Master the best of what other people have already figured out so you can use their lessons in your life to create an unstoppable advantage. Shane Parrish is an entrepreneur and sought-after speaker. His newsletter (https://fs.blog/podcast) offers timeless insights you can use to change your life.  In The Knowledge Project, Shane interviews people at the top of their game. Every episode is packed with hard-earned lessons that you can use in your life. Tune in to create an unstoppable advantage. Sit down and learn from the best. Previous guests include Reid Hoffman, Esther Perel, Daniel Kahneman, Tobi Lutke, Marshall Goldsmith, Kunal Shah, Ander Huberman, David Sinclair, Ret. General Stanley McChrystal, Marc Andreessen, Patrick Collison, Robert Cialdini, Walter Isaacson, Chris Bosh, Kat Cole, Adam Grant, Angela Duckworth, Seth Godin, Matt Mullenweg, Lisa Feldman Barrett, Maria Konnikova, Bill Ackman, Annie Duke, Derek Sivers, Jim Collins, Naval Ravikant, and many others. They reveal hard-earned lessons on leadership, decision-making, hiring and firing, productivity, habits, and more. New episodes are released every second Tuesday. Learn more at https://fs.blog/podcast

Master the best of what other people have already figured out so you can use their lessons in your life to create an unstoppable advantage. Shane Parrish is an entrepreneur and sought-after speaker. His newsletter (https://fs.blog/podcast) offers timeless insights you can use to change your life. In The Knowledge Project, Shane interviews people at the top of their game. Every episode is packed with hard-earned lessons that you can use in your life. Tune in to create an unstoppable advantage. Sit down and learn from the best. Previous guests include Reid Hoffman, Esther Perel, Daniel Kahneman, Tobi Lutke, Marshall Goldsmith, Kunal Shah, Ander Huberman, David Sinclair, Ret. General Stanley McChrystal, Marc Andreessen, Patrick Collison, Robert Cialdini, Walter Isaacson, Chris Bosh, Kat Cole, Adam Grant, Angela Duckworth, Seth Godin, Matt Mullenweg, Lisa Feldman Barrett, Maria Konnikova, Bill Ackman, Annie Duke, Derek Sivers, Jim Collins, Naval Ravikant, and many others. They reveal hard-earned lessons on leadership, decision-making, hiring and firing, productivity, habits, and more. New episodes are released every second Tuesday. Learn more at https://fs.blog/podcast

The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish

Practical Philosophy & How to live

Startups

Parenting

The founder and CEO of Character Lab, a nonprofit whose mission is to advance scientific insights that help children thrive. As well as a Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studies grit and self-control.

The underdog mindset and never being content with what you've already achieved.

How it's not always about having willpower, changing what situations we're in is another alternative.

The difference between rules and decisions

Angela Duckworth

Angela Duckworth is the Rosa Lee and Egbert Chang Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and the Founder and CEO of Character Lab, a not-for-profit whose mission is to advance the science and practice of character development. She’s also the author of Grit, a New York Timesbestseller that examines why some people succeed and others fail, and why talent is hardly a guarantor of success. Angela and Shane discuss whether human behavior is constant or circumstantial, the mindsets that help us succeed in life, developing our passion, and personal rules for success. -- Want even more? Members get early access, hand-edited transcripts, member-only episodes, and so much more. Learn more here: https://fs.blog/membership/   Every Sunday our Brain Food newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/   Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish

Angela Duckworth is the Rosa Lee and Egbert Chang Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and the Founder and CEO of Character Lab, a not-for-profit whose mission is to advance the science and practice of character development. She’s also the author of Grit, a New York Timesbestseller that examines why some people succeed and others fail, and why talent is hardly a guarantor of success. Angela and Shane discuss whether human behavior is constant or circumstantial, the mindsets that help us succeed in life, developing our passion, and personal rules for success. -- Want even more? Members get early access, hand-edited transcripts, member-only episodes, and so much more. Learn more here: <a href="https://fs.blog/membership/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://fs.blog/membership/</a> Every Sunday our Brain Food newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: <a href="https://fs.blog/newsletter/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://fs.blog/newsletter/</a> Follow Shane on Twitter at: <a href="https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish</a>

#109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior

Our situations have an impact on the kind of person we are, as does our personality have an impact on how we act in situations. After you've been in a job that requires lots of attention to detail, you yourself become more attentive to detail. So your circumstances can shape who you become. But to have been in that job in the first place, requires certain personality traits.

It's not so much nature versus nurture, as it is nature with nurture.

So the problem to solve for parents, or even for yourself, is finding the right size of challenge for your child or yourself, in the next moment in time. We often choose challenges that are too big or too small.

The number one thing that helps develop confidence is when people overcome something that they have genuinely struggled with.

It's not a gift that we usually want to receive at the moment it's given to us and the way it's given to us. Both figuring out how to wrap the gift of feedback so others are more likely to accept and find value in it, as well as figuring out how to unwrap others gifts of feedback, are skills we can learn.

Feedback is a gift, but most of us don't know how to unwrap it.

How much of your day are you hyper-conscious about exactly what you're trying to do?

"Being more interested in what we've done wrong, means we can do more right."

Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA, managing a 7 billion dollar budget for space projects.
- His research is mostly in in solar, experimental space research, space systems, and innovation and entrepreneurship.

What the biggest concerns are for what's happening in space.

Why Thomas doesn't want his employees to be calm when talking about what they're working on.

How the privitization of companies like SpaceX has impacted NASA.

Thomas Zurbuchen

Thomas Zurbuchen is currently Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA, where he seeks answers to big questions about the universe and our place in it. Previously, he was a professor of space science and aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan and a founding director of its Center for Entrepreneurship. In this episode, Thomas and Shane discuss the origin of his passion for astrophysics, commercial spaceflight, exciting experiments going on at the International Space Station, the challenges of space flight, how he makes decisions, whether humans will ever live on Mars, and more. -- Want even more? Members get early access, hand-edited transcripts, member-only episodes, and so much more. Learn more here: https://fs.blog/membership/   Every Sunday our Brain Food newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/   Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish

Thomas Zurbuchen is currently Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA, where he seeks answers to big questions about the universe and our place in it. Previously, he was a professor of space science and aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan and a founding director of its Center for Entrepreneurship. In this episode, Thomas and Shane discuss the origin of his passion for astrophysics, commercial spaceflight, exciting experiments going on at the International Space Station, the challenges of space flight, how he makes decisions, whether humans will ever live on Mars, and more. -- Want even more? Members get early access, hand-edited transcripts, member-only episodes, and so much more. Learn more here: <a href="https://fs.blog/membership/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://fs.blog/membership/</a> Every Sunday our Brain Food newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: <a href="https://fs.blog/newsletter/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://fs.blog/newsletter/</a> Follow Shane on Twitter at: <a href="https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish</a>

#108 Thomas Zurbuchen: Adventures in Astrophysics

For Thomas, it's like walking in the mountains on that ridge, on the one side, it's the irrelevant, where things are already proven, where it's easy to do research there, it's safe, you get tenure and can make a lot of money there. The other side is the impossible. Where it's not only about asking the right questions, but also whether it's the right time. For Thomas, the hardest part is to set the program at the right speed of innovation and allow for experimentation, for iteration, as opposed to kind of being that colossal kind of that kind of slow organization that only wants to make everything safe.

Thomas says: The hardest part of research is always to find the edge between safe and impossible.

[01:03:30] And it's not that you're divert attention from the critical path, but you also need to focus off the critical path and pattern match. Thomas says he listens really carefully to what you're not talking about, as opposed to only what you're talking about.

Everything off the critical path is what you're going to lose sleep over one year from now if you're not watching it.

Thomas believes that, one of the reasons our air borne travel is so safe is because of the mechanisms that were put in place on safety. Any pilot can say, we almost made a mistake. And for Thomas, that almost made a mistake mechanism is so important for big projects. because talking about the almost mistakes will help lead to focusing and hopefully fixing them. Talking about mistakes is better than not. Talking about things that were almost mistakes is even better.

When things get complicated enough, when organizations get big enough; you're not going to be the person solving the problem, so you have to create the environment where people can learn, iterate and improve.

Can you think of something that you learnt by looking at was omitted (or not talked about)?

"The answer to most questions that we ask in science is I don't know or I don't yet know. But that's ok, that's always been the case, look how far we've already come though."

Best-selling author on topics such as evolution, the environment, innovation and economics.
A member of The House of Lords in the UK, and was the chairman of the UK bank Northern Rock.
Writes for The Times (London) and Wall Street Journal, and worked for the Economist as science editor and Washington correspondent.

How innovation is much more about collaborative rather than lone geniuses.

Why we often default to zero sum thinking instead of growing the pie together.

Why we end up voicing stronger views and opinions on social media to get heard.

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley is the author of several books related to science and human progress, biologist, newspaper columnist and member of the House of Lords in the UK. Matt and Shane discuss writing books about science, the age-old battle between viruses and humans, rational optimism, the difference between innovation and invention, the role of trial and error and the effects of social media on seeing others’ points of view. -- Want even more? Members get early access, hand-edited transcripts, member-only episodes, and so much more. Learn more here: https://fs.blog/membership/   Every Sunday our Brain Food newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/   Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish

Matt Ridley is the author of several books related to science and human progress, biologist, newspaper columnist and member of the House of Lords in the UK. Matt and Shane discuss writing books about science, the age-old battle between viruses and humans, rational optimism, the difference between innovation and invention, the role of trial and error and the effects of social media on seeing others’ points of view. -- Want even more? Members get early access, hand-edited transcripts, member-only episodes, and so much more. Learn more here: <a href="https://fs.blog/membership/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://fs.blog/membership/</a> Every Sunday our Brain Food newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: <a href="https://fs.blog/newsletter/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://fs.blog/newsletter/</a> Follow Shane on Twitter at: <a href="https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish</a>

#107 Matt Ridley: Infinite Innovation

Inventors are the ones who come up with ideas. Innovation is the process by which an idea is turned into something practical, reliable, available and affordable for ordinary people. And that's a long slog and it's a lot of hard work and it's often more important, more difficult than the process of coming up with a good idea in the first place. A funny story Matt tells in the book, which illustrates the point, is a Beevor and a rabbit looking at the Hoover Dam, a hand made human dam, and the beaver says to the rabbit, I didn't build it, but it is based on an idea of mine. [00:14:31] And of course, getting from a simple beaver dam to the Hoover Dam requires a lot of innovation that isn't invention.

We tend to overvalue the idea and undervalue the execution.

Matt tries to not use the word creativity or creative people, because it tends to imply that a special sort of juice runs in the vein of inventors that doesn't run in the vein of ordinary people. Greats like Thomas Edison or Jeff Bezos all emphasize the importance of trial and error, failure of getting things wrong and ing again. Thomas Edison said. I haven't failed. I've just found 10000 ways that don't work. That doesn't mean, of course, that every failure. Is simply a step towards success. We can't expect that just because we're failing. We're eventually going to succeed. We have to still have a system and process that means we're learning from our failures and doing better every time. Every success has it's failures, but not all failures lead to success.

If you look at companies like Amazon and people like Thomas Edison, their stories can often be told as a series of failures, which ulitmately lead to success.

Matt references a lovely essay, called Pencil, written by an economist named Leonard Reid in 1958. [00:32:54] It's written by a pencil and the pencil is trying to understand its own origins. How did it come into the world? And it's researched it and it's discovered that it's made of wood and it's made of graphite and it's got paint on the outside and the razor in the end and so on. And so it traces the origin of these materials and it discovers that the wood came from a tree that was cut down in Oregon by a lumberjack who was drinking coffee at the time and using a chainsaw, which was made by somebody else. There's an enormous network of people went into manufacturing this one pencil. And yet not one of them knows how to make a pencil. Not even the person working in the pencil factory, because they don't know how to cut down a tree. So when you to see the world in this way. It makes it clear what amazing collaboration is going on the whole time between us through the medium of exchange, through me doing what I'm good at and you doing what you're good at and us sharing the results on a massive scale.

Collaboration is one of the greatest tools humanity has.

Can you think of a failure that really helped you succeed, and a failure that didn't help as much?

"There's no reason we can't innovate indefinitely, if not infinitely. If you think how far we've come in the last 200 years, imagine what the world will be like in the next 200"

Author of three bestselling books:
- The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business
- The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything... Fast!
- How to Fight a Hydra: Face Your Fears, Pursue Your Ambitions, and Become the Hero You Are Destined to Be

Why we should read more broadly, and then look for recurring patterns.

When and where not being dumb is the best way to be smart.

Overcoming the fear and anxiety of uncertainty, which is what his

Josh Kaufman

Author of one of the best business books of all time, The Personal MBA, Josh Kaufman chats with Shane about rapid skill acquisition, mental models, decision making, overcoming fear and so much more. -- Want even more? Members get early access, hand-edited transcripts, member-only episodes, and so much more. Learn more here: https://fs.blog/membership/   Every Sunday our Brain Food newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/   Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish

Author of one of the best business books of all time, The Personal MBA, Josh Kaufman chats with Shane about rapid skill acquisition, mental models, decision making, overcoming fear and so much more. -- Want even more? Members get early access, hand-edited transcripts, member-only episodes, and so much more. Learn more here: <a href="https://fs.blog/membership/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://fs.blog/membership/</a> Every Sunday our Brain Food newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: <a href="https://fs.blog/newsletter/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://fs.blog/newsletter/</a> Follow Shane on Twitter at: <a href="https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish</a>

#106 Josh Kaufman: Maximizing Our Locus of Control

Josh says he thinks that a lot of times people just sit with something that's not working or uncomfortable, without properly doing anything about it, limiting your ability to actually improve. For example: let's say you're unhappy with how you speak in certain contexts. Most people just know they're not happy with it and leave it at that. Josh says that intentionally improving upon this would look like: you're recording yourself, listening to it, and coming up with a plan for how you can change it. Then you're experimenting with how you speak and collecting feedback on it. Once you properly reflect upon your experience, it's often pretty straightforward to do what you need. It's the discipline in remembering and actively and intentionally trying to to deconstruct and go deeper that's hard. When it comes to reflecting upon your experiences, the faster your feedback loop, the faster your rate of growth and improvement. There should be a very short period of time between making a mistake or not performing in the way that you want to perform and then making the adjustment, making the improvement.

You don't learn from your experiences, you learn from actively reflecting & upgrading upon them.

Knowledge is the learning act, of gathering information, forming these concepts. Skill is, the ability to actually do something to produce a particular result in a reliable, repeatable way, it's always gained in the context of practice. Actually implementing and experimenting in reality often gets you a lot further than just reading or hearing about something, in order to actually achieve, you have to turn knowledge into skill, which means putting things into practice. In many areas of both life and business, more experimentation means more mistakes, but it also means more results and more growth.

Knowledge and skill aren't the same thing, but a lot of people conflate the two.

The people you are closest to are the ones that you share and ask for feedback on your decisions, so their world view shapes how you make your decisions. At the same time, Josh says one of the greatest things about your peer group, is that they can violate your expectations about what's possible. They can help you learn about potential experiences that you wouldn't expect would work or was possible. They try things that you've never tried before, they can do experiments that maybe don't work out and you can learn from that.

You and your 5 closest people aren't just similar to each other, you can significantly improve each others understanding and decisions.

"Most of us live better than kings did as early as 100 years ago, but our satisfaction levels don't reflect this reality, because we're constantly comparing ourselves to others."

An entrepreneur &amp; marketer with one of the most popular blogs in the world on business &amp; marketing, founder of AltMBA.
- Author of 19 best selling books including Purple Cow, This is Marketing, The practice, covering creative work, marketing &amp; more.
- Founder of Yoyodyne, which was sold for ~$30 million to Yahoo! and became Yahoo's vice president of direct marketing.

ow sunk costs is a gift from your former self &amp; how it plays into our daily lives.

The role that friction &amp; luck play into our lives, and how friction has changed with technology.

The difference between an amateur and professional, and hobbies versus labour.

Seth Godin

Seth Godin is the author of 20 bestselling books, founder of altMBA, the Akimbo podcast and runs one of the most popular blogs in the world. Seth and Shane chat about creative work, fear, shame, trusting yourself, what it means to be a professional, how to become an observer of reality, emotional labor, how we learn and so much more. -- Want even more? Members get early access, hand-edited transcripts, member-only episodes, and so much more. Learn more here: https://fs.blog/membership/   Every Sunday our Brain Food newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/   Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish

Seth Godin is the author of 20 bestselling books, founder of altMBA, the Akimbo podcast and runs one of the most popular blogs in the world. Seth and Shane chat about creative work, fear, shame, trusting yourself, what it means to be a professional, how to become an observer of reality, emotional labor, how we learn and so much more. -- Want even more? Members get early access, hand-edited transcripts, member-only episodes, and so much more. Learn more here: <a href="https://fs.blog/membership/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://fs.blog/membership/</a> Every Sunday our Brain Food newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: <a href="https://fs.blog/newsletter/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://fs.blog/newsletter/</a> Follow Shane on Twitter at: <a href="https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish</a>

#105 Seth Godin: Failing On Our Way To Mastery

Sometimes we're in a bad mood or get discouraged because of some negative feedback or event, which makes it much harder to think about what the best thing to do is in that moment. And in those moments, you are not the best version of yourself, but you're still yourself. But if you have a practice and habit, you get through those hiccups, because you've already decided previously you're going to do it. You want to set-up processes and a consistent practice for the things that you know you want to do in the long term, make the decision once, then you have a process that doesn't depend on how you're feeling in the moment.

Process saves us from the poverty of our intentions.

All around us, there are people who make choices that we would not make, who do things that we would not do. People eating food we wouldn't eat, participating in activities we wouldn't want a part of. This happens is because everyone tells themselves a different story. They don't believe what we believe. They don't know what we know. They don't want what we want. Realizing the different stories people tell themselves, help you better understand how we can interact with others in the world.

Most people don't do anything that doesn't make sense to themselves.

If you had a boss who woke you up in the middle of the night, scolded you for not working hard enough, criticized all your work and told you you were never going to amount to anything, you would not work for that person for very long. And yet most of us that is our own boss, that's who we work for, that voice in our head. And if that voice is shaming you, you need to figure out how to undo that internal narrative because it is extinguishing your work. Useful feedback from people who know how to give criticism doesn't come with shame, it's just information.

How dare you is not said often enough to people who are seeking to shame us.

"Dolly Parton says: Find out who you are and do it on purpose. Seth likes to flip Dolly's phrase upside down, and say do it on purpose and you'll find out who you are."

Author of two bestselling books &amp; lecturer on building habit form products &amp; becoming indistractable (how to control your attention).
- Worked in the video gaming and advertising industries where he learned, applied (and at times rejected) the techniques used to motivate and manipulate users.

Nir's four step process in dealing with distractions &amp; how it's the same for both children and parents&nbsp;

How every distraction is one of three reasons: internal trigger, an external trigger or a planning problem&nbsp;

Some real life examples of things Nir does with his kids and wife, for a better life.

Nir Eyal

Bestselling author of Hooked and Indistractable, Nir Eyal was dubbed by The M.I.T. Technology Review as, “The Prophet of Habit-Forming Technology.” In this episode, Shane and Nir discuss regaining control of our attention from technology, how to get more done in less time, controlling the things you have agency over and so much more. -- Want even more? Members get early access, hand-edited transcripts, member-only episodes, and so much more. Learn more here: https://fs.blog/membership/   Every Sunday our Brain Food newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/   Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish

Bestselling author of Hooked and Indistractable, Nir Eyal was dubbed by The M.I.T. Technology Review as, “The Prophet of Habit-Forming Technology.” In this episode, Shane and Nir discuss regaining control of our attention from technology, how to get more done in less time, controlling the things you have agency over and so much more. -- Want even more? Members get early access, hand-edited transcripts, member-only episodes, and so much more. Learn more here: <a href="https://fs.blog/membership/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://fs.blog/membership/</a> Every Sunday our Brain Food newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: <a href="https://fs.blog/newsletter/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://fs.blog/newsletter/</a> Follow Shane on Twitter at: <a href="https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish</a>

#104 Nir Eyal: Mastering Indistraction

Nir says that research doesn't support that human motivation is about incentives (carrots or sticks), but rather it's about the desire to escape discomfort. Everything we do is for the desire to escape discomfort, even the pursuit of pleasurable sensations such as craving, desire, wanting, lusting, are themselves psychologically destabilising, they feel bad. When applied to managing distraction, we realise, what causes distractions is not external triggers outside of us, but rather distraction begins from within, what we call the internal triggers. Whether it's too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook, it doesn't matter. Something is going to distract you unless you understand what feeling you are trying to escape.

Procastination often comes from internally, not externally.

Every new technology has goods and bads, any technology of a large scale. The question is how do we keep the good aspects without succumbing to the bad aspects? And the answer is quite simple. It's what we've always done in history. We adapt and we adopt. We adapt our behaviors and we adopt new technology to fix the last generation of crappy technology. This is what we have always done. We did this with the motor car. We did this with television. We did this with radio. We always do this. But when we turn from a healthy attribute of skepticism to cynical, where we think these tech companies can't do anything to help, then there's a missed opportunity. We want to encourage more more people to go into tech, not necessarily to support big tech, but to create the new tech that fixes the latest problems in tech.

From Socrates, the Greek philosopher: Nothing great enters the life of mortals without a curse.

The opposite of distraction isn't focus, it's traction. Traction by definition, is any action that pulls you towards what you planned to do or wanted to achieve, things that you do with intent. Distraction is any action that pulls you away from what you planned to do or wanted to achieve, anything that is not done with intent. The key is the same actions can be either traction or distraction, depending on the context. Watching Youtube when you've finished your work and plan to relax is traction. Checking email when you should be working on more important tasks is a distraction.

The most dangerous form of distraction, is the kind that feels traction.

Can you think of something that feels like you're making traction but is actually a distraction?

"Lots of things in life are not your fault. But they are still your responsibility."

Loch Kelly

Loch Kelly is an author, meditation teacher, psychotherapist, and founder of the Open-Hearted Awareness Institute. Shane and Loch do a deep dive into mindfulness, consciousness, how to not let your emotions take over, ways to access your hidden awareness, debugging your mind and so much more. -- Want even more? Members get early access, hand-edited transcripts, member-only episodes, and so much more. Learn more here: https://fs.blog/membership/   Every Sunday our Brain Food newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/   Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish

Loch Kelly is an author, meditation teacher, psychotherapist, and founder of the Open-Hearted Awareness Institute. Shane and Loch do a deep dive into mindfulness, consciousness, how to not let your emotions take over, ways to access your hidden awareness, debugging your mind and so much more. -- Want even more? Members get early access, hand-edited transcripts, member-only episodes, and so much more. Learn more here: <a href="https://fs.blog/membership/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://fs.blog/membership/</a> Every Sunday our Brain Food newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: <a href="https://fs.blog/newsletter/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://fs.blog/newsletter/</a> Follow Shane on Twitter at: <a href="https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish</a>

#103 Loch Kelly: Effortless Mindfulness

Quoted directly from Locke: "So. Probably, as I look back, one of my first experiences was living outside of New York City and playing a lot of different sports. I was playing ice hockey goalie and I was watching a football game on TV. [00:05:13] And the announcer said about the quarterback, he's got eyes in the back of his head. And I thought, oh, I know what that is like, I it doesn't mean you can actually see back there, but you have this kind of peripheral awareness that isn't just visual. It isn't just sensing or informational. Let me see if I can do that. And I literally ed playing with my own consciousness and awareness, and I ended up finding a way to open my awareness around to the sides and my peripheral vision followed. [00:05:50] And then I kind of let this awareness move to the sides where sounds coming, going. And then somehow it's kind of like, I'm not sure what I'm doing. But the awareness continued around in this kind of 360 degree panoramic feeling that then just dropped me into my body. So I felt kind of spacious and embodied kind of in this timeless here, almost like a cat. So I said, OK, let me do this when I play sports. [00:06:21] And so the next time I went and played goalie, I said, OK, here we go. And I intentionally did this way of getting into the flow or zone. And then I was, you know, felt more capable and more like everything was enjoyable. I was interconnected with everything. Somebody would take a slap shot from the blue line and then all of a sudden I'd see it for the first five yards and then it would get lost in legs and sticks. [00:06:54] And then my hand would go out in the park would be in there and I'd be like, Oh, cool."

Locke talks about his initial experience with effortless mindfulness.

I distinguish two kinds of flow state, ones is an absorbed flow state where you're so interested in activity and you're focused one point at attention and you're kind of go into it and then time you look up and an hour's gone by. So you kind of enter that world and everything else is gone and they call that a flow state. But that's not as interesting to me as what I call a panoramic flow state, which is when similar to that initial exercise of opening your awareness around and feeling embodied, you're in the world connected to everybody and everything you're aware of being able to do kind of optimal functioning of complex tasks without thinking about thinking. [00:15:58] And then you feel in the now you feel selfless, a kind of sense of joy or well-being or ecstasy. Your implicit memory is you're thinking so you know how to do whatever you're doing and you're just operating from an awake awareness consciousness that's organizing your thoughts in a way that's effortlessly mindful.

Quote directly from Locke:

[01:07:37] There's small H happiness, which is the attempt to find some kind of pleasure or satisfaction, such as having a good meal, where the endorphins hit and then filling up of a biological stomach that was craving something and then feeling good after eating. Then when that fades, then what's revealed is what's the baseline. [01:09:20] So happiness with a capital H is the baseline, which is this kind of okay-ness and well-being with nature, which kind of feels like it's OK, I'm here and someday I'm going to die. I'm aware of the part that's afraid of death. And I'm afraid and part that feels like I'm not good enough and I should do something to be OK. The key is, happiness with a capital H is hidden in the background, but already installed in our brians. And if we can learn how to make the capital H come from the background to the foreground, we get to experience relief, joy &amp; happiness. Because we realise that despite life being filled with ups and downs, they are all so small compared to the baseline.

Different types of happiness:

Can you think of something that you may have overreacted to in hindsight?

"We try to change our thoughts and beliefs instead of trying to change the level at which we're accessing the mind."