Manage to Engage

We’re going to start this three-part series with something that’s probably become pretty familiar to long-time listeners: a quick rebuke of the Western educational system. We’re going to look at how one of the beliefs and assumptions at the core of our education system not only doesn’t help us but actually sets us all up for lives full of overwhelm. Pretty much every single one of us experienced t...

In the last episode, I introduced the concept of engaging with disengagement (to both you and myself, at the time). And that’s not just a step towards getting what you want — that process of inquiry, that working on why you’re not working on something, is what you really need. The journey is the destination. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to see that when you’re still early in the journey, but my g...

Over the last two episodes, we’ve been talking about the internal conflict we feel between growth and comfort, between “I don’t wanna” and “I wanna” — and we’ve established that these conflicts are man-made, not some inherent aspect of being. The easiest way to see the conflict for what it is, two sides of the same coin, is to develop a healthy obsession with whatever you’re conflicted over… but d...

In the last episode, I asked you to consider those moments when we feel like there’s an internal conflict between growth and comfort — between the ‘I wanna’ and the ‘I don’t wanna’ — a misleading conflict brought about through social conditioning. We’re told to muscle through these conflicts with self-discipline. That’s a big part of the hustle mentality that’s taken over a lot of the conversation...

Every single day, you are likely presented with an internal conflict — do I do the thing that’s hard but rewarding or do I do what’s easy?  Over and over again, we weigh the relative advantages and disadvantages of growth versus comfort. It can feel like two different parts of ourselves are competing for our attention, and we’ve been trained that it takes self-discipline to overcome the part that...

To close out this series on How Everything is True, we’re going to make CLEAR Thinking more practical. And to start, I want to break down the term “ CLEAR Thinking ” a little further.  CLEAR Thinking is thinking that is critical, logical, evidence-based, analytical, and reality-based. This is serious, productive thinking that actually changes you. This is a valuable skill because literally every s...

Over the last two episodes, we’ve established the value of being willing to advocate for any belief, even if that means putting yourself in the shoes of someone who subscribes to a truth that deviates from your own. Today, we start to examine the questions that you can ask yourself to practice this particular brand of self-inquiry. I’d love your feedback. Click here to leave a rating & review for...

We start today’s episode with another student advocating for an idea that they consider to be untrue — and this one’s a doozie. So, why are we doing this? Why are you about to hear someone make an argument in favor of a flat Earth? It’s because I want you to understand that what we were taught about the value of strong convictions is misleading — being convicted in your beliefs and being willing t...

This series on How Everything is True builds on a lot of what we discussed in the previous four episodes on How You’ve Been Conditioned to Think Unclearly. So if you haven’t listened through that or need to refresh yourself on what Transjectrivism is, you might want to go back and listen through those because we will be looking at truth through a transjectivist lens throughout this series. These s...

The rapid rise of extreme subjectivism — which we’re still experiencing, and it’s really impossible to tell when we’ll reach an inflection point — has led to the rapid death of critical thought. We can see it everywhere, especially on social media. So, today, I offer you an alternative to either objectivism or subjectivism, a philosophy I call Transjectivism. I’d love your feedback. Click here to...

In the last episode, we traced the historical development of how Western society shifted from extreme objectivism to extreme subjectivism. It’s easy to adopt a subjectivist or objectivist perspective on the world, and both perspectives will provide you with the comforting illusion of understanding reality as it is, at least for a while — but both perspectives are inherently flawed and life doesn’t...

We spend a lot of time memorizing people and events and dates in school, even some big ideas, but we rarely learn about what those things actually mean to us — and that context, that perspective, can be quite meaningful and useful. So we start today’s episode with a look at the history of objectivism in Western society and how the ideological homogeneity seen in many societies ends up creating the...

This series on how you’ve been conditioned to think unclearly comes from a course that I started last year called CLEAR Thinking. My goal with both the course and this series is to show you how to wake up to reality and begin to understand how your mind works...and how it doesn’t work so well. This series begins by examining the tension between objectivity and subjectivity that occurs as a result...

Life is your teacher, and life doesn’t care about how happy you are. Life doesn’t care about how comfortable you are. Life is fundamentally about your resistance to change, and it is conspiring with the universe to push you towards embracing, looking at, and healing your resistance to change. So, if you are experiencing significant suffering or pain, pay attention — that’s life providing feedback...

Your job, then, as a person who wants to grow and evolve, is to learn how to track your resistance and make yourself optimally helpable. That means tracking your excuses, tracking your BS, tracking your laziness, and most importantly, tracking your fear. This is true if you are a student, an employee, or anyone engaging in the practice of self-management. So, today, I invite you to start earnestly...

Imagine there is an iceberg between where you are now and where you want to go in life. Typically, we’re taught that the obstacle between you and your goals is a lack of knowledge or skill — but that’s just the bit of the iceberg you can see above the water. The real obstacle is underwater, unseen and generally not talked about. But the act of overcoming this obstacle is also the key indicator of...

To close our this series, I am going to take the concept of deep practice — a relatively easy concept to understand when put in the context of learning something like a new instrument — and help you connect it to the inquiry and meta inquiry required to grow as managers and people, which is a slightly more esoteric but incredibly valuable and fulfilling skill. I’d love your feedback. Click here to...

There’s probably no better argument against the very idea that talent exists than a talent show. Similar to the idea of an “overnight success,” we are really only seeing the byproduct of hours and hours of effort, failure, and persistence. Yet, our practical mind, audacious as it is, manages to convince us that the practice required to become “talented” or “an overnight success” isn’t rewarding. F...

Over the next four episodes, I’m going to introduce you to a concept called Deep Practice. And to start, I’m going to address how we were conditioned by our parents and schools to attain knowledge… and that’s about it. This works when we’re being evaluated through papers and tests, but it’s a shallow form of learning that fails us in the real world. Because, while knowing about something is a nece...

Over the next four episodes, I’m going to introduce you to a concept called Deep Practice. And to start, I’m going to address how we were conditioned by our parents and schools to attain knowledge… and that’s about it. This works when we’re being evaluated through papers and tests, but it’s a shallow form of learning that fails us in the real world. Because, while knowing about something is a nece...

In this episode, you’ll hear how one member of the call applies the self-reflective tools we discussed last week in their own life and relationship, which you can then use to model your own self-reflection.   Then you’ll learn how to apply these same ideas and tools as a manager so that you mentor others towards maturing beyond ego.   As you listen to this episode, remember the questions that we d...

At some point in your life, you have almost certainly experienced pain or suffering as a result of trying to get what you want. And as you learn from this pain, over and over again, you start to practice self-reflection; you start to realize that some part of yourself is steering you in the wrong direction.   This healthy distrust of yourself is a key moment in the maturation out of ego — it’s whe...

The ego gets a bad rap, but it’s essential to both our personal and societal development.    We should express gratitude for and acknowledge the good that our egos bring. Our egos got us where we are today. But we also need to understand that they will not get us where we want to go tomorrow, both as individuals and as a species   There’s a final stage of maturation that many people never see, mat...

This our last episode in this series about self-inquiry and not knowing, and today, I’m going to show you how to start creating a practice around not knowing. I’d love your feedback. Click here to leave a rating & review for the show on Apple Podcasts .

In the last episode, I shared a conversation about how our education system is built on the knowledge deficit model. It’s the idea that whatever problem only exists because you’re missing some knowledge.   So, later in our lives, when we bump into a problem — whether it’s a problem with the world around us or ourselves — we first try to solve it by finding that little piece of knowledge that we’re...