Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.
This episode is brought to you by Joovv Red Light Therapy that I have talked about for a really long time, and that is a regular part of my daily routine. I wanted to make sure to talk a little bit more about them today. You’ve heard me talk about red light therapy before because it is part of my daily routine. I feel like this is an extremely effective health modality. And it’s something that I make a priority all of the time. It’s been wonderful for my skin and my thyroid, also my energy levels. And I’ve written on my blog quite a bit about the many health benefits of red light therapy. I found more and more in the research that light is such an essential part of health. We think about nutrition and sleep, and a lot of the other aspects of health, but we often forget just how drastically important light is to our health. And red light therapy is one of the important types of light that we often don’t get enough of. Many of us are exposed to all kinds of artificial blue lights in our homes, but we don’t get enough of spectrums like red light and like all of the spectrums that come from the sun every day. And the way that I remedy this is totally inexpensive way of spending time outside every morning in the natural sunlight, and also using red light therapy daily. Anyone who’s dabbled in red light therapy has probably heard of Joovv because they are the leading brand. They have pioneered this technology, and it’s the light that I’ve had in my home for many years. Joovv is just now launching their next generation of devices and they made upgrades to what was already incredible red light therapy systems. Their new devices are sleeker, up to 25% lighter, and with all the same power and intensity that we’ve come to expect from them. But with their new intensified version, you can stand as much as three times further away and still get the recommended dose. They’ve also upgraded the setup so it’s very quick and easy to mount, and set up, and can fit in just about any space depending on what size you need. And they have a cool new feature like recovery plus mode, which uses pulsing technology to give yourself an extra boost to recover from a tough workout or a tough day with the family. Also, as a busy mom, I need all the sleep I can get. And I find that using a red light device at night helps to wind me down from the day. But now they have something called Ambient Mode for calming lower intensity light at night, which I mentioned avoiding blue light at night to help your body and your natural circadian rhythms. And adding in soothing spectrums of red light can also be really, really helpful. So, definitely check it out. Exciting news, for a limited time, Joovv is going to hook you up with an exclusive discount on your first order, and you can find out all the details by going to joovv.com/wellnessmama and using my code Wellnessmama on your qualifying order.
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Katie: Hello, and welcome to the 400th episode of the Wellness Mama Podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com and wellnesse.com. That’s wellnesse with an E on the end, it’s my new line of personal care products, including hair care and toothpaste. You can check it out at wellnesse.com.
And before I jump into this episode, I just want to say, thank you so much for being here, and for listening, and for being part of the Wellness Mama community. I don’t take it lightly how incredible this community is. And I am just so grateful to all of you for being here and for being part of it. I say often on this podcast, that I’m so grateful for you for sharing your most valuable resource, your time, with me. And that, especially, holds true when I get to reflect on these past 400 episodes. I do believe that time is our most valuable resource, followed closely by our energy. And I’m just so honored and grateful that you would share yours with me and with my guests over these past five years.
This episode is a little bit different. It’s not strictly about health in a physical sense, although many of these points will have some really important implications in health. And I’ll give examples of ways that I’ve applied some of these ideas to health and what the outcome was like for me. But in this episode, I am sharing my mental models and some of my processes by which I make decisions. This has been an important part of simplifying my life and reducing my stress. And these are actually very concrete things that I do in making decisions, or in operating my business, even operating my home. I’ve talked a little bit in passing about some of these ideas before. I won’t talk about it again today, but for instance, how I use the 80-20 principle in many areas of life, to be more efficient and more effective. And I go deeper on some other mental models and rules that I use in other aspects of my life today.
The use of mental models is a common theme among high achievers. And I think, actually, these can be especially helpful for moms, because we handle so much and we’re constantly making decisions. But yet most information about mental models and using them, is more geared toward scientific disciplines or to the business world. So in this episode, I’m going to attempt to walk through how I have really made these systems applicable to daily practical life. And of course, there are implications in business, and in health, and in science, certainly, as well. But I think we can really benefit from using these in a practical day to day way.
I’ll mention a lot of resources and books, and those will all be linked, of course, as always, in the show notes at wellnessmama.fm. So you guys can check those out there to continue learning. These will just be high level overviews. If you have questions, please leave those in the show notes at wellnessmama.fm, and I will do my best to answer them, and possibly do a follow up episode with more detail, if it’s helpful.
But in short, these are frameworks that simplify my decision making and, I find, reduce stress because I don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There are literally thousands of types of mental models. And I’m just going to go through some that I find helpful today, along with some of my inner rules for life that have simplified my life. This is by no means an exhaustive list. I’m just going through some of the high level ones that have had the biggest impact, and that I am consciously trying to pass on to my children, and that I often talk about. Some of these will sound familiar, if you’ve listened for a while, because I mention these in passing often. But to get more granular, I’m going to go through them one by one.
So number one rule for life is to question everything. There’s a quote that certainty is the enemy of growth. And I would say curiosity is its fuel. So the idea behind this is that it’s important to ask questions constantly, especially about things that we assume or believe with certainty, to be true. This is also a very difficult thing to do. It’s an easy thing to understand we should do, and a difficult thing to actually implement. I’ve talked about “The Four Agreements” quite a bit. And that is, I believe, the most recommended book on this podcast. And as they mention it early in “The Four Agreements,” we are conditioned as kids to… Or he calls it domesticated, to live by a set of rules and beliefs that we have not chosen for ourselves. And often, I find, as adults, we don’t necessarily go back and question those things. We’re so habituated to these beliefs that we operate on the basis of them, for our whole life, without ever going back and questioning. And so this is something I’ve had to consciously make time for and do as an adult, is to go back and question everything. And I’ll kind of walk through some of the ways to do this.
Anybody who has kids, you’ve seen this in action. In fact, all of these things, these rules for life and first principles, kids are naturally better at, and I’ll explain as we go. But when it comes to questioning, we can learn from kids always asking why, and then why again, and then why again. I believe it’s helpful, or at least has been for me, to constantly question things like motivations, beliefs, filters, actions, specifically in yourself. I find it much less helpful to question other people’s motives, or beliefs, or filters, because we don’t have the ability to affect those directly, necessarily, which I’ll talk about a little bit later on. But in order for us to be able to change, we have to be open to the idea of being wrong. And so part of doing that is questioning, over and over, to find out if we were actually correct to begin with. Aristotle said that, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” And this is a somewhat lost art, especially in today’s world.
So when it comes to questioning everything, there’s a simple framework you can follow. And I’ll walk through some examples of this in just a minute. But starting with the idea of whatever the thing is you’re questioning, is this actually true? From there, building on, if this is true, what is gained by acting according to this idea or information? And if this is true, what could be lost by not acting in accordance with it? Again, this is a higher level thing, but many of us never get to the point of being able to ask those questions. I think it’s a really important concept to teach to kids too. And it’s one that unfortunately, I think, as a parent, it’s easy to not do just out of sheer fatigue. Kids naturally ask questions. And they ask more and more and more questions, trying to actually understand the nature of a problem. And very often, we’ll eventually default to, because I said so, because either we don’t know the answer, or we’ve simply fatigued from answering so many questions.
So, part of this with kids is to just simply not train out this inherent trait they already have, but also on the flip side, to not answer everything for them. So rather than just always give them the information, turning it around and asking them, “Well, why do you think?” Or, “How could you find out what the answer to that question might be?” As a parent, like I said, it’s easy to fatigue when you get a lot of questions. And so that’s something to practice and to guard against. But I often find… I’ve seen as myself as well, we can, with our children, or especially with peers, take questions as almost challenges, especially if they’re touching on something related to a belief. So, learning to step away from the ego side of a belief and being willing to be challenged on those, lets us examine them more deeply.
Back to the idea from Aristotle, that it’s the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. If we had the ability to do that, we don’t have to be afraid of entertaining a thought that we may or may not agree with. With kids, I tell mine often to question everything. And I remember my oldest son, at one point when he was little, asking me, “Even you? Can I question you?” And I him, “Even, and especially me. You should not believe anything at face value just because someone tells you it. Even if it’s someone you trust. You should still always evaluate it, research it, and make sure it’s true.” And more on this in a couple of my future points as well. But for kids, this has been something I’ve really tried to cultivate in mine. And it seems to have, especially my older ones, I’m seeing the results of them maintaining that inherent curiosity.
As adults, if we didn’t necessarily have that as our framework growing up, I find… I had a lot of areas where I could question. And I had to find and recognize confirmation bias or areas where I was just trying to find confirmation of things I already believed, versus being willing to actually question things.
I found, often, these are areas where we tend to feel defensive. So it’s a difficult thing to face, but if there’s areas when someone questions us, or even if we try to question ourselves, we feel uncomfortable and defensive. That’s a great place to actually start delving in and figuring out why that discomfort is there. And that often can be illustrated that we don’t either fully understand or aren’t willing to look into the questions related to that area. I think another part of this is exposing ourselves to many different viewpoints, so that we constantly have the ability to question ourselves and have help in doing that. And this is actually a little bit related to this podcast and a topic I wanted to make sure I touched on briefly in this episode.
One of my goals with this podcast is to have guests on with a wide range of ideas, and systems, and viewpoints, and to hear and learn from them all. I firmly believe we can learn something from every instance, every interaction, every resource. And I’m going to talk more in depth about that toward the end of the episode. But I think it’s important to be exposed to a wide range of ideas. And I’ve been doing that probably even more so recently on this podcast. And I’ve had a few guests in particular, that have had ideas that didn’t typically line up with probably the majority of other guests on different health related topics. And some of you guys have brought this up in the comments, and I’m really grateful for that, have brought up the idea of, you know, this guest has something that was in conflict with a previous guest. Why didn’t you challenge them more or why didn’t you say which one is actually true?
And there are several reasons for this. But the first being, like I said, I think it’s important to be exposed to a wide range of viewpoints, and consider that there is validity in at least some or all of the ideas that this person could be saying. Secondly, I’ve mentioned many times now that my lesson over the last couple of years has been just how drastically important individuality and personalization is. And the reason I have guests on now with differing viewpoints is that people have vast differences in what ultimately is going to work best for them. So I want to have a wide range of viewpoints available so that you guys, as listeners, can hear a wide range of them, and then be able to pull and learn for yourself, what works best for you.
I firmly believe, at the end of the day, that we are each our own primary health care provider, which means that no one system, including mine, again, question, everyone, even and especially me, is going to work directly for anyone else, word for word. So we’re responsible for learning, educating, testing, and finding the things that are going to work best for us. And they’re going to be different for each of us. So that’s why I try to have guests on with a wide range of viewpoints, and not try to convince them or conform them to what has worked for me, because that’s just my viewpoint. I also use this podcast similarly, as a way to challenge my own assumptions, and beliefs, and to question things. So often, I’m not arguing or being dogmatic back with a guest, because I’m trying to stay in a curiosity and learning mindset as well, during the episode. But that said, the feedback is well taken. And I think I will make an effort in the future to at least bring up other viewpoints that have been presented by other guests, and let any new guest have a chance to respond and challenge that back. So I think that’ll lead to a more interesting conversation and I’m really grateful that you guys brought that up. It’s just my encouragement to listen and learn from a perspective of staying curious, and being willing to question our own confirmation biases, whenever possible.
And when I say question everything, I think this is the thing that often gets thought of in a broad generality, maybe. And when I say this, I mean I actually do this yearly, and concretely, and very, very intentionally, to the point of actually creating a spreadsheet. And I’m not suggesting that this is, by any means, helpful for everyone, but this is what works well for my really analytical mind. I will make, every year, at the end of the year, I’m in the process of doing this now, a list of things I believe to be true, or I’m relatively certain, probably are true. And then I question those things, actually make an effort to expose myself to things that directly offer alternative viewpoints. I’ll talk about again, this, in a little bit more depth and at a different point as well. But this is a very concrete practice that I do. So I try to do it mentally, on a daily basis, especially anytime I find myself feeling defensive or dogmatic about something. But I certainly do it yearly, very intentionally.
And I what I found through this, like I said in the beginning, the idea that certainty is the enemy of growth. And I think curiosity is the fuel of growth. And paradoxically, I feel like the more we try to be certain about something and confirm our own viewpoint, the less secure we actually feel about it. And I could give some examples of that, but they’re somewhat controversial. And I’m sure that you can probably put those pieces together yourself. But I also find that the more comfortable we get with questioning something, and not being certain, the more comfortable we actually are in aggregate because there’s a comfort in not having to be certain. So I find this practice of constantly questioning and just asking, what if this was not true, what if the opposite was true, what if there was other viewpoints here that I wasn’t considering, leads to a lot of freedom.
And when it comes to questions, another area that I think is maybe not talked about enough, and equally important, is the internal questions that we ask ourselves. Because our subconscious does a lot of work to answer these questions, and that goes a long way to creating our internal bias or our internal filters that largely influence how we act and how we interact. And so, for instance, I’ve used this example before, but when I used to inner-question asked myself, why can’t I lose weight? My subconscious did its job brilliantly of answering that question by saying, “Well, obviously, it’s because you’ve had all these kids, and you have thyroid problems, and your genes say that you are more likely to be overweight. And, and, and, and, and.” And so I never made progress because I was asking the wrong question.
So I find even internally, it’s important to rephrase our questions to question our assumptions and beliefs. Things like, well, is it actually true that those people with thyroid disease cannot lose weight? Well, no, not necessarily. Is it true that all moms have to gain weight after having children? Well, no, not necessarily. So breaking those things down, which I’ll talk a little bit more about in the next point on first principles. But rephrasing the questions we ask ourselves internally. So maybe things more like, how is it so fun to get to a point of being metabolically healthy? Or, how do I love movement so much? Or, why is it so fun to choose healthy options of food? Or, how am I so in tune with exactly what my body needs? And then my subconscious spent time figuring those things out and answering those questions.
A little bit related, and I feel like it’s worth at least lumping in here is, both internally and in interactions with others, being very careful of our phrasing of questions in ways that lead to solutions and not just more questions. So, for instance, when working with someone, instead of asking if something is possible, ask how we could make it happen? Or, how would we make this work? Or, how can we get to this desired goal? Same thing internally. So not asking, like, why can’t I lose weight? Or, if I can lose weight? It’s asking, how can I do this so easily? And then letting the brain work toward those solutions. On a practical level, I find this really helpful in business and in working with any kind of contractor or even people locally, is instead of asking if they’re okay with something, figure out what the desired solution is for you, and ask how to get there, and then put the ball in their court to help solve the problem.
So, at the end of the day, I started with this one because I think the nature of our questions shapes the nature of our lives. And so, by starting with better questions, and being willing to ask those questions, we put ourselves in a much better foundational position for all of these next points that I’m going to talk about. So, bottom line recap of this one, question everything, especially and starting with the things that you think you’re 100% sure about.
Number two, breaking things down to first principles. This is a concept borrowed from physics. And I will admit, I read a lot of works related to physics, books related to physics. And I have a brain crush on Richard Feynman, who was an award winning physicist. I’ve always been fascinated by physics since I was little. And I feel like there are so many lessons in physics that we can learn from and apply to other areas of life. And first principles is a big one.
So if you’re not familiar with this concept, the basic idea of first principle is a foundational, essentially self-evident proposition or assumption, that cannot be deduced from any other proposition or assumption. So basically, it’s the most basic building block that we know to be true, that can’t be broken down any further.
So, in physics, obviously, we’re talking about particles and things that can be broken down to very small components. But this applies to other areas of life as well, with the idea that if we break everything down to these first principles, and work from there, we’re often going to arrive at entirely different assumptions and results than when we operate from systems that already exist as if they were true. Often I find we will be in discussions with people or…certainly this happens online, or arguments that don’t tend to go anywhere. And in this case, I find there’s often a mismatch of understanding of first principles.
So for instance, when two people are hopefully discussing rationally and calmly, for instance, their position on things like vaccines, they might have a mismatch in true first principles. And so they aren’t actually having the same argument. And they haven’t defined some of these core ideas of what does a vaccine actually do, for instance? What’s the mechanism of action in the body and how much certainty do we have that that mechanism of action is being accomplished? Because often, one person will be arguing from the position that there’s a safety issue and it’s extremely important, operating on the assumption that vaccines are 100% efficient. While another person may be arguing from a position of that they might not be and that there could be danger, with the idea that vaccines may or may not be efficient, or effective, but that there could also be side effects. So there’s a mismatch of core understanding in first principles, but the conversation is happening well above that. So no probably constructive conversation or learning from each other can be reached if you have a mismatch in basic first principles.
I know that’s a controversial example, but one that I wanted to bring up to illustrate this. And this can even be true in our own life. It doesn’t have to be in conversation with someone else. I find that, once again, kids are naturally great at the idea of first principles. If you ever talk to a two year old for any length of time, you already know how to get things to first principles. Basically, you start with any idea or assumption, and then you ask why, and then you ask why again, and again. And when you get to the point where there’s no more whys you can answer, you’ve likely arrived at the potential first principle. So the idea of this is, break anything down in life to first principles. Basically dig deeper and deeper until you are left with only foundational truths of an idea or situation.
René Descartes was a French philosopher and a scientist, and he talked about this approach, and a method that’s now called, I believe, Cartesian doubt, in which he would systematically doubt everything he could possibly doubt until he was left with what he saw as purely indisputable truths. So basically boil things down till they can’t be boiled down anymore. Or in layman’s terms, this is basically the practice of questioning everything you think you know, about any problems, scenario, belief, and then creating new knowledge and solutions from scratch, operating only on those things, those truths, and not scenarios, systems, or assumptions that are just built on those. So, almost like the idea of, again, going back to a two year old or a newborn, and assuming you know nothing. Starting with only the things that you know for sure and building from there.
So, on the flip side, and in contrast, a lot of people, I think, maybe are hearing that and thinking, “Well, I think I probably already do that.” Most of us, I certainly did and still find myself doing this at times, are slipping into reasoning by analogy. And this is basically building knowledge and solving problems based on prior assumptions, or beliefs, or widely held things that most people believe to be true. And there’s a reason for this. This was part of survival for our species for many years. If we, for instance, encountered a tiger, and we’d already encountered a tiger, we weren’t breaking it down to first principles and trying to question everything about it. We were operating on the beliefs and assumptions that this was a dangerous animal and we needed to get away. So there’s a survival reason that it’s easier to operate by analogy than by first principles. We should be much more cognizant.
But these big thinkers, I feel like if you can boil things down to first principles, it gives you a great starting point to think of out of the box solutions. And with our kids, all you have to do is get out of their way. They’re naturally going to do it. So try not to train them out of the idea of this. And I think the most commonly used modern example of the idea of first principle thinking right now is Elon Musk, who has done this with Tesla and building batteries, for instance, because that was one of the big hurdles with building electric cars, from my understanding, is that batteries are very expensive. So he broke that down and he said, “Well, there’s…” To build on the first point. “There’s an assumption that batteries are expensive. Is that actually true? Does that have to be true?” So the idea from point one of questioning everything. And then he said, “Well, let’s break batteries down to their first principles. What are the core elements that are needed, the core compounds that build a battery? And is there a less expensive way to obtain those things? Is there a less expensive way to build a battery?” And he has largely done that.
The same thing with SpaceX and with rockets. The idea that rockets are very expensive. Is that actually true? Do they have to be? What are the core components of rockets? Can those be obtained less expensively and built differently? And that’s exactly what he’s done. So he’s an obviously extreme example. Most of us are not likely building rockets in our daily lives, but the same idea applies to systems in your household, to interactions in your business, to things like fitness and weight loss, which, ironically, I tried to think in first principles for many, many years, before I thought to apply it to health and fitness, which was the area I was writing so much about.
So, in life, I feel like first principles is a helpful concept because it stops us from just building on assumptions and systems that already exist, which means we’re only making incremental improvement or small percentages of improvement. Instead, if we question things down to their core ideas and then rebuild entirely from there, we can often do that much more efficiently.
So for instance, I’ve talked about this before, but an area where I did this was with the idea of education and school for my kids. So rather than…we were debating if we were going to homeschool or send them to school and try to figure out what was the best option for them. Instead of assuming those two things were true, that they were good options, I tried to go back to first principles and really boil things down, by asking, what are the goals of adult life? And why do kids need to reach these goals in today’s world?
And for instance, there’s this pervasive script or analogy in society, that going to school, as it exists, and getting good grades leads to success in life. And that actually doesn’t stand up when you break it down to first principles. So what I did was say, what are the things they actually do need to be successful? Well, first, let’s define success, and then work backwards from there. So in an uncertain future, in a potentially largely technological world, what do they need to be successful? Well, they need to be able to think creatively, because machines aren’t necessarily doing that. They need to be able to think critically, and they need to be able to rapidly acquire new skills and think outside the box. Because those are all things that they likely will have to do in whatever future they end up with. So then asking, does the current model of school help accomplish those goals? And if not, working backwards to figure out what does.
And what I realized when I did this was that, the current systems that were available when my oldest was five, both the school system and homeschool curriculums at the time, did not actively prepare children for that future. And in fact, did things that were probably largely counterproductive to that, by having them sit still, think inside a box, learn that there’s only one correct answer to a test, solve math problems forwards instead of backwards, have to show their work in the way the teacher wants them to show their work, rather than even being allowed to try to experiment with out of the box solutions. So in many ways, when you break it down to first principles, education is not just not helpful, it’s counterproductive, unless we’re building from first principles. Getting good grades in a system that focuses on sitting still, and being obedient, and thinking inside the box, literally makes success in an adult life, when you define it, harder not easier. So, by boiling education down to first principles, we were able to build a better system that is helping our kids preserve those core skills of creativity, critical thinking, etc.
Same thing with health, we boil it down to first principles, rather than assuming that the existing ideas of health are true. We often come to very different conclusions. And that’s what I did of, what if this is not true? What if eating this way is not the best way? Basically questioning every assumption I had, as I mentioned in the first point, breaking it down to first principles, and then building from there. What are the building blocks that are necessary for health? What things actually do support the body? And here’s an area, again, personalization, it’s going to be different for each of us. But there are probably some universally beneficial truths that can be used across the board. And a much easier example, the idea of food, and this is used online to explain the concept well. But, like, the idea of chefs versus cooks. And you could think of ingredients as kind of like the first principles, the core building blocks that can be used in a lot of different ways.
A cook is probably thinking more of like the analogy type thinking. Building on a recipe or something that’s already there, using these first principles, and just incremental improvements. So, like, using the recipe, a cook might execute better than another one to make an incremental improvement, but they’re not revolutionizing the system by using the ingredients, the first principles, in an entirely novel way. Whereas a really good chef or a highly trained chef is using ingredients, first principles, in a different way. They’re using them in the first principle way of thinking, starting with only the ingredients, without any other assumptions, without recipes, and building unique and new combinations and dishes, based on just the ingredients themselves. So a little bit simplified there, but I find that that one’s a helpful one to understand.
And from a fun perspective, I feel like I used to watch the show “MacGyver,” as a kid. And he is a good example in a lot of his episodes of first principles thinking, in a funny way. He was famous for using common items in new and innovative ways. So basically, the idea of first principle thinking. He broke things down, and instead of assuming that a paperclip should only be used to clip papers together, or that a wheel should only be used on a bike, he would put things together in unique and new ways, and that always or often got him out of tough situations. So he kind of used first principle thinking with every day common items, to create unique solutions. And that’s kind of the idea of first principles that we can apply across the board.
Number three, know the other side of any belief or opinion better than an opponent might. And another person I have a brain crush on is Charlie Munger. If you’re not familiar with him, he is Warren Buffett’s partner in Berkshire Hathaway. And you could read “Poor Charlie’s Almanack” to learn a lot more about him. I am a big fan of his work and have read a lot by him and about him. And one of his quotes is, “I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do.” When I first read that, it really struck me and it stayed with me to this day. I thought it was really profound. Because, to build on the second point, many of us, I was guilty of this for a very long time too, try to find things that confirm our own confirmation bias. We want to find things that confirm the things we already know.
And so this idea of not just being open to, but actively researching the opposite side of a viewpoint, so that you have a stronger understanding of it than your opponent might. It builds on the idea from the first point I made about questioning everything. But part of this is the act of exploring the other side. And I think this can be really beneficial, especially right now, when there are very strong beliefs on a whole lot of different issues, and very high emotion on both sides. So I said, we operate often from a position of confirmation bias, trying to find things that confirm our existing ideas. But if we build on the idea of first principles, I found that questioning everything and then researching in depth viewpoints contrary to ours, is really, really beneficial for a few reasons.
So first of all, we get the chance to critically evaluate if our position is correct to begin with, or not. And if we are correct, then that’s great. We’ve only confirmed what we thought we knew, and we haven’t lost anything. We’ve probably learned something in the process. If we’re incorrect, it’s beneficial to know so that we can modify and operate from a perspective of full knowledge. And in the process, we are learning about and understanding alternative viewpoints, which leads to more understanding and empathy for those who might hold a different viewpoint than we have. And I feel like this leads to much more constructive conversations. And hopefully, often, much more level headed conversations. And some of the great thinkers in history, I feel like, were very good at this and could argue the other side’s perspective better than their opponent. They would often start…if they were going to defend a point, they would often start by thoroughly explaining the alternative viewpoint, and then breaking down the assumptions, point by point, with data. But in doing this, I feel like it gives perspective, it also takes a lot of the negative emotion out of this.
There’s a blog called Farnam Street and they have a great blog post about this. It’s called, “The Work Required to Have an Opinion.” And I think, like I said, in a world where emotions run so high on so many topics, that we owe it to each other, in the name of human kindness, to explore other sides and be able and willing to talk with someone who disagrees from a perspective of empathy, and calm, and understanding, versus just everybody running on such high emotion, and not actually getting anywhere other than to be angry with each other.
So, some examples of this. I feel like often we will see very strong opinions and emotions in things like dietary approaches. Whether it’s better to be vegan, or keto, or carnivore. The answer is likely somewhere in the middle of all of those things for each of us that we have to figure out individually. But it’s very easy to read things that line up with your own opinion, to confirm your own position, which I did for years. And it wasn’t until I assumed that I could be wrong about everything, that I found some of the things I was wrong about and was able to correct them, which led to me getting much healthier. So this builds on the idea of questioning everything and asking what if this might not be true. Or what if the opposite could be true? And then actually doing the due diligence and work to question and understand. And like I mentioned, I believe in the second point, if there’s an area…no, the first point, where you find internal resistance, or unwillingness to do this, it probably means that there’s something to explore there, because that’s a protective mechanism.
So I think areas where this can be helpful is anywhere that we have a strong belief, whether it’s dietary, whether it’s religion, whether it’s vaccines, whether it’s viruses. I think, especially right now, there’s nothing to be lost and potentially very much to be gained from at least evaluating alternative viewpoints. Again, this is a point that’s easy to say and difficult to do. But I just love this idea, from Charlie Munger, of not allowing myself to have an opinion unless I know the other side’s argument better than they do. And I try to hold myself to that. It’s a difficult one and I have to remind myself often to be willing to do that. Because I think it’s human nature also to double down and try to confirm one’s viewpoint. So, I think learning to think critically and consider other viewpoints is a skill we have to cultivate.
Number four, the idea of inversion or thinking backwards and not forward. This is one that is prevalent in science, comes largely from math. And it goes by many different names from many different people. Tim Ferriss calls this fear setting, Ryan Holiday talks about this. It has other names as well. The basic idea is to not just think forward to like, how do I get what I want in the positive, but also to think backward of how do I not get what I don’t want. With the idea that it’s easier to avoid the bad sometimes than to identify and work towards a tangible goal, or the idea of learning from the opposite.
So as examples, I, for a long time, was trying to recover from an autoimmune disease. So I could ask, thinking forward, how can I recover from this autoimmune disease? And there would be helpful data and research in that. I could also invert, think backwards and ask, to identify things, how can I get an autoimmune disease? Because I’m going to identify some of the things I’m going to want to not do, to not get an autoimmune disease. So if I wanted to get an autoimmune disease, I didn’t want to, but I figured out how to do it, which was to be very stressed, eat horrible food, and don’t sleep. And that was basically my college experience. And that led to autoimmune disease. So, from that, I can then deduce that to not get autoimmune disease, it might be helpful to try not to be stressed, to deal with stress, to not eat horrible food or to eat food that supports the body, and to get enough sleep, versus not getting enough sleep.
So basically, you figure out what you’d have to avoid, or what creates the problem you don’t want, and you do the opposite. This way, you’re not just focusing on success, but you’re also avoiding failure. One example that is very relevant to moms that I can think of, in this, of the idea of inversion, comes from Marie Kondo. And you’ve probably heard of her. She had the wildly popular book, “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” which led to big changes for many people. I saw many people in my life follow her system and get rid of a whole lot of stuff in their house. But she used this idea of inversion, probably knowingly, because she’s really smart. But she had people, instead of asking, what should I get rid of? She didn’t have them ask that because that brings up all this emotion, and then you are attached to things, and it’s hard to identify the things you want to get rid of. Instead, she inverted. She told people to evaluate only which of these things do I want to keep, versus what do I want to get rid of. And that’s an easier thing emotionally to work through. And it makes it look entirely different as a problem. So, to do this, asking things like, what if the opposite was true? What if I focused on a different side of this situation? So instead of asking how to do something, ask how not to do it, and then learn from the inverse.
Another writer I really like is Nassim Taleb. And he says, “What you don’t know is often more important than what you know.” And I find that using inversion, you can help identify some of these holes and things that you don’t know. And you can avoid things that you don’t want. To bring back Charlie Munger again. I’m, again, a big fan of him. He has spoken to this many times in different quotes. That inversion helps you avoid mistakes and avoid failure, which often is more important to success than just focusing on success. And Naval Ravikant, who’s another person I admire a lot, talks about this kind of same concept as well. But Charlie Munger said…he said, “It’s remarkable how much long term advantage people like us have gotten by trying consistently to be not stupid instead of trying to be very intelligent.” He also said, “It’s not enough to think about problems one way. You need to think about them forwards and backwards.” So that idea of inversion. Naval said much of the same thing, Naval Ravikant, who I will link to, some resources from him. I’m going to talk about him more in a little while, but he has influenced my thinking and business quite a bit. And he talks about this as well, as a way to think through life decisions.
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Number five, the idea of compounding. You often, probably, are familiar with this term, through the idea of compound interest, which I’ll see if I can explain in a little bit high level, just so that you can understand it, how I’m going to apply it to other areas of life. So, compound interest is the addition of interest to the principal sum of a loan or deposit. So in other words, it’s interest on interest. And it’s the result of reinvesting the interest rather than paying it out, so that the interest, the next time, is earned on the principal plus the interest, the previously accumulated interest. And it leads to a higher growth curve. Or the idea that, like, growth leads to more growth.
So this is a term used in money. But I think it’s really relevant. And Naval has talked about this in many other areas of life as well, not just with money. And so I think you can use compounding when it comes to relationships, and skills, and time. Albert Einstein said that compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it earns it, and he who doesn’t pays it. But this is true, I believe, with time, and skills, and relationships as well. So some areas that I like to think of compounding on a daily basis, not just with money, are things like reading and knowledge. And this is another recurring area that you’ll hear people like Charlie Munger talk about. Warren Buffett talks about this. A lot of the really high achieving people who are big thinkers spend a lot of time reading, sometimes writing, but acquiring knowledge in almost what seems like a disproportionate amount of time.
In other words, many of these people will read for hours and hours a day. People who are running huge companies, who you would think would be the most busy and have the least time to read. They understand the benefit of compounding knowledge. And they spend hours per day acquiring knowledge, knowing that knowledge plus more knowledge, the compounding effect, you’re able to use more efficiently. So they spend time reading every day. Same thing with the idea of skills. The more we practice a skill, the easier it gets to keep getting better at that same skill. Also, building on skills that can help each other. I’ve done this with the business, of thinking how could I start with basic building blocks that I had, or skills that I could learn, and then build into other areas that would help me reach people in a different way or build things that way. So, like, things like podcasting. Speaking helped me get better at podcasting. Writing blog posts helped me get better at writing, which helped me write books. We can build on skills and get better at them over time.
Same thing with writing. And, like, I find that the more I write, the more I write. So writing daily, making that a practice, makes it easier to write daily. Same thing with fitness. We see compounding in fitness, and we don’t necessarily think to call it this. But as you…I’m finding this now, as you work out and get more honed in, and as you get stronger, your body is more efficient at rest. And workouts, while they may never feel easy when you’re doing them because you want to keep challenging yourself, you get more efficient at the workouts themselves, and the benefit becomes greater from the same or less amount of actual fitness.
And a trick that I use, that I’ll mention a little bit more in the last point in detail. But I use something called the Feynman Technique. So again, mentioning Richard Feynman. But I find that this helps me in compounding because it locks in knowledge, and ideas, and skills. And the concept briefly, is that, you don’t really know or understand something until you can teach it to a child. And thankfully, I have many children that I’m teaching on a daily basis. So I actually get to implement this in practice.
But the idea being that anytime I learned something new, every time I read a book, I try to summarize that thing in a concise, easy to understand lesson, and simple language, and teach it to one of my kids. And then get them to explain it back to me, which then confirms that I was able to explain it to them in an easy to understand way. And that’s been really helpful for me in being able to compound on that knowledge and on those skills. And like I said, I’ll talk more about that in the final point. But I wanted to mention it here as well.
Number six. This one is hugely helpful from a mental health and stress perspective. And it’s the idea of, focus on only what you can control. And this is talked about in everything from the stoics to modern day stoic writers like Ryan Holiday. This is brought up in different types of religious texts across the board. But just the idea of, we are much less stressed when we focus on what we can control. One of my favorite writers who mentions this is Viktor Frankl, in his book, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” that I reread every year at the beginning of the year. And also, it’s mentioned in various ways throughout many, many kinds of writing. But the core concept, high level to understand is, the things that we can control are essentially just our own emotions, actions, and responses. And what we cannot control is everything else. And when we spend mental energy and time really only focused on our own abilities, and actions, and responses, and things that we have direct impact over, and we let go of attachment, or need to try to control things we can’t control, like other people’s actions, or how other people feel about us, or world events outside of our control. We benefit because we’re letting go of stress over an essentially insolvable impractical equation, because we can’t affect the outcome.
And I feel like there’s a lot of things that build into this, but the core concept truly is as simple as that. Again, simple but not easy. It’s hard to learn how to let go of those things. But to the degree that we’re able to do that, I feel like I have found freedom and happiness in that. Some things that this has also helped me, there’s a concept of Hanlon’s razor, which is basically that you should never attribute to malice that which can just be attributed largely to carelessness, or…basically, yeah, just to circumstance or carelessness. And I feel like when we focus on only what we can control, we have less desire to try to understand other people’s motivations or correct them on these things. And often, things that we would interpret as something that was done with malice, was truly just done accidentally or without thought at all. And we can let that go.
I find also when I focus on only the things within my own control, it allows me to be more kind, which is another core principle of my life in general. And I just kind of put it under here. But the idea of always be more kind. When in doubt, always choose to be more kind. I’ve yet to find situations in my life where I regretted being kind. And I can certainly think of many where I regretted not being kind. And focusing on my own emotions, and responses, and actions, often less, that’d be a much easier process to be kind. As mentioned already, I mentioned the book, “The Four Agreements.” And this is one of the four agreements, is to not take anything personally. Because the things other people do often have nothing to do with us at all to begin with. But we can’t control them anyway. Or as past podcast guest, Lauryn Bosstick said, she said, “Other people’s opinion of me is none of my business.” It’s also firmly out of our control. So when we can let go of that, or the attachment to knowing someone else’s opinion, or caring about someone else’s opinion, we are able to use that time and energy to focus on things that we can actually affect the outcome of, which is a position of much more freedom, and much less stress, at least from what I found.
So, I use this to analyze when something pops up in life, or especially if it’s something causing me stress, is to analyze what variables in this circumstance or situation, do I actually have the ability to control. And if it’s not one of those things, letting go of it, rather than pouring time and energy, which we mentioned are the most valuable resources, into an equation as a variable that is not solvable, to begin with.
Number seven. My kids hear me say this all the time and it’s in our house. I’m building a culture wall and this is on it. The concept that happiness is a choice and a skill. And there’s a thousand quotes related to this. But this is something that I have learned, in many ways, over the last decade. And it relates to this idea of what we have the ability to control. And our own happiness is one of those things because it is a choice. But it’s also something that we have to cultivate. I find that the idea of compounding, which we already mentioned, applies here, too. Because when we set up habits, and activities, and practices that lead to happiness, they tend to do that more and more over time. The idea of inversion can also help identify what these things are.
So, like, Naval Ravikant, who I mentioned, he defines happiness as a calm mind, a fit body, and a happy home. And I think there are aspects of that, that are found in many people’s definition of happiness. But part of reaching this is kind of knowing where we’re going, but also identifying the activities, or removing the activities that don’t lead to happiness, or identifying the ones that do. And inversion can help here too. So by asking, how can I be unhappy? Well, I could sleep less. I could fight with people that I’m close to in my life. I could eat food that makes me grumpy. Then you do the opposite of those things. So maybe by having good relationships, and getting enough sleep, and eating nutritious food that’s delicious, I could be more happy. You can build on that.
I think another aspect I found of happiness is the constant reminder to try to be present and to build from place of presence. It’s much easier, I found, to be happy when you’re in the present moment than when you are future or past focused, unless you’re actively planning for something in the future, because those are areas that are outside of our control and areas that tend to be anxiety producing. So to the degree possible, cultivating happiness by being present and focusing on and compounding the activities that relate to happiness for each of us, which is going to be different. I mentioned in the beginning about time and energy being our most important assets. And I think this is a really important part of the happiness equation. Because when we deplete either of those things, we are typically not as happy. And if we find a way to focus those things effectively, even if there are still difficulties or struggles, it tends to lead to more happiness. I’m going to put a link to Naval Ravikant, I mentioned. He has a book called “The Almanack” that’s out. It’s based on his work. He didn’t write it, but it’s based on his work, and it’s available for free online, in PDF. You can also buy the regular book.
But he has a great quote that, “Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.” So, conversely, you can just choose happiness by being present now. It still might mean you work toward things. In fact, it probably will. But not being attached to the desire for those things to happen. And I think it was maybe Mark Manson who said it too, that the desire for more positive experience is in itself a negative experience. And paradoxically, the acceptance of a negative experience is in and of itself a positive experience. It’s kind of like the paradox of happiness. And a concept I like also from Mark Manson is, instead of asking what makes me happy and focusing on that, this kind of ties in a little bit to the idea of inversion. So we’re somewhat adjacent. But asking what discomfort or pain am I willing to have in my life. Because this helps us identify and work towards areas that are going to lead to happiness.
So, for instance, if I’m willing to have the discomfort of intense workouts, that might lead to a healthier body, which physically makes me happier. Probably, I have better neurotransmitters that way, but I also might feel happier by having that healthy body. I might be willing to have the discomfort of working more hours, or working a side business at night for a few hours, which isn’t necessarily in and of itself a comfortable happy experience. But that leads to helping build a business, or to more financial security, which can be something that relates to happiness. Personally, in the past, I’ve often chosen the pain…or not pain, but discomfort of fasting and not having food for a certain number of days, which led to biological things like autophagy and cellular changes, and to better health over time. So, I love this concept of choosing our discomfort. What pain or discomfort am I willing to have in my life for these goals of happiness? Naval said that, “A rational person can find peace by cultivating indifference to things outside their control.” So that ties that into the previous point as well, but finding peace and happiness by focusing on being present and focusing on the things within our sphere of control, and letting go of the things that we can’t.
And then the last point I’m going to talk about today, which is, for me, a big key in happiness, but also one of my rules for life. And one that governs many, many of my actions is the focus of cultivating curiosity and always learning. And this is done in different ways for me, and it’s a little bit easy to do because I’m a homeschooling mom as well. I’m very grateful for that. But this is where I derive a lot of my mental stimulation and happiness. And I think it’s going to look different for everybody, just as all of these will. But I have found this for me is very much a key to feeling fulfilled and to happiness. And there’s various ways that I do this tangibly. Overarchingly, it’s as simple as, I find always having some kind of goal or challenge to be working toward, and always having a new topic of conversation or topic of information to learn.
So as an example, for my kids, they have, in school, a thing that they focus on each day, it’s not really a subject, we don’t do those. But it’s called topics, where they research, it could be anything they’re interested in at all. And then they have to either write a short paragraph about it or explain it to me or to a sibling, in a way that the other person can then explain it back. That might sound familiar because that is the Feynman Technique that I mentioned briefly. But I also, myself, even though I’m not in school, I’m just teaching my kids, I try to find ways to use the Feynman Technique daily. So for my kids, they do this in their school topics. I try to do this as well. And I have several ways that I do it. But the concept is a little bit more detail, of the Feynman Technique, is that when you understand something, you can explain it to a child concisely, in simple language, and in a way they understand. And this can be done in various ways.
And Einstein had a quote about this as well. I’m going to paraphrase, but something along the lines of the idea that you don’t truly understand something until you can explain it to either…it was either a six year old or a sixth grader. But they both mentioned this. And I found this extremely helpful in learning, both for myself and for my kids in homeschooling and for retention. So what I do, myself, for this, is I have both digital and physical notebooks. So I have apps that I use for this, if I’m doing it digitally. Or I have leather bound notebooks that I love to write in when I’m doing this by hand. And I’ll research a new concept, a topic, it could be really anything. I might read a book, so every book I read, I do this Feynman Technique after. And after researching or reading and trying to understand in the best way possible, I then spend a couple of minutes telling my kids, or my husband, or a friend, about it, and then seeing if they understand it back.
And if I’m not talking to another person or I don’t have access to that, I will also just write, or draw, or illustrate on one page of a notebook or digitally, the key concepts. And the advantage here, you might know, by teaching something, you retain it better yourself and you cement the knowledge, but it also helps you understand it better. And I find it really drastically increases my recall. So if I read a whole lot about sulforaphane, or mitochondrial health, or NAD, or whatever, I’ll Feynman Technique that and see if I can explain it to my seven year old, and if she can explain it back. And then I, by default, understand it better. When I read a book and my focus is, okay, I’m going to try to explain the core message of this book in one page or less, or in five minutes or less to my child, I read with a different lens, and I find I retain much better.
If you’re not a writer or you don’t enjoy illustrating, another way you can do this is to use the app Otter, O-T-T-E-R, or a voice text to create and keep notes by just speaking them. Or if you’re going to actually explain it to a child, just use Otter to transcribe it and then you have it written as well. So anytime you want to go back and have a reminder of that topic, you have it in one place because of this. And so, like I said, I do this with books and concepts, the idea, teach it to someone else. If they can explain it back to you, then you understand it and you have succeeded in passing it on.
TED Talks are also a great training tool for this with kids. And I’ve mentioned before that we often start our days with watching a few TED Talks. There’s various reasons for this. But one, I find that children are natural pattern recognizers. So when you give them knowledge on several unrelated topics, they’re still going to look for patterns, which can be really beneficial and help them think outside the box, which is one of those core values. Often in TED Talks, people are very, very knowledgeable about their field. And they’re trying to communicate some ideas of first principles by breaking things down to a concept that people can understand. In essence, they are also somewhat Feynman techniquing themselves, because they’re trying to pass on their body of knowledge in a short amount of time, to an audience, who will then hopefully understand and share it. So when we watch these TED Talks, we either verbally or in writing, talk through and explain these concepts, which helps all of us retain them, and gives us a lot of really fun topics for conversation.
Another thing that, to me, ties into this idea of always learning, I mentioned this in the beginning, I very firmly believe, that’s something I should probably challenge, but I very firmly believe that you can learn something from every interaction, or experience, or resource. And so I try to approach every interaction with a person, or every new book, or any situation I find myself in from that perspective of being able to learn something. And I find that when I do that, I have a totally different experience of interaction. And I almost always find that to be true, that I learned something fascinating. Sometimes what we learn maybe a way we don’t want to do something, it might be we’re learning by inversion of how not to do things. But the mindset of learning something from everything that you read, or do, or every person that you meet, I find very helpful. And that’s very much a core belief for me. I believe that we can learn something from everything, but we probably shouldn’t learn everything from any single thing. And that ties back into what I mentioned at the beginning about, like, being exposed to a wide range of viewpoints and not assuming that we can learn everything about a topic from any of those, but that we can learn something from all of those.
Many people I respect have some version of the idea that we should go to bed smarter than when we woke up. Everyone I’ve actually mentioned in this podcast has a quote to that effect. Naval says that, Charlie Munger has said that, Richard Feynman has several quotes related to learning every day. But that’s the thing I think about often and tell my kids daily, is to always go to bed a little bit smarter than when you woke up. For this reason, at our house, books are a line item in our budget. And that’s one area where I am always willing to spend money if kids ask for books. We have Kindles, we also have many, many print books. And as I do this podcast, and I ask for book recommendations, I keep an Amazon cart just of books that I’m constantly adding to. And about once a month, I order a whole new list of books. And they come in and I’ll try to get through those books that month and then Feynman Technique them and pass them on to my kids.
Also, with books, I don’t tend to keep them. So another core thing with books for me is, if it’s a good book, then I always, like, underline it and I make some notes. I Feynman Technique on the last page of the book, and then I give the book to someone else to read. And I hope that when I pass these on, people will do that as well. But I feel like knowledge is an incredible gift. And it’s one that I really enjoy giving to other people. So I always try to pass books on. I don’t often reread them, because I do the Feynman Technique, but I love passing them on for other people to read. And if I do ever need to reread it, I’ll just get the book again and do it again.
But to the idea of Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett, all these guys that read, having time daily for reading and for learning. And that is another one of the reasons I’m so grateful for this community, is that now, literally, it’s my job. I get to talk to you guys, talk to people on the podcast, and learn constantly from people, and have my viewpoints challenged, and have exposure to new topics, and then get to pass those things on. So I don’t take that lightly.
Like I said in the beginning, I’m so, so, so grateful for you and for this community, for you spending your time here today. I hope that maybe some of these concepts have been helpful to you. Probably a lot of them are things you’d already considered or do in certain ways. For me, it was helpful to put them more concretely into defined mental models or rules for life, so that I could operate from them, and be more concrete with them. And I would love to, in the show notes, hear from you, about any systems, or mental models, or rules for life that you have and that you operate from. Or if any of these things were new ideas to you or challenged any ideas that you had, I’d love to hear about those things from you in the show notes. So, please reach out on social or leave me a note at wellnessmama.fm. Also always let me know any future guests you would like to hear from in the next 100 episodes, in the show notes at wellnessmama.fm.
I will also link to a lot of these books that I have mentioned, other books by people that I mentioned in this episode, and some other resources related to these things. As I said, it’s a deviation from the purely just physical health side of things, but I feel like these are principles and ideas that have really made my life less stressful and more happy. And I hope that something, again, you can learn something from everything, that you’re able to pull any small part of this that can be beneficial to your life in some way. And I hope that you will share some of yours with me so that I can do the same.
But as always, like I said in the beginning and I’ll say it again, thank you for sharing your most valuable resources, your time and your energy, with me today. I’m so grateful that you did. It is always a pleasure to spend time with you. And I hope that you will join me on the next 100 episodes of the Wellness Mama Podcast.
If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.
