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Hampus Jakobsson on Playing the Game of Life (Episode 40)
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Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
In this episode, Caleb speaks with Hampus Jakobsson. Hampus is a venture capitalist and serial entrepreneur. He is currently a general partner at Pale Blue Dot.
We talk about Stoicism and entrepreneurship. It’s a practical discussion centering on how to use Stoicism as a tool to accomplish your goals. You’ll get a number of tactics you can use to solve problems, build habits, and hear how a leading investor and entrepreneur thinks.
(00:36) Hampus on Stoicism
(03:47) Playing A Single Player Game
(07:35) Identity
(11:48) What's Holding You Back
(14:24) Identity
(21:43) Caring What Other's Think
(28:50) Quitting
(36:31) Misconceptions About Companies
(43:56) Role Models
***
Subscribe to The Stoa Letter for weekly meditations, actions, and links to the best Stoic resources: www.stoaletter.com/subscribe
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Listen to more episodes and learn more here: https://stoameditation.com/blog/stoa-conversations/
Thanks to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations: https://ancientlyre.com/
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Transcript
Introduction and Common Misconceptions
00:00:00
Speaker
I think that one of the most common misconception is that a company is kind of like, it is such a multifaceted thing. It's kind of like, if you ask somebody how to live a good life, nobody can answer that question. People have to be like, what life are you going to live?
Podcast Introduction and Stoicism Overview
00:00:14
Speaker
Welcome to Stoic Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week we'll share two conversations, one between the two of us, and another we'll be an in-depth conversation with and experts.
00:00:31
Speaker
And in this episode, I speak with Hampus Jacobson. Hampus is a venture capitalist, serial entrepreneur, and currently is a general partner at Pale Blue Dot. He blogs at hayjack.se. That's H-A-J-A-K dot s-e.
00:00:53
Speaker
And
Practical Stoicism in Entrepreneurship
00:00:53
Speaker
we'll be talking about stoicism, entrepreneurship, identity, how to concretely form habits using writing as a test case, and some of the largest misconceptions people have about starting a company. This is a practical discussion. It centers on how to use stoicism as a tool to accomplish your goals. You'll get a number of tactics you can use to solve problems, build habits, and get a sense of how a leading investor and entrepreneur thinks.
00:01:24
Speaker
Here is our conversation. Thanks so much for joining. Of course. Great to be here. I actually do think that it's great that people are doing more and more podcasts about stoicism because it feels like it's one of those things where when I started reading about that, reading on it, it was really, really hard to find people. So I'm super, super rich. You're doing this. Okay. Excellent. Excellent. Let's start with this broad question. What is stoicism to you?
00:01:50
Speaker
I think that it's very hard to say it in a way that doesn't sound like you don't care about other people, honestly.
Popularity and Eternal Nature of Stoicism
00:01:56
Speaker
I think that, for me, I think that it is that
00:02:00
Speaker
I think we are all around this world and trying to figure out what we are thinking ourselves, but then we get extremely affected by other people are thinking about us. So I think it's very rare to meet people that are saying, I don't really care what the other speakers are saying. And the problem is that stoicism is kind of the practice of trying to say care less what other people think, but not in the negative, not in the way of like, I don't care about what stoicism says is essentially, if your friend has more followers than you on Twitter,
00:02:29
Speaker
You should just chill like it doesn't really matter. And I think that's, that's what it is for me. And I think there are great ways of applying it to your life because it like relieves you from a lot of stress. Right. Absolutely. Yeah. There's this, this idea that so many things are external, whether it's the opinions of others or their followers, and that's not really matters. And that's what Stoics hammer over again and again.
00:02:53
Speaker
And one of the cool things I think about stoicism is that it's very rare to read texts or listen to quotes that are 2000 plus years old and you can't actually figure out when they're like, what I mean is like, it's not that you're trying to say is this 2000 or 2005 years old, you're thinking this dude must have been held in Brooklyn.
Balancing Opinions and Resilience in Stoicism
00:03:12
Speaker
And then you realize, this person is talking about this. And 300 years before Christ.
00:03:20
Speaker
I think that is what I find so interesting about stoicism is that the questions are eternal because it is this question of other people and they're always rapping. I think that Hitler-Albert Camus says, hell is other people. I think the plant wouldn't be very interesting without other people. Other people is also the thing that makes it all the delicious. So I think that is a good way of thinking about it is like, how do you relieve the anxiety of other people from you? How do you actually enjoy?
00:03:43
Speaker
Right, right. Of course, there's this strategy that you mentioned earlier. One way to not care about other people is to not care about them in the negative sense at all. They don't matter to you, but that's the view that other people don't matter. Of course, there's a sense that you have. Exactly. A lot of people have this view on stoicism that they think it means grit. That a lot of people are saying, oh, you're a stoic, so you just go to grit it out. And it's not at all.
00:04:09
Speaker
It's like you're not about gritting it out. That is actually about feeling what you should feel and not be distracted by other things. Yeah, that's right.
00:04:18
Speaker
Stoa, one of our main taglines is we want to focus on building resilience and then cultivating virtue. And I think a lot of people come to stoicism initially for that first bit. Does they hear that it's useful for managing stress or terrible events that have cropped up in their life? Which it absolutely is. The focus of the philosophy is on this practical aspect, building resilience, being able to handle whatever life throws at you.
Metaphors in Stoic Practice
00:04:43
Speaker
But ultimately, the focus is on cultivating virtue or being an excellent person. We try to promote both of those ideas at once. So you wrote in a blog post this idea of emulating a single player game, which I think is related to what we're talking about here. Can you explain what that means and why it would be a good idea to sort of take on that frame for your life?
00:05:10
Speaker
Yeah, so I think that the way to think about it, I think is this is that it's we're obviously every single person around you is a person just as worthy and valuable as like, you know, like we're not living in a world where you are looking out that everyone else is actually a robot and
00:05:28
Speaker
know, you're the only one with experiences in consciousness. But I think that is sometimes I find it very useful to just imagine yourself that we're in this big computer game, or I think that maybe a more modern version of that would be that we're in a big simulation.
00:05:43
Speaker
that every else, everyone else in a simulation or computer game is what's usually called a non-pick, an NPC. So they're really a real person, they're bots, they're robots and they're designed really really well to be around you and be your partner, it might be the person that you know that supermarket, be anything. And sometimes it's really good to think about that because
00:06:06
Speaker
I think we do this really thing where, you know, if you're chatting to, if you take a chatbot, like if you talk to a chatbot and says your horse is ugly, you're just going to shrug it off. Just be like, I mean, this is a chatbot saying that. But then if it's another person and you're believing it by that person, it really hurts and you're angry and you go to sleep and, you know, think about this person as an idiot.
00:06:27
Speaker
the funny thing is it's not that hard of an exercise to just kind of imagine everyone else and just believe and I think at least for me I think there is some very very strange or at least counterintuitive truth because the weird thing is that
00:06:45
Speaker
We're all living our own lives. Like we're all living in our own universe of citizens. And what I mean by that is like, if you meet a person this morning on a sidewalk and that person bumps into you and says something angry, you don't know at all what happened to them this morning. Their partner would have cancer, their kids are super sick, they're super delayed to this job interview and they're really, really stressed. And of course they're doing it. If they had a post on them that said all those things, you would move out of the way and you would say, hey, can I pay for the
00:07:14
Speaker
But because people don't, we're always thinking everyone else is an idiot and irritating and they're standing in front of you in line whistling at Walmart and you're just like, why could this person not shut up? And the thing is that if you just imagine them to kind of live in their own universes and your universes actually just cross paths.
00:07:32
Speaker
It's kind of easier to just take a step back. They're living in their own universe, living in mine, and they're kind of like a multiplayer character.
Universe, Agency, and Personal Identity
00:07:40
Speaker
So like if they say, I'm an idiot, they're that amount of meat, I should just not care as much. And if, I mean, I'm not saying this is easy. I think, I had one time where I'd like it really, I really wasn't able to use it. But most times, of course, this, you know, you think about it half-worth my action.
00:07:57
Speaker
Yeah, it's related to this idea that the ancient Stoics had that the universe is determined and everything happens because of the way the past was arranged. People aren't these individual, completely free souls acting on each other. Instead, the universe is more like
00:08:22
Speaker
a machine an organism that has its rules and serves as playing out the game as it were so on this metaphor it's you can in a more modern metaphor i suppose you know the universe is a computer program playing out we're all these different characters and we're just playing out our rules that's given by the script of the program and actually on that actually i like like really really believe as a person that it's not the case that everything is written like i think that that's another thing which i think that
00:08:52
Speaker
It's really dangerous, I think, to be very fatalistic about stuff, to just think, I am born in this family, or I'm born in this country, or this is who I am. I always try to, whenever I work with people, or if I invest in them, or become their mentor in one or another, I always try to figure out how they can yield. Sometimes they have to do, or most of the time, they have to work against you. The kind of person that doesn't usually figure this out, I've always
00:09:20
Speaker
But the funny thing is like we can all redefine that. You could just say, as you said before, start something about striving. I think it's interesting because in a sense, for your own betterment, you could say the kind of person that would stop at the person that's there. And that's right. And you would tell other people, I'm that kind of person, which means that when suddenly something happens, you would stop it up because you'd find it as that. And if you say that you're the kind of person that goes to the general times a week, exercise a lot.
00:09:48
Speaker
makes it a lot easier. So for me, these are like ultimate habitats. If you tell yourself that you're going to do something, it actually makes it easier to do it.
00:09:57
Speaker
But also on the, on the flips, it's like, if you, if you think you have a certain identity, feel forced, if somebody tells you, there's a lot of these studies, scores or people of color or differently, where people have been told that there was mass as a statistical group, and they actually become immersed with maths until somebody tells them, Oh, that's kind of a hoax thing. It's like a bad study. And then actually the crazy thing is there, results goes up.
00:10:28
Speaker
So it makes no sense, but I think it's a problem like we can miss massive filter on our head that we see the world through. So that, I think, is the thing I usually think about is...
00:10:39
Speaker
you're kind of killing computer game, it's moms. And you can actually look at your moments and say, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, why am I just seeing opportunities? Like, why? Just like, instead of thinking this is a risk, why am I asking myself what's the opportunity here? And if you start doing that, you start slowly reprogramming yourself with seeing opportunities. It's like this super cool thing. Essentially, you can reprogram might be too much of a term. But I think that that's the thing I find so exciting.
00:11:10
Speaker
Yeah, and of course, the ancient sox were fond of saying just because things aren't determined doesn't mean that they're faded. It doesn't mean that your actions don't matter because you are part of the system, right? So what you do, sure, maybe has written into the script, but it still matters and it still affects what's going to happen. So you can't just sit back and wait for things to unfold. But I think that's also a normal thing. I think it's very common that people kind of are victims that they kind of
00:11:38
Speaker
there's some people that tell you a story when something happened to them and they couldn't have done differently. And the crazy thing is that I think a lot of times the thing about stoicism is that it's complicated. I think that there's any kind of system of racism or ableism or interviews or anything makes it much harder. It's very easy to be a white person mad and say that, oh, this is just an additive question. But the crazy thing is there are certain things that actually you can't
00:12:03
Speaker
You can tell yourself that I'm not going to be the victim of this. I always think about it in a positive way, where I've met people that I think are really extraordinary. They meet them right away. They might literally be in a podcast, or they might never meet them in a business setting, or on an event, or whatever. And then I realized this person is just extraordinary. And what I used to do is I used to just think, wow, I really want to figure out a way to work with this person. I just had to rest and hope that our paths would cross.
00:12:33
Speaker
I'm not connected with what I did, whatever, change the amount of assets, but like the normal. But then I realized my first company, it's like the best way of doing that is just turning to them and saying, I haven't left to work here, I haven't left to hire you, whatever. And this person would just laugh at you and say like, yeah, I agree, like it would be fun. And I'm like, I'm in this position right now that, and most people take that as an out, right? Like it's like this person is right now doing this thing and they're in another country.
00:12:55
Speaker
And I think that we shouldn't take Noah as an answer sometimes. We should just ask her. So what I decided to do then is I just look at them and say, yeah, that's great. I get what would be needed for you to actually dump shit into it. And the thing is that now instead of saying you can't do it, because there's like, there's really nothing which is like, you can. It can be that they end up saying, that's good.
00:13:19
Speaker
But if people were saying, I would need this kind of salary. Okay, let's figure out like if that's what we can figure out instead of saying we can't do it. So I think that's also typically one of those things that we usually create these blockers for ourselves and just to say, okay, what is the range? What's the blocker? And how do we go around that blocker? And most of the time you can't go around it sometimes.
00:13:40
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, that's a, I think that's a great question. I think we often set up obstacles, you know, there are different obstacles, but we don't, we don't name them. And sometimes when you name them, it's clear that they can be addressed. So questions like what's needed to get you to change or I've always liked the form of the question, you know, what's holding you back from doing this? I once heard a salesperson say on a call, it's like, Oh, that's genius. I should just
00:14:01
Speaker
use that, not just in sales, of course, but throughout my life, my interactions with others, or thinking about my own goals, what's holding me back from actually getting to where I need to go. And once you name that, sometimes you see that it can be overcome. Yeah, I think sometimes actually one of the things I do a lot with the companies we invested in is that, like I asked them, you know, what would happen if we had $2 more, like tomorrow you open the account, so you're like, oh, shoot, I got $4 million more than I thought, what would you do?
00:14:28
Speaker
Or if somebody says, I can't read into this because I live here, it's like, okay, what do you do if you wouldn't have this house? And I think that there are a lot of times you don't realize that if you actually read one of them, you can sell the house. Or if you actually read $2 million, you could maybe fundraise. But I think we're kind of stuck in a race as dark a situation. And I think I usually love, like I have a couple of these exercises that I love doing whenever I get on an airplane or when I'm about to fly the day before, I'm going to die on this plane. I think it's a great exercise because it makes me really think up.
00:14:55
Speaker
Another thing I really is that I usually think that this thing that I like right now will burn. We just moved into our office six months ago, we love a lot of stuff, but it was really nice to meet by my colleague. It's a great exercise to ask ourselves, if this office burned down and we lost it, we didn't.
00:15:10
Speaker
And if the answer is, we would turn next to the physical office, as much as we're in the right office. But
Identity Shifts and Writing Techniques
00:15:16
Speaker
if we would say, well, we'd actually really want another window there, because this is kind of shitty that it's not in this room, well, then we can ask ourselves, could we get another window in that room? Right, right. And I think that actually sounds great, by like, if you lose something, it's way easier to just look at it fresh, right?
00:15:31
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You can see it a new. So I want to go back to something you said earlier about identity. I think you're exactly right that being able to shift your identity, take on a new one is a superpower of source to changing who you want to be. But how do you do that more concretely? Because I imagine some people might be listening and thinking, well, I'd love to take on the identity of, say, being someone who writes every day. But, you know, I can't
00:15:56
Speaker
Do I just sit and think about doing that? How do I manage that with my history of wanting to write but not pulling it off? How does that come together? That's a great question. I think a lot of times I think we want stuff that we actually don't.
00:16:09
Speaker
I think that a lot of times, many people want to be a published writer, but they don't want to write it. It's completely different. I think that there's so many times where people say, I wish I was a founder of a company, we're scaling in this space and everything was great, but they actually don't mean that. They mean, I wish I had been a founder who had built this great company and now I had all the wealth and recognition and everything from
00:16:30
Speaker
So I think one of the important things is like if we ask ourselves like, oh, I wish I could write every day. Then I think it's just like there are a couple of things and exercises. One is I think I, I find it super useful to just write on a piece of paper and put it on my laptop screen and just say, write every or whatever it is. Like don't sit in it. So whatever it is. Like I used to have a colleague that had one of these quotes on her screen and whatever she unfolded her laptop, looked at it, it was great because she paused for a second and read it. And she was like.
00:16:57
Speaker
I think it's a great thing just to just remind ourselves and it can seem so silly. I know other people are like, when I'm telling you that you should write every day or like you should not see limits or whatever. But the thing is, if it works for you, it works for you. That's the basis. That's really important. I think that also one of the things I always try to do is I try to figure out experiments of how to try. So it, for example, right?
00:17:21
Speaker
I have three different methods that work for me, or on the exact example of writing here, I think it works. So I used a platform, what's called 750 words, which is a page where you write. It saves when you reach 750 words. And before that, it doesn't save. And what happens is that you end up just writing as fast as you can. The first days you write like a good thing, but the second day you just write faster and faster, and the third and fourth and fifth, because you have to write every day, like you get like the sign bill kind of crosses in your calendar and everything, but then you shouldn't break the chain.
00:17:49
Speaker
But after a while, you more or less like text vomit out the text like the thing from your hands to just get rid of this text and get it out of yourself on the screen. But something interesting is like you're gone into day five or something. You sit down, you open 750 words, you start typing, and then suddenly you see the text being typed in front of you. It is, of course, you typing.
00:18:10
Speaker
it is really like they're quote unquote unconscious. Because you're doing it so quickly and just get it out of your body, like you suddenly start reading stuff before you actually process them. And I think that's a great exercise. So just write more to actually your unique thoughts, not necessarily voice maybe because the text actually becomes brutally bad, because you're trying to just write itself. So that's a really interesting stuff. The other thing I find is like,
00:18:34
Speaker
I pen in what's it called, a fountain book. The thing is felt better, right? Because fountain pens are extremely shitty at writing fast.
00:18:42
Speaker
You cannot write fast without it. First of all, it's hard to actually write fast, and secondly, you can't read anything to write fast. So it's interesting that just taking it away, or getting something away where I'm not sitting in front of my computer or phone or anything, so I can just back then write the headline of the thing which I was all about. And now I just sit and ponder and write, but now I write extremely slowly, because I can't write fast.
00:19:12
Speaker
And I find those thoughts are exactly the opposite of the 750 words thoughts, like they come in a lot. I've been thinking for quite a lot of time and I see the structure coming out of it. So I think that's a very, very interesting format for me. Then the other thing for me is keeping like a list of small things to write. Like I usually, if something just hits me, I'm like, why do people do this? I just, maybe I'm wrong.
00:19:34
Speaker
What I've found there is that one of the amazing things is trying to gather problems. So I tell this to a lot of entrepreneurs, but I tell it to authors as well, and bloggers, is what's great, if somebody says next to you, what on earth are people anxious about? What do people say? Twitter or whatever. That's maybe too obvious an example. But people say something where you just go, or why do people care if they're actually idiots?
00:19:56
Speaker
And then you hear this thing, you think, I care why there are idiots. But again, it's not obvious why people care about idiots. And then you just have to hold peace for yourself and think about it, and actually talk to people. And I think some more interesting blog posts written, I think I've only published like 5% of the things I've written.
00:20:19
Speaker
A lot of the things I've written, I end up having a thing where I end up being conversations with people and I end up writing a blog post and sent them the draft of the blog post and asked them to comment it and we couldn't enforce it. It got the argument that I'm better. And the thing I find about writing in particular is writing is an amazing way of carrying your own mind. You actually figure out what do I actually do.
00:20:39
Speaker
So I think that's, for me, that's a great method. So the methods there are like, write extremely fast, extremely slow, and then gather different topics to write about. And the complete the orthogonal to those three, which is not about writing, is surround yourself with people who are writing. I think that that's really, I think one of the best tips I always find is that
00:20:57
Speaker
lot of people don't do this because a lot of people would say that they're impressed by this person writing because they want to be seen. They think it's amazing where they're like, oh, other people are saying, wow, you're so great. You're writing. But the thing is, you really don't. You want to be more on other people that you're saying, I'm writing about this thing. I'm thinking about this thing. And they're like, oh, interesting. Can you talk about the process? Can we talk about the post and everything?
00:21:17
Speaker
really, really amazing to have this conversation and be inspired by them. So you start here, if you're comparing yourselves to a person that has more views than you on Instagram, it's going to be really irritating. But instead, if you're saying it's super inspiring, figure out how they're doing it. So I do that a lot. Actually, just awesome, great blog posts, switching out and whatever is awesome.
00:21:40
Speaker
Yeah, I like how we got a bonus take on how to actually become a better writer or how to become a writer at all. That's, that's an example of, so like you can't do this for everything, but I think it is. And then I think that the top thing at all, which was at previous as well is actually, if you tell people, like, I really want to write more.
00:21:58
Speaker
It helps. It helps so much. If you start to tell people, like, my goal this year is I'm going to try to write one blog post a month that I'm really pleased with. And so I'm going to probably write 30, 40 shitty blog posts. It's okay if I send you shitty posts. The thing is that these people will ask after a bit, oh, are you writing something interesting now? And this, I think, is so interesting about the dichotomy of the stoicism is that
00:22:21
Speaker
Now you're stressed by other people, right? Like these people are asking you if you're written anything. This is actually the thing you want to get rid of. But the thing is that you have created an outlier character in your game, this chip bot that you've asked to remind you to write more. And every time it does it, you feel like, thanks, that's great. You can get pissed off on your phone when your remainder comes up and it says like buy groceries or, you know, don't forget to renew the lease or whatever. You're not like, oh, I'm gone. And remind your app, like you should be like, oh, great. Thanks. That's amazing. I'm this person to do it right.
00:22:51
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I think there's the meme of you shouldn't care what people think, which to some extent is useful for many people to hear. But on the flip side, of course, you should care what people think when they are people you admire or when they are good at a specific domain. So an example you just gave, it's useful to care what people think when they're the sort of person whose working assumption is you're the sort of person who keeps their agreements, you care about being a good writer. So
Anxiety, Fear, and Identity in Stoicism
00:23:16
Speaker
I'll ask you about that about that next time.
00:23:19
Speaker
But I think it's so fascinating that most people's nightmares are really, I mean, mirrors, but I mean, like, things that are really excited about being around other people in an embarrassing situation, like coming to work and realizing that you're not wearing pants or sitting next to a person in the subway, which is really stealthily beautiful and realize you have a boogie in your nose. Like all of those things are like super crazy anxiety creating. But most of the situations
00:23:44
Speaker
You would never ever in your life meet these people. Obviously people at work, you meet them tomorrow and they're going to think it's very funny. But I think there's so many times, we make up these, it's really horrible to talk in front of people, but if you're never going to meet the people again, does it matter? I'm not saying it's easy, but it is interesting to ask ourselves sometimes, why do I feel excited?
00:24:07
Speaker
Yeah, of course, as Seneca said, we suffer more often in imagination than reality. And that's certainly true, especially because of people. But I think that's exactly the thing is I think that fear is essentially you are imagining a bad future and you're being excited for that now. And that is like,
00:24:25
Speaker
And there are two sides of this argument. One is that it's really bad because you're now to go asleep and you're already afraid of something and you know that it's kind of meaningless. But the other argument is like, I was thinking about this, when I was building my first company, I was always like panic stressed to our management group meetings, like handed off kids and whatever, and got to the meeting, panting and like being bicycle through a snow acidity or something, and I finally got there and I was one minute late, and I ran in and I was like,
00:24:50
Speaker
And then I realized, oh, I'm the first person here. And then I got really irritated a couple of times, but then I suddenly realized the people who aren't anxious about being late are the people that are, that's, those are the ones that are, if I want to be a person who is on time, I will just have to cope with the fact that I'm going to be anxious and then late. The day I'm relaxed about it, that's the day.
00:25:13
Speaker
So we can really apply that to everything. I think a lot of people look at parents and they say, oh, why are you so anxious about your kids, this and that? Anxiety and fear in parents is the fact that you really care about your kids. Like you, you're worried that something could happen to them. If you would be completely, you know, asked about your kids and well, you actually don't care. So it is like, you shouldn't be a bit, you shouldn't be a bit anxious in a strange way.
00:25:37
Speaker
Yeah, I think one idea about anxiety in particular from the evolutionary standpoint is that to some extent anxiety is going to be adaptive. As you said, it's the kid who is at least somewhat anxious about getting on the ladder, who is not going to fall as opposed to the kid who's completely reckless. And of course, most virtues are mean. So instead of being completely reckless or completely timid, you want to be prudent. And that often I think just means
00:26:04
Speaker
accepting feelings of that feelings that might be negative whether it's anxiety or what have you and noting that those those actually do serve a useful purpose in many cases. Yeah and actually on that I think also I'm gonna answer back to your previous questions about identity if you saying you want to be a writer I think that another thing I usually think about is actually if you want to be something emotionally so if you say like I want to be more brave or
00:26:28
Speaker
I find it fairly useful to just imagine yourself in person. Like, you just, you are someone else. Like, I think that you can just ask yourself, it's like, oh, do you have this friend, Thomas, who's like completely crazy and just like says stuff to people and he shouldn't, he should just shut up like teamwork. Sometimes it's great that Thomas is saying this. And I think we can actually use this in this computer game we're in, you can actually suck in part of Thomas into your brain and you can say, okay, okay, okay, okay. I'm going to be Thomas now.
00:26:55
Speaker
And you can say to the people, I'm really sorry, but this isn't cutting. Like, I'm really, really sorry. I don't want to be the douchebag who says this is bad, but this actually is really bad. And people look at you like, what, what, what got into you? And the truth is like Thomas getting, like, it's just like, you actually wield the Thomas identity, put it in yourself and then used it in this situation. And I think we can do that a lot more. I think it's harder to do that over time because a lot of spheres and depressions and stresses are actually you not being true to yourself.
00:27:21
Speaker
So the more you are actually trying to be people you're not, the delta between your inner and outer personality has become harder and harder, and then you get very, very anxious and stressed. Right. But the thing is that you can actually use it. Like, you can actually think, what would I do? I think about this at the party. This is like 20 years ago now. But I introduced a friend of mine, Stefan.
00:27:40
Speaker
And I said to the people around me, like, hey, this is Stefan. This is definitely one of my more funny friends. He's like an amazing, super hilarious person. And this guy, grabbing at the shoulders, I thought, please, never introduce me. I was like, whoa, sorry. I really meant it. You're really funny. And he said, no, but now I have to be crazy funny here. I have to actually consciously think that my being funny, oh, no. Because you can't even introduce me as the funny person. And I never thought about it. Everybody was, oh, my God. I had now forced an intensity opponent.
00:28:07
Speaker
And of course, we can do that kind of stuff, but we can also do it ourselves. You can actually tell yourself, I'm super funny tonight, I'm really on it. And then you can just imagine yourself another person saying, what's that going to do? He would actually be more aloof and more relaxed and then I'm going to
00:28:22
Speaker
Yeah, we have at StoA, we have a practice called the contemplation of a sage, which comes from a French philosopher named Pierre Hadeau, and he got it from the ancient Stoics. And many people have systematized different practices of those sorts. It's an ancient tradition, but it involves imagining a sage, someone who you admire,
00:28:42
Speaker
seeing them observe you or perhaps imagining them giving advice to you or at the next level, imagining they took your spot and acted throughout your life and then imagine yourself doing the very same actions. And I think that can help people become sort of expand the possibility set that's initially available to them. You can imagine someone else do it and you can be that same person that do it as well.
00:29:08
Speaker
And then I think sometimes when we do these identities, one of the best ways I find is you preempt the thing you're going to say in a way that people understand what you're going to say now is out of the ordinary and it's not necessarily. So if you're a timid person and now you're going to say that slightly irritating thing, and people usually never hear anything about the very nice words from you, you can use like I'm really sorry what I'm about to say, or this might come out really brutal,
00:29:37
Speaker
And I think that the thing is that when you say that, people brace themselves and your problem is going to say the thing which is that bad, but it really helps people to be like ready. I think what really surprises people is like when people flip identity and they don't give you like a big of a warning. You can even say, I don't really feel like myself saying this, but then people like it's going to make it a lot easier for them to accept or to just say it. Yeah. There's a useful kind of vulnerability in that as well. I think that people, people respect.
00:30:04
Speaker
One thought I have on the identity aspect is I think one mistake that many people make, and I'm curious to get your view on this, is they take on an identity and it's, in a sense, too ambitious. You know, I'm going to be a writer, I'm going to write, you know, twice, once in the morning, once in the evening, and we'll go from that, from not writing at all to this identity like this. And then, of course, I'll set some goal and like the one I just mentioned and fail at some point. And now,
00:30:32
Speaker
They have the history of saying that they are this person and not living up to that agreement. And if you do that too often, there is this break between, I think, what you say you'll do and what you end up doing that causes a serious lack of self-trust that can occur.
Experimentation and Commitment in Personal Growth
00:30:49
Speaker
I think that's a really great point. I think that I used to do this thing before I got kids. And like, man's manias, I call them temporary obsessions. And I try to figure out a thing that I want to spend nine months on a lot of time on it. And actually, both practices that read on it, read up on it, and actually surround myself in so many different ways. And like, these could be anything. This was like at a period 20 years ago, my life, it was barefoot running. I was just like, everything could read about barefoot running. I listened to everything, saw the YouTube videos, ran barefoot, like went to camps like different.
00:31:19
Speaker
And it was really great. And then I told myself, I'm going to do this for nine months. So the point is, I'm going to quit the nine months. And if I knew to ask, whoa, you're running this and that. And I was like, yeah, for nine months, I'm going to run. That's what it's going to be at that moment. And it was great because it really time-boxed for me, which means that when I was around seven, I was running really long distances. And it was too far, actually, for doing barefoot. I couldn't think about it and say, it's another 40 days. It's another 40 days now.
00:31:47
Speaker
And it was really good. And then there's some of these habits where I took the thing I did for nine months, and then I did like a tenth of it continuously. So like if it was, for example, I'm going to do mindfulness every day, and I was like, I'm going to do one hour of mindfulness every day, I'm going to do all these practice, I'm going to re-office this, I'm going to listen to all these things. And then afterwards, I was like, okay, what's the distilled version? The distilled version is going to do 15 minutes of mindfulness every time I get to work. I like, like in a stand, get up, get close to the door, or like get into the bathroom or whatever, and I sit down and do 15 minutes of mindfulness.
00:32:13
Speaker
It is like a super watered down, distal version of the obsession. But the crazy thing is because I've done this obsession for nine months, like, like I lock into so quickly, like my reflux are there. I know exactly what's going to happen. So it's like, it's so powerful. And there was one time when I felt I'm going to do brick and bikram yoga. So one of these obsessions. So I started this thing where I'm going to read out brick and bikram yoga. Bikram yoga is essentially a pituitary kind of yoga in a fairly warm room.
00:32:39
Speaker
And it is, like, a large group of people. And it is, suddenly, almost religious, like, how people act. Like, in the dressing room afterwards, like, when you're standing there, people are crying sometimes, and people saying, like, I can't get to work if I've done this, or, like, it's so amazing. So, like, do you understand that it is, like, a big thing when people do it? And, of course, it is. Like, you're straining yourself in very high temperatures. Like, it kind of feels like you just...
00:33:02
Speaker
And so I got into this thing, I started reading up on it and doing it many times a week. And then one person, some health practitioner I worked with for another thing, said to me that this is really bad for your kidneys. It's really, really bad for you and your liver and your kidneys. You're using so much water and you're pumping in water constantly. You have to eat better, you have to figure out salts, da-da-da-da.
00:33:21
Speaker
And then I was like, what? And then especially I started to be turned. This is like week four or something in this process. And then suddenly you're kind of like, let's actually look. And instead of going at this with like this optimistic, I'm going to hack and understand and learn Vikram Yoga. Let's look at it with a skeptic size. And it was interesting. So then of course what happened first is I read an article about the creator of Vikram Yoga and how he's like a fairly abusive person. And it got super negative. And it was interesting because then I had to, five an hour, I have to ask myself, you want to quit this thing?
00:33:51
Speaker
I'm supposed to, I've told myself I'm going to design this, I've always started writing about it, like I'm not for anyone else, but I've re-canned it. And then it just looks at it and it was really good because I paused and I asked myself, like, quitting is great. Like, it's really important to just look at something and say, quitting this thing. And it like, and it just recently released in a book about quitting. And I think that has a really, really simple, but very good point, which says, whenever you're sure that you should quit, you know you quit doing it.
00:34:21
Speaker
Like if you have enough data that you should quit, you will always quit too late. Cause then, like, you know, an hour ago, a day ago, a month ago, or whatever, you can't have enough data to kind of gut feeding Sam. So it's one of those things where I think that we have to just learn that we need to quit.
00:34:40
Speaker
And it's hard, especially if you're pinning your identity with it, to say, like, I think the person who's going to dig from yoga for 9 minutes and write this blog just people, well, people are asking me for a couple of weeks, like, are you still digging from yoga? And I was like, no, I quit it. Like, I just, and I felt they were super unhealthy. And then friends who were like, we're yoga friends. They were like, what? Like, are you doing people want to dig from yoga? And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, sorry. It's just not for me. Like, it's, it's for you. Again, back to the low player character, it's like,
00:35:04
Speaker
It works for you in your universe. You love it. It's great for you. I don't want to control you. It doesn't work for me in my universe. I don't want it. Hi, everyone. This is Michael Trumbly. Thanks for listening to Stolo Conversations. We're a new podcast. We're getting started. We're building episode by episode.
00:35:23
Speaker
So I wanted to just give a quick shout out and say that any like review or referral that you can provide really goes a long way to helping the show.
00:35:41
Speaker
is insolvable or you realize that the goal you first thought was worth achieving is actually immoral or something of this sort. There are memoirs of communists coming to change their mind and that must be such a difficult thing to do if you've built the past 20 years of your life on this political identity and then realize that you are mistaken.
00:36:01
Speaker
But it's something that many people have to do. But of course, on the flip side, you have examples of people who quit too early or quit too often. Pick up one thing, quit it, and you're next. It is also really fascinating. I think that sometimes I feel like it's the old adage of like, you know, pretty remembered what it is now, but it's about, you know, people's beliefs and their salaries. I'm trying to remember exactly what it is, but it's something about like,
00:36:26
Speaker
The point is, if somebody's salary is dependent on believing something, they will believe it a lot more, and I sadly forgot exactly the quote. But you know every time you talk to an expert, and you're like, okay, you did your PhD, or your professor has been this subject, and you worked with this for 40 years, if this turns out to be not true, you're kind of a very strange professor. Like, you're not a professor in an hour, which is not true.
00:36:47
Speaker
So I think it's really hard, right? You have not only like a vested belief, but you actually have a lot of your identity tied to it. But I think that, I know some people who actually did exactly that, they, a friend of mine is a longevity researcher, he was super into one part of longevity, does all the research, he's like amazing in it. And then one day he essentially just looks at all these data and all the things they have that are super expensive experiments and just realizes that I think that there's a much easier way. And I think I get it. And the problem, the reason nobody spends money on it is that it's generic and it's impossible to pay, pay them.
00:37:16
Speaker
then essentially he just kind of left the whole thing he was doing and he didn't move outside longevity,
Business Goals and Personal Authenticity
00:37:20
Speaker
he's still in longevity but now he's working on doing it in a very very cheap and simple way and the funny thing is of course it's going to affect the world in a better way because he's continuing it much more accessible but when he goes for grants, funding, everyone is like oh it's not that like cutting edge, it's not that different but he's just selling them
00:37:39
Speaker
I spent 20 years in this. This is the best, I promise. And sometimes people actually, I would say most people actually need more because they realize he actually has a vested interest in the other method. But he's going for that simpler one, which most people have a lot of aid on, but people don't go for it because you can't get paid for it. I mean, you can't get paid for the research, but you can't get paid for actually making the journey. Right, right. Moving to a related topic, what do you think are some important misconceptions people have about running companies?
00:38:09
Speaker
That's a great question. I think that one of the most common misconceptions is that
00:38:13
Speaker
like a company is kind of like, it is such a multifaceted thing. It's kind of like, if you ask somebody how to live a good life, the question like, nobody can answer that question. People have to like, what life to live? Like, you know, what do you mean? Who are you and what is life and what is good? Like you, it becomes very like quick definition of conversation. I think that many people, very common misconception is when people are saying I'm running a company or running a startup, they actually think they're like, they think it's a startup.
00:38:40
Speaker
And they say that, either they use the word startup or company interchangeably, and they really mean that. But I really find that, for me at least, there are three kinds of companies, or three kinds of labels. So you have a lifestyle companies, you have corporation companies, and you have financial companies. And these are completely different. They have different goals, they have different limits, everything different.
00:38:59
Speaker
And they have some overlap, which is that all are probably incorporated. They're probably like illegal entities that look similar, but everything about them is actually different. And one of the misconceptions is that when we're ever comparing ourselves or reading or getting advice, we're not telling people that I'm building a lifestyle or I'm building a corporation company or whatever. They're actually, you're, you're not telling people in my good life. So for me, in life, the lifestyle company is that the goal is to have a good life in them.
00:39:25
Speaker
That's the point, though. You have a friend right now who runs a small software development firm. There are three people that have a really nice office. They work really hard during weeks. They're off in the weekends. They go skiing and blah, blah, blah. And somebody's like, oh, you should raise money. You should do this and that. They're like, no. Don't mess up. They're building a lifestyle company. It's great. They're actually having a great time. That's their goal. Their goal is actually to be able to go skiing and have weekends and talk about stuff that are not about this company. That's the point of their company.
00:39:54
Speaker
They could only hire friends of theirs instead of hire somebody who, the best salesperson in the world that can drive sales, but who they don't actually like. Instead of saying, no, I'm just going to work until I read 11. I know that sometimes more ambitious people might drive it further, but I would prefer working until I read 11.
00:40:08
Speaker
And you have corporations, and corporations is designed to scale, to make money, and it actually means to all to regain them. Like you, you're designing this because you want to control it. And I think that you can look at like, essentially you're building a small empire. And you could look at this, depending on what kind of business, like it's a person who owns chemicals or, or anything, or a pizza chain or, or an apartments or anything. Like you're not trying to, you're, you're trying to scale it, but you want to scale it with control. Like you want to design this everything.
00:40:38
Speaker
you're going to be told it's perfect. The difference between this and the lifestyle company is that you want to make it bigger all. But you don't even want to raise money for it, actually, because if you raise money, you lose control of it. And that's probably not true. And then the last one is the exponential companies. That is actually what most of us actually mean when we say startup. An exponential is that, quoting someone else here, but essentially you're jumping with a box, you're telling people that you're going to open this box, build an airplane and learn how to fly it,
00:41:07
Speaker
you know that this is impossible to start. Like you're starting at me and saying, I think we will all communicate on our mobile phones with a kind of SMS format, which are running for your characters, and we're going to tell each other what the ad will bring. It feels like, like, I usually tell people when they tell me their ideas and say, I'm really afraid about doing it. I usually tell them that when you start to start out, you're fail, you're trying to un
00:41:31
Speaker
Like you're trying to prove that you could update people with 140 characters waiting for breakfast. It's great. Like there's no risk in you failing yourself. You're starting at a low point. But I mean, those companies, they need to raise money so they can jump in. And that's what they're designed. And the point here is like, people ask what should I do with my company, or I'm looking for a board, or I'm raising money, or whatever. They should try to ask themselves is which one of these three companies are attractive?
00:41:59
Speaker
And then they also need to ask themselves, if your question, D, and you said, do you actually want to run this company?
00:42:08
Speaker
Like a friend of mine is a ballet dancer and 10 years ago I saw her toes and like her toes looked like horrible. Like I mean horrible to the degree where I was I thought somebody was really hurting her and not herself. I thought that third party was like crushing her toes without her. And I saw her toes like what the sorry what's going on. And he said yeah that's the life of ballet dancer. And I said no but seriously you can't do this like you're doing it wrong. And she was like no no no.
00:42:35
Speaker
this is
00:42:48
Speaker
It is just like, and then she interrogated me and said, how many times have you pinged you on a Sunday and said, do you want to go for coffee? And you're into some topic about shipping some software or updating something, right? And you just don't want to go for coffee with me. And you're doing this the same. You're torturing yourself to achieve your goal. And I really realized that it's like, there's a very big difference of like, if you want to play soccer with your friends, or if you want to play in the little league and actually like, you know, you know, it's going to be fun, you play a lot, or if you actually want to build a road.
00:43:19
Speaker
Those three things, all a spherical object you're kicking on, is that commonality. And I think most people forget to ask themselves, who am I? What do I want to do? And therefore, which of these three do I want to rebuild?
00:43:35
Speaker
be true to themselves. And just say, I really want to build a lifestyle company with three of my friends. And my goal is to be able to have a small office in Brooklyn. And we're going to enjoy this and we're going to have a great view. And we're going to have our ultimate goal is to be able to have barista downstairs where we have, like we just walk down to get a call. That's our ultimate goal. That's where we're going. That's great. Like so many people will ask them, well, you have so much money that you could write money or whatever. It's like,
00:44:03
Speaker
That's not their goals. Yeah, yeah. That's a great point. It's always important to know oneself and know what you're doing and not be distracted by these really sort of opaque abstractions. Like the term startup, as you said, gets applied to all these different projects just because startups are cool.
00:44:20
Speaker
Right. Yeah, exactly. And the thing is, they're actually not, they're actually not like, what has really, really cool. I think that we've all been in a situation where somebody is really, really great. And that is absurdly cool. Like, my daughter has this thing happening to her a couple years ago, my daughter is fairly short. And she went to the soccer pitch in school. And then one kid started bullying her for real, but a bit like calling her shorty and everything. And then a kid in her class who's fairly tall, who's not a close friend with her at all, like just like a random dude in her class, just walked up to this person and said,
00:44:50
Speaker
What are you doing? Like, why are you, like, pestering her on how tall she is? You're not that tall. Like, just like, come on, like, you should really chill this. And this guy is like, you know, one of the big guys in school in his class. And he has like, you know, he's not friends with him or anything, but he was just like, I'm not going to put up with this thing. And I so admire that. Like, it's so cool that he just feel like I'm not going to put up with somebody bullying someone else. Even if I'm with our friends or anything, I just like, why anybody bully anybody?
Role Models and Personal Growth
00:45:15
Speaker
And I think that's the thing is like, it's not cool to build a startup. It's not cool to be anything. It's really cool to be you. And that was stand up for stuff. Nowadays, immensely. Yep. So how do you think about role models? You know, many people find it useful to look up to a specific person or their contemporary person, past, or even fictional to sort of inspire them or provide guidance for their life. How do you think about that general practice?
00:45:43
Speaker
I think it's like, it is really great because you can use it to wield your identity. That's a great aspect of it. But I think the dangerous thing is when most people say, who's your idol? Who's your role model? I think we try to take all aspects. Or sorry, we're not actually trying to take all aspects of it. Sorry, that's what I mean. For example, if people say, Elon Musk is my role model, he's super intelligent.
00:46:07
Speaker
The thing is, Elon Musk is obviously super intelligent. It's very hard to doubt that. But I think there are very few people who would like to fully be Elon Musk, but actually have all the attributes of Elon Musk. I actually don't think it's very comfortable. There's a reason that he tweets stuff that are very random and gets into strange situations. What people mean is, I want to pick this one characteristic of Elon Musk. That's the one I want.
00:46:31
Speaker
And then people say, I love Scott McKenzie and what she's done and empowering people like Jeff Bezos, a previous wife, and what she's doing about how she's donating. But the thing is like, most people don't know that much about Scott McKenzie. So like, if I say I wish I was Scott McKenzie, the thing is like, no, no, no, no, you wish you are the picture that you have in your mind of Scott McKenzie. That's actually what you think. And I think that's really dangerous to that. Because I think most of the time that means that we feel very, because we're saying, I wish I could do this. But it's like, well,
00:46:59
Speaker
I don't think you even know what that means is you would have all these other attributes or you would sacrifice all these other things in your life. So I think that's a complicated thing. And I used to have remotes when I was a kid, but then the more I understood about these people or the more I actually met people in person, the more I was put down and just let down by that. I just felt sad. It's like, well, this person wasn't good. And it really started shifting and realizing that I genuinely, honestly believe
00:47:27
Speaker
that we all are multiple persons. Like I really believe that most people have very, very fragmented personalities. And you, the thing you call you, is the subtle parts for you that are actually just just being for control and trying to kind of tell you what, quote unquote, you want to do.
00:47:42
Speaker
And I think, but with all that, a situation where I like, you feel like you want to go to the party, but you also feel like you're too tired and you want to do this. And then you end up saying, pardon me, wants to go. And I actually do truly feel part of you, like literally part of you wants to go. Like one, but you're an emerging property of all of these people inside you. So I think that's it segues me into really thinking about what a role model is, is me thinking about one of my personalities and trying to adopt this other
00:48:09
Speaker
role model into like an acquire of personalities and kind of have that person to be part of the course and just say, I'm going to try to slightly more do I wield this personality slightly, slightly more and just see if that for me helps me. And I think that's a role model. And I think I have one more comment about it. There's so many people that look at somebody who is successful or seem to be successful and seems to know what they're doing. And the thing is that
00:48:39
Speaker
So, if you just take everybody's whatever, who won the Nobel Prize, or who are super wealthy, or who are the Super Bowl players, whatever it is, we all believe that the ones that are the top five in each category, they're on top of shit.
00:48:55
Speaker
But they're not. The reason you would think that is you think that life is a sorting mechanism where the best people have now floated to the top like cream and they obviously know what they're doing. And I think there are two things here. One is I think that they had one characteristic which is one time very useful. Like Bill Gates grew up with computers just coming
00:49:16
Speaker
you know, to life when he can have access to it, that he was Christian already and spend time on it. Obviously, great, you know, Bill Gates is pretty smart, but also it's so much time and randomness around it. And the other thing is like, so it's very stochastic. And it's very hard for people to understand that if you end up meeting Larry Page or whoever it is, you're going to realize that just because he has, I don't know, 10,000 times as much money as you have,
00:49:44
Speaker
He is probably not like even double as smart as you are. And he's probably not twice as nice to his friend or whatever. And the problem is that we do believe the market quote unquote market is a system of sorting. But it's not. It
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:49:58
Speaker
is very, very random. And I think that it's so hard. So I think that a lot of times I think that it is
00:50:05
Speaker
We should realize we're essentially playing a poker game. Instead, we should just play the poker game. You fold hands and move on and learn. The problem when you're playing life is that life is not a three-minute game where you look at your first card and fold. It's just a thing that you've been given these cards and the game is very, very long.
00:50:26
Speaker
like it's hard for you to just say I'm gonna follow the story a new one but the same I think that you can look at what other people are doing during your life and say I should play more like that or more like this but you have cards being you know dealt so like if you say I wish I was like Bill Gates you probably don't mean that actually you probably don't wish when you're born when Bill Gates was born and did what he was when his kid and does what he does now you just want to have written a book you essentially say I wish I'd written
00:50:53
Speaker
Yeah, I think the important upshot that I'm taking away from what you're saying is that you want it to be laser focused. If you're using a role model type approach on what specific attributes you value in the other person and what that concretely looks like in their life and not be distracted by the outcomes of what you think are the outcomes of, say, someone's work ethic. If you require someone's work ethic, then just focus on that.
00:51:20
Speaker
not just your desire to, say, have an exceptionally successful company or a book. And also just acknowledging that if you're admiring a person who does X, you have to do that thing. You actually have to take the other part. There's no there's no amazing people player who, you know, we're a party in college. That was a choice.
00:51:46
Speaker
Like when I interview people, I'm always trying to figure out, I want to ask them for something they sacrifice. And I feel like mostly I don't sacrifice anything. Like I do everything I can and want and everything. I don't think that's true. I think we all try to, we all sacrifice something for something else. We might sacrifice not getting where we want to be because we want to have a comfortable life. Or we sacrifice not, you know, not reading fiction because whenever the time or something, I think we all sacrifice stuff. And I think it's a good thing to ask yourself, what are we sacrificing?
00:52:12
Speaker
and what for? And usually it's really good stuff. It's really good reasons. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, this has been an excellent conversation. Thanks so much for joining. Is there anything else you'd like to add?
00:52:25
Speaker
No, I think that, I mean, I think like there are stuff on my blog that I've written and tried to think about a lot of these things. I think my blog is very hard to kind of navigate. You just have to scroll and scroll and scroll. I should probably spend time on sorting it or something. The thing is I'm writing the blog for myself. Like I'm essentially writing it so that I would read it later.
00:52:43
Speaker
And actually before this interview, when you ping me about this quote I said about life as a single player game, I reread my blog post. And it was so perfect because not the blog post, but the feeling. Because when I reread it, I looked at something I wrote, I don't know if it was 10 years ago, in Hampus in 2013, advised Hampus in 2023,
00:53:05
Speaker
on staff. That was really good. I read this and I was like, this is great advice. Thank you very much. It was 2013. I wish somebody would have told me earlier and I read as well. Somebody did like, you know, somebody did tell me this 2013. I told me this. So I think it's a really interesting thing. Like sometimes when you're writing a thing, I think the best target group is always writing it for yourself in the future. Absolutely. Excellent. Well, thanks so much for joining.
00:53:30
Speaker
Thanks for listening to Stoic Conversations. If you found this conversation useful, please give us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or whatever podcast platform you use, and share it with a friend. We are just starting this podcast so every bit of help goes a long way.
00:53:45
Speaker
And I'd like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. Do check out his work at ancientliar.com and please get in touch with us at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback or questions. Until next time.