Using Science to Create the Perfect Day with Caroline Webb

Effortlessly Remember Anything – Lessons From A Grandmaster of Memory with Kevin Horsley

Your Ultimate Guide to Performing Under Pressure and Unleashing Confidence - Dr. Michael Gervais is BACK

Blindspots, Bias, Billionaires and Bridgewater with Dr. Adam Grant

The Scientific Search for The Self - Discovering Who You Truly Are with Dr. Robert Levine

How You Can Hack Your Creativity, Productivity, and Mood Using Your Environment with Benjamin Hardy

• Success is about growth, never plateauing
• Always be a student, always be growing
• Living according to a value system that you believe in / a cause you believe in / serving people who you love
• The difference between security and freedom. Many people base their security in something external to themselves. 
• Develop your own worldview / beliefs / values / goals to help form a more independent
• Transformational learning experiences” helps transform your world view and perception of yourself
• Stretch your mind, push your body - to start to open up your world view
• If you do not create and control your environment, your environment controls you 
• The western belief that we exist independent of our context, what psychological research shows is that your environment has a tremendous impact. Your environment shapes who you are.
• Mindfulness is awareness of your surrounding and how those surroundings influence you
• You can also shape your environment, and this creates the possibility for radical change
• Who you are is influenced and shaped by your environment
• Epigenetics shows that your environment has a huge impact on your personality
• Most people are unintentional in shaping their environment
• Personality is more of an adaptation to situations and unresolved trauma 
• The false belief of western culture is that we think personality is a fixed trait - science shows that it’s not
• Suppressed trauma can “freeze” your personality 
• Memories are social and contextual - they are shaped by your experiences 
• “You are a sick as your secrets” - the things you keep isolated are the things that keep your personality frozen, your personality changes and continues to grow, you are stuck as a child in some aspects of your personality 
• Will Durant - most people believe that history was shaped by heroes, “It’s not heroes that shape history, its demanding situations that create heroes - the average person could have double their ability or more if the situation demanded it of them”
• The Pygmalion effect
• How to “up the stakes” of your environment to create external situation to force you into the behaviors you want to create 
• The two kinds of “enriched environments” you need in order to maximize your performance
• Only 16% of creative ideas happen when you’re at your desk (when the mind is in a rested state)
• The concept of “psychological detachment” - letting go of work for a few days - really helps you fully engage when you come back to it
• The vital importance of recovery as a key component of being both happier and more productive
• How do you stop from self sabotaging? Put yourself in situations where its a self fulfilling prophecy. Create the environmental components necessary for you to succeed and thrive. 
• Creating “forcing functions” in your life to make yourself achieve the goals and results you want to create
• Creating appointments with yourself so you can have creative time
• Who you are right now is NOT what who you need to be to achieve the “big goals” you have set for yourself - otherwise you would have already achieved them and they wouldn’t be big goals
• “Pressure can bust a pipe or it can make a diamond”
• “Self signaling” concept from psychology - who you think you are is not a very stable perspective. You don’t really know yourself very well. 
• Its not your personality that creates your behavior, its your behavior that creates your personality. 
• Your behavior can reshape your personality. 
• “The unconscious will only allow you to have what you believe you deserve.” Dr. David Hawkins
• How do you make yourself believe you can do/be more?
• • Invest in yourself, spend money on coaching etc towards what you desire. This upgrades your internal sense of what you can be, do, and have.
• Creative output - “quantity is the path to quality” / “it’s better to be prolific than perfect"
• What Got You Here Won't Get You There - You have to change your strategy. You can’t be tied to just what worked in the past. 
• Your environment is the world outside of you - unless you make changes out there, you will never make any permanent changes inside your head - you can only spend so much time visioning, setting goals, etc - you have to start changing the external environment to make big changes 
• Start by examining your environment - examine whats around you and what’s being created around you. 

Four Questions That Will Change Your World - An Exploration of “The Work” with Byron Katie

In this episode, we take a journey into the inquiry know as “The Work’ and uncover the 4 question framework that you can use to break down negative thoughts and limiting beliefs. We examine what happens when we argue with reality, look at the difference between being right and being free, explore the causes of suffering, and much more with our guest Byron Katie. 

Byron Katie is an American speaker, author, and founder of the method of self-inquiry known as “The Work”. She has worked with millions of individuals at both private and public events in prisons, hospitals, treatment centers, universities, and schools. She is the author of three bestselling books and her work has been featured in TIME, The Huffington Post, Oprah, and much more!
 

• What happens when you don’t accept reality?
• Do you like it when you scrape your knee?
• How should you deal with negative experience?
• Missing the miracle of life by arguing with it
• What happens when we get caught up in having to be right?
• Why it’s painful to “believe your own thoughts” and why you should question your own thinking
• The Four Questions of “The Work” that can allow you to challenge your negative thoughts and limiting beliefs
• Using the “Four Questions” to meditate on and reflect on challenges in your life
• How to become a better listener, listening is powerful
• When you argue with someone else, you miss valuable information and become disconnected with that person
• We are often looking outside for the answers to our questions - we should instead look inside
• The only way to change the world is to question what you believe about the world?
• How to be open and fearless
• What you think that causes your suffering - it's only what you’re thinking and believing that causes your suffering
• Test it for yourself
• What we think and believe create our identities
• What you THINK causes your suffering - it's not the external world. The events of the
• People don’t need to change - what you think and believe about them could use some work
• Be aware of your life right here, right now - the value and the gift of life and how to take care of it.
• The Four Questions of the Work and how you can apply each of them
  • Is it true?
  • Can I absolutely know that it’s true?
  • Who am I when I believe this to be true?
  • Who would I be without this thought?
• Turnaround
  • You can never change others but you can always change yourself

The Secret That Silicon Valley Giants Don’t Want You To Know with Dr. Adam Alter

How You Can Become A Superconnector with Scott Gerber

Brain Scans Reveal The Powerful Memory Techniques of Memory Champions, Greek Philosophers, and SuperLearners with Jonathan Levi

Why Your Brain Struggles To Understand Money with Jeff Kreisler

• Get rich cheating??? What’s that all about?
• The common tropes within the self help industry (and how many of them are not based in evidence)
• The power of satire to explore the underpinnings of human behavior
• What is money?
• Why do we have such a hard time thinking about money?
• Awareness of your biases is a huge difference maker (even if you do nothing other than just being aware of your biases)
• Spending is very obvious in our culture, but saving is not
• Research shows men are more willing to admit they take viagra, than how much money they've saved in their 401ks
• We dig deep into several of the mental biases that stop you from understanding money
• The relativity bias and how that impacts spending habits
• ‘What do you want for dinner” vs “would you rather have chicken or fish for dinner”
• One of the most obvious traps that we fall into with money
• “The Pain of Paying” Bias and how it impacts what we think about money
• “The credit card premium” and how using a credit card makes you pay more
• Anchoring bias and arbitrary coherence. 
• How your social security number could impact how much you pay for a bottle of wine
• We often obsess about small financial decisions, but make judgements on a whim with large financial decisions like buying a home or car
• Self control is really hard
• “Ulysseses contracts," reward substitution and how to create self control
• How self awareness is the cornerstone of making better financial decisions
• The locksmith example and how we misunderstand value and fairness

The Evidence Based Habits You Need To Build an Unstoppable Brain with Dr. Mike Dow

“The Most Innovative Experimental Psychologist In The World Today” on Luck, Deception, and Success - Dr. Richard Wiseman

The Real Strategies Top Achievers Use To Create Results with Jeff Haden

• How Jeff achieved his dream and realized it wasn't nearly as exciting as he thought it would be
• Top achievers don't have special sauce - its hard work and hustle that gets them there
• In interviewing and studying top achievers and the lessons from studying them
• The power of process and the power of routine
• Map out and create a blueprint of what you want to do 
• The power of doing the right things every day without fail 
• How do we find out what the right things to do are?
• Find someone who has achieved what you want to do, look at what they did to get there, create a blueprint based off of that and execute it
• You don't need to reinvent the wheel 
• The hard part is actually what gets you to where you want to be 
• Motivation comes from action and progress - not the other way around
• Your muse comes from action, you get ideas from doing things, you get inspiration from getting out there and getting started
• 2 quick and easy tricks to be as productive as possible every day
• A fantastic daily productivity strategy you can implement right away
• Setting your daily MIT every week to avoid decision fatigue and make high leverage choices every week
• "I can’t” vs “I don’t” and what research reveals about using one phrase vs the other
• The benefits of working out in the morning
• How to generate energy in the afternoon with small rest periods
• How do you balance hard work and hustle with recovery?
• High leverage thinking, focusing questions, and avoiding busywork
• The “breaking a sweat” principle - starting with the smallest thing possible
• How do you deal with big, far off goals? “the distance between here and there”
• How Jeff did 100,000 pushups in a year
• Set big goals, but focus on the routine/process every single day to execute 
• How talking about your intentions and big goals can actually prevent you from achieving them
• How Jeff want from being a factory manager to a prolific writer, writing more than 40 books and countless articles
• Jeff’s daily writing habit and how he developed it
• Break down into parts, and execute each of those component parts by day
• The power of being an “and” instead of being hyper focused

Simple Keys To Reading Anyone’s Hidden Emotions with Psychology Legend Dr. Paul Ekman

Everything You Know About Sleep Is Wrong with Dr. Matthew Walker

Finding Joy In A World Full of Suffering - Lessons From a Former Buddhist Monk with Robert Thurman

• How Robert’s journey took him to becoming a Tibetan Monk under the Dalai Llama
• The human being is a learning machine
• The dogma of materialism - mind is the power that directs matter 
• Inner science / buddhist science
• The basic misunderstandings of buddhism from a western perspective
• • Life is suffering
  • It’s just meditation
• Meditation without context isn’t useful 
• The two kinds of meditation
• • Clearing your mind of thinking / emptying the mind
  • Analytic / critical meditation or “insight meditation”
  • • Thinking something directed towards the exploration of yourself, ideas, or things around you 
• How an egotistical approach creates “guaranteed misery” - you could become the most powerful person on the planet and people still wont think you’re important 
• Why enlightenment is not clearing your mind of thoughts
• The importance of focusing on and being open to other people
• You can learn if you examine yourself and your world
• The unexamined life will be frustrating
• “Dis-identifying from the thought flow” will not get you to enlightenment
• Look more objectively at your thought flow - see where thought flows arise, penetrate the thought flow, see the negative thoughts and the positive thoughts
• • What thought is that?
  • How accurate is it?
  • Where does it come from?
  • Whose voice is it? my mother’s voice? my fathers? my uncles? my teacher?
  • Gain leverage on how the mind works, edit how the mind works reinforce the positive insights, de-enforce the negative insights 
• Stripping away false identities and beliefs
• It’s helpful to have help of others - mobilize minds that are further along the path than you are - your the only one who can learn your reality in a  viscerally transformative way - use their help and follow their methods
• How Eckart Tolle battled back from the verge of suicide - looking critically at negative thoughts 
• Experiential understanding of the nature of reality - reality is beyond anyone’s idea of reality
• The experience of reality is beyond our ability to describe it
• How does the Dalai Llama keep up his joy, good humor, and happiness in a world full of so much suffering?
• The nature of life itself is blissful. Reality is good. The more you’re open to reality, the happier you are. 
• Broaden your attitude and orientation, don’t deny the bad experiences
• When you’re miserable, you can’t help people. When you’re happy, you can. 
• You have to put your own happiness oxygen mask on before you can help anyone else
• The habitual perception that we are our own isolated egos vs the universe 
• Interconnectedness of all life
• Suffering and frustration are rooted in the false belief that you and your ego are the most important thing
• The universe is empty of any non-relational entity
• Buddhism is the opposite of ignorance is bliss, reality is bliss. You already have bliss, you have blocks of knowing and feeling and understand it. It’s YOU. You’re made of it. 
• Wave particle paradox, Heinsberg uncertainty and the science of interconnectedness
• Quantum physics, buddhism and the observer paradox

Evidence Reveals The Most Important Skill of the 21st Century with Dr. Tasha Eurich

• How Tasha uses evidence based psychology principles to make people more succesful
• The difference between people who plateau and people who meet and defeat challenge head on
• Self awareness “the meta skill of the 21st century"
• What does the data show is linked to high self awareness?
• Self awareness is foundational to all skills required to succeed
• What does the Science say about Self Awareness?
• Self aware people are:
• • More fulfilled
  • Better communications
  • More confidence
  • Have better relationships
  • More effective leaders
  • Run more profitable companies
• Self awareness sets the UPPER LIMIT for the skills you need to be successful in the world today
• "The secret weapon of the 21st century”
• 95% people of people think that they are self aware but only 10-15% actually are
• On a good day 80% of people are lying to themselves about lying to themselves
• Conclusions from reviewing over 800 scientific studies to figure out WHAT self awareness was
• The 2 broad categories of self awareness - the ability to see yourself cleary
• • Internal Self Awareness (introspective people)
  • External Self Awareness (pleasers)
• Those 2 types of self knowledge are completely unrelated
• Self knowledge underpins any other skill
• Self awareness is an “infinitely learnable skill”
• Research conclusions from people who began with a lack of self awareness, but then developed self awareness
• There are no demographic commonalities between self awareness
• The 3 categories of Self Awareness Unicorns 
• • Being in a new role / new set of rules
  • Earthquake events - usually negative - that are so devastating that they either cause is to bury our heads in the sand, or they become a catalyst for self awareness
  • The MOST LIKELY - everyday insights
• You have a tremendous amount of opportunities within your daily life to improve your self awareness
• The barriers to self awareness are myriad
• • Internal wiring of human beings - change the way you introspect
  • • The power of substituting the word WHY for the word WHAT
  • The world we live in today - social media, reality TV, the “cult of self”
• The cult of the self - and how our culture damages self awareness
• The challenges of excavating our subconscious / unconscious mind
• Moving forward with purpose, logic, and curiosity
• Too much Introspection can make you anxious and depressed 
• To gain insight, focus on moving FORWARD
• Do your introspective practices serve you?
• Tasha’s training regimen to start to develop self awareness
• Tools for improving your internal and external self awareness
• The power of "The Daily Check-In”
• • What went well today?
  • What didn’t go well?
  • What can I do to be smarter tomorrow?
• How you can use a “dinner of truth” to ask “What do I do that’s most annoying to you?”
• • Dont’ defend, explain, disagree, just LISTEN
• The truth about feedback - you don't have to listen to or act on feedback from anyone
• How to become aware of your true strengths and gifts - ask your close friends
• • WHY are you friends with me?
• Most self awareness unicorns rely on a handful of KEY people to provide them with feedback
• • Someone has to truly have your back and want you to be truly successful
  • They have to be willing to tell you the good, the bad, and the ugly
• The power of “loving critics”
• Our strenghts - seem obvious to us which makes it hard for us to see them 
• You must be very strategic and very focused on WHO you get feedback from
• Self awareness unicorns don’t rely on other people to approach them with feedback. They never assumed that people would tell them ANYTHING - they took it on themselves to get regular feedback on their own terms
• You need feedback from multiple sources to get a clear picture 
• The easiest, highest payoff activity to get initial self awareness

Never Eat Alone - How Relationship Expert Keith Ferrazzi Built His World Class Network

• Why you need to make the shift form networking to authentic relationship building
• The importance of leading with generosity to build real authentic relationships
• Are you still clinging to the rugged john wayne individualism and self focus?
• • Keith wants to shift that to recognition that the greatest things in our lives only happen via co-creation
• Co-creation vs collaboration - it's one step beyond collaboration, going higher together
• How do we commit to growing together in the process? 
• Co-elevation is an emotional commitment
• Traditional hierarchies and silos no longer serve us
• You have to put in the work to bring about co-elevation and co-creation
• Take full responsibility for all the relationships around you - take responsibility for making those people successful 
• The victim mindset and how to defeat it
• For someone stuck in a victim mindset - how do they start making the shift towards responsibility?
• “What’s your blue flame?”
• • What really matters to others?
  • What drives success in their eyes?
  • How do you serve that?
• Do you really know the blue flame of your boss? What does your boss truly care about?
• How do you become a conduit for other people to achieve their goals? (And why that’s so important) 
• Focus on fully understanding what a person needs, wants and how you can serve them
• 2 Key shifts you have to make to get out of the victim mindset:
• • Understanding that it’s all on you to take action
  • Understand that it’s all about “them” (and the more broadly you define them, the more successful you will be)
• You can’t unite people, you can’t achieve greatness, unless you know how to create “us"
• Creating is the new competency of leadership
• How do you invite this community into becoming a movement?
• The 3 reason people don’t get on board with Co-creation
• • Laziness
  • Cowardice
  • Sense of Entitlement / Ego / Vindictiveness / Indulgence
• You have no choice if you want to be successful other than to embrace relationship building
• Practice is the KEY to building successful relationships and enabling co-creation
• How success has impacted Keith’s networking tactics and strategies
• As you become successful - the question becomes more and more about filtering and where to focus time and energy 
• The earlier you practice, the more often you do it, the more concrete and impactful those behaviors will be 
• All around you are extraordinary people - hang out with them and build them for the long term 

Your Secret Weapon to Becoming Fearless with Jia Jiang

• Jia’s personal relationship with rejection
• The misalignment between wanting to achieve and being afraid of rejection
• The only way to overcome your fear is to embrace it and meet it head on
• How to become a badass and become fearless
• Saying no with grace - how to say no with grace
• • Show people alternatives
  • Give them something else / help them to get a yes in some way
  • Have respect
• "Everything amazing and beautiful happens outside your comfort zone"
• The amazing power of forcing yourself to constantly challenge and operate outside your comfort zone
• The importance of understanding the vast majority will stay say no to you and why that doesn’t matter
• • It doesn’t matter when you get rejected
  • The few people that say yes make a huge impact - a real breakthrough
• "How many yesses have I missed in my life?”
• You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take
• It’s not about getting a yes - it’s about EXPLORING and CREATING SOMETHING
• The worst thing that can happen is you saying no to yourself
• It’s about having fun and challenging yourself
• Jia’s advice for someone who is afraid to take the first step
• How to take the first step and overcome the inertia of facing your first rejection
• Start small, just a little bit outside of your comfort zone, and grow
• How you can even blend rejection therapy into your work and your career as well
• If you ask enough, there is no request that will get rejected by everyone
• What to do if you feel like you’re bothering people when you ask them for something
• Be curious, don’t make your goal to get a yes - make your goal to ask 10 people 
• Turning no into yes, and the magic of asking “why”
• Ask people why they said no to you - find out what the reason is
• What Jia learned from asking a stranger to plant a flower in his back yard
• The power of doubt and empathy
• Humor and positivity - don't take yourself too seriously
• Give a stranger a high five! 
• We go through a bunch of rapid rejection techniques you can use right now
• You can do rejection therapy for FUN - or you can align it with you goals! 
• Embrace rejection - rejection means something GOOD not something BAD
• Rejection doesn’t mean you’re wrong - the stronger the rejcetion, the stronger your connection with people on the other side
• The flip side of rejection is the power of people who are part fo your tribe
• Jia’s Life Mission to the movement of rejection therapy 

The Psychology Secrets of Extreme Athletes, NFL Teams & The World’s Top Performers with Dr. Michael Gervais

• Years in the trenches with top performers to get the best strategies
• The importance of rugged and hostile environments to cultivating presence and peak performance
• The value of working hard and getting right on the edge of capacity in order to grow
• Our ancient brain is the thing that gets us stuck, keeps us safe, and keeps us small
• The importance of stillness - the place where all of life happens
• Expressing your authentic self in harmony with other people
• There are only 3 things you can train as a human
• • You can train your body
  • You can train your craft - this varies by person - can be anything from writing to motorcross to partening
  • You can train your mind
  • Everything falls into those buckets when we talk about the development of the human experience
• A personal philosophy is one of the most significant anchors you can ground yourself with. Great achievers always have clarity of personal philosophy
• Line up your thoughts, words, and actions across any environment - there is a sense of power that comes from that - an inner knowing and being that is so rock solid that you can move eloquently in any environment when you have that mindset
• The life-long quest of discovering your own personal philosophy - and the 3 methodologies
• • Mindfulness - being present with your inner experience
  • Being around wise people - people who are switched on, people who are having deep convos, talking about their philosophies, having those conversations
  • Writing - the art of writing, taking a thought and all the words in your native tongue and lock down these ideas and concepts
• Start with putting your philosophy to memory, and then most importantly begin putting your philosophy into practice
• There’s nothing new in the world of self help - the science is super clear - this is what we know to be true - you just have to do the work
• Optimism is a foundational pillar for mental toughness, optimism is about how you think about your future
• Optimism is a learned behavior - how to train it
• • Relentless belief that you can focus your mind on what’s good
  • First function - without awareness of inner dialogue you’re dead in the water - you must have meditation/mindfulness - train your inner experience to become more aware of thoughts and sensations
  • Second - Martin Seligman - focus on 3 good things - gratitude journal 
  • Become a researcher of amazing / researcher of good in your own life 
• Mindfulness is the backbone that runs through all of these strategies
• Going through difficult things doesn’t mean you will be traumatized - Post Traumatic Growth is also possible - How can you achieve post traumatic growth?
• “Small t trauma” vs “Big T Trauma"
• Resilience is at the center of growth - and the only way to become resilient is to go through difficult situations
• The difficult things you go through either get you stuck or push you to the edge of growth.
• In modern life for the average person  - the most dangerous thing is what people think of us
• Getting uncomfortable is a requirement for you to be your best. This can be easily demonstrated with any world class performer from music to sports to any field.
• Knowledge won’t carry us through - it's not about more information - that learning has to turn into application and action. Learning has to turn into insights - and those insights need to change your behavior
• The 4 Pillars of Recovery
• • Sleeping well - the science is pretty clear - the commitment to doing that requires incredible discipline
  • Eating & Hydration are necessary pillars - colorful vegetables & clean protein 
  • Moving well - getting your body switched on, oxygenating your system - 6-7 hours of moderate to intense movement per week
  • Think Well - your mind is an incredible tool, but it also needs to be harnessed
• Most people cannot even fathom the amount of vulnerability necessary to get to the truth - radical vulnerability - allowing the inner stuff to be revealed - is incredible, and so hard to do - most of us retreat to our normal patterns 
• Doing difficult things expands your comfort zone
• How do you strike the balance between achievement and non-attachment?
• Winning is fun, winning pays bills - but the far deeper part of that is that the process of becoming - the process of knowing that you have what it takes, the process of being creative to solve problems on the fly and make decisions is much more fun. 
• Winning is a requirement to keep going - but in order to cultivate non-attachment you have to be focused on the present moment
• Practice is more important than the conceptual idea itself
• What is your “craft" and why is it so important?
• For most people who are not on the world stage - begs the question - what is my craft? It’s not as complicated as it sounds - what are you most passionate about - what is the thing you care so much about you love doing it, you put work into it?
• Get back to seeing what we do from 9-5 as a primary craft - think about your work and your job as a craft
• Social media has made us lose our way, lose our true north, lose our focus on our craft
• Taking time to think about and articulate your personal philosophy - just starting WRITING “My personal philosophy is…” in 25 words or less - what do you stand for, what are you all about? What’s your true north, your compass?
• Write down the people who have inspired you in life - and next to their names right down the characteristics that they expemplify - those characertics might be part of your philosophy
• How you can engineer your inner experience
• Mindfulness is not a relaxation training - it's a focus training 
• That moment of awareness (that your mind has wandered) is the work taking place
• Minimum effective dose is 6-8 minutes, optimal dose is 20 minutes
• Compete to become the best version of yourself
• Every day is an opportunity to create a living masterpiece 
• And much more! 

Introducing Tuesday Talks - The 80/20 Principle

We're extremely excited to introduce to you a new occasional segment of The Science of Success, Tuesday Talks!

Are you tired of all the BS and fluff that oftentimes accompanies personal development? Tuesday Talks delivers to you Evidence Based Growth tactics that are proven to work and deliver maximum impact in your life in under five minutes. 

In this episode, we dive into the 80/20 principle and the impact it can have on your life starting today. This principle can be applied to everything in life. By utilizing it the right way, you can ensure you are focusing on the right things, getting the most out of your time, and ultimately, begin producing more results than you ever thought possible. 

Proven Practices For Building The Ultimate Competitive Advantage with Todd Davis

• The culture of an organization can make all the difference
• The nature of relationships between people becomes a companies ultimate competitive advantage
• Todd’s lessons from working with and coaching hundreds of companies and executives
• What did Sarte mean when he said that “Hell is other people?”
• The ultimate way you are measured is by the results you get
• You get your results WITH and THROUGH and other people
• What we see determines everything we do, and what we do determines the results we get
• Consider stepping back and understanding that their may be a different way to view things - that can powerfully impact your relationships
• Ask yourself “have you considered the other person’s perspective?”
• An exercise can you use right now to start to see the world from other people’s perspectives
• The power of examining your real motives
• How to avoid the pitfall of self deception
• Journaling exercise you can use to understand your real motives
• “The Five Whys” - keep asking why until you get to the root cause
• The most effective, successful, and influential people start with themselves first
• Be the change you seek in others
• Your circle of influence vs your circle of concern
• Why you should focus your time, energy, effort, and resources on things that you can impact and control
• The power of asking “Can you help me understand something?”
• Start with humility - the power of having humility in dealing with tough conversations
• Proactive, effective people don’t wait for feedback, they actively go and seek it out
• The 4 common reasons why we don’t seek feedback (and what you can do about them)
• A great opening line for dealing with tough conversations and situations 
• Seeking validation vs actually seeking feedback
• How to “behave your way to credibility”
• The 2 key components for credibility - character and competence 
• The importance of taking the long view when building credibility
• An exercise you can use to build your credibility over the long term
• The single biggest mistake of influencing other people - not “walking your talk”
• Make sure someone deeply understands your intent
• How to communicate effectively with someone who is in an emotional state 
• When emotions are high - that’s not the moment to start addressing the problem
• With people - "fast is slow and slow is fast"
• Take the time to let someone share, just try to understand them 
• The socratic method of influencing people - if you ask the right questions, seek understanding, and uncover the real issues - you can solve serious problems
• Todd shares a personal story that deeply impacts the lessons we discuss in the show
• In the end, relationships are the most important thing. 

How To Learn More In Record Time - Speed Reading, Concentration, & Memory with Jim Kwik

• We’ve discovered more in the last 20 years about the human brain than we learned in the 2000 years before that
• How Jim went from growing up with learning challenges from an early childhood head injury to become an expert in accelerated learning and speed reading
• How to read 30 books in 30 days
• How we can actually retain what we read
• Knowledge is not power, its only potential power 
• The one super power you want to master in the 21st century (learn faster)
• Traditional speed reeding, skimming, skipping words, getting the gist of something is not enough - its about fully capturing and retaining the information
• The average person reads 1-2 books per year, but the average CEO reads 4-5 books per month
• What Bill Gates said the #1 super power he would pick would be
• Warren buffet said he wasted 10 years of his life reading too slowly
• How you can gain 2 months of productive time per year
• Why motivation is such a critical component of accelerated learning - have a purpose for why you read
• "H-Cubed” - 3 things you need for motivation to have accelerated learning 
• The fastest way to read something is not to read it at all - figured out what your end goal is
• How you can remember names more effectively & become a great connector
• If you forget someone’s name, you show that they’re not important to you
• Self Awareness is a super power 
• “Smart reading” - what’s your goal for reading these books?
• How to give a speech without notes
• Half of success is just mindset, then get the mechanics right
• Brain Hacks for Speed Reading
• “Leaders are readers” and why Jim thinks you should read 30 minutes per day 
• 12 things Jim does every morning to jumpstart his brain
• Mental fitness is as important, if not more important, than mental intelligence
• If you read 45 minutes a day, on average, you should be able to read a book a week
• Using a “visual pacer” and how that brain hack can help you instantly double your reading speed
• The adventure of lifelong learning
• One of the biggest traps in the personal development field is the “next new thing”
• People who are truly on the path to Mastery focus on the fundamentals and get REALLY REALLY GOOD at the BASICS
• How to get a 20-50% boost in your reading speed right now
• Excellence comes down to a set of routines, rituals, and habits
• If we always do the easy thing in life, life becomes hard, if we do the hard things, life becomes easy
• BEMAT = behavior equals motivation ability and trigger
• The primacy principle and the recency principle - and why you should chunk and take breaks to create more “beginnings and ends”
• Start as simply as possible - pick up a book and read one word
• "Upleveling your ability to process information” not just skimming - reading so that you understand 
• Another brain hack - talk to someone else about what you just learned - we learn best by co-creating and sharing information
• If you make everything important than nothing is important
• It's not about reading slowly or quickly - its about reading for understanding - reading faster creates flow and focus 
• Read for maximum comprehension and understanding for the goal you have for your reading
• You can learn things faster by overcoming the forgetting curve - you forget 80% of what you’ve learned within 2 days
• There is a difference between taking notes vs making notes - note taking is capturing ideas, note making is writing your impressions of what you’re capturing - you’re CREATING, questions you have, how it relates to what you already know, how you would teach it to someone else
• Ultimately all learning comes down to associations - that’s why metaphors are so powerful
• Mindmapping is an incredibly powerful strategy for you to remember concepts and ideas
• Most successful people in any industry journal on a regular basis - journalling helps us retain information and make new associations to things
• Brain hack - learn something with the intention of teaching someone else very specific - or think you were coaching someone or teaching them or giving a presentation on these topics. When you teach something you get to learn it twice. 
• The FAST method - 4 strategies for learning anything more quickly
• • Forget what you already know about a subject (set it aside)
  • Active - be active about learning (doing problems, engaging your mind, etc). Learning is not a spectator sport. 
  • State - all learning is state dependent. Information + emotion becomes a long term memory. 
  • Teach - learn to benefit yourself and learn to teach others
• Forget about your limitations - if you fight for your limitations, you get to keep them - add the word “yet” to negative self talk - be very careful to the words you put behind the words “I am”
• Be a thermostat not a thermometer
• To turn knowledge into real power - you have to schedule it into an activity and execute that 

The Skeptics Guide To Meditation With Dan Harris

• How Dan went from being a skeptical hard-nosed reporter who thought meditation and self was was largely “bullshit”
• What happened when Dan had a panic attack in front of 5 million people on Live TV
• What it’s like to have your mind get hijacked by the most boring person alive
• Dan’s journey of visiting self help gurus, religious leaders, neuroscientists and more led him to one major conclusion about how to improve your brain and your body
• How many self help gurus are correct, but often not useful in a practical sense
• Simple and scientifically validated tool to deal with the voice in your head
• The secrets of "contemplative neuroscientists"
• How to train up the ability to focus, deal with emotions, be nice to other people, be nice to yourself, have patience, and be grateful
• The radical notion, supported by research, that you can literally train and transform your brain to prime it for happiness
• Happiness is skill, according to the science, and it can be trained
• There are thousands of kinds of meditation and it’s not useful to get overly dogmatic about the superiority of one method over the other
• Dan gravitates towards mindfulness meditation because it has valuable and strong research supporting it
• The basic and simple strategy you can use to start meditating RIGHT NOW
• You don’t need to clear your mind - clearing your mind is impossible
• Think about meditation like going to the gym - if you’re not sweating and panting you're not doing it right, meditation is like bicep curls for the brain
• The whole game of meditation is have the collision with the voice in your head and return to breath
• How to defeat anxiety, depression, and panic attacks using meditation
• What to do if you don’t have enough time to meditate
• The false belief that meditation is self indulgent and a waste of time
• The myth that you will lose your edge if you start meditating
• The different between responding wisely and reacting blindly
• How do we strike a balance between acceptance/mindfulness and achievement?
• Non-attachment to results - you are not fully in control of the universe - everything is interconnected and multifactorial - the wise stance for an ambitious person is to recognize that you shouldn’t be attached to results
• How do we battle back from nihilism if we go to deep down the path of buddhism?
• We do have some agency to impact the universe, but we aren’t the master of the universe
• The importance of seeing things as they are instead of as you want them to be
• It’s not about perfection its about marginal improvement,  a 10% improvement compounds
• Meditation is simple but not easy

The Ancient Molecule You Can Use To Unlock Peak Performance with Dr. Paul Zak

• Paul founded the field of Neuroeconomics - what is that?
• How are humans able to interact with total strangers when that is impossible in the animal kingdom?
• How do our brains balance the risks of meeting a stranger vs the benefits of increased social influence?
• Our brains live in this soup of chemicals, none of which we are aware of consciously
• How Paul’s groundbreaking research transformed what scientists thought about the production of oxytocin and how humans build trust 
• Testosterone inhibits oxytocin synthesis
• People are complicated, its important to have a lot of acceptance 
• Oxytocin is an on/off switch
• Paul challenges the listeners to a fight! 
• Our brains naturally help us adapt to the environment we are in
• How do we get people in groups to perform at their highest level
• How you can train your brain to release more oxytocin
• Learn how to read the emotional state of the people around you
• “All research is me-search”
• How “listening with your eyes” can help boost your oxytocin and help you become more in sync with people
• The “evil trick” you can use to get tons of information when you meet someone (it’s NOT what you expect!)
• Our brains are designed to connect, we want to be connected. We are naturally open to touch. Our brains are built to work cooperatively. 
• Strategies you can use in your daily life to increase your oxytocin 
• How companies can measure and manage their culture for high trust and high performance
• The 8 key building blocks leaders can use to build trust and improve high performance
• Paul focuses on measuring brain activity and use that to solve real problems that humans have.
• Its all about empowering humans to be their best selves
• The neuroscience firmly demonstrates the power and vital importance of sleep 
• How you can implement concrete changes to get the biggest bang for your buck in building a culture of high performance
• We trust people more who are their real, vulnerable, natural selves
• Why you should replace “how was your weekend” with “hey you look really <insert emotion on their face>” to build deeper relationships
• Almost no human can survive on their own - we only survive in groups - we must understand how to engage the groups that we are constantly around
• Science predicts, and data strongly supports, that people want to be and enjoy being part of high performance groups
• Relationships are super important 
• Why isn’t work an adventure? How can we make a work an adventure
• Connecting, touching, giving a gift - give the gift of connection, empowerment, love, to someone around you
• Effective social behaviors are rooted in SERVICE and serving others

How You Can Use Behavioral Design To Create Any Habit You Want with Nir Eyal

• Persuasion, mind control, and behavioral design
• What is a habit and how do you define it?
• How we can leverage technology to build healthier habits
• How 50% of your actions take place with little or no unconscious thought
• Internal vs External triggers 
• There is only one reason you use a product or service - to modulate your mood - that’s it
• Our behaviors are driven NOT by seeking of pleasure, but rather the quelling of a unconformable emotion 
• Figure out what your frequently occurring internal triggers are
• We are driven more by PAIN than by PLEASURE
• There’s no end to what we can accomplish if we can understand that pain is our primary motivator
• Even seeking pleasure = satisfying the PAIN of WANTING
• The power of the unknown to draw us in 
• The 4 stages of the “Hook” Model on how Habits are formed and sustained
• Rewards are actually wanting to quell the “stress of desire”
• Discomfort drives us to action
• How the same mental hardwiring behind addiction also underpins love and desire
• The easier you can make a behavior the more likely people are to do it
• The biggest thing that drives people to adopt technology is making life EASIER
• Reward itself doesn’t have much impact on your brain, its the anticipation of the reward that drives us 
• 3 Kinds of Variable Rewards
• • Rewards of the Tribe
  • Rewards of the Hunt
  • Rewards of the Self
• The power of adaptability
• Belief is as much of a factor in addiction as physical dependency itself
• How making a behavior just a little bit easier can have dramatic results
• How to put the hook model in reverse and destroy bad habits
• How putting space between steps in your habit loop can create massive changes
• Even small amounts of friction can change the marginal decision and make a habit much harder
• How can you make bad habits more difficult, take longer, or be harder to do?
• How you can use “temptation bundling” to break the hold of variable rewards in your habit loop
• Never do something when you don’t have the end in sight - do things that have a finite END so that you don’t get hooked
• Key question you must ask yourself: Is this technology serving ME, or am I serving IT?
• One simple piece of advice to implement the ideas discussed in this interview right away
• How to leverage technology to combat technology that is distracting you 

How This Astronaut Survived Going Blind In Space & Tools for Crushing Fear with Chris Hadfield

• The 3 key things that enabled chris to make it all the way through the astronaut selection process
• How Chris survived going BLIND during a space walk in outer space!!
• How astronauts rescue incapacitated crew in outer space
• How to cultivate the mental toughness to survive the most dangerous situations imaginable
• The learned and trained ability to deal with extremely complex circumstances
• Why Chris was an astronaut for 21 years and only spent 6 months in space, thats how important training is
• In outer space, you can’t count on luck, you count on your own learned ability to deal with the probable things that could go wrong
• How NASA develops training programs to do everything possible to be successful
• The vital importance of visualizing failure and understanding what could go wrong
• The importance of practicing the 10,000 things that could go wrong
• Astronauts don’t visualize success, they practice for failure, all the time
• Visualize failure, incrementally improve, don't count on luck
• NASA’s Recipe for Success
• The relationship between DANGER and FEAR
• Things aren't’ scary, but people get scared
• Things don’t change whether or not you are afraid of them - the ONLY question is whether or not you are prepared
• Preparation is the antidote to fear, if you’re ready, you won’t be afraid
• Your body’s physiology reacts to being unprepared to a dangers situation with a reaction we simply call “fear”
• FEAR = LACK OF PREPARATION
• Perpetual fear = STRESS (and overwhelm)
• Ask yourself “what thing am I not prepared for that is causing me stress?"
• Listen to fear, but don’t keep fear from allowing you to dictate your life
• How do you change your own threshold of fear?
• How to overcome your fear of spiders!
• Recognize real threats through the noise of the non threats
• if you dont know what to be afraid fo, then your afraid of everything
• the difference between belief and knowledge
• If you're afraid of a jaguar, should you be afraid of a kitten?
• One of the ways to increase your own significance is to exaggerate your problems
• Why the perception that the world is more dangerous now than ever is fundamentally flawed
• "The Sky is Not The Limit"
• Life is TOUGH and the earth is TOUGH - it’s been here for 4.5 billion years
• The perspective of an astronaut viewing the entire world from above
• The shared nature of human existence
• Why Chris recommends that you should “aim to be a zero”
• Take the time to get informed, understand what is happening, and then take action
• The building is very seldom on fire, yet we always treat it like it is
• In space, ”there is no problem so bad, that you can’t make it worse”
• Don’t just accept your fear, understand WHY, dig in, and treat it clinically - whats the REAL danger, whats the REAL problem I’m trying to solve, how can I change who I am to solve that problem / challenge better, what skill am I lacking? Why am I allowing myself to be terrified? 
• How can I change myself to move beyond fear
• Fear is a destructive long term solution to anything

Hack Your Biochemistry To Create Spontaneous Weight Loss and Improved Mental Health by Dr. Kulreet Chaudhary

• How Dr. Chaudhary’s personal experience led her down the path of integrative medicine
• The health of the brain is highly dependent on the health of the gut
• Auyerveda is the oldest recorded medical system in the world - one of the oldest forms of “lifestyle medicine"
• Why food is medicine
• The way you live dictates whether you are sick or healthy
• Disease is a result of imbalance and can be cured by changing habits
• How the Neurologist’s perspective on the brain fundamentally ignores the health of the entire system
• Dr. Chaudhary’s perspective on how eastern & integrative medicine can be integrated with western science to form a more holistic solution for health
• Tumeric is a great example of a spice that has scientifically demonstrated health benefits
• Micro-biome & gut health underpins huge medical issues
• Western medicine is just now catching up with insights from 5000 year old holistic medicines
• 90% of your serotonin comes from your gut and gut health is a major factor in depression 
• Scientifically, the mind and mental health are deeply connected and directly related gut health
• Why is it so hard for people to break negative eating habits? Is it really just a question of willpower?
• The neurochemistry and biochemistry that underpins negative eating habits
• Your micro biome itself can shift your eating habits and make you desire and consume certain foods
• The science behind how addictions form in our brains (especially food addictions)
• Why 85% of people cannot change the way they are eating with willpower
• The biochemistry of addiction and food addiction & the role dopamine plays 
• How food scientists have engineered junk food to produce massive dopamine spikes
• The dangers of overstimulated dopamine receptors and how they lead to addiction
• An obese person’s brain chemistry responds the same way to sugar as a cocaine addict responds to cocaine
• Environmental toxins and toxic inflammation and how they impact your body
• Enteric nervous system - the “brain inside your gut” which produces 95% of the serotonin and 50% of the dopamine in your body
• “The gut does most of the talking and the brain does most of the listening”
• Who dictates the content of what the gut says? The Microbiome 
• "How smart is your gut?"
• How fecal matter transplants in mice can completely reverse genetically engineered personality traits
• Research clearly demonstrates that your micro-biome controls your behavior and emotions
• We are still in the infancy of discovering and understanding the microbiome - there is a lot of “noise” that’s hard to understand
• The importance of taking an individualized approach to gut health - its not always about taking probiotics or fermented food
• The most foundational steps to implement in order to improve your gut health
• The simplest interventions are usually the most powerful
• How Tumeric has helped reduced Alzheimers disease by 75% in India
• Foods and spices are more interactive than the “unilateral” approach of western medicines - interacting with multiple cells and systems, rather than a hyper focused intervention
• We discuss a variety of herbs and supplements that Dr. Chaudhary recommends to improve your gut health and microbiome
• The environment can interact with your genes to change genetic expression
• Dr. Chaudhary’s work as a neurologist revealed many of the same conclusions from Auyervedic medicine
• How your genes interact with the environment, including what you’re eating, to create the outcomes in your life

The Military Influence Training that Maps Out Human Weakness, Harnesses Confusion, and Triggers Obedience in Others With Chase Hughes

• How seeing "how weak and vulnerable everyone was" transformed Chase’s worldview
• Is it possible to create real world Manchurian candidates? 
• Why you’re grossly underestimating the work necessary to read human body language and understand human behavior
• Why the typical strategies of influence won’t work unless you can profile and understand the individual - and tailor what you’re saying and doing to meet that individuals weaknesses and needs
• One of the best things you can start doing every single day
• Simple questions you can use to “disengage someone from autopilot” and break the pattern they are stuck in
• How you can develop “FIC" to hack human behavior 
• • Focus
  • Interest
  • Curiosity
• The “RAS” - reticular activation system - constantly looking for things that are threats and things that are socially valuable
• Social authority and perceived authority are more important than influence in shaping human behavior
• How the Milgrim experiment fundamentally demonstrates the incredible power of the authority bias
• The one strategy that can be effective influencing strangers to commit murder more than 80% of the time
• The 5 key factors you can use to hack authority and trigger an “obedient” response
• • Dominance / ambition 
  • Discipline
  • Leadership
  • Gratitude
  • Fun /  sense of adventure
• When we interact with authority we go through an “agentic” shift - our brain shifts responsibility for our own actions onto the person who instructed us to do it - you can make people take extreme behaviors if you get them to give YOU responsibility for their actions
• Master yourself first before you can influence others
• • Master environment first
  • Master your time - keeping a plan and sticking to it
  • Master the mechanics of your habits
  • Master your attention span
• Tactics for mastering authority today
• • Express genuine interest in other people and make them feel INTERESTING not interested
  • Remember the phrase - LEADERSHIP through SUPPORT
• The people who think they are alpha males are usually NOT the alpha male - big dogs don’t feel the need to bark
• The Columbo method - make deliberate social errors, be vulnerable, start with an insecurity - that helps open people up to influence
• Chase offers a challenge to you - Talk to a stranger every single day. And once that gets easy, you have to push out your comfort zone even further. 
• The Texas crosswalk study - why wearing a suit makes you more likely to get people to follow you than wearing jeans
• Why you should ask unique questions and do unique things
• The 3 tools you can use to develop a profile of anyone
• • Social Weakness Chart
  • Human Needs Map
  • Behavioral Table of Elements
• There’s no vaccination to being socially vulnerable - if you become socially invulnerable it makes you a nasty person - it diminishes your ability to connect with others and takes away your ability to feel empathy and anxiety for others. 
• Be completely real with your self, and with others, as it can help build more genuine connections 
• Trying to manage your own behavior and body language really starts to suck up alot of your own “CPU power” and Chase doesn't recommend it 
• How you can watch a video of an interview or interrogation - using this special tool - and decode the behavior and determine 
• Why a polygraph is usually no better than a coin toss and is typically biased against people telling the truth
• How Conan Obrien can help you become a better human lie detector
• Simple exercises you can use to start RIGHT NOW to develop an understanding of human body language and behavior 
• The concept of embedded commands and how you can use them to make a person have a thought without it being conscious of it
• Confusion statements and embedded commands - they will go straight to the subconscious
• Why you should ask yourself "What does this person like to be complimented on, what makes them feel significant”
• And much more! 

How This Government Agency Spy Recruiter Hacked Psychology To Change Anyone’s Behavior with Robin Dreeke

• How Robin went from being a hard charging type-a individual to learning the principles of actually inspiring people and changing behavior
• Robin’s main job was to recruit spies
• How manipulating, pressuring, bullying people doesn’t work - and why learning that lessons in counter-intelligence is one of the most powerful places to learn the lesson
• The Art Form of Inspirating Anyone and Getting them to do what you want
• The New Car Effect - and what that has to do with influencing and inspiring anyone
• "Strategizing Trust" - the five steps of trust 
• How the old conception of leadership is flawed and ineffective
• How being hard charging, type-a, and in your face is backwards from what you need to be successful
• How the crucible of counter-intelligence doesn’t afford you the luxury of making mistakes - and the strategies that come out of that for influencing others
• When people don’t have to talk to you and don’t care about your title and position - you have to find the strategies that work
• The vital importance of self awareness and honest self assessment
• What you think you’re projecting to the world is often not what the world is seeing
• How ego, vanity, and insecurities can hijack what you say and do
• Listen to the people around you, take feedback, and learn how you can change
• How strategies of inspiration and influence focus almost exclusively on the other person
• Focus on other people, what their priorities are, and what’s important to them - that’s how you can change their behavior and influence them
• Why should someone want to talk to you, listen to you, and do what you want?
• Think in terms of inspiring other people, not manipulating them
• You have to know what someone’s priorities are, and you have to speak about things in relation to their priorities
• How seeking other people's thoughts and opinions can help you neurobiologically build trust with them
• Leaders don’t keep scorecards. Give and let go. And wait. 
• When you honor the healthy and happy relationships - everything falls into place and flows very easily
• How to get someone’s brain to reward them for engaging with you
• Honesty is one of the critical factors 
• Why you shouldn’t convince, cajole, and manipulate people
• How the FBI spy recruits hacked evolutionary psychology to learn to change anyone’s behavior
• What is manipulation? 
• How the use of lies and deception can destroy trust forever
• Why it’s important to understand that Robin is not judging the right or wrong of any of these strategies - its just a question of what’s the most effective
• It cost nothing to make it about other people and its one of the simplest strategies in the world - and can have a huge impact on your ability to influence and inspire 
• Become an available resource for other people’s prosperity
• How we can become non-judgemental and cultivate nonjudgemental validation
• Don’t judge, but seek to understand - everyone has a reason that they believe what they believe in 
• When you dig in, you start getting context for someone’s understanding of reality, and that helps build tolerance
• You are the cause of most of the negative interactions in your life
• Most people do not care what’s important to you - they care about their own priorities
• How to recognize and prevent yourself from getting emotionally hijacked
• The core principles of the code of trust
• Great leaders are very empathetic and focused on OTHER people
• Why Robin doesn’t give advice or guidance, he only asks discovery questions
• The 5 principles of trust
• • Suspend your ego
  • Be nonjudgemental
  • Honor Reason
  • Validate Others
  • Be Generous
• The CORE of the Code
• • Happy healthy relationships
  • open honest communication
  • available resource for the prosperity of others
• Why should discover the GREATNESS of others - don’t focus on what people are doing wrong, focus on their greatness and what they are doing RIGHT
• How to make relationships bloom - find out what other people’s priorities are, their needs, wants, aspirations and dreams.

Do You Have To Be Ruthless To Succeed? The Truth About Survival Of The Fittest with Dr. Chris Kukk

• Social and emotional learning and how Chris is using that to transform early childhood education
• How positivity and compassion can spread from the bottom up to change schools
• The neuroscience behind how compassion helps children learn more effectively
• Why cultivating personal awareness is the first step to mastery
• With meditation you catch more than you miss, without it, you miss more than you catch
• What did Charles Darwin have to say about how compassion impacts the “survival of the fittest”
• How a focus on helping one another moves society forward
• Why the conception of compassion as “soft” or “weak” is completely wrong
• How compassion is powerfully linked with success
• Mother Theresa’s “Ripple of Kindness” 
• Do you have to be ruthless in order to succeed?
• Compassion enables you to have sustained success
• Lessons from Enron
• What psychology and neuroscience studies show about extrinsic focus vs intrinsic focus on your achievement
• How Utah has saved money by pursuing a policy of compassion in solving homelessness
• The “4 step program” for cultivating compassion that you can start implementing right now
• The power of “LUCA”
• The power of listening to learn instead of listening to reply
• The definition of compassion - understanding and taking action
• How we can “understand to know” and build a deeper mosaic of understanding to find common solutions to our problems
• Connecting to capabilities, reaching beyond yourself to help people with the human potential hidden in plain sight
• The essential task of challenging your own world view and seeking disconfirming evidence 
• All feedback makes you stronger, ideology fears the truth, wisdom seeks it 
• The buddhist concept of “fierce compassion”
• Remember, water cuts through rock over time
• What are “knownaughts” and “noxxers”?
• The power of connection to make your success limitless
• How do we ask great questions (and why its so important to do that)?
• The great question is like the lens of a camera, the aperture shapes what you see on the other side
• The words that you use frame the way you see a problem
• How silence can open up doorways for deeper understanding
• Lessons from counter intelligence interrogations about how we can become better listeners
• The power of "nondoing"
• Practical steps you can implement right now to begin walking the path of compassion

Break Your Phone Addiction (& Your Other Bad Habits) With Charles Duhigg

• Habit Loops, what they are and how they form
• 40-45% of what we do every single day is not a decision it's a habit
• Emotional cue for checking your phone and "novelty seeking"
• How your brain makes that behavior automatic because it's delivering a reward
• How to break habits
• What Reward are you seeking? Get as specific as possible
• Figure out the REWARD, then reprogram the HABIT
• Keystone habits and how they can transform your identity and create a chain reaction
• Why it's that the most successful people work harder, they just think differently
• The rituals and habits of people who are more productive
• Why its not being smarter, its not working harder, its not going to the right schools - the research shows that what correlates the MOST with success is that the people who are most successful tend to have “contemplative routines”, habits in their lives that push them to think more deeply
• Journaling is a great example of a contemplative routine that can make you be more productive
• Being busy and being productive are not synonymous
• Thinking has always been the killer "productivity app"
• The story of Quantas Flight 32
• Maintaining focus while in the middle of a crashing airplane and how to cultivate situational awareness
• How Firefighters develop ESP
• Building a story, a mental model of a situation, and how that can shape your situational awareness
• The vital importance of building mental models

How You Can CRUSH Self Sabotage with Dr. Gay Hendricks

• Gay’s "encounter with destiny" and how it “knocked him out” of his usual way of thinking
• Lessons from training thousands of counselors and coaches to help people transform their lives
• Lessons from counseling and coaching over 20,000 individuals!
• How Gay went from 300+ lbs, smoking 2-3 packs of cigarettes per day, and transformed his entire life
• The two “big ideas” from the Big Leap
• • Upper Limit Problems
  • Occupying your Zone of Genius
• What are "Upper Limit Problems?"
• How to Occupying your “Zone of Genius"
• Success is not just financial - focusing only on financial success puts your out of balance
• Often times its not the lack of business skills that stifle us, its lack of heart centric communication skills
• If you’re able to bring forth what is within you, it will pave the path to success - but if you keep your emotions in, you stifle yourself
• How a tiny bit of misalignment can create echos and rattles throughout your life
• How we fall into cycles of self sabotage to “reset” our happiness down to where we think it should be
• We often manufacture fears, stresses, and anxieties to stop ourselves from feeling good
• The core fears you experience underpinning that Upper Limit Problem
• #1 The Fear of Outshining
• #2 The Fear of Being Fundamentally Flawed
• Upper limit problems are rooted in fear - unless we come to terms with those - we cannot actualize our full potential
• How to explore, lovingly, your own fears and limitations
• The concept of having enough vs having plenty 
• #3 The Fear of Leaving Behind or being disloyal to the people you care about
• Do you ever feel like “things are going too well, now something bad is going to happen”
• Focusing on what can go wrong is useful if we TAKE ACTION about it, but if we can’t act on it, its just useless worrying
• The “quick fix” for blame and criticism - get underneath the blame, own what you’re afraid of that is causing that blame and talk about it openly and honestly 
• How to fix broken relationships and heal communication problems in 10 minutes or less
• Self criticism is rooted in FEAR - something you’re afraid of in yourself, or something your afraid to communicate to someone else - what is it that im basically afraid of?
• The role shame plays in self criticism and how to find your original shaming
• Is Life Suffering as the Buddha said?
• Can honesty (with ourselves and our relationships) reduce suffering?
• Begin an open hearted, open mind inquiry into what you really want
• Ultimate success mantra - I expand in love, abundance, creativity, and success every day as I inspire other people to expand in love, abundance, success, and creativity! 
• The idea of happiness thermostat
• Shine in your life the way you want to shine, not in reference to other people
• Human beings have no idea what their full potential is once they shatter their upper limits
• Using a Lear Jet to plow a potato field
• The Zone of Incompetence vs The Zone competence vs the Zone of Excellence vs the Zone of Genius
• The questions you need to discover and live in your zone of genius
• Even the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies have blocks to their zones of genius
• “All of human beings problems come from an inability to sit in a room by ourselves doing nothing”
• Your zone of genius is a positive addiction - focused on actualizing your life’s purpose 
• How to get out negative addictions like worrying and overeating
• The success mantra you can use to push yourself into your zone of genius every day
• And much more!

How You Can Come Alive And Unleash Your Brilliance with Simon T. Bailey

• Why your definition of success might be hurting you - and how you can redefine it in a much healthier way. 
• Why success is about others and not just yourself
• Intellectual humility and why it’s so important 
• Questions to put yourself on the path towards true success:
• • What would I do if I knew that I couldn't fail?
  • What would I do if no one paid me to do it?
  • What makes me come alive?
• Don't ask what the world needs, ask what makes you come alive - the world needs people who come alive
• When you stop chasing money, money will chase you.
• How to create an “exit strategy” to test your ideas and pursue your dreams
• Can (and should) you quit your job and play videos games all day?
• We are now in a recommendation economy - people will tell other people if you are excellent
• What it means to provide value to the world and how you can do it:
• • Going above and beyond, exceeding expectations, doing more than people expect of you
  • Listen and discover ways to exceed expectations
• Meta Listening and why you should often slow down in order to speed up
• Hearing is a courtesy, listening is a compliment 
• The 3 levels of listening & Why listening shows the person that they matter
• Why it’s not good to “need to be the smartest person in the room”
• Why needing to prove something can be one of your greatest mistakes
• People don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care
• How to practice intellectual humility
• • Release the need to be right
  • Understand the power of diversity of opinion & perspective
  • Find someone who is willing to say no and challenge your ideas
• How to step outside your comfort zone and seek disconfirming opinions
• 3 Exercises you can use to step outside your comfort zone
• Simon’s strategy for reaching 1 billion people around the globe
• Brilliance - what it is, why its important - and what Harvard research says about it 
• How society has eroded our innate brilliance 
• Within the next decade millions of knowledge worker jobs will be eliminated due to automation
• How you can unlock your own brilliance in 30 seconds
• There will never be a perfect time for you to do it, just do it
• The concept of emotional congruence
• Language is the software of the mind - your words carry energy and create worlds
• How to rehearse the future in the present
• "15-7-30-90"
• You decide your habits, and your habits decide your future
• Answer the question “WHY AM I HERE?”
• Do you have a 20 year strategic life plan?

The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong with Eric Barker

• The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed
• How Eric took a myth-busters approach to success maxims and figured out what really works
• Vital importance of knowing yourself and your strengths
• Why you need to align with a context and environment that rewards your skills
• What really produces success? What separates the very successful from the rest of us?
• We take a lot of the common maxims we hear that conflict about success and look at what the DATA actually says about them
• What are intensifiers and why should you know about them?
• When are negatives positives? How can you know when it’s important?
• Context really reveals when and how these maxims work or not
• Do nice guys really finish last? What does the science say?
• Why, in some contexts, being a jerk can pay off (and when it can backfire)
• Strategies to improve self knowledge and know yourself more deeply
• Pursuing your passion doesn't always lead to happiness, but pursuing what you’re good at more frequently does lead to happiness
• Research is clear - focus on what you’re good at - and find a way to compensate for your weaknesses. 
• Understanding your strengths allows you to plan the right way to go about achieving your big picture goals
• Deluding yourself is often worst situation of all and you frequently end up working against yourself
• Do quitters never win? Should we quit or persevere? How do we think about Grit?
• The vital importance of opportunity cost - we only have so much time in the day - we have to focus in on the biggest things
• Strategically quitting is not the opposite of grit, but enables you to focus in on the most important things
• People consistently over-commit their time and don’t understand how little time they have
• We consistently make the error that in the future we think we will have more time
• Find a balance - look at what’s producing results - show grit with those things - things that aren’t producing results
• Why you should absolutely dedicate 5-10% of your time to what Peter Simms calls “little bets”
• The key litmus test on whether or not you should apply GRIT or QUIT
• What research reveals (Richard Wiseman in the UK) on how you can improve your luck!
• How do we “walk the tightrope” between confidence and delusion? How often should we “believe in ourselves”?
• Confidence as a whole is a problematic paradigm, confidence follows success, it doesn’t lead to success - it has NO effect on outcomes, only impact on trying to build confidence is that it increases narcissism 
• Confidence is often either delusional (detached from reality) or contingent (which can crash your self esteem)
• Self compassion provides all the benefits of self confidence with none of the drawbacks
• How to change the way you talk to yourself and cultivate self compassion
• The simplest and easiest cure for the “plague” of procrastination you can use right now!
• The more you work, if you’re actually doing deliberate practice, the better you do
• What’s more important HUSTLE or work life balance?
• There is an, essentially linear, relationship between time and skill development
• 10,000 hours alone is proof of nothing - its all about deliberate practice - our current understanding of skill development is grossly oversimplified
• Difference between obsession and passion?
• In living a truly successful life - relationships, alignment, and fulfillment are essential
• And much more!

How To Demolish What’s Holding You Back & Leave Your Comfort Zone with Andy Molinsky

• Lessons from interviews with students, teachers, police officers, rabbis, priests, entrepreneurs, goat farmers - and the common lessons of WHY people struggle to step outside their comfort zones
• Why do people struggle to reach outside their comfort zones?
• The vital importance of stepping outside your comfort zone
• The 5 core psychological road blocks / challenges that make it hard to step outside our comfort zones
• • Authenticity/Identity/Self image
  • Likability
  • Competence
  • Resentment
  • Morality
• Imposter Syndrome and how it can trap you in your comfort zone
• Our “amazing capacity” to avoid discomfort and seek relief
• What happens when people avoid uncomfortable situations
• How we can often create imperfect substitutions for situations we want to avoid
• How our minds rationalize excuses so that we can avoid uncomfortable things
• “Fear is about predicting the future” and we are often poor predictors of our own futures
• If you want to achieve your goals you usually have to step outside your comfort zone
• Specific tactics and strategies you can use to step outside of your comfort zone
• How conviction can help you step outside your comfort zone and push you
• Customizing and tweaking situations to make them slightly more bearable can help you take that first step
• The danger of “catastrophizing” and always assuming the worst case scenario
• The power of clarity and getting clear on the truth about what you want, and what the worst case scenarios are
• How we can build resilience and make the pursuit of discomfort stick
• The power of a learning orientation and growth mindset to give you the ability to step outside your comfort zone
• Stepping outside your comfort zone starts in your mind
• The power of desensitizing yourself to things outside your comfort zone, and what happens when you continue to have experiences outside your comfort zone
• How to deliver bad news to people, fire someone, and have tough conversations
• The dysfunctional conversations that might arise if you don’t know the right way to deliver bad news
• The vital importance of mastering the art of small talk & strategies for mastering small talk
• Why every meaningful relationship you’ve ever had (other than family) started with small talk
• Focus first on building camaraderie and rapport, then trust
• Listening, making connection, asking questions in an open ended way
• Developing global dexterity and learning to act outside of your cultural comfort zone

Simple Strategies You Can Use To Persuade Anyone with The Godfather of Influence Dr. Robert Cialdini

• Research reveals that getting you to pay attention to something doesn't just reveal who you are, it makes you who you are
• How small differences that seem trivial make a HUGE impact on human behavior
• Why most people don't’ recognize the subconscious priming of pre-suasion
• Lessons from Dr. Cialdini's time as an amateur palm reader
• How researchers boosted their response rate from 29% to 77.3% with one simple question
• Can a photo change your ability to solve problems more effectively?
• How you can create a state of mind in your recipient that is consistent with the message you’re about to give
• How getting people to reflect on a particular trait that they might have can prime them to respond to what you want them to do
• How you can get people to think of themselves as whatever you want them to be
• This one trick palm readers use that you can leverage to get people to do what you want
• Persuasion does not lie just in the message itself, but rather in how the message is presented
• "Tell me what you’re paying attention to, and I'll tell you who you are"
• Does it matter what store you’re standing in front of if you ask a woman for her number at the mall?
• Why Pre-suasion is "a dangerous stick of dynamite"
• The medium is the message, the messenger is the message, and the multitude is the message - the true power of authority and social proof
• What does the United Kingdom’s tax policy have to do with creating more influential communication
• Learning what most others are doing is a message itself
• Context matters as much as or more than content
• How can you ethically leverage the concepts of persuasion?
• One thing you can do to hack job interviews using this simple tactic
• Why you shouldn’t ask people for their opinion but instead ask someone for their advice
• Why its better to ask for $75,123.00 than $75,000.
• Ask yourself “What is it about my message that will make it most wise for people to say yes to it”
• Is it possible to use pre-suasion on ourselves?
• How changing a simple image can improve your ability to solve problems by more than 48%
• The best thing you can do to prime someone for change (the simple easy thing you can to do to get people to change)
• And much more! 

Can You Have It All In Career and Life? Learn the Secrets of Multipotentialites with Emlie Wapnick

• How Emilie’s diverse interests and passions lead her down the path of creating a community of people who wanted to do more than just focus on one thing in their lives
• What does it mean to be “puttylike”
• Who are Multi-potential-ites and what makes them so interesting and powerful?
• Do you have a destiny, one true calling?
• How the industrial revolution shaped our language and understanding of “what you do” being who you are (and why that’s wrong)
• The idea that there is one specific thing you should master is a socially reinforced illusion & narrative
• Do you have to focus on one thing to be able to be successful?
• The assumption that you can either be a master of one thing or a jack of all trades is fundamentally flawed
• There are nonlinear and multi-connected and multi-faceted domains of knowledge that multi-potential-ites thrive in
• The diminishing returns and 80/20 principle behind mastering knowledge in different domains
• The Superpowers of Multipotentialites
• • Idea Synthesis
  • Rapid Learning (and passion)
  • • Adaptability
  • Big Picture Thinking
  • Relating and translating
• How to cultivate the ability to be a better big picture thinker
• Pattern recognition underpins many of these super-powers
• How to master rapid learning and cultivate beginners mind
• The power of exploring other fields and domains and how that can bring back new knowledge to the field you’re an expert in
• The 4 common approaches that multi-potentialites use to succeed financially in today’s world
• • The “group hug” approach - combining all your interests into one thing
  • The “slash” approach - creating separate and distinct revenue streams that you focus on fractionally
  • The “Einstein” approach - find a job that supports your true passion
  • The “Phoenix” approach - diving deep into a field, then pivoting out into something completely else
• What you do for money isn’t necessarily more valuable than the other things you do in your life
• Failure Celebration Week and taking the stigma away from failure
• If you had 10 lives what would you want to be in each of them?
• How to cultivate the variety you need in your life and career
• The importance of getting everything out of your head and onto paper
• And much more! 

Discover Your Hidden Emotional Insights & What’s Truly Valuable To You with Dr. Susan David

• How Susan’s experience growing up in apartheid South Africa led her down the path of studying emotional resilience and agility
• The tyranny of positivity and how it can actually harm us
• How focusing too much on your happiness can make you less happy over time
• How surpassing your emotions increases depression and anxiety and decreases your chance at achieving your goals
• Beneath your difficult emotions are signposts to the things we value most
• Research psychology reveals the power of the “amplification effect” when we push our thoughts and emotions aside
• Emotional contagion and how the behavior of others - even people you’ve never met and who are far removed from your life, can have a huge impact on your behavior and your life
• If someone in your social network - even if you don’t know them - puts on weight or gets divorced, you are more likely to do those things!
• Between stimulus and response, there is a space, in that space is our opportunity for agency
• What happens when you bottle and brood on your emotions
• Who’s in charge, the thinker or the thought? Who’s in charge, the emotion or the person feeling them? This story, or you the person who can experience many stories?
• What is emotional agility? How can we cultivate it?
• How to make space for emotions and embrace a willingness to experience difficult emotions
• Life’s beauty is inseparable from its fragility
• Our emotions are not good are bad, they just “are”
• Strategies for developing self compassion
• Imagine yourself as a child approaching yourself as an adult - how would you treat that 3-4 year old who has failed, been rejected, struggled, etc?
• We are all trying to do the best we can with the resources we have in an imperfect world - expecting perfection from yourself when the world itself is imperfect is unrealistic 
• Emotions are meaningful, but not RIGHT (emotions are DATA not direction)
• Its critical to cultivate space between stimulus and response
• Emotions are important but they aren’t necessarily correct - tap into the wisdom they offer us, but don’t necessarily go in the direction they want us to go in
• The vital importance of cultivating an “observer” view of our emotions to help us step out from our emotional reactions and create space between stimulus and response 
• Why you should use language like “I am noticing that I am feeling X” and “I am noticing the emotion of fear”
• Accurately labeling your emotions, digging in beyond just the surface, taps into and helps deal with negative emotions - the field of emotional differentiation
• If I was asking the wisest person on the world for their advice on this issue - what would they say?
• Every day we get to make a choice - do we move towards our values or away from our values?
• Values are qualities of action and they protect us from social contagion
• How do we discover our values?
• “What did I do that was worthwhile?”
• How you can “piggyback” your habits to create very powerful strategies to live more aligned with your values
• Root out and destroy “Have To” language in your life  
• 4 Simple strategies you can use right away to become emotionally agile

A Powerful 2000 Year Old Life Hack & Creating Work That Lasts for Generations with Ryan Holiday

• Why you should understand the Stoic discipline of "perception"
• The way in which we see the world changes how we interact with it
• How to accept situations as they are, not as you want them to be
• Why you shouldn't waste time figuring out how things happened, who is to blame, etc - you should shift your focus to constructively determining the next thing to do
• “There’s no problem so bad (in space) that you can’t make it worse”
• The challenge of perception is not making the situations in your life worse with interpretations, resentments, anxieties 
• The story of Amelia Earhart and how you can use it to take action in the face of challenges
• When you’re offended, when you think something is beneath you, you are projecting onto that situation something that may not be there
• How do you react when people don’t think you have what it takes?
• How to make yourself the most important person in a room, not by posturing, but by what you can contribute
• How we can flip obstacles on their heads and view setbacks as opportunities
• “What stands in the way becomes the way”
• We have the ability with our minds to change how anything means 
• Setbacks make some people worse, some people tough it out, other people get even better
• What is “Stoic Optimism” and why stoicism is not a focus on the negative
• The distinction between Being and Doing and why its so critical
• Should you do the “right thing” even if it pisses people off, hurts your chances of being promoted, causes political infighting, and worse?
• Many people make the choice unknowingly between being and doing - and end up one day wondering where it all went wrong
• How do we untangle success from our identities?
• How do we avoid the trap of judging people based on their achievements?
• The importance of being able to measure yourself by an internal score card - and not the external score card of accomplishment and achievement
• Focus on basing your identity on an internals scorecard that is within your control
• Decide what’s important to you, and root it within the things you control
• How do we anchor our identity and self worth on a more stable footing?
• How to have a more humble and resilient worldview
• The critical difference between stoicism vs pessimism and how to look at both sides of the coin and realizing there are no good or bad outcomes - just outcomes
• Everything is relative and subjective - someone in the third world would kill to live the life you may think of as failure
• The world isn’t saying “this is happening to you because its bad” its just saying “this is happening”
• The hard work of stoicism is the practice of doing it every day
• “The message is the marketing” and how you shouldn’t distinguish between the making and the marketing when creating something
• Why Ryan writes so much about ancient philosophy and how you should focus on rooting your ideas in timeless principles
• The tactics Ryan used to build a relationship with and become an apprentice of Robert Greene
• The people who need mentoring the most often get the least mentoring
• Do well and a mentor will find you, put in the work, show the potential, and then mentors will naturally start to show up in your life
• How Ryan approaches the creative process and the strategy he uses to test new ideas
• You have an idea, you test that idea, and you work on it every single day - it gets 1% better every day - and at the end it’s finally good
• Every book should be an article before its a book, every article should be a dinner conversation before its an article
• Most of the marketing of anything that lasts is really about the product itself
• Strategies Ryan recommends for finding a market for our ideas or concepts 
• Don’t create a solution in search of a problem, find problems and build solutions
• How to uncover the problems that people are struggling with that you can help solve
• What are needs that people have that there are currently no solutions?
• How Ryan would start building an audience from scratch today if he had to start over
• If you don’t collect your fans and have direct access to them - you are at risk - own your relationships with your customers and fans as much as possible
• How Ryan deals with staying creative and productive with a new born child
• Why Ryan hates the question of “whats the biggest struggle you’ve had to overcome”
• Time you spend dwelling on the past (negatively or positively) is wasted time and attention
• What Ryan journals about every morning and how he implements stoic philosophy into his life
• And much more!

The Principles You Can Use To Live An Authentic & Fulfilling Life with Jon Vroman

• How John went from being bullied and feeling insignificant, to stepping up and living his life in the front row
• How would you rate your contribution to the world on a 1-10 scale?
• The dangers of “playing it safe” in life
• What does it mean to live life in the front row?
• The anticipation principle and how to bring the power of the future into the present moment
• How we can learn to celebrate - bring light and attention to something, even if its something small
• Celebration is appreciation and gratitude
• How do you recognize or create a front row moment every day in life?
• “What can I celebrate right now?”
• If you can’t celebrate yourself, ask “How can I celebrate somebody else?”
• Being in the front row is also about service, stepping up for people, and not always being the center of attention
• The power of cheering on, showing up, and serving other people and why there is so much meaning, love, and joy in doing that
• What does it mean to be a moment maker?
• Recognizing the beauty and joy within a moment and noticing it, take a moment, breathe in, look around, feel it and appreciate it - recognizing what’s already there and not chasing what could be
• Why you should ask “How can I make this special?”
• How you can create special moments in the simplest spaces within life, turning something normal into something spectacular 
• Why we should amplify the good so that we silence what’s not
• The importance of accepting negative emotions and living the full range of emotions in life, the importance of being cold so you can appreciate the warmth
• The 90% Rule - where do you want to “live” 90% of the time
• How to re-align with what you value and live a life of making moments and celebration
• The three things you need to live life in the front row
• How to balance questions of acceptance/discomfrot/negative emotions with amplifying the good and focusing on the positive - focus on what state you end up at when you have the balance between those two things
• "Proximity is power” - what thoughts, questions, and relationships are you close to that are shaping your life?
• Questions drives our lives - what questions are we trying to answer?
• What questions are running your mind? What different questions could be running your mind?
• Everything we've learned about living life from people fighting for their lives
• Life is made up of MOMENTS - how do we manage each of those moments
• We think life will be great when we BLANK - once BLANK happens - this is NOW - this is IT - this is where its happening - managing your mind, managing the moment is the key to maximizing our lives.
• Why I love the quote - "Alex, don’t let Mount Everest be your greatest achievement”
• Hope is not weak, hope is not wishful thinking, hope is having a vision for the future and doing something about it 
• How do I recognize or create a front row moment right now?
• The best questions aren’t the ones that YOU want an answer to - its the ones that the OTHER PERSON wants an answer to
• Why you should ask “What dream is making you come alive right now?”
• If not you then who? If not now then when? 
• The importance of self awareness and being honest with yourself 
• Ask yourself what makes you come alive? Create an environment that makes you come alive
• And much more!

Human Innovation, Artificial Intelligence, and the Uncertain Future of Cyber Warfare with WIRED’s Kevin Kelly

• The 12 inevitable forces that are shaping the future of humanity and our lives
• How the physics of the “technological” terrain make tectonic technological shifts INEVITABLE and what you can do about it
• Why cars, telephones, light bulbs, and the internet were also “inevitable"
• Evolution keeps trying to make “minds” - is AI the next attempt?
• How we are “cognifying" the world around us and what that means
• How we will fill the world with a zoo of possible minds that think differently
• AI will become a commodity like electricity - it will be a utility that anyone can get or use
• What can I do with 1000 minds (like 1000 horsepower) working on a problem
• The second industrial revolution and how it will impact our entire society
• How our lack of understanding of intelligence currently hinders our ability to truly understand what makes intelligence
• You can’t optimize every dimension - there will always be trade-offs
• How much of today’s technology is akin to “flapping wings” versus artificial flight using fixed wings
• The chief asset for innovation and wealth generation in this new economy is being able to THINK differently
• How do we focus our attention in a world with such infinite possibilities of things to do and focus on?
• How do we battle against fake news, alternative facts, and the temptation to only filter information we want to hear?
• In the future - we may have to teach the “literacy” of filtering and understanding information as Kevin calls it “techno literacy”or “critical thinking”
• The vital importance of being open to having your mind changed - and how travel can be a tool to do that
• Why you should allow yourself to be challenged by other views
• Why asking great questions will be one of the most valuable skillsets and assets in the future
• How we can start to ask better questions right now
• There are no dumb questions - never be afraid to ask if you don’t understand  - and then really listen for the answer
• Why we should use lateral thinking to approach a question or challenge from a completely different angle - how we ask a question that has never been asked before
• How you can believe you are a martian and ask questions as if you were a machine and you didn’t know all the things humans normally know
• Don’t be afraid of obvious questions
• Why Kevin describes himself as a “protopian” - technology produces as many new problems as it solves. Progress is real even though technology creates additional problems
• The technology trend that Kevin Kelly is most afraid of and thinks is the biggest risk to humanity
• What would Kevin say to someone who doesn’t  think that these technological forces are inevitable?
• Why AI is often defined as “that which we can’t do”
• AI is going to impact all areas of our lives - buy some AI from google tensor flow and start fooling around with it - see what happens
• Be a tinkerer - don’t be afraid to play with and try new technology
• And much more!

The Shocking Truth About Talent & What It Means For You with Geoff Colvin

• The “experience trap” and why someone who has been doing their job for 20-30 years may be no better (and sometimes worse) than someone who has very little experience
• What do surgeons, auditors, parole officers have in common with their skillsets?
• Why the assumption that a lot of experience makes you good at something is fundamentally flawed 
• What the very best performers are constantly doing that most people simply don’t do
• Why going to a teacher and taking lessons is NOT enough to get better at singing (or any other skill)
• What separates world class performers from everyone else
• Why the concept of talent is a loaded term that most people don’t understand
• Why the conception of “talent” as an in-born gift is a mischaracterization
• How “Talent” is overrated, misunderstood, and why most research says “talent" simply does not exist
• What 35 years of research and science answer exactly what explains great performance better than anything else
• What is the concept of "deliberate practice" and why is it so vital to great performance?
• The road to great performance is long and hard, but most importantly its available to anyone
• Why deliberate practice is not what you typically think of when you think of practice
• The key components of deliberate practice:
• • Deliberate practice is an activity designed especially for you, at your stage of development, at doing what you’re doing right now
  • It is designed to push you just beyond what you’re currently capable of doing
  • Can be repeated at high volume
  • The vital importance of continual feedback
• Why high-volume deliberate practice changes the physical structure of your brain
• As you get better, your deliberate practice must be adjusted higher
• Why deliberate practice is neither work nor play
• The vital importance of training and practicing just outside your realm of ability
• How to harness deliberate practice for business & investing
• • Simulation
  • Software that lets you make these decisions at high volume
  • Create simulators that put these decisions to the test at high volume
  • These simulations have to be highly realistic and very demanding
• How a basketball team has used the lessons of deliberate practice to achieve over 100 consecutive wins
• “The real game is easy compared to the practice” - Practice harder than you play!
• The Battle of 73 Easting and how the military leveraged deliberate practice to win one of the most decisive tactical victories in the modern era
• Try to find practice “in the activity” itself when you can
• Deliberate practice is way more work than most people are accustomed to doing, but the payoff is nearly always worth it
• How do you reconcile the advice of “focusing on your strengths” with the fundamental conclusions of deliberate practice?
• How do humans become and maintain economic value as robotics, software, and technology continues to replace human workers?
• The skills of deep human interactions are some of the most high value skills in the future workplace
• The value and importance of sensing what other humans are thinking and feeling and responding in an appropriate way
• Why human interaction, empathy, collaboration, storytelling will become more and more important
• Emotional intelligence is a trainable skills that can be improved
• EQ and Emotional Intelligence is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy

Master The Universal Skills To Become Awesome At Any Job And Succeed At Your Work with Pete Mockaitis

• The importance of reading to improving your knowledge
• The book that has had the biggest impact on Pete’s life
• How you can transform yourself into “peak state” so that you don’t feel scared or unmotivated
• How to master the universal skills required to succeed at work
• Grit - what it is, why its so important, and how you can cultivate
• The concept that had the biggest impact on Pete’s life
• Why its so important to take a hard look at yourself and your own shortcomings
• What to do when your paralyzed by fear in your job
• Why Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear
• How to be a more effective communicator
• “Answer first communication” and how it can transform how you speak and present
• How “hypothesis driven testing” can make you a much better communicator
• Why you should ask: “What things need to be true for this to be a good idea”
• Numbers galvanize attention and focus for people listening to you
• If you’re stressed out in your current role, you’re not ready to make the next move up
• “The time to meet your neighbors is not when your house is on fire”
• How to cultivate and develop better relationships
• The power of making the ask and "ask not, have not”
• The Benjamin Franklin Effect and how it can help you build a powerful network of mentors
• You can achieve whatever you want in life, if you help enough other people achieve what they want in life
• How to be courageous
• How to ask for good feedback and how to give feedback
• Ask for role models and ideal next steps when asking for feedback
• Why you should never be afraid to ask for feedback and counterintuitively how demonstrating your weakensses can help you advance in your career
• The counter intuitive truth of taking MORE responsibility for your own mistakes, flaws, and screw-ups can help you succeed more quickly
• How to cultivate and create accountability in your life, challenge yourself to rise to a higher level, and become more vulnerable
• What you should do when your unsatisfied with your career

The Mental Tools Olympians, Traders, & Top Performers Use To Make High Pressure Decisions with Denise Shull

• How Denise studied the neuroscience of emotions and unconscious thought but ditched her PHD to become a trader
• Can (and should) we set aside our emotions in a high stakes environment like trading?
• Why you should consciously incorporate your emotions into your decisions to make the best decisions
• Feelings, thoughts, emotions, and physical body are all part of one integrated system and you have to think about it as an integrated continuum
• Your psyche is trying to get important information to you by turning up the volume of your emotions
• We should focus on finding the valuable kernel of information that our emotions are sending us
• How do we learn from negative emotions (such as fear and anxiety)
• Being able to differentiate between granularity of anxiety helps you process the feelings better
• If you didn’t have some level of anxiety you would never do the preparation necessary
• Define, as clearly as possible, the things you are afraid of, own it, connect head to stomach, and describe it with the word. (your psyche will feel like you got the message through)
• Once your anxiety and fear feel acknowledged it naturally dissipates
• The vital importance of journaling and being gentle and kind to yourself, to help you understand your emotions
• Everyone has all kinds of feelings, everyone doubts themselves on some level, the top performers, hedge fund managers, and olympic athletes  - its part of the human condition
• How can historical echoes create repeated behavioral patterns?
• The critical period for who we are and how we relate in the world happen very early - as Freud called them “the compulsion to repeat”, and as Denise calls them “echoes” or “fractals”
• How studying traders and their trades showed Denise that people would trade in accordance with their life stories, and the patterns and mistakes they made repeated themselves again and again
• Negative feelings are a mechanism to look and understand the fractals from our past and exploring child hood experiences can help you uncover more about them
• The importance of doing the historical work, digging into your childhood, asking yourself “how would I have felt” (so you can get past the filter of “oh that didn’t bother me”)
• An amazing question you can ask yourself about past events - how would someone else have felt about that? That question helps you break past the self denial that it did hurt you. 
• Repetitions of past mistakes are opportunities to reorganize things you weren't able to deal with in your past
• Always ask - what would someone else think about that, how would someone else feel about this in the situation? You will often project your own feelings onto someone else
• We primarily think that discipline will change behavior, which is not always the case
• Feelings are the foundations of our consciousness, thoughts are built on top of that, you have a lot more leverage working on your feelings 
• Why you can’t solve everything with your head
• The inaccuracies of the model of the “triune” brain - no neuroscientist at the cutting edge of neuroscience believes that anymore
• The vital importance of sleep, exercise, and cultivating your physical system as part of building mental performance
• One of the biggest commonalities between peak performers - dedication to getting better, putting in the work and the preparation, regardless of what it takes
• • Break down all the core pieces you need to achieve your goal
  • Understand how those pieces fit together
  • Execute every piece
• The other major commonality of peak performers - self awareness
• How to take negative energy to use that to help you continue to prepare towards your goals
• How a lot of people ignore the social and emotional aspects of performance despite the massive leverage available to working there
• Why the biggest mistake high performers make is to set aside their emotions
• Unconscious setting feelings and emotions aside by being over scheduled - overactivity / constant distraction never gives you the opportunity to understand and dig into your emotional life
• Know your feelings without judgement, take a step to try and understand what the kernel of that feeling is
• You, your feelings and experiences matter and you need to take time to honor them
• And much more!

The 3 Keys You Need To Answer Life’s Most Important Questions with Dr. Barry Schwartz

• How Barry’s work in animal learning, following in the footsteps of BF Skinner, led him down the path of his journey
• Why a focus on rewards and punishments is too narrow an understanding
• The importance of multi-disciplinary work to unearth the truth and understand reality
• How we can begin to think in a more multi-discplinary way
• The answers to the most important questions in life are very complex, and efforts to simplify them are doomed to failure
• The flaws in the dominant ideologies of western society in understanding and explaining why we work
• People don’t work only for pay - here are the other reasons people work:
• • They want to be engaged
  • They want discretion and control
  • They want to be appreciated
  • They want to be challenged
  • They want to do something that has meaning
• Why only 10% of the world’s work force is “engaged in their work”
• How did Toyota turn around the worst automobile factory in America into the BEST factory in America without changing the work force?
• The importance of the big 3 factors - Autonomy, Control, and Discretion
• What has enabled the container store to be so successful
• How focusing on improving the quality of work and creating good work can be good for the bottom line as well
• How Aristotle defines “Wisdom”
• How excessive management and supervision has destroyed the ability of teachers to become effective
• How the the reliance on rules and incentives to get people to behave properly is the enemy of wisdom
• Wisdom is learned, but it can’t be taught - the way you learn to be wise is by trying and failing
• You learned by doing, by getting it wrong, and by correcting your mistakes
• Trial and error, mentoring, modeling - there’s no quick fix for wisdom, you have to be in it for the long haul
• Its OK to get it wrong
• We go deep into Barry’s famous book The Paradox of Choice
• Paralysis by analysis and the danger of having too many choices
• How can we simplify our lives and avoid the paradox of choice?
• “Good enough is virtually always good enough”
• People who aspire to “the best” get better results, and feel worse about them, than people who are happy with “good enough”
• Don’t be unambitious and have no standards, have high standards, but don’t feel like if you aren’t the absolute best you’re a failure
• And much more!

Proven Tactics For Getting What You Want & Persuading Anyone With Master Negotiator Kwame Christian

• Why the majority of the conversations we have are negotiations and its a vital skill to work on and improve
• Whether or not you’re good at negotiation, you’re still going to be negotiating on a daily basis
• The “Three Pillars” of Succeeding at Negotiation
• What is “offensive negotiation” & how to maximize value for yourself
• What are the “defensive” uses of negotiation? And how you can use negotiation to avoid bad outcomes and resolve conflicts
• How you can use negotiation to build relationships
• How to become comfortable with asking for what you want
• The FIRST barrier everyone faces when they negotiate
• The SECOND barrier everyone faces when negotiating
• Rejection therapy and how it can transform and improve your ability to negotiate
• One question you should always ask to see how much flexibility you have
• The common sense rules of the real world are a fragile collection of socially reinforced illusions
• How to use framing to transform a negotiation and conversation (with concrete examples from Kwame’s work)
• How open ended questions decrease the perceived threat of a conversation
• How to become a “puppet master” controlling the conversation while the other party feels like they are in control
• How to cultivate information asymmetry and get the informational advantage in a negotiation
• How you can lead someone down a logical path where they convince themselves of what you want
• How do you develop the skill of asking questions
• How you can practice and improve the skillset of persuasion
• Why curiosity is a critical component of being an effective negotiator and communicator
• Why you need to be able to be persuaded to be able to persuade
• Why preparation is an essential component in a negotiation
• How, specifically, Kwame preps for a negotiation (specific checklists, questions, etc)
• The Three Characteristics of Master Negotiators
• How creativity fits into being an effective negotiator and why you should try to find inexpensive ways to solve other people’s problems
• The false belief that negotiation is a zero sum game
• Why great negotiators go out of their way to try and solve other people’s problems
• The single biggest mistakes you can make in a negotiation
• One of the biggest barriers to moving forward in a negotiation
• How to build strong working relationships, with trust, and free flow of communication
• And much more!

Research Reveals How You Can Create The Mindset of a Champion with Dr. Carol Dweck

• What is a mindset?
• What is the fixed mindset?
• We go deep into the “fixed mindset” and how they view challenges and the world
• What is effort and how does the fixed mindset perceive it?
• Is effort necessary to be successful or is it a sign that you’re not naturally talented?
• If you have a fixed mindset, how do you think about criticism?
• Do you often “need to be right?” - and how could that need be impacting your life?
• We examine in detail what the “growth mindset” is and what underpins its core perception of reality
• Setbacks are welcome and setbacks are inevitable
• This fundamental conclusion is backed by 35+ years of psychological research, hundreds of studies, and more
• A study of over 168,000 students (the entire 10th grade population of Chile) demonstrating all of these findings 
• Research data from everything from dating life to conflict in the middle east bears out the lessons of fixed vs growth mindset
• What is the most effective way to recover from devastating rejections?
• Is it possible to change your mindset?
• How to transform your mindset and specific steps you can take to move towards a growth mindset
• How to find the things that trigger your fixed mindset reactions
• Discover and name your “fixed mindset persona”
• Success as improvement vs success as superiority
• Self handicapping and the concept that effort robs you of your excuses
• Repairing your self esteem vs repairing your failure
• It’s impossible to learn from a mistake if you deny making it in the first place
• The grave danger of placing blame, making excuses, and denying failure in order to protect your self esteem
• The mindset of a champion and how champions rise to the occasion
• Viewing people as judges vs viewing people as allies
• How do we reconcile the lessons of mindset with the idea that you should focus on your strengths?
• What are the most common triggers of the fixed mindset?
• • Taking on a challenge, out of your comfort zone
  • Struggling, not making progress
  • Setback, criticism, failure
• Strength and weakness are much more dynamic than we understand or give them credit for
• Don think your strengths will be strengths forever if you don't work on them and grow them
• The dangers of the self esteem movement and how it actually cultivates the fixed mindset
• And much more!

The Secret of How Sound Can Make You Be Happier & Achieve More with Julian Treasure

• Why musicians have slightly larger brains than non-musicians
• We are all vibrating, from the smallest physical level, to the macro level
• What is sound itself and how does it affect us?
• How sound changes your body and affects your heart rate, breathing, brain waves, and hormone secretions
• What sound to listen to if you have trouble sleeping
• How sound entrains all of your bodily rhythms
• How music and sound impacts your mood, feelings, emotions, and psychology
• It is possible to listen to two people talking at once?
• How ambient noise (especially human voice) can reduce your productivity by up to 66%
• How noise can negatively change your behavior, create stress, etc
• How noise kills 1 million health-years per year in Europe (via reduced life expectancy)
• The secret to cultivating soundscapes that make us happier and more productive
• The incredible power of listening and how it can change your reality
• The underutilized sensitivity and power in the ears
• Why it's a grave mistake to think that everyone listens the same way that you do
• How silence is a vital part of improving your ability to listen
• The power of 3 minutes of silence per day
• Why open plan offices are terrible for concentration and contemplation
• “The mixer” exercise you can perform to make yourself a better listener
• The importance of savoring the mundane sounds around us every day
• How you can use "listening positions” to transform how you listen
• The difference between critical listening vs empathic listening
• We all want to be heard, to be understood, and to be valued
• Do men and women have different default listening positions?
• Convergent listening vs divergent listening
• How “RASA” can make you a much better listener
• How truly listening to someone can be an amazing gift
• The human voice is one of the most complex and amazing instruments in the world
• The 4 communication channels - Reading, writing, speaking, listening
• The way you say something is much more important than how you say it
• The vocal toolbox and how you can use these tools to be a more effective communicator
• Posture is a critical component in the vocal toolbox
• The power of breath, and a simple breathing exercise we can all use
• The registers we can use to change the power of our voice
• The modal register 
• How to speak from the chest
• You want your voice to have the timbre of hot chocolate (rich, smooth)
• How changing pace, pitch, and tone can impact how someone receives what you say and make you a more powerful communicator
• How silence can be an incredible tool in your vocal toolbox
• The four cornerstones of powerful speech
• Good speaking is not about you, its about the other person
• It all comes down to listening, fundamentally - understanding listening positions is the most important idea of all of those
• Ask yourself “What’s the listening?”
• How technology is starting to work more and more towards speaking and listening as skillsets