you feel like you’re moving forward towards something and gives you some purpose. Something to look forward to. Well, Scott, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Dr. Scott Eilers:

Yeah, I got a few options there. So I’m pretty active on basically all social media platforms. I have a YouTube channel and a podcast of my own, which is just the videos from my YouTube channel with the audio extracted. I also post short content on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. My personal website is Dr. Scott eilers.com. That’s got both my books on there. I also offer some personal one-on-one coaching. Those are the main areas to find me.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well, Scott Eilers, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Dr. Scott Eilers:

Thank you so much, Brett. I really appreciate it today. I hope people get good value out of this content.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Dr. Scott Eilers. He’s the author of the book, The Light Between The Leaves. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Courage is one of our most prized and celebrated virtues. But once you really start exploring it, the nature of courage is surprisingly hard to pin down.

Here to help us explore the fascinating complications of courage is William Ian Miller, a historian, professor of law, and the author of The Mystery of Courage. Today on the show, Bill explains how centuries of philosophers, soldiers, and storytellers have approached courage and the hard-to-answer questions its manifestations raise. We discuss why courage has long been ranked among the highest virtues, the relationship between fear and courage, the fuzzy line between courage and cowardice, the association of courage and manhood, whether or not courage is domain specific, the difference between offensive and defensive courage, whether martyrs are courageous, whether deeds with evil ends are courageous, how fear, shame, and honor shape brave action, and more.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• The Road to Richmond: The Civil War Memoirs of Maj. Abner R. Small
• If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home by Tim O’Brien
• Good-Bye to All That by Robert Graves
• The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant
• AoM Article: Developing Manly Courage
• AoM Article: 9 Ways to Become More Courageous
• AoM Article: Courage Vs. Boldness — How to Live With Spartan Bravery
• AoM Podcast #380: How to Increase Your Courage and Bravery
• AoM Article: The 54 Best Quotes on Courage
• AoM Article: The Cardinal Virtues — Courage
• AoM Podcast #763: The Perils and Powers of Cowardice
• AoM series on honor

Connect With William Ian Miller

• Bill’s faculty page

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This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.