Latest / The iAlign Podcast with Flint Mitchell / #2 - Trusting Yourself More Than the Noise Around You With Ellen Leanse

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#2 - Trusting Yourself More Than the Noise Around You With Ellen Leanse · The iAlign Podcast with Flint Mitchell

• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: What's up y'all?
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Seeking Authenticity.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: My name is Flint Mitchell, and I get absolutely psyched by having conversations with authentic people that I admire about the things they value.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Their stories and perspectives don't just make me smile, laugh, and think.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: They inspire me to wake up earlier, listen better, focus, and work harder, and help make me a better version of myself.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: And it's my hope that sharing these conversations through this podcast might do the same thing for you.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode, I talk with Ellen Leance.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Ellen has a wealth of absolutely wild experiences through a career that seems to parallel much of the technology growth in the Bay Area, working with Apple during the Lisa and Macintosh launches, as well as with Google, Facebook, Samsung, and a variety of other fascinating organizations.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: With these experiences under her belt, Ellen has also taken on leadership and thought-leading roles, serving as an advisor and board member for several companies, as a teacher at Stanford, and an author for the book The Happiness Hack, a best-selling guide to the neuroscience of happiness and life satisfaction.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: But on a personal note, Ellen is just extremely kind.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: She has been willing to give me some of her time to ask questions about her experiences and thoughts and to learn from her, and I'm just extremely grateful for that.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: In this conversation, she tells a wild story from the early days at Apple.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: After that, the discussion moves towards the shift in perspective she's had over the years.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: We talk about having a nonlinear career, finding satisfaction by chasing what you're curious or nervous over, about doing work that will lead to leaving a positive legacy, and about innovating in technology.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Ellen has eloquent and important thoughts, which I appreciated hearing, and I know you will too.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_02: It was a pioneering move, and I didn't know it was a pioneering move at the time.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_02: I was just doing the next best thing.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_02: When we look at a threat of change, the brain maps that to the experience of what is my evidence that this will keep her safe and alive.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: The times in my life when I've been my safest, where things have been really easy, where things have gotten too comfortable, have kind of been my least satisfying times in my life because I wasn't growing.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_02: It's by definition, it's reducing the set of possibilities so that you can optimize for what is safe.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_02: And that was exactly what I was trying to get people to break away from.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_02: So how do we stay human and resilient and even you know, I dare I say happy, and by happy I don't mean like we, you know, joy, joy, happy, but I mean like satisfied and aligned with purpose as people who feel good about themselves, even in times of unanticipated change.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for doing this with me, Ellen.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so appreciative to have you on.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's exciting for me to talk to someone I respect so much on a platform like this because I get to ask a couple questions about your life that I'm super curious on and to get your take.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_02: I'm very excited to be here and um really thankful that you thought of me, Flint.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: No, you have hands down one of the coolest resumes I've ever seen.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the the the positions you've a value been in with the companies you've worked for and kind of the transition over time of the ways you've led companies and people and projects is just absolutely incredible to me.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_02: Well, thank can I say something about that real quick?
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, please.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_02: So the fact that you see that is really interesting to me because over the course of my career, one of the things that's been a challenge for many people is there hasn't been really a clear linear path to the work that I've done.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_02: I've I've sort of moved between different things and loved the cross-training and the chance to, you know, learn from different domains and apply them to things I I worked at, worked on, you know, as I went along.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_02: And something I'd love to call out for your listeners, real quick, is the fact that I have visited a number of different proficiencies and areas of focus in my career has accelerated me.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_02: I know that it has, and it's given me so much more satisfaction.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: However, some people looking from the outside have said, Oh, I I don't know what to do with this person because she hasn't followed the usual, you know, point A to point B to point C.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_02: So, what I would love for your listeners to know from the get-go is do it your way.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_02: Don't follow the outside rules.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_02: The rules are changing all the time, and doing it for your own learning growth and satisfaction is going to give you a better ride.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's so fantastic.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: Right off the bat.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's an incredible, incredible advice.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's so relevant.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's always relevant, but this is the only generation uh age I've grown up in, obviously.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: And it seems relevant to me at 25 that people are very worried about the path that they're taking and if it's correct or not.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: And it's it's wonderful to hear from someone who's taken a relatively non-linear linear path and and and chased after different projects that you were interested in, and to hear that it actually accelerated.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's that's fantastic.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_02: And the thing is, is that I could probably look at a trajectory for my quote career if I had stayed at Apple, you know, all of these years.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_02: And I'll be the first to admit a lot of things in my life would have been different, you know.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: Certainly um some of the external trappings of success would probably be more uh more obvious, you know, that it would have been great to have had a 35 at Apple.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_02: And and trust me, some people that I really love have and have done so, so, so well with it.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you said a moment ago, Flint, you know, are they on the correct path?
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_02: And I I I love that you said that because who decides what correct really means?
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and you know, what are we optimizing for whenever we make a decision?
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_02: Is it for other people's approval or following a safe bet, or is it for really making use of sort of those internal gifts and talents in ways that give us, you know, of course, responsibly and in sustainable ways, the quality of experience that we we want most?
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: No, and I I I am fascinated to hear then specifically maybe how your perspective changed from starting at Apple.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: Were when you started at Apple, were you more of the thought process like this is gonna be a long I'm committed to Apple for I mean actually to be fair, you worked there for what 10 years almost.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um did your perspective shift on the direction you wanted to change, your direction you wanted to go from when you started Apple to when you left?
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_02: I I don't I it's hard to say because you know, you mentioned a moment ago that you only have the perspective of the life that you're living in, like the expression of life.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_02: But I'm a lot older than you are, so I have a perspective that is, you know, I see a lot more in the rear view mirror than someone of your generation would, someone of your age would.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_02: So we did not have the same concept of career uh back then that we have now.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we would look at being responsible with our lives and quote, getting a job.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_02: Like think about there's a big difference between getting a job and having a career.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_02: And so I would say that when I was in my early 20s, I very fortuitously ended up at this place called Apple, which was not a startup, yet was certainly an upstart.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we were doing things differently than anyone else had done, sometimes chaotically, sometimes systemically, always a lot of energy of people coming together and taking risks and trying new things, which was just an incredible environment to be in.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_02: But we didn't think about our career as like an if-then statement in the way I think people have done more recently.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_02: You know, in the last even 15 years, I've seen people being on a career path, following these different maps that would lead to good outcomes.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_02: And we just didn't have that when I was getting started, it wasn't like that.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so I I don't know that I can make an apples to apples comparison.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_02: Here is what I will say.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_02: I I loved being at Apple, yeah, and I felt somehow like part of the package was that I would enjoy my work and enjoy my life.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_02: And it came to a time at Apple where I wasn't enjoying it, and at that time, about maybe about four and a half years in, at that time I decided to leave.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_02: And I was deep in the process of interviewing with another company because again, I made an assumption that I should enjoy my work.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't really a job, it was something I cared about, something that was an expression of me.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_02: And when I stopped enjoying it for various reasons, that signaled to me time to change.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_02: Now, as fate had it, at that time something else opened up at Apple that turned out to really be the like you know, a defining moment of my professional journey.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_02: It was when I brought Apple online in 1985, making Apple the first company in history to have an online connection with its users.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_02: Nobody had ever done that before.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_02: Email didn't even exist.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_02: Can you imagine Flint?
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_02: And yet here we were, this bold, audacious team, you know, saying, oh my gosh, we're gonna set up like a relay system of bulletin boards, but they were called BBS's bulletin board systems, with our users.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_02: History.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_02: Nobody had ever done it before.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_02: And I did that.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_02: Like, wow.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_02: And so trust me, once that happened, I was back in the realm of having a lot of fun again.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_02: But it was very different.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_02: We were, we didn't have career paths.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_02: We had more like, gosh, it was more like uh, let me do it, more like whitewater rafting or bungee jumping or something than it was following a path.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_02: You were just optimizing for the next best thing.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_02: And it's something that I've seen diminish as I've watched the world of work evolve over the last 35 and change years.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_02: That's wild.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: Before I kind of ask about that, could you tell me a bit about the experience of taking Apple online?
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's so crazy.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yes.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_02: Although when I talk about it, it sounds like such a big deal, right?
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_02: And this is, I guess, the meta message is you know, all we were doing was the next best thing.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_02: So um we didn't know what the nobody knows what the future holds.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_02: So we didn't know when we did this little silly thing, when I did this little small thing, what it would grow into.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_02: So here's the story as briefly as I can.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_02: I was about to leave Apple.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_02: I was interviewing with another non-tech company in San Francisco, and this opportunity to work with our user groups came along.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_02: I knew very little about it, but they they approached a couple of someone approached a few people at Apple to see if they were interested.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_02: I was interested, lucky me, I got the job.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_02: The first day of the job, and you know, I've written about this, it's on my, I have a pretty good article about it on medium.com where I I've you know done some writing.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_02: But the first day on the job, um, I walked into an office that flint a cubicle that was just stacked, desk covered with letters that were effectively not exactly hate mail, but sad mail from users going, hey, we put all of our school budget or all of our uh intercompany budget or whatever in, or you know, I saved my allowance for years to buy an Apple II, and now you're turning away from it, you know, as you commit to the Macintosh.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_02: Really, why don't you listen to us?
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_02: Why don't you care about our users?
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_02: What can you do?
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_02: So my job was it wasn't a customer support job, it was much more of a strategy job to say, how can we turn these people into Apple loyalists rather than people who are disappointed with us?
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_02: So I was Apple's first user evangelist, forging a connection between Apple, the company, and the community of global users.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_02: And in and nobody had ever like this, it was not work that was commonly done.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, there's there's such another story to that.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_02: That's I mean, it just goes on and on.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_02: But one of the first calls that I made, I just decided to do a little anthropology.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_02: And I picked up the call, the letters that had phone numbers, and I called people and spoke with them.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_02: And one of the people that I spoke with was very brusque and sort of chewed me out saying, you know, Apple should do this, Apple should do this.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and by the way, Apple should have a BBS.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, that sounds great, but what's a BBS?
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_02: He was like, you don't even know what a BBS is, you know, it's a bulletin board system where people exchange information and Apple could send software patches or bug fit fixes, and you wouldn't have to print them up on, you know, record them on disks and send them out to people.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_02: You can just upload them through a modem to, you know, other people's computers.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, that sounds pretty great, actually, because I saw how, I mean, there were mailhouses that were shipping disks, thousands of disks, out to people when we had a bug fix.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_02: That was costly, that was time consuming.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_02: Why not just do it, you know, through a modem that went through the phone lines to another modem and changed it on the computer and then allowed them to sort of echo or amplify that out to other nodes?
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_02: And I went about campaigning for it and um was shut down.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_02: Like people would say, no, but well, really think about it.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_02: If that didn't, if someone came along now and said, we're gonna beam it out, you know, Splint.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_02: Your job is to beam uh instead of doing food delivery, you're gonna beam those pizzas out to people through telepathy.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_02: You'd get some resistance, right?
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_02: People would, I mean, that's exactly what it was.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_02: How can you get a physical object out through a non-physical world?
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_02: People are like, you can't do that through telepathy.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_02: Nobody will ever get their pizza.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's so fantastic.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_02: It's so funny.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_02: But finally, um, I so funny, just even earlier today, I tweeted about this, and it just I haven't thought of it in years, but finally I was able to get the go-ahead and do it.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_02: John Stelle actually gave me the go-ahead to do it.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_02: Steve was already over at next.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_02: And so we did it, and it was an instant and runaway success that I would say not only changed the way uh that companies interacted with users, but actually even created an example to all companies of ways that they could just distribute what they offered.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it was a it was a pioneering move.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_02: And I didn't know it was a pioneering move at the time.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_02: I was just doing the next best thing.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: No, it's it's I love that perspective too, because that's kind of how you let off the story was, well, I was just kind of doing my job.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: I was doing what was next, what I thought was good.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: And then in reflection, you look back and go, Wow, that was a big thing.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_02: It was, and then Flynn, that brings up another point is you know, I'm I'm thinking about, you know, how did I have the conviction to trust myself more than I trusted all the people uh around me that said basically you can't deliver pizza that way?
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_02: And that is the thing that I would wish for each of your listeners, and that is to believe, to know, but to really, really know that they, you listener, have an intelligence inside that you know is right and you know is worthy, and you know is powerful, and the prevailing voices around you are going to resist that.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, maybe if I'd been at another company other than Apple, I mean, Steve's Steve's impact, you know, was very much about challenging assumptions and being an innovator and thinking different, right?
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but trust that part of you that doesn't align with what everybody else out there is telling you because that actually is your superpower.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, absolutely.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: That's such a wonderful lesson, and it's one, but it's mo most wonderful to see it in action, right?
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: To hear your story and to see that that applied theory.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so did that same mindset, it sounds like maybe it wasn't the seeds were there beforehand, but you kind of took it to another level when you went to Apple.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: Did that then kind of become your mindset for most job opportunities or opportunities afterwards?
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I I guess I would answer, I hope so, and then I would have to really look at it from both sides.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_02: So I will say that there are definitely moments in my professional journey where I have uh succeeded because I have been a little bit of a trailblazer, or I have thought differently, you know, think different is sort of my motto, because I've challenged assumptions, including my own.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_02: And I would say more and more I have had uh uh satisfaction and good results from doing that.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_02: However, I there also are times in my professional journey where I have played it safe, where I have followed the rules, where I've done what needed to be done.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it's important for anyone who's listening to this to know that all of this journey is very nuanced.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes there will be compromises in it, or actually someone should challenge me with it.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_02: Like there could be someone listening who's saying, No way, Ellen, you could have done so much more if you hadn't compromised in this scenario or that scenario.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_02: And you know what?
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_02: They're probably right, but every one of us is making trade-offs at you know, one time or another.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_02: And sometimes we have to play it safer than we do at other times.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um, sometimes we get to bend the rules, sometimes we get to break the rules, sometimes we really should follow the rules.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_02: So, to me, what what it all boils down to is just being intentional and know why you are doing what you're doing when you make a decision, and having conversations and so this is what my gut tells me to do.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, this is what my heart tells me to do, like my emotions, or maybe the people who care about me tell me what to do, and this is what my logic tells me what to do, and being really, really clear on how you're gonna decide, because it's you know, there's there's never there aren't very many easy answers in life, are there?
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, not at all.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: But that's probably the best mindset to take in order to make the decisions, right?
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_02: To just sort of believe in, I guess this is sort of a another big theme, is also to never lose that ability to trust yourself.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_02: You're you're at an early stage in your life journey, Flint, and your memory of what it was like to be a curious child is much closer to you.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_02: You know, when you would even be wondering, like, how does all this stuff work?
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_02: What's going on in the world around me?
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, why am I being told this isn't okay?
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_02: And then as time goes on, I've watched people move from sort of remembering what it was like to be curious to completely shutting down any of their curiosity.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_02: And I guess I would say that curiosity is really our greatest gift.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_02: It's our birthright, it's one of our superpowers, and it's something that, you know, you know that I I've studied the brain quite a lot in recent years and have written about it.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_02: With time and in adulthood, the brain doesn't really benefit as much from curiosity on a survival basis.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_02: You know, if you look at the really the neuroscience, it's like, okay, everything Flint is doing is working because he's alive.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_02: Why should he try anything new?
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I've watched so many people slow down on their curiosity over the course of their professional journey and over their life.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_02: And I would say uh take Steve Jobs' advice on this one.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_02: Stay curious, stay a little bit hungry.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um always challenge your assumptions.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_02: They won't staying stuck in a fixed mindset really won't get you where you want to go.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: No, I that's fantastic, and and I appreciate you bringing context into it.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I at 25, and this is actually really interesting to your point, which is I graduated college three years ago, and I've already seen that transition of in in friends and in acquaintances that I know.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Of the curious mindset in college to just a couple years out, kind of losing that.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's wild at 25 years old that that has already started to occur.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: I can already empathize with that statement.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_02: Well, part of it is the way, part of it is the way the brain works.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_02: The brain development is really interesting, and there's some things that stop happening right around the age of, you know, in between like the 19 to 22, uh, some of the changes are like your brain sort of gets set in a certain way.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_02: And if you look at this in terms of survival, which is the brain's primary job, it's here to keep you safe and alive.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_02: You can imagine something that says, gee, by the time you're 22 or so years old, you've figured out how to survive.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_02: Keep doing that, and you will now be able to reproduce, because that is what, you know, that's sort of more of our that's just sort of our evolutionary biology.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_02: However, the brain doesn't optimize for what gives you satisfaction.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_02: The brain optimizes for what keeps you safe and alive.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_02: Some people, we don't, that's not really a scientific statement.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_02: Some people say that they can actually track to the neurocorrelates the things that bring satisfaction.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely true.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_02: But I believe there is more to us than just our brains.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_02: That's my personal belief.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I think there is something that fuels us to seek a deeper sort of satisfaction and life purpose that is not located in the correlates.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_02: That's only my opinion.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um but knowing if I were to speak with the friends that you're speaking about, they've become safe.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_02: They've become comfortable.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_02: And you know what?
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_02: I get it.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_02: Everything they've done for the first 22 or 25 years of their 22 years of their lives, go to school so that you can get a job, so that you can do this, so that you can do that, right?
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_02: To have this good linear life that's going to, it's going to be a good life.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_02: It's going to work.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_02: You can see how you've been pointed to that.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_02: And then now we have to say, then COVID comes along, and all the rules that we thought we were preparing for get sort of tossed up in the air.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_02: I'm just saying.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, absolutely.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's that we've talked about this previous or had it come up two or three times, which is this idea of becoming safe and becoming comfortable.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: And it seems like that has been a theme maybe of your journey so far is searching for new experiences, not necessarily discomfort, but new stimulations, whether that's a new type of job.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, it has been uncomfortable.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_02: There have been many, many uncomfortable moments, but safety and comfort are not the same.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_02: However, the brain isn't that good at telling the difference.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_02: So the brain looks at a threat to identity, so a threat to like the fixed version of self, in kind of biologically the same way as it looks at a threat to survival.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_02: So the same more or less signals that would fire when we're going like, oh my gosh, I don't know how to do that, they're not that different than the signals that would fire if you suddenly saw a saber tooth in the bushes.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's just our biology.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_02: But so, you know, generally speaking, I'm not saying 100%, and especially now we live in a time where there are real threats to our safety, you know.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, generally speaking, from a survival perspective, the threats we face today are not the same threats we faced, you know, tens of thousands of years ago when we were coming, or you know, much, much far longer ago than that when we were coming up as a species, hundreds of thousands of years ago when we're coming up.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_02: They're just different threats.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_02: But the brain hasn't really mapped that in a way that changes our experience.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_02: At least that's what neuroscientists believe.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_02: And so when we look at a threat of change, the brain maps that to the experience of what is my evidence that this will keep her safe and alive.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_02: So I believe for some fortuitous reason, I've always been okay with discomfort.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_02: That sort of feeling of fear in the pit of my stomach.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_02: Um I've learned to trust it a little bit as you know, information that I can know is not something I have to react to.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_02: And I would say that in certain that I was saying to my son Matt, who you know the other day, the times in my life when I've been my safest, where things have been really easy, where things have gotten too comfortable, have kind of been my least satisfying times in my life because I wasn't growing.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_02: And there is a correlation between being out of your comfort zone, a certain amount, uh, and a certain amount of you know, the the certain types of stress and challenge that do lead to growth.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_02: And I guess what brings me satisfaction is a sense of increasing mastery and growth that you can't get if you're in still waters.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_00: No, it's I think it's actually I'm glad you brought Matt into this because he's such a fantastic kid.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I see these teachings, he's the way he speaks is the is the same.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I get that that vibe this totally the same.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: He it's it's no, it's really fun um to see that kind of connection between you two.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's totally true.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_02: I have to I have to say something here.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_02: I promise you I have learned more from my kids than they have learned from me.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_02: So I give a heck of a lot of credit over uh in that direction for all that I've learned from them.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_02: So but but thanks for saying that anyway.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm absolutely no, that's the first thing that came to mind.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um what how I guess do you now search for the opportunities that will make you uncomfortable, right?
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: There's uh there's a lot of opportunity to make yourself uncomfortable.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: How do you make the decision what's next?
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_02: You must be uh you must have a crystal ball there.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_02: Either that or you've been listening in on my, you know, my uh my meditation session.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_02: I am in that soup right now because um I'm pretty uncomfortable these days.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um I'm 61 years old, I'm almost 62, and there is a part I have the most incredible job.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_02: I absolutely love my job.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_02: I'm the chief people officer of a company that I really love with a team that I I love a lot, and a boss who I've known for years and really admire.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_02: And um it's super neat work.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_02: My team, my it's all and yet I have this thing in me that is really restless that says, you haven't done what you're here to do yet.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_02: And I I really believe that that is true.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_02: So I am um spending a lot of time thinking about how do I plan my longer-term contribution and the stuff that I feel allows me to find a deeper level of meaning than I have found so far.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_02: And it does have to do with being an elder and being of some sort of service or humble offering to this generation, because the world that we are leaving for you is a much more difficult and I think limiting world than the one that I was offered when I was your age.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't feel good about that.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_02: And I feel some responsibility for it.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_02: You know, even this morning when I was doing a little bit of journaling of comparing my, it's really interesting to have this talk with you because I was comparing my life to my mother's life and and comparing all the things that have changed that changed from her generation to mine, and then extrapolating that out to this generation, because I think there's some things that are very humanizing that we are losing right now, and we are moving toward a more work-centric, not only way of living, but sense of identity, where we are increasingly defined by our jobs and our work.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_02: And so many of us have learned in COVID that we relied on those for our identity, and then causes and conditions beyond what we possibly could have foreseen just took so much of that away from us.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_02: So, how do we stay human and resilient and and even and you know, I dare I say happy?
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_02: And by happy I don't mean like we, you know, joy, joy, happy, but I mean like satisfied and aligned with purpose as people who feel good about themselves, even in times of unanticipated change.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_02: And I really need to unpack where that goes.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_02: And it is, it is, it is.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_02: Let me tell you how I experience the discomfort even as I speak about it.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_02: I feel something weird in my gut, like kind of an unease or a not a dizzy disease, but a dis-ease.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_02: I know everybody listening has felt that, like, oof, something's wrong.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_02: You feel it in your body.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um, sometimes I feel my voice get a little shaky, like I'm not clear on what I'm talking about.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_02: And I just feel this sort of like dullness of like, oh, there's something, and I can't name it.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_02: Over the years, I have learned to see that as really valuable information.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_02: It's a signal that something is something needs to change, and that I need to be comfortable with the signal in order to to begin to hear it more clearly.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_02: And when we look at how, when I look back on how I would handle that signal when I was younger, there are two things that come to mind.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_02: One, I've got there's something wrong with me.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_02: Everybody else is doing great with this, but I'm feeling badly there must be something wrong with me.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_02: What's wrong with me that this is hard when it's so easy for everyone else?
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_02: Over the years, I've learned it was hard for everybody else.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_02: They were just covered, they were just covering it up too.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_02: The other thing I've noticed, we have that feeling we humans tend to want to medicate it away.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_02: We want to medicate it away with maybe we go out, maybe we drink, maybe we, you know, get high or something like that.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe we, you know, indulge in a video game just to dull the feeling down.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I'll be honest with you, we've all done some of that, but I've come increasingly to feel that discomfort is really powerful information.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_02: And learning to listen to it helps us get, even though it's not all that much fun, to uh a better understanding.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_00: No, I I there's so much to unpack there, but the first thing that comes to mind really is this physical feeling of discomfort, and I think that that kind of symbolizes maybe all of our primal emotions or feelings, which is another one I would kind of say is similar is this feeling of adventure, right?
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_00: There's a like the first time you get in the car to drive to college or get on a flight.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's a visceral feeling.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know how to define the word adventure except for with that feeling, right?
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, yes, you're about to take a risk.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_02: I love it.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you're right.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I never even thought of that.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_02: That is that is such a great frame, Flint.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you, because really it is, you're right.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_02: Like you, you, I you kind of look at it as sort of like the feeling, but it is it is a little bit of a call to adventure.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_02: I love that.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_00: No, absolutely, because I yeah, I think it's kind of synonymous, right?
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_00: The feeling of discomfort and then moving into it kind of makes life the adventure.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's what that's why it is nonlinear, is because it's kind of full of risks and novel experiences.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's great.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_02: Cool.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_02: I love it, thank you.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and so we talked then about what it feels like to make the next decision, and it sounds like you're searching for ways to bring about positive change now for the youth or kind of this world that we exist in now.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_00: Is that why you're starting to look towards roles of uh mentorship as teachers and advisors and board members and stuff like that?
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_02: Well, yeah, you know, it's a funny thing.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_02: When I joined LucidWorks, the company that I work for, I came from a pretty well-established um practice in teaching and mentoring, coaching, things like that.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_02: And the reason I chose to join LucidWorks, aside from working with some people that I really admired and valued, was I wanted to go to more depth with what I was doing rather than breadth.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_02: So I felt with like teaching, you're with someone for eight weeks or three months or whatever it is, and then you hope some of it's stuck, but you really can't put yourself to the test to see what was the real difference I made in the way you do when you form long-term relationships and so forth.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_02: So I want to get real specific with something because your question gave me clarity.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_02: I was feeling pretty uncomfortable two weeks ago with what um feeling like, you know, this desire to uh, you know, sort of mentor and guide.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_02: And um it had been, you know, in my work, what I did is I looked and said, why are you not playing out that opportunity in your work?
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_02: What is keeping you from doing it?
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_02: And I looked pretty hard at all of the things that sort of like filled my day without actually giving me that sense of like, ah, I'm doing this thing that I'm I'm really, that I'm really here to do.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_02: And so this week I I blocked a lot of time on my uh calendar to to just go and do that deeper work of creating new content or creating coaching modules and so forth.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, um I I spent, I would say, the majority of my time that week doing that within my job.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_02: So for this week, I experimented with actually really redefining what my work is.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and thank goodness I had the latitude to do it, and it began to bring me back to that place of feeling satisfied and challenged and like almost like my my brain was a little bit tired at the end of the day because I pushed it, you know, pretty hard.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_02: So I believe that the best canvas I have right now is A, to bring this practice that I love so much to my current work.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_02: And that isn't about my work changing, that's about my approach to my work changing.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_02: Why had I let myself get sucked into all the minutiae?
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I know why, because it was easy.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_02: And it gave me a sense that I'd accomplished something, even though I hadn't really accomplished something.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_02: You know, sure, I was at inbox zero, but had I really delivered value?
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_02: No, maybe not too much.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_02: And then that just became a habit.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_02: It just became what I robotically began doing.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_02: I'm making it sound a little worse than I thought it was, you know.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_02: And then I thought the problem is me.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_02: The problem is I've let that happen.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, that's why I was uncomfortable.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, what are you gonna do about it?
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I'm gonna block time on my calendar and I'm not I'm not gonna go do that stuff.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna actually go push myself out of my comfort zone, walk out on a limb, and start to generate the stuff I believe was so I can offer it to my company.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_02: Great.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_02: So it has been a fantastic week.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_02: I've been on a I've been on an adventure again.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_00: That's I it's so wonderful because it takes the perspective of this discomfort that people generally associate with I'm in the wrong place.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_02: To my job sucks.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_00: To I'm in the right place.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, but I need a different perspective.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly, exactly.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_02: And you know what?
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_02: I forgot about that for a very long time.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_02: Not, you know, not a very long time, but for enough time that I was sort of feeling like right.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_02: So COVID, very uncomfortable time, I think to some extent helped me, it disoriented me enough that I could take a new look at the landscape.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_02: And then also just this feeling of like I'm stuck, I'm not growing, was a signal to me that I needed to change.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't the job's fault.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_02: I have a fantastic job.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_00: No, that's awesome.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_00: That's so wonderful.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_00: What kind of feelings come to your mind when you when you look back on that that change you made then over the past two weeks?
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I'm excited.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_02: I am increasingly satisfied.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um I'm a little torn because part of me also saying, like, I haven't done all of that usual stuff or people noticing that, you know, there are all these head games we play with ourselves.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_02: But I also feel that um I'm excited.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_02: I'm really excited.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_02: It's gonna be fun to roll it out.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_00: That's awesome.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_00: Excitement is probably the best way you could feel when you wake up in the morning.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you mentioned wake up in the morning.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_02: You are so right.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_02: Like the the when I wake up in the morning, huh?
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_02: Interesting.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_02: I notice I've been waking up a little bit earlier, and then I have a few things that I do in the morning that are part of my routine.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_02: You have to believe me when I tell you one of them involves coffee, that's given.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_02: And then I've um been doing a little bit more gardening uh than I've because I'm you know working from home.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_02: So I go out and I water my plants in the morning.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_02: My uh I'm growing some veggies and herbs, and um I feel myself getting kind of impatient to get started, and it feels really good.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's awesome.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's a great way of uh of describing it.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_00: I feel impatient to get started.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's neat.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_00: I then wonder how have you tied so many of these teaching roles into your life over the past decade?
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it sounds it looks like you've taught uh it was the the course at Stanford this was pre-happiness hack, or was that while you were doing that?
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_02: Kind of before, during, and after.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, neuroscience has been um such uh uh just such uh uh a fascination for about the last 15 to 20 years, you know, and it's all like it's it's it's it's just been so much that we've understood we've come to understand about how the brain functions, like how it as a biological system actually functions, that I have just just loved learning about.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_02: But I think one thing I've felt that I feel really good about is I've always stayed curious about, you know, well, first of all, it's easy to stay curious in neuroscience because it's always changing and we're getting new understanding, and things that we thought were true eight years ago turn out completely different than we'd assumed.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_02: So one thing I feel happy about is as I've looked at neuroscience, I've never looked at it as being, I've looked at it as being a work in progress, a continual work in progress, and I've never looked at anything in it as being, you know, too absolute.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_02: I've kept a lot of space open for, well, on the other hand, maybe, and that because I believe there is something more about the human experience that we don't have evidence for, or we can't show scientifically yet that actually shapes our our our uh experience.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_02: And by the way, I have a pretty interesting story about the accident I was in in December.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_02: Do you know about that when I had a head injury?
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know you had a head injury.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, you can invite me back and I'll tell you about a really weird thing that happened about one half of a second before I collided.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_02: Uh my trapeze on a zip line collided with a breaking block and hit my house.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um what I saw in that moment.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_02: You can there's a teaser, you can invite me back for that.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's a hook.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_02: It's pretty interesting.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_00: That's wild.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_02: So, in any case, I do believe there's something more to this than meets the eye.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_02: I really do.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_02: And um, so I haven't looked at neuroscience as like the absolute.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_02: I've stayed curious about it.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_02: And that curiosity has been at the hub of the teaching I did at Stanford.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_02: The course that I taught there was primarily directed toward technology innovators, founders, product people, and it was the neuroscience of creativity and innovation.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_02: And it looked at the finding curiosity, you know, uh, it looked like how curiosity changed over the course of adolescence in the early 20s, and then how that informed product strategy.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_02: And I used things that I'd seen happen at Apple, but also I'd seen happen at other companies that weren't as innovative as Apple over time.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_02: And I brought those together in ways that were aimed at helping innovators and founders.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_02: And product people think different about how they really created and how they how they how they came up with really great ideas.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_02: And it was just a wonderful class.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_02: I really, I really loved teaching it.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_02: When we took it to an online format and offered it globally, it was really wonderful to work with entrepreneurs from around the world.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_02: But I also got a little frustrated with the teaching because even in the short number of years I was teaching the class, I watched literally us move from about 20% of the innovations that were surfacing being mobile technology based, like make an app, to 100% of the ideas coming up being make an app.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_02: And I didn't really know how to uh I I I didn't know how to take that one on because I felt that was such a reduction of potential.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I I gosh, I've had a career in technology.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_02: Clearly, I believe in the power of technology to do some, you know, really amazing, world-changing things, but it's not the only way that humans innovate.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_02: And uh that was a little bit of a ramp, pardon me.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, it's it's really fascinating to hear this from you because it kind of sounds like this that frustration from an outside perspective is if you take this as kind of a broad analogy, that frustration is kind of like discomfort in the analogy in the story we were talking about earlier, because your course is based on creativity.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's like not is it's it's like kind of your path, right?
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's look for the the the nonlinear path, look for the next big thing, look like make a change from the from the common ground.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_00: And it makes sense that you would get frustrated with 100% of the ideas being app-based because that was then becoming the safe zone, like the comfort zone.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_02: And then you also see how the brain optimizing so for survival.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_02: You I love that you pulled that thread through because that's absolutely right.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_02: But it's it's by definition, it's reducing the set of possibilities so that you can optimize for what is safe.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_02: And that was exactly what I was trying to get people to break away from.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_02: So I, you know, we've all seen probably, you know, memes and stuff where people are going like, you know, either face palms or hum what or something.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_02: I I just didn't know what to do with that on a on a meta level.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_02: And um yeah, and I think you know, I talk about rehumanizing.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_02: I say at a time when so many of the things that are happening in the world around us are reducing what it means to be human and even dehumanizing us.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_02: How do we rehumanize in that, you know, fully expansive way that is our higher potential?
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_02: And that's that's those are the toys I really want to play with as I go forward.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_00: No, I see that a lot in modern day.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_00: I guess my take on that, my perspective when you say that is I see it's really common now to generalize other people by any sort of you know political, religious uh grouping that you can, you know, any sort of genre you can put a person in.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that is, to your point, a form of dehumanization.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_00: You're you're reducing the individual person, you're stripping them of their humanity, and then giving them some sort of label that you've already generated in your own head.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_02: And then we're just we're in both the linear and the assumptive biases that the brain resorts to because it's it's very fuel efficient for there also, you know, there are other things about it, rather than this much more integrated and systemic way, sort of systems-oriented way of thinking that is more of our uh creative and innovative potential.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_00: No, it seems like that is it's a and it's a hard thing to do.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's a hard because it's it's the safe zone, it's the easy thing is to just rest on what you have on your assumption.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_02: That's the evidence-based approach to life, you know?
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_00: I would I call it the experience-based living.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's like making decisions based off experience, like future, you know, the experiences that you create as opposed to what you already know.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I'd have to hear more of that to understand it.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_02: So maybe um maybe we'll be able to dig into that more sometime.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, on another time.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to take too much of your time.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I really appreciate you coming on once again.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I I wonder if looking back on this conversation, looking, we've talked about so much about kind of your your path being accelerated by taking the nonlinear one, which is driven by what I would say one of the uh priority values that we've spoken about is this thing, this this value of being curious, right?
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_00: Curiosity.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I wonder if the the audience could take one thing away from this discussion.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_00: What what is one lesson do you think?
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_02: Here's what I would say trust yourself more than you trust the noise around you.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_02: Your brain wants to listen to the noise because you conforming to that, complying with that, believing that that is reality, uh, allows you to fit into a system that favors your survival.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_02: However, that voice inside, that thing you already know about yourself, that truth that you hold is very, very, it's a very powerful fuel cell for you living the life that you want to live, even when it challenges the noise.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_02: That's awesome.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you, Flint.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_00: I want to thank Ellen for that discussion.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_00: I loved hearing about how many of the successes she's had in her career were seen mostly in reflection.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_00: In the moment, as she says it, she was just doing the next best thing that she could.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_00: Likewise, I find Ellen's nonlinear path so inspiring.
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_00: Those who take a winding route through their career tend to take on a bit more risk.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_00: But it's always fun to hear stories of when those risks became opportunities and then successes.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_00: There isn't a better way to put it than the way she wrapped up this episode.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_00: Trust yourself more than you trust the noise around you.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_00: That message makes me wonder where life could take me if I just put trust in myself and in my own actions.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe it does for you too.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_00: If you liked this episode of Seeking Authenticity, that's freaking awesome.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_00: All I want to ask of you, the listener, in return for the time and effort I put into making it, is that you take a deep breath.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_00: I mean really breathe.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_00: Breathe so that it stretches out your shoulders and your back and your chest and pushes out your stomach.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_00: No more of these shallow, bullshit breaths.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_00: They're barely keeping you alive, my friend.
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_00: And after you exhale, go out and soak up today.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_00: Because in the end, your actions and the way they interact with the world and the people around you right now are all you have in this life.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_00: So be authentic with them.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_00: Peace.