Alchemy For Life

Well, hey there. Welcome back.

How are you?

No, I mean it.

How are you doing?

Are you okay? Are you good? Are you fine? Are you going through something?

Odds are that right now you’re not really registering that someone is genuinely curious as to how you’re doing. So you’re not really thinking about how you’re doing, you’re just thinking, “Okay, yeah, I’m I’m okay. Let’s get to the other point in the in the conversation. Let’s get to the good part of this podcast, right?”

If a person asks you that in person, your response and your ability to sort of dig down deep is going to vary based on a number of things. It’s going to vary based on your relationship with the person, the social setting—so is it somebody in passing, is it someone getting coffee at the same time you are, and they’re giving you that same, “Hey, hi, how you doing?” and you say, “I’m fine,” regardless of how wonderful or terrible you are.

It’s also going to vary based on certain things you have set up as protective shells, and we all have that. Our psyche is protected on a number of layers. In the same way that if somebody just walks up to you and says, “You’re doing it wrong, you’re wrong,” you’ll immediately have a protective layer that’ll say, “Wait, wait, I’m I’m not wrong, especially to a stranger. Hold on. Hold on, don’t accept what they’re about to say.”

It’s the same thing as if someone says, “Tell me deeply how you’re doing. Reveal to me your most innermost pain.”

That’s not going to happen.

That may not even happen with someone you’re very close to. The odd thing is, it’s more likely to happen with someone that you’re not very close to. But it’s probably not going to happen at the water cooler, and it’s certainly not going to happen with some disembodied voice that already’s recorded this, that can’t reply back to you. I can’t reply back to you, right?

So if you truly were to say to me, or you just pause this and you go, “Okay,” and you’d vent in your car about how you’re really effing doing, you wouldn’t get the advantage of being validated, right? I wouldn’t be able to look at you and go, “Man, that sucks,” or “Oh wow, that’s quite the triumph,” or “Huh, tell me more about this thing that’s happening in your life.”

And I can tell you that I’d like nothing more than to do that. I’d like nothing more than to be able to somehow teleport into your car or next to you or what have you, and actually look into your eyes and listen and and say, “Okay, you know, tell me more, I’m listening.”

Our capacity for accepting someone’s empathy is, like I said, greatly variable, and it depends on a lot of things. People say trust must be earned, and it must, but that doesn’t explain why a stranger in pain will suddenly trauma dump on someone. They don’t trust that person, they just need that person. They need that person to listen to them. They need that person to understand how they’re feeling inside.

It boggles my mind to know just how many people are out there that really need this.

There’s a service in Japan where you essentially pay 20 times the value of the snack that you’re going to get from someone, and it’s literally called The Snack, because what comes with it is someone who listens. And you get to open your heart up and just dump things out to them.

Obviously, there’s a layer of anonymity that comes with it. I mean, you’re there in person and they see what you look like and what your name is and so forth, but there’s a layer of anonymity, which is why it’s easier sometimes to tell a a stranger or a semi-stranger about something going on in your life than it is someone that you’re going to see every day.

I’m not saying you should rush out and and trauma dump for 20 minutes, only to have them say, “Sir, this is a Wendy’s,” versus you telling your wife or husband how you feel. I think communication between you and your spouse and significant other and pals is vitally important, and in a lot of times, in a lot of circumstances, it simply doesn’t happen.

There are cultural and sex-based barriers, and when I say sex, I mean male or female. Men are taught at an early age to suck it up and be stoic, and a lot of men, unfortunately, find that in their relationships, once they become truly vulnerable, the relationship changes, and sometimes it ends.

So there’s obviously a need for this layer of semi-autonomy with a stranger in which you can truly vocalize what’s on your mind. The space where you can just say, “Look, this has always bothered me and I’ve had to deal with this, and this is something that’s been going on forever, and no, I’m not okay. I say I’m okay, but I’m not okay.” There’s a space for that.

I’ve thought about this for a while. I have a forte for creating interactive things, interactive software and websites and and so forth. What I don’t have a forte for is reaching people so that they feel comfortable doing that in a in a in a manner that makes sense to them.

So I can’t teleport next to you into your car or wherever you are listening to this. I can’t look in your eyes and feel your pain and help and hold your hand or put my hand on your shoulder or whatever is appropriate or give you a hug. I want to, I wish I could, but I can’t, because this is a one-way communication.

I can make you feel seen and validated by talking about something that’s near and dear to your heart, in which you didn’t think anyone else felt the same way. I can make you feel better by giving you a solution, or at least an understanding, to something that you are going through. But it still bothers me that I can’t do more.

Now the asterisk is that, yes, I can do more, actually, if if you’re in a seminar or in a group coaching or in a direct coaching with me, I absolutely can do more with you, but I’m not really talking about that, and if you’re interested in pursuing that, please, by all means, talk to me. But I’m talking about the vast majority of people who wouldn’t be doing that, people who are casually listening to my podcast episodes and may get a kick out of one or may find one to be really useful, or read one or more of my books and go, “Oh, I’m getting a lot out of that.”

So I’m being honest and vulnerable with you to tell you that I’ve had this desire to do more, but there are a lot of barriers between me and you. One of them is the fact that I’m only one person, the the fact that I cannot teleport to a million places at once and listen to someone, the fact that it would be very undoable and very unsafe to say, “Here’s a phone number, just call me,” and the fact that 99% of the people wouldn’t do that even if it was available.

But what would cause you to do that?

What would make you feel so safe and so anonymous and so validated and so heard that you would do it?

What exactly does that look like to you? Is it a form on a website? Is it an email? Is it something else? Is it a seminar or meeting? Is it a group setting, or is it a personal one-on-one setting? And what is it called? What would a what would a what would a seminar or what would a group setting be called that would make you say, “I’m going to do this. This is what I’ve been waiting for. I need to feel heard”?

And how is it constructed in such a way that it’s just not a lot of people standing up and talking about a problem for 30 minutes? I mean, you run out of time with one person, and if you have 30, 50, 100 people there, or even if it’s a small group of 10, how do they all feel heard and validated?

I will tell you that the closest I’ve come to this is that I did group coaching. I did group coaching actually for dads who were divorced or going through a divorce. Because a lot of their problems were similar and their experiences were similar, I was able to address them as a group. But I’m talking about everyone, including you who’s listening to this.

So if you’re interested in this and would participate and have some ideas on it, you can write me at [email protected]. That’s heymark all one word at markbradford.org. Thanks.

Thank you for listening as always. Go to markbradford.org to see all my author-related things. Go to Alchemy for Life to see coaching, speaking, writing, and this podcast.

Alchemy for Life theme by Mark Bradford and Alchemy for Life. All background music is by Audionautix and Jason Shaw.

Make the decision!

Well, hey there. Welcome back.

I’ve been thinking a lot about, well, overthinking.

As someone who’s a self-professed overthinker, I also notice that I’m typically not accused of it by others.

Do you think you overthink? Do you overthink a lot? Is it just sometimes? Is it only in your personal life, but you don’t do it at work?

And what’s the difference between analyzing something and overthinking it? Let’s let’s talk about that.

When someone is accused of overthinking, what does that mean?

It typically means the person thinks the other person is committing too much brainpower to something. On the on the most basic level, you’re thinking too much about that.

Make the decision! Or you’re taking too long to make the decision, right?

If a surgeon goes home and practices his knots for 10 hours, is he overthinking the knots?

If the surgeon is in surgery, and he just freezes with the scalpel for 10 minutes, is he overthinking what to do next?

Do you see the difference between those two actions?

If you’re trying to teach someone how to sword fight, you go through the movements very slowly. You tell them, “If this happens, move it this way. You can parry this way. This is going to take too long to move your sword here. You should always have this stance.”

It’s a long, arduous, methodical process, just like anything that we get good at.

In my book Three Voices, I talk about how our first voice is our intuition, our knee-jerk reaction, and our own muscle memory.

If you’re really good at something, like, let’s say, tying knots for surgery, or the perfect golf swing, or sword fighting, the amount of decisions you make in a matter of microseconds is astounding, especially when compared to someone who doesn’t know the skill.

And that’s why, as I said in the book, it’s sometimes difficult to explain a skill to someone because you’re used to doing it in literally half a second, but it takes you using your third voice—the thing I’m using to talk to you, hello!—that can take literally hundreds of times or even thousands of times longer to explain and say, “Now you do this, and no, if this happens, do this.” Oh!

I mean, that’s literally a microsecond when you’re actually performing the skill. If you try to talk a race car driver through racing, he’d barely make it around the track once.

If you have embraced and taken to heart your job or your skill, which I assume you did, you can do things in a very short amount of time that others take a while to do. And you pay no attention to it because you say, “Well, that’s the level I’m at. I’m I’m a professional.”

And one of the pitfalls of people who are solopreneurs, or people who are in the service industry, is that they charge based on time.

If you spend 15-plus years honing a skill and becoming so good at it that you are not only as good as, if not better than your competition, and then you charge based on time, you’re doing yourself a disservice.

If it takes you a half hour to do something that it takes them three hours to do, and they charge a certain price, you should be charging that price as well. And in the cases where the lessened time is important, you should be charging a higher price. And this is the trap a lot of people fall into.

But what does this have to do with overthinking?

Well, getting back to the description of it, overthinking is thinking too much about something. So I’m showing you how when you’re learning a skill, you are thinking too much about it, because you’re doing it at a speed that you can monitor.

Now, add to that the fact that sometimes, some things require a good amount of thinking.

I can tell you, I have had past experiences in solving problems in which I paused for literally two seconds only to have the client think I didn’t know what I was doing.

I mean, that only happened once with the client until they learned just how much I I knew, but the first time they see it, they think, “Oh…”

like they expect you to instantly come up with a solution on something that you literally were just shown.

And there are a lot of times you can do that, right? I mean, that happens in parenting, with problem solving, with with with your job, and so forth. But sometimes you have to think, “Mm, I have to think this through a little bit. This is interesting.”

And again, that’s different than freezing up and pausing because you are thinking about too many permutations of what this could be.

Does this sound confusing and overwhelming? Well, yes, it it is. Well, maybe you’re overthinking it.

Okay, silliness aside, overthinking is a very subjective thing when it comes from the outside. And as we’ve said before, I think in my episode on labels, we talked about how if someone labels you, they’re exerting some control over who you are.

Let let that sink in a little bit.

Søren Kierkegaard said, “If you label me, you negate me.”

Others have said, including myself, “If you label me, you diminish me.”

What I’m saying here is if you are labeled, you are defined. You’re letting others define you.

So in that moment where I was giving a tremendous amount of brainpower to something that the client didn’t have a clue about, they labeled me as being confused or not understanding something, when in fact I was actually committing a good deal of brainpower to figuring out something very quickly.

Don’t get me wrong, overthinking is a real thing. Overthinking can take the form of simply not understanding your time constraints. It can take the form of a lack of confidence. If you don’t have a lack of confidence, you may have come up with the solution, but you don’t act on it. Well, that’s different than thinking, that’s simply not being able to act on something.

But if I’m allowed to get up on my soapbox—there we go—I will tell you that we live in a society that does not reward deep thinking.

You can prove this if you go to a group of diverse individuals, let’s say a networking group, and you announce that you have been thinking a lot about X, Y, or Z, and you’ve been studying it, and you’ve been researching it, and if it’s something that’s not necessarily part of what you do for a living, you’ll get a laugh.

You’ll get more than one uncomfortable laugh because people won’t know what to say.

It’s absurd for someone who is not in a learning state like high school, college, or whatever, to actually just commit a good deal of thought to learning something outside their sphere of influence. You you just don’t hear about this and people don’t talk about it. And they’re uncomfortable.

This place of discomfort is where the accusation of overthinking comes from from people who are labeling it incorrectly.

“Tunga spend too much time study plant. Tunga stay in cave where fire warm.”

So what I’m saying is if you take a—I hate to say deep dive because it’s so overused by AI—if you take a good amount of effort to thoroughly research something analytically, it can look like overthinking. But again, the label of overthinking will be awarded to you based on the time constraints of the viewer.

If they’re teaching you a golf swing and you just sit there, you’re overthinking.

If they say, “What do you want for dinner?” and you take forever to decide, then you’re overthinking.

But what if you’re training yourself, your first voice, to make that swing properly, to have proper follow-through and all that stuff?

What if you’re just trying to get it right the first time?

What if that also applies to what you want to eat because you’ve found you tend to go for the most expensive thing, or you go for the easiest thing, and you’re trying to change your diet? Well, that can cause the pause.

What if you’re trying to come up with a really clever solution for your client who’s coming to you for something they think is mundane? “Well, just give me the answer. The other people just said, ‘Well, this.'” Well, we don’t do it that way here. We want to consider other things for you.

Oh.

Is it overthinking then?

Maybe our default in society should be to award people who take a pause, to award people who are considerate, who think deeply about something, who actually pause, take a breath, and take the time to consider what the right answer is.

Maybe we’d be in a better place.

As always, thanks for listening. I welcome your comments. Take care.

Thank you for listening, as always. Go to markbradford.org to see all my author-related things. Go to Alchemy for Life to see coaching, speaking, writing, and this podcast.

Alchemy for Life theme by Mark Bradford and Alchemy for Life. All background music is by Audionautix and Jason Shaw.

Well, hey there. Welcome back.

Have you ever—oh, wait, what is… Oh, sorry. I was confused there. I thought the pile of clothing on the floor was a dog.

Has that ever happened to you?

What about when you’re taking a walk, or you’re outside, or driving, and it’s dusk or dawn?

Then does it happen?

Have you ever thought a tree or a pole was a person waiting for a bus? The coat hanging up in an open closet is a man standing waiting to attack?

We’ve all experienced this.

Sometimes it’s kind of unnerving, sometimes it’s interesting, and sometimes it can make you laugh.

In the episode called “The Holy Grail of Positivity Bias,” I talked about how we have a built-in system for negativity, and that’s why we are still alive after all these generations. Fire bad, bear attacking is bad, stay away from cliffs, don’t eat that. Stuff like that.

Well, our vision has something similar to that built in. In fact, it has a lot of things built into it, which is what creates the whole “pile of clothing is actually a dog” kind of concept.

So, our vision has predatory bias, meaning if it doesn’t recognize a thing, maybe it’s a thing trying to hurt us.

It’s why our first instinct is to scream or jump or reel away from something that is in our field of view suddenly. Like, someone who’s your best friend or someone you’re madly in love with is standing next to you, you turn around, and you don’t go, “Oh, I’m so happy to see you,” you go, “Oh my God!” and you jump away.

Because if you didn’t, your ancestors or you could be eaten by something. Shoot first, ask questions later.

So let’s talk about our eye hardware.

So, we have cones and rods, as you may know.

The cones are high-resolution optic devices that recognize color. The rods are for lower light and essentially non-color input.

So, when lighting drops to a certain level, your cones can’t really provide much information, they don’t fire off, and then we see everything as kind of a gray, which is kind of really cool. If you’ve ever taken a walk or been outside early morning or late night, dusk and dawn, you notice the color just drains out of things, and it’s kind of poetic.

That’s your eyes switching from your cones to your rods. Things are of a lesser resolution, you could say. They’re they’re they’re grainy black-and-white kind of stuff.

So when your brain is fed this lesser information, not only is it still dealing with that whole predatory reflex, it’s now dealing with something it does all the time, but you notice it more, which is this top-down programming, which is this predictive programming. “Hey, what is… Oh, that’s probably a dog. Hey, that’s a stranger. Hey, that’s a…” It’s doing that before you even get to really see what it is you’re seeing.

I thought about this so hard, I actually saw the change. Most people don’t. They just have like a a thought of, “Oh my god. Oh, that’s that’s fine. That’s a tree.”

And I saw a tree near my house change from a person to a tree as I was driving up one day. And no, this isn’t an admission that I’m going crazy. That’s actually episode 1,000. 👀

We also have another element, which is pareidolia, and you may or may not know what it is. You know what it is, but you may not have heard the word for it. Pareidolia is basically when we see faces and objects and things that are very familiar to us in things that they’re just they’re not there. You look at an outlet, and you go, “Oh look, it’s kind of like a happy face.”

You look in the sky at some clouds, and you say, “Oh, I see a puppy.”

So your brain is doing all this processing at the same time you’re simply just getting visual information.

And the processing is biased towards something bad, except for the pareidolia for the most part, which can be something good.

And this is, in my opinion, what sort of constitutes what spooky is.

Think about it. If you go outside and and it’s pitch black, it’s pitch black, that’s that’s it. But if you shine a flashlight, you’re going to be using a lot of light, and you’ll be able to see colors and everything else. You get some pretty crisp visual information. There’s nothing really spooky about necessarily shining a light on something scary, you go, “Oh my God, I saw something scary.”

But if you go outside, and most of the light and color has drained away, all of a sudden it’s spooky! What could that be in the shadows? I saw something move! Oh my God, I’m leaving.

So let that sink in for a little bit, because I’m I’m going to switch gears in a way.

We’re going to take everything we just learned and apply that to something else.

So, if you have all this processing and bias and so forth in place when it comes to visual information that’s input into your system, what happens when you get a new idea? Or someone presents something to you?

Well, those same systems, or systems similar to them structurally, kick into effect as well. You still have negativity bias. You still have predatory bias. And you have a form of pareidolia.

And that’s called apophenia.

It’s essentially our tendency to perceive meaningful connections, patterns, and connections between things that are completely unrelated or random.

Am I saying this necessarily kicks in when when you’re looking at the menu and you say, “Well, I’ll have the chicken”?

Well, in in in a way… well, let’s not get into that. But…

it’s definitely something you have to be aware of when it comes to larger concepts and systems. If someone presents to you an entire system and says, “Hey, what do you think about this? This is the direction we’re going to to move. We’re going to merge with an entire company. We’re going to switch from this company to this company as far as who produces or supplies this thing for us.”

And you might say, “Well, I we don’t do that.” Well, yeah, but you’re on the receiving end of it. If you are supplying something, if you are providing goods and services, and someone decides to go with you, more likely than not, they’ve already gone with someone else previous. They’re not suddenly in need of a product they’ve never needed. Now, that does happen, but most of the time it’s someone going with someone else.

And so when they do that, conceptually, intellectually, from a problem-solving standpoint, they are going to be using all of these systems in place we just talked about. And so are you.

If you have ever made a decision or, more likely, been part of a company that made a decision and you thought, “Why did they do that?”

If you think about these terms, it can explain that a little better. It might not be very satisfactory, because you think, “That was a bad decision,” but at least it helps you to understand the why of it.

Think about it. Let’s go back to our original discussion on vision. If you’re walking through a a scary, spooky area, and your cones are doing nothing, and your rods are doing the best they can, and you go, “Oh, what is… Oh, okay, phew. I thought that was an animal attacking me.”

“I would like to prevent that in the future. I will make this decision.” Think about that. That’s how that works.

If you’re selling kitchen alligator insurance to people in the Midwest, you’re not going to have a lot of success. However, if someone wakes up one morning at 2:00 in the morning because they want a glass of water, and they don’t want to turn the lights on, and they walk in there, and they see something on the floor, and they go, “Oh my God!”

Suddenly, it doesn’t sound like a terrible idea to get that insurance.

People sometimes have close calls with their imagination!

If you’re really being skeptical of me right now, I would say, safely, go take a walk at dusk or dawn. Go take a walk in your neighborhood, go take a walk in an area you’re unfamiliar with. Now this sounds like terrible advice, so don’t do it, so we’re only going to do it in our minds, but if you were to do that, I would bet you that a lot of the things I’m talking about would kick in—a lot of it.

It doesn’t matter how brave or strong you are. We’re talking about systems in place, evolutionarily, that have been there for a very long time for a very good reason.

So what now? Do we just laugh at our caveman brains? No! Just like I told you in “The Holy Grail of Positivity Bias,” what if we flip that around?

If you become aware of the fact that you have this system in place, you can have more control over it. You can be the driver. You can sit in your chair and say, “No, I’m in control.”

“I understand that might look like that, but logically, it’s this.” And that can apply to both your vision and your decisions. So think about that.

And I’d love to hear your feedback.

And thank you, and… Wait, what is that behind you?

Take care.

Thank you for listening as always. Go to markbradford.org to see all my author-related things. Go to Alchemy for Life to see coaching, speaking, writing, and this podcast.

Alchemy for Life™ theme by Mark Bradford and Alchemy for Life. All background music is by Audionautix and Jason Shaw.

Trapping a moment of reality in time.

Well, hey there. Welcome back.

As someone who’s recorded over 300 of these episodes, I’ve become aware of something. And it might surprise you to know that I’ve listened to these, each one of them, probably at least twice. And no, it’s not because of some narcissistic need to hear my own lovely voice—why, thank you for saying that! It’s because I… I listen for errors, I listen for sound levels and things, and I listen for one other thing. And that’s the thing I’d like to talk about today.

Like these short episodes, every time you send a text message or an email, you’re essentially trapping a moment of reality in time. You are suggesting or saying or conveying something that reflects who you are at that very moment. And the minutiae of that moment is magnified by the fact that everything is so fast and so instant. You can have a thought and then send off a text message in literally a second or two.

And I’m sure you’ve read things about, you know, don’t send when you’re angry, reread something you’ve sent, if you have heightened emotions perhaps you should write it and then send it later, and so forth. And those are all related to the thing I’m conveying right now.

In the olden days, and I mean the olden olden days, people would write on a piece of paper, and it would take some time to get to the subject. And by subject, I mean the recipient. Writing something in ink meant you were going to be really careful about it. In fact, you might say it out loud a few times before you put your pen to paper.

If you’ve read Three Voices, it means you’re using your third voice, the one I’m using right now, to say things out loud so that your second voice isn’t talking directly to the paper. And that’s an interesting concept.

So let me branch off here for a second. So, in my book Three Voices, I say your first voice is your gut reaction, your knee-jerk reaction, your internal yes/no. It’s the part of you that always tries to answer correctly, and a lot of times we don’t listen to it. And I use the example of: “Should I have this cake?” Well, and your first voice is, “No, no.” And then you say, “But I’ve been good! It’s been a long time since I’ve had cake, even though I shouldn’t have it right now.” So, we tend to overrule our first voice sometimes, and that’s when we run into some problems.

The second voice is the most complicated. It’s our inner monologue, but it’s also our inner dialogue. It’s the voices in our head. It’s the fight we had with our spouse. It’s the argument with a client. It’s an interaction with someone that was really distasteful that we play back over and over and over again in the shower. It’s the voice of a parent saying something that a parent should never say. It’s those kind of things.

And when you let those voices speak directly to a piece of paper, it’s bad. It’s far, far worse when that voice communicates directly to an electronic medium. Ladies and gentlemen, I reveal to you: social media. Specifically, Twitter, things like that. When you’re sitting in front of a keyboard and you read something that immediately creates an emotional reaction out of you, and your second voice is in full effect, and it communicates directly with the keyboard, which communicates directly with the upstream reality of millions of people, you can see how that’s a bad thing.

So putting all the negatives and warnings aside, let’s get back to the third reason of why I listen to my podcast. And that’s because I want to make sure the thing that I’m conveying is something that is beyond the moment. It’s not something that I say, “Hey, I was at the store today and someone stepped on my foot and here’s how I feel about that,” which is 80% of LinkedIn posts, sorry.

I want it to be something useful. I want it to be something you can listen to a few years later. And to my positive surprise, I have found that pretty much for the most part, the things that I’ve recorded are things that I can actually recommend to people that are 5 years old.

Can you say that for texts that you’ve sent? Can you say that for emails that you’ve sent? Can you say that for policies and decisions that you’ve sent? Well, you know, we are evolving people. We are people who do change, and hopefully we change our opinions based on new and exciting facts. I’d like to think that we don’t change our core beliefs, because those should be core. That… that’s our first voice. That’s our instinct, our morals, our ethics, things like that.

But when we gather more data, we should be able to sort of alter our perspective on things. And in those cases, you may have text messages that don’t exactly reflect who you are. But my fascination in this particular episode is with the fact that regardless of what you’re saying, regardless of what you’re thinking, regardless of how much you’re micromanaging your emotions, every single time you hit send, it’s done. It’s gone. It’s trapped in time. You’ve trapped a snapshot of who you are in time.

And that in and of itself is really fascinating, isn’t it? I mean, what other… what other way can we do that? Obviously, if you take video and whatever form of media you’re taking, you’re still trapping yourself in time—or at least who you were at that moment, what you believed at that moment, what you were trying to convey. Man, that’s a lot of weight on your shoulders when you just want to say, “Can you pick up some eggs?”

So what I’m saying is, I guess we… we have to consider that weight. We have to consider how amazing it is to be able to do that. If you’re someone who struggles with overcommunication—hello!—you struggle with sort of trying to predict what the other person is thinking. You try to predict what other questions they may have. Now, obviously that can work in your favor if you’re someone who, oh, I don’t know, has a podcast or writes books, because that way you get to address a lot of the things that you can’t because you’re not in a dynamic communication with someone. You’re actually in a, “Hey, listen to this,” and you don’t get a say in what I’m saying.

But it also means you add extra information, or you adjust your information because you’re… you can… you can think to yourself, “Oh, wow, I phrased it that way because I didn’t want you to be upset. I phrased it that way because I really wanted to focus on this instead of the other thing, but now that I mentioned that, that’s all you’re focusing on.” And it’s not just for personal communication. Obviously, people who are good at marketing know this all too well. They know what to mention and what not to mention, they know how large a font should be because that’s the important part of it, etc., and so forth.

When people look back on their communication, sometimes they’re amazed and sometimes they cringe. I mean, think about if you kept a diary or journal when you were younger, and now you read it right now. You may have said that, “Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m going to be 30 years old sometime, that’s old,” and now you’re… and now you’re twice that.

Having a historical record like this is really interesting. I mean, granted, if as part of your job, if you look back at your historical record for 5 years, all you see is, “Here are the Ferguson files. Let me know if you have questions.” And it’s just that same email over and over again, not a lot to look at, not a lot to examine historically. But the way that you compose your proposal, the way that you address your clients, the way that you follow up, the documents you include, the wording on the document, those are all things that you probably evolve with.

My suggestion to you is first of all, just think about the enormity of what happens when you send a text or an email or something, and you say, “Wow, this is a moment in time I’m trapping.” And then, think about your documentation. And finally, judging yourself based on what you know now is sometimes unfair. If you’ve written something, sent something, believed something, and you look back on yourself and go, “Wow, I was dumb.” No. You just didn’t experience the wisdom you have now.

And hopefully, I just added to that wisdom.

As always, thank you for listening. Take care.

Thank you for listening as always. Go to markbradford.org to see all my author-related things. Go to Alchemy for Life to see coaching, speaking, writing, and this podcast.

Alchemy for Life theme by Mark Bradford and Alchemy for Life. All background music is by Audionautix and Jason Shaw.

Well, hey there. Welcome back.

You know, at one point, you might have been on the fence about whether you’re going to listen to this episode or stick with the podcast or subscribe to it.

There may be hundreds of things you’ve been on the fence about in your life.

And when was the last time you actually used that phrase with another human?

Because depending on your definition, it may or may not mean undecided. So let’s talk about it. And let’s talk about those monsters and unicorns that are involved in it.

So, but first, let’s talk about what it isn’t. To me, it’s not a lack of decisiveness. It’s not a lack of being in one direction or another. Because if you say, “Well, I like this, but do I want it? Hm, I don’t know.”

Well, then you don’t really have a lot of energy pushing you to make that decision or to purchase something or what have you.

You may think, “Okay, well, I’d like to agree to this, but I just… I don’t have the resources for it, the energy for it, the time for it, the… the desire.”

Or you may think, “I don’t want this at all. I don’t want this at all, but I… I don’t want to tell this person. So, I’ll just string them along,” which is another fun phrase.

None of those are really being on the fence. On the fence makes you literally feel like you’re sort of teetering on a very precarious position. You’re going to fall one way or the other way. You’re going to say yes, or you’re going to say no. You’re going to take the plunge, or you’re not.

Making a decision requires time and energy and, in some cases, resources. Or, in some cases, it may cost you a considerable amount of resources if you make the wrong decision.

It can feel funny, it can feel out of character, or it can kind of feel exciting, because you may feel both the danger or the risk, at the same time, you feel the pleasure of going, “Wow, if I do this, this good thing will happen and make me feel good.”

I suppose that sounds like gambling a little bit, doesn’t it? But it also sounds like a couple of monsters and unicorns pulling at you. One of them is trying to pull you to one side of the fence, one of them is trying to pull you to the other.

You have the monster saying, “If you do this, it’s going to hurt. You’re going to waste money, you’re going to waste time, you’re going to get tricked, it’s a scam, it’s not something you need, you’re going to regret it.”

That could be one monster, that could be a number of monsters.

You can have a monster working on the other side saying, “If you don’t do this, it’s going to hurt. If you don’t make this decision, you’re going to continue to suffer, you’re going to continue to be in pain. You have to do this.”

You can have a unicorn saying, “You know what? Stay here. Don’t… don’t do this. Don’t make this decision, because not making this decision makes us feel really good. It feels good not to do this. So, just leave it as a default, as a no.”

You could also have one on the other side saying, “You know, man, this’ll feel good if you do this. Man, this is what you have wanted. Look at how your friends are going to revere you. You’re going to be the coolest guy. You are going to have the neatest stuff. They’re going to come over and go, ‘Wow.’ Or they’re going to say, ‘Wow, I can’t believe that you did this. You’re impressing me, and the best person ever.'”

And now imagine all those monsters and unicorns are are joining hands, they’re working together to yank you from one side to the other. They’re pulling you. And you’re, again, teeter-tottering on there. That is exciting.

So, there’s a certain excitement to being on the fence, and it can be kind of rare.

People who are decisive typically do a couple of things:

They move quickly, and they try to remove emotion from it.

But in both cases, sometimes that doesn’t work. Sometimes you can’t move quickly because you might have to do some research, and the research might tell you you were really wrong.

Taking the emotion out sounds great on paper, but what it really sounds like you’re doing is you’re taking a monster or unicorn out that’s disconnected. Again, the decision as to whether to purchase a large TV because you decide you want one or you need one for movies or so forth, if that’s affected by the emotion of “my friends will think I’m cool,” well, then that’s disconnected. So by taking the emotion out, you’re really just taking out the control of that monster or unicorn in this particular equation.

I use TV because it… it… it’s something that a lot of people buy. The size of it tends to rely sometimes on what you think your friends will think of it or your family, and so forth. It’s sometimes it’s a one-upmanship kind of thing. It… it’s a good thing to pick on. I mean, people buy TVs, people like large TVs.

This is my way, or the way that I purchased my TV, which is like 100 years old now. 😆

I stalked it for months and months. Wait, I was like, “I’m probably going to get this thing.” But there was nothing really pushing me to get it. I wasn’t on the fence about getting it, I knew the time wasn’t right. And then one day the price dropped dramatically, and I made an impulse purchase—which was not an impulse purchase. It was a purchase that I had been waiting and building for for many, many months, actually.

So I wasn’t on the fence, but I was collecting data, and based on what I was seeing and thinking, I thought, “Well, when the price drops, I’m going to get it.” So I just had a variable that I had to match, and when I matched that, everything was peachy.

When you are in a transaction with someone, and you want them to make one of the decisions, and they are on the fence, it can be, at minimum, a little bit frustrating, and at maximum, it can be maddening.

You will then push back and say, “Look, I just need you to make this decision. Just make a decision. Come on, just pick one. Look, at this point in the game, I’d rather you set no, because I just need to know.”

If you are wise in the ways of the thing that you do, you may already know what to do and say, “Okay, when someone is in this frame of mind, that’s when I back off, and I say I’ll revisit this. I put them in my customer management software and and we come back to it. Big deal.”

I can relate once again for when I am asking someone to be on the podcast. And I have mentioned this before, that in some cases I have to pursue someone for months. And in some cases they say yes right away. And in fact, the podcast episode called “A Fast No Beats a Slow Yes,” I talked about my version of the CEO mindset.

Some people talk about the CEO mindset, they have books written, but in my case, I think the CEO mindset is just somebody who can just say yes or no quickly.

And it’s not the yes or no quickly because they instantly can assess a situation, although that certainly helps. They are more likely people who will just say no if they know it’s a no.

And that’s why the fast no beats a slow yes, because if I approach someone and they give me a nice, solid no, and I know it’s not going to change and there’s nothing I can say to sell them on this, well, then we’re done. All done. No more energy needed, move on to the next.

It’s not surprising, this same concept applies to dating.

But if someone is a yes or an almost yes, well, then you keep going. And I’ve done that with a few guests in which I had to pursue them for a while, you know, and sometimes they’ll say, “Hey, can you reach out to me again in such and such?” And more often than not, that’s just a no that wastes my time.

But let’s get back to this quintessential being on the fence. So you already can visualize the monsters and unicorns. And if you can actually see them, if you can actually decide and feel out what they’re telling you, well, I’ll bet that you’re not going to be on the fence much longer.

As always, if you want to learn more about monsters and unicorns, pick up a copy of BeCAUSE!.

And as always, thank you for listening. Take care of yourself.

Well, hey there. Welcome back.

Boy, you sure are consistent! Well, I just jump right into that, don’t I? Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about being consistent and consistency, because that’s one of those words you hear and you’re like… what?

It’s certainly something that naturally affects and engages your defense mechanisms, because if someone says, “You need to be consistent,” they haven’t even told you whether you are or not, and now you immediately feel like you’re under attack. “Well, I’m… I’m consist- what am I not consistent in?”

Or even if they’re teaching you a new skill or this is part of your onboarding, and they say, “Okay, and so you’re going to do this, and you need to do this consistently.” “Well, oh, okay, because I was going to immediately default to doing it haphazardly and randomly.”

It’s one of those words that really is overused because it sounds important. In fact, I’ll tell you, I’ll go as far as to tell you that there are a lot of dating profiles that use this as as part of their filter, and it says, you know, “How do you win my heart? How do, you know, what’s impressive to me? Be consistent.” What? What? Who are you? Hello?

So, there really are two parts of this, isn’t there? There really are two parts. The first part is just taking this at face value and not assigning it to any other action. Being consistent means you did that thing again. You’ll continue to do that thing over and over again. You do it on a regular basis. You do it on a predictable schedule.

Well, that sounds as neutral as monsters and unicorns, doesn’t it? “I’m consistently going to drink and drive. I’m consistently going to be late. I’m consistently going to forget my homework, be rude to clients, and, um, forget the shower.”

So what they really mean is for you to do that thing they like, that thing they value, consistently. The problem is they don’t tell you those things they like and those things they value. Now, getting back to the job interview or the onboarding, yes, that’s where they tell you, “Hey, you should do this thing.” And then that’s where they say, “Do it consistently.”

But again, the word sort of loses meaning because we’re talking about your persona. Your default persona is to do the things you’re asked on a regular basis, on a predictable, measurable intensity that’s equal to or greater than what people need and want.

So, what do you do? Because it sounds like it’s a skill that’s, well, not a skill, right? “I’m going to learn consistency.” Well, consistency with what? “Consistency with all the good things. And I’m going to learn the opposite of consistency with all the bad things.”

Wait a minute! Hold the phone. Now we’re back in monsters and unicorns territory. In fact, we’re even before the monsters and unicorns. We’re in the territory of repetition.

So at risk of repeating myself—get it?—let me talk about repetition, which we have a number of times, and if you’ve read Because, you know that that’s really… well, the secret is repetition with everything. It’s how you get really good at good stuff, and it’s how you get really bad at bad stuff.

So what they’re asking you when they say “be consistent” is: utilize the magic of repetition for the things that I want you to do. But here’s the problem with that: if they want you to do a thing that’s either not in your wheelhouse, something you don’t feel comfortable about doing, or simply not something that’s in your skill set that you want to do, repeating that is not going to happen, because you don’t like it.

Now, this is the part where I say, “Well, you can engage a monster or unicorn to get you to do these things,” because that is how they work. But again, being consistent in a thing that isn’t your thing is a waste of your time and energy.

Do you see how the more we examine this word, the more it kind of falls apart and it’s just annoying? I’m sorry, it just is. The word consistency and being consistent is… is just become such an annoying buzzword that it has very little meaning. And I’d submit to you that if you push back on the person that says it to you, they’ll say, “Well, I… well, wait.” They will have a little bit of a meltdown and they will struggle to tell you what they’re saying, and then they’ll completely reframe it in a way that isn’t consistent. We’re having fun, aren’t we?

So what can you do when you encounter this in the wild? Well, you can take the step back and see it for what it is. If someone just says “be consistent,” you need to question what it is they’re talking about.

If it’s something you are expected to do, you can sort of look inwardly and say, “Can I do that on a regular basis that’s predictable and of high quality?” Yes? Okay, sure, great. I’ll be consistent with that.

But there is also the part of you that says, “Well, why is my ability to be consistent even being challenged?”

Because that’s an overarching attribute.

Now, you may go years and even decades without anyone even telling you to be consistent. Consistency may not even be brought up at all in your job, your career, your relationship, anything. It just may not come up, and you’re very fortunate. But I think for some people, it… it does come up, especially in new relationships. And a new relationship, whether it is personal or work or client-related, you will see consistency come up. You’ll say, “It’s what separates us from the other guys. We’re consistent. We’ll be there. We do something the same way over and over again, and you can depend on us.”

And dependability is a big, powerful magic word in all relationships, isn’t it? If there’s someone who does your plumbing and they’re dependable, that’s going to rank very highly in your matrix of saying, “Am I going to keep that person on? Am I going to call them again?”

In the creative realm, that is something that comes into question a lot. A lot of times creativity has pretty high ups and downs. People may do something really am- they’ll create something amazing, but they don’t do it consistently, right? They may come out with some sort of art piece or what have you and say, “That was really cool,” but like a lot of their other stuff is garbage, like, “I don’t like their stuff. Once in a while, they… they make something great. I don’t know what they’re thinking with this other stuff they make.” Or with music, you know, you buy an album in the olden days and you got one song. You had to pay for the whole album just to get one song out of it.

I think consistency is something we struggle with with our kids. When you have young kids, and especially teenagers, getting them to be consistent is hit-or-miss. And you’ll note as part of their personality, they may be someone who’s just consistent. You may have multiple kids, and there’s that one kid who sometimes gives you a hard time and a lot of friction, but when they do it, they do it really well. You can always depend on them.

So, when you’re on the receiving end, recognize it for what it is and help yourself to define it above and beyond the way they are defining it.

If it’s as an output from you, if you’re saying it to other people, then again, make sure that you are connecting consistency with the thing, the action.

And from a personability and likability standpoint, questioning someone’s consistency when they haven’t demonstrated that they don’t have it may not go over very well, so treat it lightly.

I hope that makes sense. I hope you enjoyed this, and I will talk to you later.

But you’d be wrong.

Well, hey there. Welcome back.

I hope you brought a considerable amount of dopamine, because you’re going to need it.

You hear that word a lot, don’t you? And when you hear dopamine, you think of reward, right? You think, “Oh, I got a dopamine hit.”

You think of gambling and shiny things and all the reward circuits that your brain has for things in your life. You think of exercising and all the positive, healthy things that you do for dopamine. And then you think of the negative things that you do: the overeating and the eating the bad stuff and the sweets, and the other behaviors that perhaps you shouldn’t be engaging in at all or as much.

But you’d be wrong.

Most people are wrong about dopamine. I’m one of those people until recently. See, I just basically took a broad brush and went, “Oh, you get a dopamine hit, your brain squirts dopamine, and you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s the stuff.'” But no, oh, that’s not the stuff at all.

So let’s talk about the four neurochemicals that are involved. Technically, three of them are neurotransmitters while one is a neuropeptide, but let’s go with neurochemicals.

So here’s what you might be misunderstanding and why it’s so hard to sort of break out of certain loops of things, like doomscrolling and so forth.

See, you’re focused on thinking, “Well, I’m just going to scroll until I hit something. It’s that reward and then I stop or whatever.”

But it’s the… it’s the journey, not the destination. That’s your problem. That’s the problem with this stuff.

So, in other words, you are getting these little microbursts of dopamine. But here’s what dopamine does: It actually keeps you seeking. It says, “Keep looking.” We’re in a state of of almost anxiousness and seeking. And that’s really what its function is. We need a healthy amount of dopamine because that keeps… it can put us in the zone, and it can keep us looking when we shouldn’t be looking.

And that’s what happens when you’re scrolling. You get little tiny microbursts of dopamine that says, “Keep looking, keep looking, it’s here, it’s here, keep looking, keep looking.”

The norepinephrine gets released when you think you’ve found something. It provides the clarity and focus.

When you do find the thing that you’re like, “Oh yeah, that’s the stuff,” that’s when you get the endorphins and the serotonin.

The endorphins are the reward. They’re actually a a painkiller, but they make us feel like we’re relieved. And then the serotonin gives us that that feeling of everything’s okay, like, “This is good. This is the good stuff.”

The problem with that is when you continue to get microbursts for an extended period of time, your brain sort of messes with the receptors and says, “Well, we need to we need to back off from this. This is… we’re getting flooded here.”

So then, you start feeling it less, so you start doing it more.

Do you see how that might be a problem? It would be analogous to you being put in a completely empty room. The dopamine says, “There’s something here, there’s something here.” So you’re looking and looking in the room and you see that it’s empty, but you’re like, “Well, maybe I haven’t checked every corner.” And you keep looking and looking and looking.

And then you see something. So the norepinephrine kicks in and goes, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let’s let’s focus on that. I think that’s the thing you wanted.” And you look at it and you’re like, “No, this isn’t… this is a ball of yarn! I don’t want this.”

But now you’re really looking.

So you keep looking and keep looking with your friend dopamine and epinephrine…

And then you find it. You finally find the treasure in there. It’s that thing, that thing you really wanted. Look at it! Just go get it. You go and you pick it up, and that’s when you get the endorphin, and then the serotonin kicks in. Ah, I’m so rewarded and I have so much calmness and satisfaction that I found this thing.

But wait! “Maybe there are more things in this room,” says dopamine. “We should keep looking!”

And that is the cycle that you’re basically repeating, whether you are doing the doomscrolling on Instagram or you are putzing around with something that has no real end or purpose. Okay, I’ve raised your awareness, now what?

Well, you might say, “Well, these are just biochemicals in your brain. These are these are not like foreign substances, so there’s got to be a real purpose for these, right? So how does that work?”

Well, let’s compare this to doing something constructive.

So if you really like your job, and since there are a gazillion jobs, let’s… let’s say writing a book, right?

You sit down and you write a book, those chemicals are involved as well.

Well, why doesn’t that burn out your brain?

This is something I wanted to know, because as soon as I found this, I thought, “Well, wait a second. I have been able to sit down and repeatedly focus for months at a time to complete a novel or a book or research or what have you.”

And I’ve told people that when I look at The Sword and the Sunflower and I look at how big and thick it is, I think, “My God, if somebody handed that to me and said, ‘I need you to write one of these,’ I’d say, ‘No, no, you don’t. I’m not doing that. That’s impossible.'”

So why didn’t my neurotransmitters go, “Whoa, hold your horses here, uh-uh, I’m I’m burnt out”?

And the difference is speed.

So while the dopamine kept me seeking, it was a slow burn of effort.

So if I stop the effort, everything else stopped.

When you’re scrolling, you’re just flicking your thumb going, “Nope, nope, nope, maybe, I don’t know, nope, nope, nope, maybe, I don’t know.” And in fact, it’s so low effort that you could be watching TV or talking to someone and scrolling at the same time, and you probably shouldn’t do that.

But you really have to focus if you’re looking at plot and characters and overarching things and and looking at the story as a whole and the outline and all that other great stuff.

And again, you’re probably coming up with analogies of what you do for a living and think, “Well, yeah, I have a lot of long-term, hard-focused things I have to do. I get lost in my spreadsheet, I get lost in my database, I get lost in my software, I get lost in discussions with clients.”

So the dopamine is keeping you in that seeking state of wanting to talk to them, of wanting to write, of wanting to do.

The norepinephrine keeps you alert and says, “Yeah, this is the thing that we wanted to focus on. Yeah.” In my case, it’s, “Yeah, this is the character development. Oh my God, this is what this person would definitely say here. Yes!”

When you make those connections on your spreadsheet, when you make those connections with people in real life, and they say the things that you would ideally want them to say because they’re getting what you’re saying and you’re making the sale, or you’re making the connection, or you’re teaching something, that’s when you’re getting your endorphins and your serotonin.

And that’s when you go, “Wow, what a rewarding job. This is what I like to do. I helped someone. I made a whole bunch of money. I taught someone something. This is good. I like this.”

Same four neurochemicals applied in a way that’s healthy.

So moving forward, I think the most important thing to learn here is that it’s not about getting squirted with endorphins, it’s the constant squirt of dopamine. Dopamine is the real thing that we have to worry about.

If you complete a difficult level, and then at the very end you’re rewarded with some sort of reward screen, a a spinny coin, or or a total goes up, or it plays an animation, you go, “Oh, yeah.”

But if all you had to do is hit a button on your keyboard and that exact thing would play, you’d say, “Well, well that’s no fun. There’s no challenge there. I didn’t earn it. I didn’t work for it.”

So when you are writing a book and you look back on it, or you are completing your job, or focusing on a client and so on and so forth, you feel that effort. You look back on what you did. You played the level!

You played the level and you risked your guy dying, and you only have two more quarters left. You risked possibly not making as large of a sale, or not getting the client, or not really getting through to the person with what you’re attempting to teach them. You risk all that, and then you get the reward, and you think, “I want to do that again. I want to go through that challenge with my buddy dopamine and norepinephrine when I’m really focused in on the target.”

And that’s why when you are doomscrolling and you look at the clock and you go, “Oh, it’s an hour and a half later,” that’s when you feel like, “What have I done?”

Because you don’t look back and feel the effort. There is no effort to feel because no effort was made.

Okay, then how do you break out of doomscrolling and things? Well, let’s… let’s take a step back. First of all, it’s perfectly fine to be doing activities that that don’t necessarily have an endpoint, right?

It’s okay to twiddle your thumbs, or to doodle, or to watch some silly reel once in a while. There’s nothing wrong with having downtime. It’s when the downtime is hours and you are filled with delightful regret at the end.

So one of the things you can do is set a time limit. “I’m just going to mess around for 10 minutes.” Like literally set an alarm. We have all these assistants around us, you… just with your voice, you can set a 10-minute alarm.

Or, actually give yourself a legitimate reward.

Say you’re going to do something in search of something.

Then you’ve brought it forward. Then it moves from your first voice up to your third voice, in which you say, “Hey, I am drawing a line here and I am saying out loud, I’m going to do this.” Now, if that sounds really silly and a waste of time, boom, you just realized that you’re probably not going to do that.

Do you have ways of breaking out of your doomscrolling? Do you have a schedule for doing nonsense?

Ultimately, I think it’s just the balance you feel is really the balance you are.

So, thank you again as always for listening. I will have links in the article to the definitions of these four neurochemicals so that you can look them up and study them yourself. Take care.

Thank you for listening as always. Go to markbradford.org to see all my author-related things. Go to Alchemy for Life to see coaching, speaking, writing, and this podcast.

Alchemy for Life theme by Mark Bradford and Alchemy for Life. All background music is by Audionautix and Jason Shaw.

in 1656 Blaise Pascal wrote in a long letter at the very end (in French) “I have made this longer only because I did not have the time to make it shorter.”

His point was that it takes effort to make something shorter. This is the effort that I have used to make my podcast episodes only about 10 minutes. And I’ve done so for over 300 episodes. Join me for a celebration, reaffirming my mission statement, and answering questions.

Well, hey there! Welcome back—and welcome back for the 300th-plus time. I didn’t have a 300th-plus episode celebration, and I think this show deserves that. Not only is this podcast in the top 5% as far as reach, but with reaching over 300 episodes, we are in the 1.4% of podcasts that survive that long. For comparison, would you believe that only 50% of podcasts ever make it past 8 episodes?

So you’ll definitely agree that we need to celebrate and also talk about some things. It’s about time I told you about my mission and origin and all that stuff, and I do tend to sprinkle that in from time to time. But let me get down to it, and in advance, I’m going to apologize for breaking my rule. Podcast episodes like this, I try to stick to 10 minutes. This is probably going to be double that. I explain why I do that as well.

So let me talk about the origin. The origin is the same origin as everything else that I work on in Alchemy for Life. It was a life-changing event that set me on the path to figure out what life was made of and what we spend our time, energy, and resources on. So, from that moment, I worked on a coaching system. I worked on understanding. I started writing books. And one of the very first things I did was start a podcast.

And at that time, I started focusing on interviewing people because I knew that I didn’t know a lot of things, and other people did. I pushed far out of my comfort zone, and I interviewed really high-profile and famous people. I interviewed Scott Adams, the late John McAfee, recently a monk from Bhutan, and the executive producer of the Stargate franchise.

My interviewing style is different, and let me try to kind of put bookends around it—and you can see I’m struggling just to sort of describe that. So this is what I do. I don’t really have a list of questions. I formulate a list of questions and how I think I’d like it to go in my mind, but then I’m open to the way that the conversation works.

And then at the same time, you’re there. I think of you being there. I think of the average person who’s listening to a podcast. I don’t want you to ever say, “Oh, why didn’t you ask them that? Oh, if I was interviewing them, I’d ask them this.” Well, I try to do that for you.

Reaching guests is direct. I reach out directly. I don’t use a service. I don’t like filling out forms. And a lot of times, it’s an email or a DM in some way, whether it’s on YouTube or Twitter or what have you. Sometimes it takes literally six or more months to get in touch with someone. Sometimes they’re busy, and sometimes they’re kind of putting you off because they don’t know who you are. I mean, if you say, “Hey, I’m Mark with Alchemy for Life,” they go, “What, what?”

Those interviews are kept to about an hour. And when I say they’re kept to about an hour, there’s a number of reasons. I don’t like podcast episodes that are extra long, and I’ll get into that later. But for interviews, I promise people I will only take one hour of their valuable time. And I think it’s very valuable. And for you to sit there and just have a conversation with a stranger for an hour or more is really wonderful. And I remind them when we get to the end of the hour, and some people actually say, “Well, no, can we go longer?”

And so that leads me to the philosophy and the format. So, for those, they are one hour. My episodes in which I try to do what I do for you are kept at 10 minutes. And the reason I do that, there’s a number of reasons. One of them is I respect your time. I mean, if you’re going to listen to this, I’m not going to babble for 30 minutes instead of giving you what I could give you in 10 minutes. I think the majority of podcasts out there do the opposite, quite frankly.

My format is that I research and find something or notice something, and then I present it to you to raise your awareness. So the first part of the show is raising your awareness. The second part is, “Okay, what do we do with that?” And then the third part is moving forward and kind of a homework. And people think homework’s a bad word, but it’s not. It’s sort of like something to do or think about after the show. I want every single episode to be something that you take at least one thing moving forward and go, “I’m going to think about that. I’m going to write that down. I’m going to do that.”

And speaking of actionable takeaways, the Check Mark app that I created also has the episodes in there, and it includes the homework in a really cool list to use. I don’t really know of any other podcasts out there in which they have an app that you can use as a to-do list, but also has the episodes in there that you can search. It’s kind of cool. Check it out.

My philosophy in really approaching everything, which includes the show, is the 3 D’s. And there’s actually 5, I think at one time I wrote them down. But for me, it’s Discover, Distill, and Disseminate. So, I find something, I notice something. I try to research it and break it down so that it makes sense and that I’m not fibbing. And then disseminate means, you know, I show it to you. I get it out to the masses. I get it out to you so that you can see it as well, and you can go, “Oh, I didn’t realize there was this known psychological effect of doing this. I didn’t even know what the parasympathetic nervous system was. Three Voices? That’s crazy talk. What’s that?”

As far as the production of the show, it’s my massive team. And when I say my massive team, I mean me. That’s it. It’s just me. I’m the person that creates the graphics, I’m the person that records the show, sets up the clients, reaches out to the guests, posts about it, and so forth. I don’t even use automation to post. I don’t like when people use automation because I can tell right away. It’s like static. You see the same thing posted time and time again, and you’re like, “And?” Like I’m supposed to pay attention to you in this thing you posted, but you couldn’t take the time to post it? Now look, I understand when you have a lot going on, it makes sense to set up, you know, HootSuite and all that other stuff. I get it. But for me, I just post something thoughtful about each episode because I care about each episode. Each episode means something to me. I put my heart into it.

Sorry, I need to back up. When we were talking about the show format and things like that, one of the things I also like to do is like integrate things. So if I mention something to you, but it’s something I’ve talked about at length in a book or touched on in a book, I mention that book as well. Like I said Three Voices before, if there’s something that is related to intuition, I’ll say, “Hey, by the way, in Three Voices, I talk about that and it’s called the first voice.” So I like to cross-reference everything in the library, and I’m your friendly neighborhood card catalog for all of my stuff.

Okay, back to the production. So, I have some interesting thoughts on AI, and I’ve probably done four episodes on it, and I have another one that’s probably going to come out right after this one. AI has its place as sort of like a bean counter and sorting machine, but I am absolutely against AI doing anything remotely creative for me. It has never written for me, it never will.

And the only thing it does, or there are two things it does for me: One, I actually have a paid subscription to a service that allows me to do AI art. And we can talk about that and argue with me about that later. But it will take literally 10, 20, 30, hundreds of iterations to get one image that I want correctly. I don’t go into ChatGPT and say, “Oh, make me an image about this, make me this flyer that makes me throw up.” Instead, I craft something over and over again to the point where I go crazy. And that’s the art I sometimes use. There’s one that turned out really well, it was a little boy who was like fascinated with wonder and creativity, and I thought that one turned out really well.

The other thing is I will run by my particular AI the SEO titles for my stuff. Sometimes I listen, sometimes I tweak it, sometimes I don’t. As of this show, I have actually switched the software that I use to produce these episodes.

As far as monetization, with the reach that I have and so forth, I have none. I’ve been approached a couple times about, you know, a certain pill or a certain this or that that they will pay me to talk about, but I’d also have to take it. And I’m not doing that. I’m just I’m not going to be taking any kind of drugs or medicines or herbs or whatever just to put it on the show. If you want me to say, “Hey, this is a great vacuum because, you know, I’ve noticed that and I did the research,” that’s fine. You know, please send me a vacuum.

So because of that, I’d like to think I have some pretty good sponsorship integrity, which is at this time none. But I also don’t really have any support. I mean, I do have Patreon set up for this, but I have never gotten a subscribing Patreon person. I mean, I have a donation link for people, I have a Buy Me a Coffee thing. So people are always welcome to do that. You’d think after 300, or after 100 or 50, at some point I would have said, “Well, dang, this is—I don’t make money doing this.” And you’d be right, because I did. I did that many times. I had this little meeting with myself and thought, “Mark, why are you doing this?”

And for me, the reason I do it is it’s sort of the outreach wing of what I do. You get to hear about my books, my thought processes, the new things I’m working on, how everything integrates together, all that stuff. And you don’t have to pay anything for it. You don’t have to even go pick up a book or do that—please pick up a book—but you don’t have to do any of that stuff. You can just simply listen to these episodes.

And speaking of listening to the episodes, I make this available on Spotify, iTunes, YouTube, and on my Alchemy for Life site. There’s an embed on there where you can look at each and every one of these, and there’s a player you could play in the browser while you’re reading the transcript or reading the articles that I write. In some cases, I write an entirely different article. And people have thought I’m crazy because I record this, and then I go back and I go, “Well, now I’m going to write that in—not a conversational voice, which is what this is, hello—but instead, I do it as an authoritative voice, which is how you write articles where you’re trying to teach something.”

There’s actually two pages on the Alchemy for Life site for this podcast: One just shows all the pretty graphics that I have, and it’s in chronological order. And then there’s another page that’s just text that specifically lists every single episode. And the cool thing about that is Command+F on a Mac, Control+F on Windows, will allow you to search that page. So if there’s a name or a concept or something that you want to look for, boom, you can do that. And in the Check Mark app, it does that as well.

So let’s talk about you. Because I’m in a vacuum. How many emails, how many comments, how much feedback would you think I get? If your answer is anything other than, “Well, none,” well, you’re wrong. There’s an incredible lack of communication, and it bothers me. It’s sad, because I put a lot of work into this, and I’d love to hear how you feel about something. I’d love for you to say, “Well, Mark, I disagree with what you said in this particular episode.” And you can go into Patreon without paying anything and actually be part of communications.

I envisioned having after-listener parties in which people would listen to this and then we’d get together and everyone would sort of talk about a specific podcast episode. Wouldn’t that be kind of a fun community to form? Like people who are like-minded, as they say, but people who are really open-minded and enjoy this stuff. And then I can sort of moderate and do that. I would love to do that, and I hope someday I’m able to do that. Hopefully before 400, 500, or 1,000.

So if you haven’t commented, feel free. I’m open and I listen. There are a number of ways to communicate with me. You can email. Again, Patreon’s fun because that way people can see your comment and then there might be other people who say, “Yeah, you’re right.”

If you haven’t rated this podcast, I implore you, please. I mean, obviously I hope that every rating is 5 stars, but, you know, rate with your heart. And if it’s something that you got something out of, I’d love to hear about it. I have some really great—I have some great ratings, except for when I was review-bombed. And you can always see that there’s 5-star ratings from people and they have this great description, and then there’s that 1-star rating. And you’re like, “Oh, what didn’t you like? Did you just come from the dentist? What’s wrong?” And that sort of thing happened to my books, too. And, you know, it is what it is.

But your voice is heard and it’s added to the whole, and it really means a lot to me. If you’re like, “Look, Mark, I’m not going to throw you any money, but I can say something kind,” by all means, do that. It means the world to me. And that’s why I do this. If this podcast got in your hands and you yourself also have a podcast and you’re looking for guests, I am open to talking about all the amazing things that I work on.

The music I use for this podcast is from Audionautics—Audionautics, excuse me, I never say that right—and it is under the Creative Commons, so I’m free to use it. The theme song, however, was created by me, and it’s much longer than what you hear in the beginning. It’s got an awful lot of words and it tells the whole Alchemy story, but I don’t use it. I just use that beginning part that fires me up.

So, in closing, if this is the very first episode, oh my god, I apologize. I don’t normally ramble on for this long. And I know for you, you’re probably like, “Oh, well, that’s not a big deal. We just hit the 15-minute mark.” And if you’ve been with me for a long time, if you’ve been with me for more than one—this is your second episode—thank you. You’re a long-time listener. I really appreciate it.

I know what it takes to listen to a podcast, which is why I don’t do hour-long or hours-long rambling about stuff. I mean, if you really want to hear that, go sit in a bar next to an old dude and ask him a bunch of questions. But I’d like to do something that gives you tangible takeaways. So I really appreciate you listening and being a listener and subscriber. It really means a lot to me. If I get to work with you sometime in the future, even cooler. But regardless of that, thank you from the bottom of my heart.

This is the 300+ episode.

Take care of yourself. You mean a lot to me.

Can you truly never go without intent? How important is intent in your everyday actions?

Well, hey there. Welcome back. It takes a lot to keep coming back like this. And that’s actually what we’re going to talk about today. So, let me ask you this to hook you in the beginning. So, is there something that you do that you are kind of keeping tally on? Like it’s been X amount of days that you’ve done this. Like you go on a diet or you quit smoking or you’re trying to give up a a habit or you’re trying to develop a good habit where you say, look, I’ve gone to the gym, you know, every other day for the last month? I’ve kept my desk at work, really tidy, I keep my email box under X amount of emails and if you do your crazy, that’s just I don’t know how you do that.

Or maybe your desire to keep a streak going is basically relegated to games. Maybe you have a game you, I don’t know, Candy Crush or one of those things, you kids are playing on your phones. You know what I mean. You may have some sort of game that you’re maintaining a streak. Or even you’re using a a language program that says, good job, you’ve maintained your streak. There’s a specific psychology to streaks and maintaining one, just like there is a specific psychology to collecting things. And many companies and games worth billions of dollars capitalize on those two facets of our psychology.

I know this because I’m attempting to do the same on the software that I created called Checkmark, which is basically a to-do list that capitalizes on you maintaining a streak of doing at least one thing each day. And then I capitalize on the psychology of collecting things by offering you collectible badges for accomplishments, like you check off something really late at night so now you get the Night Owl badge and stuff like that. I am not bringing this up in any way to try to get you to try Checkmark. I’m bringing this up because I failed miserably.

So, I was maintaining a streak, and again, a streak is simply you check at least one thing off every day, and I had to write all this complex stuff to track that properly and so forth, and you would get a little flame on the top of your screen that would count how many days you were maintaining a streak. So if every day for the last week you checked at least one thing off, now you’re at seven, and the next day is eight, and nine, and ten. But if you get through the entire day tomorrow and forget to check something off, boom, your streak resets to zero. Well, I maintained a streak of 221 days, and then one day, I lost it.

I was I was I I was a little taken aback because I had I had accomplished two of the things on there, but I simply hadn’t open it up and checked them off. And having the power to go and manipulate databases would have allowed me to just say, oh, come on, Mark, here you go. But I didn’t. I thought, I’m going to be just like the other users of it and take my lumps because that’s the way this should work. And the interesting thing is it sort of changed me. It sort of changed my concept of how I used it.

Because I was checking things off partially because I wanted to check something off. And you know, that’s a little bit of your old dopamine hit. But after I got through that loss, I kinda didn’t care about maintaining a streak anymore. I still cared about checking things off, I still cared about being productive, but I didn’t care if for some reason I didn’t check it off. Now, I had already had a very avid user of this who sang the praises to me and had a pretty complex professional life who had told me that he doesn’t care about streaks. He never did. And I had talked to him about streaks and he had like a seven-day streak one one time and that was it, he never got past that, and it was just because of the way he used it.

So now I was kinda in this mindset where a streak didn’t really matter. Did losing my streak change my desire to get things done? No. But it sort of changed my relationship with the way I recorded it. So the streak wasn’t propelling me to make sure I was productive. The streak was propelling me to make sure I recorded it. That’s a big difference.

And upon reflection, it makes me think about people, including myself, who sometimes do things, rather elaborate, enormous, productive things, and don’t really check it off. Meaning, they don’t really write it down, they don’t really think about it. One day, they’ll just become super productive. They’ll get all the yard work done, they’ll get a bunch of projects done, they’ll get a bunch of stuff done. And they won’t even think about it. It’s not like they had, hey, I had a honey-do list for myself or or or for my wife or what have you, and I got all this stuff done and I was finally able to check that off. They mentally checked it off because now they knew they had needed to do it anymore, but they didn’t do it so that they could check it off.

Do you understand the nuance there? One’s one’s the reverse of the other. One of them says, I have the thing to do, I better go do that so that it’s not on this list anymore. And the other one is, I have a thing to do, I’m going to do it. Oh, now that I did it, it’s not on the list. Does that even make any sense? I hope it does.

Understanding nuance of what I just said can help you understand the nuance of your productivity personality. Oh, I just made that up and I’m gonna write that down. Yes, it’ll be the next book. I’m kidding. But if you understand your productivity personality, it can help you to well motivate yourself, right? I mean, when it comes to certain things, and you know, we can go back to my book Because about monsters and unicorns and how they’re always there motivating you. But in this case, I’m just saying the simple motivation of to be or not to be, to do or not to do.

Because the former treats the, well, let me say it this way: the former makes you treat yourself like a second person, like a third, like a third person almost, and the latter just shoves you into the driver’s seat and says, I’m just going to do this. And let me explain what that means. So the former is saying, hey, future Mark, do this thing. I have a list I want you to do. So you’re sort of like two people. I gotta make myself do this, I’m lazy, I’m going to do this, okay, I’m setting myself up for this. And the other one just says, okay, I’m in control, I’m cognitive, what do I need to do? I’m just going to do this. And yeah, I’m not writing it down somewhere, I’m not checking it off, I just need to do this.

So, the latter is more present in the moment, but the former is more of a planner. It’s more logistics. And as you can imagine, both of these have strengths and weaknesses. And it’s no shock that you may flip between these. If you stick to one of these too long, it may cause some issues for you. You you may even have a spouse that says, you know, you don’t have to constantly be planning stuff, can we just figure out what we’re going to do tomorrow? Well, let’s write it down today. Oh no, I don’t want to write it down today, honey. Let’s can we play it by ear? Oh, I don’t like playing things by ear. Well, then you’re the former. You are, you know, your productivity personality is one that says, I need to have my checkmarks here.

If you’re more of the latter, then you’re somebody who feels constrained by that sort of thing. You may even feel constrained by your job. You may even bump into things when it comes to procedure manuals and things like that because you’re like, well no, I’ll know what to do when I get there. You see how that sounds just as dangerous as the other one, and that’s why you sometimes have to flip back and forth based on a case-by-case basis.

So, what do we do? Now that we’re in the awareness portion of the podcast, well, just be aware of this and figure out which one you are, and if it’s situational, and understand the benefits of either. I think if it, I think if it helps, there are a lot of people who spend their week being the former, meaning they’re in planning phase, and then for the weekend, they’re like, oh, it’s Saturday, I’m just not going to think. Or they save all that up and they go on their vacation.

And unfortunately, they may be married to a spouse that wants to plan vacation, that wants to say, every single day we’re going to get up at seven and we’re going to do this and this and this and this and this. And if they say, well, I’m on vacation, that may not land very well with their spouse. You’re on vacation and now you just want to waste it laying around? The the person isn’t laying around. The person is now living in the moment that they are not necessarily allowed to live in during the week because they are busy trading their time and energy so that they can bring resources home and put food on the table.

I hope this made a lot of sense. I hope my failure has allowed you to understand something. I’ll be happy to get right on that and continue to do so. So, take care of yourself, know that you are important, and I appreciate every person who listens to this. Thank you.