The Daily Stoic - Dr. William Stixrud and Ned Johnson on Developing Confidence and Finding Purpose | You Never Know What Someone is Going Through

Episode Date: June 30, 2021

Ryan reads today’s meditation and speaks with Dr. William Stixrud and Ned Johnson about their book The Self-Driven Child which they wrote to help parents and educators nurture a sense of agency and purpose in children, how to define and give your best effort in all of the things that you do, the difference between a healthy drive for excellence and having enough, and more.Ned Johnson is the president and founder of PrepMatters. A 1993 graduate of Williams College, Mr. Johnson has a BA in Economics and Political Science. Originally from Connecticut, Mr. Johnson now resides with his wife and children in Washington, DC.William R. Stixrud, Ph.D., is a clinical neuropsychologist and founder of The Stixrud Group. He is a member of the teaching faculty at Children’s National Medical Center and an assistant professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the George Washington University School of Medicine.Athletic Greens is a custom formulation of 75 vitamins, minerals, and other whole-food sourced ingredients that make it easier for you to maintain nutrition in just a single scoop. Visit athleticgreens.com/stoic to get a FREE year supply of Liquid Vitamin D + 5 FREE Travel Packs with subscription. LinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business this fall. It’s the largest marketplace for job seekers in the world, and it has great search features so that you can find candidates with any hard or soft skills that you need. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit linkedin.com/STOIC to post a job for free. KiwiCo believes in the power of kids and that small lessons today can mean big, world-changing ideas tomorrow. KiwiCo is a subscription service that delivers everything your kids will need to make, create and play. Get 30% off your first month plus FREE shipping on ANY crate line with code STOIC at kiwico.com. Ten Thousand makes the highest quality, best-fitting, and most comfortable training shorts I have ever worn. They are a direct-to-consumer company, no middleman so you get premium fabrics, trims, and techniques that other brands simply cannot afford. Ten Thousand is offering our listeners 15% off your purchase. go to Tenthousand.cc and enter code STOIC to receive 15% off your purchase.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookFollow Dr. William Stixrud and Ned Johnson: Homepage, Twitter, Facebook See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wonderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. You never know what someone is going through. People are frustrating. They fall short. They fail us.

They do something that surprises or disappoints you. But before you get angry, you have to remember everyone is going through something. Sometimes people are going through things they don't even know about. NBA All-Star Kevin Love began suffering panic attacks several years into his career that severely affected his game. Mental health is not something that gets talked about a lot in professional sports. So for a long time, Love struggled

with this private demon alone. It wasn't until he began to share his story publicly that he discovered that other players battled with all sorts of mental health issues. Before that, it didn't even occur to love that he wasn't alone, that other players also had issues. We all do this. Our natural absorption inclines us to assume

that we're the only people to have a good reason to be tired, angry, frustrated, scared, or hardened. So we rob ourselves of the empathy of others. We close ourselves off from the opportunity to become personally much more empathetic, both of which Kevin Love experienced when he started to share his struggle. Santa Cah reminds us that a leader should grant pardon but ask for none, that they should make excuses for other people because of what they're going through, but not themselves. Marcus Aurelius tried constantly to put himself in other people's shoes, particularly those

who snipe at him, or made his life more difficult. He tried to understand what made them act the way they did, because he wanted to be able to forgive them, because he wanted to be able to offer them leeway for their failings, to be able to make use, because he wanted to be able to offer them leeway for their failings to be able to make use of their strengths where possible. And this is all a much better alternative to walking around either beating yourself up because you're the lone loser, weakling or head case,

or assuming the worst of everyone in granted no forgiveness or tolerance for not being at your level. Remember, everyone is going through something. They might not even be aware of that, just as it took you a while to figure out what was troubling you. So cut your fellow human some slack, grant pardon, even if they struggle to do that for you in turn. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I have been starting to fool around with the next book. I started about a week and a half ago laying out all the note cards.

I was starting to doubt myself. I was starting to get worried. I was intimidated by the project. I wasn't sure if it was going in the note cards. I was starting to doubt myself. I was starting to get worried. I was intimidated by the project. I wasn't sure if it was going in the right direction. And then I found this note card that I'd wrote and slipped into the box. I don't know when. But I'd always been planning to work on it about now.

So I wrote, trust the process. Keep doing your note cards. When you check this in June, if you have done your work, there will be a book there. And as it turned out a few days ago, it clicked. All of a sudden, the three main characters I wanted to profile started to become clear to me how I was going to delineate, became clear. And now, although there's still a very, very, very, very, very long road ahead of me, I do have a vague map for the direction that I need to go, and I'm going to do it. So I'm chugging away on that, going to do all my regular stuff in the

meantime, and I will tell you more about it as it comes, but it's the first book, the second book, in a four book series, I'll leave it at that and we'll check in with that soon. My guest today, I'm very excited to talk about, we had a whole bunch of technical difficulties on this interview. I was interviewing two different people at the same time, which is always tricky. And yet, we persevered at one point. They couldn't hear each other,

and then one of them got kicked out, and then I thought we lost the file, but we kept going, and here we are. I'm talking to the authors of the self-driven child, the science and sense of giving your kids more control over their lives. I love this book, my wife loved this book. We carry it at the Painted Porch bookstore.

It's one of the few parenting books we have. It's a fantastic book. It's really about this idea of agency. How do you give your kids control over their own lives? Because believing that you have control over your own lives is essential. And we talk about, of course, the Stokes say, the vast majority of what happens is not in our control, but we have to decide what we do with what is in our control. That's what we're gonna talk about today. This episode's gonna land hardest with those of you of kids, but even if you don't have kids, I actually got a lot out of it as a human being.

You know, there's this great idea, you're not raising kids, you're raising adults, right? How do you make adults? But then also, how do you be an adult, right? How do you be the best self that you can be? And then how do you pass this on to your kids? That's really what we're talking about. And my two guests are quite distinguished.

Dr. William Sticksrad goes by Bill is a clinical neuropsychologist and a member of the Children's National Medical Center in George Washington University Medical School. He's an expert on the human brain, particularly in adolescents. member of the Children's National Medical Center in George Washington University Medical School. He's an expert on the human brain, particularly in adolescents. He's published many influential scientific articles about it. And then, Ned Johnson, the co-writer on the book, is the founder of Prep Matters, a tutoring service in Washington, DC.

It's the co-author of conquering the SAT, how parents can help teens overcome the pressure and succeed. Both my guests today are experts. They speak all over the world. They've written everywhere for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal. I've loved their stuff. I've loved this book. I recommend it. If you want to pick it up, you can check the links in today's episode to pick it up at the painted porch, or just go to thepaintedpourch.com, come see us in Bastrop, Texas. Or of course, support the local bookstore in your town, or pick it up on Amazon.

It's a great book, a must read for parents. And I think this is a great episode. And it happens that the two guys know their fair share of stoicism. And I'll leave it at that. their fair share of stoicism and I'll leave it at that. I thought we could start with a definition, let's go way back to basics. So before even getting into what a self-driven child looks like,

what does it mean to be self-driven? Because I feel like there's plenty of adults that don't necessarily understand it and maybe struggle with that in their own lives. So I think that, then I lectured for some years together about motivation in kids and some of the parents that I work with and the network with, they're just concerned about their kids are overly motivated, they're kind of obsessively driven, or a lot of kids that I see right are, have learning stability is radHD, they just don't seem to be that motivated.

And we realize what people, what we want is for our kids to, and for us, to feel that kind of internal drive that this is our life and and we're gonna make what we want of it. We were able to make what we want of our lives. And I think that's for me what this self-driven quality is, it's that the motivation and the direction for our lives comes within us. I'm really glad you said that because it's something I've written about before, and certainly the ancients

were concerned with it. This idea of ambition isn't inherently a good thing, right? Because a lot of times, very ambitious people are either ambitious for the wrong ends, or they're ambitious because they've picked this up from someone else, right? Someone wants to be a doctor because their parents wanted them to be a doctor. They want to be wealthy because they think wealth will make them happy. They feel like they need to prove something to someone or something. So it sounds like what you're saying is that drive in and of itself is not necessarily a virtue that drive has to come from a

place of sort of fullness and self awareness and a sense of your own needs and wants especially in kids it can't just be you're just driven to do whatever your parents told you you should do. I used to do a lot of psychotherapy and when I was struck by how many 30-year-olds or 40-year-olds would come into my office and I'd say how can I help? And they'd say well I felt like I've spent the first 35 years of my life trying to live up to other people's expectations. I'm trying to figure out what kind of life I want, what's important to me. And I thought we could get a lot earlier to start on this.

Yeah, Ned, I was thinking of your work when I was watching the college admissions document or a Netflix and I read that book, unacceptable about the admissions scandal. What I found so interesting about it is it wasn't the kids who desperately necessarily wanted to get into Harvard or USC or whatever. This was being pushed upon them. In some cases, they internalized it, but it must be sort of surprising or surreal to watch how the source of the motivation that you see in young people and how, I guess, a good portion of them are not self-driven at all.

Yeah, I mean, there are a bunch of things there. I mean, we want to quick talk and word on those parents, you know, a lot of what was thrown at them, you know, in Prettyton the Press was that it was all, you know, it was all ego and they need a bumper sticker on, you know, from this or that college, but it also occurred to me that Bill and I were talking about this, that a lot of maybe may have been driven out of fear. And I wrote a piece for the poster right around that time, saying that the message that these parents were delivering to their kids, directly or indirectly, is, you know, be very afraid that, you know, you can't be successful in life unless you go to an elite enough

college, right? You couldn't handle it if you didn't get in to college if you got rejected. That you can't do this without my help. And all of those things are terrible messages to give to kids. And to your point about motivation for kids, I mean, the problem with school, I mean, the bunch of problems with school, but one of the things is that the current paradigm is set up for kids to really not intrinsically care about the stuff that they're doing, but just to get an A. We use the term in my test prep world of kids being stationed to station.

And the parents will say, I don't understand. They've gotten A's in everything, but they haven't thought about it or integrated. I take a test on, I learn chapter seven, take a test on it, quickly throw that over my shoulders and move on to chapter eight. And it just, it makes me nuts. One, because it leaves them really unprepared for any real mathematics when they get to the end of high school or go on to college.

But it's also just a colossal waste of all of that adolescent time and energy, because they're just doing it to get the grade. Yeah, there's a beautiful graphic that Tim Urban made. I just Googled Tim Urban Paths Graphic. And it's this cool thing of like all the things that you went through to get where you are, then where you are, and then you think,

like if I don't get into college, if I don't do this, like all these paths are close to me, but you don't see all the potential branches off. So you're right, the fear is like, if I don't get in a car, Harvard, if I don't win this, if I don't accomplish this, like the future is incredibly bleak, which is such a pessimistic view of the world

to pass on to someone at 17 or 18 years old that they don't have the ability to decide where their life is going to go if they don't make the tennis team at the University of Texas, which of course is preposterous. Right. Well, that's exactly right. And the other point along those lines that Bill and I make when we have the opportunity to talk with schools is that

even for me as a test prep guy, I mean I hold to believe, we hold to believe that the most important outcome of high school in adolescents is not where you go to college, but to developing the brain that you're going to carry into the rest of your life. And so, you know, given the plasticity of adolescent brains to be chronically stressed, to be chronically, extrinsically driven, and to shape a brain that is stressed intolerant, that becomes easily anxious or depressed, and that is only really responding to extrinsic motivators. I mean, that is a lousy way to launch a life, whether that's college or or other paths. Yeah, I thought of you guys also when I was reading your book and I thought of this famous

exchange, one of my sort of literary heroes is the writer Walker Percy who wrote this great book, The Movie Goer, which is sort of about adolescent angst and anyway, he was adopted, his parents' boat died, he was adopted by this guy named William Alexander Persey, a member of one of the great Southern families, who himself was sort of a poet. He'd gone to Harvard. He'd fought in World War I. And he adopts these three boys.

He sends them both to the best schools in the world. I think Walker Persey ends up at some medical school in North Carolina or something. And he gets terrible grades like his first semester. And he writes home this letter to his uncle, adopted stepfather essentially, thinking like, he's going to tear me a new one. He's like, I'm so sorry, a bad job. I haven't been paying attention.

And I think you guys would like this exchange. The letter survives that his uncle writes back to him and he says, my whole theory of life is that glory and accomplishment and grades are much less important than character and discovering the life you want to lead. And that struck me as like an exchange that's probably extraordinarily uncommon

these days. It was uncommon even with my parents. The idea that, and I know you guys have talked about this, that grades like really don't matter at all, like not that they don't matter a little bit, but like they don't matter at all. And yet, we drum into young people's heads that their worth is determined by their test scores or their grades instead or their grades. Instead of their character. You know, I moved from Seattle to DC in 1984,

and I wasn't used to this kind of East Coast preoccupation. Wait, wait, sorry. I don't know if you guys can hear each other, but you're both talking in the same time. I don't see net, yeah. Oh, sorry. So Bill, why don't you go first the internet? Yeah, so I was saying that when I moved from societal to DC in 1984, I was stunned by this, but

what I considered to be an insane preoccupation with grades and elite schools, given that that time, it didn't seem to be much for correlation between grades and success in later life, and it seemed to make much difference where you go to college. And just before the pandemic, I was lecturing in Houston about our book, and two things happened. I lectured to, I spoke with some high school students who were on the student government in an elite independent school, and I asked these kids, how many of you want to be happy as adults?

And they all kind of sheepishly raised their hand. And this one kid said, and I said, what do people tell you about what it takes to be happy as an adult? And this one kid says, we're told that if we get into a good enough college, everything is set, which couldn't be farther from the truth if you look at the mental health problems in all the elite colleges or off the charts. And also, I was given a lecture at another group. Yeah, I mentioned an elite school high school in DC. And this woman came up to me afterward and said, I'm a

cyclotherapist at the manager clinic here, a mental health clinic. You're induced in. We know the school really well because so many the graduates get into these elite colleges, but they can't handle them emotionally. And so they take a medical leave and they come here for the school really well because somebody to graduate get into these elite colleges, but they can't handle them emotionally. And so they take a medical leave and they come here for treatment. And what she said is that none of them have the experience of dealing with hard stuff. And they've been driven by this kind of, really this kind of false narrative that the most important thing is your grades and your resume and not you

as a person. We open by defining this idea of being self-driven. The other word that appears a lot in the books and Bill, let's go with you first, this idea of agency. I feel like that is a word that not a lot of people understand that use it incorrectly, but also I would say agency and a lack thereof is actually at the root of a lot of the problems that we have as a society today, either perceived lack of agency or actual lack of agency,

but at the core society depends on agency. Well, it was so interesting, Ryan, and that, you know, Ned and I lectured a lot initially about motivation and about all the stress-related mental health problems that young people have. And they're just kind of off the charts now, but it's been growing for the last 23 years. And every place we looked to try to understand how do people become self-motivated? All the arrows point in the direction of that agency or sense of control. And also, when we looked at what makes life stressful, why are kids so stressed? We learned that the four factors that contribute to the making life stressful are, you can

summarize with the acronym Nutsuts and its novelty on predictability perceive threat and a low sense of control. And it's that low sense of control, that low sense of agency or autonomy that is so, that is more stressful than anything else. And so net and I figured if autonomy or that age sense of agency or control is crucial to motivation, to that self-motivation, that healthy internal drive to serve this world in a meaningful way. And it's also completely related to mental health, that it must be a big deal, which is

why we wrote this self-driven child to try to help parents and educators get ideas about how do we help to nurture that sense of agency, that sense of this is your life, and I respectfully have confidence and respect that you can figure out your own life. Well, isn't the irony of agency and the Stokes talk about this a lot, that the vast majority of life and what happens and what we see is not in a lot, that the vast majority of life and what happens and what we see is not in our control, that we don't have any agency about it. And yet, the most important thing where we do have agency is, of course, how we respond to all those things.

Right. And we mentioned, in the introduction to our talk, we talk about the serenity, the wisdom of the serenity prayer, you know, that it could give me, as you know, well, it did the serenity to accept what I can't change, and the courage to change what I can. And the wisdom know the difference. And that sense of control, or sense of a doesn't mean that I'm supposed to control everything, or I get to control the kid gets to be the boss of the family.

What it means is the opposite of sense control are feeling helpless or hopeless or overwhelmed or impotent, chronically anxious, chronically stressed, chronically fatigued. And so I think being clear about what we can control and what we can't is crucial and for parents to take home points for our book is you really can't control your kid. You can't make another human being do something against their will.

Yeah, and if you can, if you do force them to do something, it's like building a castle made of sand. It's not, you can give them the tools, you can give them character, you can give them guidance, but you can't make them do it. And if you do make them do it, as soon as they have the ability to undo it, they're probably going to do it.

That's completely right. That's exactly our experience. And our experience is that you can really, from very quite young, you can encourage kids to think about this is your life. And nobody knows you better than you know yourself. You're really expert on you. And so there's a lot of ways that we talk about in the book

that we can help nurture this sense, this is my life. And not in a, you're on your own body kind of way or not in a selfless way. But just the acknowledging that we don't know, I never I didn't always know what was my kids best interest. And as you pointed out, that oftentimes what seems like a disaster turns out to be something that in the long run is very important and very useful. And we want kids to have this experience

of making decisions and learning from them. And see that if you're floating, if you're floating in class, your whole life doesn't come totally down. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. Ah, the Bahamas.

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One of the things that strikes me though about where we're going as a coach like I think Download the Amazon Music app today. One of the things that strikes me though about where we're going as a coach, like I think it's wonderful that we're more inclusive, that we're more sensitive, that we understand the sort of forces and pressures and structures that are acting on individuals, it seems like also you can end up out of this compassion depriving someone of agency.

So I think about this with trigger warnings. On the one hand, I try to go through the world not offending people, not saying things that are insensitive, trying to consider how my words and actions would be perceived by someone of different experiences or different realities that I know nothing about. And yet, the idea that they don't control how they respond to what other people say and do, or even how messed up or rigged the system might be, seems like it implicitly deprives

a person of their agency. I think that's a really interesting point, Ryan. And, you know, we take the term, I take offense at that. And it's an act. I'm basically choosing to be offended by what you say. And oftentimes we say, I didn't mean any offense. But I do think so much, the way people that become emotionally strong and resilient,

my point of view, I think from a stoic point of view, as well, it's by experiencing challenges in life and dealing with them, and then having the developing the confidence that I can handle can handle I can handle stuff, I can hand and increasing stress tolerance. We talk about stress tolerance probably more than resilience because what we want kids to be able to do is to function well even in stressful situations and not avoid them or not freak out. And so I do think that by trying to protect kids too much, that we really do deprive them

of developing that healthy sense of control. And that confidence, they can handle hard stuff. So Ned, we are just talking about this idea of agency in kids. I've got to imagine you see kids that come in that don't have any sense of their own agency, any belief that they can change, that they can grow, you know, when Carol Dwack talks about having a growth mindset, it seems like what she's really talking about

is do you believe you have agency over your own mind and your own growth or do you not? Oh, and that's exactly right. And more often it's, of course, it's not a continuum more than being binary, as we would all imagine. And so, you know, in the work that I'm always trying to do, it's always trying to help kids feel that their successes are theirs. You know, that I'm, you know, when people say,

I never could have done it without you, I come up with all the clever ways I can to try to disabuse them of that notion because it's such a healthy one. My wife, the Latin teacher who I mentioned before, is so enamored of your daily stoke books. She's been using that with her students. In school, it maintains that when her mom was driving her country to deposit her college where we met, on the way there, her mom, I think in her own anxiety, said to Vanessa, I don't know how you're going to make it without me. Yikes.

And she's a lovely woman, but she's very fretful. And you think it's hard to come up with words that be more disempowering than though, right? You know, where we maintain, and in our book, The Self-Divine Child, that one of the most powerful things you can say to any person, particularly to teenagers, that I have great confidence in your ability to make decisions for yourself. And that when you make mistakes, which you will, because you're human last time I checked,

that you'll figure out what the next best thing is to do then. Because what is life but but that? If make a decision, some are good, some are bad. Okay, and learn and just adapt on an on me go. Because for me, I mean, certainly I also see, as Bill mentioned at the top of this, he tends to work more with kids who are really struggling and trying to find motivation to do this school thing.

I tend to work more often with the kids who are just obsessively driven perfectionistic. And that's also a terrible, place to be and with perfectionism It's really this fear of making mistakes in part because they've never done them and And I for years would people would ask well, you know You're you seem to be really good at this work that you do now You know, why are you any better than anyone else? And I used to make the point though most people look at me like I'm nuts, I said, well,

I simply had the advantage of having more kids fail with me than other people did early on. And I'd sit there and look at them like, well darn it, what did I miss? What did I get wrong? Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, and to try to figure it out. But at this point, I really can, can, can, can, can, and convince you can give me almost any situation and almost any kid. And I'm convinced that I can, that I can make it better.

Well, I make it perfect. That's not my goal. My goal is to make it be better. And so for a lot of kids in school, yeah, they don't feel a sense of agency. And they're not doing things that really matter to them. And they may not feel that their successes are really their own, that it's parents or tutors or whole pottery of other people doing things for them that they can do themselves. There's a bunch of things there which I love.

So the first of which is we're talking about agency, we were just saying like, because I failed, I've learned all these things, which is in a weird way, the ultimate trump card and the ultimate bit of agency that we have, which is from the worst failure, from the most devastating tragedy, from the biggest mistakes that we make, we always have the power to say, I'm going to learn from this. And really, no one can ever take from you the ability to do that, but most people just see the failure and that sort of the end of it. The other thing that I love, you're talking about, that confidence that in the ability to do that, but most people just see the failure and that sort of the end of it. The other thing that I love, you're talking about, the confidence that in the person to make the right decision, I've been reading a lot about Admiral Hyman Rikovar, who's sort of the father of the nuclear navy,

and he builds, you know, almost externally, but inside the Navy builds this sort of whole separate Navy, the nuclear navy, you know, at the end of the Second World War, at the beginning of the Cold War. And his famous mantra that would be repeated inside his set of protégés is someone would come to him with a bunch of things, and he'd sort of this, this, and this, and then they'd go, well, what do I do? And he would say, do what you think is right.

Because he wanted that mantra to spread through the organization, which is like, because you can't make people's decisions for you, and you don't want people to be making the decisions that they think you want them to make, you want them to be empowered, and you want to be able to trust them that they will make the right decisions, because you've gotten on the same page about what's right, about what's important, about what your shared goals are, so on and so forth. But ultimately, you have to have confidence

that your kids or your employees or whomever is gonna make the right decision. Because if you don't, I mean, it's a pretty bleak, exhausting future that you've laid out for yourself. I mean, I was reflecting, I have a former colleague who was really talented, very bright, but very controlling, and she seemed really to live her life by the mantra. If you want something done right, do it yourself.

And you're thinking, and all I can think is, you aren't going to get that far. That way. That doesn't scale. You know, yeah, what's that? I mean, I think it's apocryphal, but there's some proverb that comes out somewhere in Africa and I can't recall. But it says simply, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with others.

And to bring in your point, they're right. Just ideally do with people who you trust. Yes. Yeah. So how does this work though? Like let's say, you think is right, I trust you to make good decisions. I want you to be self-driven.

At the same time, how do you have high expectations, have high standards in your family, in your business, in life, and then also be hands off, right? There's sort of attention there of like you expect or want your kid to fulfill their potential, to be great, to be everything they're capable of being, and at the same time, you can't want it for them more than they want it for themselves.

Right. And I'll say that one part of that is simply that we want to inspire our kids and we inspire them in part by living the life that is worth emulating or that we model the things that we want our kids to describe to or to follow. And so I mean, certainly trying to, in terms of expectations, we know that parents' expectations kids, our expectations for kids are hugely related to academic achievement, but it's not. You must get good grades, you must go to a new school. It's, I have confidence that you can do well. It's the expression of confidence in kids that they can figure things out that they can

learn to have a great life that they want. While we're modeling a life of integrity and a life of purpose and a life of meaning and self-discipline and the things that we want are kids to learn. There's another famous Rick over story. I told it on my episode with James Clear and I'm going to use it in my next book, but Jimmy Carter comes out of the Naval Academy. He wants to work for Heim and Rick over.

He wants to make it on a nuclear submarine. And so famously, the Rickover interviewed every single person that works in the nuclear navy. And so he has this interview with, and so he sees the best and the best out of the navy. And he's interviewing Jimmy Carter, who's brilliant and ambitious and hardworking. And they're going through his resume,

what do you accomplish, the submarines that he worked on, and Carter sort of going through his achievements You know, I was 33rd in my class. I you know, I accomplished this. I won this blah blah blah and Rick over Looks at him. He listens to all of it and he goes But did you always do your best and Carter sort of stops and he Thinks about it and he knows that he could lie and say, yes, always. And he realizes that's probably not what Rick over wants.

And so he goes, you know what, no, I didn't always do my best. And Rick over stands up and says, why not? And then walks out of the room. And that question, like, why didn't you always do your best? Rick over ends up hiring Jimmy Carter, and then obviously we know Jimmy Carter goes on to be president. Well Rick over is still in his position, so they have this wonderful working relationship. But that question of why didn't you give or do your best become sort of the mantra by

which Carter lives his life. In fact, his campaign biography, like the book that he publishes, I forget what Eury Runs for president, but it's titled Why Not the Best. And I love that idea of like, in that sentence, Rick over imparted an entire life philosophy to Carter, which is like, you should always do your best. That's the highest standard that you can really expect

from a person. And in just a few words, he sort of imprinted it on this kid's DNA, which I think is what we have to try to do as parents or educators or whatever is like, it's not like I expect you to get these grades or do X, Y and Z. It should be, I expect you to get these grades or do x, y, and z it should be I expect you to Give your best whatever it is that you're doing and whatever road you decide to walk

Well, you know, it's interesting. We we actually pick up that that idea in our second book You know, because we'll get parents saying that why don't care what grade he gets so long so long as he does his best and I think and it's it's a powerful idea, but why does it have to be careful? Because for Ryan Holliday to hold himself to his best, and for Ned Johnson, hold himself to his best, is a different thing than a parent holding a kid to his best. And there's this cartoon we will,

sure, with this little kid to look up to his parents. And there's this cartoon we will, sure, where this little kid looks up to his parents with dad and thinks that, did I do my best? And so it's the idea that, that, well, Gali, it was just reading up on Seneca quotes that was, I guess it was really a saying, we love ourselves above other men. And yet, we seem to care about their opinions of us more than our opinions of ourselves.

Yes. And you know, so when people, you know, this idea of doing my best and I'm constantly looking outward to say, is that my best? And it makes me, it just makes me worried because there's a wonderful body of research by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Maybe three years ago, there was looking at the sources of anxiety and stress and adolescence. And the first three were poverty, trauma, and racism. And the fourth and fifth were intense pressure to excel in social media. And so when you think about this, I've dueed you in your best. If it's really an extrinsic, locus of control of other people judging me was that my best or not, you know, it can lead to some pretty bad things.

Whereas I was just in my head for a moment there, Ryan Plain, with the idea of what best means. Now, is that like maximum achievement or is that doing thing with the highest amount of integrity? You know, I've not holding myself short of saying that, I could have been more thoughtful, I could have taken more care with that, right? Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here,

and then we'll get right back to the show, stay tuned. Yes, well, best can't be a euphemism, doing your best can't be a euphemism for beating other people in competition. Best has to mean, did you do everything you were capable of doing or wanted to do on this? Like, I think about it with books. Like, did I do my best?

Does not? Did it sell the right amount of copies? Did it get recognized by certain people or win certain awards? It's, did I cheat myself or the book on a random Tuesday when I could have been working on it and should have been working on it, but instead I browse Twitter all day. Or did I pull my punches because I was afraid? Or was I really worried about just impressing a handful of people or was I actually trying to say something that I really believed in?

So I think best has to mean, as you talked about the locus of control, best, the best, the boundaries of did you do your best is did you do, did you try all out in that includes integrity and effort and commitment, all those other things, on the things that were up to you. And I like that little rink of what you had in there of tier-own satisfaction, right? Because I know you talk a good deal about moderation and the idea of enough, right? And so do I make enough money to have the life that I want to have versus people who are obsessively driven? I need, I'm made in a billion dollars.

Now I need two. And where does that end? In our upcoming book, we have a chapter about talking with kids about the pursuit of happiness. And Bill, this is your line, you know, it phrases that our kids building a life or living a life or any of us living lives that we want. Right? And that to me is the best that if I, at the end of the day, we can be deeply satisfied with. So I'll keep dying. Okay. This is a funny story. And Bill, I'll stop talking moment. I swear, but, you know, you're the point about Churchill and it's brick lane. Right? So

I have this, my family has this, we're lucky to have this cabin up in upstate New York right across the lake from from Jess Lehigh, I know as a mutual friend. Yes. There's this kind of disillet property, it used to be a great camp, the whole thing got knocked down, but there's all this hard scape still there. So I, your listeners can't tell by looking at this, I'm a massive 5'9.5 and 158 pounds. So I've been rebuilding a stone wall for almost 20 years with my natural side and strength. And I had this one time when my wife and my kids shoot my wife as visioner in laws with

our kids. And I had literally 14 hours I could have done whatever I wanted, spend the whole time in the internet, whatever, whatever, whatever. And I sat there and rebuilt this entire length of law. I don't know, hundreds, something linear feet. And at the end of the day, I have never had a greater flow experience than that. I was never more satisfied. I could barely lift my hand to put a glass of water to my lips. Now when I look at it, it's a solid, maybe B minus, but at that point, that was the best that I could do.

And I was incredibly satisfied and proud of the work that I've done, even though other people might be like, eh, should I hire to pro? Yeah, I think Martin Luther King says this. He's like, if you're going to be a shoe shiner, be the best damn shoe shiner in the world, right? No matter what the task is, you have to give your best. But I think where we go to agency and where I think this is important, I think it's in your book. I might be, I might have gotten it from someone else.

But this was helpful for me when I heard about it. It's like, I remember as a kid, you're taking piano lessons and you don't want to do them anymore. And your parents say your parents are concerned. They don't want you to be a quitter. But it's like you never voluntarily decided to play the piano. You were forced into doing this thing. So doing your best on something that you were bullied into or you were doing without agency is not the same as, you know, you committed to writing this book or you committed to starting

this company or whatever it is you decided to do, that demands your best. I don't know if you necessarily have to do your best waiting in line at the DMV or something. You know what I mean? And Bill has a great story about being forced to play piano or not. Well, in our book, I mentioned that my parents could tell our musical, I wanted to play the accordion of all things. They said, well, if you demonstrate that you have discipline to practice in the piano, which we own a piano, then we'll buy an accordion.

I didn't want to play the piano. I didn't have a really good year for music. I didn't want to learn to read music. So I took lessons for a couple of months, and my parents let me quit. And I said in the book, I've always been grateful to them for letting me quit because when the Beatles came out, I got in the band.

I'm still playing Rock and Roll band, 50 years later, 60 years later. And I play and sing probably more than anybody I know who is forced to practice. And so I think that that agency piece is really important. I also want to mention that I think that there's a balance between always doing your best and accepting if you can't, that being accepting yourself,

that not having that perfectionistic drive that's never good enough. And it's that healthy balance between, there's a difference we're saying, oh, that's good enough. And yeah, this is good enough. If they said healthy bellows between there's a difference we're saying, oh that's good enough and yeah this is good enough. This is good enough for me to go on the next thing. And so many of the kids that we work with who have this completely anxious, obsessive perfectionistic kind of idea where they just lose all sense of proportion. So much is trying to help them is to get comfortable with the idea that

good enough doesn't mean, oh, that's good enough. I'm just doing a half-ass job. It means I've put in my, I've done well on this, and I can go on to the next thing. Yeah, Churchill said that the other way to spell perfection is paralysis. And I think people get stuck trying to do it perfectly and end up not getting it done. And then they don't get the sort of iterative cycle where you do something over and over, where you get the reps and you get better and better because you're still stuck on draft one.

As all writers know, like, you gotta finish the draft so it can get notes and then you can edit it and then you can redo it. But if you never finish, you never get on to version 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Well, one of the interesting things we learned in writing our second book was the difference between people who have a healthy drive for excellence. They want to do an excellent job at everything that they do. But it's not perfectionistic because they have a sense of when they're done. And the people who have that healthy drive for excellence, they welcome mistakes because they learn from them.

Perfectionists avoid mistakes or try to cover them up. And then it's just as you're saying they don't have a chance to learn from them. Yeah, and let's go to this idea of how you teach being self-driven. You guys mentioned inspiration or example. That's obviously the essence of stoicism. Epic Titus says, don't talk about your philosophy, embody it. I think one of the popes said, preach all the time, use words

when necessary. But in the history of stoicism, Marcus is adopted by this guy, Antoninus Pius, who's supposed to be the regent who guides Marcus for a year or two before Marcus becomes emperor. But Antoninus ends up living for almost two decades. So Marcus spends two decades under this older man who is everything he wants to be.

And when you read meditations, if you haven't looked at it, it's an incredible passage where he lists all the things that he learns from Antoninus here. Actually, let me, Marcus here has a pretty good definition of being self-driven that I think you guys might like. He says, self-driven that I think you guys might like. He says, my adopted father, compassion, unwavering adherence to decisions once he'd reached them in difference to superficial honors, hard work, persistence, listening to anyone who could contribute to the common good, his dog-it determination to treat people as they deserved, a sense of when to push and when to back off, his altruism, not ex, I'll skip, his search in questions at meetings,

a kind of single-mindedness, almost never content with first impressions or breaking off the discussion prematurely. His constancy to friends, never getting fed up with them or playing favorites. Self-reliance always in cheerfulness. His constant devotion to the empire's needs, his stewardship of the treasure, his willingness to take responsibility and blame for both,

his ability to fill at ease with people and put them at ease without being pushy, his willingness to take adequate care of himself, not a hypochondriac or obsessed with his appearance, his willingness to yield the Florida experts, he respected traditions without needing to constantly congratulate himself. I could go on, but the point is, there's no evidence that Antoninus explicitly taught Marcus

any of this. He taught it by actually living the ideas, which I think is the hardest thing for a parent to do to go. I could give you a lecture about this, but instead, I'm just going to show it to you how I live my own life. Well, it's such a good point. And part of it is we know that one of the reasons that we as parents and all sorts of other relationships tend to lecture and nag and scold kids is it gives us a sense of control. We feel like it's effective. It may not be effective at all, maybe actually counterproductive, is it gives us a sense of control? We feel like it's effective.

It may not be effective at all, maybe actually counterproductive, but it makes us feel better because, you know, sitting on our hands and biting our lips and letting kids, you know, make through mistakes and draw their own lessons from them is really hard to do. The other thing that would say that we talk in the book about how do kids develop this inner drive, this self-motivation, Bill was looking early on about how to adolescent to become self-motivated, and he stumbled in the research of a guy named Reed Larson, who makes the point that adolescents and teens and adolescents don't become self-motivated by doodifully doing their homework.

It's by what Larsson describes as the passionate pursuit of pastimes. So this is when they're deeply engaged in really that, you know, mehyde-6 and mehyde flow experience, whether it's rock climbing or art or music or dance or small-engement repair, learning how to lassel horse. I mean, things that you have to work at over and over and over to get it right. And then you keep working at it over and over and over to get better and better and better. And so I know that all of us know people who have

been profoundly successful in their lives and all the ways that matter to them, some of whom were very academic as successful and some of whom were far from that and so it's for we seem to believe We seem to be living in a time when we feel that we have to get our kids and they have to be academic is successful at every step of the way They have to go to USC where they play whether they play water polo or not Right and without that that they can't build successful lives. And it's just hogwash. And it also pulls kids away from the activities to which they're naturally drawn.

Those very same experiences where they would have this inner drive, this flow experience and wire their brains for intrinsic motivation. Knowing that, they may, when they're 19 or 23 or 33, all of a sudden have an academic interest that draws them, but they've wired a brain that is ready to work hard at things that matter to them. Yeah, and how can you expect to have a self-driven child if everything you do in your life,

you became a doctor because your mom wanted you to do and you live in this neighborhood because that's where people of your background or occupation live, even though you hate it, you know, you're driven by this compulsion or this addiction, like you can't expect your kids to do or follow advice that you flagrantly violate with your own choices day to day. with your own choices day to day. Well, one of the main things that we recommend to parents is that especially as their kids get a little bit older, and they think about themselves more as consultants to their kids, rather than as the kids manager or boss or the homework police, where the role is ultimately they help kids learn to

run their own lives. And we think there's so much mental health problems and so many kids who can't finish the first year of college because they simply don't have enough experience running their own lives while they're at home. And for us, that's the goal. That's the goal is to kind of model as much as we can that healthy living and encourage kids to find the things in their life that are important to them, to work important enough that they work hard to get better and better and better and better. And that they focus on self-development so that they have something useful to offer

this world, which we think is what ideally, what we want kids to think about motivation, what they're doing to develop themselves. So they have something useful to offer this world. And this consultant idea is a nice alternative to thinking that somehow I suppose to be the boss of my kid or I'm supposed to be the manager

as for my kid's life. Yeah, it's like you're a facilitator in their drive or path to mastery. What is the profession or task or craft or whatever it is that they're going to become great at and how do you help them, how do you help them do that? And it may require a bunch of starts and stops. It may be the exact opposite of what you think is valuable or interesting, but your job is to help them become great at something, and it may be that becoming great at this thing, which there is no future in and makes no money in,

is precisely what sets them up to transfer those skills to another thing that doesn't even exist yet. That's a wonderful form of it. I was a C-plus student in high school, but I was a passionate rock and roll guy, and I don't remember ever turning in a homework assignment on time. I don't remember ever getting in a homework assignment on time. I don't remember ever getting past base 50 in a book But I I play rock and roll and practice my instrument and learn songs and teach myself chord structure Two or three hours a night and my father died at the brand in my senior year of high school

It kind of woke me up and kind of matured me yet. So when I hit college, I was a straight-a student kind of woke me up and kind of matured me yet. So when I hit college, I was a straight A student. Yeah, I got myself into the top graduate school in English literature, I promptly, promptly flunked out of that and which is actually the most, the best thing that could have ever happened to me because I was much more suited to be a psychologist than an English professor.

And I should add to the tens of thousands of kids whose lives you've transformed by helping them understand how their own brains work. Thank you, my friend. But I really do feel that the adieu chart about the plasticity of the adolescent brain, I really feel that through rock and roll, I sculpted a brain that once school became important to me,

I could go pedal to the metal. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. I wrote something about that many years ago that everything I know about being a writer I learned from Iron Maiden. I was a huge heavy metal fan as a kid. And yes, it was writing songs with my friends and recording them with my friends. And you go down this rabbit hole, and you might think that it's totally

unapplicable to actual real life. But it turns out I was learning about the artistic business, I was learning about history, I was learning about all these things. And mostly though, I was learning about what I liked and I didn't like and how to be self-driven at something. Isn't there attention though? So as a college dropout, I've written about this before. I often get messages from kids. It's often like three in the morning, you know, they're thinking that they're like,

they're asking me for permission to drop out of college, basically. And this might be surprising, but I almost always tell them not to, because the vast majority of the kids that I am talking to are not thinking of dropping out of college, they're failing out of college and trying to salvage it by quitting. So one of the things I always talk about is, is I say like, it's not the college is important,

but if you can't, if you're having trouble playing this game and college and, and all sort of systems are a game, why do you think you're magically going to be better at life not being out of college? So I guess what I'm saying is, and I think you guys touched on this earlier, which is that you have to figure out how to play this game of school. It's not important, but it is, you know, a sort of a system with rules that you have to figure out. Isn't there kind of attention between, you know, not actually caring about something, not being super motivated in it? And then it also being a sort of a reality of life or existence and sort of figuring out how to, in a moderated way, be proficient enough at it that, you know, you can graduate high school or a college or whatever it is. Like, you do have to figure out how to work within certain systems in

life. Well, I think it's a good point. I mean, you know, one of the angles that we come back to over and over and when we talk to folks is that the vast majority of mental health and is really changing thinking from I have to to I want to. And so I think there are a lot of kids who are in college and really struggling because they feel like they have to. And then, you know, the statistics right now on college kids and anxiety and depression

are just off the charts. And the problem is, when you're super, super stressed, by definition, your brain isn't working very well. The stress response is flaring. The prefrontal cortex that handles problem solving, decision making, planning, putting things in perspective, all of that goes completely haywire and can't think you're way out of a paper box, much less to the paper bag, much and can't think you're way out of a paper box, much less of the paper bag, much less of the dilemma that you're in.

And so when we tell kids, you don't have to go to college, you don't have to graduate college to have the life that you want, but there may be some good reasons why you want to. Then that, you know, for you're having that conversation, it pivots much in the direction the bill is mentioned before, of being a consultant. I'm like, well, let's pro-con this. If you want to do this, but there's some real headwinds to this, what are those headwinds? Are these things that we can tackle?

Are these things that you need help with? Are these things that are within your control? And because I think you're right, you know, that people, you know, things are going poorly because the major, the dominant manifestation of anxiety is avoidance, you know, things are going poorly, because the major, the dominant manifestation of anxiety is avoidance, you just want to get the hell away from the thing that is really giving you hell at a time, just because this stinks, this is lousy in thinking, but grasses so much greener over there. But you're right, if they can find ways to persevere and be successful, even with maybe

lower expectations for now, that's an important way, you know, playing the game is is another way of saying learning how to navigate life in ways to get you in the in moves in the directions of the goals that are important to you. And I guess I guess that's you know a part of agency right? This talks about how every situation has two handles which one you're going to choose. You can go this is bullshit. it's meaningless, it doesn't matter, I hate it, I quit, or you can say, I don't like this, but it's a game,

and I'm gonna figure out how to get just good enough at the game that I can get through it. And then once I am through it, I'm gonna focus on whatever it is that I wanna do. I often talk with kids who, to whom the most wonderful thing in the world is simply hanging out with other kids. Yeah. And often I say, and often they kind of discount that social giftedness that they have.

And I say that this is a real gift. Not everybody can do this. But I want you to know that the careers in which you get to skillfully interact with other people. They all require at least a college degree, many a masters degree, and some a PhD. So I want you to translate, to figure out over time how you can translate this passion for interacting with other people and helping people solve problems, to doing enough school so you can do what you want to do. And it's completely ineffective. Just tell kids, repeat, you need to do better,

you need to do better. And so many of the ways that I motivate kids start out by saying, you don't really need to do better. You could flunk all your classes now that if you decide that was a bad idea, there's other ways you can make up for it. But eventually, I want you to learn how to, this may be important to you,

I want you to learn how to do it. Yeah, that it's about sort of preserving optionality, right? You don't know, like for me, as soon as I knew, okay, what I actually want to do is be a writer. And so the best way to do that want to do is be a writer. And so the best way to do that is to work for an actual writer. I had a real sort of, I had an off ramp I could take. But in that intermediate period where you're just sort of dissatisfied or you don't know

what you want to do to sort of drop out or quit or not try and think that you're just magically going to figure it out is probably both naive and makes whatever it is that you want to do later harder. And so, yeah, I think sort of phrasing it as a game or as a strategy like, hey, does doing this give me more options or fewer options? That's kind of how you want to think about it. I won't, the caveat for me is that, and then I had had an article in New York Times in I think in 2018 or 19, it came out of the run Thanksgiving

because by November 1st, we already knew seven kids who had started college and were already home by November 1st. And they all took them one. They simply weren't ready to go. And in our sense is that many kids start college without any signs of readiness at all, in terms of being able to run their own life and manage their own sleep and their manage their use of technology.

And I think that there are kids who, and many start college, especially kids with the ADHD or executive functioning problems, where their prefrontal cortex is three to five years less mature than it is in most kids. And so those kids start college with the real disadvantage and there are kids who taking a year or two they go back with the more mature frontal cortex and they can do it. But your point is brilliant that,

and Ned was mentioning that the major manifestation of anxiety and we don't want to just avoid things. And maybe there may be a timing issue here. It may not be the right time for you to college, but I don't want you to avoid the things that are hard for you. Well, the irony though, is like, let's say, so you're 18 years old, you've been coddled or sheltered by your snow plow, helicopter parent,

or you've been driven by your, you know, your Tiger Mom parent or whatever it is, then you show up at college, you realize, you have no idea how to exist in the world as a human being, you have no idea what you actually want. None of this is important to you. Going back and spending two more years living with those people who are largely

to blame for what happened is probably not a boot camp for rapid maturity either. No, that's not the optimal gap here. You're exactly right. So how do you, so I've got a four year old and a two year old, to me that's my worst nightmare. Like at 18 years old, I was ready to do all those things. I was self-sufficient and self-driven

and had a clear sense of who I wanted to be. I'm not sure how much my parents contributed to that or how much there was some sort of, what's that policy that founded America? Was it salutary and a glad to benign the glad to work? Yeah, I had some of that. And so, how do you, as someone is sort of consciously trying to raise self-sufficient, independent, self-driven kids,

what are some big to-do's or not to-do's that we should kind of wrap up with here? Well, one is don't do for kids that which they can do for themselves, those things they can do for themselves. Knowing for well that if your four-year-old wants to help with the dishes or anything around the house, there's a decent chance that more messes will be made than fixed, but the inclination that kids have, even a young age to help, we want to work with that as much as possible. There's a wonderful book out, Michaeline DeCleff wrote, Hunt Gather Parent, and talks about how they're in these other cultures. There's simply an expectation, a culture, of having everyone in the family help. And so, when

you talk about kids being coddled, you know, and not getting ready for college, a lot of times that started out maybe well-intentioned enough where parents think, well, my kids going to goof this up, it's better for me to do this. But then you get on that, you get on that path and you never get off of it. And part of it also is that parents will often jump in to rescue their kids, partly to rescue their kids, but also because it's so stressful to watch our kids in their own distress. We have our second book is we look a lot about parental over control. And so part of this is, you know, manage your own anxiety first. And as much as you can, you know, Bill has a line of whose problem is it. So if your kid comes

home and didn't make the soccer team or didn't get invited to party or blew the speech, or as a teacher they don't like, or whatever, we have this natural tendency as loving parents to want to protect our kids, including soothing them when things are rough. And we just, we don't want to do that constantly because fixing things for kids and soothing them rather than letting them, you know, put things in perspective themselves deprives them of the very experiences that wire their brains for stress tolerance and their own motivation. So it's about letting them do stuff, letting them struggle at said thing.

And is there, are there things you should consciously, like if you were like, this is the number one thing that parents with self-driven kids do. Like what do you feel like that thing is? I think it's treating them respectfully, it's treating respectfully and realizing that kids want their life to work.

Everybody if they can wants to have a successful life. And I think so, it's treating them with respect. And I think starting from the time they're little, do you want to do it this way or this way? Just respectfully giving them choices, and with preschool age kids, you know, we give them a delimited number of choices and say, do you want it, which way do you want to do it? But we respect that individual sense of agency.

I mean, preschools have historically always known this, because there's always a free choice time. They're like, what do you want to do? And I think that it doesn't mean that we don't set limits. We absolutely do. I think that this consultant idea is that we don't always know it's best. We want to encourage kids to make decisions. We don't want to just tell kids the same thing over and over and over again. We want to offer our advice or offer or our help and not and as little as possible trying to force it, we want to minimize the extent to which it

feels like we're trying to force kids to do things because you really can't make somebody, you can't make a kid really do anything. And recognizing that is hugely beneficial as well. I love that. And last thing is like, since we open with this, sort of what does it mean to be self-driven, what strategies do you have for adults to remain self-driven? Or if we're trying to be great examples,

how do we maintain our own agency being a self-driven person as we go through life? I think there's a lot of ways. And certainly, you know, Dan and I are huge fans of meditation. And I think that that meditation is one way that allows us to, to, in our case, twice daily, kind of reconnect with ourselves and kind of and and so so many ideas with during meditation popp and your head about that this is important to me this I'd like to do this or that and so I think that the habits of self-care of meditation, exercise that's challenging the thinking, the practicing of acceptance, accepting the reality as it is,

and not thinking that somehow it's supposed to be different, or we're supposed to be different, there's so many tools that adults can use. And certainly, the stoic approach, which I frankly, I've just been learning about, since I've been meditating for 47 years, I've focused more on Eastern philosophy, and I've just shocked by how much practical wisdom

that there is in this tradition. I love it. Ned, any last words? Well, yeah, I would add to that that, that when we talk about self-driven, when it's the subjective sense of autonomy and to the brain state that supports it, When we talk about self-driven, one, it's the subjective sense of autonomy and two, the brain state that supports it, where when we're in a healthy, mental balance, our prefrontal

cortex that's really the key, you know, that's all these executive functions, including anything involving goal-directed behaviors. So, so, being living lives of moderation, of being well-rested, of having downtime to really reflect on what matters to us. And what do we want to, how do we want to spend our time? There's a, curiously, again, my wife, the land teacher, we have an inscription from Santa Cah over our mantle. I was just going to ask you about this.

Yeah. And I'll do my best not to butcher because I'm not the scholar that you are, or that my lovely wife is. But to best my recollection, it's ignorant, when portum peta, nullus, suis, wentus, est, which I gather translates pretty much to for the person ignorant of the port that he seeks, no windows favorable. So to be part of being self-driven is having the time to reflect that we're not just responding to every email, every text, every fear, every expectation, but we give ourselves downtime to daydream, to mind-wonder, and to reflect on what kind of life is it that we want to live and want to build,

and then with that in mind, we do the things that are important to move us in the direction of the things that matter to us. I love that. Yeah, the way I've heard that quote rendered is to the man who knows not which port he sails, no wind is favorable. And it actually ties, I was just thinking about this with my own life. So I did spend two years in college, and I would have graduated in three years. So I almost got through. But because I didn't go into college knowing, hey, I want to be a writer. Here's what I want to write about. I feel like so many of the

classes I took, you know, I could have studied under this writer, that write, like, why did I take all these general ed classes that don't even matter that I've never thought about again? The handful of really cool professors I met who were world-classic, you know, whether it was political science or creative writing or this or that. Those are the people that stayed with me. And so, yes, I think when you don't know where you're going or what you want to do, it makes it very hard to make intentional aligned decisions that get you closer to that thing. You just end up doing what everyone else is doing. And to go back to the college admission scandal, the thing that jumped out at me the most

was I think Felicity Huffman's daughter. She ended up having to go to jail for this. They cheat to have her do well on the SATs. It turns out she wanted to go to Juilliard where they don't even require the SATs. She was all famous. She was pointless. Oh, God.

You end up just doing what everyone else is doing, and you might win a competition or cheat to win a competition that you don't even need to be participating in. Somewhere I picture the oracles of Delphi, just sort of snickering at this whole thing, but... No, thyself. Yep. Well, guys, I love the book.

I'm glad we soldiered through our technical difficulties and appreciate all the work. And it's been very helpful to me personally. Thanks for having us on. It's great to talk with you. Thanks so much for listening. If you could leave a review for the podcast, we'd really appreciate it.

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