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Micro wisdom delivered to your ears every morning in voice notes ranging from 3 to 15 minutes long. Wisdom on how to live a healthier and more fulfilling life. Every podcast will ground you in the present moment to ensure you know what's important, the here and now.
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. Hope you're doing well. A little one today, but a bit different. So I've been going back through my notes and ideas, rereading.
Speaker 1:It's really, really good. You should reread some of the
Speaker 2:books that you really love. I'm going look
Speaker 1:at three fascinating connections really across history, biology, and psychology, and to answer the question, how do we enlarge ourselves in a world designed to diminish us? That's the question I'm trying to look into.
Speaker 2:How do we enlarge ourselves
Speaker 1:in a world designed to diminish us? So the first connection I found looking back through my notes was about the physical architecture of our minds. So we like to think that we're rational beings floating above our environment, that we are separate from our environment. That's what we think. We think we can act upon it and we're different to the environment and we are this like centralized force.
Speaker 1:When I was reading the notes on Anirin Bevan's biography, who is the founder of the NHS, and there's so much gold in that book, it's amazing. He has an incredible exchange with his counselor, right? Local counselor tells Bevan that people want a certain type of cheap housing, you know, like he was in charge of the housing of the government. They basically give him the health ministry job and the house job, thinking it hopefully would destroy him because they didn't really like him. He was a coal miner with a big mouth, so they didn't like him.
Speaker 1:They thought this would destroy him, but he was in charge of housing, building hundreds of thousands of homes and found in the NHS, absolutely insane levels of stress. This guy was saying, People just want cheap housing, man. What are you doing? And he snapped back saying, A rabbit warren accommodation leads to a rabbit warren mind. And he knew that the physical space dictates the mental scope we have, and it's so true.
Speaker 1:Like, you know, if you live in an area that's gray, beat down, hard, all that type of stuff, it is going to be difficult sometimes to overcome it, you know? Because the thing is overcoming a bad environment is rare. For you listening who have overcome a bad environment to come at the other side is quite lucky. You know, a lot of people typically grow up where they're born, stick to the same mindset of the area, and it's hard to overcome it, right? It's really hard.
Speaker 1:But there's another connection in the body keeps us cool that kind of connects us, right? And he talks about how trauma isn't just a memory, it's basically a physiological change. He says trauma results in fundamental reorganization of the way the mind and brain manage perceptions. So if you put these two and two together, you start thinking of this stuff, you realize that basically our environment, whether it's cramped house in a mining town or your body's stuck in a chronic stress, it does literally shrink our horizon. It shrinks our perception.
Speaker 1:You can't think bigger than these houses in the street that aren't great and a small town has no opportunities. It's the same with people who going through traumatic states or they go through things of They have core memories that limit them. I've never been to the gym, there's no way I can go, I'm not one of
Speaker 2:those type of people, la la la. You really
Speaker 1:put yourself in your own cage. When it comes to behavior change, I do mention him a lot because he's one of the leading experts, BJ Fogg. He says, there's only three things that we can do to create lasting change. Three things he says. The first one is having an epiphany.
Speaker 1:The other one is changing our environment. And third one is to change our habits in tiny ways. Epiphanies are rare, right? Epiphanies are very rare. We cannot rely on them, but we can change environment to
Speaker 2:a degree and we can work on tiny habits. You know, that's what we can do.
Speaker 1:So the first key to enlarging ourselves, we can't just think positive, right? You can't just change the room you're standing in essentially. You can't have that cathedral strong mindset if everything around you is chaotic. If you do, you're very strong, it's typically another thing. So you need to start looking at what's impacting you environmental wise and what can you do about it.
Speaker 1:That's the first thing. Are the people you're spending time with talking about your health and fitness plans, are they enlarging you? They diminishing you? Are telling you and you're feeling worse off or are they supporting you? Do know what mean?
Speaker 1:All of
Speaker 2:these things come into it. The second thing is the battle of your desire. Now, if environment shapes us, who shapes our desires? Okay, there's a terrifying concept in a book called Wanting, and it's a
Speaker 1:book about mimetic desire. It's the idea that we don't know what we want, we just want what other people want. So he says humans learn through imitation to want the same things other people want. The more that people are forced to be the same, the more intensely they fight to differentiate themselves. So this creates a trap basically.
Speaker 1:We end up in
Speaker 2:the herd mind, right? It's kind of like a weakness in a sense.
Speaker 1:You just follow in the crowd, like everyone's on keto and are you doing keto? Everyone's on this, you're doing that. Everyone's on how you doing that? You know, everyone's doing, what's everyone else doing? I'll just do that.
Speaker 1:And we copy that because we're scared. Like, you know, we lose our nerve. We're like, well, if there's a lot of people doing that, it's going to be right. And that's how social media influencers gain traction. It's like, well, if a million people follow this person, he's saying that, that's gotta be right, I'm gonna follow it.
Speaker 1:You you kind of heard mentality, but we do typically go down that path, know. I'll go to the gym if my friend goes to the gym. I'll do jiu jitsu if my friends do jiu jitsu. I wanna go to Mykonos cause everyone else got Mykonos. You can see this holiday destinations.
Speaker 1:People are always going to see them holiday destinations once they've seen you on TikTok, lot of everyone's going there. There's no like sitting back once, what do I actually like? Like Napoleon, let's go to route Napoleon. Anyone else? No, nobody?
Speaker 1:So that's what's happening. But to find an answer to this, in
Speaker 2:the book Lives of the Stoics, there is
Speaker 1:a story about Cato, the Roman senator, who refused to compromise with Julius Caesar. They described him as being indifferent to everything but virtue, public opinion, keeping up with appearances, his brand reputation did matter, doing the right thing is what mattered to him. He cared about everything else. That's outside of his control. And you kind of escape the herd, really, when you
Speaker 2:think about that. You break some mimetic desire because you're a differentiated leader,
Speaker 1:you're a well differentiated leader. In the book I mentioned before, like these notes are all connected together, it's a book called A Failure of Nerve, right? And I don't want throw loads of different books and things at you, but in the book Failure of Nerve, he talks about this failure of nerve, he says that you need to become a strong leader, especially in your own life, because if you don't, and if you're not willing to be a bit weird, if you're not willing to be disliked, if you're not willing to take a step away from what I heard is saying, right, you're always going to be part of that. You're always going to have the anxieties and the problems everyone else is going to have. Starting the businesses like this happens all the time.
Speaker 1:I guarantee you, if someone says to me, Scott, I want to
Speaker 2:start a business, I say, are you
Speaker 1:ready for people to throw some hate at you? Are you ready for comments on the social media to be very, very mean? Are you ready for people to say you're an idiot, it's a stupid idea? Are you ready to defend what you're doing but people are rude to you and you have to be nice back but they still think you're being defensive, you know? It's crazy out there.
Speaker 1:You to be disliked, you have to be willing to step up and say, believe in this, I'm going forward with this, and there'll be people who
Speaker 2:want to tear you down.
Speaker 1:100%. I've had it many times in my life and every business I've tried. If I listened to them,
Speaker 2:I would be back on wheels still. I wouldn't
Speaker 1:have left the place, stuck back there. And then there's loads of books covering this, The Courage to be Disliked, Freedom is Being Disliked by other people, stuff like that, people pleasing, like you need to start thinking of where you are here, yeah? Coming to the third connection I'm looking at in the notes, the biological reality of willpower, you know, so we've looked at environment, we've looked at what shapes our desires, are we willing to be different, are we willing to step
Speaker 2:out from the crowd, are we willing to be firm and take some questions and now everyone's gonna be nice.
Speaker 1:But when we look at mindset and hustle and trying hard, there is a biological flow to our psychology, right? There is. So there's obviously the new GLP-one drugs, there's food noise, call it, right? Constant low level hunger signaling that some people have, sometimes it's quite extreme. They take the GLP-one, the food noise goes away.
Speaker 1:And it's the first time in their lives that's gone away. And I think like when you're stressed a lot, chronic stress, the frontal cortex, the logical part of our brain kind of goes offline. It's kind of like our superego, you know, keeps us from, you know, keeps us in check. Know, we think this is me and I'm going to look after myself. And you can't essentially change much if you're, for example, if your biology is a lot of food noise, if your biology is super stressed, very, very difficult, very, very difficult to do long term changes at.
Speaker 1:Know, chronic stress leads to chronic food noise likely,
Speaker 2:if chronic food noise leads to chronic eating, right?
Speaker 1:And you can't just will yourself to stop. You can't just say, No, that's it. I'm going to will myself. No, no, no, no. Your biology is screaming at you.
Speaker 1:Like that food noise is loud, loud. These things are loud. They're not a simple thing, like they just go away. So you've got this chronic stress, food noise shouting down you, you're fighting a losing battle. You can't will yourself.
Speaker 1:There is a flaw to this type of stuff. You have to realize it. So you have to go at it from a different view.
Speaker 2:You can't go away from the view of willpower. You can't just think things better. Right? And I think a lot of people think they can just will change. And then when
Speaker 1:their willpower runs out, which you have a finite amount of willpower, they think, I'm an idiot. I'm not the type of person that can be this healthy type of person. And that's the sad part.
Speaker 2:That's the sad part. It's like we have
Speaker 1:to be realists about all of these factors impact us. Our environment impacts us. What other people want around us impacts us. Our biology impacts us. We have to be very open and aware of where we sit here.
Speaker 1:Where do we
Speaker 2:sit here? What's helping me
Speaker 1:and what's not? Is my food noise linked to my chronic stress? Is my food noise linked to the foods around me all the time? Can I take a slower, steady approach? I'm less desperate to make change.
Speaker 1:Can I stop trying a new fitness plan every three days because online someone said this works better than this? That's where people are at. Can we get out of that? Can we differentiate ourselves,
Speaker 2:be a strong leader and take some of those criticisms along the way? You know, what is it? Are you willing to do it? Yeah. And I'll leave you with this.
Speaker 1:There's a guy you posted, Polish guy, jiu jitsu guy. He's the first European to win the world championship in jiu jitsu. I was a little bit the Americans and the Brazilians. He did a post before Christmas saying, or just after Christmas saying, he lost in the first round of a competition for the first six years of his career as a black belt. Thought lost in the first round, out, gone.
Speaker 1:You could plan and you can go there, you lose in the first round, you're gone. Six years he lost in
Speaker 2:the first round. The year he
Speaker 1:won his first world title, he went on to win the world title, the European title, the American title and the Brazilian title. And winning all four in the same season is called the grand slam. And he said, I always and I quote him as I'm speaking as if I'm him. He said, I used to think that the people who did the grand slam are so crazy, like super talented, unbelievable. There's no way I could touch that.
Speaker 1:But then I did it. I realized actually, I lied, that's a lie, that's a false narrative. You don't have to be like the most insanely talented person in the world, just gotta put the work in over a long period of time and you might be that guy that reaches it. And it really resonated to me, you know, like winning the Grand Slam, I think only four people have ever done it. And this guy who wasn't a winner for many six years, imagine that guy, six years he wasn't a winner out in the first round.
Speaker 1:How long are you willing to try and improve your health? A week. Some of you think, I haven't lost a pound in a week. I give up. Guys, you've got
Speaker 2:to be better than that.
Speaker 1:You've to be better than that. That's way too like, I'll give up. No, you're building habits, you're building lifestyle that's going to impact you. Not just about weight, about your strength, it's your mindset, your freedom, all of it. That's important.
Speaker 1:You you can't keep thinking, Oh my God, one week. People are putting years in. You say, Well, Grand Slam, well, he's born that way. No. Sometimes this is a lot of hard work and persistence.
Speaker 1:And can you put a lot of hard work and persistence into your own self knowledge, into your own health, and stop panicking and doing 20 different plans a year? Can you do it? I'm gonna leave
Speaker 2:you with that. And hopefully, you have a good day, and I'll see you all soon.