This Week

The Week That Was: Encouraging Others; Setting Your Bar; and Takeaways from Tyler Cowen on Rick Rubin's podcast, Tetragrammaton.

You are busy, let me curate and highlight for you.

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You’ve Already Done It

I really enjoyed this short clip. Great storytelling features, but there’s some deeper lessons in here about believing in and elevating others, whether you know them or not. The two celebrity encounters offer different approaches to doing so, and I think equally valid in their own ways.

On Performance

There are certainly dark sides to perfectionism, and just because we set standards it doesn’t mean we automatically reach them consistently. There’s also being selective in expecting standards as a customer of experiences for example (say at a restaurant or hotel), but then in our work, not putting in the effort to reach the equivalent standard for a variety of reasons - some emotional (our psychology), some cultural (what’s valued), or even structural (like time).

All this to say, I really enjoy Gordon Ramsay. I read his early autobiography Humble Pie in the mid 2000s, which gave me some background on his origin story. Crazy to think of the longenvity of his career since. While he may be synomynous with yelling at people on reality TV, there’s so much more we can learn from his approach to work/craft and life. For example, the way he set out to learn each discipline required to bring a restaurant to life, or his ability or necessity to leverage risk as motivation for action.

Takeaways

Having listened to both Gordon Ramsay and Tyler Cowen this past week I draw some similarities from them. Perhaps, easy to say as both are accomplished in their respective fields and domains. But like the first point in my reflection on the Chris Distefano clip above, contrasts in styles between them certainly.

Rick Rubin was a guest on Tyler’s podcast earlier this year, and so this is the other side of conversation. I didn’t know Rick was podcasting and interviewing others. I think he borrows a bit from Tyler’s interview style (either naturally or learned). He is direct and curious to learn from the guest, which I really enjoy. It’s rarely conversational and when it does, it’s ok because its not the norm.

I was also thinking that the guest I have listened to most in my life on podcasts might be Tyler. It’s never boring for me, and he continues to update his knowledge and experience so you are not always hearing the same thing. He also shares when he is willing to change his mind on things, which he does a couple times in this episode. It’s a long one, but there was a flurry of questions and answers around the hour mark that made me choose it to highlight this week.

On weirdness…

I think now some of it is changing. You have now these long established tech companies, which are not so weird but they still might be successful. So how much the future is a future for weirdos, I would we don't know yet. But I still think it will be. Certainly in the creative arts.

On universal basic income; the pandemic; mental fragility…

It's an idea I used to favour. You asked about changing my mind. I now don't think it will work anymore. So, people want to work. We do need to make jobs more rewarding.

In different ways we paid people to stay at home during the pandemic. It was bad for most of them. Mental illness or frustration. So I don't favour UBI anymore.

I think we need to work harder on creating more good jobs though.

I saw other people not doing well during the lockdown. Though, financially they were doing well and they were much less happy. And it made me update views on a bunch of things.

Also, our mental fragility I see as much higher than I used to see. Again, if you don't have to go to work. You might see it as this extreme form of comfort. Everyone will just have a great time.

It wasn't that way. Like, "what is your purpose" people would ask, or "what am I doing?"

How can I return to my project. Or my kids with school. All sorts of issues. It just kept on growing in their minds and praying on their happiness.

On what goes in to success…

Is there usually some sort of a, I'll start with the word obsession, but was going to say an unhealthy obsession with people that succeed?

It's definitely an obsession. I don't know if it's unhealthy. If you think happiness is the standard for everything, it's probably unhealthy. I don't think happiness is the standard. I think having doing something worthwhile or great, is a standard of its own. It's not the only standard either. Then these unhealthy obsessives look a lot better.

Links to Youtube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts below.

On having mentors…

Many mentors. And I still have mentors. And it's always important to have mentors. Have mentors that are younger than you. But when I was in my early teens I had met a bunch of older people who had read a lot of books. And what I learned from them, and this will sound stupid, but it's possible to have a life where you have read a lot of books! And somehow that was physically possible. You don't know that when you are 10. Like, you read books, but you don't really know how the bigger pieces fit together. And that was a huge impact on me. Perhaps a bigger impact than any other people have had.

Enjoy.

Will be back next week.