Modern Wisdom
#879 - 16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi
Thu, 19 Dec 2024
Get my free End Of Year Review Template here - https://chriswillx.com/review/ It’s the end of 2024 and to celebrate I thought I’d run through some of the best lessons I’ve picked up over the last 12 months. This year has had over 10,000 minutes of episodes produced so there was a lot to choose from but I ended up settling on 16 insights from some of my favourite conversations both inside and outside of the podcast. Expect to learn what the insecure overachiever mindset is, whether success has to be painful, why men aren’t seen as having problems, how come so many people in shape have an issue with Ozempic users, whether you can be good if you can’t be evil, Elon Musk’s reflections on being a CEO, what to do if you don’t believe in yourself and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get the best bloodwork analysis in America and bypass Function’s 400,000-person waitlist at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What lessons were learned in 2024?
What's happening, people? Welcome back to the show. It is an end of 2024 lessons episode. I like to do these toward the end of the year, recapping some of the best lessons I've learned from the podcast and from my reading and from my newsletter and everything else. And I kind of bundle them all together.
So there'll be some greatest hits that you're familiar with and maybe a lot of stuff that you missed. Apparently, 66% of you only started listening to the show this year, which is pretty wild. Spotify rapped. Tell me that. So lots of new things. And yeah, I love doing these. I'm so fired up for today. I fucking love doing these episodes. They're so good. So yeah, let's get into it.
First one is the insecure overachiever mindset. When faced with a challenge, your nature might be to worry and obsess and grip
tightly the sort of classic insecure overachiever mindset and because worrying is so common in every pursuit that you attempt your successes are seen as proof that worrying is a performance enhancer and your failures are seen as proof that you should have worried all along so you end up with
unfalsifiable negativity, kind of a walking anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity, like Andrew Wilkinson says. You build this link between worry and performance, belief that your performance would have been markedly worse if you hadn't worried so much, and that the worrying is precisely what motivated and enabled the outcomes that you wanted.
even when you reach black belt status and you've got confidence in your capacities, there's a lack of enthused energy. I think it seems like maybe the worries left you, but it's not been replaced with excitable enthusiasm, just higher expectations.
And I have been thinking about this an awful lot this year and kind of want to propose a radical new approach, which is assuming that things will actually go well. Basically, after a while, I don't think that the fear is aiding your performance. You're primarily running on habit and skill and experience. And maybe the fear was needed in the beginning to narrow your focus and create the obsession.
But now you've reached escape velocity and you're drifting in space. So why are you holding the controls just as tightly as you were when you're on the launch pad instead of actually enjoying the view? And it's a realization that we all need to come to that this is all going to be over pretty soon. And I need to remind myself to realize that, that this thing isn't going to last forever.
This is one day you will do your final sports match or your final trip to give a presentation or a concluding project at work or whatever. And you can look back on a great run of miserable successes or actually try to embrace some enjoyment. perhaps even try to prioritize it.
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Chapter 2: What is the insecure overachiever mindset?
Rather, it indicates just how broken the conversation around men and women is, that care for people who are struggling in life is seen as a fucking finite resource.
Women can point to how men don't need to fear sexual assault as much, and men can point to how women don't need to fear Me Too allegations, but men hold more CEO positions, but women are graduating college at higher rates, but there's more male homelessness, but there's more women in sex work. It's like both sides are trying to balance some bizarre simultaneous social justice equation.
How many false allegations are worth a sexual assault? How many female graduates are worth a male CEO? The entire conversation is basically saying, my privilege is more oppressed than your privilege. It's like victimhood masquerading as arithmetic. And it's entirely based on a flawed premise because the complexity of the truth is inconvenient for both sides.
There is no equating the suffering of one group to another. And perceiving the discussion in this way causes everyone to enter the framing correctly. as adversaries. Accepting the challenges of one group does not disable attention from being paid to another.
And similarly, it shouldn't be the case that a discussion about men's troubles should first be hedged with fucking groveling caveats about how we know that women face a myriad of problems too, lest the position be seen as myopic misogyny.
zero-sum empathy is one of the most boring and narcissistic things that keeps on happening and it's done over and over again and it achieves nothing except for pushing both groups apart from each other and I can't do much for women but I've got some I think pretty reasonable and influential friends that could propel a better conversation around men and working quite hard to make that happen in whatever way I can but
It's an uphill battle in many ways. Richard taught me this really interesting thing about how when people don't listen to your point, if you've been sort of campaigning for something for a while, you turn up the volume and the intensity ever more, especially if they say, no, it's not, or you don't feel like it's being welcomed, not only not being heard, but is actively being pushed back.
And I can definitely see that
temptation that dynamic going on that gravitational pull uh for you to become ever more a firebrand when talking about this sort of stuff and uh there's definitely days when i feel a bit more fiery than others those are the days i try and stay off twitter but um i think i'm happy with the job that's been done this year i think the conversations i've had have been really great and i hope that they've helped a lot um but still more to be done uh speaking of which another conversation i've been having a lot another lesson that i took away was
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