7 Semi-Controversial Rules For Success - Shaan Puri | Modern Wisdom 683 - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3d4AkAaF_Mw Transcript: (00:00) we already did this once it went well it went amazingly well and I was very sad that we couldn't put it out because we had technical difficulties this time we're both in our home setup no technical difficulties and we're going to run it back from what we got through last time plus more well last time I was also very sick that night uh after we were I recorded a podcast I did the podcast with you so two podcasts in a row and I went home and basically just was in bed with a fever for the rest of the night so uh if (00:29) you thought that was good great uh because I thought it was terrible and I was feeling terrible at the time I got it I gotta do better than that okay maybe that's just what all guests feel like once they've finished up recording with me that's what I like the post title like depression that occurs after you've podcasted with me I'm not too sure I'll have to ask some previous guests all right so I want to go through some of your most controversial or semi-controversial opinions which you've (00:53) kind of become famous for I think first one one of my favorites hard work is massively overrated why well I'll take a step back the reason I like these controversial opinions is uh a you always look cool if you have some controversial opinions uh but B I I'm I've learned how much of what we believe is just simply stories that we're told um this goes from everything religion to uh school to being taught what you should be doing for your career and all this stuff and so I've actively tried to just deprogram (01:30) myself and ask and question the Assumption so I actually started with looking at what are the things that almost nobody disagrees with and are those really true and one of those that I found that I in practice disagree with was growing up I was told hard work is what's most important hard work is the key to success hard work is and you just hear hard work preach and it's almost like you'd have to be insane to be um anti-hard work right like some people do it just for the just for the effect but I don't I don't really being like that I (02:01) just mean it's overrated it's not that it's a bad thing but that it is overrated because what I found in my life is that what you do is far more important than how how hard you work on that thing so for example you know I thought about the hard work thing and I used to work in restaurants and nobody works harder than people in restaurants restaurants are open you know from breakfast till till late night every single day seven days a week it is uh you know a thankless job you were working in a hot kitchen (02:30) um and you are you know Cooks work hard Cook's in the back line of a kitchen work hard janitors work hard you know the cleaning lady works hard um but you know you sort of think about you're like why isn't the janitor driving a Bentley right like if hard work was the key to success then why aren't the people who I think works work the hardest in most these situations doing better um and it's because you know hard work will let you win the game that you're playing but it doesn't help you if you chose the (02:57) wrong game and so the most critical decision is actually project selection what you decide to work on uh what you decide to do with your talent and your time and your your work ethic is far more important and I don't really hear that in fact I actually growing up heard the opposite um you know you get to college and they're like What's your major uh I don't know I'm 17 18 like how am I supposed to you know I just came from high school right like I don't I don't know what the thing is yet (03:24) um is there a list I can look at of like the jobs and what they're like can I do do I get to go see one um you know instead it's just like just pick if you don't pick if you don't declare if you don't declare your major this is in the US at least I don't know how it's for you if you don't declare your major you're behind like already it's like you if you've chosen to wait and see or think or go test you've fallen behind right so it just became this thing where picking what you (03:52) do was like this quick one second thing you were supposed to just get right right away with no preparation and then spend the rest of your life working hard and I just found that the opposite actually turned out to be true for me which was picking the right project made the made a huge difference and working hard enough was good enough I consider myself to be frankly somewhat lazy but very happy and successful so you know I you know I don't know if I'm the outlier or what but like at least disproved it is not um (04:20) it is not the main thing in terms of success I believe it's overrated yeah to clarify here I don't think that you're saying hard work doesn't matter hard work isn't a competitive Advantage you're saying that for the people who believe that hard work is absolutely everything it is the end-all be-all that there are other higher points of Leverage that you can do that open up layers uh levels and and layers to the hard work so that it can be maximized yeah exactly hard work is Maybe the fourth or fifth most important (04:52) factor or ingredient um so you might say uh what what's more important so number one to me is what you work on number two would be who you're around who who you work with because those people will influence you in a far greater Direction and provide more opportunities in the future so what you work on who you work uh who you work with far more important than how hard you work I sort of think it's something like fourth or fifth most important on the list and that that really there's just a threshold you need (05:24) to reach so um if you simply don't take action you don't do the work it doesn't matter how good of an idea you had or how good of Partners yet obviously not gonna work but um it is a threshold and that going far beyond that threshold going from 40 hours a week to 70 hours a week to 90 hours a week like some people will will popularize um has much less of an effect than I think people think it just sounds good sounds cool and it sounds like you earned it yeah why why is it if if you're true if what you're saying is correct and hard (05:54) work is as overrated as you say it is why is it such a pervasive myth it's virtue signaling most people um you know the reality is if you looked at um like a contribution a chart that showed the contributions to success well I was born with like all my healthy functions right yeah 10 fingers ten toes everything works great um I was born in the United States so already that was like far more influential in my future success and Endeavors than uh you know somebody who had a you know the genetic Lottery played out differently for them they're (06:29) born in a different place with a different set of fiscal resources um and you just keep going down the list of like how uh what you what what actually contributes to success a lot of those things are out of your control I can't take credit for where I was born I can't take credit for the genetics that I was given or the gifts the talents that I had uh as a baseline um so what people try to do is they try to shove those away pretend those don't matter because you didn't earn them and people will say you're privileged if you (06:56) if you bring them up and so instead they go to the thing that sounds like they made a choice to do it and that is the sole reason why they had the success that they had I chose to work hard I put in the time I earned it and it's sort of like you know the same thing happens in uh in any any Endeavor um when I win it's because I'm great when I lose it's bad luck so why is that why do we think that when we win it's because of what we did and when we lose it's because what everybody else did (07:23) right what the what the economy did what the weather did what the uh you know the government did like you know people are very quick on the downside to offload uh accountability and on the upside to load in accountability so just notice these things notice human Nature's Tendencies and realize it does seem like that would be the convenient thing to do uh to assign credit to your actions and to make it sound like you if you if you have a lot if you earned a lot if you got a lot of success the reason why is because you (07:54) put in a lot and in reality we know that sometimes it's asymmetric sometimes you just make a few critical decisions simple decisions I might have taken you a very short amount of time to do but totally differentiated between success and failure yeah I think there's a few things going on um one being if you achieve success and it wasn't painful people who are working hard and suffering and haven't achieved success to you to them you just look like a wanky sort of Bourgeois Aristocrat of some kind like a a (08:24) Randomness Aristocrat that was blessed by this this sort of chance um Sam Harris has got this idea that I didn't get chance to bring up with him on our episode The Myth of the self-made man and he takes this one step further because he folds in determinism and a lack of Free Will so he's basically like none of the things none of the achievements that you have are yours to Bear because you didn't choose the circumstances you didn't choose the laws of thermodynamics he didn't choose your genetics he didn't choose the randomness (08:52) he didn't choose anything and he uh sort of aims this at the right and says this does an awful lot of heavy lifting for people right of Center and uses it to kind of lambast this this myth of the self made man the problem that I have with that is it's a very disempowering story to tell yourself I I don't see it as an Adaptive or useful story like I want to feel pride in my successes because otherwise I know that I'm not going I'm going to leave more on the table because what's the [ __ ] point (09:18) like I get satisfaction from doing things well so it's almost like uh it might be a literal truth but a figurative falsehood in that it's not adaptive to believe even if it's true and I think that I don't know maybe there are times when self-deception can be justified and that might be one of them 100 agreed um on both of the points you made so I think the first is that uh you know if you were honest about what actually works and what doesn't it might annoy people um because if they have it hard if (09:52) things are going poorly or it's hard uh they wanna nobody likes to hear uh how easy it was for somebody else or how simple it could have been if they had made different decisions uh so it's sort of like Keeps The Barbarians at the gates type of thing to be like no no the reason the only difference was I put in more time in this direction and you put your time in this other direction you know and it's the most Equitable way to describe this uh that pisses off the least number of people however for me pissing off people is not (10:21) really a priority or a concern I'm not trying to do it nor am I trying to avoid it I'm just simply trying to be and let the chips fall where they may if you some people will love it some people will hate it and that's okay um I don't really care too much either way um the second point you made which is uh there is no you know the complete myth of the self-made band is it is disempowering and so um I have this whole category of things that I always say are maybe true but not that useful so for example if it's true but not (10:48) useful there's plenty of things like we'll be in a meeting at work and somebody will say something I say that's that's true I don't argue with what you're saying but it's simply unimportant it's not useful to what we're trying to decide or what we're trying to do here similarly if it is true that we sort of have no Free Will and that it's all determined anyways and that doesn't really matter what would you do well that's not that useful because it doesn't actually serve me (11:10) that's not a story that serves me and once you realize that it's all just stories anyways pick the ones that serve you pick the ones that make you feel the way you want to feel that get you to the outcomes you want to have and and not the one that make you feel like crap a related Point another opinion of yours what are the most underrated skills in the world right now in your opinion so I have two the first one people don't even think is a skill which is how underrated it actually is is um enthusiasm (11:40) sort of a lame maybe a little bit of let down from the way I I framed that but uh I don't think it should be a letdown I think it should be exciting that enthusiasm is underrated I'll give you a little story so I had a realization one day so I was 24 years old and I took a job it's like I moved to Silicon Valley to take this job I joined the company and I think at the time I was probably the youngest employee in the company about 20 people there I was the youngest of 20. (12:06) and um and I looked around and there was engineers and there's designers people with all kinds of talents that I did not have couldn't code couldn't design uh you know can't dance can't do a lot of things right so it's a not like don't feel like I have a bunch of hard skills and I was like what am I good at all right you sort of have that sort of like imposter syndrome self-doubt moment where you're like what why do they have me here why do they put me in charge of this project is it because I literally (12:30) give them like you know and I and I realized that like one of the things that I had that turns out to be quite important for most people who go on to do interesting things is I had a lot of enthusiasm meaning I was very excited about what we were doing I would paint a picture that was compelling to me and then I would Sprint at it and the ability to paint a picture that excites you the ability to bring excitement to a situation sounds cheap sounds fun sounds totally frivolous until you're around a group of people that don't have it and (13:03) then when the first person comes in that has a bunch of enthusiasm that has hope about the future that brings energy to the table it's contagious it changes the way everybody feels and if you're going to do something that's important generally it's hard right I come from the world of entrepreneurships Entrepreneurship people sort of realize like yeah it usually starts off like you're starting from scratch you have nothing trying to make it happen there's a lot of force of will that goes into (13:24) that and discipline is one force of will I'm gonna show up at the right time and do the right things the other is enthusiasm which is I'm gonna believe before it's here and I'm gonna believe that it's gonna happen I'm going to take that I'm going to borrow on that future excitement today I'm going to take out a loan against the future and I'll borrow my happiness and excitement about the future and I'm going to deploy it today to invest that that enthusiasm today that's how I think about enthusiasms (13:50) borrowing from the future and um I think it's a skill I think it is massively underrated I think having enthusiasm when things are going good is quite easy having enthusiasm when things are neutral to bad is where you get the value of it and um most things are hard and most things have pretty deep dips um so having enthusiasm is I think completely underrated because people don't even see it as a skill they don't see it as something you could develop and they see uh and they don't place the importance on they don't realize how (14:21) important that source of fuel is how contagious that is how it brings everybody's level up when you have it so I think that's underrated I'll tell you the second one is storytelling I want to go I want to jump I want to jump in on enthusiasm two things by the way three or disagree uh I have noticed since I've been in America I've realized the value of people around me being excitable the British are genealogically like we are genetically predisposed to be kind of dour uh sort of personality is very (14:52) similar to the weather it's sort of gray and everything's a bit [ __ ] um but we're very great with the satire and the sarcasm and the cutting the cutting remarks and stuff but my disposition doesn't need any more of that and what I realized one of the reasons that I flourished since I've been in America is I've been around people who believe that things are going to be better than they are right now they continually presume progress is baked in it it's factored in all the time that things are (15:20) going to get better because it's going to grow oh dude it's going to be fine this catastrophe you're going to get over it and everything that may be America overall I'm not sure that may just be my particular cohort of particular people in this particular City that I'm living in but what it's done is it's raised my ambient mood an awful lot um we do not know the things that are going to happen in the future right we are not Clairvoyant we don't even really truly know ourselves we're self-deceptive (15:48) other people deceive us we don't have a crystal ball that shows us what is going on either outside the world or inside of our own minds and our own bodies given the fact that we have to have some form of delusion Why not pick a delusion that's going to be beneficial to you right like you have the choice to do this why ER on the side of and the only real reason I've been railing against cynicism for quite a while now and it was Michael malice's book the white pill that really got me onto it cynicism is the opposite of (16:16) enthusiasm in some regards and what I realized is the people who were being cynical were doing it because it was like sour grapes at an existential level I called it the cynicism safety blanket that if you presume that things are going to be terrible you can never be disappointed by the world exactly and it just seems like it's like a coward's way to live and I understand I understand people have had bad things have happened to them they've gone through traumas they've had discrimination they've had (16:44) all of this stuff like don't I get it right I understand and that would set you up to believe this may very well happen in the future but like what does it do for you what con does it grow show me the corn that you're growing from this the corn you're growing is [ __ ] shitty so yeah I think less cynicism more enthusiasm the skill two questions you can respond but two questions as well how do you develop it as a skill and how do you feel it effectively let me um let me give you a couple different (17:15) angles of this okay so I come from Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley the cynics get to be right and the Optimus optimists get to be rich um so the cynics get to be right that you know eight out of the ten things are gonna fail of course yeah you were right you get to be right eight out of ten times and the two out of ten that actually work you sat on the sideline thinking it was just another thing that's not going to work so Silicon Valley Silicon Valley retrains your brain so one way to train your brain to default optimism rather (17:41) than default pessimism is to play in the game where optimism gets rewarded and so come to Silicon Valley you get to play again uh the up against broader here's another here's another angle where it comes from this great Conor McGregor quote I love it used to be my desktop background I told the story before I came to silica Valley and uh every engineer has like multiple monitors it was like a status symbol like they don't have Louis Vuitton or the status levels like how many monitors you have how (18:07) elaborate is your desk setup so I'm sitting here with just my laptop and I'm like [ __ ] I got the I'm like the you know I'm I'm wearing the the thrift store version of of this luxury style idiots kid at the party exactly I didn't even know what I would do with another screen but hey I need another screen here it guy come on let's go so I get another screen and I don't know what the hell to do with it and so I just put up one quote because I was like I don't have any functional you like there's no (18:32) functional utility here aside from again honing this skill of enthusiasm I'm controlling my mood and the quote that I had on there was a Conor McGregor quote where he said they were like Connor you always have this personality and even when you lose you seem to be having this like I feel like we never get to see you you know down in the dumps and this is usually a sport of highs and lows and he goes at the end of the day the quote is this at the end of the day you got to feel some type of way so why not feel (19:00) unbeatable why not feel Untouchable why not feel like the best to ever do it and I just love that quote which is I'm in any moment I am going to feel something I'm going to be feeling a certain type of way and I think what a lot of smart people do is they try to make that neutral because it's just like almost logically mathematically rationally makes sense it's like well I'll make my default emotional home to be neutral feeling nothing and as good things happen I'll feel better and as bad things happen (19:30) I'll feel worse and this is like a unspoken thing that I see a lot of smart people do a lot of intellectuals do this it is like a neatness and starting at zero and then I'll go up if you're good and bad if it goes down whereas people with the self-delusion and which are usually if you you get to sit down with like kind of people remarkable people every week you'll notice that their emotional home is not zero their emotional home is closer to ten they default feel Untouchable Unstoppable unshakable they (19:58) just enjoy that feeling and they just start there and yes sometimes the world will beat them down a little bit and they'll dip but they'll everybody always returns to your emotional home and so you have to like program it set that like a temperature like a thermostat in your room what is my default temperature going to be and I I just took time to do that um so that's the first thing the second thing is here's enthusiasm in a non-business context um anybody who's ever dated somebody knows that like there is the (20:28) quote-unquote honeymoon period like the start of every relationship that you get into um is typically where it's like you know the highs the you know both people like I always say a first date it's like two people sitting down and deciding to lie to each other it's like you present your best self you're going to um you're going to basically play everything up you're gonna your gentleman how genuinely are you you're gonna play it up here let me get that door for you let me let me dress up let (20:53) me do XYZ you know nobody farts on a first date and so what happens is later in a relationship uh people will Retreat back to their emotional home their their personality home um and all of a sudden they'll start to behave differently somebody you know at the beginning let me take out that trash at the you know at the end why I always have to take out the trash why don't you do whatever you know for once once in a while um so we we kind of slip and we slip in these ways and the worst way we slip is that the enthusiasm dips uh we get (21:24) comfortable and the enthusiasm dips and the kind of the classic Trope here is like when um if you see somebody come home from work you see like a dad come home from work this person you know Dad might have been left left the house at six in the morning seven in the morning worked hard all day drive back home sit in traffic for 40 minutes get back to the house open up the door they're hungry they're thirsty they're tired they put down the briefcase take off the suit jacket finally and like they sort of slump through the door (21:54) and what all they want to do is get to the couch get the cold beer turn on the TV and turn off their brain and this is how like I think a lot of the world operates and I heard this once and I never let it go which was that if you if you if you do what you did at the beginning there would never be an end and um and there's Works in relationships if you act the way you act at the beginning there would never be an end in the relationship because both people would be on their absolute best behavior giving to each other uh all the (22:23) time and the version of this that I try to like make as a practice or a habit is to have honey I'm home energy so honey I'm home energy is like have you ever seen I Love Lucy back in the day the guy opens the door he's bursting with energy like nobody comes home from work like that but this guy did it in the show because it's a show he would come home honey I'm home and you can just hear from the voice if somebody's in the house oh get ready it's on like get ready for a great ball of energy coming (22:51) your way that is going to be loving that is going to be affectionate it's going to be playful and flirtation is a Charming all the things we kind of want to be um but we we slip and we don't do it and so one simple practice to develop the skill of enthusiasm is to have this honey I'm home energy which is before you walk through a door whether it's to a meeting whether it's to your house your apartment whatever it is just decide to walk in with that honey I'm home energy and you only need to do (23:17) it for like 45 seconds but if you just do that for 45 seconds you'll like the way it feels they will respond to you differently and it'll just carry um versus if you come in slumped over you're going to have that type of energy and that type of interaction those types of experiences which nobody actually wants to have we'll get back to talking to Sean in one minute but first I need to tell you about HubSpot look I spent a decade and a half networking with people and 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(24:30) com lnx or the link in the description below yeah the enthusiasm or excitability portion is it's almost kind of like a personality trait that I didn't know about it's like finding out that there's a new type of weather you just step out one day and you're like what the [ __ ] is this oh I've never seen this before it's like that right and um yeah I I very very much I'm completely Pro I've been calling it toxic positivity I'm very Pro toxic positivity like just seeing seeing the good in situations being around (25:01) people that do the same there's definitely an undercurrent in the UK of um excitability almost being naive it being uh kind of immature it's being lame um and then you know even as you move up through the the IQ distribution smart people like the idea of being cynical because it seems heterodox and it's it it seems like you've considered all of the options only somebody that's a you know a smooth brained idiot would believe that things are going to go well yeah obviously you know that's what (25:30) that's what that's what the Normie midwards think no no I I've considered the options um but it fails to recognize that all ultimately your experience of your life is largely determined by the story that you tell yourself about it in fact you could maybe say that it almost it's almost exclusively determined by that there's a thing called the so people talk about Vicious Cycles and we've seen Vicious Cycles how people slip into depression how companies fail how vicious cycle a vicious cycle for example would be if (25:59) you break it down into its core elements there's just three little it's a triangle three dots triangle dot one is belief if I believe that something is not going to work this relationship is not going to work this company's not gonna work this meal is gonna suck whatever whatever it is if I believe that it's not gonna work the second dot is actions how much action am I going to take towards making it happen right like I'm going to take minimal action because I don't believe that it's going to work if (26:25) you don't believe it's going to work you just sort of tiptoe in you're not actually gonna like Go full full force on it so minimal belief leads to minimal action which leads to a minimal result which only reinforces your shitty original belief and that's the Vicious Cycle so then the next time you just reinforce that oh you know um I don't really believe I'm gonna stick to this diet so therefore I'm not actually gonna like throw away the junk food I'll just put it away in the closet a little bit and (26:54) therefore I'm gonna actually end up snacking on the stuff because I know where it is it's in the closet it's just I just have to open the door and then I get a shitty result and I say I knew it I'd never follow through with these things right like these are the stories you tell yourself silently in your head the voice in your head and the opposite is true there's also the winner cycle or The Virtuous cycle the virtual cycle is the exact opposite massive belief oh my God this is going to work what if you knew that like if (27:18) you knew that if you get to this like you're what you're going to the corner store and if you knew at that corner store there is the winning lottery ticket it is there the next person who prints it wins would you would you walk or would you run right like you're going to run so your belief if you really believe that you would take Massive Action you would Sprint and when you sprint you would actually get there first right and like you would actually have a different result than you know Lottery is not (27:44) exactly right because you're not gonna the belief is ill-founded in that case but you would take Massive Action and generally Massive Action over a consistent period of time leads to results which reinforces your belief that I'm the type of person that whenever I set my mind to something I do it and when I do it I get results right like that that just becomes how a winner thinks and so enthusiasm is another word as a sort of a it you know roommates with belief and if you say belief beliefs are these kind of like heavy (28:11) long-term you only have a few beliefs enthusiasm is a general state that you operate in such that it takes your default level of belief in something up which takes your action up which takes your results up over time and that is sort of like the this and to me the strategy that under that explains why this works not only does it feel good to have positive enthusiasm or positivity but like there's an actual Advantage I think there was a TED Talk Back in the Day called The Happiness Advantage and this guy was talking as a Harvard (28:39) professor and he explained that like happiness is not just doesn't just feel good it literally makes you perform better they did many tests to see how you actually perform on the same same test if you came in in a certain State versus a different a different state the Happy Happy State versus not yeah George Mack has this really great idea that I'm going to write an article a code written article with him about of um uh public metrics and hidden metrics and he talks about stuff like peace of mind being a (29:06) hidden metric but money being a public metric and time is very interesting times somewhere between the two we kind of don't know time but we kind of do as well uh so for instance people will happily sacrifice that peace of mind in order to achieve money because there's no dashboard that tracks your peace of mind and it's almost like enthusiasm right enthusiasm is such a hidden metric uh as opposed to it being something that you fail to see the cost of it's something that you fail to see the Returns on uh because the the inner (29:34) texture of your mind is not something that you're open to so that's people will learn another language they'll tick a box oh I'm gonna learn Spanish um versus work if you said I'm gonna work on upping my general level of enthusiasm you'd be looked at like an insane person what's going to actually serve you better in life we need to do a lingo we want to do a lingo for enthusiasm yeah I actually I prefer the opposite I am happy to be the one who is massively exploiting this Arbitrage (30:01) captain or capturing all of the games exactly that's a talented talentless guy like me thrive in a world like this right okay second skill what's the other one storytelling um so stories are then storytelling is is massively uh underrated because stories are the natural um like transfer mechanism between individuals so like if you want something to stick in somebody else's head you really have two choices music or story um and you know you look at like through all of time what are the things that have lasted thousands of years (30:35) um religions how are religions coded do you remember all of the all of the rules of religion no but people remember the stories um same thing with you know anything that lasts a long time or sticks in people's heads uh you know I couldn't tell you what I learned in seventh grade but I could tell you the plot of Lion King uh you know a play-by-play plot of Lion King why because it's encoded as a story so stories are like an encoding mechanism for for information or for knowledge music is another one people (31:02) will naturally you know uh remember catchy music uh most people don't have the ability to make music but almost everybody could tell a good story so uh if I could do the music thing I would uh but instead I'll do the story thing and I think this is underrated because um and I think you know Steve Jobs had some quote like this he's like um uh something like the Storyteller is the most powerful person on Earth because they get everybody else to take action so uh they're the ones who move one person to the next and this is how (31:30) politicians get people this is how uh CEOs run companies and stories and so um but you're very rarely taught how to tell a story like if I went and asked somebody like just explain to me like how if I wanted to get better at storytelling what would I do like what what what are the skills like give me like the two or three big Concepts and so they're very uh uh nobody really knows how to articulate it you're not taught this in school and um because of that again there's a massive Arbitrage you have a (31:58) thing that is quite it is very valuable that most people don't know how to do very well so if you even try a little bit you'll become the top 10 one percent of storytellers very quickly and from there you know you get the sort of results that a great communicator would get what are the principles of Storytelling as far as you're concerned so if you listen to like um Aaron sorkins the guy you know the the writer and movie guy who did you know I think he did like whatever West Wing and Newsroom and a bunch of other stuff like (32:24) The Social Network movie he's like if you ask him like I wanted to take his master class I had set out a day I was like I'm gonna learn everything there is to know from this guy about storytelling because this guy's a master Storyteller I cleared my calendar and like in the first 30 minutes he just repeats the same one principle over and over again I'm like oh that seems to be it uh which is stories are about intention and obstacle he says I worship at the altar of intention and obstacle so basically (32:49) if you watch any movie you watch any TV show within the first second you will you you should know right like at any given time you should be able to pause and you'll know this usually within the first five minutes of every story There's a Hero and the hero wants something they have an intention and they have an obstacle what's in the way of it um last night I was watching a show called hijack you've seen this it's on that yeah I finished it did you finish it I finished it last night oh yeah (33:13) everyone should go and watch it right away you see Idris elbow well I'll I won't spoil it but Idris Elba wants one thing right at the very beginning is he wants to be with his family and he's got some obstacles wife doesn't want to be with all right so like you get that if you go watch Die Hard Die Hard oh it's this movie about defusing a bomb and doing it let's create this terrorist plot what does he want at very beginning he gets a call he wants to be home with his family but then there's this terrorist plot and (33:39) really at the at the end of Die Hard all he's trying to do is just get to his family like the whole movie is hero wants something and there's something in its in his way in this case a terrorist plot um and so and then throughout any story that escalates so like let's take uh this show hijacked right the name kind of gives it away a plane gets hijacked Okay cool so now this person wants something different he doesn't want to you know bring his family back together he immediately just wants not die from (34:04) this terrorist right or not die from this hijacking land safely now that's the intention what are the obstacles well there might be people working against that plan and so every story must have at its underpinning and intention and obstacle okay that's the first key principle of Storytelling and um it doesn't matter if it's a romantic comedy oh what does she want well she's a high-powered lawyer but all her friends are getting married and she's not dating anybody what does she she has (34:30) an intention she wants to remember he wants to have a loving relationship the obstacle she's so successful in all the guys she meets are [ __ ] okay cool she's busy and happy tassels okay now what do you do to to make a story more compelling the next ingredient you need to add is steaks so you sprinkle some steaks on there what are steaks steaks are elevating the what's at stake if they don't get it so intention obstacle if the intention is I'm hungry and the obstacle is you know lunch is over there in the other room (34:56) it's not that exciting of a story if the stakes are this person hasn't eaten in 30 days and they're you know if they don't eat they're gonna die right like now all of a sudden you have something more interesting so steaks are how you elevated now Stakes don't always have to be life or death the best story some of them some of the best things like I don't know if you've seen this show called The Bear that's out recently it's on uh it's on Hulu and it's cool it's (35:19) just kind of like critically acclaimed like cool people think it's cool type of show and in that there's not life or death Stakes there is no terrorist plot there is no like uh life on the line but they know that for everybody in a in whatever your world is there's something that's the highest Stakes thing the thing you want the most and all you have to do is convince the audience that this character really cares about this that the character really feels like it's a like a life