One of the most neglected virtues of our daily existence is appreciation. —Dale Carnegie 

My career has mostly played out in roles that don’t involve directly managing other people. In late 2021, though, I spent a handful of months in a management role. That short amount of time totally changed my view of a manager’s job, as well as human nature and relationships in general. 

I expected the role to be more business-focused and even scientific in nature. Management content would have you believe that if you follow a certain set of predictable steps, measure the right “KPIs,” and give performance feedback based on a standardized rubric, you’ll be all set. 

The reality, as always, is a bit more nuanced. During my time managing a small team, it was far more about wrangling personalities and aligning expectations than anything else. Above all, though, I quickly realized that what folks mostly want and need is a cheerleader. They want someone to notice their effort and encourage them when the going gets tough. 

As William James once wrote, “The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.” 

It’s not to be managed to a set of desired ends, but appreciated. 

Dale Carnegie, perhaps the most influential self-improvement author of all-time, wholeheartedly agreed with James’ wisdom and made it one of the core principles in How to Win Friends and Influence People: 

Give honest and sincere appreciation. 

He knew that people primarily wanted to feel seen, valued, and respected — and that genuine appreciation is one of the fastest ways to build better relationships at work, at home, and everywhere in between.

The Nourishment of Sincere Appreciation

We nourish the bodies of our children and friends and employees, but how seldom do we nourish their self-esteem? We provide them with roast beef and potatoes to build energy, but we neglect to give them kind words of appreciation that would sing in their memories for years like the music of the morning stars. —Dale Carnegie 

The craving for appreciation is not merely about vanity. Human beings are wired for connection; we need it and thrive on it. In the same way our bodies need food and drink in order to function properly, our spirits need kinship. Giving appreciation is one of the most potent ways we can nourish the people around us. So when someone goes out of their way to tell you, “I noticed what you did, and it mattered,” it hits at the core of what makes us human and fills our emotional tank like nothing else. 

At work, appreciation boosts motivation more effectively than bonuses. In marriage, it fills the relationship bank account. For kids, it builds confidence faster than correction ever could.

Flattery vs. Appreciation

On the flip side of the appreciation coin, mere flattery feels disingenuous and gross. Carnegie drew a hard line between the two:

The difference between appreciation and flattery? That is simple. One is sincere and the other insincere. One comes from the heart out; the other from the teeth out. One is unselfish; the other selfish. One is universally admired; the other universally condemned.

Flattery is a manipulative type of praise that tries to get something in return. Appreciation, on the other hand, is grounded in sincerity. 

Fortunately, humans are generally pretty good at intrinsically noticing the difference between the two. We have a way of feeling it. It’s not easy to fake sincerity or earnestness, which is why certain people — or the certain things that some people say — just hit us as being off. 

True appreciation needs to come from a sincere and honest place or it simply won’t work.    

Making Appreciation a Daily Habit

Every morning, perhaps as part of your journaling or meditation routine, think about someone in your life that you can show your gratitude towards. Friends, coworkers, family members, even your rolodex of loose connections is fine. There isn’t anybody who would respond negatively to a bit of appreciation, even if it’s been a while.  

1. Make It Easy. No need to schedule phone calls or write handwritten letters (unless you want to); a quick email or text message is totally fine, as long as it’s sincere. 
2. Be specific. Generic compliments don’t land. Tell people exactly what you appreciated and why it mattered to you. 
3. Notice effort, not just results. In a society where ghosting of all kinds is commonplace, simply showing up and giving effort is commendable. The ol’ college try really does matter and deserves to be recognized. 
4. Don’t ignore what’s around you every day. Make a special effort to notice things around the house and express appreciation to your partner and kids. As Dale Carnegie said, “We often take our spouses so much for granted that we never let them know we appreciate them.” 

A Virtuous Cycle 

Giving honest and sincere appreciation doesn’t just strengthen relationships, it improves you too. When you make a habit of noticing what’s good in others, you start noticing more good in the wider world. You complain less. You lead better. 

Regularly offering sincere and honest appreciation takes but thirty seconds, costs nothing, and can make a world of difference. 

Be sure to listen to our podcast about Dale Carnegie’s insights for the modern world: 

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Most of us grow up thinking of anger as a problem. We’re told it’s childish, irrational, and something to repress or rise above. As journalist Sam Parker, author of Good Anger: How Rethinking Rage Can Change Our Lives, told me on the podcast, that assumption has left a lot of people more anxious and depressed than they need to be.

The reality of anger is more complicated. Anger is, in fact, a neutral emotion. Yes, it can make you snap at your kids or rage at a reckless driver. But it can also be a beneficial energy that helps you defend your boundaries, clarify your needs, and move forward on your goals.

The key is to learn how to work with anger, rather than against it — to make it your ally. The next time you feel your face get flushed and your pulse start to rise, here are four steps Parker suggested on the show to turn that heat into a positive force:

1. Name It

The first step is to simply recognize that you’re angry. For years, since Parker thought anger was a bad thing, he didn’t acknowledge that it was something that was present in his life. Then one day, while pounding a heavy bag:

I felt this strange surge of energy kind of coming up from somewhere lower down in my body, and I just started punching and swinging away with this kind of energy that I’d never had before, but also this feeling that I’d never had before in my body. And this went on for however long I managed to box for. And afterwards I was kind of sweating and bent over, exhausted. But I felt better than I had in months.

And I realized that the feeling that I tapped into was anger. I was absolutely furious.

And I was thinking about the things in my life that were going wrong and the conversations I needed to have to put them right. And everything was kind of unfurling beautifully in my thoughts. Everything was looking like targets rather than things to be afraid of.

Parker’s realization that he was deeply angry dramatically changed his life. By giving something he had been feeling all along a name, he was able to begin to get a handle on it.

We’ve talked before about the power of labeling emotions. Naming your emotions doesn’t make them disappear, but it does give you a better grip on them. There’s nothing quite so disempowering as knowing there’s an influence working on your thoughts and behaviors, but not being able to register and recognize what it is. Labeling your emotions allows you to evaluate them from an objective distance and gain greater control over what often feels like an uncontrollable force. Once you know, “I feel angry,” you can decide what to do about that.

2. Figure Out What the Anger Is Telling You

Anger is a signal. It imparts information. Psychologists say it usually points to:

• A boundary being crossed
• An unmet need making itself known
• An old wound being prodded

When anger shows up, ask: What does this say about the state of my life? What does this say about me? What does it say about my relationships?

Parker gave the example of feeling slighted at work. Maybe the jab was small, but your reaction feels out of proportion. Instead of brushing it off or blowing up, stop and ask: Why am I feeling so angry? Did that comment feel unfair? Am I feeling overlooked? Is this touching on some longstanding insecurity from my childhood? Once you figure out what anger is trying to tell you, you can figure out how to address its root cause.

3. Give Yourself 20 Minutes to Cool Off

When anger hits, your brain gets scrambled. Parker describes it like this:

You become momentarily disoriented. You can struggle to articulate yourself. You can struggle to understand your own thoughts . . . It’s a sort of mental scrambling.

You don’t want to react when your brain is addled by a surge of anger; you can end up saying or doing the wrong thing and hurting others or your reputation. It’s best to cool off a little before putting the energy of anger to use.

You may have heard that you should count to ten when you’re angry, but the research says it takes a lot longer for your system to reset — about 20 minutes. During that time, rehearsing arguments or plotting payback can just amplify your anger in an unhealthy way. Instead, use the break to distract yourself; Parker recommends listening to a podcast or reading a book. Taking a walk very often helps too — solvitur ambulando!

Parker says that while it is helpful to let your anger diminish a little before you react, you actually don’t want to let it cool down completely; as we’ll talk about next, anger can be a positive source of motivation, and you want to use it to take action while it’s still providing you a little heat.

4. Channel the Energy Into Something Useful

Parker calls anger the most energizing emotion. Once you’ve got it harnessed by labeling it, recognizing what it’s telling you, and letting its most volatile edge pass, you can channel anger’s energy into a productive force.

You might think that anger is like steam in a kettle that simply needs straightforward release. But punching or breaking things, yelling, or kicking over a wastebasket aren’t effective ways to deal with anger; venting without purpose usually just amplifies your rumination, which makes you more angry. Rather than releasing your anger in cathartic bursts, you want to direct it toward more sustained and constructive outlets.

If you’ve identified an interpersonal issue or boundary violation as the cause of your ire, use your anger to give you the boldness to have a difficult conversation with someone. While your anger can provide the push to initiate a forthright discussion, keep the dialogue itself calm and composed.

Even if an anger-causing issue isn’t within your power to resolve, you can still use your anger as a source of general energy; unleashing it during a workout can give you the drive to push yourself harder.

Parker notes that anger can also be used as a spur for tackling creative projects and reaching your goals. He calls it the “I’ll show you” energy. While seeking “revenge” for slights and offenses can sometimes be pursued in an unhealthy way, burning to prove the naysayers and critics wrong can be a very motivating and positive fuel for achievement.  

Anger isn’t a bad thing or a good thing; it’s a neutral emotion that can be used for positive or negative ends. Aristotle had it right: the goal in life isn’t to banish anger but to purposefully direct it — “to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right reason, and in the right way.”

Do that, and anger isn’t dangerous — it’s a force for courage, growth, and greatness.

For more insights on anger, listen to this AoM podcast episode with Sam Parker:

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Most people think of anger as a problem — something to avoid or repress. It’s irrational, immature, and best left behind.

But what if anger isn’t bad? What if it can actually be an incredibly positive, productive, energizing life force?

My guest argues we’ve misunderstood anger — and that doing so has made us more anxious, depressed, and stuck. His name is Sam Parker, and he’s a journalist and the author of Good Anger: How Rethinking Rage Can Change Our Lives. Today on the show, we explore the surprising psychology and philosophy of anger. Sam explains how anger should be understood as a neutral emotion that imparts valuable information. He shares why we confuse anger with aggression, how anger can point to unmet needs and violated boundaries, and why repressing it might be damaging our health. We also talk about anger’s role in work, creativity, and relationships, and how to channel anger to help us achieve more, maintain our self-respect, and live a more grounded life.

If you’ve ever thought anger was something to outgrow, this conversation may just change your mind.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Marcia Reynolds’ TEDx Talk: How to Use Anger as a Force for Good
• AoM Podcast #489: How to Get a Handle on Your Anger
• AoM Article: How Labeling Your Emotions Can Help You Take Control
• AoM Article: Should You Go to Bed Angry?
• AoM Article: How to Make Anger Your Ally

Connect With Sam Parker

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

The ancient art of rhetoric has shaped political policies, influenced social movements, structured legal arguments, and molded cultural narratives throughout history. It’s been used for three thousand years to persuade other people to change their lives.

But what if you could use it to persuade yourself?

My guest today says you can. Jay Heinrichs is the author of Aristotle’s Guide to Self-Persuasion, and he explains how the same rhetorical techniques that great leaders and orators have used for millennia can be turned inward to help you change your life. We discuss how to identify your “soul” as your internal audience, use the concept of kairos to turn chaos into opportunity, create hyperbolic moonshot goals that inspire action even if you fall short, and employ ethos, pathos, and logos to achieve the habits and goals you aspire to. Along the way, we talk about how Jay used these self-leadership tools to go from barely being able to walk to attempting an athletic feat physiologists told him was impossible.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Jay’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #639 — Why You Should Learn the Lost Art of Rhetoric
• AoM series on Rhetoric 101

Connect With Jay Heinrichs

• Jay’s website
• ArgueLab

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

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast. The ancient art of rhetoric has shaped political policies, influenced social movements, structured legal arguments, and molded cultural narratives throughout history. It’s been used for 3,000 years to persuade other people to change their lives. What if you could use it to persuade yourself? My guest today says you can. Jay Heinrichs is the author of Aristotle’s Guide to Self-Persuasion, and he explains how the same rhetorical techniques that great leaders and orators have used for millennia can be turned inward to help you change your life. We discuss how to identify your soul as your internal audience, use the concept of kairos to turn chaos into opportunity, create hyperbolic moonshot goals that inspire action even if you fall short, and employ ethos, pathos, and logos to achieve the habits and goals you aspire to. Along the way, we talk about how Jay used these self-leadership tools to go from barely being able to walk to attempting an athletic feat physiologists told him was impossible. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/selfpersuasion. All right, Jay Heinrichs, welcome back to the show.

Jay Heinrichs: Well, thanks, Brett. It’s nice to be back.

Brett McKay: So we had you on the show way back in 2020 to talk about your book, Thank You for Arguing, which is all about reviving the lost art of classical rhetoric to persuade others. You got a new book out, but this time it’s about using Aristotelian rhetoric to persuade ourselves to be better people. And you talk about at the beginning of the book that it was sort of a midlife rut that kickstarted you exploring whether you could use classical rhetoric to improve your life and become a happier person. Tell us about what was going on there.

Jay Heinrichs: Back in my late 50s, I was suffering from this illness that should be familiar to a lot of men our age, middle age and older. I was depressed and I was feeling very sorry for myself in part because I had this physical problem. It’s called snapping hip syndrome. It’s disgusting. The iliotibial band, which is this tendon that stretches from the knee to the hip, was catching on my hip bone on both sides. And what happens when that happens is you fall down. You literally can’t move. And the reason for this tends to be when you get a really tight butt, like your gluteal muscles are contracted all the time and stress can cause that. Sitting down too much can cause it. All kinds of things can. But basically what was causing it was that I was just tight, like all wound up. And so doctors had, we’d talked about surgery and they said maybe I’d be able to walk again afterwards. So that was out. And I tried pills. I tried everything. Nothing was working until one day my doctor said she’d found somebody who would understand me because I didn’t want to just be able to walk normally again.

I was able to walk with a limp, but then my hips would catch and I’d fall down again and not be able to walk at all. This guy had a new procedure who might be able to fix me. But I thought that wasn’t enough because in order to do the incredibly painful physical therapy, I wanted to do something more than just being able to walk. And I had been a trail runner back through my 30s and 40s, not a great athlete, but an enthusiastic one. And so I thought, how can I possibly talk myself into doing all that it would take? And my wife came up with this idea, which was to persuade myself. She had mentioned the work I’d been doing with clients. I’d worked with NASA, with Harvard fundraisers. And she said, “Have you thought about persuading yourself for once?” I hadn’t, but my wife is really smart. I do everything she says. And so I gave it a shot. I made that attempt.

Brett McKay: Okay, so you’re gonna get a treatment for your snapping hip syndrome. And this treatment, it involves getting a lot of painful injections. It’s very unpleasant. And then you have to do some arduous physical therapy on top of that. And you decide, if I’m gonna be doing all that, I wanna push myself not only to walk again, but to run again. So you’ve got this big challenge ahead of you and to convince yourself to take it on and stick with it, you decide to persuade yourself to do it. And at the beginning of the book, you say this bold statement, that if you’re going to improve yourself, get a little bit better in your life, whether you want to accomplish some goal you have or overcome some obstacle, the master key is self-persuasion. Why do you think self-persuasion is the master key for us to make changes in our lives?

Jay Heinrichs: When you think about it, in order to make a change, you have to do something. And usually that means changing your habits, right? Getting rid of the bad ones and acquiring new ones. And Aristotle was the philosopher of habit. His books, almost all of them talk about habits and how to do that. Why? Because habits put you on autopilot. You don’t have to make choices whether or not to exercise if you simply do it every day. I mean, you think about it, if you floss every day, that’s a lot easier than deciding whether you want to floss in one particular day, which is, when you think about it, kind of disgusting, right? And tedious, going in between every two teeth. The same thing works with diet or exercise or practicing a new instrument or learning a new language. All these things that make a change in your life for the better require a lot of discipline, a lot of motivation. And where do you get the discipline and motivation unless you can talk yourself into doing it? And that’s where persuasion comes in. So the idea my wife had was, what if I could use those tools of persuasion on audiences in general or markets, all the work I’d been doing over the decades, and applying them toward myself to gain these habits that will allow me to make the change I wanted? That’s what this is all about.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve noticed in my own life, any change I’ve made, it’s because I actually wanted it. Like I convinced myself this is what I need to do. And we can convince ourselves with the tools of rhetoric that people like Aristotle wrote about 2000 years ago. So let’s talk about some of this stuff. So typically when we think of rhetoric, it’s about persuading an audience. When we’re persuading ourselves, we’re the audience. But what exactly does that mean? Like what part of ourselves is doing the persuading? What part of ourselves is the audience?

Jay Heinrichs: Yeah, what is the audience when you’re the person doing the manipulation and at the same time the one being manipulated? So this was a big problem. I mean, when my wife said, “Why don’t you persuade yourself?” My first reaction was, well, how can I be the rhetorician and the audience at the same time? So I did a deep dive into Aristotle, reading books I really hadn’t gone into in the past. And I came across this really weird little book titled On the Soul. And so the way Aristotle describes it, your soul is this ideal version of yourself. It’s the person you wish you saw in the mirror. So you think of what’s an ideal Boy Scout, and I was a pretty unsuccessful Boy Scout myself, but I still remember what a Boy Scout is supposed to be. See if I can just from the top of my head.

Brett McKay: Yeah, it’s the Scout law, right?

Jay Heinrichs: Is that what it is? So a Boy Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. That almost duplicates what Aristotle wrote about as the ideal soul. It’s like the ideal Boy Scout. It’s not who you are, but it’s the soul that represents your best self as opposed to your daily self that eats Dunkin’ Donuts or whatever. So the question is, how do you find that soul? You know, where is it? One philosopher claimed to locate the soul. He said it’s in your pituitary gland. But a better way to do it, a more useful way to find your own soul, is to separate your wants from your truest needs. Separate your wants from your needs. This is what Aristotle tells us to do. So our daily self wants things, but those things make us fatter or less healthy, or simply, you know, flatters our ego. We take a job because we think it’s prestigious, and even though we know it will make us miserable. Your soul is telling you, “No, don’t do that,” whereas your daily self is saying, “I’m going to take this because then people will respect me.

Your soul, because it can be such a nag if you really pay attention to it, thinking, what do I really need? What is it that’s important to me? That can be pretty annoying. I mean, when I was working on my own soul or discovering it, I kind of wished my soul would do something stupid and embarrass itself in front of strangers, you know, the way I do. But my soul is my audience, and my job is to convince myself that I’m worthy of that audience. Like, I’ll show it. I really can live up to it. And I found that to be a really powerful tool because it allowed me to use all the other tools of rhetoric, sort of thinking of my soul as an extension of me or maybe something that’s deeply internal to me, but something that’s a little different from my daily self. And that way, I had an audience I could persuade.

Brett McKay: Okay, so make sure I understand this. The daily self is the audience and your soul is the persuader, or is it the opposite?

Jay Heinrichs: It’s the opposite. So your daily self is the one every day that tries to prove you’re worthy of your soul. So, if you’re about to skip a workout, say, you say to yourself, “What’s my soul going to think?” Because I need to convince it that I have the kind of character that’s worthy of it. And at the same time, there are other things you can do to sort of manipulate the soul, and I’m hoping we can get into that. And those are the tools of ethos, pathos, and logos.

Brett McKay: I love that. So you’re looking for a way to help yourself admire yourself, in a way.

Jay Heinrichs: Exactly. And when you’re helping yourself admire yourself, that admiring self is your soul. It’s your better you. It’s like the really, the coolest, most awesome, impressive part of you that deep down is who you truly are.

Brett McKay: Okay, so your soul is the best part of yourself. That’s your audience, and your day-to-day self is the persuader. And you want to use your day-to-day self to persuade your soul that you’re worthy of it. And one rhetorical tactic that’s inspired by the ancient Greeks that can help us persuade ourselves is this idea of kairos. It’s K-A-I-R-O-S. What’s kairos?

Jay Heinrichs: Kairos is so cool. And it’s funny that so few people study it. I kind of hope they’ll start. So kairos is what helps you determine what your goals are and what your big achievements are going to be. So kairos is the art of opportunity. And it’s a way of interpreting the most chaotic moments in their lives. Now, I think we’re going through, as the world and nation in particular, we’re going through a very chaotic time. We don’t know what’s going to happen. Things are very confusing. Pure chaos. Now, what’s interesting is the ancient Greeks and Romans actually saw chaos as an opening. So a kairotic moment is this time of crisis, this chaotic moment. Those who can keep their heads can push through this opening, this gap. And in fact, the original kaos in Greek, where we get chaos from, means gap. It doesn’t mean horror. It means something that just is something you need to go through. And if you look at great moments in history or great inventions in technology, they tend to happen at the most chaotic times. And in rhetoric, that’s called the kairotic times. It’s the best time to take action.

So now where Aristotle comes in on all this is in his theory of rhetoric. So one way to understand kairos is to think in terms of the tenses. So, and Aristotle described the rhetoric of each tense, past, present, and future. So the past tense, if you’re thinking about chaos and kairotic times, like the time we’re in right now, we tend to think about going back to the past and somehow restoring the better days. But the past tense also has to do with crime and punishment. Like who made this happen? And they should be punished. What went wrong? Who’s to blame? Now that can be useful. It’s not entirely something to ignore. But then also people use the present tense, which is all about values, what’s right and wrong, who’s good and who’s bad. So we tend to attack people who are the bad people who caused all the things, the bad things we think are happening today. And Aristotle actually said, “If you want to make a change in your own life, as well as in the world, you need to focus on the future.” And Aristotle called this kind of rhetoric that focuses on the future, deliberative rhetoric.

So you’ve got the past, the present, and the future. Which is going to actually fix things? That’s what you need to focus on. And so I tell a story in my previous book, Thank You for Arguing, about how my son George, when he was 15, used up all the toothpaste in the bathroom. And when I blamed him, he was making fun of me because he had heard me lecture about rhetoric at the dinner table for years. But he said, when I yelled at him saying, “Who used up all the toothpaste?” He said, “That’s not the point, is it, Dad? The point is, how are we going to keep this from happening again?” Now see what he was doing? He was switching the tense from the past tense, crime and punishment, to the future tense. How are we going to fix things? And by the way, if you’re ever in trouble for something, or someone blames you for something, or calls you a name or whatever, you can say, “Call me whatever you want, or I may or may not have screwed up, but how are we going to fix things?” That’s deliberative rhetoric. And in a time of chaos, these kairotic moments, when we have a tendency to panic, return to the old days, or get angry at people, deliberative rhetoric lets us say, “How are we going to fix things?

How can I use this time to make things better, or to get better myself?” And so back in my own kairotic moment, when I was having this late midlife crisis, my aging body, and this depression I was in, I found very confusing. This doesn’t seem to be me. Deliberative rhetoric and this idea of kairos made me reframe the situation. I thought, I’m not drowning in a whirlpool. Maybe I’m looking at a gap. And the question is, how do I get through to the other side of that gap?

Brett McKay: I love that. So yeah, instead of thinking about, “Oh, if I could only just go back to when I was 30 or 40, or what happened? What could I have done differently?” Using that past tense in this kairotic moment you had, you thought, you focused on the future. What can I do now? What can I do to make things better?

Jay Heinrichs: Exactly. And it’s a great way to understand what the situation really is without getting all panicky and negative about it. And yeah, if I wanted to go back and be a not-so-awesome 30-year-old, it’s, in a way, thinking about this kairotically in terms of navigating some gap. You know, the gap was between my youth and old age. And what gets me through that is being an awesome old guy.

Brett McKay: And so anyone can use this. So let’s say you’re a guy and you’re in a job that’s just making you miserable. You can see this instead of like, it’s just terrible. It’s like, this is a moment of kairos. This is an opportunity to exercise my ability to harness the future, like exercise my ability to improvise and take action.

Jay Heinrichs: Right. And one way to do that is if you’re thinking in terms of gaps, what exactly are the gaps? First of all, what’s making you most unhappy at work? Can you fix that while remaining in the same job? And if you can’t, what are the solutions? And the other thing is, what’s blocking you? What’s blocking you from getting another job? What’s blocking you from fixing the things that make you unhappy at work? So you think in terms of obstacles, the obstacles don’t necessarily prevent you because there’s always some space between them. That’s what chaos is all about. And kairos allows you not just to choose where the gaps are, but when’s the best time to act.

Brett McKay: So another rhetorical tool you talk about that we can use to persuade others, but we can maybe use to persuade ourselves, are tropes. I want to talk about a specific trope here in a bit, hyperbole, but just generally, what is a rhetorical trope?

Jay Heinrichs: A trope is anything that plays pretend. I mean, if you see it that way, it pretends something is not exactly what it is. So a metaphor is the most common trope. If I say, “The moon is a balloon,” you know the moon is not some inflatable bit of rubber, but it’s like one. And so if I say it is one, you start seeing the moon a little bit differently. You think about it floating. There’s a lot of unconscious brain work that goes on if somebody uses a metaphor. Then there’s other metaphors like irony, where you pretend to be serious when you’re saying something else. I mean, every teenager uses irony when somebody drops a tray in the cafeteria and they yell, “Nice,” as if they’re complimenting the person. I mean, the Southerners, especially Southern women, will say, “Bless her heart,” you know, not exactly praising. So those are what tropes do. They pretend one thing while actually meaning another, and they can actually change people’s whole views of reality.

Brett McKay: Okay. So one trope that you used is hyperbole. Before we talk about how you used it on yourself, hyperbole on yourself, what are some examples of great rhetoricians using hyperbole in their speeches?

Jay Heinrichs: Oh, my gosh. So hyperbole is the trope of exaggeration, where you say something is bigger or more important or tinier, for that matter, than what it really is in real life, and then pretend that that exaggeration is a true thing. So if you look at every great successful revolution of every kind, they start with a hyperbole. I mean, you think about, well, the American Revolution, this gaggle of British colonies, not all of whom got along all that well with each other, decided that they were going to push off the greatest military power in the world, the United Kingdom, and at the same time create a brand new political system that everybody around the world will someday imitate. That is totally hyperbolic. So when you think about it, all the great visionaries were hyperbolists. Think of Apple Computer. That arose out of this crazy hyperbole that people would have their own personal computers at a time when massive mainframes and terminals maybe in everybody’s home was the vision of the day. So, you think about that. If you ever want to do something amazingly great, first you have to sort of believe in the impossible, and that by definition is a hyperbole, if you can get people to believe it. That’s a trope.

Brett McKay: Another famous hyperbole, JFK’s moonshot speech, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade,” because we had just put someone into space, and the idea we’re going to get someone on the moon, that’s big. 

Jay Heinrichs: In a decade.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Jay Heinrichs: That is like, and we didn’t even have the technology to do that. Yeah, I mean, that’s brilliant. It’s a good, and you know, part of that speech that’s really interesting is he said, “We’re going to do this and do the other hard things,” he said. What’s really interesting about that is one way I started thinking about the hyperbole is if you have this grand moonshot goal, it actually helps you think about all the other hard things. It makes you believe you can do the other hard things as well, even if you’re failing at that one goal. I mean, imagine if we didn’t reach the moon in 1970, but it took a few years more. Even then, we would have been so far ahead in technology and beating the pants off the Soviet Union and all that good stuff that it would make us believe we could do other things. And the fact is we did achieve it, and it made us believe in all the other things as well, that we could do the hard things in general.

Brett McKay: So how did you use hyperbole in your quest to maybe overcome your snapping hip syndrome?

Jay Heinrichs: The etymology of hyperbole comes from two Greek words, hyper, which means above or beyond, and bállō, which means to throw. So bállō is actually where we get the English word ball. So hyperbole literally translated means to throw beyond. A hyperbole throws beyond actuality, which is kind of this amazing work in the imagination, but it’s more than that. And I thought personally, in my case, what if I created my own like capital H hyperbole? I would create an image of myself as this record-breaking athlete. Now, I never was a great athlete. I was an enthusiastic outdoorsman at best. But I would prove, you know, even though I couldn’t walk well and it looked like my condition may worsen to the point where I’d be in a wheelchair, I would prove my hyperbole by being the first person over 50 to run his age up this classic mountain here where I live in New Hampshire. Olympic skiers had been using it for years to test their fitness. Only a dozen people had ever run their age, which means reaching the top of this mountain in fewer minutes than their olden years. And I’d be the first old person to do it, the first over 50.

Never mind the fact that doctors had told me I’d never run again. And two physiologists told me that even if I were a good old athlete, they thought it was physically impossible to do because of the amount of oxygenation you need to have in order to run up this very steep, difficult mountain in fewer minutes than I was old in years. And that was to be my hyperbole. This was what was going to get me to do all the painful training over that time. But so just to make this clear, that was my hyperbole. But what I suggest to readers of the book is that this isn’t a fitness book. It’s about creating your own hyperbole, to create something exciting, some crazy big goal, with the idea that even if you fail to achieve it, you’re still way ahead. It’s this great motivational technique. So, imagine giving a speech in a foreign language. Instead of just learning the language, going someplace and delivering this scary talk, or learning to play the guitar and then busking performing on the streets of Manhattan, or learning to cook, and not just cooking a decent meal, but serving haute cuisine to a whole bunch of snobs to raise money for a good cause or something. Those are all hyperboles. And my book actually offers kind of a technique to come up with your own.

Brett McKay: I love that idea of creating a moonshot for yourself because it can be inspiring, and you might reach it. You reach it great, but I think the benefit is it’ll get you to do those things that are good for you. Along the way, you’ll be better for even just attempting that big moonshot hyperbole goal.

Jay Heinrichs: Exactly.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think that’s a cool tactic. We’re going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So let’s talk about another way you used Aristotle’s ideas of rhetoric on yourself. I think we talked about this last time in our last conversation about rhetoric. It’s the three means of persuasion. We got ethos, pathos, and logos. Let’s talk about ethos first, because Aristotle thought that was the most powerful, most important one. Recap, what is ethos? And then talk about how did you use that means of persuasion on yourself?

Jay Heinrichs: So Aristotle’s ethos is your projected character. It’s what people think of you, or it’s your brand. It’s whether your audience likes and trusts you. And this is why Aristotle thought it was most powerful, because if you like and totally trust somebody, you’re really likely to basically do what they say. That’s your leader. So now the ideal ethos, Aristotle says, three characteristics. And of course, he said them in Greek, but I translated them from the Greek and simplified them as what I call craft, caring, and cause. So first comes craft. You want your audience to think you know what you’re doing. You have the knowledge and the experience to solve whatever problem there is at hand. That’s craft. The caring part of it means your audience thinks you have only their best interest at heart. You’re selfless. You’re totally not selfish. It’s all about them. Then there’s cause, which has to do with values, with your audience believing you share those same values and that you live up to them. You’re a good person, right? You have a good soul. Now, when it comes to how I persuaded myself, that audience, as we talked about earlier, is my very own Aristotelian soul.

And my job was to convince that soul that I have an ethos that’s worthy of it, that I have the craft, that I knew how to get in shape and knew how to develop the habits, that I was selfless about it. This wasn’t about what I wanted from day to day. I wanted to read books with a cat in my lap. That’s what I really wanted. But my need was deeper. I wanted to be able to run my age. And then came the cause part, what I deeply valued. And that’s what connected me most closely with my soul. And that was the biggest secret of all, this idea that I was projecting a worthy ethos to my soul that allowed me not just to create these habits and believe in them that they could actually work, but to stick to them from day to day.

Brett McKay: Yeah. One of the tools you use to do that is decorum, correct?

Jay Heinrichs: Yeah. So decorum is how you make your audience think you’re one of them. And actually several days a week during the school year, I talk to high school and college classes and law school classes. And I talk to students whose classes have adopted my books. Now, the problem I have is that my children are older than these teachers now. And so how do I make people believe I’m one of them? And so there are certain techniques you can do. One is to understand their language, not necessarily use every word of it. But the most important thing I tell people is say before you talk to any kind of audience, “I’m going to love these people.” And projecting love, believe it or not, which honors your audience and makes you thrilled to be with them, makes you appear thrilled to be with them, actually works. So now how do you do that with your own soul? I decided that the most important thing was to try to love my soul as much as I could. And I know this is getting a little squirrely here, but really what it comes down to is another tool of rhetoric that Aristotle describes in many of his books, which is this idea of phylos.

And phylos is this idea of ultimate friendship, of being willing to do whatever it takes for the other person. And that’s partly what caring is, but it’s also about what decorum is. So decorum is this idea that you’re one of them, you’re very close to them, and you’ll do anything for them. So if you think of your soul as like your very best friend, and you’ll do anything for it, and you know at the same time your soul will back you up at any time and forgive you for these temporary lapses, which are inevitable, then that’s decorum. That’s acting as if you’re part of the tribe, with you and your soul the only members.

Brett McKay: And it sounds like one thing that you might need to do if your day-to-day self isn’t there to where your soul self is at yet, is fake it. Like if you want to be healthy, think of yourself as an athlete, but you’re not there right now. Just do athlete things. And then your soul will be like, “Oh, hey, this guy, this guy’s trying. Like he’s trying to be me here, and I’m gonna like this guy.”

Jay Heinrichs: Oh yeah. So weightlifters describe this phenomenon. It’s a joke, but they call it Invisible Lat Syndrome. So your back muscles from a whole lot of pull-ups get a little bit bigger. So you walk around as if they’re 10 times the size they are with your arms out as if you’re a well-armed policeman or something. So walking around like that actually can convince you. And one of the things that I found myself doing, this is faking until you make it, but it’s also a kind of decorous act. It’s pretending I’m so close to my soul, I’m already there. And that was, I would, when I still found it a little bit difficult walking after this procedure this doctor gave me, which was weeks long and involved a lot of very painful shots to flood the zone of my nervous system so that my gluteal muscles will stop contracting. I still was walking with kind of a limp. So I turned it into a sort of swagger. So I walked around as if I was like this really cool athlete instead of this old guy with a limp. And eventually as I overcame the limp itself, in the meantime, my brain had changed and I really kind of believed that I was capable of being more of an athlete than I was in reality. So that’s faking until you make it, but it’s also getting close to my soul, like what my soul really wanted to think of myself as.

Brett McKay: You know who I think did this? Ernest Hemingway. So I’m watching that Ken Burns documentary on Hemingway. And one thing I’m watching about right now is how Hemingway, there’s like this myth around Hemingway, but he created that myth. Like he had this idea of like ideal Hemingway. And then I think he tried to do the things that ideal Hemingway would do. And I think it got him into trouble, but I think that’s what he was doing. He had this ideal of himself, his best self, and then he tried to do those things, whether that was hunting in Africa, boxing, just doing all those manly Ernest Hemingway things.

Jay Heinrichs: That is such a great example. And so in rhetoric, there’s this term called actio, which is Latin for acting. And it means acting in both senses of the word. It means playing pretend, like you’re acting a part, but also means action. So to project a certain character before you take an action allows yourself to sort of play a role that then you try to take on in real life. And Hemingway is a brilliant example of that.

Brett McKay: Okay, so we talked about ethos. Let’s talk about the next means of persuasion, which is pathos. What is pathos? And then how did you use it on yourself?

Jay Heinrichs: So pathos has to do with emotion. And in rhetoric, it has to do with your ability to change your audience’s mood. So there are lots of tools doing that. And one that worked really well for me. So by the way, to change my mood from depressed loser to like aspiring athlete and optimist. One of the things that I found that really worked was self-deprecating humor. And instead of telling myself what a loser I was every time I failed at something or made a mistake, I learned to laugh at those mistakes and sort of forced myself to do it until I did it naturally. And I actually, this is still working for me. The other day, I was asked to do a favor for a friend. I live on 150 acres and I cut a lot of my own firewood. So I’m pretty good with a chainsaw. And so this guy asked me if I would cut down a cherry tree at his condo development. So cherry trees are awful to cut down. They lean in all directions and you never know which way the damn thing’s gonna fall. And here it is, if this tree fell the wrong 

Way, it would crash through a stranger’s glass door on the ground floor. So, and of course I’m cutting this thing. I made a big mistake in the angle I was cutting and my chainsaw got stuck. And I’d forgotten to bring my ax and the other tools you need like wedges to get your chainsaw unstuck. Anyway, so the chainsaw was simply stuck. I live 40 minutes away. I didn’t have time to go back and get the other tools. So I drove home, leaving the chainsaw embarrassingly in the tree so that everybody in this condo development could see some idiot had left a chainsaw in a tree that was partly cut. That night it got windy and the tree fell, missing this glass door by like two inches. I mean, it was right there with a chainsaw still sticking out of it in the worst possible way so everybody could see it. I came back the next day with my ax and my wedges and got the chainsaw out and cut the tree up and everything was fine. Now, before I started practicing the rhetoric on myself, I would have said, “You can never face these people again.

Just leave the chainsaw there and buy a new one.” And instead I thought, this is just a sort of idiotic thing you do, Jay. And the great thing is you always fix it. So I laughed, I went back and fixed it and I kind of felt better for it. And nobody in the condo, they were very kind people. They watched me as I cut up the tree and nobody was laughing at me. God bless them all.

Brett McKay: Another example of a famous person who maybe they were using pathos on themselves and they just didn’t know it, FDR, Franklin Roosevelt. So we all know he had polio. He couldn’t walk, he was in a wheelchair. And I remember reading a biography about him. And when he was in his braces, he would often fall down, especially on like slick marble floor because the metal would just scrape and he would just fall down. And instead of engaging in self-pity and just like, “Oh, I’m such an idiot.” He just acted like it wasn’t a big deal. And he kind of kept that smile on his face and he’d say, “Hey, can someone help me up here?” Like people knew that he couldn’t walk, but he just had that big grin and just exuded levity and confidence.

Jay Heinrichs: Yeah. And so, you know, it’s interesting. You see the same thing in toddlers. Where, you know, a two-year-old falls down, which happens often, and scrapes their knee or whatever. And you always see this moment where the toddler looks around at the adults, especially the parent, and sees their reaction first. And if the parent looks horrified or rushes, “Oh my gosh, my baby is hurt,” the kid will cry. And when, I’m not sure this shows good parenting on my part, but when my two children were toddlers, when they fell down and there’d be that moment, a kind of kairotic moment when you think about it, like what’s the action to take here? I would quick look at the concrete or the floor or the ground, whatever, and I’d check and see if it was okay, which would make the kid angry more often than not, but much less rarely cry. Their mother would come rushing to them and they would always cry. And there’s something about doing that to yourself where are you going to be the one who sort of jokingly checks the floor or are you going to be the one who immediately thinks, this is awful?

And that’s a way to change your mood. Now, there’s another tool I have to talk about, which is actually more effective, which is repeating the same things over and over again, to have an expression when you’re in a bad mood that improves your mood. And this is where those cheesy affirmations, the stuff they used to sell, like eight track tapes for you to play in your car.

Brett McKay: Oh yeah, like Stuart Smalley, I’m good enough, I’m smart enough and gosh darn it, people like me. 

Jay Heinrichs: Yeah. And you know what? I mean, there are ways to do that. And I’m hoping we can talk about a way to use a particular rhythm to do that, which rhetoricians invented many, many years ago. But the big thing is repeating them. And there’s something that neurobiologists and neurologists have discovered, which is there’s a part of your brain, see if I can remember the term, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. That’s a part of your brain that actually controls our view of reality. And it also is very responsive to repetition. So if you repeat things often enough, or if you see things often enough on social media, even if they’re untrue, you start to believe them. It becomes your reality. And it’s that part of your brain, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, that actually starts changing the world for you. And actually repeating these stupid affirmations to yourself stops making them seem stupid if you repeat them often enough, and it becomes your idea of reality. And you can do it in very specific ways that actually change the way you see things happening around you and see the way you’re actually behaving. Now, so beyond that and what we call affirmations today, in the old days, they called charms, which were expressions that actually made magic happen.

And so to this day, you can find, people dig up all the time these leaden objects with expressions written on them that would cure people or curse people, whatever. These were charms, but they were really repeated things. You were supposed to say them over and over again, and it becomes your idea of reality. You could make magic happen. You repeated things often enough that would change reality. And rhetoric does the same thing by changing your brain. Now, there’s another factor here in terms of pathos, and that is you can actually make yourself into a kind of charm. And Aristotle wrote about this. The perfect ethos actually has a magical effect on an audience, which is charisma. And the word charisma comes from the Greek word for charm. So a charming person originally meant someone who had sort of a magical effect on people. And you see that with some Hollywood actors or when politicians like JFK or Martin Luther King, they were seen often enough in a perfect kind of character, at least according to their followers, enough that people changed the way they saw them and saw reality as a result. Those are the most powerful tools of pathos have to do with charms and repetition.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned there’s a specific way you can formulate those mantras or charms that make them more effective. What is that way?

Jay Heinrichs: Well, there’s something called the paen, P-A-E-N, which originally was a god that would protect soldiers from harm in ancient times. So when they would run in a battle, they would pray to the goddess paen. So they realized that if you do this with a certain rhythm, and actually, Marcus Tullius Cicero, this ancient orator and one of the great rhetoricians, wrote about this. If you repeat it with a series of short and long syllables, that becomes that much more effective. It’s more convincing. There’s something in the brain that’s not fully understood yet, I think someday it will be, that allows you to do this. So in Homer, he used paens a lot, like golden-haired far shooter, son of Zeus. And you repeat that often enough, and you really believe that this was a real character. Now, you can see that in basketball games in the Ivy League. People will be chanting, “Repel them, repel them, make them relinquish the ball,” which is silly. But on the other hand, it has this particular rhythm that actually works. So these charms that people dig up actually had these same rhythms on it, these paen rhythms.

So I use them myself, and I repeat them over and over again. And these rhythms become memorable. And so my own posture tends to be terrible. So I tell myself all the time, head on a swivel, not in my lap. That’s short and long rhythms with this kind of convincing way. When I was running up this mountain, this mountain Moosilauk in New Hampshire to try to run my age, in training for that, I repeat things to myself like, “My legs love rocks. I flow up rocks.” And stupid as that was, my brain changed to the point where my legs were loving rocks, which are the most horrible thing in the world. I mean, these were boulders I was running up. And I actually was convincing myself that I wasn’t kind of hopping in a weird, unrhythmic way. I was flowing up those rocks. That’s where the peon comes in.

Brett McKay: All right, so come up with your own charm by using a paen. So it starts with like a long sentence and a short sentence? Is that like the rhythm you want? 

Jay Heinrichs: A long And short phrase and syllables. It’s short syllables and long syllables. You don’t have to be too precise about it. But marketers have used this all the time. I mean, the New York Times came up with the first great paen logos. All the news that fit to print. That long and short syllables that convinced people that this was a newspaper of record. And Lay’s potato chips. Bet you can’t eat just one. The quicker picker upper for Bounty Towels. I could go on.

Brett McKay: No, okay. I love that.

Jay Heinrichs: But it convinced people. It made billions for marketers and companies.

Brett McKay: Yeah, so find one for yourself and repeat it to yourself, even though it might seem silly. It can work.

Jay Heinrichs: Yeah, and part of this is talking about mood. Do it ironically in the beginning. Like smile while you do it, because it’s going to be stupid. And then repeat it often enough that it’s not stupid. I mean, another thing about irony we’re talking about. Irony is another trope. Whenever I completed these horrible workouts I had to do, I was working out four to six hours a day in order to get myself into condition where I could run my age up this mountain. My wife, bless her, would always ask me how it went. And instead of saying, “It sucked, what do you think?” I would say, “Refreshing,” ironically. And, you know, after a while, I never truly believed my workouts, I still don’t, are refreshing. Part of me kind of thought they’re not so bad, they actually make me feel better in the long run.

Brett McKay: Okay, so we talked about pathos. Let’s talk about logos. That’s logic. So what is Aristotelian logos? Because it’s not how we think it is. I think typically we think of logos has got to be these iron clad arguments, no fallacies. Aristotle didn’t think that when it comes to logos.

Jay Heinrichs: No, not when it comes to rhetorical logos, which isn’t pure logic, in fact, it can be the opposite. You know, fallacies can actually convince people, but even as formal logic has confused people for centuries.

Brett McKay: Oh man, there’s a period I went through Aristotle’s like works Nicomachean Ethics is great, metaphysics, interesting, and then I get to his book about syllogisms. I’m like, oh, just started snoring. This was not fun.

Jay Heinrichs: Oh God, topics, even worse.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Jay Heinrichs: You know, even Sherlock Holmes gets it wrong, gets Aristotelian logic wrong. He talks all the time about using deduction to solve crimes when he’s actually using induction, which is a kind of logic that gathers facts and uses them to make a conclusion. And actually, I talk about formal logic that way because actually Aristotelian logic can let us deal with this firehose of information and fake news that comes to us through our devices. Aristotle taught us how to interpret facts and determine their value and reach conclusions without getting all emotional about it. And that can actually help in terms of improving your mood and not think that everything in the world is going entirely wrong. But using illogic to convince yourself to do the habits your soul tells you you need to do can work even better. So some fallacies I found work great on me. One of the best was the fallacy of antecedent, which has to do with, if something has always been done this way, it always will be. Or if something went well, it always will be. Or if something has always gone wrong, it always will.

So I happen to be an absolute master, and I don’t mean to brag, but nobody’s better, at least in my household of two people, at loading the dishwasher. I am brilliant at it. My wife is terrible. I swear she stands back and throws dishes into the thing. It’s hurt our marriage slightly, but now I’m the dishwasher loader and she’s allowed me to do it. But here’s the thing, this leads to a second fallacy, which is the false analogy. So I’m good at loading the dishwasher. Therefore, I’m brilliant at organization and problem solving. Because I can load the dishwasher, I could probably run a corporation, right? Same thing. So this is a fallacy. But that same kind of combination of things, I’m really good at this one thing. Now think of an analogy, however far away from that, that lets you overcome imposter syndrome or convince yourself you’re qualified to apply for a job that might otherwise seem above your station. So these fallacies can really work, again, if you repeat them often enough that you actually believe in them.

Brett McKay: Okay, so with logos, we’re gonna use logical fallacies for a positive end, convincing ourselves that we can do something, our moonshot goal that we have.

Jay Heinrichs: Exactly. And so that’s the thing, that moonshot goal, if you do it, if you set it up right, is impossible. So it’s fallacious logic or illogic that convinces you that you can even do it. Because if it is literally impossible, you won’t be able to do it. But to believe that it’s impossible and then to believe you can do it, that’s the greatest kind of fallacy.

Brett McKay: So we’ve talked about some of the rhetorical tools in your book, there’s a lot more. But I’m curious, how did your experiment go in using rhetoric and self-persuasion in overcoming this snapping hip syndrome you had?

Jay Heinrichs: Well, so I decided I would make the actual attempt on one day, my 58th birthday, August 27th.

Brett McKay: That’s Kairos.

Jay Heinrichs: That’s Kairos, very good. That was my one opportunity. I was gonna do it or I was gonna fail. And I deliberately, to test the tool, this whole experiment was to test the tools, to see if they would work, what would work, what didn’t. And I thought putting as much pressure on myself as possible would be one way to test the tools. And so one day, my birthday. Besides, when I turned 58, that gave me an additional minute to run my age, which meant running it in less than 58 minutes. So I’d have another minute. And for every minute less than 58 that it took me to make it to the summit, I would declare myself that much younger in years. So when you think about it, it makes as much sense as declaring your age in terms of number of years. So to prepare for that day, I had spent nine months in training, four to six hours a day, after this horrible procedure with this orthopedist who injected me with these hundreds of shots of dextrose, sugar water, to flood my nerves with pain. So I did everything I could with all these things of rhetoric.

And then on that one day, at 6 o’clock in the morning, I was at the trailhead of this mountain, 3.7 miles, 2,800 feet of elevation up these very slick rocks with a river running in waterfalls down beside it. Very difficult kind of run. And the conditions were bad. It was way too warm and humid. And the older you get, the harder it is for your body to deal with heat and to allow yourself to oxygenate. And the whole way up, I didn’t look at my watch the entire time. When I got to the summit and I hit the button on my watch, I didn’t even look then. I just realized it didn’t matter so much what my time was, whether I’d gotten younger by running my age or not. I discovered, and this is absolutely true. I know this sounds self-helpish, but it’s true. I was happier than I’d been in years. And that effect has lasted ever since. And this is years later. It’s taken me a long time to do the research to complete this book. But the rhetoric itself had worked. And when I looked at my watch, I then discovered, well, I won’t tell you. It’s going to be a mystery, you have to read the book.

Brett McKay: This is awesome. So it sounds like you can use Aristotle’s rhetoric to persuade yourself. So we encourage people to go check out your book. So where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Jay Heinrichs: Well, I have a Substack newsletter. If you look up my name, you’ll find it. It tells all about the tools of rhetoric and self-persuasion. But I also have a website called ArgueLab, all one word, arguelab.com. 

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Jay Heinrichs, thanks for the time. It’s been a pleasure. 

Jay Heinrichs: Brett, this is a real pleasure. Thank you.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Jay Heinrichs. He’s the author of the book Aristotle’s Guide to Self-Persuasion. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, jayheinrichs.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/self-persuasion, where you find links to resources we delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us an email on podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member if you think we’re something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay. Remind you to listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

All the neurochemicals in the brain have to do with life in the present. Except for one: dopamine. Dopamine is the one neurochemical that looks to the future. It anticipates what may be to come and drives you towards it.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

When you’re feeling stressed, burnt out, and anxious — when you’re striving and achieving but still finding yourself persistently dissatisfied with life — you might start looking for answers beyond what’s offered by contemporary self-help.

One ancient philosophy that can cast light on the sources of and solutions to our seemingly modern dilemmas is Buddhism. If you’ve ever been intrigued by Buddhism but admittedly only have a vague sense of what it’s all about, Brendan Barca — co-author of The Daily Buddhist: 366 Days of Mindful Living — will walk you through its foundational principles.

We begin our conversation with how Buddhism is similar to and different from other ancient philosophies like Stoicism, and Brendan offers an accessible introduction to the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. In the second half of our conversation, we explore how Buddhist principles and practices can be applied to our everyday modern lives and help you deal with the anxiety created by living in an impermanent world, shift your perspective on daily challenges, and cultivate greater compassion and patience. We discuss different meditation methods, the real purpose of meditation, and how to get started with it as a beginner. We end our conversation with the Buddha’s final words and what it means to “strive with vigilance.”

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Shamatha Meditation
• Vipassana (Insight) Meditation
• Tonglen Meditation
• AoM Article: A Primer on Meditation

Connect With Brendan Barca

• The Daily Buddhist website
• The Daily Buddhist on IG

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. When you’re feeling stressed, burnt out, and anxious, when you’re striving and achieving but still finding yourself persistently dissatisfied with life, you might start looking for answers beyond what’s offered by contemporary self-help. One ancient philosophy that can cast light on the sources of, and solutions to, our seemingly modern dilemmas is Buddhism. If you’ve ever been intrigued by Buddhism, but admittedly only have a vague sense of what it’s all about, Brendan Barca, co-author of The Daily Buddhist, 366 Days of Mindful Living, will walk you through its foundational principles. We begin our conversation with how Buddhism is similar to and different from other ancient philosophies like Stoicism, and Brendan offers an accessible introduction to the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. In the second half of our conversation, we explore how Buddhist principles and practices can be applied to our everyday modern lives and help you deal with the anxiety created by living an impermanent world, shift your perspective on daily challenges, and cultivate greater compassion and patience. We discuss different meditation methods, the real purpose of meditation, and how to get started with it as a beginner.

We end our conversation with the Buddha’s final words and what it means to strive with vigilance. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/Buddhism. All right, Brendan Barca, welcome to the show.

Brendan Barca: Thanks so much for having me, Brett. It’s great to be here.

Brett McKay: So you and your wife have a new book out called The Daily Buddhist, where you provide 366 daily devotionals based on Buddhist principles and philosophy. Let’s start with your story. How did you find your way into Buddhism?

Brendan Barca: Yeah, so my journey into Buddhism really began in my mid-20s. I was a sales professional in finance up in Boston and really grew up without a concrete religion or philosophy to help guide me, and I was experiencing a lot of burnout. I was like your typical, I don’t know, typical for at least for me in my environment, but type A person who’s striving and trying to do and accomplish and try to achieve and found that even after a few years of trying to just go too hard, I was stressed. I was burnt out and I was anxious. And so it led me to look for answers and look for ways to help cope with that. And I remember actually to this day, I was having brunch with a friend who was my age, so about 25, and she actually said that her psychic, I didn’t know she had a psychic, had told her to try meditation. And that was actually the first person I knew personally who was going to try meditation on their own. And to me, it kind of jumped out as a cool idea and something that could help me what I was going through in terms of that stress.

And so I went home that night and started meditating for the first time. And now 10 years later, I’ve never stopped. I don’t know if she continued, but I kept going. And that eventually led me to discovering different spiritual books, read some books by Eckhart Tolle, and then started to read some books that were more traditional Buddhists like Pema Chödrön’s work or Sharon Salzberg. And then eventually I moved to Brooklyn from Boston. I met my wife randomly at a bar. And one of the things we had in common was our meditation practice. And she was originally from Nepal and she grew up traditionally Tibetan Buddhist. And so that really carved the path for me to really take my mindfulness and meditation into Buddhist philosophy and practice and learn with her. And now seven and a half years later, we have made this really our life’s work. And that’s where the book comes from. So it started about a decade ago.

Brett McKay: As you learn more and more about actual Buddhist philosophy and principles, did you have any misconceptions about Buddhism that you later learned were wrong or misguided?

Brendan Barca: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I grew up in Massachusetts in the suburbs and was raised loosely Catholic. There wasn’t too much in terms of having to go to church on Sundays and all that. But I kind of when I heard about Buddhism or anything of these Eastern philosophies, I think one of the things that I had as a misconception was that to practice that, you had to like abandon your everyday life. Like let’s say you have to leave your career, move to the mountains, maybe in the extreme sense become a monk or something like that. But one of the things I’ve learned over time now, as I’ve really started to ingrain it into my life is you don’t have to follow that path. There’s a way to still practice mindfulness, practice meditation, Buddhist philosophy while living. And I do live right now in New York City. So really in the heart of it and I can use everyday experiences to practices. So I didn’t know that back then. And meditation can help to kind of create insight into my life, but it doesn’t mean I have to abandon everything and then move to like the mountains and practice there. So that’s definitely one thing I didn’t get back then.

Brett McKay: One misconception that I had about Buddhism, I think a lot of Westerners have about Buddhism, is that we kind of think of Buddhism as we think of someone sitting on a pillow and it’s just all about being relaxed and going with the flow and being calm. But if you really look at the philosophy and the different teachers of Buddhism, one of the things you take away is that Buddhism, and we’re going to talk about this in our conversation, there’s a discipline to it. There’s kind of a hardness that’s soft at the same time. It can be very bracing, which I think is interesting.

Brendan Barca: Yeah, and that’s definitely something now as I reflect back, I probably had too. You kind of see maybe people in the lotus position or sitting serenely on the mountaintop just in this tranquil state. And for anyone that’s first ever meditated knows that that’s not the case, right? When we sit down with our own thoughts for as little as five or ten minutes, it can be a whole whirlwind of things happening within us that are probably pretty uncomfortable. So there’s that. And then also when the philosophy itself, and maybe some of this we’ll get into later a lot of Buddhist principles are really trying to ground you in reality, and reality is not necessarily all rainbows and butterflies. What they’re trying to say life is suffering, and then what do you do from there? Well, that’s where the Buddhist path comes in. So there’s so many elements that I think I didn’t understand back then that have now made the practice or the philosophy feel much more grounded in everyday life versus kind of this element where it’s like really fantasy world, which it’s not.

Brett McKay: So you just referred to Buddhism as a philosophy. Sometimes it’s also considered a religion depending on how it’s approached and practiced. Either way, I think a lot of people, particularly in the West, just have kind of like a vague idea of what it’s all about. So let’s start off by making things a bit more concrete here. What’s the origin story of Buddhism?

Brendan Barca: So Buddhism really began with one person’s journey, and that is the person we now call today as the Buddha. His name was actually Siddhartha Gautama, and the story goes that he was a prince in what we now call India, and he had all the things that we would want as people, right? He had wealth. He was young. He was handsome, and he was very privileged, and yet as he reflected on this, and he was a curious individual, he felt and realized that even though he had everything one could wish for, he still suffered. He had negative emotions. He had discontentment, persistent dissatisfaction with life, and he also saw other people in his community suffering, whether it was becoming old or getting sick or people dying, and so he set off and left his life as a prince and at first became an ascetic. So he wandered, and he fasted and meditated like that, but he found that even as he deprived himself of those things, food, clothing, and money, he continued to suffer, and I think I can understand that. That sounds pretty difficult, and so he decided to try something different, which we now call the middle way.

So it’s a path that steers clear of extremes, and from this new perspective, he began experimenting with his mind and examining it, peeling back its layers, investigating both his inner reality and also his outer reality, and then the story goes that one day while meditating under what we today call the Bodhi tree, he unearthed the cause of his suffering, so his attachments, his ignorance, and then discovered a path out and achieved enlightenment, and this enlightenment or this moment led to his Four Noble Truths, which is his foundational teaching, and that’s now today really the core of Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy.

Brett McKay: What are those Four Noble Truths of Buddhism?

Brendan Barca: So the Four Noble Truths are first, we all experience suffering, and that suffering is woven into our existence, and there’s all different types of suffering. We can think of it as the suffering of change, so whether that’s having a breakup in our relationships or the suffering of a layoff if we lose our job or as we get older and our skin starts to age, suffering of conditionality is another one where let’s say you go on a fun vacation with your family, maybe you’re in Costa Rica, which we were there a couple years ago, then after it’s over, you’re back in the US, back at your job doing emails, and you’re dissatisfied with daily life because your conditions shifted, and there’s also just simple suffering like your ankle hurts or you have a backache or you have a heartache because someone offended you. These are all things that we all experience, so that’s the First Noble Truth, and the Second Noble Truth is about the cause of our suffering, and so it’s caused by our attachment to the different things in our lives, and even our attachment to ourselves, and this attachment stems to our ignorance of reality, and our ignorance in reality.

Misunderstanding is we think that things are going to be permanent, things are going to be satisfying, yet things are impermanent, right? They’re always changing, they’re not always satisfying us, and so we struggle from that breakup, not only because the person leaves us, but because of the suffering and the pain we add on top of that. We even suffer in our healthy relationships because the person we thought would make us happy forever maybe disappoints us here or there, so that’s the Second Noble Truth is about the cause, which is really our attachment, which is rooted in our misunderstanding of reality, and then the Third is really where it starts to get positive, and this is where we can end our suffering, so since there’s a cause, there’s also a possible solution, which brings us to the Fourth, which is the path to end our suffering, otherwise known in Buddhism as the Eightfold Path.

Brett McKay: All right, that leads to my next question. I think people might have heard of the Eightfold Path. What is the Eightfold Path?

Brendan Barca: So the Eightfold Path is a practical set of guidelines to achieve inner freedom or happiness, right? So if we are suffering, maybe a grasp on our own careers or relationships, our own emotions is out of control, and we’re failing to find happiness in that, the path is going to help us to be able to achieve that. So yes, there’s eight different elements of it. So just to kind of list them out, there’s one, right view, two, right intention, three, right speech, four, right action, five, right livelihood, six, right effort, seven, right mindfulness, and eight, right concentration. And within the eight parts of the path, there are three sort of core components. So a couple of them pertain to developing wisdom, which would be otherwise known in Sanskrit as prajna. And so that would be the right view and right intention where we were trying to understand reality with right view, but also the right intention, try to let go of our attachments and cultivate compassion. And then there’s also ethical livelihood, which is the second of the third key elements, and that’s in Sanskrit known as shila. And that has to do with right speech, right action, right livelihood.

So how we talk to people, how we act in the community, even what our work is as we try to make a living. And then finally, the third element is mental discipline, otherwise known as samadhi, and that has to do with right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. So how we’re disciplined and taming our mind, awareness of our body and mind and feelings, and then concentration has to do with meditation. So that’s the high level version of the Eightfold Path.

Brett McKay: That’s really good. I think in our conversation, we’ll hit on some of these principles. But as you were listing the different parts of the Eightfold Path off and discussing the Four Noble Truths, I mean, it is surprising, or maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, you can find commonalities in Buddhism and other Western philosophies. For example, I’m a big fan of Aristotle. People who listen to the podcast know that I love Aristotle. And Aristotle has something kind of similar to the Eightfold Path. His goal in life is not enlightenment, but it’s human flourishing eudaimonia. And he says you can achieve that by first getting your metaphysics right, like understanding what the world is like. So that’s very similar to the idea of wisdom. And then once you understand the metaphysics, like what the social world looks like, what reality is like, then from that, you can derive ethical principles. And that’s where virtue ethics come from. And then he also provides practices on how to become more virtuous. I think another thing people will see similarities to in Western philosophy in Buddhism is Stoicism, I think has a lot of similarities. Have you noticed the similarities between Stoicism and Buddhism?

Brendan Barca: Yeah, and I’ve actually, I haven’t studied Stoicism like I have Buddhism, but I’ve read Marx’s Aurelius’ Meditations, for example, and I’m familiar with a lot of Ryan Holiday’s work. And a couple of things that I’ve learned over time as I’ve gone deeper into my Buddhist practice is there are some similarities, but also some key differences for people to be aware of. So some of the things that are similar, and you touched on some of these, is definitely ethics. We mentioned ethical livelihood in Buddhism, and there’s definitely some things that are similar there. They’re also both very practical, designed to help us with our daily lives, not just some abstract philosophy. The other two main things that I’ve noticed that are similar is they both have a lot of focus on impermanence. So really trying to internalize the fact, not only that we’re going to die, but also the fact that everything changes. And I’m sure you know the Stoic term memento mori, which is basically remember death. The Buddhists would definitely think that’s a good exercise. So those are some of the similarities I’ve witnessed. Some of the differences that I’ve seen.

One thing is about self. So in Buddhist philosophy, there’s a big emphasis on what we can call no-self, which is the idea that there’s no permanent self for us to cling on to. Whereas in Stoicism, at least the way I understand it, they do affirm a rational self or a soul. So for example, in a Buddhist context or from a Buddhist philosophy understanding, we can maybe think of an example with our physical bodies. And in fact, there’s been studies done that cells in our bodies are actually regenerating every seven years. So actually the person who you were 10 years ago, even from a cellular level, from a physical level, is completely different than the person you are today. And so a Buddhist philosopher would argue it’s the same thing with our mind, with our feelings, with our bodies, is that we’re changing all the time. There’s no one part of us that we could label as the self. Whereas I think maybe the Stoics would disagree with that. The other main thing that I’ve seen is the goal. So in Buddhism, the goal would be enlightenment or to be able to see through the illusion of the self and end our suffering.

Whereas in Stoicism, my understanding, and maybe you can help me clarify, is to live a life well lived through logic and virtue. So that’s some of the things I’ve noticed. I don’t know what else you’ve seen.

Brett McKay: No, I think those are the two big differences. I think you hit the nail on the head with that. Well, let’s dig into some of these principles that you discuss in The Daily Buddhist. And what’s great about this book, it’s like a devotional book. Each day, you just highlight a short little devotional that hits on a principle. So you don’t have to read this all in one setting. I did read the entire thing, but you have a schedule. Like February 13th has something you’re going to read. May 8th, you’re going to have something to read. It’s a really great way to get introduced to Buddhist principles. Let’s discuss some of them. Let’s talk about wisdom. We’re going to get a right, we’re going to work on that first path of the Eightfold Path, which is getting a right view of the world. And so in the first part of the book, you talk a lot about the impermanence of the world. Why start there?

Brendan Barca: Yes, we modeled the book, first of all, over how traditional Buddhist masters would almost train their students. And so from a specifically a Tibetan Buddhist perspective, where you would begin if you were a monk or even a lay person who is just trying to learn about Buddhism, it’s really important to start by trying to ground ourselves in the nature of reality. And that has to do with right view, as you mentioned, the Eightfold Path. So a big element of that is reflecting on and really trying to internalize, not just intellectually, but emotionally, that life and we are impermanent. So the problem is, and why we start there and why Buddhism starts there, is that we know intellectually that things change, right? That we will lose our job or that our family will eventually pass away or that even our skin will age. But the thing is, we don’t really live our lives with that understanding. So we might work in a career for 50 years and spend our time there, even though it doesn’t fulfill us. We might believe that our relationship is going to last forever when in reality it doesn’t.

And this denial of impermanence leads to a lot of our suffering. And that’s part of the reason why it’s so important to begin there is by accepting and internalizing permanence. When things do inevitably change, let’s say our kids go off to college or we’re retiring and our life is moving on, well, we’re going to be able to meet that with more acceptance and more grace and let go of our attachment to those things rather than cling too tightly and let ourselves suffer. So that’s why we begin the book with impermanence.

Brett McKay: Yeah, it’s a foundational principle. And I love that section you have about you have to understand things, not just intellectually, but emotionally. And I actually made a note as I was reading, it reminded me of Kierkegaard, the existential philosopher. He had this famous phrase, truth is subjective. And people are like, what does that mean? Does that mean that truth is whatever you want it to mean? It’s relative. And he was like, no, what I mean by that is he’s coming out from a Christian perspective and you say, okay, you can intellectually know that God is love. So it’s like an objective fact for you. It’s like, yeah, God is love. But if you don’t emotionally, like if you don’t subjectively know it, then it’s not going to transform you. And I think the same thing, you quote a Buddhist philosopher there, you have to like internalize that truth in order for it to have an effect on how you behave and interact with the world.

Brendan Barca: Yeah. And that’s one of the things with impermanence, like we might know this, right? But if we don’t think about it every day or maybe integrate it into our meditation or even the way we live, then we’re not going to live our life in a way that reflects. And I think that if we do keep impermanence top of mind, then it’ll help us in those moments to be more present with our loved ones. Like maybe we won’t be on our phone so much, or it’s going to help us to be able to be kinder to maybe a relative who’s not so kind to us because we can realize that these relationships will change. Our life is not forever. And then hopefully act accordingly, which I think is one of the best things about Buddhism and also Stoicism about why we reflect on impermanence so often.

Brett McKay: Are there any practices you recommend to help people truly understand and keep that idea of impermanence of life top of mind?

Brendan Barca: Well, one thing to do, and it’s part of the reason why we structured the book like that with 31 straight days on reflecting on impermanence, is start to just notice the changes that are happening all around you. You could use the seasons or you can see this with looking in the mirror and seeing how your face has changed from an old photograph. And then even just in a subtle day-to-day changes, like some clients come, some clients go there’s all these subtle things happening that we can start to notice. And if we can notice this both on like a mini level, but also understand like the big picture that this means that our life isn’t forever, then we can start to hopefully change our thought and our action around how we behave given these truths. And in fact, there’s like a Tibetan tradition where people try to treat each day as an entire life of its own. So they visualize when they wake up here I am waking up to my new life, and then they go through their day, which you can think of as a microcosm of your life.

And then at night, as they’re lying down, they’re visualizing themselves dying to that day. So that’s another helpful practical reflection that I try to do quite often.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I love that. I mean, something that I do is I just think about something that I was upset about that maybe happened a few weeks ago, and then thinking about it now and thinking, well, am I still upset about that thing? And the answer is probably not. I’m usually not upset about it. I mean, I was upset about it then, but now it’s not a big deal. And that just kind of puts things in perspective for me.

Brendan Barca: Yeah, I like to think will this affect me a week from now? Will it affect me a month from now? Will it affect me a year from now? Will it affect me five years from now? And then the answer keeps getting more and more like, absolutely not. So then the challenge, of course, of the practice is, okay, how can I not let affect me so much now?

Brett McKay: Related to the idea that all life is impermanence constantly changing is that all life is interrelated. Why is that an important concept in Buddhism?

Brendan Barca: So one of the things that we learn in Buddhism as we reflect on the nature of reality and try to continue to cultivate, as the Eightfold Path would say, that right view, is since all things are impermanent and so they’re always changing, all things are also what we would say is interdependent, or as you mentioned, interrelated, which is that everything is constantly in flux but also arises from various causes and conditions. So we are now you’re a podcaster and you have your own business, and I’m this author because of who we were before. So each step that preceded us has made us who we are now. So you can think of it as links on the same chain. And where we’ll go next has to do with who we are now, what we’re doing now. So Buddhism really develops that. You can think of that as cause and effect in a way, which is a term we’re used to talking about in the West. But this not only has to do with our lives and our careers, is what I was just saying as an analogy, but also has to do with our mental state or our emotions or our relationships or even our body.

Our backache might be there because we’ve been hunched over our computer for 10 years, or our relationship with our spouse might be falling apart because we haven’t been listening to them for five years. So it helps us to keep ourselves accountable because if we realize that everything’s interdependent, we can try to live in that ethical way, which is one of those elements of the Eightfold Path. That’s one part of it and why it’s helpful for us to reflect on interrelatedness or interdependence.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Let’s talk about the Buddhist understanding of how the mind works. We’re still trying to get an understanding of reality, a right view of reality. So what is the Buddhist understanding of the mind?

Brendan Barca: So in Buddhism, they talk about mind, nature of mind is how they talk about it. And really you can think about, although it’s not this simple, you can think about your mind with two, we’ll call them parts, even though it gets a little bit dicey when you start to even label these things. But in Tibetan terms, there’s two terms that maybe might be helpful to familiarize yourself with, which is rigpa and sem. And rigpa is what the Buddhist philosophers would call the true nature of your mind. You can think of this as your true essence. It’s clear, it’s spacious, it’s free, it’s light, it’s free from labeling, dualistic thinking, free from negative emotions. Maybe you can think of it like the feeling you might have after a really long run and you just finished and you’re just feeling so clear and all your problems have kind of fallen to the wayside. So that’s what the nature of mind is, what we are kind of aiming for. And someone who’s living in that all the time would be considered enlightened, which for most of us, we can say, okay, I probably either haven’t seen that lately or maybe just once in a while.

Whereas sem is what you can also translate as the ordinary mind. And so the ordinary mind is the one that we know very well. It’s like kind of our own internal enemy. It is the one that will plot and scheme and worry and overthink and overanalyze. And it’s the part of us that gets us into fights with our partner or our friends because it’s oftentimes confused. And you can think of it almost like our lesser selves. So from a Buddhist perspective, we’re constantly dealing with kind of those two major elements and working towards uncovering more and more of our nature of mind. And the Buddha would say that we all have that pure essence in us just waiting to be uncovered. And so our goal working towards enlightenment and working down the path is to get more and more of that so that we can live in that state of Rigpa. I mean, it’s definitely aspirational for most of us, but it’s a good way to strive to get towards.

Brett McKay: And meditation is part of the way you get there, correct?

Brendan Barca: Yeah. So in Buddhist context, one of the most important things that we can do is to study our mind. And a lot of this, when we’re talking about nature of mind or interdependence and permanence, not only should we be thinking about these with our own minds, like journaling or just thinking about these when we’re on a walk, but we also would want to practice that in a more formal meditation. And meditation, there’s a lot of different meanings and definitions out there depending on how you practice or which tradition you follow. From Buddhist perspective, there’s a couple of different styles. So one thing that is a good starting place for many people is what’s called shamatha meditation. And that really translates as calm abiding. And the point of that is to focus on a single point, like the breath, for example, and to start to calm the mind. And what happens when we start to calm the mind is we start to remove those different parts of the ordinary mind or the sem, or not remove them, but see them for what they are and they start to kind of dissolve a little bit, like more than usual.

And then that’s where we can maybe start to peek into the nature of our mind and start to live both inside our meditation. And the idea is for it to spill over into real life too, with that more calmness, with that more ease and lightness. And so meditation is definitely a big key to working towards the path.

Brett McKay: There’s also vipassana. What is that? What kind of meditation is that?

Brendan Barca: So that would be called insight meditation, and you can practice these separately, but I would say is that for a beginner, we’d want to start with shamatha and then you could always transition into vipassana. So let me explain the two. So if shamatha is the calm abiding meditation, which is focusing on the breath and basically working to calm the mind, the idea is that if you do that for a couple minutes, like let’s say five minutes, and you notice that your mind starts to settle, it stops jumping around from thought to feeling to prediction, right? It stops doing that, at least quiets down, then there may be opportunity to transition to what they would call in Sanskrit vipassana, which is insight. And the idea with insight meditation is to start to perceive things more clearly. So it’s not to say you’ll have an insight in terms of a big idea that you’re gonna, I don’t know, use for your career endeavors, but more of like insight into the true nature of reality.

So the fact that our mind is always having fleeting thoughts, the fact that things are always changing, the fact that things are interrelated, these are all things, not necessarily you’ll have these in the meditation itself, but we’ve kind of worked towards by giving ourselves the space in a vipassana meditation. So instead of focusing on the breath, we would try to not focus on anything, which is quite challenging, but that’s how we would transition from one to the other.

Brett McKay: For someone who’s never meditated before, can you kind of give us a sample practice that they could start doing today to get a taste of what Buddhist meditation is like?

Brendan Barca: Yeah, and I think it’s important also to provide another definition in terms of how we can think about meditation. The Tibetan word for meditation is gom. So gom actually translates to being familiar with. So when we are sitting down to meditate, our goal, although it’s kind of a slippery slope to say goal when it comes to meditation, would be to be more familiar with ourselves. And that starts by studying and watching and sitting with our own mind. And so for a beginner, and I was a beginner only nine or 10 years ago, I think the most helpful thing we can do is first carve out the space for us to be able to meditate on our own. So if you have kids like I do, and like you do, Brett, what that might mean is before anyone wakes up in the morning or before they come home from school or at night when everyone’s in bed. And then when you have that space on your own, then to simply set like a, you can use an app, the Calm app or Insight Timer. Those are great free apps out there. And simply set like a bell that would go off for, and I would think five minutes is a great starting point for most people.

And then within that time, work on focusing on your breath. You don’t have to try to make the breath do any tricks. You don’t have to try to slow it down or speed it up, but just notice its natural rhythm and watch how your mind responds to this. And at first, when you’re new to this, if you’ve never meditated before, it’s going to feel maybe a little bit overwhelming, like all these ping pong balls are bouncing around in your mind. You might want to even get up, but I would encourage you to sit with it and just see that and notice things as they are. And even that awareness is going to be a really beneficial practice. And then after a few minutes, you will notice a little bit of a shift and that’s the practice. So you might want to start there and then think of it just like something that has to be practiced repetitively, just like we might exercise. We want to meditate consistently. Otherwise, if we do it once and wait a year, then the benefits aren’t going to be there. So it’s got to be consistent practice.

Brett McKay: How long does a session need to be?

Brendan Barca: So it varies, but I would think for most people, the most practical thing we can do is make it short. Three to five minutes would probably be where I would suggest people to start. It’s long enough for the mind to start to settle, for us to also watch it. But if we aim for 10 or 20 minutes, like there’s some practices that require like a 20 minute session in the morning and the afternoon, well, then the risk is that we don’t actually follow through and we drop the ball. So if we can integrate this into our busy lives with a short five minute session, then it becomes not only attainable, but it’s also beneficial. There’s been studies out there that just five minutes a day of meditation can reduce stress significantly. So I think that’s a good amount of time for people to aim for.

Brett McKay: All right. So the trick is just be consistent with it. So figure out a way to be consistent with it. How do you know if you’ve had a good meditation session or is that a bad question to ask?

Brendan Barca: So it is a bit of a, yeah, a bit of a tricky question because one of the things that we learn in meditation over time is that it’s not always going to be fun. And actually oftentimes it isn’t even after meditating now for 10 years, almost every single day, oftentimes I sit down and my mind continues to race and it doesn’t slow down. It doesn’t feel calm like I wish it would be. But I think one of the things that we can do to make it “successful” is use it as an opportunity to one, familiarize ourselves with our mind as we go back to that Tibetan word gom, but also to be able to create more awareness around our thoughts, create awareness around our emotions. Because if we’re aware of these things in our meditation, then we’re outside of it the next day or that afternoon, well, then we’ll have a little bit more insight into our mind and a little bit more control over our emotions. So if we start seeing, for example, that our calmness or our patience or our compassion in meditation starts to bleed into other parts of our lives, and that’s a sign that we’re progressing.

So that would be, I guess, a long-term success, but we can’t expect results right away.

Brett McKay: Something I’ve noticed when I’ve done meditative practices, I’ll do really well for like a month because when I start meditating, I’m like, oh wow, I’m feeling calmer. This is great. I’m noticing these benefits. And then after a month of meditating, you don’t get the same sort of, you don’t notice it as much. And then you’re like, oh man, I’m not noticing any changes. I don’t feel any calmer. This is dumb. I’m just going to stop doing this. But I’m wondering if I should just stick with it. And like you said, you got to be disciplined with your meditative practice, even if you don’t feel as calm as you did when you first started.

Brendan Barca: Yeah. Meditation is one of those things that even if you’re not feeling like in the session itself, that calmness or that benefit, whatever it is that you’re looking for, we don’t want to let ourselves give up and think that it isn’t working. One of the studies we point to in the introduction of our book was they were putting an fMRI machine around some of these prolific Buddhist monks who have meditated for tens of thousands of hours. And one of the things that they found from that level of practice and that commitment was that they were, from a scientific perspective and psychological perspective, they were less stressed, more happy than the average human. They had ways of measuring that. So if we want to experience these things and we want to use meditation as one of the vehicles to get us there, then we can’t necessarily rely on our experience of meditation because as you mentioned, that’s when we give up. But rather think of it as like just something that we need to do to be able to keep our mind stable, be able to progress on the path, as they would say in Buddhism, and treat it like a ritual that’s needed. Not always fun, but something that’s necessary for our well-being.

Brett McKay: It’s like brushing your teeth.

Brendan Barca: Yeah. And not even as fun as that.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Brushing your mind. That’s what you’re doing when you’re meditating. And so that leads me to my next question I want to discuss because you have this section, there’s just filled with reflections on patience and diligence. What insights from Buddhism can help us cultivate more patience with others, with ourselves, with our goals to be better?

Brendan Barca: So let’s stick on the topic of meditation as being one of the important tools in Buddhism. And one of the benefits of meditation, although it might not be calming and peaceful all the time, is that by understanding our own mind, and we can inevitably do that if we sit with it for long enough, then it’s going to help us to better understand both ourselves and others. So when we sit with ourselves and we start seeing, oh, wow, I just had this distracted thought. Oh, wow, I just thought about some random high school memory. Oh, I just thought about something that’s going to happen or not happen in 10 years. Or I just noticed a thought of agitation or anger or envy, whatever it is, then we not only understand that we experience these things, but we look out the window and we know, oh, wow, there’s 8 billion or so other people out there that are going through these things too. So when we start to have that right view, then we can start to, the idea is, and the practice is, starts to develop patience for both ourselves and others. Because if we see that our mind is really this crazy, and it doesn’t mean all these thoughts are necessarily ours.

In fact, Buddhists would argue that they’re not. Oftentimes thoughts are just kind of coming into our minds versus actually being things that we’re originating. That’s another important point. We can be more patient with ourselves, but also with other people who are going to have their own afflictive emotions, or as they say in Buddhism, defilements that are hurting them. So then when we’re, for example, in line at the coffee shop and someone’s taking forever to pay, we can be a little bit more patient with them because we can understand, okay, maybe they’re having a rough day or they can’t find their wallet or whatever it is. So that’s one of the ideas of where we can develop patience for others. And I think for ourselves, being in meditation helps us to hopefully develop more self-compassion. And that’s going to help us to be more patient when we make mistakes, when we fall on our face and help us to be able to pick ourselves up again. So I think those are some things that can help with patience specifically.

Brett McKay: One of the things I love about Buddhism, and you do a good job in the book with this, is highlighting all the different ways Buddhism talks about dealing with negative emotions. So anger, frustration, sadness, anxiety, even envy. What does Buddhism say about how we can better manage these, what you said Buddhism calls defilements.

Brendan Barca: So one of the things that we can first start to understand that these are emotions and feelings that are happening across all of humanity. So everyone out there, ourselves included, are dealing with negative emotions like anger, anxiety, and envy. And so this is part of the human condition and part of the condition of suffering, which goes back to the first noble truth. But what the Buddhist perspective that would help us to kind of start to deal with these is if we can not only through meditation, but also through what you would think of as mindfulness, which is watching our mind, let’s say when our partner says something that triggers us and we get angry and we start to react in a negative way. If we have started to cultivate some mindfulness, which means being alert, which means being aware, then we can begin to, instead of just react haphazardly or react too quickly, we can start to respond in a more intentional manner. So think of meditation and mindfulness as a way to almost create a gap or a space between our emotion and our reaction to it. And that could be outwardly towards someone else or even internal self-loathing.

So when we get angry or we get anxious or we get sad, we can start to almost create a space between us and those feelings. And one of the things that I like to think about, and I use this all the time, is we tend to label ourselves as our feelings. How often do you hear someone say, I am anxious or I am sad or I am angry? So we’re literally saying, I am this. But the truth is we aren’t those emotions. Those emotions are things that are passing through us. Those are things we are dealing with at a practical level, but they aren’t us. So one thing we could do to reframe that is think, I am feeling anxious. I am feeling sad. I am feeling angry. And it already creates a little bit of that space between us and the emotions themselves.

Brett McKay: I love that. I also think too, just thinking about those noble truths about the cause of suffering, that life is impermanent and we get attached to things, really coming to understand that emotionally, not just intellectually, can go a long way to staving off those negative emotions. Because you’re like, wow, why am I getting angry about this? There’s no reason to get angry about this. Of course, the vacation got canceled. That’s just part of life. And then you just learn how to roll with the punches.

Brendan Barca: Yeah. The Buddhist monk and great teacher Thich Nhat Hanh once said, when someone makes you angry, picture them in 300 years and then picture yourself. What will become of them? What will become of you? Ash. The idea is that that’s going to help to dissolve your anger because we all have the same end. So it’s a little bit humorous, but also true. And every time I think about that, it kind of zooms out because we’re always too zoomed in to our own lives, our own problems, thinking that all these things are going to get fixed one day and all of a sudden we’ll wake up happy. But in reality, if we don’t work on our own minds, first of all, if we don’t try to have more patience to ourselves and others, then we’re going to continue to be upset or be suffering no matter what we’re going through.

Brett McKay: You mentioned that compassion, developing compassion for others and for ourselves can be an antidote to a lot of these negative emotions. How is compassion defined in Buddhist philosophy?

Brendan Barca: So the word for compassion in Sanskrit is karuna. And the definition for that is having a genuine wish to alleviate the suffering of others. So we can think of that, and I would also expand the definition. When we say others, it can also and it should also include ourselves. But we’re pretty good, most of us are pretty good at giving ourselves a break, being compassionate towards ourselves, being generous towards ourselves. I think there’s some exceptions to that. But one of the things that we’re not so good at doing is extending that not only to our loved ones who we do have some attachment towards, who we do want to help, we do want them to succeed, but then layers or steps beyond that. So to our friends, to our neighbors, to our colleagues, to strangers. And the idea with compassion, with karuna, is to be able to have a genuine heartfelt compassion for other people. And that is one of the pathways or one of the things we can use. The more we cultivate compassion, the more we mature our mind and start to see that, first of all, we are all struggling, so all of us deserve that compassion, but then also help to change our action so that we actually do want to help other people. Not just necessarily being altruistic, although that’s one form of compassion.

But even by, let’s say our partner or our friend gets angry with us and gets us upset, well, how can we be compassionate in that moment and be there for the other person? Because we can see or we should start to see that they’re suffering and they actually need us now in that moment more than ever. So they need compassion. They don’t need us to get angry too.

Brett McKay: And there’s actually, you highlight this in the book, there’s like a meditation you can do to help develop compassion.

Brendan Barca: Yeah, so one of the meditations you can practice is called Tonglen meditation, and that’s a Tibetan Buddhist idea and exercise. And how Tonglen meditation would work, or when you could use it, is first you could use it when someone you know is suffering. So actually the first time I was introduced to this, I didn’t know Buddhism well at all at the time. I had kind of stumbled across this. It was one of my friends was dealing with a gambling problem and was an addicted gambler. And I remember when I heard about Tonglen, which is trying to wish for the other person’s suffering to end, it was a helpful meditation to try. And so you can use it when a friend is suffering or when you’re suffering. Let’s say you get sick or you’re dealing with something difficult, you can use it for yourself. And how it would work is basically you would do like a seated meditation, and you would still want to be doing your breathing, which obviously we’re doing all the time, but more intentional breathing. And what you want to practice is when you’re breathing in, visualize taking in the other person’s suffering, the other person’s pain.

And then as you breathe out, visualize breathing out that purified air. So to send them relief, to send them comfort. And so what we’re doing is we’re not taking in their pain and feeling it ourselves, we’re almost purifying it and sending it back to them. And what you find through this meditation practice is that yes, it can actually help the other person, but the other thing too, and you’ll notice this if you try it, is it also boosts you up because in that moment you’re acting out of pure compassion and you’re at kind of a new heightened level in your mind. So that’s called Tonglen. And yeah, I encourage people to try it if either they’re in pain, or someone they know is.

Brett McKay: One compassion meditation that I’ve done, and maybe it’s related to this, but I got this from Rick Hansen. We’ve had him on the podcast before. He’s a psychologist, written a couple books about meditation, particularly Buddhist meditation. And he suggests a meditation where you wish someone well with a mantra like, may you be safe, may you be happy, may you feel strong. And he says, when you’re starting off with this meditation to kind of get a toehold into it, is you want to start off with someone who you naturally feel warm towards. So like your wife, your kids. Of course, you’re just going to naturally have compassion for them. So it’s kind of easy to do that. And then he says, once you’ve done that for a bit, then you move on to a more neutral person, someone you neither really like or dislike. And then to really challenge yourself, you pick someone you don’t like and then try that same compassion meditation where you wish them well. So you repeat the mantra, may you be safe, may you be happy. And that’s hard to do. So you do that for a while. And then once you’ve done that, you direct the meditation toward yourself.

And I found that really useful. And I actually still do that occasionally.

Brendan Barca: Okay, yeah. So actually now I know what you’re referring to. That’s like the loving kindness meditation.

Brett McKay: Yeah, loving kindness.

0:43:41.1 Brendan Barca: Okay, yeah. So maybe that’s what Rick was referring to. We do have that in the book too. So another great practice. And you definitely walk people through the steps very clearly. So that’s another great one to cultivate compassion for yourself and others.

Brett McKay: So we started our conversation talking about how people in the West, we typically think of Buddhism as a contemplative philosophy, which it is. There’s the meditative practices that you’re doing to help you understand reality. But it’s also, it’s very action oriented. And you have a whole section of reflections about how to put into action these Buddhist principles. So what role does action play in Buddhism? And what does Buddhist action look like?

Brendan Barca: So one of the key parts of the Eightfold Path, as we were mentioning earlier, has to do with ethics. And with ethics, when we talk about it from a Buddhist perspective, has to do with a couple key elements such as right speech, right action, and right livelihood. And all of those are examples of action. With speech, it’s are we speaking truthfully? Are we speaking kindly? Are we avoiding lies and gossip? With right action, are we making sure that we’re not harming others through our actions? Are we trying to help people? Or at least if we’re not helping them, let’s make sure we don’t harm them. And then for livelihood, it’s more about are we earning our living in an ethical way? So while everything we do starts in our mind, right, and how we perceive the world, also how we determine what our actions are, we have to make sure that we then follow through. Because if we just have a thought that, let’s say, we want to donate to a really great charity, but then if we don’t follow through on that and all of a sudden our life gets in the way, things get busy and we don’t do it, then our generosity, even though we had the feeling in it, isn’t complete.

So what we want to do is not only be able to think compassionately, think generously, think and also in accordance with a way that’s true to the nature of reality, but we also want to make sure that we’re following through in living in a way that aligns with our virtues. And so in the three doors that we can use for that is going to be our thoughts, so what we think, our speech, and then also what we do. So those are some of the things that we can start to strive for in terms of Buddhist action.

Brett McKay: And I mean, you talk about this throughout the book, any point in your life or the day where you experience frustration, anger, things are just off kilter, instead of seeing it as this, just an annoyance, see it as a chance to get to actually practice this Buddhist stuff that I’ve been reading about and put it into action. So see life as practice, basically.

Brendan Barca: Yeah, we can think of it like everyday scenarios. If one of your colleagues gets you angry, we can think, oh, this person, I wish they weren’t in my life, or you can start to see them as your teacher, see them as someone that can help you to practice self-control and patience, because if we didn’t have difficult people in our lives or difficult situations, how would we ever practice these virtues? Our life would just be so smooth, we would never have self-control or patience. So I think that’s another way we can think about it in our day-to-day lives as we come up across new obstacles.

Brett McKay: Another practice to help people think about whether they’re put into action, these things they’re meditating on and reading about, you offer this nighttime reflection from a Buddhist philosopher. So I’ll just kind of read it here. How do you say his name? Patrul Rinpoche?

Brendan Barca: Yeah, Patrul Rinpoche.

Brett McKay: This is what he said. I like this. At night, when you go to sleep, do not just drop off into unconsciousness. Take the time to relax in bed and examine yourself in this way. So, what use have I made of this day? What have I done that is positive? Yeah, so it’s just a time to reflect. Like, hey, did I actually do the things I’m trying to live out, these principles? And it reminded me of Benjamin Franklin had a similar thing. He had this journal that he would keep, and he’d ask himself, what good have I done this day? I mean, it’s just a time to self-reflect. And then if you didn’t do as great, well, there’s always tomorrow.

Brendan Barca: Yeah, I think that there’s two huge benefits of that practice. One is that it’s important to redefine our measurements of success in that day. Like if, I mean, I speak for myself as someone who’s like kind of that type A sort of career-driven individual. One of the things I’m trying to rewire in my own brain is that like making that sale or finishing the book, whatever it is, aren’t necessarily like, yes, they’re markers of some success, but what’s more success is if I can create harmony in my household, if I can be kind to my neighbor who’s difficult with me, if I can maybe text my parents, not every day, but more often. Like these are markers of like true success and making sure I’m living virtuously. Then the other major benefit of that reflection is that the idea is as you drop off to sleep is that it’s going to encourage more of that behavior the next day as it kind of bleeds into, I don’t think your dreams, but into the next day. And then you can think, okay, how can I continue to be that person or change into the person I want to be.

Brett McKay: So let’s end with this. The final words of the Buddha were supposedly strive with vigilance. I really like that. So what did he mean by that?

Brendan Barca: So with strive with vigilance, the word that we’re translating from for vigilance is apra-mata. That’s the Sanskrit or Pali word. And there’s a couple of different variances to that word in English. So we can think of it, yes, as vigilance. Also, you can think of it as carefulness, alertness, mindfulness, even diligence. And what the Buddha was saying, or at least what we believe he meant by this based on all of our research is that, first of all, our mind is the root of our suffering, but it’s also the root of our freedom. So what we need to do, and he was saying this to his disciples at the time or his students, is that we need to have absolute vigilance at every moment. Because if we don’t have vigilance over our minds, then it’s going to go back into poor behavior. It’s going to go into reactive emotions. It’s going to lead us into a life of non-virtue. So if we can remain vigilant of our own minds, then we can start to alleviate our suffering and work towards the inner freedom that we want. Because if we want to practice compassion, if we want to practice loving kindness, whatever these things are and be there for ourselves and our family, it all is held together by vigilance. If we don’t have that, then everything else falls apart.

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

Brendan Barca: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. So people can catch us, and it’s me and my wife who wrote the book, Pema Sherpa, at thedailybuddhist.net to learn about the book and where to get it. And then we’re also on Instagram these days at daily.buddhist, and we post every single day on there too.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Brendan Barca, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Brendan Barca: Thanks so much, Brett. Thanks so much for having me.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Brendan Barca. He’s the co-author of the book, The Daily Buddhist. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about the book at the website, thedailybuddhist.net. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/buddhism, where you find links to resources where you delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com. We find our podcast archives. And while you’re there, sign up for our newsletter. We’ve got a newsletter for the Art of Manliness. It is free. We have a daily option and a weekly option. It’s a great way to stay on top of what’s going on at AOM. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you’d take one minute to give us a podcast on Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think is something out of it. As always, thanks for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to stay on my podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

In the 13th century, philosopher-theologian Thomas Aquinas wrote about a vice he called “effeminacy.” While the term can sound off-putting or old-fashioned, Aquinas wasn’t talking about mannerisms or gender.

Rather, for Aquinas, effeminacy meant moral softness: failing to persevere in something good because you’d rather be comfortable and avoid pain. The name reflects the ancient association of softness with femininity, but Aquinas saw the vice as a failing in men and women alike — a black mark on the character of both.

Aquinas also believed there was a remedy to this moral softness: fortitude.

Fortitude, or courage, is the virtue that helps you endure adversity for the sake of the Good. It’s the backbone that allows you to do the right thing even when you really don’t feel like it.

Below, we’ll unpack what Aquinas meant by effeminacy, why it sabotages the Good Life, and four ways to strengthen your fortitude.

What Is Effeminacy, According to Aquinas?

In his Summa Theologica, Aquinas writes:

A man is said to be effeminate if he gives up a good on account of difficulties that he cannot endure, because he is too attached to pleasure or too averse to pain.

For Aquinas, effeminacy (mollities, Latin for “softness”) was a weakness in character; it was the inability to stick with virtuous pursuits and withstand challenging circumstances because of a lack of toughness and an inordinate need for comfort.

In short, effeminacy meant being a moral sissy.

Why Being a Sissy Is an Obstacle to the Good Life

According to Aquinas, effeminacy is an obstacle to virtue.

Aquinas was an Aristotelian. So by his reckoning, the Good Life is a life of virtue: ordered, purposeful, and directed toward the highest values.

But sometimes, living virtuously is hard.

It often requires sacrifice, discipline, and the ability to endure discomfort. Sometimes, doing the virtuous thing means going against your personal interests and desires.

Effeminacy folds when the going gets tough.

You don’t need to be a medieval monk or an Athenian philosopher to recognize this in your own life. Just consider the moments you’ve:

• Avoided a conversation with a friend or family member because it would be awkward.
• Skipped a workout because you just weren’t “feeling it.”
• Used alcohol to numb the pain of a bad day at work.
• Snapped at your kids because you were in a bad mood instead of controlling your emotions.
• Didn’t speak up at work about unethical behavior going on because you were afraid of what it would do for your promotion prospects.
• Quit a new, edifying hobby because you were frustrated with how slow your progress was.
• Spent frivolously instead of sticking to your budget.

The Opposite of Effeminacy: Fortitude

The flip side of moral sissyness is fortitude: the ability to stand firm in difficulties. In his Summa Theologica, Aquinas explains that fortitude is all about holding fast to what’s good and right, even when danger is breathing down your neck or discomfort is tempting you to quit. Fortitude is the mental and spiritual spine that keeps you from giving up at the first inkling of hardship or fear.

For Aquinas, the ability to endure discomfort while holding on to the Good is a key feature of fortitude.

Sure, you can make the hard choice towards virtue once, but can you do it again and again, day in and day out for weeks, months, or years, when it would just be easier to give up?

Another important element of Thomist fortitude is that it isn’t reckless. It’s about doing the hard and maybe dangerous thing — guided by reason. Like the good Aristotelian that he is, Aquinas sees fortitude as the golden mean between cowardice and rashness.

4 Ways to Strengthen Your Thomist Fortitude and Quit Being a Sissy

1. Get Your Loves in Order

Effeminacy happens when you love comfort more than you love a greater good. It springs from disordered loves: giving your heart too much to things which are not worthy of it, and too little to that which is.

If you say you love strength, but you can’t get up in the morning to lift weights, then you really love your bed more than you love strength.  

Aquinas believed contemplating the goodness of the Good was one way to gain greater love for the things which deserved it. Another was to choose to associate with those who modeled the Good, thereby internalizing their example. But he primarily thought of love as an act of the will rather than a feeling — that the more you deliberately practiced the virtues, the more your desires would align themselves correctly.

Each time you choose courageously (enduring discomfort, pain, or fear for what’s truly important), you’re strengthening your attachment to higher goods and loosening your attachment to lesser comforts. Fortitude is found in the exercise of it.

As you exercise fortitude and your loves become rightly ordered, the attraction of higher goods grows stronger, and the pull of lesser goods diminishes. When you genuinely prefer virtue to fleeting comforts, choosing rightly becomes more habitual and natural, requiring less effort or strain each time.

Fortitude never becomes unnecessary — it will always act as the guardian of the Good. But when your loves are rightly ordered, courage becomes more intuitive.

2. Perform a Weekly Fortitude Self-Examen

We’ve talked about self-examens as a powerful spiritual discipline to improve yourself. Here’s an Aquinas-inspired fortitude/effeminacy examen you can use each week:

• Where did I choose ease over something important?
• Where did I quit too soon on a worthy goal?
• When did I embrace difficulty and do the right thing despite discomfort?

This honest inventory sheds light on patterns of softness and where you can improve, and it shows you where you’re growing in fortitude.

3. Seek Out Small Hardships

If ordering your loves by choosing virtue over comfort is the primary way to exercise your fortitude, performing difficult tasks of any kind can be considered “accessory work” for further strengthening your courage.  

Incorporating small acts of intentional hardship into your life can help develop your resolve:

• Fast from a meal or a favorite indulgence.
• Wake up earlier instead of snoozing.
• Take a cold shower.
• Speak up in a situation at work where you’d usually stay silent.

For more on challenging yourself, check out these AoM resources:

• You May Be Strong . . . But Are You Tough?
• Podcast #640: Weird and Wonderful Ways to Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable
• Podcast #708: Overcome the Comfort Crisis
• Podcast #941: How to Avoid Death by Comfort

4. Persevere in the Boring and Mundane

Fortitude isn’t just about facing dramatic challenges. Remember, for Aquinas, a key feature of fortitude is the ability to endure in the Good even when it’s hard. Practice perseverance in small virtuous habits even when motivation flags to help you build up endurance for the big important challenges in life:

• Keep working out even when you stop feeling like it.
• Keep praying/meditating, even when it’s dry or dull.
• Keep budgeting, even when an impulse buy tempts you.
• Keep volunteering or helping a friend in need, even when results are slow.

Little daily acts of endurance like the above can help you to build up your fortitude muscles while burning off your moral flab.

Conclusion

Effeminacy, in Aquinas’s sense, is letting comfort call the shots, causing you to abandon good things at the first sign of difficulty.

Its antidote is the virtue of fortitude: holding steady in adversity to pursue what’s right and worthwhile.

Start small. Choose discomfort over ease in just one instance today.

Then do it again tomorrow.

And the next day.

Stack those hard choices on top of each other, brick by brick, and you’ll build the kind of man Aquinas thought worth emulating: resilient, disciplined, and decidedly un‑soft.

That’s how you build fortitude . . . and quit being a sissy.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

The human urge to explore has taken us to every corner of the planet. From the highest peaks to far-flung islands to even the deepest dimensions of an idea, our species has an innate drive to venture into the unknown.

But what exactly drives this need to explore? Is it genetic, cognitive, or something else entirely?

Here to unpack this question is Alex Hutchinson, author of The Explorers Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map. Today on the show, Alex shares the fascinating science behind our exploratory tendencies, from the dopamine-driven “explorer’s gene” that varies across populations to the universal cognitive frameworks that govern how we navigate both physical and mental landscapes. He explains the delicate balance between exploring new possibilities and exploiting what we already know, and why we sometimes find meaning in difficult challenges. We also discuss why younger people explore more than older people do, how this decline in exploration doesn’t have to be inevitable, and how to keep exploring throughout your entire life.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Alex’s previous appearances on the AoM podcast:
  • Episode #382: How to Lift More, Run Faster, and Endure Longer
  • Episode #538: Research-Backed Answers to All Your Fitness FAQs
  • Episode #1,021: You Were Born to Run
• AoM Podcast #534: How Navigation Makes Us Human
• The Wundt Curve

Connect With Alex Hutchinson

• Alex’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.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here. And welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. The human urge to explore has taken us to every corner of the planet. From the highest peaks to far flung islands to even the deepest dimensions of an idea. Our species has an innate drive to venture into the unknown. What’s behind this need to explore? Is it genetic, cognitive or something else entirely? Here to unpack this question is Alex Hutchinson, author of The Explorer’s Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map. Today on the show, Alex shares the fascinating science behind our exploratory tendencies. From the dopamine driven explorer’s gene that varies across populations to the universal cognitive frameworks that govern how we navigate both physical and mental landscapes. He explains the delicate balance between exploring new possibilities and exploiting what we already know and why we sometimes find meaning in difficult challenges. We also discuss why younger people explore more than older people do, how this decline in exploration doesn’t have to be an inevitability, and how to keep exploring throughout your entire life. After the show’s over, check out our shownotes at aom.is/explore. All right, Alex Hutchinson, welcome back to the show.

Alex Hutchinson: Thanks Brad. It’s great to be back.

Brett McKay: So you got a new book out called The Explorer’s Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map. I’ve known you and I’m sure a lot of our listeners know you as the endurance and running guy. But something I didn’t know about you is that you also enjoy backpacking, but you like to backpack in really, really remote places. What’s been the most remote trip you’ve been on?

Alex Hutchinson: That’s a good question. And I should clarify that. I’m not a real exploring guy. I don’t go like parasailing to the South Pole or anything like that. But I definitely like to go places where I can imagine that I’m in the middle of nowhere. I did a trip with my wife on the south coast of Tasmania. The whole southern part of Tasmania is basically like empty. And there’s a route called the South Coast Track. It was originally blazed in the begin… Early 1900s as a way for shipwrecked sailors. ‘Cause the ocean’s really crazy down there and so people would sometimes wash up on the south shore of Tasmania and then they’d have no way of getting back to civilization. So there’s a track that just basically follows the whole south coast of Tasmania to get back to the the one road that leads down there. So you drive down to the south east east corner. Then you take a little two seater plane out to the southwest corner and land on a little patch of gravel and then you hike back for a week. So that was a trip where it was like, yeah, if something goes wrong, there’s no way of hiking out. You need to be rescued, basically.

Brett McKay: And then some of these trips you’ve taken your kids on as well.

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, I don’t know if anyone from Children’s aid is listening to this podcast please press mute now so I don’t get in trouble. Yeah, we definitely dial it down for the kids. But both my wife and I love, we just love being out in the backcountry. And so we didn’t want to just like turn that off for 10 years while our kids were young. So we tried to find ways of having adventures that have become steadily, frankly, steadily a little more crazy as the kids have gotten older. But at the very beginning, I remember like when our youngest kids were still like, I don’t know, six months old, we did a camping trip, for example, where it was a 400 meter walk in or 400 yard walk in to camp. And so 400, it’s not a long way to travel, but it’s still enough that instead of camping where you’re 10ft from the next tent and 10ft from the one after that. We were just trying to find ways of feeling like we’re in the forest. And yeah, we’ve started to push it a little farther and we go on hiking trips and camping trips with them.

Brett McKay: So how did your backpacking hobby get you thinking about what causes humans to explore?

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, it’s funny. So for a while I was writing adventure travel articles for the New York Times. And so basically every time my wife and I would go for a crazy vacation, I’d then write about it for The Times. And I started to notice a pattern. Like you don’t want to write the same article over and over again. But in every article I was like, we’re in whatever, Nepal or we’re in Papua New guinea or we’re in Australia and there’s this beautiful hike that everyone does. And so we decided not to do that hike. We decided to go to this miserable place that’s covered in leeches and is hard to get to and do this hard thing to get away from everybody. And I started to wonder like, what is it that’s driving me, like, the reason people go to the popular places is because they’re really nice. Why am I going to the less nice places just to get away from people? Because I’m not, I’m generally like, I actually quite like people. I’m not like a people hater or anything like that. But somehow on these trips, I was really drawn to the idea of getting out into the unknown.

And I didn’t really know why. I didn’t know what I was looking for. And I started to see connections with other parts of my life in whether it’s career choices or ordering in a restaurant or whatever, that I have this drive to find out, to try the new thing, to try the unknown thing. And I wondered what that was all about.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and you talk about this in your book. You’ve kind of explored with your own career. You started off as a physicist, and then you moved to writing about outdoor adventures, writing about sports, science. And, I mean, there’s been this constant shift in your career.

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah. And it was like, I feel like everyone gets one mulligan. Right. So I started out studying physics, and I went pretty far in that. I did a PhD and was working as a researcher. And then when I was 28, I was like, yeah, this is not for me. And I went back and did a journalism degree and became a journalist. And so, fine, okay. Well, it took me a while to find myself, but then in my mid-40s, I’d kind of gotten where I wanted to go as a journalist. I was writing about topics that really interested me, the science of endurance. And I had a book that came out in 2018 called Endure, which was really kind of bringing together all my reporting on the science of endurance. And it did actually quite a bit better than I expected. And so it set me up to kind of like, okay, my career is that I can be the science of endurance guy for the rest of my working days and kind of milk that and I should get to work on Endure II. And it all made sense, except that I just… The subtext was like, it doesn’t sound that fun to me. I don’t want to write Endear 2. I want to do something different.

And at this point, I was like, well, I had a career swerve in my 20s going from physics to journalism, but to do it again, it’s like, hang on, maybe I’ve got something wrong with my wiring that I just can’t settle down and enjoy what I’ve worked hard to achieve. And is this a good thing? Is this helping me discover the world or is it meaning that I’m going to be wandering around, never actually finding what I’m looking for? So that kind of seeded the idea of the book.

Brett McKay: Oh, let’s talk about humans and exploration. So, humans, we’re everywhere on planet Earth. Most animals, they kind of like an area where they’re at. They might expand across a continent, but then they don’t go any further. Like, humans are everywhere. Even in the most remote places where you wouldn’t expect humans to be, they’re there. Are humans the only animals that explore, or are there other animals that explore in the way that humans explore?

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, there’s a debate on this. So on one end of the spectrum, there’s a view that humans are unique. Not that they have, like, some trait that nobody else have, but just in terms of the degree to which we explore, that we’re maybe the only species that even when things are good, when we’ve got enough resources and enough space, we’re still pushing on to find somewhere else. So you can imagine, like, how did we get from Europe to Asia? Well, maybe there was a bad weather, a famine, or it was crowded and people spread out. But when you’re looking at, like, how did we get to Easter Island? It’s like, yeah, no, nobody gets to Easter island because it was a little too crowded where they were. You only get to Easter island by being like, I want to know what’s over that horizon, and I’m going to go sail in that direction. And so to what extent are other animals like this? You know, I talked to some scientists who are like it’s same like maple trees have spread pretty far across large swaths of the planet.

They’re not exploring. They just have seeds that blow in the wind. And so I guess where I would come down on this is that humans are uniquely exploring, but it’s a matter of degree, not that they have some gene that nobody, no other animal has.

Brett McKay: Well, one thing you do in this chapter where you try to figure out if humans are unique in the way they explore, is that you look at Polynesians and how they spread and settled across islands of the Pacific. And I love this chapter because my family, we went to Hawaii for the first time last year, and I remember there, being there and thinking, man, this is kind of crazy. Like, how did humans end up on these islands way out in the Pacific? So how could understanding how Polynesians spread across thousands of miles in the Pacific help us understand how humans explore?

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, so in this debate that I was just talking about of like, is there something different about humans? Water crossings become this crucial test of, like, okay a maple seed can blow in the wind, cross a long distance, but it’s not crossing the ocean. And so what size of water crossing tells you that it’s not just someone drifted off, but that they’re like, let’s go see how far we can get. And even getting to Australia, some people view that as the first concrete evidence of, like, modern humanity. Australia was separated. Even in ancient times, when sea levels were different, there was enough water crossings that someone had to have, like, technology and the kind of thinking ahead and planning and imagining what life might be like in a different place even to get to Australia. But if you move beyond Australia, then it’s like, okay, once you get to Polynesia, the distances are so crazy that one could argue that you can only get there if you’ve got some desire to sail off into the unknown. Because it’s not just like, hey, in the distance, I see a dot there. It’s like, no, there’s nothing there.

And you can take your boat and you can sail out three days and there’s still nothing there. And so then either you turn back because you need to fresh water or whatever, or you’re like, no, we’re going to stock up for a long voyage and we’re going to keep going. And there was a really famous academic debate in the 1950s and ’60s and ’70s between people who thought Polynesians, to get there, they must have had this voyaging culture where they could figure out where they were going without the benefit of GPS, and they could sail long distances, like more than 300 miles in their little slender catamarans built with… They didn’t necessarily have big trees on their islands. So a lot of cases, it’s like little pieces of wood kind of sewn together, and there was a strong view. There’s a guy named Andrew Sharp, a historian, who was like, there is no way. The only way they made it to these islands was by being blown off course or by being banished. And most of them died. But occasionally someone would make it to one of these islands.

And that led to this famous voyage. In the 1970s, there was the Polynesian Voyaging Society. They built a traditional boat, and they’re like, we’re going to sail from Hawaii to Tahiti, which is like 900 miles or something like that. We’re going to do it with no technology. We’re not even bringing watches, because being able to tell time is useful for navigating. We’re going to navigate by the stars and we’re going to prove that, yeah, it’s possible to navigate using traditional knowledge. And they did it, they made it. That doesn’t prove that that’s what happened in the past. But I think the general consensus, based on sort of all the lines of evidence, is that, yeah, it required deliberate exploration to go and settle these islands again, to, like to the extent of places like Easter island, where it’s like, no… It wasn’t just random chance that people ended up there.

Brett McKay: So with human exploration, there’s intention behind it. It’s not just like a wolf who kind of happens to wander into new territory. For humans, it’s like the Moana lyrics. See the line where the sky meets the sea, it calls me.

Alex Hutchinson: It calls me. Yeah, exactly. Because lots of animals spread out and normally it’s like, yeah, you’re looking for food you don’t see any here. Let’s try over there. Oh, over here’s pretty nice. Maybe I’ll actually make my den over here. To set out on a water crossing. It’s like, there’s another concept that I came across in the book, which is this idea of expanding the adjacent possible. So if they look at patterns of how people discover new music on Spotify or even how they write new articles on Wikipedia, most of the way people expand into new territory, whether it’s intellectual or physical, is you take where you are and you take one step beyond the border of what you know you’re expanding. And so when you’re expanding on land, you can expand the adjacent possible, but you can’t get to Easter island by expanding the adjacent possible. You have to stand there at the border of your island or your shore and imagine what might be completely out of sight and why it might be nice to get there, what you might get out of it. So it’s a real imaginative leap, and it requires, like, there’s a lot of reasons not to get on a boat and sail out into the ocean, not knowing where you’re going or what lies over the horizon. So there has to be some strong intrinsic drive that pulls you to take on this seemingly crazy challenge.

Brett McKay: Oh, let’s talk about that intrinsic drive. So your book is called The Explorer’s Gene. Is there a gene in humans that nudges people to explore?

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah. I will confess that the Explorer’s Gene was maybe a slightly deliberately provocative title.

Brett McKay: The editor picked that.

Alex Hutchinson: You know, I can’t even blame the editor. I picked it. But I was like, let’s stir the pot. Look, no, exploring isn’t determined by one gene, but there is definitely some genetic underpinning. And where I got the name from is that there is one particular gene that’s associated with one particular dopamine receptor, the DRD4 receptor, which basically there are different variants and some people get a bigger kind of jolt out of discovering something new or experiencing something novel than others do. And this variant seems to have first appeared about 50,000 years ago, which as it happens is roughly when our ancestors started really spreading out rapidly from Europe and Asia and Africa to the rest of the world. You know, moving out to crossing the Bering Strait and getting down into, well, Polynesia and South America and all that. So what’s interesting is there’s a study in 1999, so it was quite a while ago, that asked if you look at populations around the world, do they have different proportions of this so called explorer’s gene based on how far their ancestors migrated? And the answer is yes. It’s basically a linear relationship. The farther a population moved, the higher the proportion of this explorer’s gene they have this dopamine receptor gene.

So at the southern tip of South America you’ve got population groups that have 80% of the people have this explorer’s gene, whereas closer in Europe you have some populations where it’s like 20% or lower. Now the key thing that I want to, the caveat that I have to throw in there right away is this doesn’t mean that some people always want to explore and others never want to explore or that all South Americans want to explore and no Sardinians want to explore. That’s not what we need to take from this because we all have the same kind of reward circuitry, dopamine circuitry, that, and it’s complicated, but that essentially is looking for surprises, is looking for things that it didn’t expect. We all have that. It’s just that some people have a slightly bigger helping than others and over time that can lead to these changes we see in populations, but we’re all wired in… Like I definitely as someone who spent the last five years writing a book about exploring, I’ve had lots of conversations that go along the lines of like, oh yeah, exploring. Well, if there’s an exploring gene, I definitely don’t have it.

I don’t like exploring. And it’s like, no, no, no, you may not like parasailing to the South Pole. But we’re all drawn, I think, to novelty in some way, whether it’s listening to new music or finding books that you haven’t read, or ordering different things in the restaurant or whatever. Exploring doesn’t just mean physical hardship, but what it means is we’re drawn to novelty. All of us have that wiring, that gene, but some of us have variants that amp it up a little bit more.

Brett McKay: Yeah. When you talked about how some populations have more of this gene than others, it made me think. I know this is reductive, and I know this is not the point you’re trying to make, but it made me think about America. Like, America is like, this dynamic that people are constantly moving like, what’s going on there? And there’s probably a lot going on, the environment and history. But I do wonder if, like, sort of our immigrant past, like the type of people who come to America, they probably maybe, I don’t know, maybe had some more of that dopamine gene, and so maybe that contributed to a bit of, sort of the national character of America. I don’t know.

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, well, there’s some… So people have tried to look for this, and the signal for the dopamine receptors is hard to see. Like, these things are subtle. But the piece of evidence that I found really fascinating is someone did a big analysis of the emigration records from Scandinavia in the… I can’t remember the exact, like, late 1800s, early 1900s, where there was this huge, like, millions and millions of people went from countries like Sweden and Norway and settled in, like, Minnesota and places like that. So you look at the… They looked at the ship records of who emigrated and correlated them with their family. So people who emigrated were more likely to have unusual first names than people who… Than families who stayed relative to the general population. And what they think is that having an unusual first name is kind of a marker of these people didn’t want to just do the same old thing and follow the same old path. These families were families where someone in the family valued novelty and trying something new and being different and being individual. And those are the people who left Scandinavia and came to the United States.

So you could say that might have informed the character of the United States and that. I’m sure that was sort of replicated not just in Scandinavia, but who chooses to leave and emigrate to the new world as it was then informs the country, and then it may also have had an impact on the old country. So one of the then sort of corollary theories is why the Scandinavian countries have such strong social programs and a sort of collectivist mindset. Well, the individualists all went to Minnesota and the collectivists stayed behind it. And so those two societies have kind of diverged. And like you said, that’s reductivist. And people and countries are complicated. But it’s interesting to think that there may be some kind of effect like that.

Brett McKay: That’s really interesting. So nothing you do in this book, besides looking at the genetics, potential genetics, that influence exploration as you get into cognitive science, probability, mathematics, to help us figure out why we have this nudge to explore. And you really brought to bear your experience as a physicist into this book. I thought it was a lot of fun to help us figure out, like mathematically why humans explore. And one area you start exploring and talking about is this idea of predictive processing. What is predictive processing and what role does it play in the human urge to explore?

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, this was a fun little digression for me. I actually didn’t expect to get into that. And then I discovered this literature on it. I was like, oh, this is super interesting. It’s relevant to exploring, but it’s also like a cool topic on its own. So this was kind of news to me. So I’ll give some general background for listeners who may not have heard the term predictive processing, because I think it’s going to be something that people are going to hear a lot about in the next 10 years. Basically, it’s an idea that emerged about 20 years ago in neuroscience as a very small niche idea and has gradually kind of taken over the field to where I think it’s fair to say it’s probably become, or becoming the dominant view of how our brains work, why they’re wired the way they’re wired. And the basic idea is that our brains and everyone’s brains, that all living things, the fundamental goal in order to stay alive is to be able to successfully predict what’s going on in the world around you so that you’re not just like sitting there looking around and seeing what’s happening around you.

Your brain is always predicting, and then basically what your senses are doing is just checking whether your predictions are right. And having good predictions is a good way of staying alive because you know what’s happening. You’re not going to get surprised. So this creates a philosophical problem, which is that if our brains are fundamentally wired, all we want to do is to be able to predict exactly what’s going to happen next. Then what it suggests is we should hate exploring. We should, in fact, want to just go into the closet, turn off the lights and shut the door and stay there, because then we’re going to know exactly what’s happening next at all times, which is nothing in the sort of philosophy and cognitive science world. This is called the dark room problem. Why don’t we just all want to lock ourselves in dark rooms? And there’s been a lot of debate about this for about a decade. But I think where the current thinking is it’s like you need to think about prediction, about learn, knowing about the world. Not just in the sense of can you predict what’s happening exactly right now, or two seconds from now? You want to know what’s going to happen in the future.

You want to be able to predict well in advance what things are happening. And to do that, you need to understand how the world works. And so you need to learn as much as you can about the world. So this idea of having a predictive brain then ends up suggesting that we should be wired to seek out the areas that we know the least about. That when we see a closed door or a road leading over the horizon or around a corner, we want to know what’s around that corner. Because if we don’t, then something might jump out from around that corner and come and chase us. So predictive processing ends up creating this argument that we are wired to pursue uncertainty, to pursue what we don’t know, not because we love uncertainty itself, but because it gives us the opportunity to reduce that uncertainty. And so the kick we get from exploring is the feeling of finding an area where we didn’t know how things were going to turn or know what was going to happen, and then having the satisfaction of reducing that uncertainty.

Brett McKay: Okay, so we explore and we see uncertainty so that we can be more certain in a way?

Alex Hutchinson: That’s right. It’s kind of like, why do we like sugar? Well, we like sugar because ultimately it gave us something good, which was calories. And similarly, we don’t like uncertainty because we like not knowing what’s going to happen. We like uncertainty because we like learning what’s going to happen. We like the result of pursuing that uncertainty.

Brett McKay: And then you bring this idea of the Wundt curve. Pronounce that with W-U-N-D-T?

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, I’ve been debating how I should be like, should I put on the full Germanic. The Wundt curve. Very important. It’s named for a, I should not do accents. It’s named for a 19th century Wilhelm Wundt, who was the first to kind of look at this idea, but let’s call it the Wundt curve. So I’ll anticipate your question. I’ll jump in and say what the Wundt curve is. Yeah, basically it’s like a bell curve. So it’s an upside down U that’s saying there’s a relationship between how complex or how novel or how unexpected or how complicated something is and how much we like it. And if it’s not complex at all or not unexpected, we find it boring. But at the other end of the spectrum, if it’s really complicated and really unexpected, we find it scary and incomprehensible. But there’s a sweet spot in the middle where it’s… There’s enough uncertainty that it’s interesting and we feel like we can learn something about the world, but it’s not so uncertain that we can’t actually make sense of it. So there’s this sweet spot of uncertainty, which is really a moving target. It’s different between people.

It’s different over time. Wundt curve will shift. I mean, I think a good example of that is musical tastes. You don’t like music that’s just like Mary had a Little lamb after after you’ve heard it a billion times because it’s too simple. You might not like atonal 20th century classical music because it’s like, I can’t figure out what the heck’s going on. There’s a sweet spot in the middle of intermediate complexity. But that changes. If you spend a lot of time listening to music, you’ll generally start to like more and more complex and dissonant and unexpected music. And conversely, like, if my life is really stressed out and I’m I’ve got lots of uncertainty in my professional or my family life. I want to listen to, like, some simple music that I know really well, that I listened to a lot when I was 18 or whatever. I want to go back. And so my Wundt curve has shifted just based on what’s going on in my life.

Brett McKay: And I imagine dopamine is interacting with this kind of shifting the Wundt curve. So when it’s like completely boring, there’s no dopamine. And then when it’s just chaotic, you just can’t even make sense of it. So you don’t have any dopamine release. But then that sweet spot, it’s like, yeah, you need to hit this more because you’re getting some good dopamine here.

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah. Well, and one way the dopamine turns out to be super complicated. I was hoping that there’d be a simple dopamine story so I could once and for all say, here’s what dopamine does. But one of the ways of understanding dopamine is that it’s effectively a marker of prediction error. So it’s not that you get a hit of dopamine when something is good. You get a hit of dopamine when something is better than expected. So that’s why the first time you take a drug, let’s say you get this feeling that’s good, and you’re like, that was way better than I expected. I need to do this again. The 10th time you take the drug, you’re like, that was exactly what I expected based on the last nine times I took it. So you don’t get a hit of dopamine, and that’s why you have to then increase the dose. You know, your Wundt curve has changed. I guess you have to increase the dose to make it better than expected. So what this Wundt curve is telling us is you’re looking for ways of finding prediction error that you can then resolve so that you can get that hit of dopamine because something was different or better than expected.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay, so let’s kind of summarize what we’ve talked about. One reason why humans might explore or have this urge to explore. There’s a gene potentially that plays a role in that kind of nudging some people more than others to explore. But then also cognitively, all of us are wired to look for new things so that we can figure out the world in a way. That’s what the whole predictive processing thing is. Then you also talk about this idea that’s been floating around in cognitive psychology that’s popping up more and more. It’s the Explore vs. Exploit framework. What is the Explore vs. Exploit framework?

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, so we’ve been talking all about exploring and how great exploring is. And I started writing this book and figuring that the subtitle might be, like, why we should all explore more and that kind of thing. And one of the sort of nuances that I eventually realized is actually exploring isn’t the only option. Exploiting can be a good option too. So exploiting is set up as a classic choice. And exploiting is basically staying on the path you’re on, taking advantage of the knowledge you already have to pursue where you kind of know what the outcome’s going to be. Exploring something is getting off the beaten path where you don’t know what the outcome is going to be. And the classic example of this is that it’s often used to explain it is you’re at a restaurant, it’s a familiar restaurant you’ve been to many times. You know that you like the hamburger quite a bit, and you always order the hamburger, and then you see the server walking by with the meatloaf or with the special or something like that, and you’re like, oh, wait, I know I like the hamburger. I know it’s pretty good.

I’ve never tried that. It might be better, but it might be worse. And so do you want to take the chance? And we all wrestle with this, right? And then you order the meatloaf, and then it turns out to suck. And the person you’re with ordered the burger and you’re like, I can’t believe I ordered the thing that I didn’t know was going to be good when I could have ordered something I knew was going to be good. So it turns out that exploring and exploiting are both useful. And trying to figure out when you should do one and when you should do the other is a super, super complicated challenge.

Brett McKay: Well, yeah, this problem pops up in big issues, too. Like, you had the explore exploit problem when you were deciding after you rode indoors. Like, all right, I set myself up as the endurance guy. I can write about the science of endurance and fitness and I could have a great life. That’s the exploit. Like, you found something you could exploit, but then you started feeling like, what am I missing out on? Is there something that would actually be better if I did something different and leaving more of a sure good thing to try something else? That was a risk. It’s like that whole a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush type thing. That’s kind of the explorer versus exploit problem right there.

Alex Hutchinson: Absolutely. Yeah. The explore exploit terminology was actually, it came from a 1991 paper by a guy named James March, who was a Stanford University management prof. And he was writing about it in a corporate context. How do companies decide when to, like, spend money on R&D trying to develop something radically new versus why don’t we just spend that money marketing our current product line? You know, we’ve got some good stuff. Let’s exploit what we’ve already done. And so it’s a corporate context, it’s a societal context. Like, how much of our resources do we want to devote to like, blue sky research and development that we don’t know is going to pay off in any tangible way? And James March’s argument was fundamentally that, because when you exploit, you know what’s going to, you’re going to get. And you get feedback pretty quickly. Like, you find out I spent more money on marketing, hey, look, sales went up. Whereas when you explore I gave money to R&D and three years later, we still have no idea whether it’s going to work out. There’s a big chance of failure.

We might get nothing. That we tend to systematically underinvest in exploration because the feedback loop is so much less direct. Even though when you look over time, the return on exploration in the corporate context or in the ordering food from a restaurant context, the return is actually positive. But it’s still hard to take that leap because you’re giving up the bird in the hand.

Brett McKay: So when humans are trying to make this decision of whether to explore or exploit. So imagine there’s a guy, midlife, he’s got a solid career house, and he’s like, man, I’m feeling the… Is this all there is? That I don’t want to leave, I don’t want to jump careers, because that’s going to take a long time. How do we make that decision, whether to explore or exploit what goes on inside of our head?

Alex Hutchinson: Okay, I thought you were going to ask, what should the right decision be? And I was going to say, I don’t know. I don’t want to get in trouble for the guy leaving his career. What’s going on in our side of our head is actually a really interesting. It’s a deep and interesting question, and one that cognitive scientists have been spending a lot of time working on in the last, let’s say seven or eight years, there’s been a ton of work. So I guess the thing to start with is that… And you know, you mentioned the math trying to “solve the explore, exploit dilemma,” even when you restrict it with very specific conditions so that it’s the kind of thing you can solve in a lab. It is mathematically super, super hard. For decades, scientists were working on this, and then in the ’70s, someone finally came up with a solution called the Gittins index. But it only works under very specific solutions, circumstances, and the math involved is just insane. So it’s like, that’s not what’s going on in our heads. We’re not doing the Gittins index. Instead we have sort of shortcuts that try and help us figure out what we should do.

And you can dig into the math behind them. And it turns out that we actually do a pretty good job in most cases of coming up with good, rough and ready solutions. And one example that I think is a good illustration is, well, okay, let me give two examples. One is that there’s two ways of exploring. One is that you can pursue the thing you know the least about. So when you’re choosing options, exploring is like, well, I know a lot about that. I know a little bit about that. I know nothing about that. Let’s do the thing I know nothing about because I have the most to learn about that. The other way you can explore is you can just basically flip a coin. You can say, I’m going to do what’s called random exploration. It’s like, well, in order to avoid biasing myself by always going with what I know, I’m just going to make all decisions randomly. There’s been some funny experiments where people have tried to live their life that way. It’s like I’m just going to draw a random number every time I have to make a decision. And that’s another way of making sure that you don’t get stuck in a rut.

And so these things happen in our brain. And you can put people in like decision making lab studies and dial up and change the parameters so that it’s more advantageous to use random exploration or more exploration to use uncertainty directed exploration or more advantageous to not explore. And people do respond. And so like random exploration, for example, you can see the variability in the nerve signals in the brain goes up. So you just, basically you’re putting noise in the circuit and your brain is deciding, okay, well, we’re going to follow the usual instructions, but we’re going to add some random noise as I send this signal so that sometimes I’m going to get the opposite answer of what I thought I was going to get. And that’s going to make sure I keep exploring. So there’s really subtle sort of neuroscience that goes on that influences these decisions.

Brett McKay: No. Yeah, it is really interesting. You go deep into it, it’s completely fascinating. But I think you’re right. Like humans just kind of use heuristics. And I think most people, like I’ve noticed in my life, I use that sort of uncertainty directed heuristic to decide whether to explore and exploit. And something I’ve noticed too, that I’ll do is I’ll do both at the same time or try to do both at the same time. I’ve noticed that with my career with the Art of Manliness, I started off just as a website where we just published articles. And then 2009, like, podcasting kind of came up, and I’m like, oh, that’s interesting. I’ll try that. But I kept writing articles. I knew that was a good thing. I was exploiting it. So I started exploring the podcast. And then that worked out. This is great. I’m going to exploit that. And then I tried video, explored that for a bit, didn’t like it, so I stopped. I just didn’t do that anymore. So I think that’s one thing that humans do is like they’ll try to explore and exploit at the same time.

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, and I think that you relate this back to the one curb, a little bit of a sweet spot. But it’s like if you’re always exploring, and I use the example of music too, like, okay, most of us become less exploratory in our musical taste as time goes on. And so you might say, well you’re 28 and you’ve got all the songs you need, so you’re not going out there looking for new music. You might say, well, you’re missing out on something. You should still be listening to new stuff, exploring new stuff, and that’s great. But if you were to push it to the extreme and say, I’m going to always explore everything essentially means I’m never going to listen to the same song twice. I’m going to just seek new music. And once I’ve heard it, it’s dead to me. I need to explore something new. And that’s obviously you can, that’s obviously an absurd example, but it makes no sense. Like, one of the reasons to seek out new music is to find things you like and then to enjoy it, to exploit it, to sit back and listen to this music you’ve discovered that you like.

And so I think career wise, or more generally making these decisions, if you don’t have a mix of exploring and exploiting, it’s clear that you don’t want to be on either end of the extreme, both for the point of view of satisfaction, but also like, risk and safety and like career wise, that I definitely identify with what you’re saying with the Art Of Manliness in terms of how I’ve managed my career. I’ve taken some big risks, but I’ve generally tried to cover My risks so that the downside is not too serious.

Brett McKay: Something you explore too is that, or you explore about exploring is kids, young people are more likely to explore than adults. Why is that?

Alex Hutchinson: Well, it’s a smart decision in a lot of ways. So, I mean, you can think of it mathematically, you can also think of it just logically, that the more time you have in front of you, the greater the time you have to enjoy whatever or benefit from whatever you discover through your exploration. There’s a scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, Alison Gopnik, who’s proposed this theory or this idea that childhood really is basically designed as a solution to the explore, exploit dilemma. That the reason humans have an unusually long childhood, even compared to, like, apes, and the reason is it’s a good solution that you learn as much as possible about the world when you still have lots of time to enjoy whatever you learn. And as time goes on, you take advantage of what you learn and you start exploiting more and more to the logical endpoint that in theory, the day before you die, you should not be exploring at all because there’s no benefit.

Brett McKay: Well, let’s talk about that. That’s kind of depressing. As you get older, it’s like, well, there’s no benefit to exploring. What do you think about that? I mean, it sounds like you’re not for that, that we should keep exploring?

Alex Hutchinson: I hate that idea. I hate that idea. Yeah, but I also like, look, I respect the math.

Brett McKay: So, yeah, mathematically it makes sense, right? It does make sense rationally, but I just, I don’t like that.

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, I hate it. And I asked pretty much every scientist I spoke to, I asked about this and they had various answers. I think most people agreed that it’s like, it is logical that you explore less as you get older. That, I mean, for one thing, when one of them said this quote like, you can’t regrow your expectations about the world when you’re older, you know stuff. So it’s like, for my kids when they were young, it’s like, oh, we’re going to go tobogganing for the first time. This is going to be an act of exploration. It’s going to be so much fun. They don’t know what it’s like to slide down a hill. It’s like, I already know what it’s like toboggan. I still like tobogganing, but it’s no longer exploratory for me and I can’t invent new sports every day. Like, I already know stuff. So there is a logical progression, but the trend or the sort of natural progression of exploring less may not match up well with modern life. And so one of the scientists said if you’re 60 years old a million years ago, when you’re 60 years old, it may have been like, yeah, dude, just kind of, you know where the tubers are.

You keep digging those tubers and just try and stay alive a little longer. Don’t explore anymore. Now if you’re 60 years old, there’s a good chance you’re going to live 20, 25, 30 years. And so how depressing is that if you’re like, well, I’m not going to make any new memories, I’m just going to kind of coast along on fumes. So there’s that argument that we live longer, so you want to keep exploring longer than you might otherwise assume. And there’s the other thing, which is that we can describe the reasons for exploring in two ways. One is that it leads to good things. It’s how we learn about the world. The other is that it feels good and those two things are linked. The reason it feels good is that evolutionarily it led to good things. It was good for us, but now we’re in this world where it’s just like sugar told us where calories were. But sometimes, even if I don’t need calories, I like to eat dessert because it tastes good. And I’m 49 now. I hope that when I’m 75 or 80 or whatever, I still will enjoy the feeling of discovering something new, of the frisson of uncertainty of, of not knowing how something’s going to turn out instead of just doing the same things over and over again.

Brett McKay: Okay, so this is inspiration to even if you’re 40, 50, 60, keep doing new things. You don’t have to go crazy. You don’t have to like just upend your life. Maybe. I mean, if that’s what you want to do. That’s how you scratch your itch and it’s like you can minimize the downside. But yeah, keep trying new things. There is a benefit to it, even though rationally it doesn’t make sense.

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, so a good example is a few years ago I took up rock climbing and I’ve been a runner all my life. And I pat myself on the back here. I’m a very good runner. And so in terms of like, recognition from other people or even self actualization of like doing something good. Running is the no brainer for me. I can go and feel good about myself. I’m a terrible rock climber. I just suck at it. But there is something amazing about… Because when I took it up, it had been a long time since I’d done something that was just totally new and that I sucked at. And it’s not that I enjoy sucking at things, but I enjoy, I realized that I was kind of missing this feeling of learning something new. Of like every day is a journey of of, not that I’m making tons of progress, but I make little bits of progress and I don’t know how it’s going to turn out. I’m not an expert in this area. And so yeah, I would absolutely say that you don’t have to go to the North Pole or whatever, you don’t have to take up wingsuit flying or anything like that.

But you should have something in your life that’s new and different, that’s different than you were doing a decade ago where you have the prospect of learning that is… It’s good for your brain on a neuroscientific level, but it’s also just the cool feeling.

Brett McKay: It’s good for the soul. Let’s talk about how we explore landscapes. You go into this. So how does our brain explore physical landscapes?

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, so this is a really neat area of science. And I think a lot of people are familiar with the idea of cognitive maps. That there’s an area in our brain, in the hippocampus that maps areas that we’re familiar with in an actual, like a completely literal sense. You get to know a neighborhood, then there will be one neuron that fires whenever you’re at that particular intersection and another neuron that fires when you’re at a different intersection or halfway down the street. These are called place cells. And in addition to place cells, we have like boundary cells and direction cells and stuff. So we literally have like this GPS in our hippocampus. And there’s famous study from about 25 years ago where they studied London taxi drivers who have to basically memorize the streets of London in order to get their license and found that their hippocampuses are enlarged. That this is a “muscle” that enlarges with use. So we can find our way around the world by wandering around gradually mapping the world and recording it in our hippocampus. We can also get around by just memorizing basically a series of stimulus response directions.

I Want to get to the library? I go two blocks that way until I see the gas station. Then I turn left and go up the hill until I see the church and then I turn right or whatever. That’s called stimulus response navigation. And it’s generally faster and easier and more efficient than this cognitive mapping approach. And we all use both, right? Like there’s context when one is better than the other. But the general trend in the modern world is that we need cognitive mapping less and less. Even if no one has given us directions. We have our phones with GPS and turn-by-turn directions, we don’t have to know anything about where we’re going. We just have to press a button. And when it says turn right, we say turn right, we turn right. When it says jump, we say how high? And it’s just removing the need to actually know where we are or to form a cognitive map.

Brett McKay: Yeah, so GPS uses that stimulus response navigation?

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, certainly the turn-by-turn directions, it’s pure stimulus response. A key distinction is like, if I know how to get from point A to point B and I know how to get from point B to point C, if I’m following stimulus response, it’s just a series of turns, then I have no idea how to take a shortcut from A to C. Like to get to C, I have to go first to B because I know the directions to B and then B to C follows directions. If I have a cognitive map, I know where everything is relative to each other. So I can say, oh, I can just cut straight across here to get to C, because I understand where these things are because I have a map in my head.

Brett McKay: What does the research say that this reliance on turn-by-turn directions using GPS, what is that doing to our ability to create cognitive maps?

Alex Hutchinson: This is a small area of research, but the researchers I spoke to are worried about it because like everything the brain responds to how we use it. Stimulus response navigation is mostly dependent on an area of the brain called the caudate nucleus instead of the hippocampus. So the more you use stimulus response navigation, the more you use your caudate nucleus, the bigger it gets, in fact, and the less you use your hippocampus, the smaller it gets. Smaller hippocampus is a risk factor for a whole bunch of pretty unpleasant things. Things like Alzheimer’s and PTSD, cognitive decline. And so there are some researchers who are like, yeah, you should really be wary of turn-by-turn directions on your GPs of being overly reliant and not actually taking time to look around. To explore, to be lost occasionally. And I don’t want to be like again, I don’t want to over hype the findings, but I will say I try to avoid using turn-by-turn directions on my phone or in my car. You know, I will look up where I’m going, I’ll try to figure out where I’m going and then I’ll just turn it off until if I’m not sure where to go, I’ll turn them back on.

So that’s my reading. My reading of the events is such that I’m trying to be more conscious of wandering through my surroundings and knowing where I am, even if that means occasionally getting lost.

Brett McKay: Well, it’s something else that some research have speculated is that our reliance on GPs not only has affected our ability to navigate the physical world, but it also might be affecting how we explore, navigate abstract ideas in our head.

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, so this was a really cool thing that I didn’t realize until I started researching this, which is that the hippocampus, this idea of a cognitive map, I thought of it purely in terms of physical landscapes, but it turns out there’s a growing amount of evidence that we map ideas and people and social relationships. We also map those in the hippocampus in a very similar like sort of map. So that you can think of like two ideas that are close to each other or farther apart and you can have shortcuts between ideas and you can expand the area around those ideas. Or people, for example, there is a study that shows that we tend to map people in the hippocampus based on how well we know them and what sort of interactions we have with them. So that’s like a two dimensional map of like, I know this person really well and they’re a jerk, I know this person not very well, but they seem nice or whatever. And so the hippocampus is important. So on the one hand what this suggests is that even if we use GPS navigation, we’re not going to stop using our hippocampus because we use it for lots of other things.

So we shouldn’t overstate the dangers of GPS. But on the other hand, it suggests that if we do allow our hippocampus to become less, if we use it less and it atrophies to some extent, if we’re compromising our hippocampus, it might be not just that we’re having more trouble finding our way around, but also that we’re having more trouble mapping ideas together. Seeing how things connect, keeping track of people.

Brett McKay: Okay, so maybe the takeaway there, use GPS less, try to navigate by dead reckoning every now and then perhaps. I also, it kind of inspired me. Like I thought about. Because you talk about this in the book, doing orienteering. Maybe that’s something you could do to exercise your hippocampus. Take an orienteering course.

Alex Hutchinson: There we go. ‘Cause there’s a little bit of research coming out on orienteering where it’s like ’cause these are races where you run but you have to navigate with hippocampus and it’s like whatever you’re doing for your brain, you get a supercharged effect because the physical exercise is flooding your brain with things like BDNF, which helps enhance the growth of neurons or the connections between neurons. So you’re getting a double whammy of the exercise plus the cognitive effect. But yeah, just to amend or to follow up on that point, I’d say yeah, GPS is an easy example. And so I use GPS turn-by-turn directions as a thing. That is an example of the way we’re moving towards stimulus response. But I think it’s not just the one specific technology. It’s more the idea of always optimizing efficiency, of always prioritizing getting to the destination rather than seeing where you’re going. So I think that the big picture advice is like be present, look around, know where you are. Like, so I’m looking out my window right now as we speak and it’s like I should know what’s there, I should know what kinds of trees are there and which direction the river is and stuff like that.

I should be aware of my surroundings. I’m willing to get lost occasionally willing to take a wrong turn because that will force you to pay your attention to start forming cognitive maps. So yeah, it’s about being present as much as avoiding your GPS.

Brett McKay: Yeah, this goes back to predictive processing. You want to make errors because it’ll help you in the long run.

Alex Hutchinson: That’s right, yeah. Otherwise you’re just living at the bottom of the Wundt curve where there’s no uncertainty and no prediction error.

Brett McKay: So exploring it feels good, but it can also be uncomfortable and frustrating. Like your explorations might lead to failure, setbacks, disaster sometimes. It’s not exploration if there’s no risk of failure. But we still explore despite knowing that, oh my gosh, like things could end up poorly. Like what’s going on there? Like why do we do this thing that can make us feel bad but we still enjoy doing it?

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah. This was one of those kind of eureka moments for me when I stumbled across some research in psychology about something called the effort paradox.

Brett McKay: This is from Michael Inslicht.

Alex Hutchinson: That’s right.

Brett McKay: We had him on the podcast. Yeah, we had him on the podcast.

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah, there we go. So I refer listeners then to hear Michael himself explain this.

Brett McKay: Well, we actually, we talked about willpower. He debunks willpower. But we talked a little bit about the effort paradox. So, yeah, flesh this out a bit more because we didn’t get much into that.

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah. So the idea is that there are things that we value not in spite of the fact that they’re hard, but because they’re hard. And so this is a kind of mental shift because I’ve been talking about how wonderful exploring feels. And like, we do it because it’s self actualizing and blah, blah, blah. And then it’s like you, you actually get out and take a risk and do something, whether it’s career wise or climbing a mountain or whatever. And it’s like, actually, this is really hard and I’m scared and it could all go very wrong. And so there’s a tendency to assume that we’re willing to put up with the challenge in order to get to the destination. But what Michael Inslicht and his colleagues essentially argue is that that’s not actually a satisfying explanation of why we’re willing to do hard things. We really seem to actually like the hardness of it in some way. You know, we’re eating spicy foods and we’re climbing mountains and we’re buying furniture from Ikea. There’s some hilarious research on something called the IKEA effect, which is if you buy a piece of furniture from IKEA and you spend all this time trying to sort out the stupid pictographic instructions and find all the mismatched screws, you put it together.

If you then want to sell it, you will ask for a higher price than you would have if you had bought the exact same furniture pre-assembled because you value it more because you had to struggle with it. And it’s it’s same with, like, you may start running because you want to get fit, but if you’re running your fourth marathon, there’s something more there. You’re pursuing something different. You know, if you keep hitting yourself on the finger with a hammer, you’re doing it because on some level you like it. And so why do we like it? There’s a whole bunch of theories that probably all have some grain of truth. But I think the big one that encompasses them all is that we tend to find things that are hard, meaningful. And we have trouble defining what it means to say that something is meaningful. Like, why is life something you do meaningful? I don’t know. I don’t know how to explain it. But this thing is meaningful, and that one’s not. And it tends to be. We find taking on challenges meaningful, and that leads to a feel of satisfaction and a feeling of wanting to do it again.

Brett McKay: Okay, so if you experience some difficulty, some discomfort in your exploration, like, lean into it, because you might find meaning in it. But then also, you don’t want to be stupid about this. You know, it might be hard, and it’s… Your brain’s trying to tell you, like, hey, you need to stop doing this because this is not working.

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah. And that’s a subtle distinction. And I don’t have a simple heuristic to know which is which. It’s like with running there’s two conflicting pieces of advice, which is that you’re going to have aches and pains, and you need to run through them because otherwise you’ll never run. But you need to rec… And running’s gonna be uncomfortable, but you need to recognize when you have like a shin splint or a stress fracture coming, and you need to be able to distinguish between those two. And to some extent, you just kind of have to get out there and explore, if you will, and figure out which one is which. But, yeah, something that is challenging, the feeling of challenge or difficulty or struggle, it’s just like if you playing on a soccer team and the soccer team wins 10 nothing that’s much less interesting and rewarding than it is than if you win 4 to 3. And so it’s great to have things that challenge you. If it’s just defeating you, it’s not great to lose 10 nothing. Losing 10 nothing is challenging, but that’s on the far end of the Wundt curve. And so don’t go out there and just take your beating as a masochist. But if it’s hard, don’t view that as a disqualifying factor right away.

Brett McKay: So you’ve been researching and writing about exploration for the past five years. What’s your Explore More playbook for people? What would you recommend people listening to this episode do this week to start exploring a little bit more in their lives?

Alex Hutchinson: Yeah. So, I mean, first of all, I would say exploiting is good too. It’s balanced. And that’s one of the things I came away from the book with, which is that it’s not about always mindlessly exploring more. It’s about making sure that you’re finding a role for both, exploring, exploiting in your life. So one of the big insights for me was, and we talked earlier about my sort of backpacking addiction and really trying to get into these crazy places. And after spending a lot of time thinking about exploration and marinating in all this research, I really came to the realization that I still love those places. But fundamentally, what I’m pursuing, this feeling of discovering something that’s new to me does not require that I go to the ends of the earth, that there are ways of exploring in my own neighborhood. There are ways of exploring intellectually, but also even physically. Like, I live in a city of 4 million in Toronto. There’s a river a block from my house. So in the course of writing this book, I bought a kayak and I bought a couple, actually, so I can go with my kids, and we go down and float on the river and it’s like, whoa.

I’ve actually lived in this neighborhood most of my life, and I know that river really well, but I’ve never I’ve never seen it from the water. And there’s places I can go. There’s a marsh near there, just half a mile down the river from from where I live. You can’t access it from land, so until I’d gone on the water, I’d never been there. And then you go in there and there’s like, turtles and deer and stuff. It’s like, wow I’m in a city of 4 million, but I’m having that feeling of discovering something new. So I think in terms of practical advice, it depends on the person. But what I would say is there should be something going on in your life, something you’re doing, something you’re pursuing, whether it’s a hobby or at work or in your personal life, where you don’t know how it’s going to turn out, where you don’t know what the outcome is, where it’s not all mapped out and maybe even makes you a little bit scared. Not in a, like, crap your pants way, but in a, like, I’m nervous about this. So that would be my big call to action.

Brett McKay: I love it. Well, Alex, it’s been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Alex Hutchinson: Probably simplest place is my website which is alexhutchinson.net. I could not get.com unfortunately some kid in New Jersey got it. But yeah, alexhutchinson.net. I’ve got links there to the book, but also to various stuff I’ve written and stuff like that. Social media.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Alex Hutchinson, thanks for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

Alex Hutchinson: Thank you so much bud. I really appreciate it.

Brett McKay: My guest here is Alex Hutchinson. He’s the author of the book the Explorer’s Gene. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website alexhutchinson.net. Also check out our show notes at AOM is explore where you find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic. Well that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives. And check out our new newsletter, it’s called Dying Breed for both men and women. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly and if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to use me up a podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot and if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member. You think we get something out of it? As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time is Brett McKay reminds anyone listening to our podcast, but put what you heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

People commonly think of time as a fixed, linear, objective structure. But our own experiences belie this belief. We’ve all been in situations where time has seemed to drag on or speed up, and there are even whole periods of our lives that seem to have gone by slower or faster.

As my guest Steve Taylor will explain, time is a lot more fluid and moldable than we often recognize. Steve is a psychologist and the author of Time Expansion Experiences: The Psychology of Time Perception and the Illusion of Linear Time. Today on the show, he unpacks the four laws of psychological time. He discusses the theories as to why time speeds up as we get older and what factors slow down and speed up time. We delve into the way time particularly expands in accidents and emergencies, giving people the ability to take life-saving measures. And we discuss why some people are more likely to have time expansion experiences than others, and what you can do to slow down time and make your life feel longer as a result.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Article: Be a Time Wizard — How to Slow Down and Speed Up Time
• AoM Article: More Footage — Take the One-Month “Do Something New Every Day” Challenge

Connect With Steve Taylor

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Listen to the episode on a separate page.

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here. And welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast. People commonly think of time as a fixed, linear, objective structure, but our own experiences belie this belief. We’ve all been in situations where time has seemed to drag on or speed up, and there are even whole periods of our lives that seem to have gone by slower or faster. As my guest Steve Taylor will explain, time is a lot more fluid and moldable than we often recognize. Steve is a psychologist and the author of ‘Time Expansion Experiences: The Psychology of Time Perception and the Illusion of Linear Time.’ Today on the show, he unpacks the four laws of psychological time. He discusses the theories as to why time speeds up as we get older and what factors slow down and speed up time. We delve into the way time particularly expands in accidents and emergencies, giving people the ability to take life-saving measures. And we discuss why some people are more likely to have time expansion experiences than others and what you can do to slow down time and make your life feel longer as a result. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/timeexpansion. All right, Steve Taylor, welcome to the show.

Steve Taylor: Hi Brett, it’s great to be with you.

Brett McKay: So you are a psychologist who has spent his career studying time expansion experiences. What is a time expansion experience?

Steve Taylor: It’s a moment when time stretches out way beyond its normal speed. So a second or two could stretch out into maybe half a minute or a minute or even longer. They often happen in accidents or emergency situations, but also in other unusual states of consciousness. So really it’s a massive expansion of one second or 10 seconds or any period of time which seems to be much longer than it really is.

Brett McKay: Okay. And we’re gonna dig deep into this. It’s incredibly fascinating, the research you’ve done on this. How did you get interested in researching time expansion?

Steve Taylor: Well, I actually wrote a book about time maybe 15 years ago, and I felt as though I kind of worked out time and I didn’t really need to focus on it anymore. But then 10 years ago, I had a car crash. I was driving along the highway, or the motorways we call them here in the UK, just outside my home city of Manchester. And it was quite a busy afternoon. Lots of cars around me traveling at maybe 60 miles an hour. And I was in the middle lane. I was preparing to overtake a truck on the inside lane, but the truck didn’t see me. And he tried to move out into the middle lane and he clipped the back of my car and I started to spin round. He clipped the car again so we were spinning around even faster. And immediately, as soon as I heard the sound of his truck hitting my car, everything went into slow motion. I remember saying to my wife, who was in the passenger seat, “What was that noise?” And then it seemed like there was a long, long pause, and then the car started to spin. It seemed like it was spinning slowly, even though it probably wasn’t.

And I remember looking behind and I saw the frightened faces of the drivers behind me stretching way, way back along the lines of cars. And everything became very clear. I had this very heightened perception. And I was also incredibly calm. You know, in my mind, I knew this was a very dangerous situation. I thought, well, maybe we’re gonna be seriously injured, maybe even killed in this situation. But I started to think very methodically, you know, is there anything I can do? I tried to shunt the car to the left, towards the shoulder. I tried to pull the handbrake and press down on the other brake. And maybe it was because of my actions, but fortunately, the car began to spin towards the left, towards the shoulder. Then we crashed into a barrier at the side of the road. And then everything seemed to go back to normal speed. I seem to go back into a normal state of consciousness. So in reality, this whole incident probably lasted maybe three or four seconds. But in my mind, it seemed to last for much, much longer, maybe half a minute or 45 seconds, because I had so much time to perceive the situation, to think about what to do. And it was my first personal experience, what I called it, a time expansion experience. So then I began to do research on them as a psychologist, and I found out that they’re actually very common.

Brett McKay: Okay, we’re gonna talk about some of these heightened time experiences where time really slows down. It’s almost like bullet time in the Matrix. But in the book, you not only talk about how time can slow down, but how it can also speed up. And you unpack four laws of psychological time, and the first one is, time seems to speed up as we get older. And I’m sure most people listening to this probably agree that as they’ve gotten older, time just seems to be going by faster and faster. In your research, how common is that experience?

Steve Taylor: It seems to be a fairly universal human phenomenon. About 90% of people feel that time is getting faster as they get older. And, you know, research in different countries has shown the same that it doesn’t matter whether you’re living in the Middle east or Asia, everybody in the world seems to experience this phenomenon. And people try to take some measures against it. You know, everybody kind of regrets the fact that time is moving quickly. But, yeah, it does seem to be a natural human phenomenon.

Brett McKay: And this is something that philosophers and psychologists have been grappling with for nearly two centuries. What have been the different theories put out there as to why time seems to go faster and faster as we get older?

Steve Taylor: The first philosopher to speculate about this was a French philosopher called Paul Janet in the 19th century, the mid 19th century, and he was the first person who put forward a theory, and I refer to it as the proportional theory. It’s the idea that as you get older, each period of your life is a smaller part of your life as a whole. So that when you’re five years old, for example, a year is 20% of your whole life. Therefore, it seems like a massive period of time. But when you’re 50, a year is only 2% of your whole life. So it seems correspondingly insignificant. That seems to work quite well. It explains why time seems to speed up in a kind of mathematical way. You know, the older you get, the faster it seems to go. So that’s one theory. But there was a later psychologist called William James, an American psychologist, who suggested that it was maybe related to new experiences as well, that when you’re a child, your life is so full of new experience, and all of this new experience stretches time. So that’s the theory that I lean towards, that it’s to do with new experience.

Brett McKay: I think I agree with William James and you on that one. I’ve noticed, I think other psychologists have studied this, but a lot of our memories, most of our memories are from adolescence or young adulthood. Like, I don’t remember too much about my childhood, but I remember a lot about my high school years, my college years. And it just seems like there’s like this time at a time where it just seemed expansive. And I think it’s because there was just so much going on during that time. When you’re a young adult, ’cause you’re making these big, important decisions. You’re doing new things with friends, you’re going off to new places. And then once you hit, I don’t know, your 30s, life’s, for a lot of people kind of set. You might be married, have kids, have a career, and it just it’s the same thing over and over again. So it just goes by faster and faster.

Steve Taylor: Yeah, I think that’s a lot to do with it. When you’re young, you are literally experiencing everything for the first time. But as you get older, your life becomes a repetition of those experiences. So there’s corresponding less newness in your life. And you know, by the time you’re maybe 70 or 80 years old, you’re living in a world of familiarity. Every experience has been experienced many times before. So, yeah, there’s less newness in your life. I think fundamentally it’s about information processing. There’s a strong link between time perception and information processing so that the more information you process, the slower time goes. So if you’re having a lot of new experiences, there’s so much new information going into your consciousness and that seems to stretch time.

Brett McKay: Oh, and that leads us to the second law, which is time seems to go slowly when we’re exposed to new environments and experiences. What’s been the research on this law?

Steve Taylor: Well, it’s anecdotally, you know, it’s a well known human phenomenon that when you go to a new place, if you go abroad for a few days, particularly to a place which is very different to your home environment, it makes time stretch so that when you come back you feel, “Wow, have I really just been away for a few days? It feels more like a few weeks.” I had that when I went to India for a few weeks many years ago. I came home and I felt like I’d been away for about six months rather than six weeks because I’d had so much new experience. And again, this seems to be to do with new information processing, you know, because when we were in a new environment, there’s so much newness around us. Everything is unfamiliar and strange. So our consciousness just expands and time stretches. And there have been some experiments where psychologists have found that new information seems to stretch time. People estimate longer time periods when they’re exposed to new information and also varied information. If you repeat the same information, time contracts. It can be, for example, auditory information in a laboratory, noises, unfamiliar noises, they seem to stretch time. Whereas familiar noises, which are repeated again and again, people estimate shorter time periods.

Brett McKay: With this law where time seems to go slowly when we’re exposed to new environments and experiences, is this people remembering like it’s a retrospective or does it feel slower in the moment? ‘Cause I’ve heard this theory that part of the reason why time seems to go more slowly when we experience new environments and have different experiences is that your brain is like a camera. And when you do the same routine stuff, your brain’s like, I don’t need to turn on and film this ’cause I’ve already seen this a bunch of times. But then when you do something new, your brain thinks, I may need to remember this. I’m gonna remember this later. So it takes a lot more metaphorical footage so that later when you look back, there’s more footage to unspool, which makes the experience seem longer when we remember it.

Steve Taylor: I think that’s a factor because new experiences do create more memories. So when we look back, you know, we have a lot of memories to draw on. But I think it’s also a present tense phenomenon. I mean, all our experience takes place in the present tense. So the information that we process, that happens right now, our consciousness is open in that moment, and it’s taking in that information in the moment. So I think it is mainly a present tense phenomenon. But obviously, you can only really measure time in retrospective. We’re living through time in the moment, so we can’t really get outside and measure it. So usually our measurements of time take place retrospectively when we get home from a journey or at the end of a brief period of time. But that doesn’t mean that the actual time stretching doesn’t take place in the moment. I think it does take place in the moment. And maybe there is also an effect from memory. But I think fundamentally, it is a present tense phenomenon.

Brett McKay: Okay. The third law is about time speeding up. It says time seems to speed up in states of absorption. What do you mean by absorption?

Steve Taylor: Absorption is when our attention is immersed in an activity, or it could be entertainment. It’s when we were so immersed in the activity that we forget our surroundings, we forget ourselves. We kind of lose ourselves in whatever we’re doing. So it could be when we’re playing a sport. It could be when we’re watching a film. It could be just when we’re in a social situation with friends. But all these situations tend to contract time because they lend themselves to absorption.

Brett McKay: And I’m sure people have experienced that. Maybe they get involved in a really… If they play video games, there might be a video game that was just really enjoyable. And then they look back like, “Oh, my Gosh, it’s been three hours. It felt like 45 minutes”.

Steve Taylor: That’s right. That’s a very common phenomenon, actually, video games, ’cause they lend themselves to such intense absorption. Generally there is a proportional effect. The more absorbed you are, the faster time seems to go. And I guess, you know, particularly for young people, video games are incredibly absorbing.

Brett McKay: But for other people, it could be an intense bout of work, like something’s going on in the office, there’s a lot of action, and you have to get into the zone, you have to get locked in. And in that moment it just seems like time goes by really fast after you’re all done.

Steve Taylor: That’s right, yeah. In some ways that’s a good thing because people often report job satisfaction in relation to absorption. The more absorbed you are in your job, the more effective you are in the job, but also the faster the time goes. Whereas if a job which is kind of, you know, maybe it doesn’t engage your attention, maybe it’s a bit boring, or maybe there are lots of different things that you have to do and you have to switch your attention around so you can’t get into a steady focus of absorption. Those kind of jobs are less, well, they’re less absorbing and also they tend to bring less job satisfaction. And also, they make time pass very slowly, which is a bad thing.

Brett McKay: Well, and you also talk about, this is connected to this idea of boredom, our moods and emotions can affect absorption and thus our perception of time.

Steve Taylor: That’s right, yeah. Generally, negative states of mind tend to slow down our time perception, which is, you know, it’s quite weird in a way. It’s kind of as if a malevolent God is playing tricks on us because time goes quickly when we’re absorbed, which usually means fun and enjoyment. And time goes slowly when we’re bored. So it’s as if somebody’s playing tricks on us. And pain as well. Usually painful situations or painful states of mind slow down time. Depression, anxiety, any negative state of mind tends to slow down time. And I think that is again because of absorption. Because when you’re bored, you know, it means by definition that your attention is not absorbed. When you’re in pain, you can’t focus your mind, your attention keeps being drawn back to the pain, so you can’t focus on a book or a film or a conversation. So time tends to drag and the negativity of the situation tends to be prolonged.

Brett McKay: I imagine people who have had a family member or maybe themselves waiting for some sort of health diagnosis, they might have experienced that time slowing down and dragging because they’re just ruminating about, oh my gosh, what’s going to happen? Do I have cancer or is something bad gonna happen?

Steve Taylor: That’s right. So again, you know, you’re in such an anxious state, state of mind that you can’t get absorbed in anything. You can’t focus your attention away from the situation. There’s a similar situation if you’re on a long haul flight and you’re a person who feels a bit anxious when you’re flying, so you can’t absorb your attention in a film or conversation. You’re constantly looking at your watch or at the time to find out how long is left. So your anxiety is prolonged because you can’t absorb your attention, and therefore, the flight seems to last for much longer than normal.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and that’s what we do. If you wanna make the flight go by faster, you bring something to get yourself absorbed in, whether it’s a movie or a book or something like that.

Steve Taylor: That’s right. I mean, we subconsciously make use of these laws because we know that there are certain things we can do to slow down or speed up our time perception. And we know intuitively that absorption makes time pass faster. So yeah, you’re right. That’s exactly why we watch films, we try to get engaged in conversations when we’re on long flights.

Brett McKay: Okay, so the fourth law and what the bulk of your book is about is this. It’s time passes very slowly in intense altered states of consciousness when our normal psychological structures and processes are significantly disrupted and our normal self system dissolves. There’s a lot to unpack in this law. And I think the best way to unpack it is to give examples of times when people are put into intense altered states of consciousness. And this goes back to your experience with the car accident. One area that you research this altered state of consciousness happening is in emergencies and accidents. In what types of emergencies and accidents do people typically experience time expansion?

Steve Taylor: In my research, around 50% of time expansion experiences happen in accident situations. And that’s mainly car crashes, but also falls, many reports from falls, but also other situations such as under the effects of psychedelic substances, also in sports, but also general emergency situations when people are told bad news or when they undergo trauma of some kind. But yeah, the most prevalent situation which occurs is accidents of one form or another.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and it says the accident has to be unexpected, sudden and dramatic.

Steve Taylor: That’s right. So you know, you can’t recreate this situation. There was a famous experiment where psychologists tried to recreate an accident situation or an emergency situation where they asked people to do bungee jumps and they tried to measure their time perception while they were jumping, while they were doing bungee jumps, but the results weren’t valid. They didn’t find that people underwent time expansion. I think that’s because it wasn’t a genuine emergency situation. It wasn’t unexpected, it wasn’t dramatic or sudden. People knew what was gonna happen. So it has to be a completely unexpected situation.

Brett McKay: In your research, have you figured out like, how much does time feel like it slows down in an accident or in an emergency?

Steve Taylor: It varies from person to person. Most people experience a time dilation of maybe to the order of magnitude of 10 or 15. So that 10 seconds seems to be one and half minutes, or maybe five seconds seems to be something like a minute. That’s quite common. That’s the kind of time dilation which I experienced in my accident. But there are some situations where it becomes even more extreme. For example, there are some examples of falls. When a mountaineer, for example, falls off the side of a mountain and a two second fall can seem to stretch out into what seems like many minutes. Sometimes occasionally when people are close to death through drowning, that can also make time stretch in a very dramatic way. And also there are situations like near-death experiences when a person actually does clinically die for a short time, where there’s an even more dramatic time expansion.

Brett McKay: Yeah. But what’s interesting in regards to falls, the first person to start kind of studying time expansion in a fall, this happened a long time ago, this is like in the 1800s, is this guy named Albert Heim. He was a geologist and climber and he experienced a fall and he just, he noticed that, “Man, time seemed to slow down”, and so he started trying to figure out like what was going on there.

Steve Taylor: That’s right. He was the first person to study these experiences actually back in, I think it was 1885. Yeah. As you say, he was climbing a mountain. He fell off the side of a mountain. He fell about 20 meters or 60 feet. And in reality, a fall of 20 meters takes two seconds. But in his mind, those two seconds seem more like minutes. He described in incredible detail the thought processes which went through his mind in those two seconds. Incredibly detailed thoughts about his friends and relatives and how they would react to the news of his death and what was gonna happen to his career at university. He pondered over whether he should take his glasses off so that when he hit the ground, he wondered whether they would smash and hurt his eyes. He wondered about his friends who he’d been climbing with, and all of these incredibly detailed processes. And he also had a life review when his previous experiences flashed before his eyes. And he also felt incredibly calm, felt a strange sense of well being, almost as if he was outside himself watching the situation. Unfortunately, he survived. And afterwards, he began to ponder over the experience and he began to collect reports from other mountaineers and other people like builders or roofers who’d fallen off the roofs of high buildings. And I think he collected around 25 examples, and he studied them to work out the most common factors in these experiences.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned, besides in these accidents or emergencies where time expansion occurs, there’s other characteristics of it. People feel calm, they feel a sense of beauty sometimes. What are some other characteristics whenever people are having these very extreme time expansion experiences?

Steve Taylor: Yeah, as you say, the most common characteristic is a strange sense of calmness. I experienced that and Albert Heim reported on it too. And that’s kind of paradoxical. You know, in theory, we’re very close to death or very close to serious injury. So it seems strange that in these moments we feel a strange, powerful sense of, well being, a sense of detachment and calmness. But also, sometimes people report heightened awareness and that leads to a sense of beauty, so that they could be in a very brutal or violent situation, like a car crash. But they describe it as if it’s a beautiful scenario, a beautiful situation. There was one person in my research, he reported that the windshield of his car smashed. So he saw these tiny shards of glass floating in the sunshine. And he said that they were like diamonds, all glinting in the sunshine. It looked incredibly beautiful as they floated by. So that’s quite common, this heightened awareness that leads to an enhanced perception of beauty. People sometimes report a sense that noise has become muffled, external sounds seem to become silent, so that nothing seems to exist outside the situation. Almost as if they’re in a kind of cocoon of awareness. And another common feature is the ability to take preventative action. The feeling that they were able to use the extra time that they had to take some measures that would help to minimize the danger or would help to prevent injury.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that last one, you give lots of examples of that. I mean, in your own case, when you were in your car accident, you started thinking, like, what can I do to mitigate the damage here? And so you started taking preventative action. Other examples of people who fell, you know, just downstairs, there’s like a pregnant woman that fell downstairs. And the fall only took maybe a second, but in her mind it felt like it was going on for a minute. And so she was thinking, “Okay, what do I need to do with my body during this to protect myself and my baby?” And she was able to do it, like she was fine.

Steve Taylor: Yeah, that’s right. In fact, in my research, in situations where it’s possible to take some kind of action, because in some accidents it’s not possible, but in situations where it is possible, over 80% of people feel like they were able to take some kind of action. And often that means falling in such a way that they didn’t damage their body, maybe bringing their knees up to their chest so that their organs were protected. And yeah, it’s, you know, the woman you mentioned is a good example. She was able to fall in such a way that she didn’t damage her baby. And there was also another interesting example I collected from a man. He was waiting at a bus stop and there was an old lady next to him who started to fall to the ground. I think she had a stroke or a heart attack. And he immediately held out his arm to try to protect her, but her weight pulled him to the ground. It probably takes less than half a second to fall to the ground. But he described how that half second opened up and he described it as a strange slow motion choreography where he was able to fall in front of the woman and twist his body round so that she fell on top of him. And he was able to twist his body round so that he felt relaxed and didn’t damage his ribs. So it was, yeah, in half a second he was able to perform all these, all of these actions that minimize the danger.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. How have researchers tried to explain time expansion during an accident?

Steve Taylor: There have been a few different theories. One popular theory is that it’s related to a surge in noradrenaline to the brain. Obviously, when we’re in dangerous situations, our brains respond. And one of those ways in which it responds is to surge to increase noradrenaline in the brain, which creates a kind of flight or fight response. And that seems to make some sense, especially in accident or emergency situations. But it doesn’t explain why in these situations we feel such a sense of calmness, such a sense of calm well being. And that doesn’t fit with a fight or flight response. And also it’s significant that time expansion experiences don’t just occur in dangerous situations. They also occur in moments of intense calmness, such as in deep meditation or in moments of stillness or presence when we’re in natural surroundings, for example. So the fight or flight response or a surge in noradrenaline can’t explain that. There is another theory which I’m quite fond of, which I put forward myself, and that it could be a kind of evolutionary adaptation, because if you think about it, our ancestors were living in quite difficult circumstances. They had to protect themselves from wild animals and natural disasters.

So it would have been quite useful for them to switch into a different state of consciousness in which time slows down. It would have definitely helped to help them to survive. So maybe we inherited that from our early ancestors as a kind of survival response. But again, that doesn’t really explain why time expansion occurs in other situations, such as moments of deep calmness or deep presence.

Brett McKay: Okay, so it’s a mystery. We don’t know exactly what’s going on?

Steve Taylor: We don’t know exactly. But I think the key to understanding these experiences is that they always occur in altered states of consciousness. You know, we don’t normally think of accidents or emergencies as altered states of consciousness, but they actually do put us into a different state of consciousness. The shock of the situation or the drama of the situation jolts us into a different state of consciousness. And we also know that psychedelics slow down time because they dissolve our ego boundaries, they heighten our awareness. We also know that sports people experience time expansion in their highest moments, in the moments of peak performance, and they also experience altered states of consciousness. So I think the key to understanding them is these altered states of consciousness. And it makes us realize that the kind of time that we normally perceive, our normal time perception, is really just a product of our normal consciousness. It’s really just a creation of our normal psychological processes and our normal psychological functions. So as soon as we change our state of consciousness and shift into different psychological processes and functions, we also enter a different time space.

Brett McKay: And just to clarify, again, you think that based on all these antidotes you’ve picked up over the years, that people are actually experiencing slow down time in real-time. It’s not as if people are just remembering later, oh, it seemed like it was a long time. No, they really did experience slowed down time as they were falling or having an accident.

Steve Taylor: Yeah, I think if anybody listening to this has had a time expansion experience in an accident or in another situation, people are almost always convinced that it was a real experience which happened in the now. I did a survey of 200 time expansion experiences, and I asked people whether it was a real experience in the present or whether it could have been an illusion due to an increased number of memories. And only 3% of people felt it could have been a memory illusion. 10% weren’t sure, but 87% of people were convinced it was a real experience in the moment. But also the fact that people are able to take preventative action, People are actually able to accomplish things which would normally be impossible. They’re able to perceive and to think in much more detail than would normally be possible in such a period of time. To me, that does show that it’s a real experience in the present.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned another area where people experience time expansion is in sports. When athletes experience time expansion while playing, how do they describe it? What is the subjective feeling of time expansion while playing a sport?

Steve Taylor: They often describe having more time to position themselves, having more time to anticipate their opponent’s actions. Sometimes there are sort of perceptual changes, like the ball seems to grow in size. Just like accidents, external sounds become muffled. So even if they’re surrounded by thousands of spectators, they don’t hear anything. So they’re usually moments of peak performance where they have a lot of time to, you know, position themselves or to take action against their opponents. And it gives them, obviously, it gives them a massive advantage.

Brett McKay: Yeah. One player you described having this time expansion experience was the great baseball player Ted Williams, the best hitter of all time. And he described, like, “Yeah, I could see the stitches on the ball that’s going 95 miles an hour. The ball seemed to get bigger”. And you suggest that maybe one of the reasons why he was such a great hitter is that he was able to, like, for some reason, able to slow down time when he was in the batter’s box.

Steve Taylor: I think so. I mean, he described his experiences quite eloquently. I think he was actually the first person to coin the term in the zone, which has become quite common now for sports people and athletes. Yeah, and he even said that when he was at home listening to music, in those days, it was 78 RPM records. So he said that in his perception, the record was moving so slowly that he could read the information on the label as it was playing. So, yeah, if you think about it, if you’re a baseball hitter, to slow down time gives you such an amazing advantage. You have a lot of time to wait for the ball and to put yourself in the right position. So I think that explains why he was the best hitter of all time.

Brett McKay: How does time expansion differ between sports and emergencies?

Steve Taylor: I think it’s essentially the same phenomenon. You know, I think the state of consciousness which athletes experience is essentially the same state of consciousness which people experience in accidents. I think the only difference is how it arises. I think in accidents, it occurs due to the shock and drama of the situation. And obviously, sports can involve shock and drama, too, so maybe that’s a factor. But I think the important factor in sport is that people get into a very incredibly intense state of absorption. I know we said earlier that absorption tends to speed up time, but I have this concept which I call super absorption. And it’s when absorption becomes so intense, it becomes much more intense than normal over a long, long period of time, or maybe just during a very intense period of a game. When absorption becomes especially intense, time seems to open up. We seem to enter a different space in which time suddenly becomes panoramic, almost as if we pass through a portal or a gateway, and suddenly we’re surrounded by this vast expanse of time. So I think that’s what happens in sports. People get so intensely absorbed that they shift into this very intense alter state of consciousness in which time opens up and they have a lot more time to play the game.

Brett McKay: In your research, this is kind of a question with all these time expansion experiences, is there a type of person who’s more likely to have them? ‘Cause not everyone has them. Most people who play sports probably don’t have time expansion experiences. People, even in accidents, don’t have them. I think you talked about in your accident you had a time expansion experience, but I think your wife didn’t have one.

Steve Taylor: That’s right, yeah, my wife didn’t have a time expansion experience. In fact, she was terrified. She was in a state of panic. Well, I was sort of, you know, quite calmly and serenely observing the situation. So, no, you’re right. Certain people do not have time expansion experiences even in accidents. And most sports people, no matter how good they are, they don’t experience these moments. Or at least I think many sports people experience them very occasionally in the greatest moments of performance. But I think there are a few very elite athletes who have this ability to switch into a mode of time expansion quite easily. And if you look at the great athletes who’ve been able to do this over history, like Lionel Messi, the soccer player, for example, Ted Williams. There was also an Australian cricketer called Don Bradman, who was by far the greatest cricketer who’s ever played cricket. You know, he’s just at a level way above everybody else. Even somebody like Diego Maradona, the famous Argentinian soccer player. They are or were quite unusual people. Many people have suggested that Messi may have traits of autism. Ted Williams was quite an unusual guy, kind of neurologically diverse person.

So they tend to be quite unusual people. And I think that’s related to altered states of consciousness. I think there are certain people who live quite close to an altered state of consciousness, or maybe they’re in an altered state of consciousness all the time as their normal mode. So these are the people who tend to be the most elite athletes, and these are the people who are prone to time expansion. So I think going back to accidents, whether you’re prone to time expansion in an accident or emergency, it probably depends on how liable you are to shift into an altered state of consciousness. Some people, you know, their kind of mental boundaries are quite solid or fixed, and it’s more difficult for them to switch into a different state of consciousness. So that’s probably the main factor.

Brett McKay: So another area where time expansion occurs and that you researched and you mentioned it earlier, is near-death experiences. Before we talk about that, how do researchers define near-death experiences?

Steve Taylor: Well, usually it’s used in two senses, the term near-death experience. The first sense is just when a person comes close to death, when they have a close brush with death, for example, when they come close to drowning or when they fall off the side of a mountain. So that’s one meaning. But I think the more specific meaning which researchers use is when a person does clinically die for a short time before they are resuscitated. So a common situation when this occurs is a cardiac arrest, and it could be a few seconds or a few minutes before somebody is resuscitated. And in that space of a few seconds or a few minutes, many people report a conscious experience while they were apparently dead. They report very detailed and complex conscious experiences. They report feeling that they left their body. They were traveling through a very peaceful darkness towards a light. Occasionally, they meet beings of some form, even deceased relatives, and then, they are resuscitated and then they report back on these experiences. So that’s the most specific meaning of near-death experience.

Brett McKay: Okay. And in near-death experiences, time seems to slow down a lot. Based on your research, how much does time slow down for someone during the near-death experience?

Steve Taylor: It seems to be the most dramatic kind of time expansion of all, so that a person may be clinically dead for maybe a few seconds, but in that small space, they may experience hours of conscious experience. They sometimes report incredibly detailed and complex series of events and experiences that take them hours to record. People have written whole books about near-death experiences which lasted just a few seconds because there’s such an incredible time expansion. Sometimes they have a life review in which the events of their lives are replayed within the near-death experience. And sometimes people feel that time disappears altogether so that there is no time at all.

Brett McKay: Yeah, this is, you call it time cessation, that’s what that is.

Steve Taylor: That’s right, yeah. I also investigated what I call time cessation experiences, where time disappears or dissolves away entirely.

Brett McKay: You also talk about people who had near-death experiences. They describe that not only does time slow down or just disappear entirely, but sometimes they describe time as being spatial. What do you mean by that?

Steve Taylor: This is quite a common report from near-death experiences. These experiences are quite hard to describe because our whole language is built on time. You know, our language is based on different tenses and different verbs in time. So people find these… They do find it quite difficult to describe these experiences that they often say that somehow the past and the future became part of the present. It was almost as if time became a spatial landscape, almost as if you’re on top of a mountain overlooking a landscape all around you. So rather than time being linear, somehow it became spatial, as if it was all around them.

Brett McKay: Yeah. But when I read that, it reminded me, have you seen ‘Interstellar?’

Steve Taylor: I did. I watched it recently, actually.

Brett McKay: Yeah, well, that part where the Matthew McConaughey character, like, goes to the fourth dimension and he’s just kind of floating in that weird area and he’s able just to go to different places in time. Maybe it’s like that. I don’t know.

Steve Taylor: I think it is. I mean, that that film was solidly based on physics. So, I mean, there are ideas in physics which suggest that time is like that, the time is spatial rather than linear.

Brett McKay: Okay, so let’s talk about some practical takeaways from your research, ’cause a lot of this is just really interesting. I love talking about this, thinking about it. I’m sure we’ve provided a lot of fodder for people at their next get-together with their friends. But let’s talk about practical takeaways from your research. Since you’ve done that, how can we become, in essence, time wizards and speed up and slow down time at will?

Steve Taylor: Well, we spoke a little earlier about how even on an unconscious level, we manipulate time. You know, we change our time perception by, for example, on a flight, we get into a state of absorption to make time pass quickly. And I think this is one reason why we like vacations, is because when we go on vacation, it slows down time. All of the new experience stretches our consciousness and stretches our time. So we can do things like that. We can mitigate the speeding up of time that seems to take place as we get older by introducing new experience into our lives, by making sure that our lives never become too full of routine and repetition. That we keep changing things around, you know, we keep traveling and we keep investigating new hobbies and new challenges and meeting new people. So I think, all of that will definitely slow down our time perception.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve been really intrigued by this idea that doing new things can slow down time and make your life seem longer. And I actually find it really motivating planning activities or vacations. Whenever I’m feeling that inertia, it kind of just gets me up and going and start doing things. And something we’ve done in our family is we’ve had periods where we’ve challenged ourselves to try to do at least one new thing a week. So like a new novel thing. So it could be small stuff, like just go to a new restaurant or go to a new park in town, and yeah, hopefully, it will kind of extend my life. But I mean it’s just also, just fun to do. I’m also curious about this. Is it possible to deliberately induce those extreme time expansion experiences that we talked about that people have during accidents or near-death experiences?

Steve Taylor: To a degree, I think it’s definitely theoretically possible. Now we spoke about sports people and they do this. Even if not consciously, they do manage to shift into a different state of consciousness in which time slows down. But interestingly, there are some martial arts from China or Japan or Korea where people consciously cultivate a state of consciousness, a kind of meditative state they call it in Japan, Mushin, or no-mind or empty-mind. And it’s taken for granted that when you’re in that state of empty mind, time will slow down. So you’ll have more time to anticipate your opponent’s actions or to take actions yourself. And obviously, it gives you a massive advantage in combat. So in theory we can cultivate a meditative state in which our minds are empty, in which the boundaries between us and our surroundings seem to fade away and that would expand time. And in fact there is research from scientists which shows that people who regularly meditate over a long period of time, long term meditators, in other words, that they do experience more expansive time than other people.

Brett McKay: Interesting. Well, Steve, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Steve Taylor: The best place is my website, which is www.stevenmtaylor.com. That’s Steven with a V, M for Mark. Stevenmtaylor.com, and there’s lots of information about my books and my activities and events and so forth.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Steve Taylor, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Steve Taylor: It’s been a pleasure, Brett. Thanks very much.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Steve Taylor. He’s the author of the book ‘Time Expansion Experiences.’ It’s available on Amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website stevenmtaylor.com, also, check out our show notes at aom.is/timeexpansion where you can find links to resources we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives and sign up for a new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. And sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple podcast or Spotify, it helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay. Reminding you not only to listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

When people get stuck in their job or personal life, the common response is to either work harder or shrug and accept that “that’s just the way things are.”

My guest today has a much better solution to getting moving and making progress again.

Dan Heath is a bestselling author whose latest book is Reset: How to Change What’s Not Working. Today on the show, Dan shares how to escape from ineffective systems and the inertia of continuing to do things the way they’ve always been done by pressing on leverage points — places where a little bit of effort yields disproportionate returns. Dan explains why you need “to go and see the work,” why meaningful change requires “restacking resources,” how short, focused “bursts” of effort often accomplish more than prolonged campaigns, how sometimes being inefficient can actually make us more effective, and more. Along the way, Dan shares plenty of stories and examples that illustrate how to implement these principles into your work, relationships, and family.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Dan’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #591 — Solve Problems Before They Become Problems
• AoM Article: You Need a Reset Day
• AoM Podcast #896: The Art and Science of Getting Unstuck
• YouTube video: Spotify Engineering Culture

Connect With Dan Heath

• Dan’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.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here. And welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. When people get stuck in their job or personal life, the common response is to either work harder or shrug and accept that that’s just the way things are. My guest today has a much better solution to getting moving and making progress again. Dan Heath is a best selling author whose latest book is Reset: How to Change What’s Not Working. Today on the show, Dan shares how to escape from ineffective systems and the inertia of continuing to do things the way they’ve always been done by pressing on leverage points, places where a little bit of effort yields disproportionate returns. Dan explains why you need to go and see the work, why meaningful change requires restacking resources, how short focused bursts of effort often accomplish more than prolonged campaigns, how sometimes being inefficient can actually make us more effective and more. Along the way, Dan shares plenty of stories and examples that illustrate how to implement these principles into your work, relationships and family. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/leverage. All right, Dan Heath, welcome back to the show.

Dan Heath: Hey, thanks for having me back, Brett.

Brett McKay: So last time we had you on, we were talking about your book, Upstream. This was right at the start of the pandemic. You got a new book out called Reset, which is all about how to solve problems that seem like are unsolvable. And you start out the book talking about how just a regular old trip through a Chick-fil-A drive-thru inspired you, basically inspired you to write this book. So what happened in that Chick-fil-A drive-thru? Yeah.

Dan Heath: So let me take you back in time. It was, it was pandemic era. I had been sent out to fetch Chick-fil-A for the family. I’ve got two young girls and they eat about eight different foods and, and one of them is Chick-fil-A. So I log a lot of visits there. But this particular night, it was terrifying what I saw when I arrived because it was probably the longest line I’ve ever in my life seen at a drive-thru. I mean, a minimum of 50 cars, like spilling out onto the feeder road that approached the franchise. And oh, I was just… My soul was crushed because I hate long lines. And I started trying to make up lies to tell my wife or why I came back without nuggets and eventually put on my big boy pants, got in line and what happened next completely flipped my mindset because this line was just insanely operationally sophisticated. It just crept along steadily like one of those automatic car washes that you get pulled through. And by the time I finished, which took less than 15 minutes, I was totally captivated and I resolved to go and investigate this drive-thru later.

And a couple of days after that, I found that I couldn’t stop thinking about this drive-thru because the core mystery was we have this idea that in the business world, when one person’s better at something than somebody else, everybody else catches on and copies them and the advantage is eroded away. That’s competitive markets. And meanwhile, Chick-fil-A is doing the same thing that a dozen or more other national franchises are trying to do, but they consistently do it better for a long period of time. And why? Like, what is it that they’re so good at? And so that became kind of the founding question of this book is how do you run things better? And then we can get back to Chick-fil-A later and kind of geek out about the fast food. But as I got into the research and probably a year in, I realized it’s not so much how do you run things better that was appealing to me. It was more like, how do you get out of a bad equilibrium? Like, if you’re Arby’s and you don’t do majestic clockworks of drive-thrus and you aspire to that, how could you? How do you get out of a stuck place and start moving in a positive direction? And that’s when this book really took off.

Brett McKay: How is this book a continuation of your previous work in Upstream?

Dan Heath: So Upstream was about how do we get ahead of problems? How do we prevent problems before they happen? This book is more about, okay, you’re in a mediocre place. It’s not even an emergency. It’s just like, I don’t like where I am. I aspire to more, how do I get out of that rut? So they’re different in framing, but I’ll tell you one point that they have in common is a focus on leverage points. Leverage points being places where a little bit of effort yields a disproportionate return. And so in Upstream, we were looking for leverage points like, where can you poke in a complex system to try to prevent problems? In this book, leverage points is actually one of the most important concepts because it’s to say, when you’re stuck, you can’t change everything at once. You’ve got to kind of place your bet in wise places. And so literally half the book is about where do you go looking to find these magical leverage points where a little bit goes a long way.

Brett McKay: And we’re going to talk about some of those leverage points today, but kind of give us an idea of some of the problems that you encountered as you’re researching this book that people find themselves in or groups or organizations where it seems like, Man, this is a big problem. We can’t solve this. It’s always been this way. It’ll always be this way. What are some examples?

Dan Heath: The very first story is about the Northwestern Memorial Hospital receiving area. So this is the part of the hospital that takes in all the packages coming into the hospital and gets them to their ultimate destination. And several years ago, they were in a situation where it was taking them an average of three days to get packages delivered within the hospital, which just blew my mind, right? A medicine or some surgical gloves might get across the country via FedEx or UPS or whatever. And then to get from the basement of the hospital to the third floor might take another three days. But here’s what’s interesting about this. This equilibrium had persisted for so long. It’s like there were a bunch of people in the receiving area, been working there five, 10, 20 years, even 30 years, and that was just the norm. They came to work, they worked a hard day. None of these people were lazy. None of these people were ignorant. They came to work, they did their job, they went home, and it took three days. And so after a while, you just kind of shrug your shoulders and say, well, that’s just what it takes.

And that’s what I mean by being stuck. There’s a quote that has just stuck in my brain from this healthcare expert named Paul Batalden who said every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. And I think that is such a brilliant quote because it makes it obvious like if you’re in this receiving area, you’re not going to solve this by working a little harder, staying 20 minutes later, working more frantically during the day. This is a systemic problem. You have unwittingly designed a system that delivers packages in three days. And if you aspire to different and better results, you’ve got to start tinkering with the system.

Brett McKay: I’m sure everyone who’s listening to this probably think of something like that in their own work where it’s like, Man, this thing is terrible, but we just kind of shrug our shoulders. That’s the way it is. And we also talk about this doesn’t just happen in businesses or in bureaucracies. It can actually… This whole getting stuck can happen in a relationship, a marriage, or a family.

Dan Heath: Absolutely. And one of the examples I came across was from this couples therapist named Laura Heck. And I think this is a great symbol of stuckness. Just imagine her situation. So every day she looks at her calendar and it’s full of meetings with couples who are at the lowest ebb in their relationship. And there is so much that is out of your control as a therapist, right? I mean, essentially everything is out of your control. The history of the relationship, their current conflicts, their own childhoods, not to mention the fact that you might only have their attention for one hour out of the 168 hours every week. And so in a situation like that, your only hope is to look for a leverage point, some little thing that can have disproportionately positive consequences. So Laura Heck gave me this beautiful example of something that she says she does with her clients. She calls it sticky note appreciations. And the idea is that in the bathroom, she knows you’re going to brush your teeth twice a day. And so you put a Post it notepad right by your toothbrush holder. And while you’re brushing your teeth, you jot out some kind of compliment for your partner.

Just something quick. You write it out while you’re brushing your teeth, you put it on the mirror for your partner to find. So later they come in the bathroom to brush their teeth and they see, Thanks for taking the time to talk with John about college. He really admires you and appreciates your calmness or whatever. And so let’s just think about this on a couple of levels. So the first level is just who doesn’t like to get a compliment in life, right? So it’s fun to come in the bathroom and see something nice about yourself on the mirror on a Post it note. But Laura Heck told me that the real significance of this is actually broader. She said, what I’m trying to train these couples to do is to see their partner in a new way. You know, that by the time they come to me, they’re so used to just seeing the negative, what they don’t like, what annoys them, what makes them angry. And I need them to take off those glasses and put on a new set of glasses where you’re scanning for the positive. And so that just blew my mind when I heard it, because I thought, what a brilliant way to use just a little bit of time, a little bit of effort to do something that has importance beyond that effort, because if you can rewire the way you’re seeing your partner, like maybe that’s the first ray of hope that you can get your relationship back to the way it was.

Brett McKay: Right. It was a leverage point, right?

Dan Heath: Precisely.

Brett McKay: Little effort, but huge ROI. Let’s talk about some more of these leverage points that you discovered in the research of this book and helping people and groups get unstuck. One of them, the first one you talk about is the leverage point of go and see the work. What do you mean by that? ‘Cause I think a lot of people, if they’re in a system that’s stuck, they think, well, of course I know how the thing works. I’m in it every day. Why do I need to go and see the work?

Dan Heath: So this is a phrase, go and see the work that I took from Nelson Repenning, he’s an MIT professor. And the idea is a lot of times we are dealing with our work at some kind of remove. Like if you’re a leader maybe you’re managing by state… Financial statements or reports or memos. If you’re a principal, you might stay in your home office. And over time we can kind of lose touch with the ground reality of our work. So I’ll give you an example from Repenning and some colleagues. They told the story of this corrugated box factory. And the owner of the factory was concerned because paper losses had been higher during production than competitors in the industry, which of course costed him money. And so he, inspired by Repenning’s imperative to go and see the work, he goes out and he just starts walking the halls in the factory and kind of following through production. He notices that they have a main corrugator machine, sort of like the most expensive piece of capital equipment in the factory that was stopped every day around lunchtime. And he was puzzled by that because the startup time and the wind down time ended up wasting some paper.

And so he started asking some questions. It turns out the history was years prior there had been some instability in the power provided by the local utility. And so the manager at that time had kind of wisely started preemptively unplugging the corrugator machine at lunchtime, which was seemingly the time with the most unstable power. And the idea was, we’re going to preserve the lifespan of the machine because it’s not good for the machine to have this weird erratic power. Well, in the years since, the utility had long since fixed this problem, but it had become entrenched as a habit in the factory. Like people had long since forgotten the original intent of this. And it just became one of a hundred things that you have to do every day at the factory. It’s like you unlock the door doors, you come in, you flip on the lights, and at lunchtime, you shut down the corrugator machine. And that’s an example of the kind of thing that you see when you go and see the work.

And Repenning, he says you might hear a story like that and think, Well, that’s just dumb. Of course, if you are doing dumb stuff, you can find it and stamp it out. But his quote stuck with me. He said, if you aren’t embarrassed by what you find when you go and see the work, you probably aren’t looking closely enough. Like, all of us probably have some equivalent to that corrugator machine story in our work or in our life.

Brett McKay: Yeah, yeah. So go and see the work. So if you’re… You have a problem, you’re like, what is going on here? Like, why is this even a problem? Going back to that idea, the results we get are due to the system that we have. You have to actually go and see, Okay, what is causing? Like, there’s something in this… The way things are organized currently that’s spitting out this system that. It might not be obvious, but if I get down there on the front lines and talk to people who are in the front lines, I can actually figure out, Oh, this is why they’re doing it this way. Maybe if we make this small change, we can solve the problem.

Dan Heath: That’s right. I think this is a principle that really is most valuable when there’s some distance between you and the actual work product. Like in a relationship, it really doesn’t make sense. Like, how do I go and see the work with my wife? We’re in a relationship, we’re in it. But in the factory it’s easy to be the boss and stay in your boss’ office the whole day and kind of lose track of what’s going on on the factory floor. Or another example that I gave was from a vice principal who decided to shadow a 9th grader all day from when the 9th grader arrived at school to PE like, ate lunch with them in the cafeteria, did the assignments that he was doing sitting beside him in math class. And that’s something that’s uncommon, right? I mean, you might think, Well, how could a vice principal not know what’s going on at school? But that’s not quite fair. Because the stuff that gets to a vice principal’s desk is plenty to fill up their day. It’s discipline issues, it’s administrative issues, it’s teacher evaluations. And you could go years easily without ever sitting next to a student in class.

It took an unnatural act to make that possible. But that one day of just shadowing the student kind of unlocked all these ideas and inspirations for action.

Brett McKay: Well, going back to relationships, that’s one of the roles if therapists can play. You can add that distance. Maybe the therapist, in interacting with the couple can say, Oh, my gosh. You guys are doing this. You might not even know it. So if you want to see the work with your relationship, maybe go to a counselor or a therapist.

Dan Heath: Yeah, that’s interesting, actually, that to sort of go and see the work, you have to bring in someone else to see it, because it’s almost like you’ve lost perspective from the inside.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Another leverage point is consider the goal of the goal. What do you mean by that?

Dan Heath: So we’re so used to setting goals in organizations. I mean, goals are sort of like the language of organizations, that goals can actually take on a life of their own, and we can think we’re succeeding even though we’re actually failing. Let me give you an example. I met this guy named Ryan Davidson who told me about his experience buying a truck. He bought a ram truck. He’d been saving up for it. So he buys the truck. He decides to take the truck camping its first weekend away. And sort of a couple days after he buys this truck, the survey shakedown begins, where people from the dealership just start hounding him to fill out a survey. Probably we’ve all had this experience in some domain or another. And not only are they trying to get him to fill out the survey, they’re kind of like pestering to give them really good scores. We would really appreciate your positive scores, underlined, bolded, on the survey. And so probably five different people from the dealership reach out to him multiple times over a period of two weeks and in multiple media, on the phone, via text message, via email.

And so Ryan Davidson eventually realizes, like, I’m never going to be able to live a normal life until I fill out this survey. And so he takes the time, fills it out, and he says he gives them pretty much an A minus level rating. He was generally okay with the experience, but thought that some things could have been better. And he sends off the survey and clicks submit. Never hears from anyone again about the survey. After all the pestering, just the line goes dead. Except that his sales rep starts texting him, complaining about not having been given all 10 out of 10s on the survey. And so it’s just kind of this silly charade that’s taking place that, if you think about it, probably had a really good origin. Like, at some point, some of the leaders at Ram thought, Hey, we would like our customers, when they buy trucks from us, to have a good experience. Like, so far, so good. Okay, well, how are we going to know if we’re succeeding at that? Well, let’s give a survey after people buy a car. Let’s ask them some questions and see how they respond.

Okay, that’s even better. Now we have a way of diagnosing whether we’re succeeding or not. Okay, so you start collecting the survey. Well, then you start to get uncomfortable because some of your dealerships aren’t getting very good scores. And so you think, Well, gosh, we gotta boost those scores. And so it becomes a goal to boost the scores. You start layering on incentives and potential punishments if the scores don’t improve. And all of a sudden, the survey, which was supposed to be a diagnostic, becomes its own target. In other words, my contention is the people at this dealership that Davidson went to actually didn’t care at all what the experience was like. All that they cared about was that he bubbled in tens on this survey that they sent. That was what they cared about because that was what their incentives were yoked to. And so it becomes like this kind of perversion. And that’s what I mean by the goal of the goal is we can’t be content in setting and chasing goals. We have to ask, what’s the goal of the goal? Like, in this dealership example, why is it important that we get good scores on these customer surveys? Well, because we actually care ultimately about whether people had a good experience with us, would tell their friends, would come back and so forth.

Brett McKay: I think this can happen in groups, like churches. You see like a church. Maybe they want to start a program of some sort for fellowship or spiritual formation. But then the program becomes the focus, and there’s all this. It becomes a problem. It’s not implemented the right way. No one’s coming to the thing. There’s resentment that builds up because people aren’t doing what they’re supposed to do. And then you have to step back. It’s like, Wait, why are we doing this thing anyways? The original goal was maybe some fellowship enrich people’s lives. But here we are talking about just dumb Stuff for this dumb program. And so asking yourself… It’s actually Richard Rohr. He’s a monk. He’s a father. Richard Rohr. He has this phrase. He says to ask yourself, what are we really doing when we are doing what we are doing?

Dan Heath: Ooh, that’s good.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Dan Heath: Yeah, that’s very, very goal of the goal friendly.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think remembering or thinking about the goal of the goal can also keep you from goal lock. So you might figure out a better way to achieve your original aim doing something else. So, for example, let’s say you’re trying to make friends, but you’re finding that hosting dinner parties, it just stresses you out. All right, that’s fine. Maybe you could just have people over for dessert and games instead. There’s more than one way to skin a cat when you’re achieving your goals. Another leverage point is to focus on what’s working in a system or organization to find a leverage point. What does that look like?

Dan Heath: This is the notion of studying bright spots, which I think is a really powerful idea. It’s actually an idea that my brother Chip and I wrote about in a previous book called Switch, and it’s kind of getting its second wind in this book. So the idea is very simple. It’s to say so often in life, our attention is grabbed by what’s not working. And if you think about employee engagement, for instance, is something a lot of businesses and organizations are thinking about. How do you keep your employees happy? How do you keep them around? And so you imagine you get a survey back, a pulse survey from your employees. And of course, every survey ever commissioned has different results. Some people are unhappy, some people are in the middle, Some people are happy. And your attention immediately gravitates towards the employees who are unhappy. And what studying bright spots says is, why don’t you spend some time trying to understand the other side of the spectrum. For the employees who are really psyched to come to work every day, why? What are they so jazzed about? What’s keeping them happy? What’s giving them a sense of purpose? Because if you can understand that, it gives you the hope of reproducing that for everyone.

Could you boost everybody’s engagement by harvesting and kind of replicating the factors that are making your most satisfied employees that way? And that’s the spirit of studying bright spots is sometimes we can find leverage points by just understanding at a deeper level the things that we’re already doing that we’re succeeding at.

Brett McKay: I was thinking about how we can apply this to our family life. My kids like a lot of siblings. They bicker a lot and it’s annoying. [0:22:11.8] ____ always like, yeah, just leave your sister alone. Leave your brother. But every now and then they have moments where they don’t. It’s just awesome. It’s almost like a Norman Rockwell painting. It’s like, wow, this is great. So I think finding the bright spots would be like, okay, what’s going on? When they’re just like super kind and nice to each other and not bickering, like, what happened? And how can we get more of that?

Dan Heath: That is exactly the spirit. And in fact, this is actually kind of a methodology used in a branch of therapy called Solutions Focused Therapy. In traditional therapy, it’s very, very problem driven. Like, let’s get to the source of the problem, the root. And in Solutions Focused therapy, they basically don’t care about the problems. They want you to solve them, but they don’t want to kind of wallow in them. And so in the book, I shared this case from a therapist named John J. Murphy. He’s like a giant in the field. And he tells the story of this woman who comes. She’s been having a lot of behavioral issues with her daughter and she’s been diagnosed with ADHD. And there’s just a lot of tension. They’re reluctant to put her on medication. And so they end up talking about the morning, which seems to be like the crux of where things really can boil over sometimes. And this mother said sometimes I end up yelling and I feel terrible about myself. When I act out, it makes her act out. And so they start thinking about the bright spots.

And so Murphy, the counselor is like, Well, when does this not happen? And the mom starts thinking, she says sometimes when I have a little more time in the morning and I could just have a cup of coffee and be in my own brain, it’s like it kind of steals me in a way where I can absorb more and I don’t immediately react. And then when I don’t react, my daughter doesn’t react. And so it’s almost becomes this kind of self reinforcing positive system. And so Murphy kind of praised it and he said, well, despite all the things that are going on, despite all the stresses in your life, you’ve already figured out a way to manage this. Well, do you think we could figure out a way to replicate your own success? And so the woman kind of thinks about it she realizes, Hey, the days when I wake up earlier, the days when I don’t stay up late with my husband and maybe I don’t have too many drinks. And so she goes home and after one therapy session, it’s like she kind of cracks this system where she just gets up 15 or 20 minutes early, has a little bit of me time, and that prepares her for the day.

And I just love stories like that because it’s like the seeds of success were already there in her life and it just took someone to kind of point them out and say, even if you’re failing sometimes, even if you’re failing a lot of the time, you’re not always failing, you’re succeeding sometimes. And what explains your success and can you do more of it?

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Well, I want to talk about Chick-fil-A because like you, I’m always impressed every time I go through the drive-thru because it’s just so efficient. And use Chick-fil-A to talk about the leverage point of constraints. Tell us about that.

Dan Heath: So constraints are the things that are holding you back, the bottlenecks, the limiting factors. And so when we’re looking for leverage points we want to find somewhere where a little bit of work goes a long way. Looking at a constraint can be really enlightening because if you can kind of whittle down the number one thing that’s holding you back, that can be magical. And to me, the Chick-fil-A drive-thru is a kind of brilliant example of this, because the guy that ran the drive-thru I talked about earlier, a guy named Tony Fernandez, is just a genius at managing constraints. This drive-thru I’m talking about can process 400 cars in an hour. I mean, that’s a car every nine seconds.

Brett McKay: Wow.

Dan Heath: Which is just like Olympic level fast food drive-thru. And he thinks very explicitly about the constraints. He says one of the first things we realized was that the menu board the thing where you drive up and you look at the menu, is often a constraint. And virtually all fast food places have one menu board and some of the busy ones have two with two lanes. He said, we just thought, why do we need a menu board? I mean, Chick-fil-A menu, it’s like there’s nuggets and fries. How hard is it? And so they just literally eliminated the menu board and they pushed employees into the parking lot with iPads to take your order at your window. And the beautiful thing about that is where before you were constrained with one path to ordering, or maybe two with the two menu board system, now they can have five people in the parking lot at the same time. And when they’re not busy, they can scale it back to one person in the parking lot. And so now you have eliminated the constraint of the ordering. But notice, and this is an important theme is you always have a constraint.

It’s not like you just fix it and poof, it’s gone. No, what happens is when you eliminate one constraint, you’ve made the system better and the constraint hops somewhere else. So if you’ve got five people taking orders on iPads in the parking lot, like, orders are flooding into the kitchen, and then these poor people have to cook up massive batches of nuggets and fries. And so now the kitchen’s the bottleneck. And so you have to staff up in the kitchen and create better systems so they can keep up. Well, once they’re on par, then maybe the bottleneck pops to what they call meal assembly, which is the people that bag and box and pour your drinks and so forth. And so he just had a very disciplined approach to this fast food flow problem, which is to just chase one constraint at a time. And each time he eliminated one constraint, the system improved, and then it hopped to the next. And then he did it again and again and again.

Brett McKay: So those are some leverage points. There’s other ones you talk about in the book. After leverage points, you recommend people start doing what’s called restacking resources. What do you mean by that?

Dan Heath: Restacking resource just says leverage points is kind of about where do you aim? We’re trying to get unstuck. I’m saying you can’t fix everything at once. You got to aim. You got to find a place where a little bit goes a long way. Okay, now that you’ve done that, you’ve got to find some fuel. You’ve got to have a way to push on the leverage point. And so for that, you need resources. That’s what I mean by restacking resources. Like, a lot of times, especially in organizations, when people start talking about change, it’s like one more thing to add to the pile. It’s like we’re going to do everything we did yesterday and this new thing that the boss is excited about. But one of the themes in the book is that change is not about ‘and’ it’s ‘instead of’. So it’s like if something has become a priority, if we Want to push toward that new priority, we’ve got to give somewhere else. I mean, we’re constrained to what we have, probably. There’s not just like giant satchels of free cash in the supply cabinet that we can tap or there’s not an army of idle employees that we can bring to bear.

We’ve got to figure out how to reconfigure what we have to push in that new direction. That’s what I mean by restack resources.

Brett McKay: Gotcha. And the first way you recommend people restack resources to start improving things is to begin your action plan, or maybe the action plan on leveraging that leverage point with a burst. And you mentioned earlier, a lot of people, when they have a problem, one of their first instincts is just to work harder. If we just work harder, we’ll solve it. How is doing a burst, which you describe as a focused output of energy, different from the standard way of working hard?

Dan Heath: That’s a great question. So I think the notion of a burst is not necessarily work harder, it’s like work denser. What I mean is, if you’ve got some new priority, if you can work on it for 30 focused hours on that priority in one week, my contention is that’s probably going to be the equivalent of 100 hours that you scattered and fragmented across six months. So it’s like you want to push hard in a concentrated way, in a collaborative way, all at once maybe leaving other things on the wayside to focus on the new priority. It’s almost like if you’ve ever pushed up a stuck window, like the amount of effort to get the window moving at all, it’s pretty dramatic. And then once it starts moving, it becomes a lot easier to keep it moving. That’s the idea of the burst.

Brett McKay: And one thing it does, too. There’s a psychological impact, right? You actually start seeing some progress. You’re like, Oh, maybe this problem is actually solvable. So that initial burst creates sort of like a flywheel of motivation.

Dan Heath: Well said. And it reminds me, I met this guy, Greg McLawsen, who talked about how sometimes actually being inefficient can make us more effective. He gave an example of. He was working on a gardening project for his wife. I think I shouldn’t call it a project. They were just trying to add some irrigation to their family garden or whatever. And he was put in charge of the run to Home Depot. And he had this great line. He said, The immutable law of the universe is that no project can ever be completed with one trip to Home Depot. It’s like, even if you go in search of one 60 watt light bulb, when you get home, inevitably you discover, Oh, actually, it was supposed to be a 59 watt light bulb. And you have to go back. And so this proves true for him. He ends up with the wrong splitter part for the irrigation system or whatever. And he’s an attorney. And so he said in his mind the efficient thing to do would be wait for the next trip to Home Depot, which would be in a week or a couple of weeks or whatever, and just add it to the list rather than make a special trip for this $5 part.

And he was thinking in his mind it’s going to cost me $200 in billable hours and $6 in gas to go get this $5 part. Like, that’s crazy. But then he said. It’s not crazy, because the definition of success to his wife is, I can water the plants. And it doesn’t matter that we’re 90% there, absent one part, 100% is what matters. And so he got right back in his car, went to Home Depot, got the part, and worked to completion. And he said it may have been inefficient, but it was effective. And he said it made him realize that he was doing some similar things in his law firm, where in the guise of efficiency, maybe he would get a bunch of documents to 90%, but 90% doesn’t mean anything. You haven’t solved problems for clients. You haven’t been able to bill for it because it’s not done. And so he started trying to kind of reconceptualize his work with effectiveness as the goal instead of efficiency. And that’s your point about how this burst of effort can get us to completion. It’s like you want the burst to get the irrigation system done, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s efficient or not. What matters is, can you water the plants?

Brett McKay: Yeah. And in this chapter, you talk about scrum. And in scrum, they use sprints, which is basically a burst. And what you’re doing with these bursts or these sprints is like you’re not working hard all the time. You do some planning, and then you schedule an intense amount of activity. It’s dense. Then you take another break, recalibrate, see what needs to be done, and then you start up again so you have a clear goal which you’re trying to achieve. And then you work hard for a few hours and then you’re done. That’s it.

Dan Heath: And it’s an antidote to anybody who works in a large organization knows this problem of just how mind numbing it can be to get something changed because you’re working through meetings and then to align calendars, you can’t meet until two weeks from now. And then you start an email chain, and the email chain starts to spiral outward with more and more people on it. And then it’s like something that you all could have resolved if you’d been in the same room and just put your heads together and done the work. Not talked about it, but done the work for eight hours in the same room. Like all of a sudden it can take six months just because of asynchronous delays and so forth. And so I think that’s the power of a burst is it may be unnatural to try to clear your calendars and kind of get in the same room to work on the same problem, but boy, does it pay off down the road.

Brett McKay: Another way to restock resources is to recycle waste. And I think a lot of people understand what waste is in a factory setting. So you gave that example of the box factory. They had a lot of waste there. So if you have a lot of leftover material making a widget, that’s widget, that’s waste. But let’s talk about how does waste appear in organizations not creating widgets or even in families? What does that look like?

Dan Heath: So I want to share the kind of operational definition of waste I’m using in the book, which is taken from this guy named Taiichi Ono, who was one of the godfathers of the Toyota production system. So if you’ve ever intersected with people obsessed about operations, they all talk about the Toyota production system.

Brett McKay: Six Sigma Black Belt.

Dan Heath: Six Sigma. Yeah, exactly. So the definition, waste is any activity that doesn’t add value for the customer, which I think is a really interesting thing to try to wrap your brain around. Like that receiving area we’ve talked about a couple of times. Here’s a classic example. So nurses in the hospital would get frustrated. They ordered some medicine, hasn’t shown up. They would call the receiving area and there was a red phone in the receiving area. Somebody would have to pick up, deal with the nurse’s complaint. They’d have to go rushing around looking for the box, seeing if they had it, when was it going to be delivered. And so every one of those answered calls to the Red phone is waste. Even if the person handling the inquiry did it politely, even if they did it efficiently, it was waste because the nurse never wanted to have to call to check on the package. It did not add value for the customer. And when you start to think about it that way, you realize if you can change the way you work every time the nurse doesn’t have to call, that puts 15 minutes back in your pocket of the time you spent kind of noodling around looking for the package.

So, anyway, I kind of got into the waste literature, and, yes, there is such a thing. And it made me start thinking about family life, and I mentioned my girls. And so every morning getting ready for school is like a thing. It’s just like a mother load of waste. All the things that we do and the pestering. And one kind of recurring source of pain was just shoes and socks. You’d be able to find one shoe. Where’s the other shoe? Oh it’s by the front door. And, okay, we got the shoes, but now wear socks. You got to go back upstairs and get the socks. And. And so my wife has this kind of stroke of genius. We have this giant drawer by the back door where we go out to walk to school. And she just piled all of their shoes, every pair and all of their socks into this drawer. And so that’s where they live, and they never get beyond that room. So, number one, we always know where they are. And number two, it had these kind of unanticipated benefits of, well, now they take their shoes and socks off by the back door, and so they don’t track dirt through the house.

And I just had to smile at how with this kind of one idea, we’ve eliminated this whole source of nagging and fussing and rushing around the house. And now we can use our time like arguing about whether you can eat the brown spot on the waffle or not. So it’s been a real breakthrough for us.

Brett McKay: Right. Your wife’s got a Six Sigma Black Belt in home management.

Dan Heath: Exactly, exactly.

Brett McKay: I love it.

Dan Heath: By the way, I was remembering last time we talked, you had a great personal burst thing of the reset day.

Brett McKay: Oh, the reset. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah.

Dan Heath: If you haven’t talked about that in a while, you should share that with your listeners, because that’s a really, really good example.

Brett McKay: Yeah, we wrote an article about that, and I’ll put it in the show notes. So a reset day is. It’s basically a day we set aside. We’re not working. The kids are at school, so they’re not in our business. And my wife and I will just get done all the life admin that’s been piling up. So paying bills, doing retirement stuff or estate planning, planning vacations. All that stuff that just kind of gets pushed back and back. So we’ll just dedicate a day and get all of it done. And then it feels great to be done with it.

Dan Heath: That’s so good. I had a reader that talked about using a life crap month. I think yours is even better because it’s more punchy and focused, but it was exactly the kind of stuff you’re talking about. It’s like updating the wills and making sure the address on your life insurance policy is updated and all the stuff that’s just like pulling teeth day to day. And they said by the end of the month, it’s just like they felt like they were on cloud nine. They just felt like such effective adults having checked all these boxes that had gone unchecked for so long.

Brett McKay: Yeah, no, I highly recommend it. Another thing you talk about is if you have a problem that seems intractable, look for ways you can do less, but you also have to do more at the same time. What do you mean by that?

Dan Heath: So this is back to the idea that change is not ‘and’ it’s ‘instead of’. And I had this very provocative conversation with this guy who’s a consultant. His name is David Philippi for the consultancy Strategex. And they’re kind of obsessed with the Pareto principle, the 80/20 rule. 80% of your revenue might come from 20% of your customers. But one of the methodologies they use really stuck with me. So here’s what they do. They go into a client’s financials, and they try to isolate each client and figure out how profitable they were by client, which would seem obvious. I mean, you would like to know how profitable your different clients are, but it’s no trivial thing, because even if you know, like, well, I sent this many parts to this client and the parts cost this much. But you also have to balance in things like how much relationship time does this client eat up? Are they a needy client? Are they an easy client? Do they eat up a lot of support time? And so you kind of go through the ledger, try to come up with profitability by client, and then they force rank the clients from best to worst in terms of profitability.

And Philippi said that in virtually every case, when they’ve done this. What they find is that your very best clients are under coddled and your worst clients are over coddled. Here’s an example of what he meant by that. He said repeatedly, they have found that the on time delivery record. So he works with a lot of manufacturers that are like shipping stuff out. The on time delivery record was better for the worst clients than it was for the best. And that just seems like impossible. How could you ever treat your best clients that way? But he said, what happens is a lot of times the worst clients are the ones that are buying like little nickel and dime stuff. Maybe it’s just one part that you have to stick in a box and ship out. And so it’s easy, it’s quick. And if your shipping department is incentivized, for instance, on percentage of on time deliveries, well, you can just nail those like simple ones, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and look like a genius. You’ve got a 96% on time rate, but meanwhile the 4% might have been like your very best customers who had complicated assemblies that took some time and took some planning.

And so he kind of flips the lens and says, look, your best clients need to have a perfect on time rate every time, no matter what it means for the rest of the folks. So all that’s been about profitability so far, but let me kind of flip the script here. Imagine that same idea applied to almost anything in your life. It might be how you’re spending your time across projects. It might be relationships. Think about all the relationships you have in your life and imagine that you kind of ranked them according to the value and preciousness that they have for you. And so obviously probably your family’s at the very top of the list. And then if you zoom all the way to the bottom, it’s going to be maybe old friendships that have grown increasingly toxic or commitments that you made to some volunteer organization that just kind of gone sideways and feels like a waste of time or whatever. But we all have a ranking. We all have people who are more and less precious to us. And if you take this kind of logic and you think aren’t I probably under-coddling the people most precious to me with all this time and energy I’m expending on the people at the bottom of the ranking? And wouldn’t it be smarter to kind of steal from the over-coddled people at the bottom to give me more wherewithal, more availability to the people I care most about? What was really seductive about that logic to me is just to remind listeners where we are.

We’re thinking about when you’re trying to push in a new direction. Where do you get the fuel to push? And if you think about this kind of over-coddled, under-coddled logic, you realize that’s where you get the resources is you steal from the over-coddled and give to the under-coddled. If that makes sense.

Brett McKay: That makes perfect sense. So if someone’s feeling overwhelmed in their life, it’s usually because they have too many commitments, I think. Yeah, ranking things can be really useful and then focus more time. So you’re going to do less with the people that aren’t as important to you. So you can do more with the people that are important to you or do…

Dan Heath: That’s it.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I love that.

Dan Heath: Exactly.

Brett McKay: A lot of times when organizations or groups get stuck, the typical approach to solve the problem is there’ll be like a sort of top down command and control type dictating. So there’s a manager that says, Oh, here’s the problem. And then they tell individual employees, here’s what you’re going to do to solve the problem. But you argue that handing things off directly to individuals in the group and just letting them come up with solutions can actually speed up solutions to the problem. How so?

Dan Heath: This is a concept that I call let people drive. And the idea is if you’re looking for fuel to push in a new direction, one of the best sources of fuel is motivation. And one of the most evergreen sources of motivation is autonomy. Like letting people drive, giving people some reins to act. I mean, there’s basically no high performing team in the world that is micromanaged. Navy Seals, Green Berets, not micromanaged. Like you’ve got to loosen the reins. But this can be counterintuitive in organizations because when things aren’t going well, a lot of times our instinct, as you said, is to kind of clamp down.

I took inspiration from… There’s a great video. You can find this on YouTube. It’s from a consultant named Henrik Kniberg. And he talks about how Spotify organizes itself and he distinguishes autonomy from alignment. And he said you might start by thinking that these are kind of opposite ideas. Autonomy is like I can do what I want and alignment means I’m doing what everybody else is doing. But he says at Spotify they’re not in opposition. If you think about a two by two matrix, low autonomy and low alignment is the bad one. That’s like, it’s an ineffective culture. It’s like a call center. Everybody’s on their own. They’re not really collaborating, but they’re also being heavily micromanaged.

Where we really want to be is in the high autonomy, high alignment, square of the two by two, which means we know what the vision is. Like Kniberg in his video says, management says we need a way to get across the river. That’s the strategic priority. Figure it out. That’s the autonomy piece. So we’re aligned on vision, but we trust our employees to figure out the methodology. And I think that’s a really enlightened way to look at it. Autonomy doesn’t mean, like, everybody just gets to do what they want willy nilly. Autonomy means we trust people enough to kind of let them figure things out.

Brett McKay: Yeah, so it’s about giving people maybe some guardrails. Like here’s what we don’t want you to do. We definitely don’t want you doing this. But anything within those guardrails is free game. You can do it if it gets the job done.

Dan Heath: That’s it. That’s it. And I find myself making this mistake all the time as a parent. It’s like even little dumb stuff like teaching kids how to use knives and cut up their food at dinner, and it’s like a hundred times out of a hundred, you’re going to be better at that than them. You know what I mean? And so, if you’re in a hurry or whatever, it’s like, Oh, just let me just do it. Let me just cut up your steak or whatever. But that robs them of autonomy. And it also kind of dooms you to being in the same role forevermore. Every time that you take some task back from them is a time that they haven’t built any personal capacity.

Brett McKay: Well, let’s workshop this. Maybe you and I can figure this out. One thing I’ve been always getting on with my kids about is just keeping things tidy. They just kind of dump things off everywhere in the house. And you’re like, Hey, why is this here? And typically I actually just. I throw stuff away. If I see it on the floor for longer than 12 hours, I’m like, oh, it must be trash. It’s on the floor.

Dan Heath: I like that.

Brett McKay: I picked that up from my dad and my kids hate it. It’s not a good habit. But what can we do? How can we use this idea of giving maybe our kids autonomy to help us get the house tidy.

Dan Heath: I’ll tell you a story I remember from years and years and years ago. So this woman emailed my brother and I and said she was in exactly the situation you’re in. She had a kid, and it would never… He liked to play with trucks. He was probably, I don’t know, seven or eight years old, maybe younger, loved to play with trucks, did not like to clean up the trucks. And so it became a recurring source of tension. And then she said one day, I just kind of… I just realized motivation is the game here. It’s not about instruction. It’s about, I have to figure out a way for him to want to do this. And so she said, I took an old bookcase, I took all the books off of it, and then we painted parking stripes on it together. And then I let him assign a parking space to every one of his trucks. And so he had some autonomy. And it’s like, Well, this one’s going to go here, and this one’s the prime spot. So this is where my best truck’s going to go.

And then she said she never again mentioned the idea of cleaning up his room or cleaning up his truck. She said, have you parked your trucks yet? And it was like part of the play. And I think that’s kind of brilliant jiu jitsu is figuring out where’s the motivation here? Where does their motivation align with mine? And can I figure out a way to thread that needle so it’s not just my order and their compliance?

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

Dan Heath: Well, I have a website at danheath.com that will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about the book or my podcast or anything else.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you do have a podcast. What’s your podcast about?

Dan Heath: The podcast is called What It’s Like To Be. And the conceit is in every episode, I talk to someone from a different profession. So I’ve talked recently to a Christmas tree farmer, an Olympic bobsledder, a London cabbie, Secret Service agent, and more.

Brett McKay: Sounds awesome. Well, Dan Heath, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Dan Heath: Hey, thanks a million, Brett.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Dan Heath. He’s the author of the book Reset. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, danheath.com also check out our shownotes at aom.is/leverage, where you can find links to resources where we delve deeper into this top.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives. And check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net and as always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to AoM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.