Transcription
Enter Harvey Kellogg.
[laughter]
Yes, that Kellogg. He ran a famous health sanitarium and believed that a clean, light, grain-based diet would cure indigestion and improve overall health. He co-invented cornflakes, and he and other cereal pioneers pushed the narrative that a healthy, cold cereal breakfast was essential for a productive day, and your dad bought it hook, line, and sinker.
Yep.
I mean, a lot of people did.
Everybody did.
And and I did until I until I started to like feel into this. I would have this big cereal bowl of cereals. That's how I grew up as well. And then I would feel like this low, like this um, you know, low energy. And I think now I understand why because I was overloading my system with way too much kind of rapidly available sugary energy that I didn't need. Uh, and then the body needs to find a way to handle this. Either you get fat, which I can't do, so then it goes kind of to my brain and then makes me feel lousy.
So, on this point then, just to close off on this diet question, if I want to feel really, really optimal on a given day, I probably do want a smaller eating window, and I probably want to eat just what I need. And I want to not overeat. I don't want to under-eat, but I don't want to overeat.
If you under-eat, you're going to pick it up tomorrow.
I'll pick it up tomorrow anyway, so I'll be fine tomorrow. But the worst thing is overeating today, which is going to impact my performance today.
Correct. And food is one thing that influences where energy goes in the body, how it flows. Um, and and just maybe to close the loop on that example, like when you're sick and you're fighting an infection.
Yeah.
I had a a beautiful opportunity to understand not just under-understand, to experience this one day. It was New Year's Eve, uh, 31st in the evening, and I start to feel like a little scratchy throat. I'm like, oh, I think I'm getting sick. So, I I go to, you know, the the evening dinner. I didn't cough or anything. I didn't I don't think I was contagious, but I just could feel, right, like something was was coming up. I felt terrible. I was I had I started to have like full-blown flu symptoms, went home early at like 10, 9:00 p.m. Um, and then I went to bed. It was a horrible night. Horrible. I felt even I was in pain, and then my I had like massive fever. I took a bath, a warm bath to help my fever kind of, you know, go up so that it could fight the high fever stimulates your immune cells and weakens the virus. So, it's a it's it's usually a good thing. Um, and then it's next day I was out, and I was so depressed, and I was like, I should write about this. I'm writing a book on on energy and energy constraints and like the the division partitioning of energy in in the body. I was like, I should write about this. This is so interesting. My immune system is in full-blown defense mode, and it's not like I I was like I could feel my heart. I'm wearing this aura. My heart rate was like 110 at at rest instead of being like 60, you know, normally. So, there's all of this energy flowing through. It's like, wow, like my metabolic rate objectively is higher. We know this is true from from, you know, good studies on that when you're fighting something, you burn more energy. Um, yet I'm feeling completely drained. Right? So, it's not like the amount of energy that's flowing through that I should feel more energetic. The my immune system in that moment, uh, was draining all my energy. Drains is sucking away my energy from, you know, from my from my mind, from my brain perhaps. Um, and I remember thinking it wouldn't be a whole lot of energy if I just pulled my laptop, like propped myself on the bed, and then start to write what I'm experiencing in the moment, right? Like the uh, and but I couldn't muster the strength. I was like, what the what the [ __ ] Like why would I care?
[laughter]
I couldn't care, right? And this is the stuff I care about on a daily basis, but in that state of my energy being disrupted, I couldn't care about this. And then I started to think about the work and about, you know, the the lab and about, uh, you know, family things. I was like, "Whoa, it's My whole life feels so different."
I don't care about anything.
Yeah, I don't care about anything. I just I'm just trying to [ __ ] survive.
That's so interesting 'cause I can relate so much.
Yeah, I mean, everyone has been through like a difficult like you when you're really sick.
Or when you're really stressed.
Yeah.
Or just anything that's all-consuming like that.
Exactly. That's like Maslow's pyramid, right? The the top is crushed, and you're like, "Survival."
And you're Where Where did I go?
Where is [laughter] Where is the
Yeah, I remember that.
So, I was still me, right? I was still Martin, but I I felt completely different. The quality of my of my mind, the quality of of my intention was like completely different. I was just trying to survive. I didn't care about anything else. So, that episode went on for like 2 days or so. Through Day number three, I was able to take my computer and I like start to feel again the purpose. But, it was so interesting that just the what what it felt like when I was able to write about it. And really feel into it. It felt like I was diffuse energy. Like the light, for example, right? There's a form of energy. You can have a laser. And the difference between a laser and a an incandescent light bulb, like an old-style filament light bulb, is not the amount of energy. Is the the way the energy is patterned. And in a laser, you have every photon that are kind of in phase with one another.
Mhm.
And then there's a coherence to it, right?
Mhm.
And it's the coherence that gives a laser its power. Uh, it's not the total amount of energy. The same amount of energy if you put in an incandescent light bulb, now it's the same energy, but it's diffuse, right? Every photon is doing its own thing. They're all going in all over the place. And then if you want to look at how far can these photons go? Right? How far can my mind go?
[laughter]
Caring about things. The diffuse energy doesn't go very far. Uh, but the the laser can go super far. So, my mind had become like a diffuse incandescent light bulb.
Uh, I the two things came to mind when you said that. The first is in my previous company, because we were a startup, fast growing, we had cash flow issues. Cash, making sure we had enough money coming in from our clients, whatever, to pay our staff was always a problem. For anyone that doesn't know, um, when a business is growing quickly, it's usually spending more today than it's receiving in. So, even if you're you're growing from like 1 million to 6 million to 12 million to 25 million or whatever as we did, you're you still have a cash flow problem. And there'd be times when we're nearing the end of the month and months months in a row, and I had the same cash flow stress. I couldn't pay the team. They they always got paid. They never knew. We always figured it out. But, what I'd notice is in those moments of really, really high stress, sometimes, not always, but there were periods where I lost motivation. And what I meant by that is I literally, as a 23, 24-year-old like CEO of all these hundreds of people, some of them older, double my age, I'd basically hide at home. And what I mean by hide at home is like I didn't have the I lost purpose for this [ __ ] business. Like I I'd wake up for it might last a week or 2 weeks, and I just didn't have the purpose, the quote motivation, as they call it, to like go out and be a leader. And now as you say, I could always because I was stressed. And it would last for when the cash flow issue would resolve, my motivation, my purpose, the reason why we're doing this, zoomed back into focus. And I think that's really important 'cause I you know that we do have a lot of entrepreneurs watching this show, and they'll beat themselves up sometimes because they lose motivation. And as a founder and as a CEO, it's you feel so guilty that you the the source of motivation and inspiration and leadership for this group of people, you could lose it. But now I understand what it was. Now I understand that I was at like an a chronic well, uh, yeah, a bit of a chronic energy deficit in that moment.
Yeah.
The other thing actually made me think about as well, when you you said about this diffusion of energy, it actually made me think about businesses and OKRs and goals.
Yeah.
It made me think about if you take 10 10 people in a startup and they're all really really focused on the same goal, they're way more successful. But sometimes you don't have a clear goal and you're all pointing in different directions.
Yes. So there's incoherence.
There's incoherence. It's kind of like a diffuse light bulb.
yes.
Yeah, but you need to be a laser, and this is why OKRs are so important 'cause you can point all the energy at the problem.
Yes.
This is traction.
Yes.
Towards a particular goal.
This is what purpose does. Purpose focuses energy. And I think the reason purpose is so powerful, right? And why you need to have that, right? To to feel it. I I want to say like you have purpose. It kind of becomes this must find my purpose, you know, must like I'm on a a spiritual journey to find my
you out and then you're emphatic.
Yeah, exactly. Uh, but when you uh somehow find your yourself in a place where you feel like those things, you know, that are in your life are meaningful, right? [snorts] And that the path you're on is purposeful. I think what this does is it brings all of your energy that might be diffuse like a a light bulb and boom, it brings it like a laser. And then you can go that distance, right? You can go through that half day without eating. You can go through that month, right? Where it's like you have all all of these meetings, and it doesn't feel as difficult as it would if you were going kind of all over the place. Focus, I think, brings our energy into a coherent state, and then it feels like coherence, right? It feels like I know what I'm doing. This is then it becomes very easy to say no to this and to say yes to just the right thing 'cause there's this coherence, not just energetic coherence that uh allows you to do more with less energy, uh, but also this coherence of mind, right? And and maybe of spirit, if we want to go there.
Um, I'm going to ask the team to play a clip. It's a clip of Kevin O'Leary talking about this idea of signal and noise, and he's referencing his experiences with, um, Steve Jobs who used to work with, and also Elon Musk.
Look how wildly successful he was. But here's why. There's a concept that he understood that very few people focused on back then in the early 90s of signal to noise ratio. What was so brilliant about Jobs that I tell every CEO now, and I don't care if you're an S&P 500 CEO or you're just starting a business. His vision of signal was the top three to five things you have to get done in the next 18 hours. Not your vision for the business next week or next month or next year. Just the next 18 hours you're awake. You're going to get those three things or those five things done that you have deemed critical for your mission. They must get done today. Anything that stops you from doing that is the noise. So this signal to noise ratio to be successful for Steve Jobs was 80/20. 80 signal, 20 noise. And I knew that to be true with him because he would email me at 2:30 in the morning and expect me to get back to him because back then we didn't have texts. It was all email. He was right. He was right. And the only other person that I've seen that has a higher ratio than that is Elon Musk. He has no noise. He does not deal with noise. He is 100% signal 24 seconds, you know, every cycle. I mean, the guy is just 60 seconds of every minute, 60 minutes of every hour, the 18 hours he's awake, it's all signal. And look what he's achieved.
And so I can really sort of summarize this for my audience. Signal is the most urgent thing you should be focused on right now, and noise is basically everything else.
goals you you for the the way the that you were If you're going to be awake 18 hours,
Yeah.
and you've determined that there's three things you have to get done, you're going to get those done. No matter what it takes, you're going to get those done. And you're not going to let anything distract you from the three to five things. If you're a CEO, and you achieve that, and you can get those done with 80% of your time based on that, you're extraordinarily successful.
In that clip, he's basically saying that the most successful entrepreneurs in the world are remarkably good at focusing on the signal. He said that from his time working with Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs would be 80% signal. I he wakes up in the morning, and he knows exactly what we need to work on. And I watched these interviews with Jony Ive. I'll actually also play the Jony Ive interview, 'cause I send this around to everybody. So, I'm going to play it where Jony Ive talks about how remarkably focused Steve Jobs was.
This sounds really simplistic, but it's still shocks me how few people actually practice this. Um, and it's a struggle to practice, but it is is this issue of focus. Um, Steve was the most remarkably focused person I've ever met in my life. And um, and the thing with focus is it's not sort of like this thing you aspire to, or you you decide on Monday, you know what, I'm going to be focused. It is a every minute, a why are we talking about this? This is what we're working on. You can achieve so much when you truly focus. And one of the things that Steve would say, um, because I think he was concerned that I wasn't. Um, he would say, um, how many things have you said no to? And I would honestly, I I would have these sacrificial things, 'cause I I mean, I want you to be very honest about it. And so, I say, oh, I I said no to this, and no to that. And um, he but he he knew that I wasn't vaguely interested in doing those things anyway. Um, so there was no real sacrifice. What what focus means is saying no to something that you with every bone in your body you think is a phenomenal idea, and you wake up thinking about it, but you say no to it because you're focusing on something else.
There's something in giving your entire being of focus to something. Maybe it's the context switching, or that means your probability of being successful at that particular thing drastically drastically increases.
Mhm.
Solving hard problems is hard.
Yeah. Yeah.
But these great great founders, they they solve them because they're so they're focusing every available unit of energy on the thing.
Mhm. Yes.
I think the reason this is is because of a physical principle about energy which is called a resonance, right? If you walk through life with such clarity of mind, right? Like this is what the truth is. This is where we're going, right? And and you live and you breathe that. You become like a resonator. You hold this energy pattern, and it comes out not just in in your actions and your emails. It comes out in the way you speak, and then comes out in the things you turn attention to, right? It turns out in your tone of voice, in the care that you, you know, look at people with. It comes out in every facet of you, right? So you become the emblematic leader, I guess, for for that thing that you're 100% into. What this does is that it's picked up by other people, right? Maybe this gets like vibes. You have that vibe. You have like the founder's vibe, right? Or like the entrepreneur's vibe. I think this is real, and this is the energy that's flowing through mitochondria somehow becoming coherent and, you know, aligned, and it feels meaningful. It feels purposeful, and then you live like that. And then other people around you that resonate with it, right? Like people are drawn to a pure signal. Like if you have that the specific signal, it's like a a music, like a symphony, right? Like when it sounds when it's on tune, then people that want to come on board, like they feel this, and then it gets amplified.
It's so funny 'cause we were talking there about Steve Jobs being often cited as a prime example of someone who was really intensely focused with his with his energy. And what you've just described sounds almost perfectly like what people said about him when they described him as having a reality distortion field.
Mhm.
Probably heard this term. Um, the reality distortion field, they called it his RDF, was a term coined by Apple software engineer Bud Tribble in 1981 to describe Steve Jobs' uncanny, almost hypnotic ability to convince everyone around him to believe practically anything. And people who work closely with Jobs described the RDF, the reality distortion field, as a confounding mix of intense charisma, unyielding power, and sheer persistence in a certain direction, which [clears throat] pulled you with him.
Mhm. That's an energetic quality. And in physics, if you have something that's it has a really strong energy, then it can entrain other things. If the the source resonator is strong enough, people will come in resonance. And then it looks spooky. It looks like, "Whoa, this thing, you know, synchronicity or this you know, this thing happened and somehow, you know, that he was able to mobilize this this donor and you know, fundraising is like easier than it should be." And so the all of these things snowball because you hold that, you know, that that vibe. You hold that energy, and it amplifies.
I mean, exactly that. So I was just reading this quote from someone that used to work with Steve Jobs. Um, and he said that it would cause two things. It would be like he was casting spells on you, but he was also bending time and physics.
[laughter]
They said Apple engineer Andy Hertzfeld recalled that if you told Steve Jobs a task would take 6 months, he would look you in the eye and say, "You can do it in 2 weeks." Because of the sheer force of his conviction, engineers would often actually end up doing it in two weeks, completely rewriting their own understanding of what was possible. And even Bill Gates famously remarked on Jobs' charisma, saying, "I was like a minor wizard because he was casting spells, and I would see people mesmerized, so much so that I was so jealous." Gates noted that even when Jobs was lying or wrong, he had everybody completely hooked.
What's clear to make something like something like this happen is you need to feel that there's something compelling. Like you need to feel something is important. And again, that's not a rational thing. Like you need to feel it in yourself. And then you need to kind of bring that energy into focus and bring attention to it, right? And then then that's where ideas start to come. You build a structure around it to to sustain that flow.
You said at the start that we are the energy flowing through ourselves. And if I think about the fact that every barrier obstacle we have in the world is actually other people. Like that is true. Like for me to become the president, prime minister, best sales person, or best philanthropist, what I need to do if I am energy is convince other energy to change its shape.
I think that's what amazing people do. They're able to, you know, see something, hold that vision so strongly, and then mobilize others, right? And then new things become possible. I think that's what great leaders do. And I I now approach, you know, other human beings and, you know, my my son, like my 6-year-old son Noah, I see him as yes, a little boy, and yes, a lot of energy, and yes, you know, some some challenges
[laughter]
that come with this, but he's this beautiful little energy pattern, right? He's this energy flowing through this little child's body. But my role as a parent is to provide just around the right amount of resistance, right? The right amount of constraints. If I don't provide any constraint, I do whatever you want, have whatever you want, you know, anytime, then like that's not good for development. Kids need to feel, you know, some boundaries. And so those are like resistance, right? Little constraints. But if every minute, like me putting constraint, no you can't do this, no you can do that, then it damages the system. It traumatizes the system.
to grow in different directions.
So the the art really of parenting, and I think the art of leadership is providing the right structure, right? So that the energy has some constraints. Like there's a challenge. There needs to be a challenge for the team to meet, right? Challenge is like a barrier. It's like a little resistor. Of course there are challenges. You're like it's difficult to get there. And if it's not difficult, then everyone's bored. If it's like, yeah, we're going to do the same thing as we did last year. And then next year we do the same thing. That's not the same kind of energy as we need to double this year. And then we need to double the you know, the year after. This kind of goal or challenge is a form of constraint, something you have to work through. I think that's why the human mind is naturally drawn to challenges. Like, what's the next challenge?
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