The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk
Read my NEW BOOK -- The Price of Becoming -  www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming
Eric Ries is the author of The Lean Startup, one of the most influential business books of the past 25 years, and the founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, the first new U.S. exchange to both list and trade multiple stocks since NASDAQ launched 50 years ago. His new book is Incorruptible.
Key Learnings
The more successful a company becomes, the more valuable it is as a target. Companies are worth stealing and taking over. Most founders are naive about this and don't understand what's coming for them. They've been following the so-called best practices about how companies should be built, structured, and governed. Most of those best practices are value-destroying.
Sol Price was a lawyer before he became an entrepreneur. He believed a lawyer had a fiduciary duty to put the client's interests before his own. So when he became a retailer, he asked: "Who's my client?" The customer. He treated the customer as the person he would rather die than betray. When competitors sold a product for less, he'd put up signs in his own store: "Don't buy this from me. You can get it cheaper somewhere else." He capped his margins at 14 percent. He paid above-market wages.
It is so much easier to destroy than to create. One day, Sol came into work and couldn't get into his office because the locks had been changed. Investors had pushed him out and forced Fedmart to practice retail best practices. Within seven years, they bankrupted the company. We've built an economy that rewards people for cost-cutting without holding them accountable for the consequences to trustworthiness, brand, or culture.
The origin story of Costco: Sol took two weeks off, then leased the office upstairs from Fedmart and started Price Club. One of the young guys who left with him, Jim Sinegal, had worked his way up from stock boy. Jim eventually started his own company using the Sol ethos. A few years later, their companies merged to form what we now call Costco.
Wall Street routinely calls Costco the exception to every rule. Wall Street analysts say things like: "At Costco, they take money that rightfully belongs to shareholders and instead invest it in the customer experience." As if that's a criticism. Costco endures because it's protected by a governance fortress. A series of worst practices that resist outside pressure structurally.
The $1.50 hot dog has been the same price since 1986. A McDonald's Big Mac was $1.60 in 1986. Today that same Big Mac in California is over $7. Costco sells more hot dogs than every Major League Baseball stadium in America combined. If they raised the combo to $7, it would be a billion dollars of extra net income. They could do it. They choose not to.
"If you raise the price of the effing hot dog, I will kill you. So figure it out." Jim Sinegal said it to his COO in 2008 when costs were rising. Figure it out. Costco vertically integrated the hot dog supply chain. They own hot dog production plants in multiple cities. They worked deals with soda vendors. They did all that extra work for the privilege of not making more money on the hot dog.
Harder is easier. "When you take the hard road, when you make a principled commitment, you get these almost unbelievable values. Because you're generating the most underrated and most valuable asset in all of business: trustworthiness."
"Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life." Jerzy Gregorek, Olympic weightlifter.
"Everybody wanna be a bodybuilder. Nobody wanna lift these heavy ass weights." Ronnie Coleman, eight-time Mr. Olympia. Everyone wants the outcome. Nobody wants to do the actual thing.
Culture and mission can be cultivated, not commanded. Most leaders get this wrong. They say "I'm in charge of my team." But can you command your team to have integrity? Can you command it to have a particular culture? You have to make consistent, responsible choices, just like cultivating health in your body.
Get reps. Eric gave practice talks at a Hobee's restaurant at 7 AM to six people just to get the reps. Caring and trying to do a good job is so unbelievably rare. That alone is a competitive advantage.
Feedback tells you something about the person giving it, not about yourself. If someone reads Eric's manuscript and says, "This book sucks," he hasn't learned anything about the book. He's learned this person doesn't like this kind of book. When he stopped arguing with negative customer reviews and started studying who they came from, he noticed patterns. People 16 and younger loved the product. People 16 and older hated it. He learned who his product was for.
Separate qualitative from quantitative feedback. Qualitative is for hypothesis generation. Quantitative is for hypothesis validation. When test readers told him a chapter wasn't working, that was qualitative. When the platform data showed nobody was getting past that chapter, that was quantitative. You need both to know what to fix.
It is always too early until it's too late. Eric tells the story of a multibillion-dollar founder he warned before his IPO. The founder talked to his bankers, lawyers, and CFO. They told him Eric was a downer. The founder went public anyway with conventional governance. Five months later, his stock dropped 90 percent, and he was ousted. The best time to plant a tree is 40 years ago. The second-best time is today.
Eric's checklist for building an incorruptible company:
Encode your mission into the corporate charter. Most founders have never read their charter. If your mission statement says one thing but your legal charter says another, you're lying. The easiest fix: file a public benefit corp filing (PBC). Two pages. 44 states. Your lawyer can do it tomorrow.
Identify your fiduciary commitments. Who would you rather die than betray? Is it your customers? Your employees? Product quality? You decide. If your answer is nobody, you're a sociopath. The whole book is for the people who actually want to accomplish something.
Align your employees to that mission. Make sure everybody on the team is committed to the same fiduciary priority.
Create a director's oath. Like the Hippocratic Oath for doctors, but for your board. They must pledge to commit to the company's mission. Board betrayal and investor pressure are leading causes of death of companies in the modern world.
Make the directors accountable to somebody. Power without accountability is corrosive to the human spirit. Novo Nordisk is governed by a nonprofit foundation. Patagonia is governed by a perpetual purpose trust. John Lewis Partnership in the UK is governed by an employee ownership trust. IKEA, Vanguard, and REI all have these structures. The data shows these companies are dramatically more stable and higher performing than conventional structures.
You are not stuck in traffic. You are traffic. People love to blame the system. But you're not just a passenger. You're part of what creates the system. Where you work. What you buy. What you give your attention to. Every one of those choices is fueling somebody's company, somebody's algorithm, somebody's bonus. The richest people in the world spend billions on PR because they know your individual choices matter. Use that power.
Eric's champagne moment a year from now: a grassroots movement around Incorruptible. This book won't get wall-to-wall media coverage. It's antagonistic to people in power. So Eric hopes readers will hand it to their founders, their bosses, their friends. If consumers and employees start demanding, "I want to work in an incorruptible company," that's the toast.
Reflection Questions
What is your equivalent of Costco's hot dog? The one commitment you'd defend even when it's financially painful, even when the easy move would be to abandon it?
Have you ever read your corporate charter, or the foundational document of your team or department? Does what's actually written match what you say you stand for?
Where in your work or life would the harder short-term path build something more durable in the long run? Are you willing to lift the heavy weights?
More Learning
#258: Jesse Itzler: Creating Your Life Resume & Living Outside the Box
#529: James Clear: Setting Up Your Future Self & Becoming an Optimist
#565: Noah Kahan: The Art of Asking For What You Want
Podcast Chapters
00:00 The Price of Becoming - Pre-Order Now! 
01:03 Meet Eric Ries 
02:55 Is It Possible to Build an Incorruptible Company? 
04:04 Why Culture Alone Won't Save You 
05:13 Sol Price, Fedmart, and the Locks That Got Changed 
07:56 Why Wall Street Calls Costco the Exception 
09:11 The $1.50 Hot Dog Story 
13:59 Harder Is Easier: The Principle Behind It All 
16:48 Why Governance Is Just Soul Craft 
19:50 Building the First New Stock Exchange Since Nasdaq 
22:33 Eric's Communication Style: Reps, Not Talent 
30:52 The Opportunity Hiding in Broken Markets 
31:59 How to Know Which Feedback to Listen To 
35:39 Qualitative vs. Quantitative: Why You Need Both 
37:23 The Whole Foods Cautionary Tale 
40:25 The Founder's Checklist for Building Something Durable 
43:44 Encode Your Mission Into the Corporate Charter 
47:35 You Are Not Stuck in Traffic. You Are the Traffic. 
52:37 The Champagne Question: A Grassroots Movement 
55:27 James Clear, Author's Equity, and the Future of Publishing
56:43 EOPC

Go to www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming for my new book, The Price of Becoming
This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver.
Dr. Henry Cloud is a clinical psychologist, leadership consultant, and New York Times bestselling author whose books have sold nearly 20 million copies worldwide. His titles include Boundaries, Integrity, Necessary Endings, and Trust. For three decades, he has worked with leaders, helping them close the gap between where they are and where they want to be. His newest book is Your Desired Future: The Five Essential Steps That Take You Where You Want to Go.
Key Learnings
Henry's five-step model for getting from here to there:
Vision (clear and compelling)
Talent (engaging the right people around you)
Strategy and plan (how you'll win)
Measurement and accountability (how you'll know)
Fix and adapt (course-correcting in real time)
At the age of 16, Henry's daughter asked, "Dad, how do people become singer-songwriters?" Henry went out to the garage and brought in his whiteboard. Lucy rolled her eyes. He gave her the five-step model. A couple years later, she published a song called "Crash and Learn" that got bought by CBS, the CW Network, and featured on Spotify and Apple Music.
We tend to create departments and businesses in our own image. Of the five components, we're going to be good at two, maybe three. But the others still have to happen. That's where most leaders fail.
Only humans can picture a desired future state. Finley is Henry's Doberman. When the FedEx guy comes to the door, she runs to it, and barks every time. Henry has never seen her stop and ask herself: "I wonder if that barking will help me get to where I want to be on Thursday." Most leaders are operating like Finley. Working hard. Doing what they've always done. Never stopping to ask if any of it is getting them where they want to be.
You need an observing ego. The worst thing you can do is hit the accelerator harder when you're going down the wrong road and you don't even know where you're going.
Tony Blair, while Prime Minister, spent half a day a week sitting by himself next to a pond in reflection. Warren Buffett spends an hour and a half a day at his desk staring out the window. 
A revenue number is not a vision. The single worst vision statement Henry ever heard: "We want to be a $50 million company." It provides no clarity of what the company is going to do.  
A vision is a compelling picture of a future state that makes people want to sacrifice for it. If your vision wouldn't inspire anyone to get out of bed early, it's a metric, not a vision.
Will Guidara created a "dream maker" role at Eleven Madison Park. Their job: listen for clues from guests, then create a personalized, unexpected, memorable experience the guest will never forget and tell everyone about.
Trust Fuels Investment. People invest in leaders who feel like they understand them. You're taking your team into a war. They've got to have deep trust with you. The first thing a leader has to do is develop deep, deep trust and let their team know that they understand the pressure they're under.
"A vision can die without a plan or without people."
Alan Mulally's weekly 7:00 AM Thursday meeting at Ford. Every VP had to give every project a red, yellow, or green status. When Mulally first arrived, the company was hemorrhaging money. Everyone was holding up green. He said: "How can you be holding up green when here's the reality over here? I need some reality in here." When one VP finally held up red, Mulally moved him to sit next to him.
The wrong view of accountability is looking back to spank somebody for what they didn't do. The right view of accountability is a tool to make sure we reach our destination.
You get what you create or what you allow. Henry was working with a global CEO whose team had cultural problems. Henry kept asking, "Why is that?" After a few rounds, the CEO finally said, "I guess I am ridiculously in charge, aren't I?" If you are the one actually in charge, you are ridiculously in charge. Either you're creating it, or you're allowing it.
Accountability answers two questions:
Did we do what we said we were going to do? If not, why not? Don't just tell people to "do better." Run a root cause analysis. Maybe they don't have the tools. Maybe you gave them competing goals. Maybe it's a leadership problem.
If we executed perfectly, did we get the result we expected? If yes, pour on the gas. If no, go back up the model and adjust your strategy.
Most leaders measure goals, not activities. Goals are lagging indicators. You can measure them after it's over. It's too late. Measure activities. Did we do this week what we said we were going to do?
Micro drivers matter. Henry worked with a CEO who built multi-billions in valuation from a one-office company who was excellent with micro drivers. It's an atomic compression of the 80/20 rule. He knew the specific activities at each level of the business that actually moved the needle, and he made those objects of extreme awareness, focus, training, and deliberate practice.
Peter Drucker said, "Nothing's worse than perfectly executing the wrong things."
The number one thing the greatest leaders share: character. Not moral or ethical character. Your makeup as a person. How you're glued together. Integrity comes from the word that means wholeness. The great performers are drivers of tasks and relationships.
The highest performers utilize coaching the most. Henry expected the disastrous leaders  to be the ones calling. It was the exact opposite. The ones crushing it are the ones who reach out. The struggling ones rarely do.
The greatest leaders reverse the law of entropy: things get worse over time. But entropy only applies to a closed system. Open the system to a new energy source from the outside plus intelligence to organize it, and you can reverse it. That's what coaches, mentors, and advisors do. A leader is a closed system when the only voices they're ever listening to are the ones in their head.
The greatest leaders embrace negative realities. They move toward problems. Not to nuke them, but to either resolve them or transform them into something better.
Reflection Questions
In how many areas of your life are you just barking at the door, working hard at activities without ever stopping to ask if any of it is getting you where you want to go?
Is your current vision a metric, or a compelling picture of a future state that would make people want to sacrifice for it?
Where in your life are you a closed system? Whose voices outside your head could open you up to new energy and intelligence?
More Learning
#229 - Dr. Henry Cloud: Be So Good They Can't Ignore You
#050 - Dr. Henry Cloud: Integrity is the Wake You Leave Behind
#682 - Will Guidara: Adversity is a Terrible Thing to Waste
Podcast Chapters
00:00 The Price of Becoming – Pre-Order Now!
01:13 Meet Dr. Henry Cloud
02:40 The Leadership GPS: Where Are You Going?
04:54 Step 2: Building the Right Team Around You
06:09 Steps 3-5: Strategy, Measurement, and Adapt
10:45 Why the Best Leaders Carve Out Time to Think
15:50 Why a Revenue Number Is Not a Vision
18:20 Crafting a Vision People Will Sacrifice For
23:12 The HVAC Story, Joe Girard, and the Dream Maker
27:38 Trust: The First Thing Every Leader Must Build
30:04 Alan Mulally's Red-Yellow-Green Meeting at Ford
32:38 How to Run Status Reviews That Actually Work
34:26 Accountability Should Be an Immune System, Not Autoimmune
38:18 Measure Activities, Not Goals
43:10 Micro Drivers: The Atomic 80/20 Rule
45:14 The Voices Outside Your Head: Peers and Accountability
47:47 The #1 Trait of Sustained Excellence: Character
50:39 The Greatest Leaders Reverse Entropy
56:17 EOPC

NEW BOOK -- The Price of Becoming
Buy it -- www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming
The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk
This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver.
Jim Collins is the author of some of the most influential business books ever written — Good to Great, Built to Last, and Great by Choice. His concepts have become part of the leadership vocabulary. Level 5 Leadership. The Flywheel. First Who, Then What. The Hedgehog Concept. He spent more than a decade at Stanford as a professor and has advised CEOs, four-star generals, and heads of state. His new book is What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire, and the Self-Knowledge Imperative. It is the product of ten years of research and is the most personal thing he has ever written. We flew to Boulder, Colorado, to record this one in person with Jim.
Key Learnings
Jim's grandfather wrote his own death story. Jimmy Collins was a test pilot in the 1930s. He told Jim's grandmother, Dolores, that if he died, she should pull the last chapter from his desk and publish it. He died in a test crash. After the service, she pulled out the chapter. The title was "I'm Dead." The last chapter, written in first person, described the plane coming out of the sky, the screaming wings, the crash. The final words, by his own pen: "I am dead now."
For seven decades, his grandmother never cried. When Jim asked her in her nineties to tell the story of his grandfather, she cried and said, "Thank you for that. I've never cried before." She'd been a single mom in the middle of the Depression. Of all the things Jim feels good about in his life, asking her to tell that story before she died at almost 100 years old is one he's most proud of.
A cliff is an event that alters the trajectory of your life and forces you to reconstruct everything that comes after.
Jim's first big cliff: he lost his father while his father was still alive. Jim's father took the family to San Francisco in the 1960s. They lived a few houses down from Haight Street. When a man was shot dead on their doorstep, Jim's mom moved them to Boulder. They lived in a cold basement with cots and a hot plate. They couldn't afford a Christmas tree, so Jim and his brother rolled a boulder into the basement and called it their Christmas rock.
The Greyhound bus moment. In high school, Jim took a Thanksgiving turkey on a Greyhound bus down to New Mexico, where his father was living in an adobe hut with a dirt floor. He had this romantic vision: they'd cook the turkey, share Thanksgiving, bond as father and son. The whole weekend, his father had no interest in him. He spent it trying to convince Jim to convince his grandmother to give him money. On the bus ride home, looking out the window into the fog, Jim realized: there will never, ever be a father there. No male role models. No frameworks. No guidance. "I've got this one life. What do I do with it?"
The inflection point in Jim's life is Joanne. They got engaged four days after their first date. He'd admired her from afar for years but never had the courage to ask her out. Once they were together, Jim began a conscious process: I need to become a person worthy of being married to her. He didn't know exactly what that meant or how to get there. But he knew that was the work. Forty-six years later, it's still a never-ending journey.
What Joanne does brilliantly: she sees what needs attention. Jim is encoded to hear it. Someone once asked Joanne what she thought Jim's greatest strength was. She said: "Jim takes critical feedback better than any person I've ever met." Joanne sees what needs attention. Jim hears it. Then they adapt and adjust. That's the inner flywheel of their marriage.
Circle the wagons together. Guns pointing out, never at each other. When life gets really difficult, whether it's disease or other cliffs. You are always together. Always on the inside of the wagons. Never aimed at each other.
Joanne won the 1985 Hawaii Ironman by 92 seconds. With a hamstring injury that limited her running training to 16 miles a week, she came off the bike with a 10-minute lead. Then mile by mile, the lead shrank. Nine minutes. Eight. Seven. With a few miles left, she stopped in the middle of the lava field, massaging her legs, almost pleading with them to run. She looked up at the sky. Then her gaze fixed somewhere down the road. She started to run.
You're racing for self-respect. Joanne told Jim afterward: in the end, you're racing to know that you couldn't have run a step faster. Only you'll know. If you know you couldn't have run a step faster, that's actually winning.
When Jim writes, he's on the lava fields. When he finishes a book, he wants to know he couldn't have written one sentence better. When you're on the lava fields, this is the moment you want to quit. Don't.
Writing is thinking. When the writing isn't working, the thinking isn't clear. Go back to the data. Find the through-line.
There are three types of luck:
What luck. A cancer diagnosis. A guitar left in an empty house. An event that breaks your way.
Who luck. The people who walk into your life. Joanne. Morten Hansen. Jerry Porras. Bill Lazier.
Zeit luck. When what you're doing intersects with the surrounding zeitgeist. Jimmy Page was in Surrey when the British rock explosion happened.
Luck is an event you didn't cause, with significant consequences, and an element of surprise.
The big winners weren't luckier. They had a higher return on luck. What you do with luck events matters more than the luck itself.
Bill Lazier: the closest thing to a father Jim ever had. Jim ended up in Bill's class at Stanford because the class he was trying to take was full. The random course-sorting mechanism threw him into the first class Bill ever taught. Pure WHO luck. Jim did not cause that. 
Discover your encodings. An encoding is a durable capacity of your intrinsic construction that resides within, awaiting discovery through the experiences of life. 
Jim has done over 300 online courses on every imaginable subject. Constitutional law. Napoleon. World War I. The history of China. He started them to learn how to teach. Then his curiosity took over. That's what an encoding looks like in the wild.
You have a constellation of encodings. Like stars. When your life captures a bright set of those encodings, you're in frame. When it doesn't, you're out of frame. The same person can look amazing in frame and not very amazing out of frame.
The most important finding from this book: don't follow anyone else's advice. Their advice is well-meaning. It may have worked beautifully for them. But it worked for them because it flowed from their encodings. And their encodings are not your encodings.
Barbara McClintock and Grace Hopper. Two women who won the Nobel Prize and shaped computer science. McClintock was encoded for solitary work. She didn't even have a phone. She heard about her Nobel Prize on the radio. Hopper was encoded to work through people. She kept a pirate flag in her office and once stole furniture for her team in the middle of the night. Two completely different encodings. What they shared: their lives were in alignment with their encodings.
Leadership is the art of getting people to want to do what must be done. It's not a trait. It's a choice. Anyone in any organization can lead, depending on their desire to make a difference. Nobody needs to wait for a title.
Ryan's encoding is "the relentless persistence of invitation." Jim observed that Ryan has incredible encodings for what he'd describe as attractive persistence. Not pushy. Not aggressive. But persistent and welcoming. The invitation never goes away.
The way you lead should be different from everyone else. Because you are encoded differently. Trust your encodings, not their playbook.
Roger Sherman saved the U.S. Constitution. Twice. He created the bicameral legislature compromise. He insisted the Bill of Rights be amendments, not rewrites. Yet most people don't know his name. He almost never spoke. He listened in committees and waited for the precise moment to introduce just the right point to turn American history. Quiet. Behind the scenes. Uncharismatic. Unglamorous. Enormously effective. That was his encoding.
You should largely ignore what other successful leaders did. It's marvelous to listen to. It might give you ideas. But everything that worked for them reflected their encodings, not yours. The work isn't to copy their playbook. The work is to discover your encodings and trust them.
The color of Jim's fire changed. When he was younger, his fuel was rage, fury, and a sense of terror with no safety net. He used to worry that if he ever lost it, he'd lose his drive. What replaced it was a different kind of fire: the joy of curiosity, of being lost in giant projects, of marvelous conversations, of sharing what he's learned. His drive is higher than ever. It just feels a lot better now.
The 3x3 reflective practice. After almost any conversation, teaching moment, or significant interaction, Jim writes down three things that went well and three things he could have done better. He's done it for years. He's now systematizing it. He doesn't pause to celebrate. He pauses to learn quickly and move on.
At the top of Jim's notes for this conversation: "The biggest reminder for today, reconnecting with an old friend." That's the celebration. What could be a better celebration than reconnecting with somebody you've had marvelous conversations with?
Reflection Questions
What is your most significant cliff? What did you reconstruct on the other side, and what are you still rebuilding?
What are your encodings? Not what you've been told you should be, but what genuinely flows from your intrinsic construction. When have you felt most in frame?
Like Jim with Joanne, is there a person or purpose you are actively trying to become worthy of? What would that work look like this week?
More Learning
#397: Jim Collins - Creating Your Generosity Flywheel, Make the Trust Wager (Part 1)
#398: Jim Collins - Creating Your Generosity Flywheel, Make the Trust Wager (Part 2)
#216: Jim Collins - How to Go From Good to Great

Pre-Order new book, The Price of Becoming www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming
This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver
My Guest:
Dr. Nicole LePera is the creator of The Holistic Psychologist, a platform with over 12 million followers, and the author of three New York Times bestselling books, including her newest, Reparenting the Inner Child.
Key Learnings:
Nicole was good at everything, so struggling meant failure. Her family's message was clear: success in life meant financial security through academics or athletics. The implicit message: you're worthy when you're bringing home A's, when you're winning the softball game. She quickly learned to identify things she wasn't immediately good at and just not pursue them. She filtered life, staying on the path of comfort.
Your childhood adaptations don't leave. Nicole calls it the inner child. It doesn't matter how old you are or how far beyond your childhood you think you've gotten. It impacts you in reactions, in identities, in your way of being. What was once your best attempt at safety, security, or connection still drives behavior today.
Not all adaptations are problems. Many continue to benefit us.
The question isn't whether the adaptation is good or bad. The question is: are you choosing it, or is it choosing you? Nicole's drive for achievement created opportunities. It led to massive impact. But she still has the overachiever who wants to blow past her limits and say yes when she's exhausted but means no.  
The Holistic Psychologist started in 2018, and Nicole had no idea it would explode. She was living in Philadelphia, operating within a private practice model. Within the first year, people from around the world were resonating, joining, and interested in working with her in this new way. But at the beginning, even learning how to speak on camera was such a big challenge. Her partner would say, "Say what you said to me earlier," and Nicole's mind would go blank. Just putting a camera in front of her was near debilitating.
Boundaries are about knowing who and when to take feedback from. Sometimes the feedback from a loved one, while uncomfortable, is helpful to hear. Other times, it's a helpful boundary where you're not opening yourself up to the opinion of someone who has a different vantage point or is speaking from their own projection. That's allowed Nicole to create safety in herself, confidence in herself, which translates to flow.
Several years in, Nicole's dad sat front row at her book event, crying with pride. In the beginning, her dad and mom would ask, "Why do you have to use us as the example? Why do you have to share about our family?" Nicole would explain: " This is the only experience I can speak from, and our family's experience is so common. To see her dad, who came from a family largely shut down emotionally, crying in understanding and pride, was overwhelming and validating for why she does this work.
At 13, Nicole was getting straight A's but unraveling on the inside. She was socially shy, struggled to order food at restaurants, and had very few friends. Then she discovered alcohol and pot made her feel comfortable. That anxiety she lived with suddenly felt freer. She would stumble through the living room at night, her parents already in bed, then wake up at 6:00 AM the next day, pitch a softball tournament, win it, and seemingly be fine.
Her parents had no idea. She was very good at suppressing her emotions and coping. By contrast, on the surface, it seemed like she was doing well. They were a family who didn't really talk about emotions, so they had no indication.
The drive itself isn't the problem. It's the energy that inspires action. Nicole's dad worked into the night to support the family. Her mom would say, "why not 100?" when Nicole brought home a 96. That translated into drive and ambition. That's not a problem. For a lot of us, it's the energy that inspires action and translates into impact. It can become a problem when we have no limits to our working, where we exhaust ourselves and burn out, where we don't feel worthy in moments of inaction or rest.
The marker of a healthy relationship with drive is flexibility. When you're forced to stop because you're sick, exhausted, emotionally overwhelmed, or someone else needs you, can you be flexible enough to do that without feeling terrible about yourself? The ability to choose to say, "Okay, contextually speaking, I need to pause," and still feel okay about yourself, that's the marker.  
Hold space for both: acknowledging harm and taking agency. Other people have contributed to our discomfort. Maybe parents didn't meet our needs. If we don't acknowledge that, we suppress. But we also can't stay stuck in anger and resentment.
A true boundary isn't demanding that someone else be different. That's still giving away your agency. A true boundary is saying: you've hurt me, and I'm gonna take responsibility that I'm allowing it. I'm gonna show up differently now to limit the impact of what you're doing.
Talking about trauma can keep it alive in your body. Trauma doesn't live in logic and understanding. It lives in your body. It lives in habits and reactions. Your mind is so powerful that you can think something and feel as if you're living it in that moment. If you're going week after week talking about all the things that are hurting you, you're continuing to keep that alive in your body.
Holistic psychology bridges the gap between mind and body. Traditional psychology focused solely on the mind. The CBT model says if we think differently, we produce different feelings, then different actions. But Nicole was missing the body. Our nervous system, our earliest environments, neurobiologically created patterns wired into us. Science now shows we maintain the ability to change throughout our lives.
Drop into your body. Where is your attention right now?
Are you feeling your muscles, your heels impacting the earth, where you're sitting?
Or are you so lost in thought you're disconnected?
Jaw clenched? Fists clenched? Shoulders up to your ears?
Holding your breath? Breathing short and quick from your chest?
These are markers that your body is under stress right now.
Once you have that information, make small shifts. Slow and deepen your breath. Elongate your exhale just a little longer than your inhale. If your movements are quick, slow them down. If you're holding tension, release it. Now you're regulating your body so you can show up differently.
Meditation is just awareness. It's not sitting cross-legged trying to make your mind quiet. Life can be a meditative experience. Thoughts are helpful. They're where we create things, have insights. The goal isn't a blank, quiet mind. The goal is awareness.
Nicole calls it her spaceship. Her protective habit for so long has been to dissociate, to disconnect. She pursued clinical psychology where she can live in her mind. When what she's feeling in her body is too uncomfortable, the quickest path out is to distract herself with someone else, with the next achievement.
This work has made Nicole's relationships more real. More authentic. More grounded in vulnerability, messiness, emotion as opposed to curated versions of who she thinks she needs to be. What she's most familiar with is dealing with all her feelings alone.
The Harvard study found one thing leads to a happy life: love. Ryan referenced the longitudinal Harvard study that has gone on for 90 years studying what leads to a happy life. At the end of the day, it's love. The ones who live the happiest, longest, most fruitful lives are surrounded by people they love and who love them. 
What a gift it is to be loved for all of yourself, not just the perfect parts. When you can show someone all of yourself, your messiness, the things you hid and kept secret, and still be loved. The overachiever gets to show more parts of herself, and people don't abandon her. They stay. That's the love most of us are striving for.
We are all a bunch of messy humans trying to figure it out as we go.
Nicole's champagne moment a year from now: presence and beingness. Whatever is happening or not happening in her life, she's celebrating the celebration of that moment. Being alive. Feeling the gratitude, the joy. Not focusing on what was produced to give her the opportunity to celebrate, but being present to the life around her. The taste of the champagne, the humans surrounding her in that moment. 
Reflection Questions
Which childhood adaptations are still driving your behavior today? Are you choosing them, or are they choosing you?
When was the last time you actually dropped into your body and checked: am I tense? Am I holding my breath? Am I stressed?
Who in your life sees all of you, not just the polished version, and loves you anyway?
More Learning
#547: Dr. Michael Gervais - Stop Worrying About What People Think of You
#140: Dr. Carol Dweck - The Power of a Growth Mindset
#229: Dr. Henry Cloud - Be So Good They Can't Ignore You
Podcast Chapters
00:00 Book Announcement 
01:08 Show Intro and Guest Setup 
02:36 Good at Everything: The Hidden Cost 
06:47 When Therapy Stopped Working 
09:32 How The Holistic Psychologist Started on Instagram 
11:20 Purpose, Fame, and Setting Boundaries 
15:06 How Her Family Reacted to the Spotlight 
19:21 At 13: Straight A's and Self-Medicating 
22:12 What Her Parents Missed 
23:48 Drive vs. Worthiness: Where It Becomes a Problem 
29:20 Why Flexibility Beats Rigidity 
31:03 Agency vs. Blame in Therapy 
31:57 When Therapy Becomes an Excuse 
33:47 What a Real Boundary Actually Is 
35:44 The "Bad Therapy" Debate 
38:50 What Holistic Psychology Actually Means 
41:35 Daily Body Practices, Not Retreats 
44:06 How to Drop Into Your Body 
46:38 Meditation Is Just Awareness 
49:36 Why Vulnerability Makes Relationships Real 
52:07 The Harvard Study: Love Is Everything 
55:36 The Champagne Question: Being Present 
57:33 EOPC

Read my new book, The Price of Becoming. www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming
The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk
This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver.
My guest: David Epstein is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Range and The Sports Gene. A former investigative reporter at ProPublica and senior writer at Sports Illustrated. His new book is called Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better.
Notes
 
Be part of "Mindful Monday" -- Text Hawk to 66866
Key Learnings
The easier move is to let it go. David found a factual error in Ryan's new/my new book. David was supposed to read it and write a blurb on it - but went further and challenged a factual error. The kind move, what great leaders actually do, is being willing to point things out, even if it could cause a little friction. 
There is such a thing as too much autonomy. After Range became mega viral, David optimized for autonomy. He individualized his whole life. He no longer was writing about what others assigned him. A year later, he realized there is a thing as too much autonomy. He missed the structure of a work day, the deadlines, the annoyances of working with other people's schedules. This total freedom ended up feeling terrible.

"The great thing about being committed by your own choice is that you can stop wondering how to live and start living."  This quote by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi hit David when he was on a dating app for book topics, just swiping and swiping. That day he said, "I'm really interested in constraints. I need some myself. I'm writing a book proposal on this." Two weeks later he was 10 times more interested because he decided to dive into it.
Cal Newport says "system shutting down" at the end of his workday. It seems silly, but when you have all that freedom, you need something to close the workday so you can recover and be ready for the next day.
Your brain is made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible. Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham says thinking is energetically costly. So when your calendar is too open, all you'll do is what's convenient. Your brain will be lazy. The path of least resistance.
The mere urgency effect: when schedule and structure is too open, people do things that seem urgent even if they're unimportant. When you're too unstructured, you end up doing huge volumes of low value stuff just to have checked off doing something.
What David's workday looks like now: 
Batching work: people at work check their email on average 77 times a day. The way people are usually doing that is they're toggling all the time between email and something else. When you do that, it lowers your productivity and massively increases your stress.
David doesn't start his day with his inbox. He'll check it at the end of the workday because emails can take him away from the most important work at the beginning of the day. 
Stress + Rest = Growth. The workday ends when David's son gets home. When writing, you have to program in rest, just like you would if you were an athlete in training. 
Daniel Kahneman said writing "Thinking Fast and Slow" was the worst few years of his life. David had lunch with Kahneman and praised the book. Kahneman said, "Never again." He said it was so isolating. He was used to working with a partner or multiple partners and colleagues. He felt so isolated that he said he'd never write a book again, or if he did, he would write it with somebody else. And that's what he did. And David could empathize with that. 
David made a one-page architectural outline for how "Inside the Box" would look. If it's not on that page, it is not in the book. He wrote as small as possible to try to defeat his own system. The book's 20% shorter than his other two. He thinks it's much tighter writing. He was so much more efficient that he doesn't feel nearly as burned out.
After a mega hit book, two things matter: (1) A lot is out of your control, and (2) Identify as a craftsman. David's colleague at Sports Illustrated told him, "If a book about genetics and vampires comes out the same day, you're screwed, and there's nothing you can do about it." He was right. But David very strongly identifies as a writer now, as a craftsman. He's taken fiction writing courses just to learn about craft. With Inside the Box, he did a structural experiment that he found so engaging because he was focused on the craft itself, not just the commercial outcome.
"Docendo discimus" - by teaching, we learn. This is a quote from Seneca. If people think they're going to have to teach certain material, they organize it more coherently in their own mind. They start pulling out main ideas and attaching different ideas together. Teaching it is even better, but just making someone think they're going to have to teach it makes them learn in a much more coherent way.
Narrative values: the recurring themes that give coherence to a life. David went back and looked at his life and identified: curiosity, open-mindedness, diligence, and resilience. Now that he's started telling his story in that way, it shows up everywhere. But going forward, he also wanted some things in his story that he didn't have. So he identified forgiveness in particular because that has not been a strong suit for him.
Ben Helfgott: the only living Olympian to have survived a concentration camp. Almost everybody in his family was killed in the Holocaust. He just preached forgiveness all the time. When David saw what Ben did, these petty grudges he's holding are nothing. You're just poisoning yourself when you hold these grudges. So David decided he wanted forgiveness to become one of his narrative values. 
Herbert Simon won the highest award in computer science, psychology, and the Nobel Prize in economics. His quote serves as the epigraph of the book: "It is a myth, widely believed but not less mythical for that, that people are most creative when they're most free."
Simon coined the term "satisficing." It's a combination of satisfy and suffice. It means having good enough decision rules. He contrasted that with maximizing. From a mountain of psychological research, it is almost always bad to be a maximizer. Maximizers are less happy with their decisions, less happy with their lives, more prone to regret. There's not much evidence they actually make better decisions most of the time.
Simon was a proactive satisficer. He said you need three sets of clothing: one on your back, one in the wash, and the next one ready to wear. He simplified all the decisions in his life so he could save cognitive bandwidth for the really important ones. He famously said, "The perfect is the enemy of the good."
Choose when to choose. Choose when to save and when to use your cognitive bandwidth. 
Good enough doesn't mean you have low standards. It means you're saving your bandwidth for the most important things.
"How you do anything is how you do everything" is completely wrong. This is one of David's least favorite quotes. It's wrong. Herbert Simon did the same mundane thing, the same breakfast every day, the same socks, so he could crush it in his work. He wasn't doing everything the way he was doing his work.
The Fredkins Paradox: We spend the most energy on the least important decisions because we agonize when the options are really similar.

General Magic: They invented the smartphone in 1990. The iPhone would not exist without them. They had infinite degrees of freedom. They could do anything. When the device came out, it didn't solve a clear customer problem. It had a 200-page manual. They sold 3,000 units in the first six months.
Meanwhile, people inside General Magic who bit off much smaller chunks had success. One low-level engineer started Auction Web. His bosses said no, too small. He left and changed the name to eBay. Another created Graffiti. He said "I'm going to solve a clear customer problem. Busy professionals want contacts and calendars on the go." He did just a calendar, contacts, and a memo pad. That was the Palm Pilot. By doing way less. By doing something, not everything.
Tony Fadell (the "podfather"): "If you don't have constraints, make up constraints." 
Bill Gurley said, "We have a saying in venture: more startups die of indigestion than starvation." When Tony co-founded Nest, he made his team work inside a literal box. He made them prototype the box before they had the product. If it didn't fit in that box, it was not a priority.
Reflection Questions
What area of your life has too much freedom right now? Where could you add a constraint (a deadline, a ritual, a boundary) that would actually make you more productive or creative?
If you had to pick three narrative values that run through your life story, what would they be? Are they the ones you want, or do you need to add an aspirational value like David did with forgiveness?
What's one decision you're maximizing (trying to find the perfect choice) when you should be satisficing (good enough and move on)? How much time and energy would you free up if you applied Herbert Simon's approach?
More Learning
#310 - David Epstein: Why Generalists Will Rule the World
#582 - Cal Newport: Obsess Over Quality
#660 - James Clear: The 4 Laws to Behavioral Change
Podcast Chapters
00:00 The Price of Becoming - Ryan's New Book
01:15 Meet David Epstein
02:39 The Fact Checker: What Great Leaders Do
04:27 Dedication Easter Eggs
05:50 The Problem With Too Much Autonomy
10:47 Why You Actually Need Constraints
12:29 Batching Work: The 77 Email Checks Problem
17:20 Lunch with Kahneman: Thinking Fast and Slow Was Miserable 
22:18 What To Do After A Viral Book
27:07 Docendo Discimus: By Teaching, We Learn 
29:13 Why Leaders Should Regularly Teach
31:09 Desirable Difficulties
31:56 Narrative Values: The Themes That Define Your Life
34:31 Adding Forgiveness As an Aspirational Value
36:13 Chips on Shoulders vs. Proving People Right
39:10 Herbert Simon: The Man Who Won Everything
40:20 Satisficing Over Maximizing
42:40 Choosing When To Choose
44:29 Good Enough Doesn't Mean Low Standards
46:13 Why "How You Do Anything" is Completely Wrong
47:25 General Magic: Do Something, Not Everything
52:49 One Year From Now: What Are You Celebrating?
54:54 EOPC