Here's ten years of therapy summarized in one minute.
Number one, no one is coming to save you. Being a functioning adult means realizing you are responsible for everything in your life even if it wasn't your fault. Number two, strong boundaries make for good relationships. Weak boundaries make drama.
Number three, many of your problems don't get fixed.
You just learn how to live despite them. Number four, your mind lies to you all the time. It will tell you that the world is ending when it's not, that a mistake is fatal when it's not, that everyone is thinking about you and laughing about you when they're not. Learn how to tell your mind to shut the fuck up.
Number five, stop trying to convince people to like you. The right people won't need to be convinced, and everyone else is just gonna get very annoyed.
Number six,
sometimes the best thing you can do is let a dream die. No one likes to hear that, but it's true. And number seven, only a few people in your life are gonna matter in the long run. When you find them, treat them right, make time for them, keep them close, and be grateful.
You know, sometimes when I when I
put together stuff like that, I I I'm
Like hearing you read that back to me, like the the thought that comes to mind is how is this not taught in schools? How
are we just How is this not just Discover this at 34. Right.
Why do people have to listen to podcasts all day to hear some of this stuff?
It just seems
so fundamental.
You know, but it it is interesting.
One of the things one of the things that
my perspective has shifted, you know, I've been doing this for
seventeen years. Too long. Yeah, a long, yeah. A long time.
And when I look at things
that I've either changed my mind about or changed my perspective on over the course of my career, I think one of the big ones is that early in my career, I really thought it was all about just ideas,
information,
knowledge. Right? It's like finding
there's a few
pieces of key knowledge that if you can kind of figure it out, if you can dig through enough psych studies and find the application, like it's just gonna be a key that unlocks all these areas of your life. And
I think
if you were a consumer of personal growth advice,
that the experience you have often feels that way,
but I don't think that's true. I think actually what is true is that there are just certain
concepts, ideas,
principles that are
pretty obvious, and we all kind of already know them, but we lose
It's extremely
difficult to keep them in front of our face through
day to day life, and so we
need rituals and reminders
consistently.
And
I actually think that for most of human history, think religion was that mechanism of
those reminders to keep people like, hey, nobody's like, you're responsible for this. Hey, treat people well. That person matters, you know, like let go of the small stuff.
But I think in our
modern world, you know, most
people are losing that. And so
you're
almost seeing this reinvention
of those rituals
online
through like what you and I do Mhmm. Through podcasts, and Instagram, and YouTube, and all this stuff.
And I do it as well, right? It's like I've got my shows, and I've got the channels I follow, and the people I follow, and it's like they
it's it's not that any individual piece of information is like changing
my life, unlocking this whole area of my life. It's just like, oh, yeah. It's a good reminder.
That's so true. I think because the modern world is filled with novelty,
anything that we've seen before,
we don't usually want to hear again. Yeah. If you think, well, I already know that, even if you don't, even if there's 10 things that you basically just need to hear over and over again,
what you need to do, I think, is play the game of novelty
whilst just redelivering the same core message. Yes. And that's going to be antimemetic and wholly unimpressive to people. This is the fucking clean your room thing again. This is the tell the truth thing again. Oh, neediness, is it? And you go, okay. Well, I can
lie to you and create this sort of Fugazi gaslight thing where I say, this new thing is the big unlock. Right.
Or I can just try to repackage
stuff that is the existing concept so it satisfies your desire for novelty and my own desire for novelty whilst reinforcing
the principle that is most accurate. Mhmm. And that's really, I think, what a lot of the game is now. And we we were talking before we got started. I think that
very, very dense information,
like consumption
and over optimization is kinda dead in the water. Mhmm. And
the alternative is
reminding people stuff that they already know
in a manner that just you know how the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve works? Like, it's it's spaced repetition. It's why think the flashcards and stuff work like that. Yeah.
Basically, you need that,
but with novelty added in so that people are just regularly reminded,
oh, yeah. Like, I'd I'd just need to, like, go for a walk and sleep more. Yeah. Oh, right. Yeah. I just I
probably need to say how I feel to my partner when something upsets me.
I I've started
one way I think about it sometimes is that a lot of this advice, it's almost like having a fire extinguisher in the room. You've
probably had the experience where
maybe you read something
five years ago, and you're like, yeah, it's obvious. I know that. And then something happens in your life, right? It's like you get dumped, or somebody dies,
or you move across the world, and you're like suddenly you're like, oh my god. I need this so badly. Either. But one of the most embarrassing things is to realize that the problem you're facing was solved by something that you learned long ago Yes. But didn't appreciate. And, yeah, and then and then have to now go and relearn. Yeah. And you're like, fuck. Or that you're now facing a problem that you faced in the past Mhmm. And that you not only learned something, but a specific type of pain that both me and you do. You go, oh, I wrote about this. I fucking wrote this thing. Dude, tell me about it. I don't like me about it. Yeah. Yeah. So I had a speaking of
ascending the mountain and struggling to deal with fame, when my book took off,
I went into a real identity crisis. I think I've talked to you about this before on the show, but that
first year or two, when my book was number one everywhere,
it was like just all these crazy things happening.
I felt super disoriented,
and very lost, and kind of went through a little bit of a depression,
became like I got everything I ever wanted, and it made me depressed. Yeah, pretty much. And massive impostor syndrome for a period of time,
and started saying yes to a bunch of things I didn't want to say yes to. Right? And so then I ended up in this situation where I'm like, I feel trapped in my own career.
I'm obligated to do all these things for these people that I don't really want to be doing. I'm
stressed all the time. I'm anxious. My health's going to shit, and it's
I'm fat. And I'm fat on top of everything else.
Just add insult to injury. Fucking
fat.
And
it's so funny because I remember
when I was doing my film,
you know, it was that we were doing a film on The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, and I hadn't really read the book since I wrote it. And
so I went back, I'm like, well, I should probably read my book again. So I went back, and I read this was like 2018, 2019. I went back, and it was like all the shit I'd just I'd been spending the last two years dealing with. It was in my own book, and I'm like, I'm fucking all of this up. I'm saying yes to things I don't care about. I'm overloading
my life with all these distractions.
I'm not standing up for myself. I've lost clarity on what I value. Just chapter by chapter by chapter, I'm choosing the wrong struggles. Yeah. And I just it
was rough. It was really rough. I
had to
really have a
heart to heart with myself of like, dude,
Get it together, man. It's like it's like personal growth Groundhog Day. One
thing that I think is is kind of important, I
I understand how you can say, hey. Look. The small bucket of principles, over optimization, thinking about your life too much, all of these things, like, they they you're majoring in the minors, etcetera, etcetera. Mhmm.
That is true once you've been through it. Yes. It is not true before you've been through it.
Breaking the rules of the game before you've learned how to play the game is not breaking the rules of the game and being an innovator or being some essentialized
distiller of cool stuff.
It's playing a different game. And this is why I highly recommend that people become totally obsessed with personal development and productivity
and David Allen's Getting Things Done and James Clear's Atomic Habits and Morgan House's Psychology of Money and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck for, like, probably between
three and six years.
And then once you've done that, you can sort of get your black belt, put it on, and go,
okay.
Yeah. 95%
of that
was packaging. Here are the bits that really matter,
and I'm now gonna spend the rest of time trying to just
maintain that momentum and not overcomplicate stuff. And maybe
once a year, there'll be a novel insight which is genuinely
principled and fundamental that I just didn't know yet, but you can't get to that level without having gone through the first bit. And maybe it's just the case that the world of like, everybody went through
the same holy fuck. Like, this is novel.
But talking about, like, choosing your struggles appropriately or even neediness and stuff like that, that was novel when it happened, but that area of cognitive real estate, that territory's now being you know, when you play a a a video game and the map's all fogged out? Yeah. And then after you've played it for a while, the areas get opened up. It's like, well, that area's opened up now. So assuming that you've gone through this process previously, it was kind of like
humans were moving at the same level that technology developed. Yeah. But if you start doing personal development now, there's so much technology that you can speedrun all the way up to the top. Whereas for us, it's like, wow. Telling the truth is something. This is revolutionary.
Not that I've just discovered it, but it's just been said. Yeah. Right? This is this is groundbreaking
research.
But because there's so much to go through, and maybe it's just the case that the era that we're in
had a
formative
hockey curve, like, j shaped thing
where, wow, there's a fucking ton of insight that's repackaged ancient wisdom for a secular world that's distilled down into good language that's memorable.
I should I'm learning this as it goes in a new book and a new book and a new book. And now we're at the stage where much
of that territory that's important has been captured. Yes. And now because everybody kind of started the race, whether you were 18 or 28 or 48,
everybody started it kind of at the same time. And Peterson comes along with you and James and da da da da da. And you go, oh, wow. Like, that's that's now all being done. So everybody has a degree of
personal development fatigue, but that's not true if you're starting your journey. If you're like, hey. I'm Yes. I'm a fat piece of shit Correct. And I'm 25, and I've never done any of this. It's like, lock in for the next six years. Yes. Absolutely.
And then and then it is very much after that is it is just about maintaining the practice. Correct. A quick aside, there is a stat that genuinely surprised me when I first heard it. Ninety five percent of people don't get enough fiber. Not because they're being careless, but because hitting your daily fiber target through food alone is actually quite hard. But that's why Momentus built fiber plus. See, fiber isn't just a digestion thing. It's the foundation
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