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The first question asks what would have had to happen in a week for you to look back on that week with pride. Maybe stop breaking promises to yourself. When you say you're going to wake up tomorrow at 7am and the option comes to hit the snooze button, don't do it. There's one win you've got for the day, and that's action. If you had a friend and every single time you and your friend decided to go out for dinner, that friend either showed up two hours late or didn't show up at all, you would stop trusting that person. That is the relationship you have with yourself.
You talked about the layers of paint that build confidence. This is something I've been particularly compelled by, because so many people who listen to this podcast struggle with the idea of confidence. There's a big industry out there, as you've said, that says look in the mirror, tell yourself you're a millionaire, say it three times, write it in your journal. But as I reflected in my book, and it relates to what Alex Hormozi said, the thing I've learned is that it's all evidence, for better or for worse, a stack of undeniable proof, and it goes the other way too. The evidence you got at seven years old when you went up to do a public speech and everyone laughed at you is a thicker layer than one layer of evidence saying you're capable. It's a harder layer to strip.
If someone is listening now and wants to orientate their drive toward the fulfilling pursuits you talk about, but also wants to build their confidence, what advice would you give them? I imagine that's 80% of the listener base here.
Act first. You have to lead with action, because if you are someone who deals with a crippling sense of insufficiency, your ability to discount any good thoughts you have in your mind is going to be so strong. If you try to lead with positivity first, "I need to think it, wish it, believe it, and I will achieve it," your set point of negativity is just going to crush that into the ground. I'm speaking from personal experience, as the guy who was chronically unconfident and still has imposter syndrome that creeps in. You have to start with action. It needs to be: what would have had to happen in a week's time for me to look back on that week and find pride in myself?
Pride is something people are often told they should be ashamed of. It's one of the seven deadly sins. But David Goggins did an episode with us a couple of months ago, we could put it in the show notes if people are interested, and he said pride is something everybody misses: having pride in your name, your performance, the way you show up for other people. You can do that, but you need to do something worthy of being prideful about. What would have had to happen in a week for you to look back on that week with pride? Maybe stop breaking promises to yourself. When you say you're going to wake up tomorrow at 7am and the option comes to hit snooze, don't do it. There's one win you've got for the day, and that's action.
It's a bit like the Jordan Peterson "clean your room" idea, but the reason that works is that you start with the smallest possible step and expand out from there. You want to become a writer, you want to leave your job and become a writer. Okay, can you commit to writing one blog post on Substack per week for the next three weeks? That would make you feel like less of a loser if you did it. Action has to come first. If you're the sort of person who is chronically unconfident, you will drag your sense of identity behind you. Mark Manson says identity lags behind our status by about one to two years. So for both me and you, in two years' time we'll go, "Ah, I understand why I was in LA that day," and look back. Start with action, and make small promises to yourself that you don't break.
If you had a friend, and every single time you and your friend decided to go out for dinner, that friend either showed up two hours late or didn't show up at all, you would stop trusting that person. That is the relationship you have with yourself. You need to be able to trust your own word, and a lot of us don't, because life is very convenient and it's easy to not stick to the promises we set ourselves. Our ability to be idealistic is always going to outstrip reality's ability to deliver. As soon as you posit an ideal, you begin to compare yourself to that ideal, and true hell is when the person you are meets the person you could have been.
Sometimes I ponder how, and you've probably seen this in your own life, I'm sure you have. You'll have a friend in your life. I've got a couple of friends back home who I've tried to help in some way, maybe give advice when they're struggling in their hardest times, and the advice has been ineffective. Then you've got another friend who will just need one idea. They'll be listening to your podcast, and one idea will be the seed that changes their life. I often think I overestimate the power of words, because everything you've said there makes perfect sense, but we both know that 95%, maybe more, of people who have just received that will not convert it into any kind of behavior. Habits are hard to break, man. The habit of not doing things is unbelievably difficult to get past.
It's one of the problems with anyone who listens to your show or my show. You will love being cerebral. You will love the idea that you can use cognitive horsepower to just get yourself out of problems. There is a case of learning as masturbation, and believing that learning about something is the same as enacting it. It's not. That's why it has to be action first. A quote from one of my friends that he uses when he's thinking about a concept is: does this grow corn? Basically, is it useful? Tell me how I can use this in my life. Does it grow corn? It's a beautiful-sounding concept, cognitive bias, that helps me understand the way my brain works and my relationship with everybody else. How do I use that in my life? Give me something to apply it to.
That's why, with the confidence thing, you choose promises you will never break to yourself. "I'm going to get up on time for the next month. I am not going to hit the snooze button." If you do that and you look back in a month and think, "Oh my God, that's the first time I've done that in forever," maybe that's a big win. You can do the James Clear thing: write it on a board, track it, measure what gets measured, and so on. But the main thing is just to keep promises to yourself. That's a good way to go from here. It's an insight I learned: I want to do breathwork, cold plunge, go to the gym, fast until midday, get up on time, get sunlight in the eyes, and then whatever else it is you want to do. Turn it into a promise, and don't break the promise.
One of the really important things you said there was about the size of that first step. I was reflecting on the way video games are designed to make sure every subsequent level is not too intimidating, so you don't lose motivation, but not too small either, because you can lose motivation both ways. It's the same with crosswords and video games: they get incrementally more challenging to keep you engaged. The size of that first step is, I think, a central point, because when people listen to podcasts with people like me and you, or Andrew Huberman, and they hear they've got to get up at a certain time, go outside, gaze at the earth, put their feet on the ground, cold plunge, and they go, "I'm going to do that," and set that as their first step, they're set up for failure. How important do you think the size, and the subjective size, of that first step is for building trust with yourself and starting that discipline?
The goal isn't to have the perfect daily routine tomorrow. The goal is to still be winning your daily routine in 50 years' time. If you expand your time horizon sufficiently, you will realize that very tiny steps can compound. Look at the graph of my followers or your followers on Spotify, especially mine, because I was doing my show for so long and it was just nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, everything. Why? Because it's latent leverage. It takes so many layers of paint to get there. So yes, the first step has to be incredibly small. Make it so small that you can't say no to it, and then what's next, and then what's next.
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