Essential Practices for Finding Success and Joy in Everything You Do with Suneel Gupta

Hello, and welcome to another episode of All the Hacks, a show about upgrading your life's money and travel. I'm Chris Hutchins, and I'm excited to have Sunil goob to back again to talk about the ancient wisdom of Dharma, and ways to incorporate simple and effective daily habits into your life, so you can find success and joy in everything you do without sacrificing your professional ambition. Sunil is a good friend of mine who I met when he was building his startup rise, but since then he's run for Congress, co-founded the Gross National Happiness Center, and just released his latest book, Everyday Dharma, which was a fantastic read. So let's jump in right after this. Money can be stressful, but if you want to find some inner peace from actually knowing how much you're spending and on what, so you can be more intentional about your financial decisions, you have to check out co-pilot, which is one of my all time favorite apps. 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So for the best app to track your spending, subscriptions, investments, and now real estate, go to allthehacks.com slash co-pilot on an iPhone or Mac to download co-pilot, and enter code hacks to during onboarding for a two month free trial. Again, that's allthehacks.com slash co-pilot, and the code hacks to for a free two month trial of my favorite personal finance app. Senile, thank you for joining me again. Chris is really good to be back. So the whole book you wrote is based on Dharma, this concept that's a thousand years old or more from Indian religions and philosophies, so I'm curious. What is it about this millennia old concept of Dharma that you thought was so important that people today need to understand it and even practice it? Dharma is a timeless solution to I think the emptiness that so many of us are feeling right now, especially at work. Most of us believe that the number one determiner for our mental health is our job. And yet very few people right now can actually say that they are enjoying their job on a day-to-day basis, it seems. And Dharma is really this way of how do we bring the joy back into what we do each day. And what kind of impact do you think that could have on someone's life? Is it just being happy or does it go beyond that? I think it's more than happiness, at least it is for me. It's about finding some meaning in what it is that we do. And I know meaning is a big word, but I think the way that I sort of look at it and I think that when I go back and I look the way that my ancestors would think about Dharma, there are sort of two kind of ways that we can look at success in life. There's outer success, which is wealth and its status and its fancy LinkedIn profiles. And then there's inner success, which is truly are you enjoying what you do each day. And the point of Dharma isn't necessarily to shame outside success or to shame the idea of wanting nice things or having a career that is ambitious, that other people respect. What it is saying though is that we can get all that stuff and still not feel inner success, which is really meaning and a sense of purpose and what we do. And I know that I've experienced that and Chris, you and I have had enough conversations to feel like you, I think at least a certain degree have experienced that as well, whereas like you were getting the outside rewards, you were in jobs that other people found to be interesting, but at the same time it wasn't really lighting you up, right? And at a certain point in time, it can be very easy to be walking a path that doesn't actually feel like your own. The idea behind Dharma isn't to shun again, the idea of wanting nice things or doing things that are really interesting, but it's more about beginning with inner success. What is it that actually lights you up and investing in that even when we are overwhelmed with other things in our life, right? And I think that's where I wanted to write a book that really challenged philosophy through the lens of today's day and age, right, fast paced, overwhelmed, lots of comparison. How do we bring this concept of Dharma into what's happening today? Yeah, it's funny. You talked about me and I looked back and thought about my history and every job I've had, maybe until pretty recently, I just wasn't that excited about long term. I thought I don't think I could do this job forever, and in fact, part of the reason I've been so passionate about personal finance in my life was because I thought I need to save as much money as possible because I haven't found a job that lights me up sustainably. Any job would light me up for a period of time, maybe it was six months, 12 months, but at some point I thought, wow, am I ever going to find something that keeps me sustainably happy and excited? I don't know. And then through a series of trial and error, I kind of stumbled into a career now doing something I love that I genuinely think I could do forever. And it would have been great if there was a book that I could have read and realized what wasn't lighting me up and what I needed to be focused on. But I didn't have that book. I didn't have a time machine to find your book, but I have you now. And so I'd love to talk about it. In the book, you broke everything into eight practices. So I thought maybe we could run through a few of the ones that I thought were most relevant to this conversation. And obviously, if people want all the practices, the book is out. You can definitely check it out, highly recommend. But let's start at the beginning. The first one is Suka, and it's all about uncovering your essence, and I figured that's a great place to start, because a lot of us might have some idea of what we're good at or what we like to do, but they're not really sure how to put that into place. Yeah. So Suka is really about your essence, right, uncovering your essence. And this is the way that my grandfather described Dharma to me, which Dharma has been called many different things. You'll find different definitions. I think one that comes close is inter-calling, but my grandfather called that your essence, right? We all have an essence. Are we expressing that? The key, I think, though, Chris, and this is where I got it wrong for a lot of years, which is I always assumed that essence equals job title. My essence is to be a programmer. My essence is to be a product manager or to be a lawyer. Those are occupations, but they're not an essence. An essence is deeper than that. It's I enjoy helping people. I enjoy designing things from scratch. I enjoy assembling products or growing other people's careers. And the idea is that when you can come back to that essence, it opens up a universe of possibilities because there are always multiple ways to express that essence. And one of the stories in the book is about a nurse named Karen that really felt like her Dharma was to be a writer. That's what she wanted to do. She wanted to write, but she couldn't afford to do that. She couldn't afford to quit her job and she'd spent a lot of time investing in the profession of nursing. Then she was actually doing pretty well as a nurse. So she was torn. I think a lot of us are. She was showing up to the hospital. She was doing the work, but she wasn't emotionally connected to what she was doing every day. Eventually, the way that she ended up finding her Dharma was not by quitting her job and becoming a writer. The way she founded initially was by patient paperwork. Literally while other nurses and doctors would fill out the clinical details of a patient form and hit print, she started to actually write about the patient. Who were they? What did they love? How did they spend their evenings and what really mattered to them? And she would pour these details into these really clinical patient forms to the point that every single one of these forms almost turned into like a mini novel. And she would start to pass these forms around the hospital and they would get distributed by others because it really reminded them of the humanity of what it is that they do. Now again, her profession was nurse and that stayed the same. She didn't quit her job. She didn't make any type of lateral shift. But the essence of being a writer was something that she was now bringing into her day to day. And that's kind of the point of this first chapter of Suka is if we can dig below the occupation mindset that so many of us have been put into and go deeper into the essence of what it is that you love ultimately. What is that thing that you feel like really embodies who you are? Then you can start to find other ways to express what you do. And in the book, I offer some ways that we can start to get to that. And the metaphor that I love is Michelangelo would look at a block of marble and he would say the sculpture is already inside. I just need to chisel away the layers that are in its way. And I think Dharma operates in very much the same way. I can almost guarantee for you and me and anybody who's listening right now, there is an essence that you've already been in touch with at some point in time, right? It could have been when you were a little kid. It could have been last week, but you've had brushes incidents with this essence. It may be buried under deadlines, under drop offs, under all the other things we have going on in our lives. And we can start to kind of chisel away those layers. One of the ways that we can do that is through good questions. I think good questions are an amazing way to come back to who we are. One of the questions that I love the most is what would you do for free? If compensation was not a factor, what is it that you would want to spend your time doing anyway? And that's not to say that all of a sudden you can flip a switch and go work for free or that you should work for free. But if you can clearly answer that question, right? What's that thing that I would keep doing even if I wasn't getting paid? How you're starting to get closer to this thing inside of you that wants to express itself, no matter how the outside world reacts, there are a series of those types of questions in the book that help us get closer to that essence. And these are the chisels. Is that right? These are the chisels. Yeah. The other thing that I think is really interesting is what I call the bright spots chisel. And what I mean by that is in my career, I spend a lot of time writing, meeting with people who have succeeded at their highest levels. But I spend the other half of my time, I think, meeting with people who are miserable in their careers and helping them come to a place where they can actually do, I think their best work, reach their potential. And one of the things that we spend a lot of time talking about is, all right, you don't like your job. But what are the moments? What are the bright spots right now in your day that you really, really do look forward to? I don't care how small they are. I don't care if they last for literally just a minute. But what are those little interactions in your day that are the bright moments? Because misery in a lot of ways can be a very useful tool. It can actually illuminate very clearly the parts of your world that you actually want to spend more time on. It can be a very useful way to get to the moments that actually bring us joy. And so by identifying these bright spots, you can start to see a pattern. For me, for example, when you and I got to know each other, Chris, I think I was a startup entrepreneur, right? I was working in tech and I had spent most of the past 10 years really trying to make that work. And I guess to a certain degree, it was kind of working. I had a startup that had raised some money and it wasn't hitting a home run, but it was doing reasonably well. But I think the bigger thing was that I wasn't really enjoying being a startup founder. Not nearly as much as I thought I was going to you, right? I like the idea that being a startup founder much more than I like the act of being a startup founder. But the day to day of what I was doing and managing and trying to build a product and looking at growth charts and figuring out the metrics, like, I wasn't that into that to be honest with you. It was one part of my day that I always look forward to. And that was when I had a chance to hear customer stories. Anytime we had a health coaching business, so we were helping people lose weight, then anytime that I received an email or I got on a phone with a customer or I could hear some kind of story about how this was useful to them, what their life was like before, what it was like during and what has changed. That to me wasn't just interesting or validating. It like set me on fire, the idea of sharing that story, whether that be with teammates or with that being investors, I could feel literally my body come alive. And in the days when I had that moment where I could talk and I could tell stories, I felt alive. And in the days that I didn't, I felt completely vapid and blank. So what that told me was, hey, in this job that I know is not for me, I've identified this act of storytelling that I really like. This would convince me to start sitting at my desk every morning before work to write. I'm like, if you like to tell stories, you can just write to a page. So I started to write every single morning. Those pages ultimately turned into blog posts and then turned into articles. And now books. It's interesting how we both went through this arc of startup founder. It felt like an identity that suited us, but also at the same time, didn't. And here we are now both creating content as a future role, which is not what we originally intended. And in some ways, both stumbled on it. When you talk about these questions to ask yourself, I'm curious if it's easier to ask yourself or to talk about it with a partner, talk about it with a family member or a friend. Do you think one method or maybe it's a different person, but helps you uncover these things better? It's a great question. I think the last time we actually hung out, we were talking about our partners and how we would be completely lost in our freaking lives without them, right? I very much feel that way about Lena. I guess there's two things about that. One is that I have found it useful to spend some time thinking about things alone before I share with anybody, including Lena. And the reason for that is because when I come up with a new idea or a new concept, or I'm like, oh, you know, maybe this is something that I need to start doing or really focusing my time on. That idea is always like a newborn baby right out the gate. And if you share it too early with people, it might be a little too fragile, right? And so the way they respond to that might cut a little bit deeper than it might if you gave it a few days where you could reflect on it yourself, right? And build just maybe a little bit more conviction for it. Here's why I'm into it and you can start to poke holes in it yourself. So for example, the idea of writing a book, you know, writing a book is not a great way to make money. I knew that, right? Writing a book is not a great way to necessarily if you want to be known and get your content out there and get your ideas out there, you're much better off like writing articles. And so when I started to think about writing a book, you know, I'm like, all right, I'm going to spend the next two to three years, nobody is going to really know what I'm working on. I'm not going to be able to share it with anybody. There's a good chance that it's not going to make any money. There are all these sort of things in my head and I need to spend some time myself writing about this before I kind of went out and shared it with anybody, including Lena. But then after I did, that's when I opened it up and I went to a few people that I really trusted and said, hey, what do you think about this? 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There's another hack think I would maybe useful here that I have found extremely valuable, which is as soon as they started to get more connected with my essence as a storyteller, all of a sudden this world of options began to appear. It was like oh, you could start a podcast, you could write a book, you could write articles, you could be on stage, stand up comedy, there are all these different ways that you could express yourself as a storyteller. So then the question is what do I do? Because that's too much stuff, I can't do all that. And so one of the tools in the book is what I call a Dharma deck, which is anytime something emotionally inspired me, I would literally write it down on the index card, go take stand-up comedy class, begin writing proposal for book, and I would over time have this almost stack of index cards that I felt like were all options, all ways from me to express this essence of being a storyteller. Then what I would do is about once a week, I would go to a quiet place or take a walk and I would take that stack of index cards with me and I would sort them from top to bottom. The ones that had the most emotional pull for me, the ones that were calling me the most, stayed at the top of the pack, the ones that didn't went to the bottom half of the pack, and what you notice over time is that there would probably be like somewhere between one and three cards that will always just stay at the top of the pack, right? No matter what, it's like those are the ones that you don't want to give up and what I realize is writing a book definitely stayed at the top of the pack for me and that's why I decided to pursue it. I love this. It's funny because I think back to my Dharma, which I haven't quite figured out my essence to say, I haven't done all the work. I've read the book, but haven't done the work, but storytelling is a similar one. I loved pitching a company. I loved recruiting employees, telling them why we're doing this, what we're doing. There are many hats you wear as a founder, but that one for me was particularly moving, which is funny because now I'm similarly creating content down a different path. This is what you're doing. Back to your example with Karen, the nurse, I'm curious, is there some percentage? There's probably not an exact number of your job that needs to be associated with your essence in order for it to work. I think to her example, if patient intake forms were one or two percent of her job, is that enough to sustain the other 99% that you maybe don't feel as connected with? Such a great question, Chris. I haven't been asked that question before. I don't know is the short answer. What I will say is the difference between 0% and 1% is like astronomical, right? Even having touch points with your Dharma each day is, I think, something that can be a complete game changer for people. In the case of Karen, this patient paperwork, you're right. I mean, most of her time was probably spent talking to patients, and very few of it would actually spend writing these patient forms, the sense that I get from her and from other stories that are like this, the assembly line worker who decided that they were going to actually create a record label. Once you start having this touch point every day, you start to embody this persona, right? So for Karen, she may have been doing things that had nothing to do with being a writer. She wasn't sitting down and she wasn't actually doing these patient forms, but she was meeting with patients. One of the things that she was probably doing during that time is starting to think like a writer. I want to hear your story, and so I want to start asking you questions that go beneath the surface of the symptoms, and I want to start learning more about your life. That was her persona as a writer. For me, same thing, storyteller startup founder, two very different worlds, but when I started to connect with myself as a storyteller, I started to feel like a storyteller at work. In fact, one of the things that I did is I actually wrote on a piece of paper. You are a storyteller, and I kept that in my pocket. Anytime I was in a place where I felt like, oh, I feel completely lost right now or I feel like I'm like not doing what I meant to do, I pull out this piece of paper and I would remind myself, hey, you are a storyteller. And I do that mean that I like dropped everything I was doing and went and told stories, no. But what it did mean is that when I went into the next meeting, I could embody myself as a storyteller. I had this reminder of, yeah, this is who I am, right? This is what I do. And I'm expressing that in a way that feels maybe a little bit different than somebody who's writing novels or writing screenplays. But I can still embody myself as a storyteller, even if I'm doing something that's not completely related to it right now. For people listening to this thinking, how do I take this essence of mine and embody it in my job? It doesn't actually always have to be in your role. And this makes me think of a particular person. My wife was at Lyft for 10 years and there was a guy named Paul and he always had all energy and could connect with people and he volunteered and said, could I MC all hands for the company? Could I be the person that gets everyone excited for the meeting? I don't need to do all the presentations, but could I just run the all hands meeting? And for almost a decade, he ran the all hands meeting and I what didn't work there, but I think I probably went to one or two meetings, but he brought that energy. But that was one, two, three percent of his job. He had an entire other job. And so whether you're the person that might volunteer to work the booths at the conferences your company goes to, there are opportunities maybe outside of even your role at any company where you might be able to bring some of this and go from that zero to one. So I just encourage people to make it known to your manager what your thing you're trying to do is there might be opportunities you aren't thinking of. Totally. It's such a good point, man. Again, I think the war we go to and where I went to for a very long time is, well, I need to have a particular job in order to express this essence of mine, right? Again, story teller, oh my gosh, like that has nothing to do with startup founders. I need to quit that job and I need to go do something else, but no, I'm not going to go quit that job. I have a team when we raise a little bit of money, I have investors, I can't do that, but I can start to find ways to express that through what I'm doing. There's another story in the book about a woman who's a project manager inside a tech company and she really wanted to be a teacher. She talked to her husband about it. They really kind of went back and forth and ultimately they found financially they could not make that work. They needed her healthcare insurance. She was earning a pretty good salary. They needed that to stay afloat, the family is based in Detroit. So she was stuck in this moment where she was like, gosh, I wish that I could have around or wound the clock 15 years before and I could have gone down the path of becoming a teacher because that would have made me really happy. Every day, that's what was consuming her at work. But when she sat down with the mentor of hers, she was able to dig down to the essence of what it was about teaching that ultimately made her come alive. Then what ultimately made her come alive was that she loved helping people grow. That's why she wanted to be up in front of a classroom. That's what she wanted to be doing working with students. She wanted to be shaping the arc of people's careers. So the question that became her obviously teaching is a very clear way to express that. What are the many other ways out there that are ways to express that? What she found is like learning and development inside a technology company is actually one way to do that. So she started to throw her hat in the ring inside the same company for these opportunities that would allow her to take what she knew already about what the organization did and start to grow other people inside the company. And so she did and flourished became like a huge rising star inside the company started to speak on stage about how to develop and grow other people. Her career completely bloomed and she never had to leave the company. She never had to shift her industry. She didn't have to lose her salary or the healthcare insurance. What I love about your show, Chris, I know when I listen to your show, I feel stuck with something and you offer a way to get unstuck and that way is not necessarily always the most complex thing, which makes it beautiful, right? There's a lot of beauty in the simplicity of it. This might sound really simple. The idea of connecting with the fact that she wanted to help people grow doesn't seem like an earth shattering insight. And that's the beauty that doesn't have to be. There's something inside of you that you can connect with. And once you do, it just opens up all sorts of possibilities. You asked me for other tactics. There's another one that I really love, which is what I call the magazine I'll walk. And what I love to do is when I feel like I'm trying to explore what it is that makes me come alive. What's my essence? I'll go to a magazine aisle, whether it be in a bookstore, whether it be in an airport, and I'll literally very carefully slowly walk from one side of the magazine aisle to the other. Well, try to tune out what it is that I feel like I should be picking up. I should be picking up the Wall Street Journal because I should be staying on top of the business news or I should be picking up our business view because I need to be staying on top of what's written in that. And I kind of tune that stuff out and I emotionally connect to what's actually really pulling for me. What magazine covers are really grabbing my attention. And slowly, and it's a very slow exercise, one by one, I'll pull out the magazines that are really vying for my attention emotionally. And if I then lay those magazines out on a table, I'm like, oh, okay, it's pretty clear. And for me, when I started doing the magazine out walk, I was living in Detroit at the time and I would literally go to this local library and I would walk from one side of the magazine out to the other. Inevitably, it would end up being a combination of storytelling oriented stuff. So it'd be like script writing, movies, books, but the other that really surprised me was spirituality. And I've never really been like a big spirituality guy. But I realized that there was a lot that was pulling at me, articles by Ram Das and Maria Pappava and Ryan Holiday, even the stuff that they were writing about, like stoicism, philosophy and spirituality was pulling me in a really deep way. One of the reasons I ended up writing this book is because I was like, wow, a combination of getting into this ancient philosophy and also being able to tell stories that bring that to real life in the modern day, I couldn't think of a better way to spend my time. Well, I'm very fortunate you have. We talked a lot about exercise to spend time on time you spent on work, thinking about time, but I want to move to Prana because it's not always about time. So maybe let's jump in here. The definition of Prana is like this extraordinary energy, almost like think of like tank of energy that all of us have, but we don't always know how to access that. One of the reasons for that is because when we think about investing in a project or investing in an idea, the thing that we are so conditioned to think about is like time, right? How much time am I going to give something? And ultimately, what tends to matter most when we look at great projects that have come alive across all these different industries wasn't really time, but it was heart. How much heart did you really give that? That's why you see movies like the clockwork orange that were written in a few days, right? The great Gatsby, all these great works, they were written in a fraction of the amount of time that you might think because all of a sudden there was this creative burst of inspiration and they were to sit down and just really bang it out. And that's proof that like what we're really trying to optimize here for is heart and not time. It's much better to be full-hearted with your Dharma than it is to be fully scheduled. And the example that is very similar, I know you've had people talk about meditation on this show. I went and spent time at a monastery and what I was surprised by, I guess it's a surprise now to have been surprised, but at the time I expected that these monks were sitting around and meditating all day. And the truth is they weren't. They were meditating for three or four hours a day, but the rest of that time was spent working the land, doing all the stuff that they needed to do, doing the duties that they needed to nurture to make the place actually function, right? But their life was dedicated to meditation and the point being that just because you're dedicating your life to something, just because you care about it, doesn't necessarily mean you're spending every waking hour doing that thing. What is more important is that you're finding ways to really bring your best prana, your best energy and your best heart to those moments. So for me, writing for a half hour every morning is way, way better and produces much stronger long-term results than if I was actually spending two hours in the afternoon writing. It's just literally the degradation of my brain. Then it's the degradation of my creative horsepower. I can sit down and I can write, but it's not going to end up being any of the purls that ultimately make it into the book. Like 99% of what I write ends up in a trash bin, right? And so what I'm looking for is like these little purls, these piles of horse shit that I write each day. And it turns out that the little purls are much more likely to appear in that half hour morning session than a two hour writing block in the afternoon, right? I know that about myself. And so for me, my Dharma is to write and to tell stories, but it's not like I spend all day every day doing that. I've got kids, I've got other work that pays the bills. There's a lot of the things going on, but I have to make sure to have this commitment. The second thing about that then is how do we then condition ourselves so that we have the right energy at the right moment? And for me, this was sort of a big breakthrough, which is that I've always looked at rest in recovery as something that you did in long periods, right? So I would take myself to a breaking point. I would take myself to the red and then I would say, I need a vacation, right? And my wife and I, we would plan this, we'd be like, Hey, we have this one week vacation scheduled. And I would literally look at three months between now and then and I'd kill myself, right? But the problem with that is I would literally return back from vacation with less gas in the tank than before that through my period and started, right? And the science kind of bears this out. Most people actually return from vacation and say they're more stressed. One week after they return, then one week before they left, right? Point being, vacations can be a wonderful thing. They're great for reconnecting with family and seeing new places and spending time with friends, but they're actually not as effective an instrument for dealing with burnout. Then we may assume what tends to work much, much better is when you can actually have frequent focused recoveries throughout the day, every single day. In fact, like average high performers, whether it be in business, or the music, or being in sports, they're taking somewhere around eight breaks every single day, about one an hour throughout a work day, which I know sounds extraordinary. But when I started to put this into practice, I used what I call the 555 model, which is like for every 55 minutes of work, I'm taking five minutes of focused recovery, right? And that five minutes can be doing anything, like literally anything. Maybe sipping on a cup of coffee, you're doing push ups, you can be taking a walk to the mailbox and back, like doing whatever it is you're doing, but you're not multitasking it. You don't have your phone with you when you're doing it and getting some quasi-rest and quasi sort of work down at the same time, those five minutes are deliberately non-productive. You're focused on rest and people have a very hard time with this. I know I did. And the reason for that is because again, we're in a time-based model. We're shrinking the amount of productive time we have in our day. We already feel squeezed as is. If you're shrinking five minutes from every hour and you're working, let's say nine hours a day, you're shrinking your schedule by 45 minutes, which is significant, right? We could use that 45 minutes. If you give this a shot, what I can almost promise you based on experience from myself and from watching others put this into practice, that five minutes is going to make the other 55 minutes far more productive, far more effective, far more imaginative, you're going to be far more collaborative. Like all the things that we associate with success, you will have more of that in the next 55 minutes than you did if you were just waiting to the end of the day to finally unload and burn yourself out because it's just clearly not working. It's funny. As I read this and as you talk about it, I think about how Google has this speedy meetings feature where you could say set these meetings to 25 minutes for like a 30 minute meeting is now by default 25 and an hour meeting is by default 50. And it takes the ability to turn the meeting off at 50 because so often it's like, well, I know no one on this call scheduled the next 10 minutes so we could just run over. And then I was thinking about, I remember when I had a Zoom account that was free, there's that timer and it's like, this meeting is going to run out and we are going to turn it off. And I've been in meetings like that. So if anyone out there knows of a way that I could hack Google Calendar and Google Meet to just actually shut the meeting down at 50 minutes to force everyone to end, I would love to see that feature in action because I find it hard, I can schedule the five or 10 minute break, but it's really hard to actually take it. You know, it's funny because I'm on all these different platforms now for virtual stuff, right? And you are too. And like I notice like on Microsoft Teams, when they set the meeting for a certain length, they will actually say five minutes left in the meeting and then they'll have a countdown timer. Now, I don't think it actually shuts off at that time, but the fact that there's actually a bit of a countdown timer, I do find to be somewhat helpful. It's like, Hey, this is the meeting you called. These are the people who schedule your dealing with everybody is assuming this one thing. Like let's put a little bit of a countdown timer in the last five minutes. I find it to be somewhat helpful. But I agree with you, ma'am. I was the kind of guy who if I had two extra minutes in between meetings, I would go to my to-do list and I would like, what can I knock out quickly and to be like a little bit of like an energetic hit that I would get from that. But the problem was that throughout the day, like clockwork, I would end up slumping, right? At the end of the day, I was far less energized than I was at the beginning of the day, right? And that hurt because there were sometimes where there was key meetings, key moments that were in the afternoons. I remember when I was raising money even and I was out there pitching investors. Some meetings were in the morning when I was fresh, but there were a lot of meetings that were in the afternoon. I know that looking back, I would be far less compelling in those afternoon meetings than I was in the morning. And part of the reason for that is because that morning I was spent like grinding. And then I would walk straight into that meeting and I would take all the baggage from that grind. I would take no time to reset myself. Maybe if you look at people who like, if you strap for time, who do this very well and they don't have five minutes, I think that one of the most important things you can do is to provide some type of transition for yourself in between two big moments, right? And again, if you only have 30 seconds, even if you have 10 seconds, it is deliberately saying I'm going to be non-productive for a period of time. And the difference between zero and 10 seconds whether it's closing your eyes and taking a breath or literally getting up and stretching, doing something will be game-changing, right? If you're having these transitions throughout. And it's different for everyone. For me, the afternoon meetings and the afternoon pitches were actually really great because I didn't have anything to worry about. If I go into a meeting at eight, all these things, what came in overnight? What emails do I have to respond to? But by the afternoon, I've been able to catch up on all the other stuff. So I think it really depends on a per person basis. Sometimes my wife asks, why were you up till two in the morning? Last night, and because we have kids, we got to get up at six to seven. The kids are up. We're up. And I was like, well, I just had this bout of energy. And I felt like I could get done in two hours what I would normally take 10 hours to do. Now the hard part is forcing yourself to use that time you've saved to actually recover. But sometimes when I find this prana, I'm just, I'm like, let's capture it when it's there. And sometimes it surprises me. That's a really good point, man. We can't always count on prana. It's tough to predict when your prana is going to be really high. Their patterns, for sure. I remember when I was at the office day in and day out, I would try to work out in the middle of the day. We had a newborn at home. The mornings were very tough. And when I went home, I wanted to spend time with the family. So I try to work out at around 12 o'clock. And then I would end up scheduling meetings at one o'clock to a clock, three o'clock, four o'clock. But what I found is that after I finished working out, I felt really good. I felt really creative and awesome. And I was like, all right, well, why am I scheduling a mundane meeting at one o'clock in that case? I should be scheduling a block of time, at least a half hour, where I can get back from the gym and I can go to my desk and actually write down a few things that are really important. I can spend some time doing some deep work. And when I did that, that changed things as well. And it's a great point. Figure out where the pockets of your day are, where you tend to have your highest prana. But then also, sometimes it'll just happen spontaneously. And when it does, try to give yourself enough flex, where you can capture it. I definitely do that a lot. 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A lot of what I do for work is I go out and I study people who are at the top of their game and I try to unpack their habits. In this case, what he had a reputation for was being very calm, even though he worked inside a very cut throat culture, people loved working for him and he had exceptional results. The board loved him, the rest of the C-suite loved him. So I wanted to figure out what it was. Was he naturally like this or were there some hacks, some things that he put into practice? And I noticed a sand timer on his desk and I asked him about it and he said that what he would do is every time there was a worrying thought, something that was nagging at him. And it wouldn't go away. What he would do is he would go into his office and he would shut the door and he would take this five minute timer and he would flip it over. And for five minutes, he would focus on nothing but that one worry. That's pretty interesting. What if it's something that you don't really have control over? He's like, it doesn't matter. I'll spend five minutes worrying about it anyway. And I was like, well, I gotta be honest, this doesn't sound great to me. It sounds like a recipe for anxiety more than anything else. But as I dug deeper into it, what I realized is that there's a lot of science behind this practice of taking a worry break. And the reason for that is because when we have a worrying thought inside our head, what we tend to do, a lot of us, will tend to try to push it out or compartmentalize it. And to basically say, hey, I don't have time for you right now. I'm focusing on this other thing. When we push things out, what they tend to do is they tend to grow louder. So what started as a whisper will grow into a conversation and eventually it'll grow into a shout, right? It wants to be heard. It's kind of like kids in that way, worrying thoughts want to be heard. And if they're not heard, they're going to continue to get louder and louder. There's a saying in positive psychology that you may have heard, which is what you resist persists. Counterintuitively, while we may think we're doing ourselves a service by trying to push these thoughts out because they're not positive, we're actually giving them a lot more runway inside our head. They're actually becoming louder and louder. One of the things we can do is we can actually say, all right, I'm going to give you a fixed amount of time. I'm going to sit down and I'm going to give this nagging worry five minutes of my time. That five minutes, I'm going to stay true to it. I'm literally going to do nothing but worry about this one thing. And strangely enough, what will happen at the end of that five minutes is that it won't be that the worry went away. You may not have a problem for this. It might even invite something you have control over. But what it will do in almost all cases, I've noticed is it will actually turn the volume down on the worry, right? So that now you can actually get on with the other parts of your day because it felt hurt, right? Because it wasn't something that you were trying to push out. You gave it its due time and now it settles a little bit more. I love this. It's almost like you can exhaust the worrying where you're like, well, I don't have anything else to say to worry about it. And maybe the next time it goes away. So on a higher note, then kind of worrying about the worst in the world. Let's talk about kind of elevating things to be a little happier, a little more exciting. Let's talk about Lila. So Lila really think of it as the blend of work and play, right? And how do we start to think of that work a little bit more like play? And it sounds probably cheesy, right? And I know the first time I thought of Lila and I started digging into this really ancient practice. I'm like, well, that sounds very lovely, but doesn't sound quite practical, right? You work hard and then you play hard. That's the mentality we've been brought into. But then I started to see these really top performers, people like Phil Jackson and NBA coach, but it was also a player who literally, as he was a player, wrote in his locker room on a piece of scotch tape, make work your play and play your work. And that was the mentality that he brought into the NBA as a coach and look at what he did. One of the most winningest coaches of all time, he raised greats like Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan. Those guys, when they talked about Phil Jackson, they would talk about that philosophy in particular. And I would say that is the thing that they ultimately ended up learning the most from him, which was to blur the lines between work and play. Because when you do, you can actually reach even more exceptional results. In all the concepts in the book, I really tried to find where it was echoed. These eastern concepts that were over a thousand years old were like, what was happening in the world of science and what has happened in the world of science that provides some grounding for these? And in all cases, I could find something. In this case, for Lila, it really came from me, how he took sent me high in his work around flow. If you look at the state of flow, what he was really talking about in many cases was being able to feel like even though you were working, there was a notion of play that was associated with it. Well, one of the things that she sent me high made a distinction of is people who tend to be exotellic versus auto-tellic and an exotellic means that they are focused purely on the goal, the result of the work they're doing. But the people who are auto-tellic were the people who are focused on the process and enjoying the point from here to there. And the assumption that I think a lot of us make is that the people who achieve the top of their game are exotellic by nature. By the way, we're a blend of all of them. We're not one or the other. We kind of tilt one side or the other. But the assumption that we, I think, make sometimes is that people who achieve the metals, the people who get to the very, very top are the ones who are exotellic, right? They're the ones who are focused on the prize. That's what they really want and they will not rest until they get it. Which he sent me high, I think, didn't exceptional job of and his body of work around flow was showing how there was just as many people out there who tended to tilt auto-tellic, right? Who tended to focus much more on enjoying the process, getting some joy out of that. Because when you got joy out of something, you wanted to keep doing it over and over again. So one of the techniques that we talk about in this chapter is what I call high quality habits. The business that I had started before really focused on health habits. How do we build health habits into our life? One of the things I realized is we're trying to get somebody to lose weight and they loved bread and they loved pasta, but they decided to go on a carb-free diet. It would last for a short amount of time and sometimes you would see people who got exceptional results quickly, but it very rarely lasted, right? Almost entirely on all cases that we studied and we work with tens of thousands of people, they would end up yo-yoing back to the condition they were in before. On the other hand, when we found people who adopted what I call high quality habit, which is a habit that they want to do over and over again. They actually love the habit. For example, drinking two glasses of water before every meal, which is a habit that some people can get really into. It can be really fun. You can put them in a little mixes into your water, let your lights. You can have cool looking bottles. It can be a part of your persona and there's a lot of fun that can come from that. People who were able to adopt that habit, we saw end up having lasting results because they were eating less, they were having more energy throughout their day, right? It was something that they just wanted to continue with. I think the same is true for our Dharma. There are certain things that we want to bring into our lives that were like, I don't really want to do that, but I feel like I should do that and those habits very rarely stick. On the other hand, finding something that you really enjoy doing, something that you want to do over and over again, I think it was Kevin Kelly and I quote him in the book and I always butcher his quote, but he's like, we spend so much time in our lives trying to figure out better ways to do tasks. What we need to be doing is we need to be spending time in our lives, figuring out what tasks we want to do over and over again because we actually love it. When you can find those things, when you can find those habits, you're on a clear path to learning this line between work and play. In the health example, I'm sure cutting carbs would probably be more effective than just drinking two glasses of water. In the short term, yeah, in the short term, but I guess in the long term, if you bring it back, the water is more helpful. This is exactly what would happen. The platform that I started was called Rise. You were matched with a health coach. You had one person that you were working with and then a number of people who had cut carbs and then gained it all back. It became like almost cliche to talk about because it would happen all of the time. Who went on paleo and lost 30 pounds and they felt fantastic and then ended up gaining it all back. We saw that I guess way more often than the people who were actually able to keep it off. The point of this all is until knock on paleo. The point of it is if you're suffering as a result of paleo, right, if you really like carbs is something you enjoy and you're denying yourself that, then that is not a high quality habit because it's not something that you want to put on repeat. For that reason, it makes it much, much harder to sick do. You're basically caching in on your willpower every single day, which is a very hard thing to do and it becomes even harder when you have other things going on in your life. You're busy, work picks up, things are happening at home. It becomes even harder to keep a high quality habit. On the other hand, something like water, again, to your point, it's not the kind of thing you're going to shed weight with very quickly, but it's the kind of thing that you can keep in place over time so that people that we saw that not only lost the 20, 30 pounds that they were looking to lose, but actually kept it off were the ones who adopted these really simple habits that they actually really wanted to put on repeat. So dieting sports, how does Lila fit into a more traditional workplace? I think Lila fits into traditional workplaces when we can start to find the little things throughout the day that actually give us some joy and also help us find our Dharma. So for me, for example, with the storytelling, finding little pockets, little moments of the day when I was actually sitting down and I was actually writing, just for five minutes every day, right, five minute pockets throughout the day, I was sitting down and I was starting to spend some time actually writing these ideas, right, and though these little pockets of joy, that was a habit that I want to put on repeat. The other one that I feel like is really helpful was when I talk about Tony Morrison, who was a single mom, she had two kids at home, she had a full time job, but she really wanted to write. And for her, the high quality habit started when she started waking up a half hour early before the kids were up and she'd have her cup of coffee and she'd watch the sunrise and she would just brainstorm and daydream about the ideas that I would want to bring to life through a novel and she would really just start to write these ideas down. It's not like a book happened immediately, it's just the same way that if you were drinking water throughout the day every day, you're not going to lose weight immediately, but those mornings that high quality habit ended up being all the inspiration that she ended up turning into her books became a Nobel Prize winning author as a result of those mornings. So what is that thing for you that you feel like you enjoy so much and again, it's not like something that you feel like you have to do, but you actually want to do. And how do you then start to build that into your day, right? In some small way, whether that be in the morning, whether that be sprinkled throughout your day, what's that thing that you feel like you can put on repeat? It almost feels like if Sookah is finding your essence, Lila is bringing your essence into your daily routine so that it feels more like fun. Well said, man, because I think that we talk a lot whenever I think there are conversations about purpose and meaning, sometimes we can tend to focus on finding what that thing is for you. And maybe not enough time talking about what it is that we need to do in order to fit this into a busy, overwhelmed, fast-paced, modern schedule. And I think Lila is one of those answers. And I think it teased us up perfectly. I wanted to last talk about Korea, which is that if you don't actually take action on all of this, right? What is there? So maybe let's close there, and we didn't hit on all of the principles. We didn't hit on, I don't even know how many rituals and tactics you put in the book, but there was so many. So obviously there will be more that people need to go find elsewhere, but this felt like a good way to wrap it all up. There's over 30 rituals in the book, and I look at this as in some ways like a menu. Like there are things that are going to work for some people, and there's things that are going to work better for other people. But being able to test these different things in your life, I think are the ways the past that we can use to figure out what it is and makes us come alive and express that. With Korea, with action, nothing happens unless we have movement, right? We can sit behind a desk and we can talk about purpose all day, but how do we put purpose into action? And the thing that I love about Korea is that there are really some great tools today that I had to figure out when I started to put them into practice myself, it really started to change things for me. And one example of that is the two way door versus the one way door. And you may have heard Jeff Bezos talk about this because he talked about it in a couple of his shareholder letters, but basically the premise is that oftentimes when we are thinking about a decision, taking action on something that we want to go do, it is very easy to confuse that as a one way door, meaning that if you go through and it doesn't work, you're not going to be able to come back through when it's actually a two way door, right? You go through, it doesn't work, you're able to come back to where you were before, right? You may have lost a little bit of time, but you probably gained a lot of information and a lot of experience along the way as well. But the bigger point is that oftentimes we treat these decisions with such weight and with such gravity that if we do it, it's like we're walking into an abyss where we have to make it work when the reality is there will be other options. Other doors will open plus you will always be able to walk back through. And so for me, running for office was that thing. I felt compelled for a while to move back to my hometown outside Detroit and run for office and I was really scared about it and I was scared for a lot of reasons, but one of them was like, I felt like if I did that, I was going to torpedo my career. I'd spent 10 years in Silicon Valley, I'd been working as a startup founder, I'd develop all these relationships and I felt like I'd finally found a way to financially make place like San Francisco work and here I am, I'm going to like torpedo all that and move back to Detroit and run for office, but I really wanted to, I really wanted to get involved. But at the same time, I felt like it was going to blow everything up and it wasn't until I really started to think about it as like, hey, listen, this is not a one-way door. I go, you go and you lose. There will be other doors that will open and if they don't for whatever reason, you will always be able to walk back through, right? And what you have lost may be a little bit of time, but what you will gain is a lot of wisdom and you'll never regret not having done this thing that you were emotionally pulled to do. But as ultimately what got me through, it wasn't some burst of courage, people would always feel like that's a very gutsy thing to run for office and to leave everything behind and go do that and move your family to Detroit. And I was like, well, I thank you for saying that, but not really, for me, it really came down to this idea. I actually don't have a lot of courage here, I am very scared, but I'm also grounded in the idea that if this doesn't work, I'm not going to be in a place of complete pointlessness. I can come back through the door because it is a two-way door. I could always move back to Silicon Valley if that was what it chose to do. I can always go back into working in a tech. It may take a little while to find something, but I will. I have to have some belief in that because it's true. Ultimately, the other thing that might happen is it may open up many other doors for me, which is kind of what happened. I went to Detroit, I gave it my all, I knocked on over 10,000 doors, election results come back in, and I lose. But as a result of that, everything had changed. I had learned so much about myself in that process. I learned about what I cared about. I learned about what I want to spend my days doing at the end. I was like, I don't want to move back to Silicon Valley. I want to start getting on stage the way that I was during the campaign. I want to start speaking to audiences. I came up with the idea for a television show, which I'm now making with American Express. All that stuff happened when I was on the campaign and as really as a result of doing that. Again, the thing that I would encourage anybody who's listening right now, take a decision in your life. Just take a decision that you're thinking about. Something that maybe you're afraid to do and ask yourself, deep down, is this a one-way door or is this a two-way door? There are some one-way doors out there, but the vast majority of decisions out there are not one-way doors or two-way doors. If it's a two-way door, the only thing I would say is lower the bar a little bit. Don't feel like you need to have this abundance of courage or guts in order to go do this thing that you want to do. Instead, ground yourself in the fact that even if you do it and it doesn't work out, you're going to be okay. You can always walk back through. I think far too many people think decisions are not reversible. I watched a great talk on speed. When it comes to building products and building companies, if a decision is reversible, just make the decision. It's almost default to a decision and then you can come back to it later. Another tactic you mentioned that I really liked was to make it to do less hard, less to overcome, make it to learn. Maybe share that a little bit. I spent so many people, every January 1st, coming up with, you're my to-do list for the year. You're my big goals. Like many people, I would abandon that list, stop looking at it sometime in February. What I found to be much more gripping and I think compelling for me was when I started to think of it less as a to-do list but a to-learn list, what are the things that I actually want to learn how to do right now? Others where I want to grow. For me, even though it's a little bit hard, it makes it just far more exciting. For example, I wanted to learn how to develop a television show. When I write that down, all of a sudden, it opens up all these ways that I can do it, but I think the most important thing it does for me is it makes me less afraid to fail. We all know that failure is a wonderful teacher and success can be a really lousy teacher. If my to-do list is I need to have a show up and running by the end of the year. All of a sudden, I'm jammed with fear and insecurity to the point that I actually don't want to look at that goal anymore. But if my goal is to learn how to develop a show, then I know that I need to put myself out there. I know I need to actually start doing the work. I know I need to start meeting with people. I know I need to start getting into the nitty-gritty of what it takes to actually pull something off in Hollywood. But it no longer makes me so afraid of going out there because I know I'm going to probably follow my ass a few times while I'm doing it, and that's okay because I'm actually satisfying this to learn objective, which is I want to know how to create a television show. It's funny. I think, especially even going back to the beginning of this conversation on finding your essence, just learning more things can help you explore. I think back to one of the reasons I partnered with Masterclass was that I found it to be such a great tool to go watch videos, but I like storytelling. Do I like stand-up comedy? Let's go learn what it takes to actually do this professionally. What? I don't think that's me. I like telling jokes, but I don't think it's a career. And so I think the more you can expose yourself to learning other things, the more you can come up with ideas of what ignites you and what doesn't, and it's so much easier. That would have been a much easier thing to do than do a stand-up routine, which is a loftier goal. Maybe I would learn more from it, but even just learning how the industry works was a much easier goal to accomplish from the safety of my own living room. Yeah, yeah, totally. So I feel like we didn't even brush the surface. There's a lot more there. Where can people get the rest? Yeah, so the book is out. It literally just came out yesterday, and you can find it everywhere. It's on Amazon. It's on Barnes & Noble. Wherever you get your books, it is available in print and audio as well, and it's called Everyday Dharma. Awesome. Did you do the audio or who's reading it? I did. I did the audio. Yeah, I recorded it at this booth in Santa Monica, and a lot of what's inside the book are the stories of my ancestors. I tell the story of my grandfather and our first conversation about Dharma, and it was just a bizarre experience, Chris. It's funny because I started to cry during the actual reading, and the sound engineer is kind of in my ear, and I got my headphones on, and I realize he's crying as I'm reading it as well. So if you hear me breaking up during the audible recording at one point, it's because I'm weeping. I feel like now I got to go back and listen to try to find those moments, but thank you so much for writing it. I love all the tactics. I think anyone listening to this show knows that one of my passions is not just learning about how to make change, but the specific actions and tactics, and in the case of your book, 30 plus rituals. So really love that. Really enjoyed the book. Thank you so much for sharing it and joining me today. Chris, this is awesome. Thank you. I really hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you haven't already left a rating and a review for the show in Apple Podcasts or Spotify, I would really appreciate it. And if you have any feedback on the show, questions for me or just want to say hi, I'm Chris at AllTheHacks.com or at Hutchins on Twitter. That's it for this week. I'll see you next week.