Coach for SpaceX & OpenAI destroys our limiting beliefs for 86 minutes straight

Key Takeaway

Treat one recurring emotional trigger as an experiment this week. When anxiety, helplessness, or harsh self-talk appears, pause for two seconds and notice it without trying to fix it. Then ask what the feeling is revealing: Do you need help, a boundary, a clearer decision, or a hard conversation? This small interruption turns emotions from commands into useful data—and creates room for a better next action.

Episode Overview

Joe Hudson, executive coach and founder of Art of Accomplishment, explains how ambitious people are held back by self-reliance, emotional avoidance, perfectionism, and negative self-talk. He offers an experiment-based approach to personal growth, covering emotional processing, nervous-system awareness, productive conflict, and building a business around energy and enjoyment rather than grind.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Coach for SpaceX & OpenAI destroys our limiting beliefs for 86 minutes straight from My First Million. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

I had this experience of I am one with everything and everything is good. It was like getting hooked on heroin. I was like whatever the fuck that is, I'm obsessed. ♪ I feel like I can rule the world ♪ ♪ I know I can be what I want to ♪ ♪ I put my all in it like no days off ♪ ♪ On the road less travel never looking back ♪ I'm excited to have you here, Joe. Welcome to the podcast. I don't know if you know what this podcast is all about, but basically, the people who listen to this podcast are very much like me and Sam.

We're business junkies, we're entrepreneurs. We're sort of perpetually always starting things, but also students of the game, always trying to learn. You've done many things. You started your life story in 10 seconds was kind of like a kind of punk rock kid to discovering an entire area of wisdom to go work in. You've been in the business world as a VC, and now you coach some of the highest level players of the game. You are one of the coaches to some of the top CEOs and entrepreneurs in the game, including Sam Altman and some other friends that we were talking about before we started.

And so we're really excited to have you here. Are you able to name drop at all? Can we give you like 10 seconds just to brag? The names that I can drop are the ones that are on the website. I find that it's better if you all name drop for me than me name drop. We've seen Mark Pincus, we've seen Sam Altman, we've seen Eric Thornburg, Ev Williams, I think. Ev is a good one, yeah. Stacey Philpott-Brown, she was head of Google India and ran TaskRabbit.

Is your specialty like type A high achievers that just need a little bit of help? Like how do you summarize the, you're starting here and you end up here? No, I really like to have a variety of people, like all sorts of people. The only thing that I think all the people that I work with have in common is they're ambitious. Only some of them are maximalists, but they're all super ambitious. What's a maximalist? I don't even know what that is. Yeah, what's maximalist? A maximalist is someone who's like, I want it all right now and I can get it all right now.

I would put like Sam Altman in the maximalist category. Any limitation that a normal person would see, they're just like, no, we can figure out how to do both. Is that achievable? No, I don't think it's achievable entirely, but I think that much more is achievable if you think that way, right? So the limitation, like limiting beliefs are like hold us back dramatically. Let me ask you a question about limiting beliefs. I had never heard this phrase till I went to a Tony Robbins event and then he started explaining it.

Now then I started seeing it everywhere in myself and my family members, different people, where we tell ourselves these stories. Can you talk a little bit about this because I think it's pretty universal. Yeah, the idea of a limiting belief outwardly is just any thought process that you have holding you back. And so I'll give you one that probably everybody has experienced. They have some sort of transformation. Something happens. And then they ask themselves, will it last? That's a great limiting belief. Because all that really is, is just a whole bunch of anxiety presenting itself as a thought process for you to believe.

And instead of saying like, oh, every learning that I've ever had ebbs and flows. Like I've totally learned stuff and then I've forgotten it and then I relearn it. Or I've been able to make that shot in golf and then I can't make it, but then I learned to make it over time that there's this natural pendulation of learning that occurs. And so the ebbs and flows are actually good because that is what learning is. Instead it's, oh, I might lose this thing. And then they have a moment where they've lost this moment of transformation and then they go, oh, I've lost it, which is a second limiting belief.

So that would be like a very common limiting belief that people have. Or they're on a diet and they're like, will I be able to maintain the diet? And then they have that one piece of chocolate cake and they're like, oh, well, I couldn't maintain the diet. As if they couldn't just have the piece of chocolate cake and then go back to the diet. Well, you don't need to make it personal, Joe. I don't appreciate that. Sam, when we say limiting belief, does one pop into your head?

Yeah, like for example, you have to grind really hard and do tons of stuff that you don't like in order to get to the end result, which in this case, let's say selling a company or making a lot of money, and you must suffer and suffer and suffer. And once you achieve whatever the end goal is, you will be at a place where you are new and happy. That's a great one. Hypothetically, yeah, I've heard that. Asking for a friend. Yeah, there's two beliefs in there.

The first one is that you have to suffer to achieve what you want to achieve or that you have to grind to achieve what you want to achieve. So I have a client who I can't mention their name and probably one of the most successful VCs ever has been involved in some of the biggest companies and most of their investments have been in big companies. I think they work like three or four hours a week. And they had like a grind period of a couple of days, I mean, a couple of years kind of in their 20s, but they just don't work really hard.

And I can name another 10 people who have been able to be incredibly successful without grinding like that. They've just been able to be in the right place at the right time. And then the secondary piece of that grind is. If you want to hit your goals, you need a system. And so I worked with HubSpot to put together a step-by-step process showing you how I use ChatGPT as a life coach. So I uploaded my personal finances, my net worth, my goals. And the output is that I have this GPT that I can ask questions that I'm having issues with in my life, like how should I respond to this email?

What's the right decision? Things like that, and it's literally changed my life. And so if you want that, it's free. We will send you everything you need to know to set this up in just about 20 minutes, and I'll show you how I use it. So check it out, the link is below in the description. Back to the episode. Here's something that I've never seen. I've never seen a venture company or a startup fail because of lack of effort. Everybody is, like anybody who's got a startup in Silicon Valley anyways, they are efforting all the time.

And yet, a tremendous amount of them fail. But the idea is if I work harder, I'll succeed. But obviously, that's not true. So then the question is, what is the most important thing that you're doing? And it's usually the relationships you hold and the decisions that you make. How do you teach people how to flip that? Because, for example, if I go to the news all day, I see these big exits or these big funding rounds, and you constantly, particularly right now, have this feeling of, I'm being left behind because everything's changing so fast, and you just said it's the relationships.

So that's one of these things where you read a book like How to Win Friends and Influence People, and you're like, duh, that's obvious, and it almost becomes a reminder. And yet, I'm like, but how do you tactically make that switch where you say, enjoy the relationships, not seeking the outcome? Yeah, so if you're gonna make any transformation effectively in your system, you have basically three levels that you need to address it at. The first level is the level of the mind. And this is what we're usually pretty good at, meaning most people know that they should work out, but it doesn't mean that they work out.

Most people know they shouldn't be dicks to the people who they need to run their business, but not everybody is. So intellectually understanding, that's actually, usually the easiest part for Americans is to actually get that, to grok that. And then there's the emotional level, the mammalian level of the brain. So the prefrontal cortex is the thinking level of the brain, it's very human. And the mammalian level, I would call it the heart, I'd call it the emotional. And so a lot of the times, if we're trying to make transformation, we have to look at what's emotionally needed to make that transformation happen.

And then there's the part of our system that's more of the reptilian, it's the nervous system. And is that nervous, can we address the nervous system? So if you wanna make real transformation, you have to address all three levels of the system. Can you walk through an example of that? So like, what's a transformation? Because you had me at the head, you sort of lost me at the heart, and then by the time we got to the nervous system, I didn't know what to do. I don't know how to, I don't have the instruction manual for that one, so let's take an example and walk through.

So let's do an example that probably touches most of the entrepreneurs that listen to this, self-reliance. So the self-reliance pattern is basically a pattern that somewhere when you were young, you were taught that you had to fend for yourself. And 90% of the time, it meant you had to fend for other people, you had to take care of other people. Maybe that's because your parents were super critical, or maybe it's because you had an alcoholic father and you needed to take care of that father, or you had a depressed mother, but somewhere you learned, hey, no one's gonna be there to take care of me, I gotta take care of myself.

My needs aren't gonna be met otherwise. And then the outcome of that is that those people have a hard time asking for help. Typically, they have a hard time owning what they want, being able to just say, this is clearly what I want. They usually have an authority problem, which means they neither want to be the authority because they don't trust the authority of their childhood, they don't fully step into their own authority, and they kind of rebel against other authorities. So they have this mixed relationship with authority, typically.

And then they have a very hard time announcing that they're hurt. Like it's the last move that they'll make is to say, hey, I'm hurt, right? And so that's the pattern that comes out of self-reliance. So now, how would you address it? The first way is to talk about like the way I just talked about it. I saw both of you, and probably most of the people in the audience, click. Oh, I never, that's all related, really? Like to be able to tie that together, to show that this is a pattern that came from your childhood, it is in particular reality.

And so that kind of like creates a little space for different action, different movement. But oftentimes, just seeing it's not gonna really deal with it. So then there's the emotional level. The emotional level is two things, right? Typically, but there can be others. But typically, there's an emotion of helplessness that I refuse to feel. I'm not gonna feel helplessness. I will go and like storm the gates of hell. I will grind forever over the idea of feeling helpless. Dude, I'll walk into the grocery store and not see what I want and refuse to ask the counter guy where the thing is.

So trust me, I'll leave. We're not eating that tonight. Exactly, exactly. So there's this feeling of helplessness that those people will absolutely not feel. Because as a kid, if you felt that helplessness, if you're like, holy shit, and there's nobody here taking care of me, it's like death and destruction. So you don't do that. And so this feeling of helplessness never got to be felt as a kid. And so emotionally, it means you have to learn how to feel the helplessness and how to actually look forward to and enjoy the helplessness, which sounds radical and impossible.

But the way that this works is what I will call the golden algorithm, what we call the golden algorithm. So the emotion that you're trying to avoid is the emotion you're inviting in the exact way that you're trying to avoid it. So you don't wanna feel helpless in the grocery store so you don't ask for help, which means you walk away without the thing in the grocery store. Or you don't wanna feel helpless about your business not doing well, so you grind, which keeps you more burnt out, making less good decisions, destroys your relationship so you feel more helpless.

So the action that you're taking to not feel the thing is actually what perpetuates the thing, in this case, helplessness. So learning how to say, oh, I'm helpless, I know how to experience that feeling. I know how to actually go, oh, this is just an emotional thing that's moving through me, and I don't have to be ruled by it. It's not my boss anymore. Because if all your decisions are based on not feeling helpless, it means there's certain risks you're not gonna take. It means you're not gonna rely on other people that you need to to scale the business, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right?

So that would be the emotional. Is the right way to think about it like, it's a counter to the idea of what you seek, what you seek you shall find. It's almost like what you avoid, you shall experience. Yeah, yeah, the self, yeah, exactly. But if we were gonna play on the phrase what Sean just said, or whatever, I think you said, whatever emotion you try to avoid, you end up inviting into your life. So then what's the inverse of that? What's the sentence that is the solution?

Fall in love with the emotions you're avoiding. Think about it this way. It's just like working out. You wanna work out, you're gonna have to lean into the burn. And eventually, you're like, I like working out. I like that burn. It's the same thing for emotions. And then on a day-to-day basis, let's just say that we are doing the hard work, or this has to suck in order to get a good result. What do you tell yourself every day for the next two years? Are there common inner thoughts that you find to be productive for this emotional state?

So that answer is part of the pattern you're trying to interrupt. What do I do every day? One, every day. Two, what do I do? Those are the two things that make you grind. It's up to me. I gotta do it. There's no grace. There's no surrender. There's no letting other people help me. And I gotta do it every day. What's the thing that I do that I can control, that I can grind at that will fix my grind? So if you're really taking a look at it, it's actually not, it doesn't work like that at all.

And the cool thing is it can often just be, I've literally seen the moment that somebody fully understands the beauty of the emotion, oh, I can't wait to feel helpless because when I feel helpless, what I know is that I am not delegating well. What I know is that I'm not letting other people help me. What I know is that my decision making is constrained by a false limitation. So I'm so stoked that I'm feeling it because I have those three signals now. And I'm gonna go take action on those three things because I know that signal in my system.

And as soon as they get that, there's no more effort required. Is the right way to think of these feelings as like a messenger, kind of the way you're describing it? If you reframe them as a messenger or a signal, then it's not something to, you know, you don't shoot the messenger, you don't avoid the messenger. You take the message and then you use it and move through it. Is that the right way to think about this? Or is that a? It's kind of, I would say half of it.

The other half is to see that the emotional thing that's happening is, let's say, like it's a tube of energy, right? And so like a hose with water. or running through it. And if it runs clear, meaning that hose isn't kinked, then life is good. If it kinks in one way or another, then there's all sorts of problems that happen. So let's take anger as an example. So you have anger moving through your system, and you kink it one way and it's like this. Nice dress.

And you kink it another way and it's like this. I'm not angry. I just need you to do the thing. I'm not angry. And you kink it another way and it's like this. You mother fucker, fuck you. But if you unkink it, if you actually let that emotion go through, which means you're not having resistance or shame, you don't think that you're bad for having it, then anger looks like Martin Luther King or Gandhi. It's determination and clarity. And when you see CEOs do this, where they go, oh, right, I'm constantly pissed because I constantly feel like I'm alone in it.

And I constantly feel like no one's got my back. Even though I have 20,000 people showing up to work every day, and none of them have ever thought, boy, I really hope the CEO is upset with me today. Or boy, I hope that the work I did doesn't please the CEO. So you got 20,000 people trying to please a CEO who feels all alone in it. And so they're getting angry. And when they realize, oh, wait, if I don't resist this, if I just listen to it, then there's actually some wisdom here.

And then they start listening to it without that shame, without that kink. And all of a sudden, they're like, oh, that means I have a boundary. It means that's something inefficient is happening in the company, and I need to go pay attention there. You seem very into words, and I buy into that. I think you use these phrases, and then it shapes the way you think. And you called out some of the words that I use, and that's pretty helpful. But are there other, on the emotional level, words or phrases that you have found that if you change or shift or tell yourself consistently, that they seem to have positive impacts on type A people?

Yeah, absolutely, there are. However, the awareness is more important than the words. So let's take, for instance, a common thing that is effective is positive affirmations or visualizing things going right. I'm gonna go into a meeting, and I'm gonna visualize things going right. So you can do that, and there's a certain amount of effectiveness. It's even more effective if you visualize it going right, and you feel the emotions of it going right. It's even more effective if you visualize it going right in the present instead of in the future, so you can actually feel what is happening right now.

So all of those things, that's really effective. But if you really have the awareness of what's behind that, then it's gonna be a lot more powerful. What's actually happening, say, with the positive reinforcement is that you're changing your identity. You're saying, okay, I'm no longer this person. I'm gonna visualize myself as this person, and that's gonna change my identity. And if you're really looking at identity shift and being comfortable with identity shift, then you also have to visualize the negative outcomes so that you don't get scared of them.

The samurai use this. The, I mean, so many traditions use this, which is visualizing their own death. And the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, samurai, and then also, what is it, is like the Marcus Aurelius. Yeah, there's a great Stoic book, Stoicism book, where you close your eyes for five minutes, and you assume everyone's dead, your kids have cancer, the worst things on Earth. You open up your eyes, and you say, none of that is true, how grateful am I? Right, so if you visualize this, and you actually feel the destruction that you're trying to avoid, then you've already lived it, so you don't have to be scared of it anymore.

So I'll give you an example of this with my wife. So we've been married 27 years. I've been married to at least three women in that 27 years. She's changed dramatically. I've changed dramatically. And so we come to points in our relationship where it's not working for us. And what our path is, is that we both grieve the relationship, it's over. We're getting a divorce, we visualize the divorce. It's horrible. We have the entire experience, because once we've had it, we don't have to be scared of it anymore.

And so when we show up, we act as ourselves. We don't try to accommodate, we don't walk on eggshells. We don't, we're like, no, this is what I want. And then we can actually have a conversation, how we can both be happy as we are now, not trying to save the marriage. The visualization thing's interesting. The Inner Game of Tennis talks a lot about that. Great book. And I actually just listened to a talk by the coach of George St. Pierre, who's one of the greatest UFC fighters of all time.

They talk about preparing fighters for the most dangerous, scary sport there is. And he was like, we find the competitors, walk out music. We wear our outfit, we're like a dress rehearsal. We listen to the music constantly. And so we do that when we practice. And we practice the walkout, we have the bright lights. This way, you are visualizing this to the point of not just visualizing, but you hear it. And like, he was even saying something about the smell. They try to use the same gloves, so it smells the same.

And this way, when you first, when you're going into this thing, that's a life-changing thing, you have been there before. Because you can sort of trick yourself into thinking, this is real, and you are prepared. It's the same thing. So, I don't know how many entrepreneurs I've walked through the visualization of the death of their company. Everybody gets laid off, people go broke. Same thing, it's the same thing. You visualize the end of the company so that you can stop acting from fear. And you can actually build the company that you wanna build and be the person that you wanna be.

Do you do that daily, monthly? Like, how often should someone practice that? It's more until the fear is gone. And it's not really how often, but it's how you do it. So, example would be, if you do it and you actually deeply feel the emotions of it, then it's probably, you don't have to do it very many times until the fear dissipates. And that's gonna, it's how you do it is more important than repetition and reps. And what is the how you do it? You sit in a room, turn the lights off.

Walk me through, how do you actually do this? I just sit down, close my eyes, and visualize everything. And anything that I don't wanna visualize, I slow way the fuck down and feel everything I don't wanna feel. The big trick is to feel the things you don't wanna feel. The reason that that's the trick is because, look, if I said to you, most entrepreneurs, one of the things that they get scared about is being homeless. Who knows why, but it is something that many entrepreneurs get scared about.

And if I said to you, hey, you're gonna be homeless, but you are gonna be happier, more content, you're gonna feel great. Like, think of the best time you've ever felt in your entire life, it's gonna be 10x that all the time. If you knew that to be true, how scared are you to be homeless? I wanna be homeless. Right, exactly. So what's actually occurring is that we're scared of an emotional experience, not an actual experience. And neurologically, this is proven. So if I was to take the emotional center out of your brain, you would have an IQ that is the same as it is now, but you would have an incredibly hard time making decisions and your total life would fall apart.

So, and you can read a book about this, it's called Descartes' Error. It was written by a neuroscientist in like 2012 or something. And so we've known this for a long time. So basically, if I pull out that emotional part of your brain, it's gonna take you like a half an hour to decide what color pen to use. It's gonna take you an hour or two to decide where to have lunch. So your whole life falls apart because you can't make decisions. And this was people who had brain damage or like a stroke in a certain area.

Oh, your logical center is still working and decisions are logical, right? Yes. And it's like, no, no, no, not right. Not right. Not even simple decisions. Right. The only decisions that aren't emotionally based are the decisions that bypass the emotional center like a snake coming at you. Like you jump back without it going through that part of your brain. Hey, let's take a quick break. You know that feeling when strategy is done, the brief is written, everyone's aligned, and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content?

That someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow. Well, the breeze assistant from HubSpot can help. It works right inside HubSpot. You can draft a campaign copy, blog posts, emails, all in your brand voice, all using your actual customer data. So you don't create just content, you create content that converts. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. What about the nervous system bit? Because that seems like the most challenging. I've read the body keeps the score and I intuitively know that trauma is a physical thing.

But to put it on a really practical level, you ever get a slack or an email from a coworker that says, can we talk? And you're like, they're quitting. I feel like you get goosebumps. And you're like, you feel something. How do you address this at a neurological level? Yeah, so nervous system, that's a super tricky one. There's a lot of things that you can do. But this is, it's all very primal. And this is where repetition and do I do this every day, this is where it really comes in handy.

So there's not an intellectual or emotional aha that can change a nervous system just like that. Occasionally, high doses of psilocybin or something, I've seen change nervous systems. But it's very undependable. And so this is actually where repetition matters in the nervous system. So one of the key principles is how do you allow yourself to experience pleasure more and more deeply? Because pleasure means that we're not under attack. So our nervous system thinks that we're under attack when we're not. And so it amps up. Now, sometimes that occurs because we have an abusive self-talk.

And so if I was your boss, and I was like, oh, you that up, you did that wrong. Why are you biting your nails? Why aren't you looking at Joe while you're podcasting? Why are you taking notes instead of being connected to your co-hosts? If I was doing that perpetually, it would cause you stress because you're perpetually under attack. But often we're doing that to ourselves. And so that's activating the nervous system. So that is the intellectual, that's how the intellect and the nervous system relate.

But there's a whole bunch of things that also happen with the nervous system. I'll use my own example in this. Is my mom, German, super rigid woman, loved me dearly in her capacity. But if I was five minutes early, I was late and I would get in trouble. It was like that kind of a thing. And things needed to be very perfect. And so there was a sense of obligation. And if I wasn't gonna fulfill that obligation, I was gonna be in trouble. And so my nervous system gets activated when I'm a minute late for a podcast.

Though it's not gonna affect anything. My nervous system's gonna get messed up. So there's some nervous system stuff that happens just through training. And so one, the overall background thought process is how do I allow as much pleasure as possible as to reset my baseline. But the second thing is to really start to notice and be present with for one or two seconds those moments when my nervous system is activated or when your nervous system is activated. So when that phone call comes in and you're like, oh shit, you just stop.

And you're like, what is it like to be me? Two seconds. And then you go ahead and do your thing. Go ahead, be anxious again. Don't try to control yourself because trying to control your anxiety is just anxiety producing. It just creates more of the same thing. It's just being really, really in touch with what's going on. Bringing awareness into that moment is all that's really necessary. But it's necessary to do it over and over and over again to see what's actually occurring in your system and what's really necessary.

And then pretty soon it unpacks what's going on beneath your nervous system. Your intellect starts to understand it. But your intellect will never get it at first. It really requires lots of just being with, present for one or two seconds when you notice that activation occur. Hey, can I ask you about avoiding conflict? Something that I thought, yeah, I think I'm usually pretty good at, but man, lately there's been a situation where I'm just, I can see myself doing it. I can feel myself doing it.

I know I'm not supposed to be doing it, but I'm doing it. By God, I'm doing it. And I don't really have a lot of language or kind of experience or wisdom around this. And I was really hoping you could help me out with that. So can we talk about conflict, avoiding conflict, especially with those who we're closest to? I think it's maybe the hardest. Yeah, so I think intellectually, the important thing to recognize about conflict, it is, imagine you're working in a factory and somebody can tell you where the machine is gonna break, or someone can point to you, this is where the machine's broken, this is where the machine's broken.

And you're like, great, thanks, and you ignore it. That's what avoiding conflict is like. Because conflict is the place where efficiency can be gained, whether it's in a marriage or in a business or between business partners. So I'll give you a story about this. So recently we had a facilitator in our business and somebody who probably wants to be a facilitator and who felt like the facilitator wasn't doing a good job and wanted to give the facilitator feedback. And we have a very open culture where everybody can give anybody feedback.

And we could say, you need to go to their boss, and then their boss will have the conversation because we're gonna avoid the conflict. And we're, as a company, deciding how. Does this feedback, is this feedback gonna work? And what we realize is that if this person gives feedback to the facilitator and the facilitator gets hurt, that's something for the facilitator to work on. And if this person's doing it out of some sort of like arrogance or narcissism, like I think I can do a better job, and the feedback is shit, then that needs to be addressed.

But either way, if he has arrogance and narcissism, addressing that's gonna make our business better. If this facilitator isn't doing a good job, that's gonna make our business better. And so every time that we're avoiding conflict in a business, we're looking at a place that we could potentially make the system better and we're not gonna do it. Yeah, you're avoiding progress, not conflict. Exactly, yeah, thank you. Yeah, but that's what a lot of people feel like. Like for example, I've talked to like really big, big shot tycoon types, and they'll be like, I need to let go of this person, but I'm too afraid of the conversation.

And so like you just said this on an intellectual level, totally, I'm on board, totally agree. Everything you're saying makes tons of sense. And yeah, I'm still like, but I don't have the courage or I don't have the toolbox or the language to do this effectively. Yeah, so yeah, let's get into that. I think that the, I do wanna say one more thing intellectually too, because it's, if I go in and monitor a company's health, I literally just use two metrics. How quickly do they have the hard conversation and how quickly do they resolve it?

So let's say you have a CEO who's a yeller. I guarantee you that a lot of hard conversations aren't gonna be had and they're not resolving quickly. And let's say you have a CEO who's conflict avoidant. A lot of hard conversations aren't gonna be had and a lot of things are gonna be avoided. So it doesn't really matter what the actions are of people, just to think about those two metrics as the health of an organization is just a great way to go in and very quickly see how healthy that organization is.

Okay, so now how do you do it? So typically, before we get into how you do it, let's talk about the resistance to it. So the resistance is usually I'm gonna be abandoned, not loved. This is a waste of my time. I'm not gonna get anywhere anyway and it's gonna take so much energy, I could use the energy somewhere else. That's the second reason that people choose not to do it. And the third is, I'm gonna destroy something that I care about. I have the hard conversation, that person leaves and then the company's gonna collapse or then the sales department's gonna collapse or whatever.

Is there a fourth one, which is like, I don't even know if this is a problem worth addressing, maybe I should just give it time? I feel like that's a reason for one of the other excuses. But I'm sure that there's moments where that's the case. And sometimes there's actually some validity to that. I've given them feedback, I'm gonna wait a couple weeks and see what happens instead of like, be on their ass every day about the thing. I can see that there would be some validity to it.

And so some of that speaks to the fact that the person doesn't know how to make the conflict productive reliably. Like I have conflict and it just ends up in a worse fight that just like, doesn't go the place that I wanna go. So typically if I'm talking about it, let's just take one example because this gets a little complex. If I'm taking just, I wanna have a hard conversation with somebody, what do I do? The first thing that I'm gonna do is I am going to not solve the problem for them.

To most people in a hard conversation say, hey, sales is off and what I need you to do is make more phone calls and we're gonna monitor those through this set of data, right? That's incredibly disempowering and that conversation usually doesn't go very well. But if you say instead, hey, sales are off, I need a plan, please present it to me tomorrow about how we're gonna get sales back on track, that's a far more powerful way to do it because you're not disempowering the person and you're not coming in and telling them what to do.

So letting them solve the problem for you rather than you solve the problem for them, you solving the problem for them is self-reliance again and it's what most CEOs do instead of let them solve the problem for you, which is far more empowering to them and it makes them feel like they can't blame you for it. So that's one of the skills that I would teach. The other one is I would really try to understand their situation before having the hard conversation. So I'd ask a lot of open-ended questions.

I would make sure that they feel very heard and so I understand what's going on. So as a CEO, I sit down and I'm like, I have an idea of what's going on over here in billing, but I don't, I do not have the full picture. If I have the full picture, I should fire the person because they're not doing a job good enough where I don't have to pay attention. So the first thing I wanna do is really ask their context and understand what's actually going on with them and see if they're even happy with the job that they're doing or what's going on actually.

Another thing I would do is I would actually be very vulnerable about where I am with it. So I would say something like, wow, I feel like we've lost trust. Like I noticed that I'm not trusting that this is gonna get done and so I'm not having confidence around this and that sucks for me and that's gotta suck for you. And so I wanna know how we're gonna fix it. So I'm gonna be very vulnerable with how I am rather than making about them. So this is, again, back to the self-reliance piece.

Entrepreneurs who are self-reliant have a hard time expressing when they're hurt, have a hard time expressing some sort of this isn't working for me really well and therefore the problem is always about the other person instead of about them helping fix your issue, which is the way an organization is designed, right? The energy is backwards if you're trying to fix everybody's issues rather than everybody's fixing your issues. Like if I was to invest in your company as an example and I got to pick one person who was just stoked as hell, I would pick the CEO because that's gonna be the best investment.

The CEO is happy with the way the company's going, the company is going the way it should be going. If the head of marketing is happy but the CEO is miserable about the way the company's going, that's not a good investment. So the happiness of the CEO is where everybody needs to be pointed. It doesn't mean that the CEO's job isn't to be helpful to people but it means that the general energy of the company is supposed to be towards pleasing the CEO, making the CEO happy, which self-reliant CEOs have a really hard time getting through their head because that puts them in the position of the authority that they don't particularly want to be because authority was bad in their childhood.

So that's an example. So those are all ways that I would talk to somebody if I'm having that hard conversation. So there are very practical skills of having hard conversations but the biggest skill over all of this stuff is the internal space. If you feel like you're bad for having the conversation, if you feel like this is completely reasonable for me to ask, if you feel like I'm actually helping this person become more empowered and I'm doing them a service and helping them become better at their job, that state of mind has a huge impact on how the person receives it.

So I'll just give you a very short example. If I was like, hey, Sean, you're such a dick. Why are you such a dick? Or if I said, oh, Sean, you're being a dick. You're gonna take those two things very, very differently because in one case, I don't want you to be a dick and in the other case, I'm like, oh, you're being a dick, that's okay. And so your attitude coming in, if you're scared, you're more likely to get attacked, you're more likely to have a bad experience with it.

So your calm, your what I would call vagal authority, your nervous system authority coming into the room and your understanding of you're here to be of service to this person is gonna make all the difference. You have this cool quote. I think it, I don't have it in front of me. I think it was something like negative self-talk is always wrong or something like that, which I read that and that was kind of shocking to me. And it seems like self-talk is a really important thing and a lot of ambitious people, I think, are like, they're like their biggest hater.

Most people, generally. Most people, yeah. Yeah. Do you have any patterns that you have seen of self-talk and what are the practical tips on improving that? So there's like three or four different kind of self-talk abuse cycles that you're like, there's like the really overt one, which is like, you're up, why are you up? Why didn't you like, why don't you do this? Why don't you do that? There's that version. Then there's the version of you gotta do this, now you gotta do this, you gotta do that.

Why don't you do this? You gotta do this. Don't forget to do this, you gotta do this. There's another version of negative self-talk. Then there's like some kind of hidden ones, which are like, you've got it, you can do this. It's all good, you've got this thing. You can do this thing. Which you would like, could you imagine going to Michael Jordan and going, yeah, you can do it. You can shoot the basket. I know you can, Mike. Like, you would never do it because you have confidence in that person.

So there's this subtle undermining, saying that you actually need this, right? It's not, you're fine either way, and there's not like a natural confidence in it. So that's all. There's about 20 tools to work with self-talk, negative self-talk. One of the ways that you know it's negative self-talk is because it's repeating, right? So when negative self-talk starts dying in your system, when it starts atrophying, you just have a lot less thought, just as a lot less thought occurs. And the thought that you have is more like epiphanies.

It's like, oh, here's a cool idea. Oh, that's a cool idea. They're not repetitive over and over again thoughts. So I'll give you just a couple really practical ones. If you try to change the self-talk, it's very inefficient. If you change the way you react to the self-talk, it's far, far more efficient. Self-talk is like, wow, you just really screwed up that podcast, Joe. And like most people, they listen to that the way that they would listen to a... Think about the politician you hate most talking on stage, and then think about the person in the audience who's like, yep, uh-huh, yeah, yeah, that's right, uh-huh, yeah.

That's how we listen to our self-talk. Most of us listen to our self-talk as, you know, oh, you screwed that up. And it's like, yep, I screwed that up. I should do something about that. Like, that's the relationship. So instead, you change the reaction to it. Like, oh, you screwed that stuff up. Oh, I see how scared you are. I'm right here with you. You can be scared. Or you fucked up. Wow, that's really shitty management. Could you try to manage me in a different way, please?

You fucked up. Prove it. You fucked up. Oh, really? I think you fucked up. So you're changing the reaction. And so a great experiment to run on this is, think about the reaction that you wanna experiment with. It doesn't have to be good or bad. It's just an experiment. And every time your negative self-talk happens that day, every time you remember, you react in this way that you're experimenting with. And then two days later, you do a new experiment. Two days later, you do a new experiment.

So you're constantly changing the way that you're reacting to your self-talk. And just like both of you are different when you're interacting with each other than when you're interacting with your significant other or your kids, if you have them, or your best friend from college, the voice in our head reacts differently depending on how we treat it. And you get to start seeing that. And so that's a really simple way to start, not manage, but start bringing awareness and therefore changing and transforming your negative self-talk.

Another really good one that's just really easy is name, like write out, here are the 20 things a negative voice in my head says the most and look for seven ways they're not true. And if you can't find them, ask your friends. Because what your negative voice in your head is saying is not true. I mean, I can give you, if you tell me anything that your negative voice in your head says to you on a regular basis, I can prove and I can tell you five ways it's not true.

Hey, can I ask you a question that sort of violates that rule, you know, never ask a man a question that his salary depends on the answer or whatever. You can try, yeah. So, you know, whenever I learn about this stuff, and as you can see, I got notes and notes right now, like I love, I get like really fascinated by this. You're saying words like vagal authority. I'm like, oh, I gotta go look into that. I wanna learn to do this. And then within like, I would say, as soon as I pass like the 90 minute mark of any of this, I'm like completely exhausted.

And I almost like go through like this cycle where I start out as a idiot caveman. Then I think I'm becoming this like elevated, higher level being who's really in touch with everything. And then I'm like, oh my God, this is so much work. I just wanna go back to being a lovable idiot again at the end of this and like, dude, it's all good. Don't worry about it. Like, you know, and I think actually recently this kind of a retard maxing kind of phrase caught on, at least in Silicon Valley, other people are probably like, what the hell is this guy talking about?

This idea of like, you know, you're trying too hard to be too smart. You're too in touch with your emotions. You're over-therapized. Like there is a reaction to the reaction. And I almost wonder like, are people better off just being kind of like more like a dog, like just dumb and happy? You know, just wagging our tail and running around and licking our butts. Like, are we just happier that way than trying to go do all this work and kind of master the psyche and all of its different parts?

Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, it seems like you have two questions in there. So let me address the first one, which is that cycle that you get into, which is, oh, I'm super inspired and now I feel exhausted. And the thing that's happening there is that in your mind, you're telling yourself you have to do all this stuff. And that's what makes it exhausting. Rather than like, what's the one cool experiment I'm gonna run this week? And that's maybe yours. Another person's is like, I have to be perfect.

And so that takes all the joy out of it and makes it like less effective. So to me, it's like how you approach it is incredibly important, both for the effectiveness and for whether it's worthwhile. The way I think about meditation is kind of an example. One of the things that I say is, meditation for most people is just self-abuse because they're just sitting there trying to manage themselves for 90 minutes. And there's no enjoyment in it. And so the question is, how do you enjoy meditation?

That's a question. Or how do you enjoy self-growth or self-awareness or understanding yourself better instead of making it a grind? If you can do that, then it's great and it's totally worth it and it's lovely. And you'll be inspired to do it. But if it becomes like this to-do list so that one day you'll be good enough so that if you make it like your company, which is once I get enough money and I have enough power, then I'll be happy. Once I understand myself enough and I deal with the voice in my head and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, then I'll be happy and then I'll be done.

Or you can be like, oh, what can I learn today? What's the experiment I can run? And this is the same way that I would suggest if you wanna learn how to market, it's the same thing. What's the experiment you can run? What can you learn today? What can you read about that's fun to read about? What's the cool thing to try? Rather than, oh my God, I gotta do this because my business completely depends on it. You're gonna make a lot more progress on the first than the second.

I think that's a great insight. I wanna come back to the second question, but just to add onto that, last year I decided to learn the piano and I had two teachers. The first teacher I went to made me almost quit the first day because we sat down and they were like, all right, so here's what you're gonna need to learn. Here's the musical notation. Then we're gonna memorize all these letters and here's what, then we're gonna learn rhythm and we're gonna learn the scales, but you can't get the scales if you first don't have finger control and posture.

Why are you sitting like that? She basically presented the whole elephant that I'm gonna have to eat. And I was like, oh God, I'm just tired thinking about what all I'm gonna have to do just to be able to, this stupid dream of mine, how much did I really want this anyways? And then the second teacher, so luckily I didn't quit. I just, I bumped into a second teacher and then the second teacher was like, cool, so what made you wanna do this? What's a song you like?

And what would be cool if you could play it? I'm like, oh, this song. She's like, oh, you know what? That's actually not that hard. Here, forget the left hand. We're just gonna look to the right hand and we're just gonna learn this intro lick. You'll walk out of here, you'll be able to play this little thing. And it just got, and then it's like, oh, do you wanna be able to play the next thing? You're gonna have to learn what a chord is. You know what a chord is?

And then I learned the next thing progressively and now I can play the piano, right? And it's like that for all things in life. So what you said definitely resonates. I didn't realize the connection between those two until you said that. If anybody told us what we had to do just to make our business successful and just handed, this is everything you're gonna have to do, most people would be like, fuck that. Yeah, yeah. Or having kids or anything else like that. Can we do the second part now of, are we better off just being sort of retard-baxing and then not over-introspecting, not overly getting in touch with our feelings and just saying, feel good, do more.

If it doesn't feel good, do less. Let me just move on and not overthink it. It can potentially work out if you're super lucky and the world doesn't change under your feet. But it's not gonna work out otherwise. Meaning like, the CEO of a tech company that has really, really hard recruitment because everybody with any kind of AI degree is already recruited, is gonna have to have a different set of skills and understanding than the person who's running a tomato, 50,000 acre tomato farm. Potentially, the CEO of one is not gonna be successful and the CEO of the other, even though they might be great CEOs in the business of their choice.

Because one is high margin, one is low margin, one is about a certain kind of efficiency, one is about a certain kind of creativity. So if you are not self-aware, then you better have landed in a place where you, by nature, are going to be capable. And that place can't change. But if you are gonna be required to change as a human being and change who you are and your identity as a human being to maintain or continue success, then you're just shooting yourself in the foot by not being self-aware.

There's also this kind of trajectory of self-awareness. Like the beginning is, why am I doing this work? And then I can't see the change. Other people are telling me I'm changing, but I can't see the change. Why am I even doing this? And then there's like, holy shit, life is better. And then when you hit the holy shit, life is better moment, oftentimes, like two or three years for people, do they really get that moment? Then it's just like, why in the hell would I ever stop this?

It's a little bit like working out. Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury. They make the world's best banking product. I think you know this already. I use Mercury for all of my businesses. I think I have like maybe seven or eight businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all of them. And now they actually just launched a personal banking account. So I have my personal account there. I moved off of Wells Fargo and Chase. I'm just all in on Mercury.

Why? I like products that are easy to use. I like products that get me and the problems that I have. So like, very easy to make a joint account with my wife. Very easy to spin up virtual cards. One click and I get savings yield. It just has all the stuff that I need in one place. So if you're looking for the best banking product on the market, it's definitely Mercury. I will fist fight anybody who disagrees with me on that. Go to mercury.com slash personal and learn more.

Mercury is a FinTech, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group in column NA, members FDIC. Speaking of like working out, and actually Sean's example with the piano was awesome. And we've only been talking for an hour and I'm like totally bought in. I love what you do. I believe what you are saying is true. But in the back of my head, I'm like, this sounds amazing. I'm a little overwhelmed. I don't know where to start. And if it's like working out, and if you said, the end goal is you want to bench 300 pounds over the next year, like here's like a really interesting progression.

And here's like some experiments or workouts you can do each week. It might be too reductive, but are there like, this idea of experimenting weekly is pretty cool. That sounds exciting and that sounds fun. Is there like a checklist or a playbook where it's like. No, I think starting point is a good word. Like if somebody listened to this, great. What's a beautiful place in the next 24 hours, 48 hours that they could go, what's a thing they could do that would just get them on the road?

Yeah, and then what's the progression and where are some other weekly experiments that I could follow to improve myself? Yeah, so there's, I can tell you how I did and then I can tell you the resources that we have for people. So I just basically pick topics that I was interested in. I would read something on that topic and I would design an experiment for myself and I'd run that experiment for a week. And I actually have a book that I just finished writing that'll be published in like whatever year in something that has 52 experiments on different topics.

And then a whole bunch of writing on these topics. What's one of them? A really cool, super cool experiment is, so right now, enjoy yourself. Don't change what you're doing at all. But just enjoy what you're doing 10% more, right? Totally possible, totally capable, nothing to it. So just do that five times a day for the next week. Five times a day, go, oh, how do I enjoy myself without changing anything, just 5% more, 10% more. That sounds like so basic and almost stupid. And then I think of myself wanting to do that and I'm like, that's actually really helpful.

Yeah, super, yeah. It's like all of a sudden, you'll be sitting in a meeting and your whole mindset will change and then the thing you say will change and yeah. That's a simple, really cool little experiment to run. The other one is, I think we talked about the one with the voice in the head. That's another great experiment to run. Another great experiment to run would be, oh yeah, this one's good, especially if you're a grinder. Don't do anything you don't enjoy for a week. Do you go to work and you can only do the shit that you enjoy and at some point in that week, there's gonna be something that happens and I'll tell you my experience of this.

I did this before I had a business and I was sitting in front of the trash and I hated taking the trash out but I also didn't enjoy smelling the trash. So I was sitting there like, well, what do I do because I've committed to not doing anything I don't enjoy and then I was like, oh, I have to figure out how to enjoy taking out the trash and so that's another cool experiment is just see what it's like to live a week doing only what you enjoy because a lot of the lack of enjoyment that occurs is because we tell ourselves we have to endure it when we absolutely could be enjoying it.

So you said something in that first experiment. You said, without doing anything different, enjoy it more, which to me reads like, because one version of how do I take out the trash more? Oh, I'm gonna listen to my favorite song while I do it. Okay, I changed what I was doing, right? That's fair but there's the other version which is I'm literally not gonna do anything different. I'm just gonna feel it more. I'm gonna bring my awareness to it. That's why there are two experiences, two experiments.

And I had this when we sold a company and then I asked my business partner, Ben, I was like, dude, how does it feel? Big win for you. First, how does it feel? Is it what you thought? He's like, honestly, no, not at all. He's like, I didn't feel anything and we were laughing and he didn't know what to make of it. So his meaning he put on that was like, dude, was I chasing the wrong goal this whole time? Was I wrong in what I wanted?

And what I kind of reframed or my life experience was this. I was like, dude, I think all these feelings are like a muscle. You just never, how many times before this did you feel ecstatic and triumphant and never. So what'd you think, you would just start today and suddenly feel it at level 100? You never used that muscle before. So the actual thing to do was practice using that muscle without having to sell your company and then you sort of build up the capacity to feel.

But you can't just, I think we think, oh, my happy is your happy. Dude, I got an uncle who I'm like, his capacity to feel happy is just fundamentally higher, like a VO2 max. It's way higher than mine. Does that line up with, I've never done the research, this is my life experience. Yes, definitely, definitely, especially the positive emotions. But they're the scariest emotions for most people to feel because they're the biggest identity destroying emotions. They just wreck your identity. The positive ones are. The positive ones, yeah.

Why does that destroy your identity? Go be in bliss and find out where you are. Well, I experienced that when I had kids. When I had kids, I wrote a post about this. I was like, not having kids was so much better in terms of ambition because it's quite simple. I just work, work, work, and there's a clear ladder and you just climb it and then you have kids and you're like, I only mostly care about this and everything else is insignificant. Yeah. And you're like, that part of me just died.

I guess you grieve it a little bit. I don't know how you feel, but when you have children, you're like, everything that I thought I cared about, I now care about significantly less. Yeah. And I'm happy, I prefer this life. And yet you're still working and still being effective, which is also an interesting thing to let your mind recognize that the identity doesn't have to be so attached to be able to be successful. Yeah. One more experiment that I think is really cool for entrepreneurs, especially if they have, because we've been talking about self-reliance.

Thank five people a day. Consciously look around and go, what did somebody do for me that I'm grateful for? And thank five people a day. It'll totally change your self-reliance pattern. Hey, how do you find joy and how do you find what you should be doing? Because you're like, fine, one of your exercises was do only what you like or enjoy something more. But that's actually kind of complicated because I don't think a lot of people have actually asked themselves or can't answer, what do I love doing?

Yeah, I think because it's a false, I think that's really just like a self-abuse in disguise. Like what's my purpose? What's my purpose is just a way to beat yourself up that you don't have your purpose. What do I enjoy? I think that the people that I find who have purpose and enjoy what they do, a lot of them weren't like, I think that what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna like really get into risk analysis. But they ended up there, but they learned how to geek out on it and enjoy the thing itself.

So I think the way that you find what you enjoy is on a day-to-day basis asking yourself, how would I enjoy doing this? How do I enjoy this? What would make it a little bit better? How would I change this? And I think for entrepreneurs, they think that that's a nice to have, but it's far more important than that. So if I had a car, if I wanted an efficient company, we think of it as a fast company. I got from A to B quickly. But if we had a car, A to B quickly isn't an efficient car, that's just a fast car.

An efficient car is a car that gets to A to B without a lot of energy. And so if you want efficiency in your life, it's how much energy you spent in that day. And often that does end up making you go faster. And so if I get to the end of the day and I say how much did I enjoy myself, that's the best measure of efficiency. Because I have energy for the next day and I want to come back. If I do a yoga class and I enjoyed the hell out of it, I'm far more likely to come back and do yoga and do it well tomorrow than if I had a yoga class that sucked and I hated it.

And so as people learn how enjoyment works in their system, how to enjoy what they enjoy, what they're great at, then their whole business becomes far more efficient. And as a matter of fact, we get a lot of people who come and say, well, I'd like to work for you. And I'll just say, what's your passion? What's the thing that you care about that you would love doing? And if they say the thing that we have a slot for, then we'll talk to them. Because if someone's naturally motivated, it's so useful.

It's interesting you say that. When Sam asked these questions, I'm kind of like, how do you know? My guess was that you were gonna just be like, you know when you see it, you feel it. It's not a heady thing. You can't think your way into this or out of this to analyze your way into success in these. There's a whole East-West or two sides of the brain type of thing. But I feel like when you're answering some of these, you are kind of thinking your way through.

I guess, can you talk about just noticing or feel rather than, where does that play in for you? I can give you a great story on this. So my wife and I were sitting, we do these very intense long retreats. And so it's very tiring. And we were at the end of one of the retreats and there was this investment we could have made that would have given us enough money where we didn't have to start a business. And we were sitting there thinking, and I said, I'm really glad that didn't happen because we wouldn't have done this.

And she said, yeah, me too. And I said, I'm just curious, would you sell this business for a billion dollars if we could not do it again, like we would be done doing it, but we'd get a billion dollars? And both of us went like this. We both went, we wouldn't. That was our answer. And I don't know, I told my, I came home, told the story to my daughters and then like two or three months later, one of my daughters comes in and says, I found my billion dollar idea.

I'm like, cool. Something you can grow into a billion dollars? And she's like, no, something I wouldn't sell for a billion dollars. That's cool. And so if you're doing something that's like deeply meaningful to you, that's one way to test if that's something that's deeply meaningful to you. If you're doing it for other reasons, if you're doing it because you think it's gonna make you happy, if you're doing it because you think people will like you or because you'll have enough money or to just be better or to win or something like that, those can actually create very big and successful businesses but they won't create contentment.

I like talking with people like you because you have this really cool perspective where you've talked to the titans of industry, the best of the best, the Illuminati. You know, you like, you have seen them and we all know what they appear like in the media or on podcasts like this where they usually look like they have their act together or they'll show just a little bit of vulnerability to show that like they're one of us but are there any interesting stories or observations about the 1% of performers that would surprise us or at least entertain us on how these guys might think that might surprise us or be different?

Yeah, specifically I can't do obviously but what I could say is that there's nothing I've said on this podcast that I haven't said to one of the titans of industry. Like the things that you're wrestling with are the exact same things that they're wrestling with. Right? What attributes do you tend to notice? Are they 10 out of 10 on or one out of 10 on? The really, really, the exceptional ones of like very fast-paced businesses. So not, like if you can be a slow-paced business then there's a different kind of attitude.

You can be, you can actually be quite self-abusive in a slow-paced business but in a fast-paced business you can't second guess yourself very much. So very few of them are second guessers. So they just are like, and part of it is because they have to make so many decisions in a day. And so decisiveness is another one, especially for the fast-paced industries. There are some, like investment, if you're an investor and you can be a billionaire investor you can really second guess yourself a ton and still be a successful investor.

But if you're the CEO of a tech company that's in fast-paced you can't do that. The other thing that I think those very high performers, it's not all of them, but I would say at least 60, maybe 70%, they both feel like they're better than everybody and worse than everybody simultaneously. So they, on one level, in their conscious mind they're like, I am more capable than people, than the average person. But underneath they're like, I'm broken. And so they're kind of doing this thing because they know that they're better and they're trying to prove that they're not broken.

It's not all the time, but it's more common in that population than in any other population that I've seen. There's a lot of people walk around thinking that they're better than everybody, right? I mean, you can go down into like the dregs of our society and you will find somebody who thinks they're better than everybody. But that like underlying like, oh, I'm broken simultaneously with it and the way that that presents is very, there's a lot of it in that realm. One of the things we did in this podcast that's sort of backwards probably for most podcasts is most podcasts start with like, tell me about your background and your story.

And we do it the opposite. We say, show me all the gold you've collected on your journey. First we start there and then we say, where'd you get all this, man? What kind of journey did you go on? Can you give us now, now that we've gotten to see some of the gold, can you give us a little bit of the journey? And I'm curious about one thing in particular. I've read something about like an eight second meditation experience. I'm very curious about that. But if you give us the journey, but make sure you hit that along the way.

Yeah, I mean, I grew up going all over the world. I think by the time I was 28, I lived in 26 places. My dad was a CEO, but also became an alcoholic. And so I rebelled against that, had a Mohawk, was a skateboarder, got kicked out of my first college, graduated valedictorian for my second college. And then first thing I did when I left college was like, I'm just having adventures one after the other. So I butchered fish in Alaska and I hitchhiked throughout the United States.

And then I did international stock lending and I was in a band. So I was just like, I'm having whatever adventure I want from life. Like James Bond, man. Well, it's because I saw my dad just like do this corporate thing and end up in misery. I was like, yeah, I'm not doing that. Then I met my wife and my wife was like, if we're gonna get married, we're gonna see a therapist, we're going to do a 10 day silent retreat and we're going to travel through third world together for like six months.

If we can do those three things, we're gonna be capable of getting married and being successful. So those were her tasks. And so I did them. The therapy was amazing. We got blessed with a really good therapist and they're pretty rare. And then the silent retreat was my first time meditating ever. And on day three of vipassana, they have, you know, so when it changes from putting all your attention into your breath to like moving your attention through your body. And I had this experience of like evaporation, samadhi is what some people would call it, but this experience of I am one with everything and everything is good.

And it lasted eight seconds. And it was like getting hooked on heroin. My entire life changed. I was like, whatever the that is, I'm obsessed. And unfortunately, I went about it in a very inefficient way. I very much was like, once I get there, I'll be happy. It was just the search for enlightenment was just like porn for perfectionism. It was just like my porn, right? But the plus side was that like I just, because I had authority issues, I just went and explored everything and took nothing very seriously and made everything an experiment.

So instead, and now that's how we teach. Like when we do our courses, everything is done as an experiment. There's not like we're talking and saying, this is how things are. We're like, go and experience the ship for yourself. Here's how you do it. You can do it with people right now. It's very in the moment experimentation. And I wasn't willing to say, you're the authority, you're the guru. I was like, I'm gonna listen to every single modality that I can find from neuroscience to psychology to traditions that are 2000 years old.

I'm gonna try 10 forms of meditation. I'm gonna do the Hoffman process. I'm gonna do somatic work. I just did everything. And I was pretty dedicated to that. I'm not pretty, I was like totally dedicated. I didn't work for seven years. I lived off credit cards. I meditated for like seven hours a day, looking, searching. And I was obsessed with it. The search ended, what people would call awakening happened. And it wasn't an end at all. There was no finish line, just like selling a company.

It was just like, oh, I see how this whole thing is just easier and more spacious than I thought it was. And then my identity got trapped in that for a while. Like I was the awake guy, and then that evaporated. And in that time period, we had kids. And then the kids were where the big emotional work came in, was like really learning. There was this thing called hand-in-hand parenting, which I highly recommend, a book called Listen, which is like one of the most profound practices in my life.

And that was really where the big emotional understanding started coming in, that like, oh, I can be with my children in these big emotions, and all they need to do is feel them and accept them to become amazing kids. And now my girls are 17 and 20, and they are frickin' amazing. And it is, I think, all because of hand-in-hand. And my wife, she's amazing. And so that was it. And then at some point, I became a venture capitalist. And... As one does. As one does, yeah.

I literally went from meditation, I did art, and then became a venture capitalist. You're like a sellout. Both of them just sit around all day doing that a lot. No, what happened was I was doing this large-scale art installation for a wealthy family, and I was giving them business advice, because before I had done international stock lending and other things, and it was like at the time when oil was going through the roof and gold was going through the roof, and I was just telling them like, hey, here's this thing, and they did, and they made a lot of money.

That's like a hilarious thought, by the way. A guy doing an arts installation at a rich person's house got like the guru energy, and it's like, hey, do you guys wanna discuss your bond portfolio? Yeah, wait, what did you actually tell them? What was going on? What was the call? Buy oil and gold. This is a long time ago, right? But I was like, I've always been obsessed with business as well, so. And the way I think about those years is I was meditating and worrying about money.

Those are the two things I did. So I had like a stack of Financial Times in the corner, and so I was, when they still had papers, and I would read the Financial Times. Because I started, one of the jobs I did was international stock lending, and I got promoted three times, and so I was inside of like a 16-month period, and so it was just something that I always thought about. Like one day, we were sitting and having lunch, and I was just like, hey, here's this thing.

So he comes to me and he goes, hey, do you want to come and work for us and help us in the family office? And I was like, no, I love being an artist. It's good. And he says, well, if you could do anything you want, just tell us what it would be. And so three months later, I was like, well, I think the biggest change agent on the planet, this is around 2006, I was like, is gonna be Cleantech, I think that this is. The biggest technological changes on the planet, I think, have come from venture.

So I'd do that, and then I would work in the nonprofit, like helping increase consciousness, particularly in children. And so he said, yeah, let's do it. And it turned out I was not a great investor because I needed to be needed too much. Like a great investor is the investor who's like, I am investing because you don't need me at all. And I was like, I need to be needed, which was horrible as venture investor. And in that, so the only way for me to be successful was to coach the CEOs into turning their companies around.

And we had a positive result on the portfolio. So we invested more, so I was investing for about 12 years. But pretty soon, the word about my coaching got out. And in doing venture, the thing that I realized about the personal work was that if you take a standard business tool and you put the awareness of personal work into it, the standard business tool gets better, right? If we have something that we teach called VIEW, it's in our connection course. It's about how to communicate with people, how to have hard conversations, how to have sales conversations.

When people have it, they sell better, they do product better, they talk to their husbands and wives better, they have hard conversations better. And it's because they're all related. And so as I was coaching people and learning all these business tools as a VC and blending them together, I just found more and more effective ways to do it, which made me a better coach. And so at some point, I was like, I should be doing this and only this. And so 2016, I started the transition.

2018, I stopped working for the family and I started building Art of Accomplishment. We've been growing ever since. You're fun to talk to because this stuff is all really helpful. I'm so convinced now, you've got me drinking the Kool-Aid where I'm like, here, you're talking about this, and I'm like, nothing else matters except for this. And that's a little bit of an overwhelming feeling. Is there a practical way that I can get started other than going through one of your programs, like anything that you suggest I read or do?

Because this sounds very fascinating. And I'm like, I'm in. Yeah, so the one thing I would do, we have a podcast that I think has now 180 episodes, and they're all on different topics. And it's all basically some version of a teaching. I would pick a topic that's particular for you. You're like, oh, wow, I'm a perfectionist. I'd go to the Perfectionist Podcast. I have self-reliance issues. Go to the Self-Reliance Podcast. And then if there's not an experiment in it, a lot of them have experiments that you can run.

and then design an experiment from that and play there. We also have an experiments page where it teaches you how to design the experiments and how to run them. That's another thing that I think is really good. We have a podcast on running and designing experiments. That's another one. By the way, Sam, so brilliant that they call them, he frames everything as experiments because so much of this industry that he's in is a, you should do this, you need to do this, this is the way versus less preachy, less rigid, more open.

Yeah, like try this weird thing and see what happens. You might be surprised and it makes it more fun. Yeah. Makes it more fun, yeah. It's also, there's another reason for it. So we have a part of our brain, I'm not gonna be very specific about this, but we have a part of the brain called the habenula. It's with all invertebrates and it's basically the part of our brain that traffics our dopamine and stuff like that and it prevents us from making the same mistake over and over and over and over again.

And the reason this is is because if you're a bear and you're fighting for sexual dominance and you lose, it'd be really stupid to go and fight the next day, right? If you eat the mushroom, it makes you sick. It'd be really stupid to eat that mushroom the next day. Unfortunately, what this does for us is it means like we're not gonna make the second sales call because we just got rejected or when we stop, we eat that piece of chocolate cake that we talked about earlier, I'm gonna just quit my diet.

That's what it does in our brain. So if you frame it as an experiment, then what you're doing is you're constantly learning and you're never failing. And so they did this study about people who were like, I think it was at or below poverty and they figured out who lost weight when they tried and the people who did were the people who were constantly iterating, where there was no, we failed. There's just, I'm gonna try this, now we're gonna try this, which we obviously see in business, right?

Those are the people who succeed in business. They keep on trying new stuff until they find the thing that works. And so to see self-awareness as a series of experiments and every experiment you learn and all you need to do is learn about yourself, then you never really can fail and it works a lot better. And if you think about like fixing a watch, if you understand a watch, you can fix it. If you understand yourself, right, you can change. You're like the worst doctor is a dermatologist because when they go out to parties with their family, everyone's like, I got a rash, check this out.

What is this? And people are popping their tops at parties, like, what do you think this is? And if you go to a party with you, everyone's like, fix me or give me the answer. It must be exhausting. You probably have to lie about what you do for work. Yeah, it can be annoying. Chris Williamson, do you all know Chris? Yeah. So Chris Williamson was hanging out with me and he was like, my life is walking down the street, some UPS driver says, hey man, good podcast.

I'm like, thanks. Your life is, hey man, I've got daddy issues. Can we have a quick session? Yeah. So I would say that's one good way to start. The other good way to start is on YouTube, I do these 15 minute coaching sessions. I do some with business folks, some without business folks. They're incredibly powerful, they're incredibly potent. And so if you can go through them and say, oh, I have this issue, and then watch the coaching session, you can get change that's not just on an intellectual level.

This has been a treat because I'm seeking, I'm looking to hire an executive coach, Sean has one, and we're both in some transitioning periods of our lives with families and business. And so this was like a treat for us because I think I needed this. I needed this, this was the perfect medicine. Cool. I'm happy to make some recommendations for you if you're interested. I'm all yours, yeah, tell me everything. You can tell me all fair, yeah. Brother, you got me eating out of your hand right now.

I'll do whatever you say. As far as the book, the one thing that I think would be really useful, we have a program that's specifically for venture-backed startups that have found product market fit that are under 50 people. And we have a program for their executive teams. So their executive teams come and do a summit with us twice a year, super effective. Basically, we are all about getting that, how do we have the hard conversations quickly and effectively, and creating that so that you know, you know and I know that two founders not getting along can cost a business decades if not the entire business and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And so we find the working with the team, the executive team is far more efficient for having a change both with the CEO inside the company. So that would be, it's called the council and we open up applications once a year. Dude, it's crazy the responsibility you have. Like I read that the OpenAI team sends a car, picks you up and you like coach the whole team or you coach the execs and then I'm on Twitter and they're like, hey, I lead safety research. It's like today, like the big story right now is like Anthropics guys like, hey, like we think there's a greater than 10% chance that AI kills all of humanity.

You know what I mean? It's like, first of all, they need a little comms coaching. I don't know if you do that on the side, but that would be nice. But secondly, like, you know, what responsibility like coaching the people that are building the thing, the bomb, you know, like either the greatest thing ever or the worst thing ever. Sometimes they say it's the greatest ever and sometimes they tell us it's gonna be the worst thing ever. It's gotta be a pretty heavy thing. Yeah, that's, it's really interesting.

So just to be very clear about my, like I coach people at OpenAI, I don't coach the whole leadership team. And I have coached most of the people who are in the research, like leading the research department. And I've worked with people in our, like in-person and other programs from all the AI labs. They all come, one multiple from all of them have come through our thing. I have a really interesting take on this. You know, if you've had a kid, your wife's in the OR or in the birthing room, or maybe she, you had a duel at the house, but just imagine like she's giving birth to this thing.

And now imagine like there's protests outside and there's people saying that they're gonna destroy humanity and, you know, like these people are doing something that's like substantial. And as a society, we are really not being supportive. And the reason I say being supportive is because the outcome is gonna be different, right? Like, I'm sure they're out there, but I haven't met one of them yet who's trying to not do something that's good for humanity, that they don't, and they're not concerned. You must've seen the tweet Sean's referring to.

That actually, this isn't in your wheelhouse maybe of expertise, but it might be given that you talk to all these cool people. Do you actually have an opinion on what that, basically for the listener, the tweet was a guy who worked at Claude quit, and he said, there's a 10% chance or more that everyone's gonna die because of AI. It was a very. One guy quit, and then the guy who's still there, who leads that team that that guy was on said, no, he's right. We do believe that.

I personally think it's a greater than 10% chance. Yeah. Do you have an opinion on the seriousness? I do, I have a very, very strong opinion. I've sat with a whole bunch of researchers and they were asked, these are the people building it, and they were asked 20 questions. Does AGI exist now? Will it ever exist? Are the things, and then they were asked to line up on this line, and they lined up very, very differently. They were spread out. Okay, is it gonna destroy the world?

Is it gonna be the best thing for humanity? They're all spread out on the line. Every single question, there's not everybody on one corner and everybody on the other corner. My takeaway from that is they're thinking about what's gonna happen with AI has far more to do with how they were raised than it has to do with any kind of reality. That's such a you answer, and it's a beautiful answer. So that's my opinion on it. I mean, of course, this has a chance to destroy humanity.

So does nuclear weapons, and so does global warming, and so does, and something will eventually, you know? And the question that I ask myself personally is like, what can I do that can affect a positive outcome? And am I participating in that? And somebody can say, that's easy, Joe, because you're coaching people like Sam. But I would say it is a democracy of clicks and money that's gonna determine AI more than any one leader. And I think we shirk our responsibility by saying it's about one leader who's gonna do it.

Does that make you feel better, Sean, or no? I don't think so. Honestly, no. Not at all. Yeah. So we're gonna die. No, not even that. I guess on one level, there's a sort of humor in the situation, to use your analogy of like the sort of birth of this technology, and you said a lot of the opinions of these people has less to do, let me paraphrase what you said, has less to do with the facts on the ground and the research, what they're seeing in the data versus how they're arrayed.

They're daddy issues, and it's like AI's daddy has daddy issues. Therefore, maybe AI's gonna have daddy issues as it grows up. Yes. Yeah, just like Meta's business is a reflection of the consciousness of Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah, I think that's why you coach, because you can affect that. I think that's why maybe you have comfort, because you know some of the people. I think that's why a lot of the people who are just in the YouTube comments, who have a sort of billionaire aversion, tech guy aversion, right, this is like, if you go look at the sentiment, the sentiment around billionaires, tech leaders, and specifically the billionaire AI tech leaders, it's awful, like there is zero trust, zero belief that those are our great kings and fearless leaders that we wanna get behind.

Part of that is because of their own poor communication and presentation, so it's not like they're just hated because of who they are, right? They contributed to some of that. Yeah. And some of it is people's, their own current life situation makes them hate, you know, and that's, you know, it's just this weird, complicated thing that's going on, but to answer your question, Sam, of does it make you feel a lot better? No, not necessarily. I sort of think of it, I don't know, just a much higher level of, like the Earth has been around for billions of years.

The odds that I will exist when the demise is here is very, very, very, very low. Yeah. The funniest tweet was when the Antarctic guy was like, yeah, 10% chance it kills all humans, and then somebody quote tweeted it and said, by the way, LeBron was 9% to go to the Sixers this summer. Just put that perspective for you. I actually took a lot of comfort when I was, I was reading about the Dead Sea Scrolls, and I found out that it was in, the scrolls were kept by a cult who saw the end of the world coming.

And I was like, oh, the end of the world was coming. Wait, wait, explain this, I don't even know what, what is the Dead Sea Scrolls? Dead Sea Scrolls are like the, It's like an ancient biblical text. Yeah, exactly, that were like in a cave somewhere, and they were kept by a cult just post-Jesus, I think, that was like the end of the world is coming, and we have to prepare for it. And then we had Y2K, I don't know if you all are old enough, but that was the end of the world.

Then we had like 2012, the Mayan prophecy, that was the end of the world. So humans do have a thing about the end of the world is coming. We do like that. Joe, thanks for coming on, man. Everybody go check out Art of Accomplishment and the podcast and all the good things. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having me, appreciate it. All right, that's it, that's the pod. ♪ I feel like I can rule the world ♪ ♪ I know I can be what I want to ♪ ♪ I put my all in it like no days off ♪ ♪ On the road, less travel, never looking back ♪ All right, let's take a quick break.

I want to tell you about Marketing School. It is a podcast that is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network and it is run by Neil Patel and Eric Hsu. And these guys are both marketers who are running businesses. And so if you want real world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it, this is the podcast for you. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.