Clint Murphy  00:03

Welcome to the pursuit of learning podcast. I’m your host, Clint Murphy. My goal is for each of us to grow personally, professionally, and financially, one conversation at a time. To do that, we will have conversations with subject matter experts across a variety of modalities. My job, as your host, will be to dig out those golden nuggets of wisdom that will facilitate our growth. Join me on this pursuit. I’d often say that if we had a real roommate in life, who talked to us and treated us the way our own mind does in our head, that we would evict them. Yet so many of us live with that voice. Rent free, controlling our mind with negative feelings. In today’s conversation with Andrew McConnell, we talk about how we can use stoic wisdom to get that voice out of our head and take charge of our mind. This was a fascinating conversation with Andrew on one of my favorite topics, stoicism. I hope that you will. Andrew, welcome to the pursuit of learning podcast, we’re going to be talking about your book, Get Out of my Head today. And before we dive into the book, where I’d love you to let our listeners know is a bit about you in your history and how we got to where we are today.

Andrew McConnell  01:46

Okay. Yeah, I mean, I think like a lot of people, it’s a pretty winding path. There was a period of my life, I was very focused athletically, I was a swimmer was on the US national team. So I’m in college. And that became kind of my identity.  I got a pretty serious injury, and had to reassess my identity when I wasn’t competing at the same level and got very serious in my studies. And then from there, went into law school, was very purpose driven kind of human rights, civil rights, got everything I wanted in terms of internships and opportunities there and found I was miserable in the work did not like the process of it. And so ended up actually getting excited and inspired about the business world because the problem solving.  I saw the businesses seem to be making the more interesting decisions, and as attorneys were just writing up the answers. And so I  went to McKinsey into consulting, and got to really tie my passions of human rights, civil rights with the consulting mindset, got to work with big public school districts, got to do economic development in Afghanistan and bounce between Kabul and Herat for a year. And then ended up deciding to go out on my own and start a company back in 2012. So it’s been a decade, ended up being in the vacation rental industry. Airbnb was just taking off at this time. VRBO was really taking off and created a marketplace business that was matching owners and guests. And then for the past 10 years, I just started a series of companies in that industry, had a lot of ups and probably more downs. Going along the way. Married my wife, got ahead of a child now. So we have a six year old daughter. And then the pandemic hit, and we took a trip to Bermuda to go see my wife’s family.  We couldn’t they close borders, so we couldn’t get to the UK to see her family. She’s British, and they couldn’t come see us. And so we went to Bermuda for a month and said, Wait, if we’re not going to the office, could we not go to the office from an island? And sure enough, we could. And so our daughter has been in school here for the past three years. And she started first grade now and we’re just really loving life.

Clint Murphy  03:51

So are you living in Bermuda right now?

Andrew McConnell  03:54

Right now? I’m in Bermuda. I was in the ocean a couple hours ago.

Clint Murphy  03:59

So what area of Bermuda are you living in?

Andrew McConnell  04:01

On the North Shore? So our steps, just step right into the North Shore water. And so just swim along the North Shore right there.

Clint Murphy  04:08

I lived in Bermuda for two years.

Andrew McConnell  04:11

Oh, wow. Where were you? Yeah. So

Clint Murphy  04:13

We were up in the back area I want to describe so you’re riding your scooter, you go up past the KPMG offices, which is where I worked, past the soccer pitch. And then you end up in the place where it’s a valley and you’ve got the really high cliffs on the left and the right and you kind of go through that chute to the back road

Andrew McConnell  04:35

Black Watch pass. That’s where I mean we live three minutes from Black Watch pass. We’re that we’re right there on the North Shore. Yeah,

Clint Murphy  04:42

So we live in two different spots there. So we lived in one home for a year, a nice little one and then we moved into a newer one.

Andrew McConnell  04:49

That’s amazing

Clint Murphy  04:50

And we you know go we used to spend a lot of time out at Elbow Beach and then I think we did our golfing over at Hamilton Princess, the nine hole course.

Andrew McConnell  04:59

Okay, yeah. the par three. Yeah.

Clint Murphy  05:02

Yeah, the par 3 pitch and putt basically. Yeah, it was a beauty. Yeah, great lifestyle. It was good for two years. Oh, that’s amazing. Its first guest I’ve had that is in Bermuda. I love it.

Andrew McConnell  05:11

It is a small place. I think a lot of people don’t appreciate, you know, it’s a 30 mile strip of rock in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean with 55,000 people. So it’s less than an NFL match. Right? Like it’s a very small place.

Clint Murphy  05:24

Yeah, I think seven and a half kilometers wide by like one and a half long. And so there’s not like you can go end to end on the island. And maybe, because it does wind right. But you can do the whole thing in 2,3, 4 hours and kind of touch every corner of the island. It’s incredible.

Andrew McConnell  05:41

Do a big ol loop. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Clint Murphy  05:44

So on that journey, right before we jumped on the air, we were talking about philosophy. And I mentioned what a pleasure it was to be talking to you about stoicism today. Because yesterday I had the opportunity to talk to another author about Buddhism, which is another one of my favorite philosophies. And you mentioned, Hey, can we dive into that in the show? So here’s our opportunity. What What was it you wanted to cover between the two?

Andrew McConnell  06:10

Yeah, so the title of my book is Get Out of my Head:  Creating Modern Clarity with Stoic Wisdom, right, so it’s around stoicism. It uses the stoic tenants as remedies for our default state, as renters of our own mind. It’s the only asset we can own. And yet we spend our whole life giving it away to other people to things that may or may not happen, to imagine that versions of ourselves, and we just rent the pieces back. And stoicism was a great framework, you know, pulling from Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca, and others on some of those structures. But I actually had a debate with the publisher, when we were finalizing the title on do we include stoicism or stoic in the title because I really believe you were talking about a lot of the parallels with Buddhism, and with stoicism, and you could bring in Taoism has a lot of the same, you could find the same tenets. Even if you go back to the genesis of prayer, and where that comes from in Judeo Christian and Islamic religion. It makes me believe these are more innate human truths, because people in totally different parts of the world, different times totally, that never could have communicated had any way to share ideas, were coming to the same conclusions, coming to the same realizations, and we keep rediscovering them. And so to put these labels, you know, there’s a book I still haven’t read, I want to read Buddhism without the ideology or something like that.

Clint Murphy  07:40

Yeah. And that’s huge. Because in a way, I consider myself a Buddhist, stoic Catholic. And when you look at it, I think the same way as you because what really blows me away about the two philosophies. And that’s how I think of them is philosophy is more than ideologies or religions, is Buddhism and stoicism were founded almost at the exact same time, plus or minus, I think, 100 years of each other. And both of them if I’m not mistaken, about 800 years before Christ. And so you look at it, and you say you have these two philosophies that are 3000 years old, and then you start to see how they actually have shaped some of the talking in the Bible and prayer and how we approach it. And even the more you read them, you fast forward and, you look at Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. And you look at some of the things we’re going to talk about from your book today that mirror some of the concepts from seven habits, when you start to think, wow, when I look at it, this is a really stoic book, or even I found stoicism through cognitive behavioral therapy, which was my way of one of the greatest life shifts I’ve had, which is why I loved what you write about, is the idea of controlling your thoughts and shutting off the monkey mind, if you will, which is again, monkey mind being a Buddhist term, but CBT tells you how to shut it off. And CBT was founded by two people who read stoicism and said, Hey, we can apply this to psychology. So just all of how all that intertwines together. It’s just beautiful. How it mirrors each other.

Andrew McConnell  09:15

Yeah, and I don’t think it’s an accident on the timing too. I think including Lao Tzu, if you get to Taoism and the Tao Te Ching, okay, I’ve got to look into that. Yeah. 100% It’s as long as meditations, right, tiny, tiny book, but I’ll read it three times, minimum a year. I mean, just and the quotes, they could be from Seneca or Lao Tzu. You’re like, they’re really such strong parallels. And these people it all rose roughly 2500 years ago, and Socrates even before was saying very similar things. And I don’t think it was an accident on timing. Because if you look at the biology and evolutionary biology of our brains, how we evolved and adapted humans were around 250 –  300,000 years.   And our brains. evolved for a very specific environment and state. That was hunters and gatherers, where we may be looking out at the plains, the savannahs we see beautiful gazelles running and zebras and giraffes grazing, we feel the breeze, we see the sun, all this beautiful stuff coming in, we have 11 million bits of data coming in to these developed brains of ours. So we’ve evolved, but we still were only able to process 50 bits of information. So you kind of go to the situation, this beautiful scene. And there’s a rustling to the side. And our ancestor that could stop, didn’t have the monkey brain going to the worst case scenario, who could stop and just smell the roses, see the beauty, they got eaten. Maybe it was a one time and 100. But when you have 365 days in a year, that one time and 100 adds up and your genes don’t get passed on.  Those people die. Right? The people that stopped and smelled the roses brains, they didn’t evolve to us.  The optimists that heard the rustling say, you know, nine times out of 10, hat’s a meerkat. No need to worry about it, they got eaten. So the optimist did not evolve the brains that we got. It was only the pessimists, right? The ones that had all this beauty around them, and immediately focused their 50 bits out of 11 million on the worst thing that could happen, and then extrapolated that to. And the worst possible case of this thing is this. Those were the genes that pass on because those were the people that survived. Andy Grove, you know, a CEO of Intel said, only the Paranoid Survive. And that was always true. That’s the brains we got. And then you go to 2500 years ago, when we started living in cities, it wasn’t just your family group or your your nomadic herd, we started having these civilizations, and all of a sudden, we weren’t gonna get eaten at any given moment. And so those brains that we had, were constantly on alert, and it was totally disserving us, because we weren’t able to focus on the beauty, on the present, on what else was happening. And so I don’t think it’s an accident. Zeno, psidium, Socrates, Lao Tzu, Siddhartha were all like, Hey, guys, let’s let’s take a step back here. Something’s not working for us anymore.

Clint Murphy  12:01

Yeah, our brain isn’t telling us what we need it to. So that’s let’s dive right in. And we’ll start with a quote you have in the book from James Baldwin, “albeit in a different context. Until this point, you have been playing the game, according to somebody else’s rules, and you can’t win until you understand the rules and step out of that particular game. Which is not after all worth playing, it’s time to step out of the game designed by someone else, and start making your own. In the game, it’s your life, it’s time for you to play to win.” So when you put the quote in, what game were you talking about? And can you include the three renters that we’re gonna be talking about throughout our conversation today?

Andrew McConnell  12:45

Yeah, so the game is, to me, the game of life. And when I say that the game we’ve been playing is the game, we default to, the game our brain defaults to. And in that scenario, right, we go back to kind of hunters and gatherers, we are hardwired, pre programmed to go to worst case scenarios. So anything happens, somebody says something, somebody might say something, we’re worried what someone might say, we give our mind to mind renter number one other people.  We’re operating in society, we have to be really worried how we fit into the group, that’s what’s going to keep us alive, right? So that’s mind renter number 1, mind renter two is events and circumstances outside of our control. I read a book by uh Timothy Robbins, that had a character that just really stuck out to me, who had a line roughly of, I decided, at a certain point in my life, I could be the kind of person who complained about the weather or not that person. Right, and we all have that. We can’t do anything about the weather. I mean, maybe we can help with climate change and everything like that. But like, if it’s a rainy day, or a sunny day or a windy day, we’re not controlling that. And so you have that choice of, hey, do I want to let those things I have no say in control my mood? Oh, it’s so rainy. Oh, it’s so windy, I really wish it was this other thing? Or do we not let our moods get dictated by that? Do we not give our mind over to these other things. And then the third is, is a little more amorphous, and probably the most difficult to overcome. And that’s different versions of ourselves, right? The the imagined version, the us of, Oh, when I get to this stage of life, or when my kids are this age, and I’m living this kind of life or man it was so much better back before I had arthritis or whatever it is. these imagined versions of ourselves that aren’t the us have right now of the present, because the truth is, and it once you hear it, it’s so obvious, but we don’t operate it.  The truth is the future and the past definitionally only exists in our imagination. There’s  there’s nothing else other than in these six inches, that have the future or the past. The only moment that ever exists that we ever can live is the present is now at every single juncture. That’s all that there actually is happening. And yet huge portions of our life we give to these imagined futures and paths and don’t ever end up living life.

Clint Murphy  15:09

And I always like to when I’m teaching people meditation, I always like to focus on right now, right here, this moment, because it is legitimately the only moment we can actually impact.  Now we can impact our future but we can only impact our future in the present moment. And so it’s such a beautiful, again, that tie in between the mindfulness of Buddhism and the this steadiness of stoicism to say both of them saying, and probably you would say, Taoism as well.  This moment, this is what we’re gonna focus on, because this is what we can do. And so when I’m here with you on a podcast, I’m focusing on the conversation with you, not thinking about, oh, how are we going to produce this? It’s what did Andrew just say, and and what does that mean? That’s beautiful. So let’s dive into some of that. And the first area you start off with is you talk about valuing ourselves. And that’s something where it’s always important for people to note, the more we talk about these renters, if you actually had renters in real life, in your rental properties, like you have in your head, most of them you’d evict pretty quickly. And so when we start to listen to that voice, you’ll notice the voice probably doesn’t value you the way you should. And you shared a wonderful quote from Seneca that said, “each man regards nothing as cheaper than himself”. And you had a story about KP, who realized it was all about how he valued his time. But not only that, how others value it. And so it was two facets there. Can you take us through those two? How we need to work on valuing ourselves? And then how we have to think about our value in relation to other people?

Andrew McConnell  17:06

Yeah, and there is probably at least three levels to it. Right? So there is that? How do we value ourselves? We live in definitionally, an intention economy, we have stuff constantly trying to hit us? And at what price are we selling our attention? What price are we giving to social media? Like, Hey, I just gave an hour and a half of my life, to Instagram? What is that value to me? What did I just give to them? And so there’s a question of what do you think, personally, you should be worth, then you start to get to the market. Okay, how do other people in the market value me and that’s where there’s really two levels, because there’s one of, it’s not static, you can go and learn new skills, and up your value. Right? If you’re a bad writer, you’re not very valuable. But if you go hone that skill, and you become a good writer, you’re more valuable, you can be a freelancer, you can do a blog, you can write a book, right, like you can move up that.  Same with programming or any kind of skill, you can work your way up. There’s a reason advanced degrees typically earn more than people without because you can earn more and increase your value. But then separate from that, it’s what are you doing in the given moment, and your value in the market, right, because you could be the world’s top neurosurgeon. Your effective billing is $50,000 an hour because what you’re billing insurance companies, when you’re operating, when you’re operating, that’s what your value is. But if you go and start repairing shelves in your house, or you’re mowing the lawn, that is not a $50,000 an hour activity.  There are people that can probably do it better for you than you. And they may only cost 10 or 20 bucks an hour, you’re worth no more than 10 or 20 bucks an hour in those times. It doesn’t matter what you’re theoretically worth, with your top skill. It matters what you’re doing with that present moment. doing with your time. And so to me, those are kind of the three levels, what do you think you’re worth, how do you change it to work out that and then what are you doing in any given moment to really optimize

Clint Murphy  19:08

So when we think about that any given moment one, that’s really important, because it’s often missed. So a lot of people will say, hey, I value my time, and I value my time at 200 bucks an hour. So unless if something costs under that, I’m just going to outsource it but what you’re trying to say there is, yeah that’s fair that if you value your time at $200 an hour as long as you’re doing something that’s productive and adds value.  If you say I value my time at $200 an hour but then you go watch four hours of Netflix, it probably wasn’t worth $800.

Andrew McConnell  19:42

I guess it could be to that person right because them shutting their mind off could be worth that right so cause you could carry the same thing of, oh dinner with my family. I could go bill another two hours for a client at this $200 but I value this time with my family at a $1,000. So whatever anybody else is going to pay me, it’s not going to clear the hurdle.  Like this, I’m not getting paid for this time with my family, but its value to me is different than the value to the market. And that’s where that first one of what is your value to you? That’s where it is separate than the value to the market, you need to know what you believe your worth is. And then if you’re selling your time, say, is it worth that to the market or not? It is both.

Clint Murphy  20:27

And so how does someone go about improving how they value themselves? So not your point about Will I get experience in marketing, I become a better writer, I get an advanced degree because that’s increasing our value externally. But how do we change that voice? That tells us, you’re not good enough, you’re not worth, you’re not worth it, you don’t deserve more money? Don’t ask for, you know, you only ask for $50 an hour, don’t ask for 500. How do we change that voice for people?

Andrew McConnell  21:00

I mean, kind of the the work in the book is to price check it and say, Okay, what is market for this activity, for my skill set? Because you could be deluded in what you’re worth, like, hey, this art that I’m creating is worth this. And it doesn’t matter for Van Gogh that 100 years later, his stuff selling for millions, right, his value at that time, people weren’t paying that. And so it didn’t matter how he valued in terms of what other people would pay. I think there is a whole separate equation and this this is in Taoism, this is in stoicism. This is something John Muir realized when he was this magnate shipping grapes to Hawaii. And he just left it and went vagabonding and taking these photos and like living in the national parks and kind of his competitor from his business life. People said, Oh, Aren’t you jealous of this guy? He’s so much richer than you. He said, Absolutely not. I’m much richer than him. Because I have enough, and he doesn’t. And so in valuing yourself, you can move your value up so much, just by saying you have enough.  It doesn’t matter, right? In that moment, if someone came and said, I’m going to pay you $2,000 to never have dinner with your family again.  You say, that’s not gonna, it’s not gonna move the needle for me, I have enough, then your value is almost infinite, right? There’s certain things that you value that can’t be sold, that can’t be bought, but only if you think through, what is that value to you.

Clint Murphy  22:24

And so that also, you know, let’s fast forward in the book, then because that also ties to the concept. Now we’re talking about that, that third renter, who’s always looking at it, saying, I’ll borrow right from you, we constantly believe we’ll be happy when, sometimes that when is when we get a material item. Sometimes it’s when we receive an award or promotion, recognition. Sometimes it’s when something will end or something new will begin. The when can manifest in many ways. But the commonality is, the when is different from today. And we’re convinced that once the when arrives, everything will be different, and everything will be better. So how do we work on our mindset in a way that we don’t need when? Because we’re here, in this moment?

Andrew McConnell  23:14

Yeah, I want to answer that.  Before I do, I do want to get back because I a common kind of pushback on this presence is, well, if all I ever lived was for the now right? This holy hedonistic life, then I’ll never save for retirement, I’ll never do anything but eat sugar, right? And plan ahead. And I guess the point with Buddhism or stoicism is live and be mindful now. And in doing that, you need to be proactive in deciding how much of your time in mind to give to the future or the past.  You should look forward and prepare and do that work. Right? You can look forward. But just make sure it’s a conscious decision and you’re doing something about it and not just losing the present in that moment. Same from learning from the past, we should look back. We should deconstruct, we should learn from the past. But make it a conscious decision in the now of hey, right now, I want to go think about the past and work on it. Right? So it’s not that we never look forward or backwards, is it? It’s a conscious decision as opposed to this passive default that all of sudden 90% of my life is not lived here?

Clint Murphy  24:17

Yeah, absolutely. Because we talk about a lot of financial independence and financial literacy on the show. So have a plan, have a budget, have a net worth statement, forecast it, think about your future. One of the number one things we always talk about is know what you want, have a plan to achieve it, do the work on a consistent basis. One of the key important things that you mentioned is you’re making a conscious choice to think about what do I want in the future? But also why do I want it because if we think that I want that because that’ll make me happy. Now that’s what now that’s where this ties in is the why.

Andrew McConnell  24:54

Yeah. And so this question the live where you are when you are, right? Really for me ties to the non attachment to results, right? Because it’s that result we think when whatever that result is, when our child sleeps through the night, or when we have X million in the bank, or when we get this promotion at work, whatever it is, we think that when that says result, and since writing the book, I’ve learned more on the science behind this, right, how we are incentivized as humans is through dopamine, right? That is how we evolved, the dopamine gives us the incentive to get up, gives us a hunger to go find food, to go search and seek these things out. And it comes not from the reward, but the anticipation of the reward. And so we’re getting these dopamine hits, expecting, oh, when this happens, when this happens, when this happens, and the higher the high of this expectation. Once it’s gone, once that expectation hits, it’s a fall off. And the higher the height, the lower the low, you go below where you started, and how far below you go from where you started, depends on how high you got. So this is why for years, a lot of times, afterwards, Olympians are depressed. This was what my whole life was built to, I’ve done it.  Who am I now? What am I going after now, because I had this highest, highest high. And now I have my lowest low of my entire life.  For pure entrepreneurs who sell their company. And the answer, again, goes back to making the process the result. So people who have a target, a good one for me, I think, to kind of explain as if, if you have a target weight loss, or if you’re training, hey, I’m going to get in shape because I want to be ready to run this marathon. People say this is great motivation, because that’s what gets me to go train each day is this marathon, then they go run the marathon. And they don’t exercise for two more years, like did that actually help you at all right? Or I lose the weight, and it stays off for two weeks. And then I started putting back on. And that’s because you were focused on the result. You got this dopamine hit, and then you came back down. But if instead and this is what top athletes are able to do with training, it’s about the training, it’s about the process. You’re getting the dopamine, you’re getting your endorphins, from the process, and you’re enjoying the process, then these other things come and go, you don’t have these expectation, highs and lows, because it’s the process that’s giving you those dopamine hits as you go. And you can stay at a steadier high without the down, down swing low. And so that, to me is the answer of look, these are realizations I come to as I live life too. But you know, I haven’t had, I used to live for vacations. Everything was about travel like, oh, planning ahead. It’s this big, big thing. And then you’re on the vacation last day or two. Oh my God, what’s the next vacation. I have to have this to look forward to. I need that next dopamine hit because I’m going to have this low after. And I mean, granted, I now live in Bermuda, but turning it around to wait, how do I make every day a day that I love that I wake up, I’m like, I am excited to live this day, I’m going to sit and my six year old daughter’s going to sit in my lap and meditate with me this morning. I’m going to be able to go journal. I’m going to go swim in the ocean for this period of time. I’m going to get to do work that I love people I get really inspired by. I’m going to do some writing, like how do I craft my days, my weeks, my months. So it’s not that I’m doing months of misery for a two week vacation, or I’m doing years of misery to get to some retired state. It’s I have the steady state, that is a life that I want to live because your life is the summation of your days, not the one off, you know, accolades that you put on your resume.

Clint Murphy  28:20

So when I’m writing that one down, because that was beautiful.  Your life is a summation of your days. And when did you have that realization that you wanted to, instead of living life or a future goal, and for you know, a semi retirement or whatever it was going to be that you want it to. And I partially bring this up because I talk openly on the podcast about what my future will be when I evolve or pivot from work, and that I have a defined timeline. And all the things you just mentioned are on the list. But when did you have that realization that you want it to switch from I do all of this to enjoy these time periods or this future time to I’m going to craft my day, in a way where I enjoy every single day. And I’m still getting to where I want to go with my business with my family. With the company.

Andrew McConnell  29:17

Yeah, and it I would say there probably at least four different kinds of pieces that came together on that. So one was a mentor of mine, PJ Bain, CEO of Prime Revenue. There was a time I really was not happy in my work. And we were talking and he said, look, you gotta remember, this is your company. If you don’t like what you’re doing, change what you’re doing. And it made me think because it’s so easy to blame it on stage of life or all these things, the events and circumstances outside your control, other people, investorsc clients, right, but had I done the work to say what is it I want to do, right? What is it? Let’s even start by defining that. And so using this framework I use now of this two by two of what do I hate doing? What do I love doing? You know, like, what do I feel really energizing, get in the flow state and do and that’s one axis. The other axis is what am I great at? What am I terrible at? And as I reassess that each quarter? And as I look, I say, how do I get more and more my life to the top rate box. And when it comes to work, it’s what of anything not in the top rate box actually needs to happen. So the starting point is what can just stop happening? I don’t need to hire other people to do it. Like what actually delivers value, because we get in habit, stuff that made sense, a year ago or a quarter ago may not make sense anymore, we may not need it, it may be duplicative. So erase those things. Those don’t happen anymore. Okay, what do I have people that could do this, at least as well, if not better than me to do? Great. And then the others are? How do I hire, automate and do other things for so that’s kind of the step one of crafting. And then to this realization of the day to day, I mean, I think part of it was really trying to live more of a Buddhist stoic life of we couldn’t travel right? After December 2019. It turned off, so I’m saying, okay, instead of living my life, if I’m going to be happy when I go travel again, let me get in the mindset of I’m happy here. And people when we moved to Bermuda said, Oh, man, you must love that you’re gonna have such a hard time moving back. And I keep saying, as much to remind myself and train myself as anything. I can be happy anywhere. I can be happy anywhere. You put me anywhere, I can be happy, because I get to decide if I’m happy or not. Yes, I love Bermuda. I’m having a great time. When you put me anywhere, I can be happy anywhere. Right? I have that ability.

Clint Murphy  31:42

And it also ties to, because that’s a good one, as well as, like when you mentioned mentor, it made me pop into my mind is when you were at McKinsey, and you were super, super upset. You met with one of your mentors at the Waffle House, and you were complaining about work and everything that was happening to you. And instead of commiserating with you, he looked at you? And he said, Well, McKinsey is designed for guys like you, insecure overachievers. And, Andrew, it doesn’t matter if you’re at McKinsey, because you’re going to be doing the same thing wherever you go. And that really hit me, as a young guy at KPMG. It was the same thing. And then when I left KPMG, and I went to another job, it was the same thing. And then my next job was the same thing. And it wasn’t until stoicism and Buddhism that I realized, wait a second, I don’t have to work 12 hours a day, I can work eight. I’m a bright guy, I’ll do enough. And then I’ll be with my family. And if something’s a little bit later, that’s life. So it was, so can you tell us about what what he told you and what your next steps were coming out of that?

Andrew McConnell  32:53

Yeah. And I mean, you just summed it up very, very accurately of this idea of self selected or purposefully selecting for these insecure overachievers, because they never feel what they do. We never felt what we did was good enough. You’re always trying to work so hard to do it. And the idea of, I have to leave this place to get a better life. I know you need to live leave this mental state, you need to leave this mindset. It’s Socrates. Somebody came from traveling said none of my travels ever did me any good. And Socrates supposedly said, Yeah, of course not. Because everywhere you went, you were there, right? You took yourself everywhere. So the travel didn’t matter, you were there. And it’s the same thing with our professional life. If we have that same mindset, it’s not going to change. And so for me, I had to get that new mindset in between McKinsey I went to a place, Axiom, that was an early stage company, I launched a new product, built it a bunch, clients were lovely, company was lovely. And it he gave me this confidence that wait, I can accomplish really great things without working the same number of hours. I decided then, already to start crafting my life. I started writing, I was writing a novel on the side while I was working, I was writing blog posts, like, hey, I love to write, let me do this while I’m working instead of, because there’s a big chunk of my life, I say, oh, I need to earn enough that I can retire so I can go write? Well, no. Why? Why don’t I just craft time? If I’m going to prioritize it? Let’s not watch Netflix. If I was going to give 90 minutes a day to Netflix, I could give that to writing. Because that’s something I say I value and want to do. I have that choice. Where am I going to put the time?

Clint Murphy  34:25

Oh, there’s so much to dive into there. So the angle I’ll take it because you do bring up a good concept and I wasn’t going to dive into it is you talked about an idea of some people may know what zero based budgeting is. I know it from my accounting finance days. You probably from your McKinsey days. But you took that approach and you said well, why don’t you apply zero based budgeting to your zero based calendaring. And so you right there when you said I can eliminate 90 minutes on Netflix and replace it with 90 minutes of writing, can you educate the readers on what you mean by that concept of zero based calendaring? And how they can use that to achieve more in their lives?

Andrew McConnell  35:06

Absolutely. This is probably this and may be because it’s early in the book, but it seems the most resonant. That’s what people reach out like, Oh, my God, I just started doing this. This has completely changed my life, my week, my days. So that the concept on zero based whether it’s calendaring or budgeting, is our default way of budgeting is looking at what we have today and say, how do we want to change that around? What should have more, what should have less Zero based is no, go from a blank sheet of paper and say, what is it that I need? What is it that I want? And so if we had a blank sheet of paper with our life, how many hours a day would we sleep with that blank sheet of paper? How many hours would we spend on social media? How many hours do we want to spend at work, how much, how many of those hours do we want to spend with family, with or without devices, with friends. You know, crafting that out as a percent of our life, and then making sure it adds up to 100%? If it doesn’t, because sometimes you can’t have it all, you can’t have 100% of everything, right, you still have to add up to 100%. So you may have to right size some things say Okay, I’m gonna have to give here to get there. But going through purposefully, to say, if I was to design my life from scratch, here’s the things I want to give it time, not where my time is going today. But where I want to give time. And then, what I do is knowing that percent, I look forward each week and say, Hey, on my calendar, did I adhere to this? I have for the quarter? Here’s where I said, I want to put my time. Is that true? And maybe there’s certain days it’s not. And there may be good reasons. Oh, I was traveling this week. So I didn’t get that time with my family. So I’m going to really make it up on this weekend to do X, Y and Z right? To get there over the course of the month, or get there over the course of a full week. But deciding I have how much time do I want to give to people asking them for advice that I don’t have relationships with right mentorship, like it’s something I care about, I want to do, but how much every week do I want to do that. And I have that number. And I have a Calendly link that only has that number of hours each week. And if someone books, and it’s for December of 23, because that’s the next available slot. That’s what it is, right? I’ve hard coded it in my life, that there’s not another way to get that time. If people ask for that kind of thing. Here’s the link, here’s the life that I’ve given to it. And so there are a few things there. I mean, one, you don’t have to be so hard and fast with it, right? You don’t want to do it and say okay, like a diet, oh, I failed. So I’m gonna give up on the whole thing. Like, understand where you failed, and what failure means, but like, where it slept, and how you can take back control of.  Hey, maybe I was unrealistic. Maybe I can’t sleep eight hours, maybe it’s only seven and a half, because I need this extra half hour for this other thing. Okay, let’s, let’s see if we can make it work with that, let’s redesign. And then the other piece is, that like so much else is not static, it needs to be dynamic. So that’s an exercise for me that I go through each quarter. And a quarter is just an arbitrary measure of time, but every three months saying, okay, now looking forward, especially because I do a double click on work, right? For me, a lot of the outside of work stuff is hard coded, I have those times hard blocked, my computer, my phone stayed in a separate room while we go to dinner as a family, like those things are kind of hard locked. And so it’s the work hours that I say, Okay, here’s what I’m going to give to work. And how much of that is going to clients, how much of that is going to my team, how much is going to investors and that changes over time. So I really have to revisit that. Say, Okay, this quarter is really about fundraising, that’s going to get more investor time. So that means I have less time for clients, I have less time for people who aren’t my direct report. And then maybe we get through that period, you say, Okay, great. Now I get more time, all that time that went to investors can now go to clients, like I can go play with that in different ways.

Clint Murphy  38:57

And so some real power there in what we’re talking about earlier with this concept of, you’re saying, Here’s, I’m taking my calendar to zero. This is my ideal day, my ideal week, my ideal month because it all rolls into each other. Then you’re building the tool to using your calendar, I absolutely agree to if it’s not in my Outlook, it doesn’t happen. It just life’s there’s too many competing things. So if it’s in there blocked off, it’s going to happen. And we’re looking out that’s the future, but we’re doing it now consciously. And then whether it’s weekly, monthly or quarterly, we’re looking back and saying how did we perform against what we wanted to do? And how are we going to use that to change what we do going forward?

Andrew McConnell  39:40

Yes, and so we look back, but I also look forward. I have 30 minutes every Friday, where I look at my calendar for the next week. And that next week, if I say, Oh, this got out of balance, I’m going to move these meetings. I’m going to cancel these meetings, or oh no, there’s a really good reason it’s out of balance. I am consciously going to be fine with this out of balance in this way for this week, but it’s I also prospectively look at it to, and I have, because it is quarter by quarter in the calendar, the 30 minutes that I block on Fridays, I have here are the hour allocations for these different activities that I have for the week. And then that’s what I use to kind of grade myself and benchmark for the coming week.

Clint Murphy  40:21

And then when I see what you’re doing, it makes me think of later later in the book. And I love jumping around through it with you, because it all ties together is you talked about the concept of doing less, but better, which is a huge thing that I’m moving towards in life as well as what are the pillars that I need to focus on? I’ll do them really well. And that will deliver the results.  And you talk about Jack Dorsey. And it’s interesting that people think like, well, he can’t be doing less better at one point, he was he was running two public companies, he’s running in and like, how does he do all of that and balance his family life? Like how is that even possible, his health, his Bitcoin conferences that he’s going to? And he’s going to India to do? Like, how’s this guy doing this? And so do you want to share a little bit about what people don’t realize he’s doing?

Andrew McConnell  41:16

Yeah so, as I understand it, how he did it. One, he said, Look, my role as a CEO of these companies, is as an editor, it’s probably more about saying what not to do, than what to do, what needs to come out.  Most of editing is taking out the extraneous material. And it that is not that dissimilar from Steve Jobs who said, Look, I’m more proud of the hundreds of things we said no to, than the handful of things we said yes to because it was only by saying no, to all these good thingg, that allowed us to that handful of great things, one at a time, right? It was the iPod, then it was the iPhone, and it was the iWatch, right,  you go through it. And so how Dorsey did it when he was balancing multiple was days have specific names, right? So this day is on product, this day is on culture, this day. And so he could stay fully in a single mindset, because he’s not flitting around, like a hummingbird between a bunch of flowers. He’s staying in a single garden and say, get fully present in these are the things that matter on this day. And I’m going to be fully fully present and focus on fewer things today. But I’m going to do them really well, right. I’m going to do fewer things, but I’m going to do great. Plus, but better.

Clint Murphy  42:30

Okay so, let’s go back in time to your childhood. And when you were a kid, your dad said something that seems like it had a massive impact on you. From you know, when you were giving us your bio, and the things you’ve you’ve done. And what he said with you to you was you’d been at a friend’s house, and you hadn’t enjoyed the day because you were focused on a project you had to do. And it was your first dose really of stoic wisdom in that he said, Son, either do the thing you should be doing or don’t do it, and don’t think about it. But don’t not do it. And then spend the whole time thinking about it. That’s the worst. If you’re going to obsess about it. You might as well be doing the thing you’re putting off. You will get it done. You always do. Just make sure you actually enjoy the time you’re taking off. What did that mean to you? And how has it informed your life said?

Andrew McConnell  43:28

Yeah, it’s it’s crazy, because the book has these quotes from Seneca and Marcus Aurelius.  But this is probably the most resonant, right? Everybody’s like, man, that advice you got from your dad? Great. That it I wouldn’t. We talked about the monkey brain, right before, the monkey brain, our lizard brain, whatever, the default. And so I’m not going to pretend I’m Buddha, that I’m perfect at this now. But what that quote allowed me to do is noticing, when that starts happening, of I’m at the pool, I’m at the beach, I’m with my daughter, and I’m starting to think through okay, I have this meeting tomorrow, what do I need to do and say, Oh, step back, do you want to step away from this time with your daughter right now? And go plan out that agenda? And the talking points? Do you want to actually do that now. Because if you do, go do that, if not, don’t be thinking about it, be right here. Because you’re not going to ever ever in your life. You’re never going to get this moment back. This is the only time you’re going to have this moment. So you can choose to go work on it. There’s nothing wrong with that, but then go work on it. Don’t just give your mind to the thing you’re not working on. Work on a beautiful day with your family, work on the problem that you need to solve. But you’re doing a disservice to both if you’re physically in one and mentally in another. that’s That’s not accomplishing anything. And so the ability to recognize when that’s happening, and then to say okay, which way do I want to go right now?

Clint Murphy  44:59

Yeah, And then come back. So for our listeners, what a lot of people think we you talk about what you and I are talking about right now. Whether it’s meditation, whether it’s mindfulness, that the whole idea is we’re not going to have, we’re going to eliminate all the thoughts. But but that’s not reality. I think we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 35,000 thoughts a day. So you’re not going to eliminate them, but you just really highlighted, Andrew, is we’re not going to grasp on to them. That’s the goal is is to do what you would have what you brought up in that situation with your daughter is, oh, I found myself grasping on to this, but I’m not going to. I’m going to let it go. And I’m going to bring myself back to this present moment. That was a beautiful example of the way to do it.

Andrew McConnell  45:46

For American football fans, you know, the the analogy for me that I tie it to is with the face mask rules, right? There are times when you’re tackling your hands and up in the face mask, if you release, it’s not you don’t get the call. It’s only if you keep holding that you get the penalty. And so as you’re tackling life, you can’t control if these thoughts are popping in. But you get to decide, do you want to relax your hand? Or do you want to hold on for dear life and follow that?

Clint Murphy  46:15

Oh, it’s a beautiful analogy. I love that. The I want to take us back to your talk. you talked about evolution. You talked about the pessimists being the ones who survive, and the optimists being the first to die. So what that clearly brings up for me is you listed two of my favorite authors and people who have demonstrated both of them, the ability to live through atrocities and still come out the other side strong for it. And the two I’m talking about there are James Stockdale and Viktor Frankl, who both relied on concepts from stoicism, one to survive in a prisoner of war camp, and the other in a concentration camp. And can you share what they both realized, in their situations? How we need to be thinking so that we can make it through those really hard times we’re gonna face in our lives.

Andrew McConnell  47:12

Year, they’re interesting juxtaposition, if you read what they actually say, right? So you have Stockdale who didn’t make it as a prisoner of war in these environments. He said, Oh, that’s easy. It’s the optimists. They couldn’t make it. Because they would think, Oh, we’re going to be out by Easter, we’re going to be out by the summer, we’re going to be out by Christmas. And these dates would keep coming. And they would die of a broken heart because they wouldn’t be released. And so the optimist had the worst chance of it. And then you go to Viktor Frankl, you say, hey, who didn’t do well?  Oh, the pessimists. And and he’s giving this lesson to people, when he’s he was estimating his own chance of survival at 5% and saying, well, that seems pretty pessimistic. But what they’re both saying is giving your mind of, Hey, am I going to be satisfied? Am I going to feel like this was a success on things I can’t control.  Viktor Frankl will say, Look, I can’t control when the liberators come, they could come tomorrow, they could come at any time. There is this possibility out there that we get out of this camp, I don’t get to dictate that. So that gives me this hope that it’s out there that I can’t control it.  Stockdale, it was giving the the other thing they couldn’t control of, hey, I’m going to set this line in the sand at this time is when my mind is going to think this thing’s going to happen. Well, you don’t control that either. And so knowing the boundaries of what could they control, Stockdale and Frankel, both from two sides of the coin came to, I can only control what my mindset is in a situation. When am I going to get my hopes up? Am I going to have a broken heart? Or am I going to accept where the boundaries of my influence and control exist? And my influence or in control are what I say, what I do, what I think.  Those are things in my control? Yeah. Does that answer?

Clint Murphy  49:03

Yeah, absolutely. They both had that almost element of neither pessimists nor optimist, but that there’s hope, but it’s based in realism, is I can only control this and I’m going to be realistic about what I can control, what I can’t. Which brings us you know, we talked about Stephen Covey, who you also mentioned, is this idea of what is within my control, what is outside of my control? Where do I need to place my focus? And I loved how you used acronyms throughout the book. And I think for this one, you had an acronym that you called REST, what was REST? And how does that apply to what we can control in our lives? Yeah,

Andrew McConnell  49:43

I mean, the R is recognize what we can control and what we don’t, right. Where are those boundaries? Where are those limits. Then the E and S is exert control where you actually have it. Stop spending time in mind where you don’t have that control or influence.  That’s the E, S and the T is track, am I actually doing a good job of this? So, you know, there are these studies that 47% of our lives, our minds are on something other than where we are in what we’re doing. So nearly half of our lives, we’re not actually living where we are. So the tracking exercise, you say, you went through the exercise, and you design your zero based calendar, you have your physical body in the right place at all these times, well, then now let’s track the mind. Where is your mind? As you’re physically doing these things? Like, great, you got to that 90 minutes at dinner, and for 75 minutes of the 90 minutes, you’re running through your head, your talking points for your presentation the next day? Was that a success or not? You know, can you exert control on this or not? You could if you go and start writing out that presentation and get that ready. But if you’re sitting there, you’re not present. So the last piece, you have to measure how you’re doing against what you said you wanted to do. And this is where Epictetus says, It’s only then that our outer effectiveness, and our inner tranquility is possible. Because we can’t be effective. If we’re putting all our time and mind to things we don’t control or influence.  That’s just banging your head against the wall. And we can’t be at peace, if we’re just banging our head against the wall, because we’re not accomplishing anything. And so it’s only, But we can be super, super effective in the areas that we can control. And so putting all your time and mind there, that ultimate effectiveness, which leads to the tranquility,

Clint Murphy  51:31

And it’s it even ties into you know, when you think about a lot of people will say, you know, one of the better decisions I made in my life was I stopped reading the news and I started reading books. And people say, Well, why you’re uninformed. It’s like, well, well, no, I’m not uninformed because the news, it’s just not that there’s anything wrong, per se, with news. But when you look at it every single day, you’re just you’re being fed headlines that are meant to get you to read an article. But books are increasing your knowledge in the fullness of time. So if you place all of your time from news to books.  You’re leaning on the shoulders of giants, and then you can use that to change your actual life and increase what you can control and what you can do with that time and energy.

Andrew McConnell  52:18

But the I mean, the other, you know, you talked about Stephen Covey the seven habits, but also the How to Make Friends and Influence People, right? People find other people who are interesting, who are interested in them. And so Tim Ferris was like, hey, this way of me stopping and checking the news, I don’t do news, I don’t read the daily paper, is you go into conversations, and I hate so what’s going on, and you’re go in genuinely interested, because you haven’t read today’s headlines or whatever. And so these people love to talk about that side. And so you’re, you’re genuinely interested, you’re learning, it’s a great conversation. And they’re super happy about it. I mean, not reading Daily News. And honestly, it’s not gotten better right.  Now that it’s Twitter, there are headlines every 10 seconds, as opposed to every 24 hours. Like it was bad enough when we had 24/7, CNN and headline news and all that, and then it got to social media, or just sitting out 140 or 240, 280 character texts, just getting out of that, because that is just you getting whipsawed left and right, sort of just pull yourself out of that. Yeah,

Clint Murphy  53:23

I even get it at the dinner table sometimes, because my wife will say something pop culture and she’ll say, can you believe this happened? And I’ll say to her, what do you like, what are you talking about? She’s like, it’s all over the news. I don’t read that. And she’s like, well, you’re on social media. And I’m like, Well, I’m not consuming. I’m creating. I’m

Andrew McConnell  53:43

Right. I’m a producer, not a consumer. Yeah. 100%.

Clint Murphy  53:47

Yeah, I don’t go read all these pop culture things. I read people’s threads on how to be better at this, how to improve at that, not, you know what happened with this relationship in Hollywood, like, you know, fill me in on Adam Levine. Let’s talk about it over dinner. What’s happening with poor Adam. the. So you know, it’s the second time in two days that I get to look at the wall and see a quote, then comes up in the podcast. Yesterday, someone asked me about Aristotle, I have that one behind me. Over on the right, I have the Man in the Arena. And so you reference that in the book. And I think when Theodore Roosevelt wrote it, he wasn’t necessarily thinking that we shouldn’t take heed of critics, but more the person doing the work was the person who deserved the laurels, not the critic. And then you had a Marcus Aurelius quote that ties into that that was beautiful. If anyone can refute me, show me  make I’m making a mistake or to look at things from the wrong perspective. I’ll gladly change. It’s the truth I’m after and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self defeat and ignorance. So there’s that fine line between, I have the critic telling me I’m doing something wrong, but I’m the one doing it. In the way I’ve always looked at it, I think lines up with how you think about it. So I’ll share mine and, and then we can dive into again to get together is the critic said something, I then get to make a choice. I hear what they say, I can ask myself the first question. Is it true? Or is it not true? If it’s not true, I can just let it go. And almost to the the example you used of the person who was here and the person telling him, oh, you should sell your business. Or you should do this to make your business more valuable, not even realizing he’d already sold it. And so he just made the choice, I’m just gonna let what they’re saying go. And then number two is if they’re right, then I have another choice. Do I act on it? Do I change? Or do I keep persisting? Even though they’re right? And how do you approach that?

Andrew McConnell  56:00

So I approach it. And this is where I may go the kind of potentially a step further, get rid of the first question, not the don’t even ask, Are they right or not? And this is where it cats, cats advice on that. And you kind of get this the tried and true framework of, then you start getting in this debate and how we are with confirmation bias. Our default is going to be to find all the arguments why they’re not right. So instead of saying, Are they right, going in, assuming they are right, there’s something I am missing, that is making them right, because they would not say this. But for something, there’s some kernel of truth in there, it may be the way I presented it, it could be the time I presented, it could be they had something else going on and how I approached it, right? It could be the content was fine. But all these other things went into play for how their perception is because people aren’t wrong about how they feel, right? And this, this how I feel they can’t be wrong about that. That is the truth. And so don’t argue about well, I meant this, that and the other because you can you can come up with all those arguments, but that’s not going to help you the next time you’re in the same situation, because the person in that same other situation is going to have the same response, the same reaction. So going back to that monkey brain, lizard brain, you know, the the first step for me is to take the time, because just like anybody, if I get something that I perceive as criticism, my guard goes up, my hackles are raised. I want to push back, I want to first say, is this true? And more than that, I know I’m right. Let me find all the arguments for why this person is wrong. So I have to take that time, I have to take the breather. Okay. Let me take a breath. Let me repeat back what I think I heard. Because a lot of times, and I’ve noticed other people do this, especially as I do workshops around this, when people say, oh, this person said this and say okay, well, let’s actually go back. Were those the words the person said? Or is that this reframing we put on it and had 10 times out of 10? Those were not the words, the person said, it’s how we heard it was this totally different way. And so it’s really important to repeat back, say, did I hear you right? Did you say and get down to what they actually said? And then you need to identify, Okay, what is the kernel of truth in there? Is the kernel of truth. I’m actually wrong about this fact, I’m wrong about this thing? Or is it a perception thing? Hey, it was the way I approached this. It was the the medium in which I shared this information or had made this request that was met with this kind of response, right? Identify what is that truth in there? Because there’s some truth that led them to give this feedback, criticism, whatever label you want to do. And then you need to go back and echo that say, Okay, I heard this, let me see, I have identified this is what needs to change. Is that Is that right? Maybe sometimes you don’t have an opportunity, because it’s moved on to have that replay. And then of course, the last piece is deliver. Okay, now I’ve learned this, let me go act on it. Maybe everything else about my process was fine. Other than I sent it in an email on a Friday, this should never have been in an email on a Friday. Everything about this was right. It should have been a Tuesday at 10am email, that could be the kernel of truth. Right? How they presented it, how people blew up, everything else that went into it may not be right. But there was some truth in there that led to this response. What is that truth that I can go control and change?

Clint Murphy  59:32

And so that first question could almost be instead, you could say, what if this was true? How would I change? If what I’ve heard is true? How would I reexamine the way I’m doing it?

Andrew McConnell  59:44

Yeah, it’s when I, when I was first a consultant when I was an intern. I was not getting along well, with my manager. It was not going very well. And a more senior partner came and said, Yeah, it’s because you came from law school. Your approach and problem solving does not equate with how most people like to do it. Because in law school, people would throw out an idea. And our job was to just all try to tear it down. And then if it got torn down, it was just an idea. Like nobody took it personally like, okay, then what’s the next one? Someone would throw that. And we tried to tear it down until you couldn’t tear it down anymore. Like, okay, this is the answer. This is the truth. So you do that in business, and it feels for most people like a personal attack. They do. You can say the ideas separate than the person, but the person with the idea doesn’t feel that way. So I said, okay, okay. So I can’t disagree with them anymore. Like we go, problem solved. So go back a couple weeks later, the person, it’s not getting better? I don’t know. I’m just asking questions. I’m not arguing anymore. Is that Give me an example of how you ask a question. So well, just yesterday, he said, This is the probable answer. I said, Well, don’t you think that’s wrong? Because then go, oh, this, is it? No, that is not how it is. You didn’t go in with the mindset that this person is raised, that they have some information, potentially that you don’t have, and your job in asking the questions is to elicit this information from them. And in that process, you may learn that you are wrong, they may learn they were wrong, you may both learn, you’re both wrong, because you had two pieces of information that came together and you get to this better answer. But it’s only when you go in with that curious mind that you’re able to get to that.  If you still go in with my stake in the ground here. You don’t have that open mind, you don’t have that curiosity.

Clint Murphy  1:01:28

And when you have that curiosity and your you have the intellectual humility, you’re willing to change your mind, you’re willing to say, and you wrote a quote, John Maynard Keynes, who said, when my information changes, I changed my mind. Now, so many people. I mean, we see it on social media, we see it in the news, we see it with our politicians, and they just this is the way it can’t be any other way. Why do people have such a challenge? With accepting that if the information changes, the answer can change?

Andrew McConnell  1:02:02

Yeah, a lot of it comes down to that confirmation bias. So it’s one thing theoretically and intellectually, to say the idea is separate from the person. But there are times when our identities are very tied up to beliefs. And if we start to get information, that challenges that belief, that challenges our identity, that challenges who we are as a person. And back to the monkey brain. The default is, in that situation, I’m going to go look for any supporting evidence that reaffirms what I already believe, because it feels like this existential attack on me as a human. And so it’s, it’s natural, right? Like, that’s the thing with so much of this stuff is, it’s natural, it’s our default state, we’re having to override the default state, there are a lot of things in life that we choose to override the default state, if our all we cared about was the default state, we’re just for the genes, we’re just trying to pass on the genes, then all we would do is go procreate constantly to try to get those genes out there. But we’ve actually said, Hey, we want a more fulfilling life, we’re gonna go do these other things and, and build lives outside of that. And so this is another area where you say, okay, that’s fine. That’s the default state. But that’s not the life I want to live. I don’t want to live that way.

Clint Murphy  1:03:18

And so one of the ways, another default state we seem to have for some of us, is we talked about focusing on what we can control and it brings up the idea of control and its whether we have an external locus of control, or an internal locus of control, can you educate our listeners? What is a locus of control? And what is the difference between the two? And how do we even know do I have an internal locus? Or am I or do I have an external

Andrew McConnell  1:03:48

Yeah, so locus of control is the belief on you know, internal versus external belief that things happen to us where the belief that we have control that we’re exerting our influence our decisions, our choices on the world? So it’s this Woe is me. This thing happened to me or man, I did not train hard enough. I did not compete well today or man, I really overtrained and I injured myself because of this. Not how unlucky am I? Because this thing happened to me. It’s recognizing, we have control and we have influence and using that to actually then go have controlling influence.  You’re going to have much better life, which all science says if you believe you can control the thing. So man, I’m so fat. Well, or, man, I’ve made some really poor health and nutrition decisions. I don’t get 30 minutes of activity today. I eat a bunch of processed food. I can choose not to do either or both of those things. I can go choose to eat fresh fruits and vegetables. I can choose to go out for a 30 minute walk each day. That is kind of the difference of man, I can’t believe I have like the fat gene, man I have the fat gene.   I suppose I have the fat gene and that hasn’t really impacted my life too much.  My wife thinks is the greatest thing ever. But it’s do I control what I eat, how I exercise, how I sleep? Or is that imposed upon me?

Clint Murphy  1:05:13

That last one was a great example of the difference between the two? Because I’m definitely in that boat where I’m reasonably certain I have the fat gene. And when I look at some of my family, not to pick on you family, I love you all. They have just said, Oh, well, genetics, and well, yeah. And choice.

Andrew McConnell  1:05:37

And epigenetics. Now we know that we can turn on and off genes based on our environment and things we do.

Clint Murphy  1:05:43

Yeah, I know, if I fast, if I reduce carbs, if I exercise, I can control the outcome. And if I eat like a normal human being, I’m gonna gain 20 pounds. And so I just, it’s just different. Once you know yourself, you can control yourself, if that makes sense.

Andrew McConnell  1:06:02

Not to go on a tangent here, but eating like a normal human as well. I mean, it gets back to that James Baldwin, quote, of living the rules, playing the game by someone else’s rules. So a normal human, right how the entire, the standard American diet, the acronym is sad, is sad. And it’s for Shelf stable calorie density, our body cannot do well with ultra processed foods. So if we go and shop in a grocery store as the default, as it’s set up, as is going to give the highest margin of profits to Mondelez and Kraft and all these others, yes, we’re going to end up in what’s not healthy for us, are we victims of that system? Or do we have a locus of internal control saying, I actually get to decide what I buy at the grocery store, I say, where I’m going to spend my money, and how I want my life to be,

Clint Murphy  1:06:54

Yeah, I’m gonna go to the back corner, and I’m going to get my fruits, I’m gonna get my vegetables, some meat, and that’s what I’m going to eat. I’m gonna eat some meat with a big plate of vegetables. And it’s hard to be out a shape when you’re eating that way on a consistent basis, and you’re getting outside in nature. And anyway, well, we won’t flip over into a physical fitness show. But But I definitely agree with you that it comes down to the control.  The last couple of questions I wanted to touch on you, and then throw our final four at you is the, there’s two, I have two stoic concepts tattooed onto my arm. So I see them every day. And so they definitely, I’d love for our readers, to understand them, because I think they change your life. The first one, and you talk about it in the book, you have a quote from Marcus Aurelius on it, which is when it comes to suffering or good fortune. The stoics taught us the concept of amor fati, it is my bad luck that this has happened to me. No, you should rather say it is my good luck, that although this has happened to me, I can bear it without pain. Neither crushed by the present, nor fearful of the future, because such a thing could have happened to any man. But not every man could have born it without pain. So why see misfortune in the event that good fortune in your ability to bear it? What does that mean to you? And how you approach your life

Andrew McConnell  1:08:19

That amor fati, right? There’s love fate, right, this love of the fate. And without this label that again, is only in our imagination of good fortune or bad fortune, it is fortune, it is this thing happen and love it. So when most modern people think of a gratitude practice, it’s spending time thinking through the things that we’re grateful for. And the things that we’re grateful for, typically, are those things that if we were asked beforehand, we would have proactively asked for, hey, I’m so grateful that my child is healthy. I’m so grateful this, quote, good thing happened, the stoics. And what that Marcus really is quoted as saying is great, be thankful for those, but be thankful for the things that also you wouldn’t ask for beforehand. You’re a product of every thing that happened. There’s a an interview that Anderson Cooper did with Stephen Colbert. And when Stephen Colbert was younger, his father and brother died in a plane crash. Like the worst thing that’s ever happened in his life. And he said he is, it’s the thing he’s the most grateful for. And Anderson Cooper said, how can you be grateful for the worst thing that ever happened to you? He said, Because I’m here, because it has me appreciate this beauty of being here, that I am here. I get this life. I got those times with them before that thing happened. And this ability to take the worst thing that ever happened, and to be thankful for it, then nothing can get in your way in life. If you can be grateful for all of it because you’re a product of all of it. And that’s nothing you ever get back, you don’t get this life back. Be grateful for every moment of it, every moment of it.

Clint Murphy  1:09:59

Wow. And the second one that I’d love to talk about is the idea of Memento Mori, which is remember, I must die. And the stoics would often pair that up with this concept of pre meditating on the negative. So you know, I might think, while I’m at work, when I get home, my family could be dead, something horrible could happen, the house could burn down, or there could be a home invasion, and I could lose my kids, I could lose my wife. Now, people often think well, wow, that’s pretty morbid, like, why would they do that? And part of the reason they would do that, historically, is, if you get home and something bad has happened, how will I react? How will I be prepared? How will I, you know, if there is a home invader? How will I defend if I can save my family? And also, when I get home? In they’re, there? Wow. Now I can cherish that time with them? How does that premeditation of future negative events? How does that help help you? In your personal life? How does it also help with the business?

Andrew McConnell  1:11:10

Yeah, it really does come up two different ways in those contexts, right. So the first is preparing for the worst before it happens. You don’t want to be developing your crisis playbook after the crisis happened, right? Like you don’t want to think about man, I’m gonna go board up my windows, once the hurricanes pass through and you don’t have glass around your house.  You want to say, hey, here’s what can go wrong. Let me plan ahead for those things. So let me think about the things that can go wrong. A competitor could do this. This is the whole idea of game theory of let me think through what other people would do, what things could happen, and develop a plan of how would we react, I was having breakfast with Ed Bastian, the CEO of Delta, in February of 2020. And he talked about they had just announced the largest profit share in the history of corporate America, probably the world, and they pay out their employees. And he said, most of the people in this company at this time have never been through a bad time. They weren’t here through the financial crisis. They weren’t here, when we were had to file for bankruptcy and went through that. This is all they felt, right. They’re not mentally prepared for what may come. And I can tell you right now, when we were doing the strategic plan for 2020, there was no mention COVID. When we were writing that up in 2019. And so the executive team, like they had been through those times. So they had mentally prepared, hey, what do we do? How do we deal with our employees? How do we continue to service  clients, but most people had not had that negative visualization because they hadn’t seen it before. Having seen it, you need to be able to see it in your mind, even if you can’t see it in real life, to be able to prepare for it, to develop that game plan. We talked about say one do less and do it better, say better.  Taoism has this, Buddhism has this, certainly Stoicism on, it’s not the man that gets what he wants that’s rich. It’s the man that already has what he wants, that wants what he already has, you can flip it, it’s not by adding to the things that we get, it’s by subtracting from the things that we want, that we can be wealthy today is the John Muir quote. I’m wealthier than him, he could have 10 times the zeros in his bank account, but I have what I want. And he still doesn’t, I’m wealthier than him. And that’s the idea on the premeditation of the negative of whether it’s a loved one, or it’s the car you currently have or the job you currently have, or whatever it is, something you already have. Putting yourself fully fully in the mindset of it’s gone. Man, I just lost my job. The company is shuttered. Today, I have zero paycheck coming in and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Next time you go to work, you’re probably going in a better mindset of man, I can’t believe I have to go to work. Man, I get a lot of work is so good. Like this company still exists. Yeah,

Clint Murphy  1:13:57

I didn’t lose my job.

Andrew McConnell  1:13:58

Yeah, yeah. And the same, I mean, you know, the hardest is to really think about loved ones. Because there is a time, you know, if you see your parents twice a year, right, we spend 90 something percent of our time with our parents before we’re 18. So as we get in our 40s, and 50s, you can count the number of times you’ll see your parents again, like, hey, they’ll probably live to about this age. I’ll probably get 13 more Christmases with my family. Okay, man, let me think about that. 14th when they’re not there, what is that going to be like? Now when I go to Christmas with them, am I going to be annoyed this person drank too much? Or this person said this, or am I gonna say man, I am going to miss this. I’m going to love this while it’s here, because this isn’t always going to be here.

Clint Murphy  1:14:41

We had that exact conversation at lunch on Friday. Three of us were sitting down. One of them has his family in Ontario. I’m maybe two or three years older than him. I was at a celebration of life this weekend for a family member and I found out three of their siblings, three more people have some challenging issues they’re dealing with. And I started to think and I started to think of this stoic concept and the Buddhist concept of impermanence. And I realized my dad and mom, being the youngest of their siblings, are in their early 70s and age ranges all the way up to early 80s. So over the next 10 years, there will probably be a lot of loss over the next 20. Most over the next 30. Probably all, and so you look at that, and you say, wow, like, if I don’t think about it, if I don’t think about it until it happens. It’ll just be so shocking every time. But if I meditate on it, and say that is going to happen, here’s the rough timeline, here’s how much time I have with these people. I’m going to be more conscious to call them or reach out or or be present when I am with them. It’s such a such a challenging and beautiful concept. And and when you think about your company, I think there’s a book by this title. But a lot of people always plan for the best. And there’s a book plan for the best prepare for the worst. And and I think it’s such an apt way to run your business is hey, let’s build our forward model on what’s gonna go on what we can control and not aberrations happening. But let’s also prepare so that we have cash reserves.  We’re protected in a downturn.  And what’s the one book that’s been the most instrumental on you and your life, Andrew,

Andrew McConnell  1:16:30

Honestly, the most instrumental if you think about the cascading effect, even though from this single book, I don’t know if there’s a ton it’s what it led to was The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss because that took me to Tim Ferriss that led me through four hour body all the other stuff, he wrote his podcast to Ryan Holiday to the stoics, to Andrew Huberman, and Peter Thiel, all of these right like you think about that was the kindling that ignited this fire. So for me, that book really set everything else off.

Clint Murphy  1:17:03

Yeah, I’ve listened to almost every single one of his podcasts and it’s a big influence on why I do what I do and how I’m going to design my my life when I’m done doing what I do. So I’m biased to loving that answer. What are you reading right now? What’s up What’s on your shelf? If we if we dive into the bookshelf? What’s Andrew got on the go?

Andrew McConnell  1:17:20

Yeah, so balance a couple of things. So I have one that I kind of pick up and put down over time. And that’s the 1001 Arabian Nights. So just kind of working through the the Richard Burton, translation on that.  Gets repetitive, lots of  poetry. So you know, it’s not every single day, and then working through finally decided to tackle Caros series on Lyndon Johnson. So means of ascent, passage of  power, all of those so it’s I’m waiting for his fifth volume to come out because I’m working my way through number four now, but he’s, it’s been about 10 years since the last one. So I think he’s due for a new one. It was supposed to be a three volumes series. He’s already on volume five, and I think it’s gonna go at least to six if he makes it through. So it’s a little bit like a game of thrones with Martin of like, is this guy gonna live long enough to get these done?

Clint Murphy  1:18:09

At least Martin is still alive. There was an another fantasy series that is one of the greatest of all time, and the author died around book 10, passed away, unfortunately, sadly.  Positively using stoic mindset of being happy, even though it’s bad. He had the foresight that he contracted a disease and knew approximate timeline. So he prepared the manu, not wrote the book, but outlined the future, and then handed the reins off to an absolutely fabulous young author, who’s now one of the giants of the genre to finish the last three books and they were they were beautifully done. So does happen where there’s such a big gap that you lose the author. It’s absolutely incredible. The What’s one thing you have spent under $1,000 on in the last year or two, that’s really been life changing. I can’t believe you took so long to spend that money

Andrew McConnell  1:19:08

Last year under a $1,000. So I, you might pick up from me, I am not big on things. Things are not really my approach. So kind of juxtaposing two things. There was a food festival we were supposed to go to.  It was super, super rainy. And a friend was already there. And he said, Hey, just make sure you bring disposable shoes, because they’re gonna get trashed. And my immediate response was everything I own is disposable. Anything i have could disappear, and I’d be fine. And then the flip side of that is, you know, people have a bunch of shoes. I’m like, oh, no, these are my shoes. My pair of dress shoes that I bought in June of 2000. Those are my shoes. Those are the shoes that I have for dress up.

Clint Murphy  1:19:48

All right, well, that’s a good answer. I love it. So this show is about growth. It’s about learning and development. What’s one mindset habit shift that you’ve made in the last last few years that’s had a significant impact on your life that you can share with people.

Andrew McConnell  1:20:05

The one and I remind myself several times a week, if not daily, and it’s, as I sit and I meditate is I’m in the ocean on my swimming. That no amount of money, no matter what’s in my bank account, I would choose to do these activities, I would choose to do this with my time I don’t need more money to do the things that I choose and want to do, to play with my daughter and just tickle and play made up games, to her to write out the rules. And let’s just invent stuff money could actually get in the way of those things, could create complications, create other things that get in the way of the purity of what I would actually want to do, that I don’t need more to live the life I want. Because these are the things that I choose to do with my time when I have that choice, which I definitely always have that choice.

Clint Murphy  1:20:54

I love that, Andrew. And as we wrap up is we had a pretty wide ranging way through the book. Is there anything that we missed that you would say, Oh, if there’s one thing I wanted the listeners to know, this would be it? What would it be?

Andrew McConnell  1:21:08

Yeah, I’m big. And you might think, gather this from the do less, but better, it can seem overwhelming. When you’re hit with all of these different things, if I need to do this, this and this, you don’t.  Just start with one. You don’t need to do everything, you need to do something. And it’s lowering that bar to what it takes to get started. Because that’s what matters is your action in getting started. And so if there’s one thing to live leave with, it’s to have one thing, one thing that you care enough about that you’re actually going to go work on and do. Because no one is going to design your life for you in the way that you want it. And few of us ever even ask how would we want to design our lives, we just level. So at least think through the design and then go live in

Clint Murphy  1:21:51

Such a fabulous way to end it. Thank you. And how can people find you Andrew?

Andrew McConnell  1:21:56

Yeah, LinkedIn is socially where I’m most active. Yeah, MAndrewMcConnell, and then my website M, the letter. My first name is Michael, MAndrewMcconnell.com. And that you can contact me through the site. I’m on Instagram. I’m on the socials, twitter and facebook but not as active elsewhere. But through the site, contact me. We’d love to hear from you. And I’d love to talk about stoic journey.

Clint Murphy  1:22:23

Excellent. I love it. Thank you for joining us on the pursuit of learning today. I really appreciate it.

Andrew McConnell  1:22:27

Yeah. Thanks for having me, Clint. This has been fantastic.

Clint Murphy  1:22:34

Thank you for joining us on the pursuit of learning, make sure to hit the subscribe button and head over to our website, the pursuit of learning.com where you will find our show notes, transcripts and more. If you like what you see, sign up for our mailing list. Until next time, your host in learning Clint Murphy