Resilience: The Necessary Ingredient for Success

Full podcast episodes available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. ⁠⁠⁠

Insights for the Matt's Mindset Podcast drawn from: ⁠⁠Tim Ferriss⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Sam Harris⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Neil de Grasse Tyson⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Dr. Brene Brown⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Dr. Andrew Huberman⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Dr. Matthew Walker⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Jonathan Haight⁠⁠, Roland Griffiths, PhD, ⁠⁠Niall Ferguson⁠⁠, Chris Palmer, MD, ⁠⁠Dr. Michio Kaku⁠⁠, Noah Feldman, Emile Durkheim, Stanley Milgram, Jean Piaget, B.F. Skinner, Abraham Maslow, Carl Jung ⁠⁠Bill Gurely⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Jason Calacanis⁠⁠, Jim Collins, Aryeh Bourkoff, Balaji Srinivasan, Ed Thorpe, ⁠⁠Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sachs, David Friedberg⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Howard Marks⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Ray Dalio⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Naval Ravikant⁠⁠, Peter Theil Rick Rubin, ⁠⁠Todd McFarlane⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Bill Burr⁠⁠, Terry Crews, ⁠⁠Hugh Jackman⁠⁠, Matthew McConaughey ⁠⁠James Clear⁠⁠, Stephen Pressfield, ⁠⁠Seth Godin⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Susan Cain⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Morgan Housel⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Jocko Willink⁠⁠, Ayn Rand, Ray Bradbury, Aldous Huxley, Friedrich Nietzsche, Marcus Aurelius, ⁠⁠Tamara Levitt⁠⁠, Soren Kierkegaard, Jean Paul Satre, James Joyce, ⁠⁠Malcolm Gladwell⁠⁠, ⁠David Deutsch⁠, ⁠Richard Dawkins⁠, ⁠John Vervaeke⁠

Show Notes:

Introduction

• Greetings to listeners

• Quote from Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Antifragility

• Disclaimer about Eurocentrism

Discussion

• Quote from David Goggins and the fear of unfulfilled potential

• Discussion of your highest self and self actualization

• Parable of the Talents

• 10,000 Hours, Learning Curve and Plateau

• Resilience and the Implicit Nature of Failure in Success

• Getting Halfway Up the Mountain and Changing Course

• Discussion of the Pillars that Make up Your Why

• Nothing is Ever Wasted on Your Journey =

Transcript:

Hello beautiful people. This is episode 8 of the Matt’s Mindset Podcast, the pod that helps you stand on the shoulders of giants so you can achieve your dreams.

So last week we discussed how to create real and lasting change in your life and this episode, while an effective stand alone, can also be seen an effective complement to last week’s, building on the lessons.

Because today we are going to discuss one of the key ingredients for success. Resilience.

Resilience can be defined as the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness. The ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity.

But resilience goes beyond those things. Resilience is not just about being tough. It’s not just about being elastic or, as my mom would say, like a duck, just let it roll off your back.

You have to be antifragile. This is an idea put forth by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who’s theory of the procrustean bed I discussed at length in one of my previous episodes.

Anti-fragility goes beyond robustness, beyond toughness, beyond elasticity; it means that something does not merely withstand a shock but actually improves because of it. That is resilience.

So this episode serves as both a stand alone episode, but also as a complement to the Create Lasting Change episode that aired last week and the accompanying PDF which can be found in my LinkTree.

And to kick off our discussion, we are going to start with a quote, or more of a story, from David Goggins.

“Unfulfilled potential is the story of most people's lives. It is, and it could have been the story of mine. I tell a lot of people, 'What's your biggest fear in life?' And my biggest fear, honestly, was let's say this, let's say I don't care if you believe in God or not, I don't care.

So this, this is play game with me. Let's say, let's say you're God, and we have a big fucking long line of people, and I made it to heaven, 75 years old, 300 pounds. I made it to heaven. I worked for Ecolab my entire life, spraying for cockroaches, that's what I did.

But I'm dead, I'm in heaven now, and you are, you're judging us all now. So we're in line, we're all sitting there in line, you have Adam Brown here's a big board up and you're talking to Adam Brown about his life, and you rip it down, and I'm next in line, David Goggins. I see my name, I see all this shit, and God goes, 'Hey, you, read this man.' Now I'm reading this list, and I'm seeing 182 pounds, Navy SEAL, Ranger School, motivational speaker, changing lives. Okay man, pull-up record, all this shit. I'm like, that's not me man.

And God looks at me and says, 'That's who you were supposed to be.'

It’s a pretty powerful thought experiment. Like who would you be if you applied yourself. Who is your highest self? Who is your self actualization? Well there’s only one person who knows that. And their listening to this podcast right now.

I think this a quintessential human experience, to want to maximize your potential, to want to live up to who you’re supposed to be. Kind of an overarching goal of our lives is to be all that we can be. It’s our reason for being. Anywhere from 80 to 300 million sperm are released per ejaculation and you are here. So regardless of what you believe, you have an opportunity of a lifetime. Literally.

It’s like the parable of the talents in the New Testament: The parable of the talents is a story told by Jesus, which illustrates the importance of being a good steward of the gifts and abilities that God has given us. In the parable, a master gives three of his servants different amounts of talents (a form of currency) before going on a journey. Two of the servants invest their talents and double their amounts, while the third servant buries his talent and does not make any profit. When the master returns, he rewards the first two servants but punishes the third for not using his talent wisely. The parable teaches that we should use our gifts and abilities to serve God and others, rather than hoarding them for ourselves.

So we all want to be all that we can be in this life, but that’s also the hardest thing to do because there are people things and entities literally trying to get us not to be the best that we can be.

There are corporations and individuals who literally have decided to make money and to make a living by exploiting your time or attention or resources in a way that is not in your highest good.

You have to know and recognize those corporations and individuals and steer clear of them. That’s like your number one thing and then you have to get out of your own way you have to have your mindset in the right place and of course you have to know where you’re going, which takes introspection and self reflection self-awareness in an age of cheap dopamine and the attention economy we find ourselves in.

And of course, once you know what you want to do then there’s the actual matter of doing it. The actual matter of putting your 10,000 hours in. The actual matter of moving that direction

So once you’ve figured out what you wanna do, whether it’s in a specific field of study, a profession a vocation, and it could just be the fact that you want to get married and have a big family or even just a family. You’ve always wanted that to help grow and shape young minds so maybe your teacher, whatever it is you want to do.

Then you have to do. There’s going to be a learning curve. There’s going to be a period of study formal or informal that you have to undertake.

And then you may come to find out or realize, as I did, that what you’re actually working for is actually not your potential, but just a pit stop along the way. Maybe you went 8,000 miles north, only to discover you were supposed to be going northwest, so you have to change your course slightly.

And this is where resilience and antifragility comes in. Resilience is probably the least talked about least glamorous, most important thing you’ll ever developing your entire life

It’s G force that will keep you going that will keep you moving. Vince Lombardi said the thing that separates the champion from everybody else is not a surplus of strength, not a surplus of knowledge but a surplus of will. Resilience and antifragility is the special ingredient of evolution. It’s not the smartest that survive, nor the strongest, but the ones most adaptable to change.

Resilience is how you pick yourself back up after you fail or discovered that the direction that you’re going in is no longer the direction that you want to go i anymore.

Like a stock portfolio, when actualizing your own potential you’re going to go up and you’re going to go down. And then you’re gonna go up a little further and then you can go to go down. That’s just how life works.

And most people, myself included, don’t enjoy this process. But your alternative is employing a little bit of Keynesian economics to in your life and you do that by just not progressing. You can choose to not grow. You can stay at the same job for 30 years, not iterating, not striving, not actualizing. You can stay in a unhappy marriage or with a partner that you no longer have any sort of spark with and perhaps never had any sort of spark with. But it was comfortable. Perhaps it was smart or expected.

You can artificially curb the natural abs and flows ups and downs of life by making sure that you just don’t have any new experiences. But a David Goggins illustrated above, that’s my personal biggest fear in life. Is the life unlived.

And so if you’re trying to self actualize you’re gonna need resilience and youre’ going to have to fail.

I think we need to officially reclaim failure. It’s not a negative or dirty word. Failure is one of the most important things that you can do is.

Tim Ferriss asks almost everyone on his show, from famous entrepreneurs and top athletes to professors and high performers in every field. Do you have a favorite failure?

And most of them laugh and they’re like well which one should I choose? Like which is my favorite? Which one was the most pivotal in my life?

I talked a bit about this in my video last week, failure is where all the lessons are. Failure is where all the growth is. Failure is where you learn exactly who you are and what you need to do.

The paradox is that you can’t ever really succeed without failure. You can’t ever be a champion without losing. Because ever losers keep going when they’re winning. But when you get knocked down flat on your back, then we separate the cream from the crop.

Only when you’re down 28-3 on the biggest stage, in the third quarter, and then you come back can we call you the greatest of all time.

As Matthew McConaughey would say, you got to get really good at running down hill. Make hay when the sun shines. But failure is going to be not only implicit to the journey, but necessary.

For me, my journeys been pretty whiny tipsy therapy I was in high school I was basically just conforming, which is nothing wrong with that especially in high school. As Picasso would say you have to know the rules so you can break them like an artist.

So I literally was in high school I was gonna just doing doing the thing and I had no idea what I wanted to do.

And I was taking a criminology class my senior year of high school and found it interesting so I thought I’ll just major in criminal justice and then we’ll see where that goes.

I did one year of that actually found a really interesting, but pretty much any course or any part of that would require you to be a police officer at some point which I wasn’t particularly interested in doing

So I switched to a history undergrad because I was fascinated by history, and was like all right. I can do this and be on a track for law school.

If you listen to my lean into yourself podcast you can hear much more detail about how that I fell in love with creative writing, a wrote a novel and kind of two more more abortive novels in undergrad while patching my time to be able to do what I wanted and do creative work and still kind of batch my actual school work to make sure that I got my degree requirements

And pretty much by the time junior year rolled around I was just pretty certain that I wasn’t gonna go to law school and I ended up then having a bit of a crisis meeting at that point.

And so I decided to pursue screenwriting and so I took a class being offered my senior year, and I learned the format. And began to learn the structure began reading on the books began analyzing TV shows.

And so I talk about this a bit more length in my lean into yourself episode, but eventually after four years of this path, two years post grad and two years in Los Angeles, I came to the conclusion that the screen writing was not going to be the route for me, and I got to that place a variety of reasons, but I remember being on the rooftop of my apartment complex which way is beautiful chairs lounges had a rooftop pool, had a Jacuzzi, 360° degree views of Hollywood of Los Angeles and basically just knew there was no point in continuing on this path.

And I used this exercise where I just said why over and over.

To figure out what I wanted I was like well what do you want.

And so I started with, well I want to write screenplays.

Okay, why? Because I want to express myself creatively. Why?

Because I feel like that’s an integral part of my character. why?

Because I feel like that’s where my potential lies.

OK so there we go, we’ve reached the ground floor and found one pillar of my foundation.

Next. Why did you want to do screen writing? Why not continue writing novels? Well I wanted to make a lot of money. Okay, why?

Because I want to spend my time how I want. Buy what I need to buy. Go where I want go. Feel secure that I can provide for myself and eventually my wife and family.

Ahhh so it’s not about money at all. You want freedom. Money is just the vehicle you are going to utilize to get to freedom.

OK so freedom is your second pillar that you can build on and optimize for to reach your potential.

Why do you feel compelled to share what you know with others?

Why don’t you just keep it for yourself and be smarter than everyone else?

Because I want to share my knowledge. I want to help people.

If I can learn all these lessons the hard way, I’d like to spare someone by just giving them the knowledge especially if they are willing and able to accept it.

So you want to help people? Yes 100%. Okay boom, third pillar you can build on.

And so I left Los Angeles, which was a difficult thing to do because of the sunk cost fallacy. The sunk cost fallacy is the phenomenon whereby a person is reluctant to abandon a strategy or course of action because they have invested heavily in it, even when it is clear that abandonment would be more beneficial.

I had put in about 6 to 8 years in writing and novels and screenwriting and had planned and executed a cross country move and now basically understood I was gonna have to just leave it all behind. But nothing is ever wasted. Energy is never created or destroyed.

Whenever I was thinking about getting cold feet about leaving for LA or not all those years ago, or I was experiencing doubt, I always framed it this way, I’ll either be the person I need to be, or I’ll be forced to become the person I need to be. And that has been true throughout my life.

And nothing is ever wasted. With each experience you have, you become antifragile. Because I can’t tell you how much I learned about the world and people and myself during that time and during those two years. And to get even deeper and more concrete with this example, screenwriting gave me boundaries and forced me to learn structure. With novels, its a much broader canvas.

But screenwriting, you have rules. Rules that you can break but there are a lot more rules. A feature should be 120 pages no more. A pilot for tv should be no more than 60 pages. It should be structured with 3 acts and a midpoint, or five acts with act breaks respectively.

And so working within these constraints, is really where some of the best creative solutions and ideas can become available to you. Screenwriting is the art of only writing what is filmable or seeable, writing dialogue that is snappy, fun to say and fun to hear, but close enough that it feels like reality. Being funny, poignant or both all while revealing character by action and progressing the broader and wider plot forward to achieve catharsis. It’s a tall order that you have to accomplice within a certain amount of pages an while hitting certain beats.

And this can be applied to life in a broader and more general sense. You’ll rarely find yourself in a situation where you are entirely unfettered. You will always have constraints, whether they are simply biological constraints such as how much energy or time you have, or physical constraints such as how much money you have.

So if you are trying to accomplish something of import or achieve your potential, you are going to have to work within these constraints. Play within the sandbox.

Using your limited time, money and other resources, how can I achieve what I want to achieve. And what you want to achieve could be as simple as, “how can I make my kids day off from school as fun and enriching as possible.” At its heart, screenwriting is about problem solving and critical thinking, which are skills that serve anyone well.

So, to continue my story, I came home to live with my parents for couple months, and after the first month I began to start doing creative things again. I began making videos. Little TikToks, bits of advice talks or things like that, but I decided to turned back to my tried and true path of the legal profession.

I resolved to just settle down at that point be like OK fine I had my fun in my young twenties, now I’m just gonna settle down and go to law school I’m gonna have 1.8 children engage in conspicuous consumption when I feel empty.

And I tried to do that. I really tried. I studied harder for the LSAT than I have ever studied for in my life. And I took it and got a good score and was happy that I did it.

But staring down the barrel of my future I knew it wasn’t the direction that I was supposed to be heading out. It was gonna be incredibly unfulfilling. It didn’t support the three pillars of freedom, creative expression, or helping people the best way I could.

And so I still working and I have my legal job and I knew that it wasn’t supporting the pillars of my potential and so then I had to figure out what would and so I took the TikTok channel that I’ve been running, which is tidbits of advice based on everything that was learning, and kind of just completely expanded it into a blog and a website and an Instagram and Twitter and the podcast that you’re here today.

So I have no doubt that my path may continue to morph and change as I move forward and continue to learn and grow as a human being because you learn and grow you literally become a new person every day. If you can think back to the person that you were a year ago, odds are you’re probably pretty different and if you’ve made an active choice to grow and change, you’re gonna be vastly different.

In the same way, the cells in your body are not even the same cells after three months they recycle every three months. Your body absorbs them and creates new ones.

So who you are is in a constant state of flux, and so in order to deal with the changes, in order to adapt, in order to not fall into the sunk cost fallacy, in order to put your 10,000 hours in at one thing and then only to realize that that’s only half of what you’re supposed to be doing, you’re going to need resilience and antifragility.

You’re gonna need to keep moving and keep striving through the failures or through the setbacks, and through the direction that he thought was a way you’re supposed to be going only to realize that you’re supposed to be going north west, not just north.

But life always does get better. You do get to reap the rewards. If you’re working on bettering yourself and getting one percent better every day, it only really does get better.

And even when you do get pulled back, its only because your an arrow. And you’re being pulled back so you can be shot forward like a canon into the next phase of your life which has much to teach you, and much to provide you with.

Light and love my friends. Go in peace to love and serve.

Outro: Titanium David Guetta, ft Sia MORTEN Future Rave Remix