Sometimes we don’t learn from our mistakes at all, and we keep repeating them again and again. And sometimes we overcorrect our mistakes so much, that we just replaced one distortion with another. Doing inner work requires a lot of sensitivity. You have to be aware of your own emotional reaction, but then also be able to explore it calmly, and really seek to understand it.
TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] I think that over-correcting is as bad as not correcting it all. I think a lot of problems amplify when people. Recognize or realize a mistake, we’ll go through some pain or hardship. And then they go to the opposite extreme in order to avoid this from ever happening again. And then they create a new world of suffering and pain.
But now, because they’ve already gone through the overcorrection phase, they’re now stuck there. It’s sort of like that like, well, I’ve already changed everything and now I have to hold onto this worldview, no matter how little it works. Right. I mean, even like take something, something as basic as your, and also mine, when there is something that bothers us, we go to the place, like, I don’t care to show that it can get to us.
Right. And that’s like, fucking what? First grade or something like this, something really fucked with us. And then it hurt us in the autumn. Never got like it. And then it’s like, now we are approaching 40 and we still care about that. I’m so strong. I don’t care about all the things that annoy me and irritate me. [00:01:00]
and also the longer you do that, that whatever that is, the, the, the, I don’t care. I’m too cool. I’m too strong. I, this doesn’t even bother me. The longer you do that, the more you do establish an image of a person that you are not that you aren’t. right. You also get better at it.
You get better at it and it hardens your self image. So let’s say that I really, you know, whatever, I really don’t like when people criticize me, right. I’m like super sensitive to criticism, but I at a young age started establishing this idea that I don’t care. If you say this is shit, I don’t give a shit.
Do you do this 20 years? And now when somebody says a small criticism. Would never bother you anymore. Like you never felt anything in 20 years. It’s very hard to discover that it bothers you and then to allow it because it really, it collapses your whole self self-image. You’re like, wait, how, how could I care about this?
If I care about this, how does one behave that is so [00:02:00] sensitive? I don’t even know. You know, nobody treats you like you’re sensitive. You don’t treat yourself like you’re sensitive. So your whole reality is built on these foundational pieces that when you have to then revisit and go, this isn’t me. You like, if I take this piece out of the whole building collapses, how to quote, am I even, you know, if I’m, who am I thought, I don’t like, I’m so strong.
I never care about anything. And then like, I’m the most sensitive person of all of them. Like, how does, how does that, that doesn’t compute? How do I change now? It’s different to say, oh, you know, um, Whatever I, you know, I should read more. I’m reading two books a year and I want this year to read five books.
These little things is one thing, but to go, yeah, these like little edits of behavior versus a foundational piece of identity, I’m not sensitive. I don’t know why [00:03:00] I just don’t care. These things don’t matter to me. You think that 30 years you build your life around it, everybody else sees you that way. And then you come to discover I’m hypersensitive.
What do you do with this? Now? You know, this is not an easy piece to rearrange in your life, right? This is this. This can lead to a collapse of your self image. Hence why. I think, hence why, again, there’s two very extreme responses to that type of realization or insight. One is a fighting against it. Like ignorance.
Like I’m no, this is not true. I’m not sensitive. This is not, you know what it is. And your push away that truth. Right. And keep ignoring it. Or there’s this, oh my God. I’m going to pull on this piece so strong and I’m going to let everything collapse. And now I’m going to build this new tower, maybe hastily.
That will be I’m the most sensitive human on earth. [00:04:00] And I will try to find refuge in that tower, in that building, that’s going to be my happiness and that those are the extreme life changes where somebody goes from wall street, stockbroker to. You know, mountain. Yeah. Man, that travels through India to find spirituality and becomes a yoga teacher.
Right. It’s like that kind of, that’s the heart, again, overcorrection that people make, versus just looking at these, a piece like this, which is difficult and going, huh? Maybe I’m way more sensitive than I thought. But also I’ve developed an incredible skillset on holding tension on suppressing certain information on doing things even when I’m afraid on becoming incredibly desensitized.
And so, okay. How do I now [00:05:00] use the skills I’ve developed the thought patterns I develop. And I apply it again, curious and open mind to this other side of me that might be underdeveloped, that I might want to explore a bit further and maybe bring up in a way where it creates more balanced within me, because this is a part of me.
Right. But let me go easy. Let me ease into it. Let me play. Let me be curious. Also, let me be careful of the trappings of the world, where maybe I overplay its significance. Maybe I think, oh my God, I’m the most sensitive person on earth. And then when I play with my sensitivity, I realized I am sensitive, but I’m not the most sensitive person on earth right now that I’ve like, looked at it, played with it, explored it I’ve it has grown, but maybe not to the massive degree, the first moment that I thought about it, I discovered something around it because we tend to in our enthusiasm to over estimate.
We constantly over estimate and underestimate, right? That’s [00:06:00] the whole thing we overestimate what we can do in a month. And we totally underestimate what we can do in 10 years. And similarly, when we discover new things about ourselves, it’s easy, especially if it’s a big revelation to overestimate, be like, oh my God, this thing is huge.
And I’m actually totally different. This thing my mother did when I was three changed and ruined my life. And it’s in reality, it was a negative influence, but there were another a hundred things that happened that ruined your life. It was not just that you, when you cut out all sugar for three months, right.
And then you drink something that has like a little bit of sugar in it. And you’re like, whoa. Yes, yes. Yeah. You, you, you’ve created such a sensitivity to that by neglect or, you know, that, that then it seems so overpowering. and really
the idea though, that when we discover something foundationally new about ourselves, [00:07:00] which is probably the case in any strong, in any person, right? Any, any one of us yesterday was listening to the audio book. The body keeps score, right? It’s uh, it’s one of the kind of, I think famous three or four books about psychology therapy that looks at the body as a re a really big.
Component to a psyche and maybe the reflection of our psyche, right? There’s the, when the body says no, which is a whole book about diseases, physical diseases, people have cancer, this Alzheimer, and then doing psychological backtracking, detective work and finding a common theme throughout everybody with Alzheimer’s had this kind of childhood, everybody with this disease had that kind of, um, um, uh, mental, psychological markup.
Right. Um, and it’s pretty, it’s pretty impressive to see how [00:08:00] certain strong diseases have psychological connections, emotional connections, right? Th things that, that connects them emotionally when the body keeps score is much more of a broad kind of exploration of, Hey, what role does the body play in our experience of life and in our mental models?
And how does. Psychological issues manifest in the body, but also how can the body and work through the body release things that are happening in a, in our psyche, it’s much more broad and more like touching on different, different, new areas of therapy and psychotherapy and all that. But there was a story in the book where they talked about theater as therapy, where they would figure out that sometimes they would sit down with like army vets and do P you know, PTSD therapy work with them.
And just talking about the trauma was not doing anything, but then he [00:09:00] discovered he had a bunch of, um, army vets as, as patients that all around the same time started to significantly improve. And he, at first he thought that’s because of. Recent improvements as a therapist, he was like, wow. See, I can definitely see that I’m doing better therapy work because all these people are doing, doing better.
And then he discovered that the five PTSD patients, he had that all started to improving all were in a third, in a, in a theater group together and started doing a theater play right around the time that we’re improving. And he was like, oh, it has nothing to do with me is everything to do with theater.
And he went into exploring kind of theater and acting out of certain emotions. They acting out of certain situations and acting it out in a way where the core goal, this is a part of acting that he highlighted that I thought is brilliant. It’s like when you act the whole purpose is to embody that emotion as fully as possible, [00:10:00] and you need to embody it so strongly that other people AK the audience can recognize it and empathize with it.
Right. So you have to be fully in character and in certain emotions so strongly and you have to project it outwardly in your face and your body language is your tonality. That others will feel it with you. And they will look at you and recognize you because there’s an audience in which you play in front of all things that people with severe trauma have worked against, right.
They worked against feeling their feelings that work against showing their feelings and their work against being seen, which is one of the things that makes us fall deep and deep in trauma that we feel we’re so isolated because nobody can recognize truly who we are and how we feel right now. Right.
And as I was hearing that, I was like, whoa, it makes so much sense. That’s actually pretty brilliant. And then he said something else, which is the actual thing that relates to our [00:11:00] discussion, which is that they started going to, uh, Foster homes with kids that had like very difficult childhoods, right? No parents abuse this, that and the other.
And they would start theater groups for these like teenagers. Right. And he was saying how most of the, uh, theater coaches and acting coaches that were there to be part of this nonprofit project had an incredibly hard time to stay with a project because they would get massive Lee abused by the teenagers.
Right. And then he talked about kids in foster homes and he said, kids in foster homes have learned that they cannot rely on anybody. They’ve learned that, um, being emotional is life-threatening like showing emotions will make you seem vulnerable and then others [00:12:00] will take advantage. Like, they will beat you up.
They will steal your stuff. They will rape you. They will do bad things to you that will manipulate you. So being weak and being emotional is actually something that they’re terrified off. And because they’re so terrified of sensitivity and emotions and openness and vulnerability, they detest and hate that in others more than anything else.
So then when they talk to adults that are all sensitive, they want to beat them. They want to abuse them. They want to hurt them because they hate that because they cannot recognize that in themselves. And I was thinking, whoa, this is this, this is so dope. It’s so obvious, but it’s so dope to hear again, because it relates back to the.
The quote that we’ve many time mentioned this, you cannot hate. Somebody will be upset with somebody while being at peace with yourself at the same time, as well as that idea of when you, [00:13:00] when something really irritates you with somebody else, ask yourself, how, how do I relate with that? Part of myself, somebody is silly and is annoying you, how do I feel about my own silly side, my own silliness?
Is that something I’m ashamed of? Is that something I’m afraid of or angry with? And I had this, we talk about that as well. In the past many times that I have a real disgust for weakness, right? A real hate against weakness in others, because that’s a part of me that I’ve grown up to the test and hate and not want to accept.
And as I was listening to that, I was thinking about many, many people in my life that I know closely and personally, as well as myself and I was thinking the stronger. Somebody’s personality and character. The more we believe we know, oh, John is this way, right? Oh, John is a, is a [00:14:00] real sensitive character.
That’s really like a sweetheart. Uh, and Bob is a real hard ass that doesn’t give a shit about bullshit that doesn’t, you know, doesn’t, doesn’t like to talk about emotions. That’s like a real tough dude. The, the easier it is for us to put certain people in categories that we know well, based on their behavior, the more likely is that the opposite of those characteristics are within them.
The most rejected and the most neglected. Hence why they acting out that like the tougher I had to think of David Goggins, right? One of my favorites, because I fucking love David Goggins, but it’s probably also one of them. Current famous people that have a strong, strong trauma. Right. And like acting out their massive mental trauma in front of all of us getting applause for it.
Right. Because in, especially like David Goggins, I try to read his book. [00:15:00] Right. And I could not get through it. And part of it is because it’s probably not the best written book ever. And he didn’t even know I was the book in the box, guys that did the book with him, I think like, but I mean, from page one to page, whatever that I read it is so full of anger and rage about his childhood and his father and how weak he was.
And then everything that he does subsequently. That’s good. That’s like an example of the big turnaround is nothing but rage. Towards his weakness to the point where every morning he seems to be waking up and this angry part of him seems to be screaming at the little chop, fed chubby child in him and telling me not today, motherfucker today, I’m going to destroy it.
And then he punches that little fat kid in the face all day long, all day long, right? Until he exhaustedly gets to bed and falls asleep in the [00:16:00] morning, he feels the little chubby afraid kid. And he says, not today, motherfucker. He punches in the face. Part of us, the part of us that hates the chubby little afraid child within us, looks at him and goes, salutes him and goes, yes, sir.
You know, I wish I was as strong as you could just punch that little fucker in the face all day long, right? And sometimes that little fat chubby child of us within us has to be punched in the face. Right? Sometimes that’s the right thing. But more than that, that little child needs to be actually raised to become a healthy adult.
And David Goggins in my current way of the world view, my current worldview is not an adult at all, has not grown up because he’s basically like in a forced training camp because he’s afraid if he, if he wasn’t suffering all day, who knows what’s going to happen. He’s so terrified that he’s [00:17:00] responsive, extreme too, is there’s nothing wise in that.
There’s nothing. That is, that seems healed and whole right. He’s like a very narrow slice of all of us humanity that you could be in is only that and everything else is bad and he rejects there’s nothing or whole or wise or healed about that kind of a philosophy. But it’s fun at times like that drill Sergeant can be fun, right?
Uh, we, that’s why we love action movies where the action here is an asshole and, you know, it takes these crazy risks and puts all these people at risk. And we’re just like, yes, fuck. Yes. For two hours, this is fun. But if we had that person in our lives that constantly put our lives and everybody would love that risk without being, without be going.
Yeah. That’s, that’s the way I want to live all day. Um, and it’s crazy because that makes you realize. How hard, the battles, all that [00:18:00] everybody’s fighting within themselves that are completely unrecognized, but also that there’s no such thing as this person is this way. Oh, I know Rameen Rameen is like this.
Oh, Steli Steli is like that. Right? It’s like a part of him, maybe the part that is most dominant, but why is it so dominant? Why is it so insanely dominant maybe because that other part of him is completely neglected, maybe because he’s terrified of that other part of him. I know for sure. Like my sweet side, my, um, also silly sight, like doing something silly.
That’s not, not something funny that I know it’s kind of cool and fun. Something silly that I might have fun with, but others would look at and go, I don’t know. This is not funny to me. I’m terrified of that. Terrified. Of being like really silly or being around people that are silly because I, I feel ashamed because as a child, I didn’t want [00:19:00] to, like, when people laugh at me or look with their finger at me, that must, that didn’t happen often.
But the one or two times that it happened, no, however often it made a real imprint on me and I was like, never fucking again. I have to be cool and I can never do something that people could make fun of me for. Right. Be like, look at that idiot. Look how dumb he thinks this had is cool, but it’s ugly, terrified of that.
Right. Hence why I have a silly and why I’m always kind of cool. It’s like, I’ve perfected this, but it’s not, I didn’t perfect this because necessarily this is who I am at my core. I perfected this because I’m terrified of this other side of me that sometimes might want to be funny or weird. And it’s like, It doesn’t want to be ashamed because people will judge it.
Right. But it would go, it goes back to overcorrection. Over-correcting I think early on, I mean, when we’re [00:20:00] really young, we don’t know shit, but then we make a few, a handful of experiences, right? Heartbroken. we peed in our pants. People laughed at us. People rejected us, you know, people beat us up. We did something that didn’t work like a handful of experiences that are negative and we hardcore over.
Correct. You know, we go never again. Do I want to feel this? What is the most extreme counter response to this? So that, that never happens sort of like, you know, Somebody, uh, somebody punched me and hands. I raised an army and destroyed him, his whole family and his whole country. Right. So, so this can never happen again.
And then some other kid comes in, punches you, right? It’s like not a solution, but it’s sort of the overcorrecting response, but this is not just true for our character. It’s true in everything in life like business. Right?
So many times a lot of the mistakes, massive problems in businesses because somebody made some small [00:21:00] mistake early on in their entrepreneurial career.
I was doing something wrong. And then they got a lot of pain because of it or some failure, some, you know, repercussions and then something inside of them, snap that they went never again. And they go the extreme opposite end of it. Right. And it. Not helping. What’s an example here that you can think of.
Well, I can, I can tell you an example. I’ll tell you one from us and one from a friend of ours. So first thing that comes up for me, because it was kind of very extreme example was, um, hiring at close. When we were at elastic sales, we’re in a phase where we said, all right, the more people we hire because we’re a services business, the more money we can make.
So let’s just hire as many people as we can. And then we’ll find the clients and we’ll find the money for it. And so we were hiring people, you know, we weren’t hiring thousands of people, but for our, for the place where the business was, we were hiring way too fast. [00:22:00] And then we were, we had tremendous struggles on two wet on three ends, one.
Uh, I had tremendous struggle because anytime we, you know, a hiring sprints go in cycles, you recruit, recruit, recruit, recruit, recruit. So for a month or two, you’re not really hiring anybody. And then all of a sudden, boom, you’ve hired seven people or something, right. It may kind of a mix of bump. Anytime we have that kind of bump, I would go into panic because we didn’t have the work or the revenue for it.
So I had to go and fucking hustle and bring in all the business, the customers, the clients, to make these people productive and profitable. So it was incredibly stressful to run the business like that. Number two, because we are hiring, we are hiring based on like, um, is this somebody with potential?
That’s kind of fun, right? We never hired like, even with, with some bad hiring back then we never hired assholes, but we hired a shit ton of people that had zero experience for the job that we’re doing. None of them was ever in sales [00:23:00] before. Most of them, this was their first job, you know, and they’re not working in tech.
They’re not working in a startup. And so there was a lot of training people that were talented, but were way under skilled and under experienced for the job. And because they’re all so early, and this was such a crazy environment, there were a good amount of like politics going on. People were, you know, falling in love with each other and people are not liking each other people.
Having groups that didn’t like this new manager that was managing them was not an experienced manager. So all of them, one of them really didn’t like the manager. And then he told everybody how bad of a manager is. And then everybody was against the new manager. You had all these kinds of dynamics that were kindergarten dynamics because we’re full of kindergarten children.
Like they were all young kids didn’t know the job, didn’t know the skill hadn’t never had worked. And we threw them into an extreme environment. And you have some, you’ll have some of that. And that, the third thing was that when we had to pivot, because this was a story. [00:24:00] We’re, you know, way too many people that we didn’t need a lot.
So I had to famously fire half the company, you know, and dance by, by, by, from India in front of them. Sometimes I remember the shit that I’ve done that I, I, I remember that I forgotten it. This is something I had forgotten for a long time ago. I’ve been some epic shit in my life. Like this is, this is not normal.
This is not a normal thing that people have done. Um, but so, so we went through, I personally went through a good amount of like hiring recruiting and managing of people paying in a period of 18 months. And then with clothes, I decided I’m going to do the opposite. I will never hire like, oh, I will hire so slowly.
And so for the first three years of closed, we didn’t hire a single person. We were just like six people, seven people, whatever. And for two years, You know, Kevin and Phil almost every other month were asking me, uh, we’ll keep growing and growing and growing, should we hire one or two people? [00:25:00] And I was always like, well, are we as productive in a sufficient as we could possibly be?
And they’re like, well, no, well then let’s not be lazy and throw humans at the problem. Let’s get better at how we work again. That’s a great, it’s actually a great question and a great challenge, but like anything else I overused and therefore abuse. Right. Asking it maybe in the first year is good, but when you, I go from zero customers with 6, 6, 7 people on the team too, you go to 500 customers and 3 million in revenue with a few, six or seven people on the team.
It’s not a good question to ask anymore because nobody will ever be honestly able to answer yes to the question. Are we a sufficient and as effective and as productive as we can humanly could come up with? No, you could always be a little better. Um, so this is an example where we under hired and then it really fucked us.
This not hiring people for three and a half to four years cost us at least two to two and a half years of growth. Right. For sure. There was [00:26:00] a massive mistake. Um, I’ll give you another example that just popped up Sophia and a common friend of ours. This is, yeah, totally. Well, this is totally me making this up, right.
So it might be true or not, but it’s still a good example if it is true. So I think. When he was younger and he started doing entrepreneurial things, he was sat up sort of like the, the German Cannock entrepreneur, overly enthusiastic, but very underdeveloped in skills, organization planning, you know? And so he made some big mistakes earlier on in his life when he was doing certain things.
And I think his overcorrection, what I see now all the time with him and he cannot, he cannot let it go no matter how many, like I mentioned a number of times he agrees with it, but you just can’t let it go as compulsive is that he over structures areas of his business, which has zero value to do so, other than some imagined [00:27:00] safety and sense of professionalism that it gives him.
So Sofian Sofian is maybe a business that does a 10th of our revenue, but he probably doesn’t. Seven times the amount of spreadsheet planning that we do, right? He’s like a company of three people. It’s a very simple business, but he, he will sit down. He’s be like, oh, this weekend, I’m going to do two days of, um, improving my spreadsheets.
And so I’m going to spend eight hours making my spreadsheets even better. And it’s the sort of work that is totally pointless. Like this business is not growing because he’s very good spreadsheet is now getting slightly improved. Bob dated. There’s no point in this. I remember in one of his ventures, they would do workshops that highlight 20, 30 people.
And they would have a marketing team of four people. And then they would say, Hey, one thing we should do is we should experiment with, um, whatever let’s say SEO. [00:28:00] Like we should create a bunch of long-term content, long form content for SEO. And then what they would do remain is that they would. Five sessions each four to five, five hours.
And they would call those SEO prep workshops. And it would be, be like a five hour brainstorming with like the whole marketing human, a bunch of people on what the long form content could be fine. The second four to five hour would be a, we, uh, I’m going to watch a bunch of YouTube videos on SEO and long form.
And then we’re going to bring some, some more. The third thing would be we’ll talk to, I brought in a friend who’s done long form content, and he’s going to talk to us. The fourth session would be a planning like we’re going to create a spreadsheet to plan, how are we going to do the work? And we’re going to do, it’s like, are you fucking shitting me in those five sessions?
You would have created 20 long form posts. And then you could have looked at the results to see what works and what doesn’t. And oftentimes some of these initiatives, six months later, they didn’t do it anymore because it was, you know, it didn’t [00:29:00] work, but it, and he had to be in all of them. I was like, wait, Why you so many sessions were for hours and hours, you’re just talking.
It’s like, no, no, you don’t understand. We have younger, less experienced people. We have to prepare them before they, you can go and do the work. That’s the sort of like, I’m going to over-prepare myself to feel prepared, to feel safe. I’m going to make these numbers and these Assana projects. And these to-do lists even more detailed and specific so that I feel safe, feel prepared, feel like I’m stable.
I am safe. I can hold onto something. Some amount of that is really good and really important. Right? I’m not, I’m not saying that none of that, like a lot of that is very good, but you, when you overdo it, you’re wasting not only time, but you’re wasting energy. Like at times where you could do work or you could be creative and come up with an idea that matters, you’re wasting it on bullshit.
That will never matter. Right. And you’re destroying value. [00:30:00] And you’re tiring yourself thinking, my God, people don’t understand how hard somebody has to work to run a company that does 2 million in revenue.
I just had to think about another friend that had an idea for something. And the very first thing he did is spent four to five months talking to lawyers to set up the corporate structure and then trademarking the first name that came to his mind for it and copywriting it.
And he’s like, well, now that I’ve copyrighted it and I legally created the, the company I’m excited to get started with this. And I’m thinking, what the fuck, dude, you wasted half a year and like 10 grand on this bullshit. Absolute, useless, worthless bull shit. Yeah. But it feels like work and it’s really safe in this case.
It might just be something else. Sometimes people do this shit because they want to avoid doing the real [00:31:00] work. Right, right. It’s sort of the, sort of the I’m gonna, uh, I’m going to, you know, take another seminar as a life coach instead of changing my life. It’s that, it’s that sort of like doing things that seem like they’re working towards a better self, but there are totally safe because they don’t require the risk of change
overcorrection is very, it’s fascinating to me because it seems like you have learned from it is more dangerous than being ignorant because when you’re ignorant, you make a mistake.
Maybe the shock is really painful because you go, oh my God, I didn’t know this thing. That ruined me and now it ruined me. Right? I’m overplaying. But now that, you know, the thing, the enemy, you now over-correcting to, I will never do this ignorant thing and I will go as far as possible. And like, now that you, you’re not ignorant in what you think, you know, and you think you’ve, [00:32:00] I’ve learned from my mistakes, never will I make this mistake again.
I now have a theory and an enemy. And with these, the theory and the enemy, I will set a plan to never that’s more dangerous. Even then the, the, the, because the person that’s ignorant in it is also blissful, right? At least you’re walking through life and you can experiment a lot of cool shit, and then you might fall into a trap.
Right? But that person that has a theory and an enemy is now stuck in this very tense, dark place. And yeah, you won’t change because you’re not open to falling into a trap. You’re not open to recognizing your feelings. You just think that whenever what you’re doing is not working, you should just be doing more of it.
Yeah. Everything, everything goes through a filter that this thoughts, reality in a way that fits your explanation and your model of the world, right? Yeah. Versus when you were ignorant, you had no filter. So you were just, you know, you’re hopping through the world and then you fell and hurt yourself and you went, oh my God stones.
[00:33:00] That’s the thing I should think about. But then if you think every life is about stones, your whole purpose of life, never will. I fall again, falling was the most embarrassing thing in the universe. I shall destroy all stones and never walk. I will be in an apartment, in a room with no stones, not walking my feet up in the air.
This will never happen to me. You know, this is much worse, you know, much money. And then you go, I’m really unhappy. Why am I so unhappy? I’m also not making money. It’s this they’re conspiring out there against me. People looking out the window,
all these people, throwing imaginary stones at you, you know, emotional Stoltz, physical, oh, you realize, you know what? It’s not just physical stones. Thoughts can also be stones. People can be stones, and now you’re fucking like you still, you make yourself a stone statue that is dead because you’re afraid of stones, you know, versus if you just kept going [00:34:00] now with the knowledge that pain is out there, that ignorance is out there, that you may fall at times that you may get embarrassed, but having the courage to keep going, you probably will live a really happy life.
And you’ll have some ups and downs, but you will have the important thing here is ups and downs. Versus when you har when you’re so harsh and over-correcting all you’ll have is the down. You just don’t have the roller coaster, right. That it’s going up again. It’s just going to, you’re just going to stay there.
Um, it’s crazy. It theory and anatomy is, can be a really, really bad place to be in, uh, because you’re not open. You’re not curious. You cannot be learning you, you think you learned, but that’s it it’s in the past. It’s like you learn the one thing that needed to be learned. You’re done already full, right?
Yeah. Yeah. I already know everything and I believe burned it. Oh, I’ve got, I’ve made this mistake once in my life and now I know how life works [00:35:00] and how to do these things. It’s like, well, that’s the biggest trap of the moat. All. There’s no such thing as you’ve learned the fucking you won’t figure out life, that’s it?
No matter what you do, you will not figure out life. If you think you’ve figured out life, you’re fucked. Like that’s for sure that you’re fucked. If you ever at a point where you’re like, I now understand what life is all about. Hi goodbye. Right? And you’re in a trap, you have a theory and an enemy you’re not open and curious anymore.
People are actually terrified of this. This is something recently. I had many discussions around friends of mine and family members discovering a new place part of themselves in the last two years, and then being shocked and slightly terrified about that. So the, the, the, they would say, wow, I can’t believe.
I always thought. That I’d done so much personal development. And then I was so riff and I thought, I knew myself. [00:36:00] I thought like, you know, I’m in my forties. I know who I am. And now I had discovered this thing that I never knew about myself in psych. It’s kind of shocking. And then I tell them with enthusiasm, I think this will never end.
I’m like, I think you will never figure it out. This is a realization I had many years ago that eventually, I mean, not that two years ago where I eventually fully internalized, I think that I will never have figured myself. As long as I keep walking through life, completely open and curious in my eighties, I will recognize things about myself that I didn’t recognize before.
And that’s, that’s the gift of life that makes life richer. Like you’ll never be done knowing who you are. And as I was, as I would tell this theory of mine, enthusiastically to those friends and family members that were telling me that they are shocked that they discovered something new about themselves, they would look more terrified.
They would look at me and go, no, [00:37:00] no, no. This, because the hidden, the hidden, uh, hope, the hidden hope in that statement was, wow. I thought I knew myself. How crazy that there was one little thing I didn’t know about myself, but now I discovered that as well, you know, and then I was like, oh, well, what if the next 50 years, if you stay open and curious, you’ll never end discovering little things about yourself.
Like I had a little puzzle puzzle in front of you and this whole, he is the final piece of meat. Wonderful. I thought I had all the pieces, but there was one piece missing. And then I grabbed him by the collar and we walk back 10 steps and I go, look, there’s so much missing. The most of the puzzle is not built at all yet.
And they, and they hang their head down and their shoulders slump. Why did she have to show me this? I don’t want to believe this. This sucks. And they go, no, this is great. [00:38:00] It building the puzzle is the fun, like, no, it’s not. I want to finish the puzzle. That’s the thing. Uh, yeah. Where in your life have you over-corrected and how do I know where I’ve overcorrected?
Well, where in my life do a whole, the strongest, most intense opinions that are based on my past failures and learnings. What are the lessons I’ve learned in the past that feel the most painful to me where I’m like, that was such a tremendous failure that I will never make that mistake again. When you have a stroke, that those are the places that I would intuitively look for.
You probably over-corrected and ended up at a place that’s worse than before. I’ll give you another example. Yesterday. I was talking to my oldest brother and his best, his friend, his best friend is a family friend. Like I I’ve known that guy since I [00:39:00] was, I don’t know, 12 years old, sort of like almost like my older brother.
Right. I think I’ve known him. My, my, you know, most of my life and I love him and he’s been on family vacations with us when I was a kid. Like he’s very close to our family is a very fun guy, an awesome human, but his first real love, uh, how old was, he was like 18. The girl was 16. They were together for a really long time.
And they were the most kind of movie, like couple ever. So he, he was before, well that he was like a womanizer and like a, you know, a player and a cool dude. And then they got together and all that was going on. He was just. He was only talking about her whenever he talked about her or to her, it was always super overplayed.
Like, oh honey, bunny, bunny. How’s my bunny, bunny, bunny, bunny. And I’m not even kidding, like in front of everybody, like at lunch at dinner, they didn’t [00:40:00] give a fuck. Like all the hot buttons you be, you be doing like, just to the extreme, you would be out with him. He would be at a bachelor party. And he would look at the floor not to look at other woman or stripper.
Like he would never even look at other women because to me, to him that was, um, cheating on his, on his girlfriend. Right. Like he took the I’m in love and I’m faithful to an extreme place. Right. Extreme place. I don’t know why, but they went hardcore there. And then they got married in, you know, in their early twenties and then they had children and then in their thirties, Have they been married, haven’t been together for, you know, 12, 13 years, whatever it was having two boys, children having a mortgage house, a whole life together.
She left him and it was very sudden, it was sort of a one [00:41:00] day she woke up, she turned around to him and she said, I’m not in love with you. I don’t think you were ever the right, man. I need somebody that is different. Right. I need somebody that is into, and she made a really harsh switch. It was a very kind of, um, glamour girl.
She wanted expensive things. She wanted to cute life and everything. And then she made like this hard switch and it was Joe GHA spirituality, um, meditation, all that. And she was, and he’s none of these things, right. Um, he didn’t fit into that scheme. She’s like, I want to change my whole life and I don’t want to be with you and we’re getting divorced.
And that was such a shock to the system. Right. Such a shock to the system that they had a terrible divorce. Terrible. I mean, to the point where, you know, the, the 10 year old son would be on the phone and the mother would scream, tell your fucking father, if he [00:42:00] doesn’t do this, he’s never going to see you guys again.
And then the kid would be like, and these are good. Like both her and him. I know her really well as well. Both of them are actual good people. Like there were never, there were good people the whole life. Like they were never, they never acted in some way that seemed that extreme. And he would scream through his son too.
They had massive fights and the way they would talk about each other, I mean, You’d get scared. It’d be like, wait, just calm down. Nobody. If he killed your father, it would be harsh. The way you talk about him, nothing, you guys have done nothing to each other that went to an extreme place. Now he married many years.
For many years, he was single and he was trying to sleep with as many women as possible. And he changed his tune of like, I’m going to lie as much as possible to every woman because they’re all horse. Right? You can, again, this is an over reaction and overcorrection that you could, it’s easy to imagine why somebody would do that.
He got married again. [00:43:00] And my oldest brother was talking to me about that because he was saying. That he, the last few years he’s been saying that friend of ours has been saying, if he plays the lottery and he says, if I win the lottery, he’s like my work to God. The moment I win the lottery, the very next thing I do is I call my wife and I tell her I’m getting a divorce and I’m flying.
I’m leaving to The Bahamas. I don’t care. And he has like, he has two children with his current wife, uh, one child, one or two children. It is like if I had the money, I would just fucking leave everybody. Now, his current wife is the exact opposite of his first wife. His current wife was the, um, like very emotionless, very cold, but very kind of simple.
Just wants to stay home. Does whatever he says, drinks, a bunch of beer watches, a lot of television. It’s just like kind of the safest person you would imagine. Not as his first wife was very attractive, very ambitious, very this very, that his current wife is sort of [00:44:00] the home body. Uh, S kind of very simple work just wants to hang out at home, watch TV, uh, drink beer, eat pizza, not go out and is maybe not like it’s not as passionate, not as warm, but also doesn’t seem risky.
She doesn’t want to change her life. She’s not constantly meeting with friends. She’s not trying to change him. They’re not like lovey w oh my God. They’re just like more like, you know, two people that have arranged that live around each other, but there’s not a lot of heat and passion. Right. And to me, that’s kind of a crazy example of somebody.
Went through a heartbreak. That was probably very terrifying. And I get it. I don’t know what wasn’t wrong in their relationship, because to me, it seemed very extreme the way they were in their relationship. The first couple of years, I was like, why is this? This doesn’t seem healthy. Why they’re so extreme?
Um, and then the, her leaving him was probably a massive blow and a massive like [00:45:00] break of the heart. And then seeing both his philosophies about life, about women, women, his opinions, and also the kind of woman he got remarried with. All that is an overcorrection is like just going as far extreme to the opposite as it could.
So he never experiences this again. And where is he? He’s in another place that will give him nothing but a shitty time. Nothing but problems, nothing but loneliness. He’s not at a good place. He hasn’t solved the problem. Right. He created a bigger problem. Just that bigger problem is one that. Because he’s always in, he’s used to now, like he’s getting used to that sort of suffering and pain versus being surprised by it.
yeah, it’s crazy. It’s crazy what we do as humans to avoid falling, hurting, feeling ashamed. Like we’ll go to the, we will build an entire life. I mean, people have, you know, build a dynasty, conquered the entire planet because of, [00:46:00] because of a experience of when I was 10, I stumbled, I fell, I hit my knee and two boys were laughing at me. So that’s the beginning of it. And then I corrected so hard that I thought if I owned the world and I conquered every human on it, nobody would ever laugh at it. Uh, but
yeah, the same, like very , effective underlying brain mechanisms. No, we almost got bit by a snake in the jungle one time, because we didn’t pay attention to the shade of green on the floor. Right. And then it’s, oh, I’m never gonna let that happen again. Right. You always tend to look out for that.
Yeah. You’re over sensitized now and you’re over-correcting. Yeah, I think that, that is a powerful question to ask, like where in my life did I over-correct and then get stuck in a pattern that now feels like life and normal and me, [00:47:00] like, that’s just the way life is.
That’s just the way I am, but you could trace it back to, I am this way, or I learned this thing because this thing happened to me because. This big lesson that I learned, uh, need to make a list of this, but there’s a bunch of examples. Obviously the last two years that I worked on that relate to this,
I wonder if there’s another way of getting to it. It’s like, what are areas of my life, where I’m not happy with right now? and what are the kinds of overcorrections that could have resulted in that?
Yeah, that’s an that’s that’s I think a really no, but, but I think, I, I think even when we guess those guests has come from somewhere and they, they’re not random, if it were random, they would fall from the trees, but they’re coming from our minds. So they’re not as random as we think. Um, no, I think that’s a great, great way that with many of us will probably lead us all the way back to childhood. Right. Some experience in childhood, [00:48:00] uh
Well, this just shows we should abandon childhood.
We should just turn a little babies into instant adults because we’ve realized that all trauma happens in childhood. So if you don’t have a childhood, you cannot have a trauma, which is obviously the biggest trauma there is, is when you didn’t have a childhood. Uh, isn’t that funny how it goes. Okay.