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The Laws of Creativity: Whatever you think, think the opposite. w/Joey Cofone
In a conversation with author Joey Cofone, Chris Do explores the laws of creativity and why embracing your weirdness is the key to originality.
Chris Do
Founder, The Futur™ · February 17, 2023
The Creativity Conspiracy
At age five, you were a creative genius. This is not a platitude. It is a statistic.
A longitudinal study developed for NASA by George Land and Beth Jarman tested the divergent thinking capacity of 1,600 children. At age five, 98 percent of them scored at the genius level. The researchers returned five years later. Of the same group of children, now ten years old, only 30 percent scored at that level. By age fifteen, it was down to 12 percent.
The number for adults? A mere two percent.
A drop from 98 percent to two percent is not an accident. It is not a statistical anomaly. It is a system working with devastating efficiency. It means we have engineered a world that systematically and effectively beats the creativity out of our children, and by extension, ourselves. It is a conspiracy against originality, and we are all its unwitting participants.
In a recent conversation on The Futur, Chris Do sat down with designer, entrepreneur, and author Joey Cofone to dismantle this conspiracy. Cofone, whose book The Laws of Creativity serves as a manual for this very purpose, argues that creativity is not a magical gift bestowed upon a chosen few. It is a faculty we all possess, one that can be recovered and mastered.
Do, who has spent his career pushing creatives to break free, agrees. “I do everything I can to push people to embrace your inner weird,” he says. That instinct, to be different, to question, to experiment, is the very core of the genius that was once universal. The journey back to that state of genius begins with understanding what went wrong.
The Unmaking of a Genius
The 96-point drop in creative genius is the result of three powerful forces we are all subjected to as we grow up. In his book, Cofone identifies them with surgical precision. These are the tools society uses to enforce conformity and extinguish the creative spark.
They are:
- Unquestionable Authority. Teachers, principals, bosses. We are taught to accept their pronouncements without challenge.
- Inflexible Rules. Man-made regulations and instructions are presented as absolute truths, to be followed without deviation.
- A Visible End. From school assignments to job descriptions, we are trained to work only on problems where the solution is already known. “Write three pages on the plot of this book,” Cofone explains. “I know how that’s going to end. Solve these two geometry proofs. I know how that’s going to end.”
This trifecta leaves no room for the unknown, which is the native territory of a child and the foundational soil of creativity. By the time we enter the professional world, most have been conditioned to fear the very ambiguity that creative work requires.
Cofone shared a personal and painful story that illustrates the real-world consequence of this conditioning. A friend from grammar school, who he calls “Bill,” was a prodigious visual artist. “At first grade he was drawing at like a college level,” Cofone recalls. “He was phenomenal.”
But Bill’s parents saw no viable career in art. They believed the myth of the starving artist and pushed him towards what they knew: nursing and accounting, their own professions. “To this day he does not do any of this art stuff,” Cofone says, a note of sorrow in his voice. “And he’s not the happiest.”
This is the casualty of the system. A potential genius convinced that his natural talents are a liability. This is why Cofone wrote his book and why he and Do are on a mission. They are changing the narrative, providing models of success that prove creativity is not just a viable career path, but a powerful engine for business and life. This work requires actively unlearning the lessons that have been drilled into us. It requires a form of rebellion.
The Laws of Unlearning
Joey Cofone's book is titled The Laws of Creativity. The name itself is a provocation. It suggests that this mystical, ethereal quality can be codified, understood, and even obeyed like the laws of physics. That is precisely his point. He aims to demystify the process, replacing vague notions of inspiration with a pragmatic, operational framework.
The book itself is a testament to this philosophy. Cofone wrote the text, designed the interior, illustrated the cover, and self-published the nearly 400-page volume. “I felt that if I was going to write a book on creativity,” he explains, “I felt like I needed to set that example.”
This act of total authorship is the first law in action: you can learn anything. But to do so, you must first unlearn the rules that hold you back. Chris Do recounts a common pattern he saw while teaching at ArtCenter College of Design. A student would present a solution, and when challenged, would inevitably say something like, “I thought we couldn’t do it the other way.”
“Who taught you that?” Do would press. “What class, what book, which author, which teacher told you you couldn't do that?”
In every single instance, the student could not name a source. The rule was an assumption, a ghost. It was a self-imposed limitation designed to avoid the perceived risk of being different, of being judged as “weird.” This is a core concept in originality and creative thinking.
This is where Cofone's own creative origin story becomes instructive. In first grade, tasked with a coloring worksheet of a worm, he initially followed the rules. But looking at the bulletin board filled with other, similar worms, he felt a pang of disappointment. His work, while well-executed, was not original. Retreating to his desk, he had a flash of insight. He took the paper scraps from cutting out the worm and fashioned them into a boombox, a microphone, and a necklace.
He put them on his worm.
The teacher’s reaction was simple and profound. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” Cofone admits, “From that day forward, very real sense, I’ve been addicted to that feeling.”
This story is a perfect microcosm of defying the three creativity-killing forces. He questioned the authority of the worksheet, broke the unwritten rule of coloring within the lines of convention, and refused to accept the visible end of just another colored worm on the wall. He ventured into the unknown.
Your Ignorance is an Asset
The most devastating rule is the one that tells you what is impossible. When a professor, a boss, or an entire industry declares a problem unsolvable, most people simply stop trying. This is why true innovation often comes from outsiders, people who were not in the room when the rules of impossibility were handed down.
Cofone shares the remarkable story of George Danzig, a graduate student in statistics at UC Berkeley. One day, Danzig arrived late to class. He quietly copied down two problems from the blackboard, assuming they were the homework assignment. He went home and worked on them, finding them significantly harder than usual. After some struggle, he solved them.
He brought the solutions to his professor, apologizing for the delay. A few days later, the professor appeared at his door, waving the papers in excitement. Danzig had, completely by accident, solved two famously “unsolvable” problems in statistics. Because he had missed the professor's preamble stating their supposed impossibility, he never believed he couldn't do it.
“Even George admits if he had known that... he probably wouldn’t even try,” Cofone says. This story, which later inspired a scene in the film Good Will Hunting, is the foundation for one of Cofone's key laws: Measure against yourself. When you stop comparing your abilities to the perceived limits of others, you enter a lane of your own. As Do's mentor used to say, most innovations are created by two types of people:
- Newcomers to a field who do not know what is considered impossible.
- Experts from other fields who bring in entirely new toolsets and perspectives.
This principle is perfectly embodied by the story of Jan Ernst Matzeliger, an immigrant who revolutionized the shoe industry in the 19th century. Shoes were a luxury item, painstakingly made by hand. Matzeliger, deeply moved by the sight of workers with bleeding feet, including his own mother, became obsessed with making them affordable.
He apprenticed at every stage of the process, looking for the bottleneck. He found it in “lasting,” the process of attaching the upper part of the shoe to the sole. It was a skilled, manual task. The industry considered it an art form that could never be mechanized.
Matzeliger, bringing a mechanical engineering mindset to a craft-based industry, disagreed. He built a machine that could perform the lasting process. A skilled hand-laster could produce perhaps 20 pairs of shoes a day. Matzeliger’s machine produced 500. He single-handedly democratized footwear. He solved the problem because he wasn't a traditional shoemaker. He was an outsider who could reframe the problem.
This leads to another critical concept: The person who can best define the problem is most likely the person to solve it. Matzeliger didn't just ask, "How do I make shoes cheaper?" He drilled down. "How do I make the *process* cheaper?" And finally, "How do I make *lasting* cheaper?" By framing the question correctly, the path to the solution became clear. It's a fundamental principle of turning problems into opportunities.
The Mathematical Proof of Your Weirdness
There is a powerful word that society has weaponized to enforce conformity. That word is “weird.”
“Weird has been weaponized,” Cofone states. “It's the avoidance of being weird that makes people put themselves in boxes.” Nobody wants to be ostracized, to get the funny looks, to be put on a different bus. So we sand down our edges. We hide the interests and quirks that make us different.
But Chris Do offers a powerful reframe, one he adapted from designer James Victore: What makes you weird makes you wonderful.
Cofone goes a step further. He argues that your weirdness, your uniqueness, is not just a feeling. It is a mathematical fact. He demonstrates this with a simple but profound exercise. He asks Do to name three things he likes from three different categories.
Do lists his favorites:
- Comics: The Incredible Hulk, for the rich psychological dynamic of a brilliant mind wrestling with a creature of raw emotion.
- Martial Arts: Hickson Gracie, the legendary master of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
- Design: The iconic skate graphics of Jim Phillips for Santa Cruz Skateboards, like the Screaming Hand.
Cofone then runs the numbers. Let's be conservative and assume there are only 1,000 options in each of these categories. The number of possible combinations for just these three preferences is one billion (1000 x 1000 x 1000). “There’s eight billion people on Earth,” Cofone points out. “So you’re already one in eight.”
Now, add just one more variable. One more book, one more movie, one more hobby. Let's add Cofone's book to the list. With four categories, the number of permutations skyrockets to one trillion. That is 128 times the entire population of the planet.
“What am I saying here?” Cofone asks. “If you can get those four things that you like in your creations, you are mathematically, incredibly unique.”
Your weirdness is your superpower. It is the unique stack of interests, experiences, and perspectives that only you possess. The people who conform are hiding their greatest asset. They are operating from a place of fear, trying to be a cheap copy of someone else instead of a priceless original. When you build a personal brand, this unique stack is the very thing you must amplify.
Do shares a story about his own son, Otto. Given a craft kit to make foam animals, his son ignored the printed faces. He turned the pieces over, treating them as pure shapes, and glued them together to create a long, winding caterpillar. He saw the components for what they were, not for what they were intended to be. He was not yet bound by the rules.
This is the goal: to get back to that state of seeing the world as a collection of parts to be reconfigured, not a set of instructions to be followed.
The Art of Self-Acceptance
Knowing you are unique is one thing. Having the courage to live it is another.
The path to unleashing your creative power is paved with self-acceptance. It is an internal process of dismantling the barriers you have built to protect yourself. For Cofone, a pivotal turning point came at age 13 when his single mother passed away. This tragic event forced him into a state of radical self-reliance.
“When you lose the person that puts you at the number one, even though there's a world filled with people, that can feel lonely,” he reflects. “I think that started a process of self-acceptance because I had to be my own cheerleader.” With no primary caregiver to turn to for external validation, he learned to generate it internally. This cultivated a deep-seated confidence that allowed him to pursue his own path.
However, self-acceptance is not a single event. It is a continuous process of discovery. Cofone shares a more recent, and surprisingly controversial, revelation. “It only dawned on me last year that I really don’t like being outside,” he admits. “I don’t like nature, man.”
He acknowledges the societal pressure to love the outdoors, the way it's conflated with being a whole, connected person. For years, he went through the motions, hiking and camping, all the while waiting to go back inside. The admission is both funny and profound. It is an act of accepting a preference that runs counter to cultural expectations. It is another layer of embracing his authentic self.
This continuous journey of self-discovery is about learning to trust your own instincts, even when they make you feel weird. It is about recognizing, as Do says, that many of the rules holding you back are phantoms. They are learned behaviors and self-imposed limitations designed to keep you safe and small. Learning how to shape your reality starts with examining the words you use to define it.
Stop Conforming. Start Creating.
The message from Do and Cofone is clear. Creativity is not magic. It is a process that has been systematically unlearned and can be systematically relearned.
The path forward is a series of deliberate choices. It is the choice to question authority, to test the boundaries of rules, and to venture into problems without a visible end. It is the choice to stop measuring yourself against others and start competing only with the person you were yesterday.
It is the choice to see your weirdness not as a liability, but as your most valuable, mathematically proven asset. Your strange combination of interests in Renaissance poetry, 90s hip-hop, and mycology is not random. It is your unique creative formula.
The first step is often the most difficult: to accept yourself fully. To give yourself permission to like what you like, to be who you are, and to create from that authentic place.
The world already has enough copies.
It is waiting for your original.
TRANSCRIPT
but this is something that I push creative people to do so if we say only about two percent of adults survive as a creative person within that group they're still questioning things that are like Chris I'm still trying to fit in a box that there's this need to conform we learned a long
time ago to get along we have to go along and being weird gets us ostracized it gets us funny looks sometimes we're put on a different bus or tease and so those patterns of thinking and the need to fit in is so strong and prevalent even within the two percent that survive and
I do everything I can to push people to embrace your inner weird James Victoria has this expression which I love which I co-opted and modified a little bit but his thing is what makes you weird as a kid makes you a creative as an adult that's a lot to say I just say
what makes you weird makes you wonderful and when we learn to lean into that it becomes your superpower in some way want to stand out in a good way we just don't want it to be labeled as weird I'm really looking forward to talking today Joey because of our previous conversation but mostly
because of this 400 I think it's almost hundred Pages yeah 400 page book that you sent over to me which I'm just super appreciative to have in my hands I've read through it I've gotten I've finished most of it and I just feel so much that it resonates and aligns with the things
I think about it's just better written than I could say the stories are better it's better research than I'm I'm also super impressed that it's self-published and we were just joking before we went started recording here it's like everything is by you text by Joey designed by Joey the exterior Design interior design
first let me just ask you that question why is everything done by you so that's not how it is at Baron fig by the way thanks thanks for happy to be here uh excited to chat I felt that if I was going to write a book on creativity and talk about the scope
of what I've done in the past talk about how you can learn anything not to be afraid I felt like I needed to set that example and I needed to you know obviously I wrote it there's no ghost writing or anything right and you know I designed the interior and like you said
the cover and I felt like I couldn't have a book on creativity with the cover be designed by someone else um it would it would I would never get over that okay you know and so I ended up doing everything but that's not my philosophy in general at Baron fig you know I
put trust in the right people to do the right things and I let them do their their jobs well well I admire you for it maybe there's some shots fired because I did write my own book and I'm like I can't design all these things I can't do all these things I need
a lot of help and this way my mind works so this stands out to me I mean the first thing whenever you read a book uh is you wonder who's the Ghost Rider because these days there's a lot of people who co-sign onto things yeah maybe they told somebody a story and then
that person does the heavy lifting and of course I I respect that too there's nothing wrong with that but it's more admirable when it's like it's you and it's all you kind of beginning to end um um the illustrations in here are yours too yeah look at that look at you I'm impressed
okay so let's see let's kind of rewind the tape here in case somebody wherever they've been didn't listen to our first conversation can you tell people who you are and what you do sure happy to hello everyone out there excited to be here my name is Joey Capone I am an entrepreneur and
a newly minted author as you have learned I founded Baron fig a company that makes tools to help you do your best thinking and I wrote the laws of creativity a book that teaches you how to master your ideas I'm a designer under the hood I've designed and art directed over a hundred
products from zero to launch and in a nutshell my work focuses on helping people turn their ideas into reality love that okay so here we are um what was the motivation for you to write the book because it's no easy under taking for someone to consolidate their thinking and put it into something
that's fairly permanent Blair ends told me uh do your due diligence write a good book because you can't unpublish a book so there's something very permanent about a book and how serious we take it as a work of ideas and maybe even within the realm of Academia you're legitimate as soon as you
write a book so why did you write this book what was the motivation yeah the motivation started way back when I was a kid and it's not the story you're thinking of from the intro that was just about creativity which we maybe we'll touch on but why I wrote the book and probably
why I do what I do so I had this friend in grammar school we'll call him Bill and Bill was an incredible visual artist he drew all the time he at at first grade he was drawing at like a college level he was phenomenal well his parents didn't think that there was a
livelihood there as a creative they forced him to be a nurse and when that didn't work they forced him to be an accountant lo and behold those are the two jobs his parents had and to this day he does not do any of this art stuff and um he's not the happiest and
I remember witnessing this and thinking oh my goodness this is an injustice we have and you know it's so normal for people to push their kids into sports which has a ridiculously smaller chance of of financial success as a as an adult but we don't nearly as much push kids into the creative
arts and they're often so interested in that and there's this uh belief that there's no money there that there's a no careers there and so I think I made it my mission a long time ago to focus on that as something that I want to combat and say like this isn't true at
all and so like you know you're doing it I'm doing it we're designers as you know leaders creating businesses and together we're you know and many other people like us are changing that so that maybe one day you know they'll be like hey you know you want to be like Michael Jordan Cool
you want to be like you know joke phone Chris go like these are all models and um so that's why I wrote the book the easy part is I basically took notes for 10 years on my phone and it went you know jumped from phone to phone thanks to the cloud where I
saw patterns and I would record them and as you know you're reading you've read you've probably recognized the same patterns uh I put them down and then the pandemic happened so I didn't plan on writing this crest for a while I figured you know let me get a little older get a little
more cred whatever it is I don't know what I was waiting for but I wasn't planning on it stuck inside during quarantine and my wife says if you don't write this now I don't know when you're going to write it and I was like man she's right and so I immediately took those
notes I looked at them parsed them organized them into a table of contents and that's pretty much what you see in your hands okay the way that the book is structured it's broken into like three major components right foundation if we get what you how do you describe the three parts there Foundation
process and Excellence okay and they're all written as laws laws to obey laws to observe and you you really do a lot to to try to dispel this idea that creativity is Magic and so maybe we'll talk about that a little bit but as I I was reading the book I was kind
of just thinking like how did you organize all these things did you write the laws all first to figure out okay these are the tenants in which I believe in and then organize and group them and then backfill in the stories and explanations and the Frameworks is that how you did it at
first I I thought I was gonna do just the process I thought that was the book how to create from start to finish I think is the subtitle that second part and so I went out and I of course I talked to a bunch of creatives but I also talked to non-creatives and
I quickly learned that it's not that they were doing anything wrong it's more that they weren't thinking in the right way to be creative I mean it sounds kind of obvious now when we say it but you know accepting that failure at the start is a given and not worrying about doing it
like other people uh and letting your weird out right we could break those down if you want but all these things are what we're really preventing these non-creatives from creating and so then I was like man I gotta write this mindset section first before I even touch the process and then along the
way it became obvious oh my goodness there's all these things that just the people who are really good do and that's a section so that's how the three parts came and then it once I had that it was so easy to drop the laws in the appropriate spot the harder part was naming
some of them I like you know struggled there was one that there's uh the law of symbiosis now is about essentially that your your body's not just a container for your mind but it actually contributes to the effectiveness of it right and it's the law of symbiosis great name now but before I
had some terrible names like the law connectedness and all the love like friendship I mean it was just dumb but that's the process which of course you know yeah so uh the reason why I asked you that question is because when you are writing you're often referencing other laws forward and backwards so
I was thinking man Joey's mind is very organized okay okay uh I've got some I've got some sick tips um okay and then I can tell you how that happened I'll I'll cut to the Chase and say that I just added that in afterwards once I wrote the book [Laughter] the magic I
looked up your sleeve here okay yeah but when I wrote the book I didn't worry about it and Mike my key tip in writing any book is never go backwards so once you're done with the chapter no matter where you know how good or bad you think it is when you're done and
you've reviewed it once you see you you save it you move on to the next chapter and that's how I wrote this book relatively quickly in 11 months and um essentially not going backwards and so then I did go backwards to add all those references in but uh a lot of people get
stuck in hyper analyzing what they've done and and treated as progress when it's it's really a the facade of progress by editing yeah before you're done writing right I I think there's a lot of people who write or create who will say very similar things that there's different brains that we're using in
the creation process and the editing process and editing involves a more analytical mind and so it takes you out of the creative process and get your first ugly draft out do not move backwards move forwards I hear that but here's what I'd love to do so it's called the laws of creativity and
so immediately and I know you know the answer to this but I'm setting you up here sometimes I'm like well that's not for me I'm an accountant I'm I'm not in a field where I would describe myself as creative so let's go debunk some myths here I think this is the foundational part
of the book right the laws that you write about in terms of how to think creatively let's talk about why there's so few of us who self-identify as creative and and talk about like why that's like why being a creative is is not something that you should be ashamed of or try to
run away from but to run towards yeah well my favorite um part of that beginning section is when I remember the day I discovered the fact that NASA had done this study on creatives you already know what I'm talking about yeah so NASA the the same organization that has put people on the
moon you know that they're precise they're not wrong but that's a deadly thing to be wrong for NASA they found that 98 of kids are at the creative genius level at age five we're talking genius level but by the time we reach adulthood that number dwindles to two percent now this is fascinating
because essentially kids are creative genius and then we entirely lose it as adults and so my goal is how can I write a book that helps you get it back I'm not teaching you something I want to remind you of what you already know and and the Curious thing about going from 98
to two is that's not an accident it'd be different if it was like 98 to 80. okay you know some whatever some people lose it but when you go to 98 to 2 that's a guaranteed effect that's happening which means we are culturally the way we operate we are systematically and very effectively
beating the creativity out of our children as we grow older and you know I have a few beliefs and there's a lot of research and discussion to come to the the conclusion you know you said why are there so few of us so essentially there's three things that happen when we're being raised
and the first is Authority like the teachers principles Deans we're taught that that's unquestionable next we're taught that man-made rules must be followed to a fault and finally this is the third part is which is the most devastating we're taught that the end is visible from the start and I'm not being hyperbolic
at all when we are in school we're given an assignment write three pages on the plot of this book I know how that's going to end or solve these two geometry proofs I know how that's going to end then we're put into the world we're given jobs and bosses that do the same
thing and so going into the unknown is something we're never trained of but as kids everything is an unknown which is why we're you know creative Geniuses so Chris you me accidentally and all these creatives out there for whatever lucky reason as kids we didn't allow those three things to pull the Curiosity
and instead replace it with fear of the unknown and that's how we have produced uh that's how the world has produced two percent creatives by accident essentially so I I have this observation or at least this theory about how people wind up being creative there is something that you touch upon in the
book about the spirit of being a rebel and I just don't listen so well I don't follow the rules yeah carefully and I question authority as part of my default operating system so I think something maybe in a traditional judging lens it's like something was defective about our brains that that these authority
figures who are trying to make us follow a very specific rules and think in a linear binary way there's a right way and a wrong way to do something for some reason it didn't click with us like you write about it about what a warm taught you about creativity and there's a very
similar thing that has happened in my life and I want to share because I at boys they're not little kids anymore but tell us a little bit about the warm and what it taught you about creativity yeah there was a it starts off the book with a story about where this came from
and Chris I agree it's you know we just talked about rules and authority and the opposite would be breaking rules and not and and actively questioning Authority when I was in first grade I was seven years old uh back in the day when I pulled my pants up way too high they were
like right under my nipples man I got legs for days dude I'm six foot three and for whatever reason man I love those high pants and I go into first grade and the teacher handed out the uh worksheet to color and we've all done this you color it you put it on the
bulletin board and everybody's happy it stays there for a week until the next one and on this particular day it was a worm and I remember thinking I'm going to make the best one possible so I put my arm around it I start coloring this thing and I'm like this is going to
be a kick-ass warrant but mine is mine is going to be awesome and I must have taken law Because by the time I was ready I cut it out and when I walked up to the board most were up there already and I saw that even though they were all colored differently as
a group they felt the same so I slowly went back to my desk and the teacher was like Joey is everything okay and I was like yeah it's all right and I'm like you know try not to cry like oh my God my thing is not as original as I thought well I'm
sitting there with my head and my hands and I'm super sad and it Dawns on me as I'm looking at my desk that I have all these shards of paper from the cutout so I picked them all up and I'm like oh my goodness this is an opportunity I draw a Boombox a
microphone and a necklace cut them out put them on my worm put that on the board the whole class gathers the teacher is there like oh my goodness then I'll never forget she simply said I've never seen anything like it and from that day forward very real sense I've been addicted to that
feeling how can I do that again where people go I've never seen that and that has driven me from seven years old to today hmm were you self-aware at that point in time like there was something happening inside of you and that the acknowledgment that you got this is different to the original
uh that you are a creative being were you that self-aware at that age I knew that what I had done the moment I thought about it I knew it was going to be a hit before I had done it like I no cutting and drawing and I was like oh this is gonna
kill it as far as was I self-aware enough to say that this was a creative act there was there was all that came later where I it was much older and then I was like what happened where did this come from and I remember this day that's this arbitrary memory that really has
stuck out so strongly hmm what about you man do you do you have um is there like a formative creative moment that you remember in your life there are but you know it's kind of interesting that that story resonates so much with me because as a parent I get to observe my children
and there's two little stories I want to share and it's going to sound almost exactly like your story uh my boys when they're much younger we would buy them toy cars like these metal die-cast cars and they're about eight or nine inches like replica models right and I remember my my little guy
I think he was barely learning how to walk at that point he was trying to climb inside the car so his foot is bigger than the door but he was trying to put his foot inside the car and I looked at him for probably 30 seconds or so just watching an amusement yeah
as a parent but not thinking like you idiot you can't put your foot in the car but yeah in his mind he doesn't understand the relationships between size and openings and so he wasn't going to buy into all these rules that we already accept as truths and laws and so I just found
it really pleasurable to see and just to witness and just leave him alone let him try to get in that car and drive it even though his whole leg is bigger than the entire car the second story is also very warm like it's a caterpillar now my wife and I when our boys
were younger we'd go to a place called Lakeshore I don't know if you have that where you're at but it's like the Toys R Us for for educators for teachers and they would have supplies to to make like different things and it's it's designed for teachers to to buy and then bring into
the classroom so my wife and I are there we're trying to buy things creative art tools different projects for our kids to work on and there's one in particular where there's a set of four animals with foam parts that you can glue together bear a tiger an elephant and a monkey and there's
like a popsicle stick right and it's since it's for teachers there's way too many parts and pieces for us as a family of four and so what happened was my wife would then show my son how to make the tiger the elephant and glue Parts together with the like little bubbly eyes right
and then she's a designer herself so she starts combining different animal parts together she's she's making like a tiger bear or an elephant monkey and she's she's like oh I'm having a lot of fun and she's playing around with this and then my son my oldest son his name is Otto I don't
remember how old he was but he was working on something else and then when they were all done my wife's like you know I gotta show you what your kids did I'm like what is that she would show me the basic set and then she showed me her set which is super creative
not thinking of the animals as having to match reality yeah but what she showed me was our son took the faces turned him around so they're just shapes and he glued them together to make a caterpillar and then you put those on the stick so he ignored what was intended in terms of
the instructions and he ignored the graphics and he turned them over and she goes there's nothing I can do to beat your son's creativity this is amazing and we still have this as a artifact of like what it means to be a creative person so that very much mirrors your story about the
warm and you thinking outside the box I love that that's awesome so he basically took the shape alone and ignored what was printed on it I was like what can I make of this I'm not going to follow their rules at all that's exactly right that's beautiful and that that reminds me of
the story that you included in the book about the mathematician who came late to his class tell us a little bit about that and how that might help us to reframe things yeah so there's a [Music] name George Danzig and he was not a very good student as as we've learned troublemakers May
tend to be but George was actually particularly uh late one day to class and so he runs he runs across campus he arrives 10 minutes late he sits down as quietly as he can he sees on the board there's two math problems so he's like okay this is the homework I'm going to
write it down and then he sneaks out before class is over so that he doesn't get yelled at by the teacher well he goes home and he gets to work it's actually quite difficult for him to solve the problems and he thinks to himself man these are some of the hardest that the
teachers ever got given but he solves them eventually he brings them to the teacher's office and he he fesses up and he's like listen I'm sorry I was late that day I'm sorry these took so long here's my homework I'll see you I'll see you in class it goes home uh Sunday morning
a few days later he hears a banging on his dorm room and he's like what the hell I think in a friend is probably you know excited about something he opens up who does he see but the professor sweating waving the papers in the air turns out George Danzig solved unsolvable math problems
and he had no idea so because he went to class late he didn't hear the teacher tell everyone these are problems that no one has been able to solve we think they're unsolvable so this chapter and the reason I tell this story is because even George admits if he had known that if
the teacher had set those expectations then he probably wouldn't even try just like the other students but because he didn't know he was able to do something no one else was and so this story is the lead-in to the chapter that is um titled measure against yourself it's the law of competition which
says do not compare yourself to others but rather compare today's you to yesterdays and so when you're incrementally better you can reach New Heights untethered by the expectations of others this whole chapter goes into teaching you first by example and then through principle of how when you do this you start to wander
into your own lane and that's when wonderful things can happen because now you're going into a new path that may not have been tread before and you're also as a human being just generally less stressed out because you're not comparing yourself to what someone else is doing we're all on our own timeline
and that's the that's the law of competition it's one of uh it's turning into one of the fan favorites of that first section too I love that and the the lesson I got from hearing that story now I'm unfamiliar with that story and also how you connected it to Matt Damon and Ben
Affleck's uh writing of Goodwill Hunting which that story is based on this this accidental Math Genius that it's like I don't know so the thing I get from that is is that when we aren't told what we can and cannot do it turns out we can do a lot more than we think
and so the professor saying to his his students these are unsolvable math problems then why even try or I'm not smart enough to solve the problem and so we precondition or Society classrooms teachers precondition us to believe things are not possible therefore eliminating all kinds of exploration my former business Mentor Karen McLaren
who recently passed he would tell me that most Innovations are created by one of two types of people one somebody's in a field but they're relatively new so they don't really know what they're not doing that is that people tell them like you know this is not possible or two they come from
totally different fields and then they innovate and basically it's the same principle which is I don't know enough about what I don't know so I'm just gonna try anyways which is what happened here with Danzig right absolutely yeah there's um there's another story did you get to the one about uh Jan ersma
zeliger and the the um the shoes yes I did so similar to the Danzig and what you're saying about it Innovations uh there's this there's this kid named yarn it's metzeliger and he came to the U.S uh as a young teenager and essentially um he was he barely spoke the language and he
was just trying to learn uh a trade and so he went into the shoe industry and back then shoes were relegated to the wealthy because they were so expensive to make they were so expensive to buy and Matt zeliger was actually the son of of a enslaved person and he would want you
know when he was young he watched his mother work and his her feet bled and it would make her sick and so when he started getting involved he said there's got to be a way to put shoes on everyone's feet why does this cost so much and so he spent years working in
apprenticeship apprenticing at every level of the process until he discovered the problem which was shoe lasting and Lasting was done by hand lasters is essentially taking the soul and attaching it to the shoe and it has to be done by hand and it takes quite a while and he said if I can
reduce the time this cost this takes I can reduce the time an entire shoe takes and people were like ah you can't replace hand lasters that's an art it's an Artistry and what he did was he built a machine that replicated the whole process of hand lasting and went from something like a
hand Laster could do 20 pairs of shoes a day to his machine did 500 a day and because of him he essentially democratized shoes and he's a total newcomer people laughed at him it's exactly what you're saying it's because he didn't have all these preconceived notions about uh you know how artistic it
needs to be to apply the souls and so on and so forth yeah I think if I remember the story correctly was did you have a background in like mechanical engineering or something like that yeah yeah he did he did so that's the interesting example right yeah it's classic whereas he comes from
something totally different instead of The Craft he's a mechanical engineer and he brings this over and says my goodness you guys aren't leveraging this thing that I know let's try it out and you know now we all wear shoes thanks to this person yeah so there's a couple of things also to to
pull apart from that story about how he basically learned the trade from the bottom up doing every little thing until he could figure out the problem and and I'm gonna try to segue to this other part which is you you say that the person who can best Define the problem or ask the
right question is most likely the person to solve it and so you write about the evolution of the questions that one might ask and can you talk a little bit about that and how framing the problem through a question leads us to the answer right it depends on what you know I talked
about um self-driving cars in the chapter and essentially the the more precise you are at honing where you're looking the more likely you'll you'll solve for that little thing and so I I tell take the example of self-driving and originally it's you know how can we make a self-driving car then it's how
can we you know they evolve Tesla uses the example evolves that question to not only that but how can we have cars read the road and then it goes from how well we get that but they need to learn now because we can't possibly program every instance so then they make cars learn
but my goodness this is too slow it's going to take us forever to gather data so the question evolves to how can we make cars learn from each other Tesla hooks up all the cars together into the the fleet becomes the neural network and all of a sudden the data blooms and now
self-driving is evolving at such a rapid rate that actually in one of uh one of the baronfig team members has a Tesla and he was just telling me they just released to him the beta for Manhattan self-driving which is you know according to hymns I don't follow it as closely is like the
Pinnacle of self-driving to handle all the craziness that's going on outside and so basically by finding the right question or through a process you can't jump to it but as you work constantly changing what your goal is you will be able to find the heart of your problem in Tesla's case how do
we make cars learn from each other that can then ultimately Bloom into the solution you're looking for um there's a couple things I want to mention here really quickly I remember a little clip I saw on YouTube about Kevin O'Leary who's one of the sharks from Shark Tank and he was having this
conversation with his son and he's like why would you ever want to invest in Tesla he asked and his son's like Dad you don't get it you're the idiot Tesla's not a car company they're a data company and he's like oh my gosh he said what do you mean well each car is
collecting data and building into this neural network so they have a distinct advantage of the other car companies don't have and other car companies are trying to approach the problem probably from the wrong way therefore they're less likely to solve it but getting back also to I don't know how to pronounce the
name but the Shoemaker who figured out this lasting part I think in the book you write about this like first is like how do I make shoes more affordable and that's too big of a question but then he reduced the problem down to like where's the slowest most tedious part of the construction
and I suspect that it's called lasting because it's the last thing that gets done the soul Supply applied to the shoe and so he said how do I improve or make that part Faster by asking that question then he can go about solving the problem and I love that because so much about
a perception and how we look at problems and solutions is about how we frame the problem when we frame the problem correctly then we're looking at the in the right direction my business coach also maybe I'll refer to a couple more times on this episode he would always tell me like you know
here's the thing when you ask the question it's not that you need people to tell you where the bullseye is so that you can hit it in your creative pitches it's just tell us what wall it's on so at least we're facing in the right direction because no matter how many shots we
take if we're not facing the right direction we have a zero chance of hitting it yeah that's exactly it because Matt zeliger went ahead from how do we make it more affordable to how do we improve uh make the process cheaper to how do we make lasting cheaper and when he figured that
out through the series and he was able to knock it out okay I'd love to Circle back to this idea of rules because I I've been thinking about this a lot myself I used to teach at Art Center a place where some of the most creative minds come to hone their craft and
learn a skill from some of the best teachers and oftentimes this pattern would emerge and it finally dawned on me I need to push this button a little bit when when students would design their storyboards with me and I would challenge him and I would ask him like why did you do it
that way and they they would almost always say something to the effect of well I thought we couldn't do it the other way I said well who taught you that like who told you that that was a rule because one of the rules I have in class is you show up on time
you do what your ass and everything else is fair game just so just so you know there's nothing that's out of bounds but they would never inevitably come back and say well I thought we couldn't do that and I would ask them to cite what class what book which author which teacher told
you you couldn't do that and in every single instance they could not name it but they felt it what are your thoughts on that Joey right there's so well there's so many expectations that we we place on ourself but there's also you know there's when someone develops something like that there's this idea
you know I want to address this in a circuitous way because weird has been weaponized and I mean you may have read that part in the beginning but it's the avoidance of being weird that makes people put themselves in boxes and so when you think about that person in school that was different
from everyone else right like um you know there's that weird kid or there's the weird person at the office we've all done this at some point in our life they're weird and we've used that as a native oh that's weird when actually weird means you're different different means you're unique unique means you're
original and this is what everybody wants to be they want to be different they want to be original and don't take my word for it think about people that Society holds high right I'm just going to throw some names out that not necessarily my people but Kanye Elon Musk Oprah politicians Arthur Stewart
Tom Cruise it goes on and on right they're all weird they are themselves they are unique because they've got their weird Tendencies and we love them for it here's the Curious part is that inside of our bubble Chris the people in our world we don't want anybody like that everybody needs to fit
a mold but if you're outside of our bubble the people that we don't interact with then we love weird it's super curious that it's told we have this dichotomy we don't want to interact with weird but we want to admire it from afar and we certainly don't want to be weird because then
we're in the other people's bubble and now we're going to be ostracized and so I think a little bit of what you're saying comes from the idea that someone doesn't know what to do so they create this limitation that they think will then fit with everyone else end them sometimes it's spoken to
like if someone says those pants are weird you know why would you wear that and other times in your example people are taking best guesses just to avoid the the the ostracism that could come or they think could come with being different and I love that you start by saying in your class
you know anything goes here there's no rules aside from showing up and you know hey ending in your homework with your best efforts or something like that like I did I used to teach I did the same thing so I'm with you on that completely yeah so I find that as a teacher
most of my job is helping students dismantle those self-imposed rules wherever they learn them from so that they can harness and open up their true creativity I do want to spend a little bit more time talking about weirdness because it's something I definitely believe as I'm reading your book I'm like dude this
is how I think it's just written better and more organized than I could ever hope to do but this is something that I push creative people to do so if we say only about two percent of adults survive as a creative person within that group they're still questioning things they're like Chris I'm
still trying to fit in a box that there is this need to conform I I forget where I read this but it says you get along we have to go along and being weird gets us ostracized it gets us funny looks sometimes we're put on a different bus we're teas and so those
patterns of thinking and that fear and the need to fit in is so strong and prevalent even within the two percent that survive and I do everything I can to push people to embrace your inner weird James Victoria has this expression which I love which I've co-opted and modified a little bit but
his thing is what makes you weird as a kid makes you a creative as an adult that's a lot to say I just say what makes you weird makes you wonderful and when we learn to lean into that and you you write about the same thing it becomes your superpower you describe something
we all in in some way want to stand out in a good way we just don't want it to be labeled as weird and you said weird has been weaponized and it's turned into a negative word and then for used against us and there therefore we kind of shy away from it but
you describe something weird if we look at it differently is just another word for unique and different and if we're able to stack enough weirdness things that we prefer then we become a really truly unique person and then you have some mathematical calculations about that can you talk about that yeah so this
is what you're about to hear this applies throughout the book was you know dismantling the idea that creativity is Magic how do you do that with the most non-magic thing there is is math or practical applications or practical examples and so this is one you know how do you know you're unique I
say in the book I can prove it like legitimately so Chris let's let's do it with you give me three things that you like in three categories and I can make it easy like a movie TV show book whatever okay you want specific things or categories of things that I like three things
in three different categories uh sorry one thing in each of three categories okay so I'm really into comics and I believe it's very of uh like foundation on how I think and so I'm a Marvel person right I'm really into certain characters like my favorite superhero is the Incredible Hulk because I think
Incredible Hulk yeah because I love him because he's he's wrestling with a darker part of him and a raw emotion I feel the same way so when he becomes angry the classic Hulk loses control of his intellect and he's a brilliant person but I just feel like it's a super creative take on
multiple personality disorder oh interesting like Dr Jackson right they become a different person I just love the dichotomy of that and also the fact that the only thing the Hulk wants in his life is just to be left alone he just wants to be at peace but because he represents such a threat
to society and Humanity that the government and super villains are constantly after I'm like just leave him alone and I identify with this character so that's one thing okay I love this number two number two I'm really into mixed martial arts uh and the the brand that people know most and most Anonymous
with mixed martial arts is the UFC one of my favorite fighters of all time is the gentleman by the name of Hickson Gracie who's part of the lineage of the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Master Orient no I'm forgetting his dad's name I'm sorry the Gracie judicial family is built around certain individuals and Hixson
is the penultimate version of this and so I'm really into Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and mixed martial arts love this and the third uh the third let's see here um I love skateboarding I can't do it anymore but I do love skateboarding and I was drawn to skateboarding through the design of it and
that was a gateway drug into becoming a designer for me and for me Jim Phillips with Santa Cruz skateboards had some of the most iconic designs the Santa Cruz screaming hand the OJ slime ball I loved all of that and that's what got me hooked into skateboarding and ultimately graphic design love this
this is really good so first of all thanks for sharing that's really cool to learn about you um I did not know you like the Hulk so much and my my dad's uh favorite characters also though so let's I asked you this for a reason we're going to talk about uniqueness okay I
just asked you for three things that you like in three different categories so now let's say that for argument's sake there's only one thousand options in each which there's a lot more than that in comics in you know mixed martial artists as opposed to hixton Gracie did I say that right yep Hicks
and Gracie and Jim Phillips and I wrote down the OJ slime ball as an example of a design that resonated so with just those three the permutations there's a billion of them which means you are already one in eight okay so there's eight billion people on Earth so you're already one and eight
that's an incredible odd instead of one in eight billion now if we add just one more variable and I'm going to add it and say that your new favorite book is the laws of creativity by Joey Capone [Laughter] I get it now with four categories okay and only a thousand options each we
know there's way more than a thousand books the number of combinations is one trillion which is a hundred and twenty eight times the population of Earth so what am I saying here is if you can get those four things that you like in your Creations you are mathematically incredibly unique and that's just
four aspects of who you are and there are way more than a thousand options and there's way more than four aspects to Chris which the point being is that you could you are actually weird because you are unique and different and if you find a way to put your interests into what you
do into your life in the way you create or who you are you become incredibly unique and if people are going to call you weird screw because it doesn't matter you're being true to yourself and it's really the people who are conforming are really basically operating under the premise of fear and that's
not something we want and so that's just one example of how the book sort of takes these ideas and says hey I'm not I'm not uh bsing you there's no hyperbole this is a fact and here's how it works yeah and and this is not my idea but I read it and I
love it and whenever I say to people I've been heard it before they they like it too if somebody tells me that you're weird I said I'm not weird I'm limited edition man I'm one of one that's Ultra Premium rare holographic whatever it is right I know them well man I love it
okay so the the thing that I want to talk to you about in terms of this weirdness and why we don't lean into it okay so when I was younger I was embarrassed to talk about comic books because those are things that kids do and I'm in junior high and there's only a
couple of friends that that were into Comics as much as I was in terms of reading collecting talking about the stories and it's it's kind of material that if you if you talked about too loudly it's it's grounds for someone to to throw in a trash can and so you kind of keep
these at Bay somewhere along the way I find my confidence I found my voice and I let my inner freak flag out and I I raise it proudly but I take it to that it's rare amongst people because we wouldn't be talking about if everybody already knew how to do it so I
asked you for some of my friends who maybe haven't found that inner confidence and voice yet how do we be brave enough to lean into this weirdness and look at it as an asset and not a liability do you have any practical tips yeah if this one is sprinkled throughout the book because
it's something that comes up so often and it really starts with self-acceptance um and and I think the reason I shared the math behind it is to hopefully um make you or any reader understand that if you're not if you're trying to convince yourself that you're not weird you're just lying to yourself
because weird by by the very nature of being an individual in the world and all your interests you are and you know when we think about I mean every day you have you know 6 000 thoughts right and it's like when you're filling your mind up with stuff that is when you're hiding
all those thoughts I should say is you're essentially beating down a large part of who you are and you know with a few tweaks to shift your mindset you can start to take advantage of them and one of them is self-acceptance and the other is starting to break down in the whole part
one really is how you can challenge assumptions measure against yourself basically chapter one sets you up for all of the other techniques in the first part which is designed to help you um be more creative so you're thinking in combinations by understanding what creativity is you've Embrace fear welcome failure these are all
techniques that we go into and then of course at the end of the day chapter part one ends with having fun and teaches you that the law of play is really the way to the most growth is when you do things you enjoy and it ties the it closes the circle on the
things you like focusing on enjoying yourself together helps you create I'm not sure if that was exactly the answer you were looking for but I feel like I could talk for a whole hour on just the techniques themselves yes well I have more questions for you on this uh I don't want to
let you off the hooks just yet I would like to for you to speak to your own personal experience as to how you found what was the defining moment for you where you've started to feel like you accepted yourself and you found your inner confidence yeah I think that you know it's it's
a it's a gradual process um you know I had some we talked about this on the podcast last time my mom died when she when I was young I was 13. she uh she was a single mom forced me to really explore the world um and figure out what it means to in
a way be alone because you know when you lose the person that puts you at the number one uh even though there's a world filled with people that can feel lonely and I think that started a process of self-acceptance because I had to be my own cheerleader I if there if I did
something great I had no one to go to and say look at this great test or this thing I made and that taught me a lot about um pumping myself up which then gave me accidentally gave me confidence to do things that um you know for a high schooler maybe the confidence wasn't
there yet but I will tell you that there was a the most recent change then I I'm excited to uh see how you're gonna react to this because everybody is different so I'm a city boy it's just a fact however it's a fact that I have only come to in my 34th year
last year uh so all my life man I have done Outdoors stuff I've hiked the Appalachian Trail I've gone camping I mean I worked Outdoors as a profession doing all sorts of stuff you know Plumbing where you're doing before a house is built and it's just basically a bunch of wood sticks and
you're in you're in the open air and it only dawned on me last year that I I really don't like being outside like what I don't I don't like nature man and it's it's like such a thing that no one wants to say out loud because like dude you don't like nature well
you're not connect to the world like how could you do that or say that and that is what kept me from saying it for so long and now I'm saying it to you and I'm saying in front of many many people is that you know what I love the beauty of Nature and
I respect it and I I am constantly in awe of the the world that we live in both the natural and the unnatural however I found myself whenever it was time to go do something outdoorsy I was waiting to go back inside and even at 34 even after all that I had learned
there are still these residual things that that are hard to acknowledge and this was one of them because of societal pressure I mean your reaction is like what that's totally fine I've gotten that so much and if I laugh about it because it is I don't hear anyone else saying I don't like
nature but I I just I'd rather be inside I'm a nerd that wants to like be in front of screens and in my VR and on my you know via video games it's just so yeah I think it's constant it is and that's just the way it is man and like I think
you know I know I bring that up because I want you know to illustrate the point that the self-acceptance is is not necessarily uh a key turning point but just continuous little changes in how you look at yourself and it'll you know there'll probably be more things I'm sure you have similar experiences
where we just keep realizing more about ourselves yeah a bunch of things to talk about there the reason why you got such a big reaction from me was this story took an Abrupt turn because I thought you were setting up like I'm a city boy of living in New York and then my
childhood it's like I'm all outdoors and Chris I'm moving to like I'm moving to like the woods I'm done with City Life and then when you're like no I don't like the outdoors it turns out that's why I'm like what right yeah I just have to say this because I was just recently
uh you know travel traveling again and I was in Manhattan and I just it's not that I forgot but I was reminded of the beauty the concrete jungle the gleaming towers of glass and steel the the the Brick Stone buildings that have been around for a couple hundred years it's just like it's
a it's a Marvel and yeah parts of New York like you could stand and point the camera to any angle at any time in the day and it's just it's breathtaking so I get it you don't you don't get that in the woods you get trees different kind of skyscraper but right and
it's it's super interesting and I don't think there's anything really super strange or weird about it it's just your acceptance acknowledgment of it despite how other people may react right I appreciate that there you go yeah no I'm gonna take it back a little bit because you talked about I we we talked
about this before but now I'm kind of looking at this moment in your life through the lens of the book is that your mom passes away you're 13 years old and I don't wish this on anybody like we all should have two loving parents who give us unconditional love who support us who
are our number one fans and tell us everything is possible but in in a way losing your mom and your primary caretaker there is that you have no one else to depend on and so this is me playing amateur psychoanalysts like well if you don't turn outward for validation then you turn inward
or you die basically because you need some form of love and we get it externally but you you gave yourself internal like you learn to love yourself and to to just look at the world as like you know I'm an independent person operating system I don't need external inputs to tell me if
I'm moving in the right direction is that is that kind of fair or no yeah that's really well said too looking internally instead of externally for validation at a young age because I think you know for most of us it it does eventually flip and we learn that or we have to become
that for our own kids and then it's sort of forced Upon Us in a different way but for me it was a forced experience to have to do that at us at a young age and I'm grateful you know I I get off often asked if I could go back and change things
would I and aside from of course you know not you know my mom not passing away and whatnot for me as a person if we're talking about me the the things that challenged me forced me to grow and so yeah you know I became accidentally you know a confident dude at a young
age because if I if something happened it was only me that was going to pull myself out of it if something challenged me it was really only me that was going to solve it and so the self-sufficiency happened at a younger age than normal and in a more formative time than normal and
a lot came from it you know this book being one of them I I would not be doing what I do now if that didn't happen and then the book therefore would not have been written or created and it all you know it all it's all connected yeah and and I think about
this if your mom hadn't passed I'm I'm sure you're still Joey but maybe not the Joey we know today and and maybe your timeline looks a little bit different maybe you you don't get to do all the things that you're doing at the age in which you've done it I mean you're still
remarkably a young person and so this whole very traumatic thing caused you to be more self-reliant to become more resilient and to be able to self-validate which is an Incredible Gift in a way like I often cite Game of Thrones like Brandon Stark like he doesn't become the three-eyed Raven unless horrific things
happen to him his siblings and his family right yeah dude I think we might have talked about this either on camera uh recorded or before or after last time when we were talking about kids and you know this suffering that brings upon wisdom essentially or perspective and when you have kids that you
want to give your kids and you know this you want to give your kids the greatest opportunities and you don't want them to suffer but at the same time it's the suffering that can really expand one's strength how do you deal with that how do you look at that having kids now and
and being you know five years into it from when we last spoke yeah I I'm I'm unusual and I do want my kids to suffer I really do and it's a fight that my wife and I when I say fight is a disagreement that my wife and I get in off and I'll
give you some examples right um because I believe some of the hardships creates desire and nothing motivates you like having desire when when you have zero desires left in life because everything is given to you and then what do you work towards how do you develop self-discipline so one example is this my
son goes to school not that far away but it's not convenient for public transportation and when we were living on the west side he would take the train back and she would pick him up in Santa Monica so her commute wasn't so bad and now what he's doing is he's ubering home when
I told her he could take a different train it's a different path we live on the east side now and she goes well it's not really worth it it's just so much time like you know what I don't have the greatest memories of riding the shame train as we referred to it but
those moments of like being responsible catching the bus when you needed to paying attention not falling asleep and being aware of your surroundings form some part of me and I told her like it is good for him to ride public transportation not to say I can solve a problem by throwing twenty dollars
at it by taking Uber home here's another example the kids they they need technological devices to do what they do and I said he doesn't need the most expensive largest iPad there are people who can create so much more with far fewer resources in fact the computer he's complaining about is 100 times
more powerful than the computer we built this whole company on and so she's always like why do you think like that why why don't you just buy him the biggest and the best because the money is not a problem and there's something maybe I'm defective in that way I do want my kids
to suffer I do want them to long to have things and and to have that drive what's your perspective on that I'm with you man 100 I think and I I can say from from experience that I have been in rooms with people who have gotten the best and who have the best
opportunities and money's never been an object never been a concern and I have unfortunately been let down by their ability to perform things that I've needed them to perform right if people I've hired people I've collaborated with where I'm supposed to be equals I and it I don't know how to say this
sound does that sound like an ass it's like I can run circles around them and I don't want them I don't want to and I I I'm not even giving myself credit it's just the things that happened to me were not my choice and likewise the things that their parents have decided to
give them or really out of their control and this is the result so you know we like when you go to the gym you want to take make it extremely practical if you go to the gym and lift a weight you can already lift your muscles not going to grow but if you
lift the weight that's hard and you suffer and you get sore and have some pain the next day that is where you're growing and the metaphor holds with life experience so you know I'm on the verge of you know potentially having kids and you know I'm sure you know what I'm saying you
know we're working on that and that's entering the conversation now in my mid-30s where let's do this thing and this is a big one for me is how do I have my kids suffer in a way where they're going to grow and so thank you for sharing that um I really I agree
with you you could play this for your wife I agree but um you know it's hard hahaha because at the same time you don't want your kids to not have the best and so you're Chris you have to you have to really stress yourself to I think to put that on them and
and let them go through that because you you do have the power to not you do have the power to make it easy and I'm sure there's so much love there for your children that you just want everything to be great anyway I commend you man for for saying that out loud and
explaining that I think that's uh something we all need to hear and hopefully culturally can start to adopt more of yeah I want to share something also super personal with you and and it's a it's an 18-year experiment maybe longer in that I I'm I'm a little emotionally distant from my children I
don't try to give them too much I want them to suffer like every time my son comes and asks me Dad how do I do this thing I'm like have you tried asking Google that question first have you even tried I mean there's no harm in you messing up there's very few ways
where you actually screw up in a way that can't be repaired or start you could start over and so I don't want to create this condition when they're constantly looking for someone to give them all the answers that they've no longer they've lost the desire to try and to fail and I want
to build failure into the normal dialogue we have exercises on admitting when we're wrong we just go around in the car when we're driving everybody tell us something that you screw it up in because that tells me you're trying something new now some of the people in the car won't name names they
have a really hard time admitting that they're wrong and they just won't say anything and I'll say I'll tell you five things I'm stupid at that I'm terrible at that I totally screwed up just to make that normal I think it's the avoidance of making mistakes that creates this state of mind that
moves you away from creativity and and feeling fulfilled and happy uh Joe you and me do you want to say something uh just um you reminded me of in my research I found that Sarah Blakely the founder of Spanx which is one of the stories in the book but I didn't write this
particular thing is that her dad just like what you're saying her dad would sit them around the dinner table every night and say what did we fail at today never what did you succeed at it was always a discussion about what did you fail at and I although she didn't say it I
assume that then it went to it did two things one acceptance of failure and two I'm sure they talked about what did you learn from that and uh Sarah Blakely goes on to fail a bunch of times before she makes Spanx a you know billion dollar company and that that thinking is instrumental
so earlier on you asked me about the techniques and it is it is I want to Circle back briefly and say that if there was there were a technique to being able to be more creative I think it would be allowing yourself to suffer more to understand that failure and trying again and
learning which is instrumental to creating are nothing that you should avoid failing is totally fine failure is directly proportional to success and so on so anyway just you you made me think of that and I I do feel strongly that um it's probably why a book like this hasn't been written Chris when
I first kind of created a little pitch thing and I was like let me go the traditional route and I went to thanks to you know some of the collaborators we've had I went to an editor for one of the best selling books in the world and I told him hey I've got
these uh the laws of creativity and he's like I love it and I said I'm going to teach people how to remember what they forgot I love it and I said and yeah there's 39 laws and he said that's a terrible idea I said well what do you mean man what's going on
and he said it's got to be five or seven laws that's it people don't want 39 and I said well that's why this book has never been written because this is the type of thing that doesn't fit into to seven laws and if someone tells you that perhaps it's not not as holistic
as it could be you know without crapping on anybody's books out there uh whereas you know I'm trying to say here's how you think here's how you act and here's how you'd be great and whatever the laws there were which it ended up being 39 I observed them I didn't create them and
this is what I can do and he at that point he said that he's like I'm not your guy and and I agreed I said no you're not this is it just can't be done and it it reminds me a bit of how you said earlier someone who's naive and comes to a
new area you know in this case book writing and I'm not all caught up on the marketing and the the pizzazz of how a book needs to perfectly presented through five laws or seven laws can write a book like this and say I've actually made something that no one has written because I'm
not following the conventional rules just like with the lasting machine um um I want to tie to something that we talked about earlier that you talk about in the book but a story that I I heard someone share that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck came to Hollywood to become like Hollywood stars and
become prominent actors and they tried out for Dead Poets Society and they didn't get the role and instead of thinking that they're terrible that they're bad and that they should quit they came to the conclusion that Hollywood is broken and the system doesn't work so with that concept they just said we'll just
need to write our own movie and and make it a part of the contract if you want to produce this script then you have to cast us and that's how they did it they didn't accept the no and they didn't internalize one setback or failure as something that's a condition that they created
but that the world is messed up not just them I love that kind of delusional thinking because it can lead to a lot of breakthroughs so in case when you're talking about this editor who should have been the authority to say Joey do not do this you just came to inclusion no it's
it's the right book you're just the wrong person for it I need to do it the way I believe to be true and I think what we need to do as society as parents as Leaders within an organization is to normalize failure we have to take away the stigma of failure because the
opposite of failure on the other side of failure is that we're going to take risks we're going to be more Curious we're going to try things that we've never tried before we're going to dare to do something that's not been done before or at least done by us and that opens us up
to True creativity I'm trying to figure out how to wait like a way to land the plane here Joe you've written a book it's thick you would not think that creative people would want to read a book this thick but you've now explained why it's 400 plus pages and they're very few pictures
my friends there are a couple illustrations that demonstrate key ideas but I do want to say this I'm saying this in in a genuine way it's really well organized it's well written well researched and it's an easy read and and like some of the the famous people that you've had commenting on the
book it holds true I check in with myself like do I believe these things I I think of myself as a pretty creative person and there isn't a single thing in here that I've read except for one which I'm going to talk to you about in a second where I'm like I don't
know about that Joey everything else is ringing true okay now the thing I want to talk to you about and maybe it's just um semantics here but you talk about boredom and why boredom is not good for creativity why don't you tell us what you think about that and then I'm going to
argue with you in a second yeah so that that was the part that I was conflicted about as well because I know that when I'm kind of ruminating is when I am um I can come up with my greatest ideas right and so what we have a lot of the discussion these days
is about how kids need to actually be okay with being bored right and then entertain themselves right it isn't always reaching for the screen or the controller or the television or whatever it is or your phone to to entertain yourself and I had to make a distinction so hopefully after I explain this
except I believe I I may have mentioned in the book so I might need to do a better job which is to The Outsider board boredom and I'm going to introduce the second half is stillness they look the same so I am anti-boredom because a boredom is a judgment on the Stillness and
a boredom is saying that I am uh unhappy with my situation I'm unhappy being in a moment of nothingness and it's it's a negative interpretation whereas Stillness I feel like is an objective description of what could appear as boredom which is just to be still and so actually Stillness is something that I
want people to um experience and I want them to leverage and search out which is the ability to sit down and appear board but actually be mentally active in their Stillness what are your thoughts okay I like that explanation a lot better okay all right all right and I it wasn't a real
argument no no I understand when the chapter where I'm referring to I think when you're like when you're doing something over and over again and you're not stretching yourself I think you're saying like now you're going to be bored and that's not a good thing it's anti-creative right and I think that's a
pretty accurate description if you're not challenging yourself you're not growing that does not make creative person happy in my opinion but the Stillness part is I think critical to being a creative so something I've said which I also get people who will argue against me I would say boredom is a precursor to
creativity and let me explain that and I believe we're talking the same language now I find that when we're running kind of in that creative Rat Race when we're asked to turn on creativity on tap on demand as needed by client mandated projects and deadlines we can get stuck in this pattern of
thinking so we go back to our most reliable techniques and ways of thinking so that we can get the job done I've always found it that when I'm on vacation traveling with my family when I leave all my work behind after a day and a half of like kind of just detaching from
work and everything and every stress that I have I get bored really fast I'm like what am I doing here I'm just sitting here Stillness I'm like I have to be in this moment and it's when I let go of all the other stuff I have the clearest thinking and I feel the
most fertile creative ideas come in this moment so I think what we have to do as creative people especially if you're asked to produce work on a regular schedule is to build in moments of quietness with Stillness where you're thinking about absolutely nothing so that you allow all parts of your subconscious unconscious
brain to connect dots for you in ways that you didn't think possible so I'll turn it back over to you to see if we're in agreement or there's some disagreement here yeah I'm one thousand percent behind you and I like that you mentioned you know your subconscious mind um there's a there's a
portion of the book about that and I called it float which is the uh sister half of flow so flow wheel knows when you're in the moment and time drips away and you're connected to what you're doing it turns out that people are only in flow about uh five percent of their day
which is I think roughly 24 minutes of the work day something like that and what happens is we because it's a named thing we tend to think okay this is one tool in our toolbox there's not necessarily an antithesis but there is something which is stepping away so stepping away from it as
opposed to being sucked into something which I call Float it's like floating down the river versus flowing with the river and we've all had this experience where you are hopping in the shower and that is when all the ideas come or when you're on vacation and you're like now I'm done and that's
when the ideas start pouring in Stillness and leveraging Float so I found in my life man I am not I'm guilty of not stepping away enough there was a period of three years I didn't take one vacation day yep there was uh you know I mean I'm doing this 10 years now and
I don't think I've done a two-week vacation ever um but an interesting thing happened earlier this summer and I was forced to stay home three weeks and it was during a one week vacation for the first time in 10 years and Chris after trying to to solve some of the questions that I've
been asking myself about Baron fig for several years now and failing in those three weeks I com I created a completely new vision of Baron fig and what I wanted it to be that I could not do for years before and nothing I didn't get any new information I had merely the space
finally provided for that to happen and it was a good lesson and you know I'm glad I put it in the book because it's certainly a reason and clearly you've experienced two on vacation do you try now to take a certain number of occasions to Leverage you know you just sound like a
lot younger version of myself was just accomplished more than the time which you've been on Earth I believe the first five years in which I started blind our service design company I didn't take a single vacation or holiday I just worked and when I couldn't work I worked some more and and people
were like well how do you work all the time well you constantly work on yourself you read books and you're just thinking about work and how to make work better so there was no opportunity because I created zero opportunities and it led me to one of my darkest periods at the end of
those five years it was completely burnt out predictably right yeah and I really really found my my true inner confidence when I took a three-month sabbatical because at this point I was really questioning if I had anything left to give the creative community and my team and it was in those three months
that I just completely unplugged from work it just so happened to coincide with a teaching opportunity so I was teaching discovering myself learning how to communicate to other people how to inspire motivate them how to critique work that I really discovered who I was and that's I think the Bedrock of who I
am today in that very critical period so to answer your question though the lines of work and vacation and play have really blurred I'm really trying to live that life where I'm only doing the things that gave me tremendous Joy like this conversation somebody would say well Chris this is work you're working
on your podcast but I don't think so I don't look at it like that I look at it like I get to talk to really interesting people reconnect with friends and pick their brain and in in many cases I look at it like I'm getting a free coaching session right now right and
so this isn't work my wife might describe it as work but this is not work for me so the lines are very blurry I just literally got back from a trip from the Philippines where I was there for eight days three of which I spent on the beach doing nothing and I was
work so you know quote unquote because I was doing some public speaking and yeah and helping to evangelize the ideas and the techniques that we've learned to spread it across the entire world so I've been able to integrate that does that answer your question Joey yeah absolutely and I feel like now I'm
getting a coaching session because there's there's more that I want to do I you know I look up to what you've done and who you are and you know I don't listen to a lot of podcasts but yours is one of them um and I respect you know what you've managed to accomplish
is amazing the way you carry yourself the people you speak to how you speak you know I'm I feel lucky to be on the other end of the call chatting with you and I am grateful extremely uh as far as you know breaks go I am learning now that I I went back
basically to bearing to the team and I was like I am taking three weeks off twice a year now because if this is what we get from it we need this we need to do this again and the team like I came back and I filled two white boards with all sorts of
crap we had one whiteboard I picked up everyone I was like we're going to the other one because I'm not erasing this you guys need to digest and then we go to the other whiteboard and I fill up this whole whiteboard and I was like all right questions and we had a whole
day's worth of refining these things and it came from the space and I have not given myself space and I have felt burnt out and it's not a it's not a burnt out like I can't keep working because I can and you probably felt the same it's just where's the thrill where's the
excitement and the joy that's the part that that uh had started to to dissipate and that's you know if I'm creating a thing that's that I'm working for I might as well have that stuff otherwise I'll you know I'll get rid of all the other responsibilities and just go work somewhere and so
to reorient and bring the joy back is critical and um and I'm glad you God did resonate too it's nice to know that you know it's nice to know that it is I mean of course I write it as it's a law the law of you know separation and Stillness is a real
thing great so there's just a couple more things I I don't want to end it just yet so and every time you answer a question or you say something now I feel like I gotta digging so it's like this is a never-ending loop I was like I was about to end this podcast
but not yet Brave listener here we go I'm with you okay so there's something um like somebody had remarked something about my aura or my energy this they said to me Chris I really feel how enthusiastic and passionate that this is not just words that come out of your mouth like you really
live and breathe what it is you're trying to tell people to do and people will also say like how do you not grow old I'm 50 years old they're like you want to feel young to look young you need to be in alignment with the things that make you happy our highest Pursuit
and life should not be around money it should be around joy and doing more of it the reward for you in alignment to that Joy is to live a life with sometimes the comfort of money and things but it's not the goal it's the result of you you wrote briefly about Socrates who
I you know his his teachings his his lessons have echoed on for for thousands of years now right and and I didn't know this about this about him but you had said in your research that he served in the in the war like he served in the military and going out into the
world probably formed a lot of his thinking and his ideas because other than that he never thought of himself as particularly smart or philosophical so when you are able to take a break Joey and you go out into the world I think you're doing what Socrates was exposed to in that you introduce
randomness in foreign Concepts and ways of thinking that challenge your existing thinking so I'm in the Philippines and this could not be planned literally the speaker right before me his name is Prim he does a lot of work with ngos and trying to help impoverished communities and he's he referenced somebody else which
I don't remember who said this but he said you know people always say follow your heart follow your passion you know if you if you listen to that it won't betray you but he said people have a hard time figuring out well what am I passionate about and so he said that if
you scramble the letters of passion like an anagram it's I pass on what is it that you want to pass on to Future Generations and that really hit me super hard so I live my passion because I know exactly what I'm doing today is quite literally the things I want to pass on
to my children into the young creative person out there who was told that it's not okay to be a creative person who was told like you never make it in this world who've potentially lost a spark because their creative spark because they've been hit with financial setbacks or the the company's not moving
the directions that they want to that's what I'm trying to pass on and that's why I'm so excited to talk to creative entrepreneurs who go a different path who Forge their own success in their own way and I want to Champion and share those stories because we need more evidence of this being
true we're told by every other Corner in our life that this is not possible I'm here to tell you it is definitely possible and that's why I kind of really cherish these kinds of conversations Joey now I have to say to you it sounds like I'm talking to myself because that's that is
it and that it is the fight for uh the ability to prove that it is a possibility that creativity is a career in and of itself to to express it to be that is your primary craft that is the thing that you bring to whatever it is you do and um it's it's
certainly a lifestyle that is not um not subjugated or or less probable or any of those things to me I look at creativity I look at creating things like uh like an accountant would look at accounting or uh basketball or Plumbing or whatever it is it is a craft that you learn and
it is a practical in its principles and that is why I wrote the book The Laws of creativity because it's not magic but besides you me and a handful of people most most creatives who are at a certain level try to make it seem like what they do is a bit mystical and
there's a there's like a utility to that because it's cool then I gotta go to the Mystic to get the you know my my um the Oracle to get my prophecy or something and to learn because the wisdom I can't possibly have but what I think is really happening Chris is let's take
music as an example music is a practice it's a craft and back in the day my best friend's a drummer and I am fully aware of um hit more music stuff than I ever thought I would be and one thing I found fascinating is that back in the day in jazz most incredible
musicians of the time could not read music they just played they did not know necessarily why the notes sounded well or sometimes even What notes they're playing and certainly not uh concept Concepts like you know assonance and dissonance and all this stuff that now is kind of part and parcel with learning music
they just felt it and as a result it was magic at the time and it did feel mysterious now music has been studied and debunked and it's just like people can pretty much explain exactly why and how a certain piece can do some interesting stuff that uh may be unexpected whereas musicians couldn't
then I think creativity is in a similar spot where we're at a place now where a lot of creatives are where the musicians were 50 years ago where it is a magic with they don't necessarily have the words for it they don't necessarily um have believed that it is a reproducible thing that
just has principles that can be studied like anyone and I'm wrote this book specifically to contribute to uh debunking that which then contributes to what you said which is we need people to understand that it's just a viable profession like anybody else you can do it and you know we're here to help
or we're here to say that it is actually what you've learned about creativity is not true I'm with you like 100. it feels like one giant freaking love Fest where I'm reading your book and just thinking like is Joey writing my thoughts right now and we're just having similar thoughts okay I have
one more question for you are you an introvert or an extrovert because I want to ask you a question that you wrote about in the book okay I just discovered a third option I never knew this existed my wife played a podcast in the car an ambivert have you heard of this yes
I am an ambivert so yes okay let's just tell them tell me tell me what you thought you were okay why you're in kind of in the middle now I I thought I was an introverted extrovert but I think I'm an ambivert I'm sorry I'm answering the most confusing remember you basically chose
every option Joey all right I'm all of the above okay if I had if I was forced with a gun to my head I would say I present as an extrovert so I would if I had to go I'd go extrovert okay okay so not many people know that there's an ambivert there's
a middle option that we exhibit characteristics from both and I've always I mean I lead with this I tell people I'm a loud introvert and like you cannot be an introvert Chris yes because my energy goes away being around people but it's odd that now I'm energized by being around people I'm like
how did that happen is it possible can one change your state and I don't think you can change that but maybe it was because when I was being tested it wasn't like I was a zero on the extrovert and 100 on the introvert it was probably like 60 40 introversion extroversions so there's
some weird blend there now here's the question for you Joey you write that extroverts tend to ask external questions questions about the world whereas introverts ask internal questions trying to discover themselves and what they think and there's pros and cons to both neither are good or bad it's just what part to use
when and where and I found that to be super fascinating because I'm thinking about a friend of mine who's an extrovert and the kinds of questions that she asks and the kinds of questions that she wants to know about seeming like I have the answers too tell me a little bit more about
this theory about external and internal questions and how we align of course there's no blanket statement that everybody's always one or the other right yeah there's I mean we all employ these it's it's generally what's your tendency and what are you more comfortable with and so there's external and internal questions and external
questions are when you ask things about the world and you borrow expertise from everything and everyone and you use that to learn and then you apply it to new things and so like you know what's the the burning point of olive oil right these are really obvious examples uh what did the first
human tell a lie a little bit more interesting well where does plutonium come from so these are all things that you're asking about the world and then we have the opposite it's the internal questions that things that you ask about yourself to better understand yourself which also allows you to better understand others
in your relationships with them and those you know this one is probably you and I ask also often which is you know what truly challenges me or when do I give up and when do I persevere and so what happens is when you have a tendency to one or the other you have
a tendency to have a a strength and a weakness so I someone could be very knowledgeable at the world and not knowledgeable at themselves at themselves and knowing themselves and therefore have a lot of trouble with interpersonal relationships and communicating and all sorts of things that stem from who we are as a
person but they might be really good at their job they would these are the people who are more traditionally successful then you have the internal questioner who really does know themselves is very sound and doesn't necessarily have to come off as someone who is bombastic or super knowledgeable per se but they have
a connectedness that's admirable that's that's almost tangible and for these people they're less traditionally successful and this type of thinking is less marketable and Commercial and that's probably why our society has a lot of um psychological challenges that it faces we do not make this psychological Health important enough an internal questioning is
related to that and so those are the two and when I write about a lot of these dichotomies there's the book is filled with them I'm really hoping that I can give really given awareness and a clear differentiation between things because I think just being aware of things allows you to grow from
them it allows you to be set on your own path you know there's that thing I think it's called The Bait or minehoff phenomenon do you hear something once and then you hear it everywhere it's because it's entered your Consciousness so my goal in a lot of things that I'm presenting is can
I put them in your Consciousness so that you can then distill them into uh principles and ideas that are that are useful to you and applicable um okay my my wife is and I were almost exactly the opposite on so many different things like astrologically we're the opposite I'm a Capricorn with the
rising Sagittarius moon sign if that means anything to anybody means nothing to me and she's a Sagittarius with a rising Capricorn sign she likes hot foods I like cold foods she's an extrovert I'm an introvert and so she would ask me these kind of questions because she's really interested in philosophy and religion
and she was like how do you know these things you've not read any of these things you don't pursue these things and I don't have great answers for her except for to say when I was growing up I'm a very introverted person I'm socially awkward I don't like being around people I don't
look to call up any friends and check in on them because that's not my thing like you use like I'm a city boy I'm just like an alone boy I just prefer right and for much of my childhood existence it was the bane of what I was doing because it was like you're
you're so weird we don't want to talk to you and it would feel very lonely but later on I started to realize something that those internal questions I was asking myself all the time gave me great clarity in how I think and then I started to compare notes with like how do you
think and drawing insights from that it's quite interesting to me because the book The Laws of creativity is full of stories that I I don't find natural for me to ask about because when I got to that part in the book where you talk about the in extroverted and introverted nature with the
questions that we ask it seems to me like you've gone and lived your life to go and discover and find stories asking a lot of these external questions like who thought of these ideas where did this go who invented this and why did that kind of pursuit reading biographies I assume collecting all
this stuff to be able to write your book 10 years later I don't usually ask those questions my questions are mostly internal and then at some point I look for external proof If I'm the only crazy person who thinks about this in your book you're citing NASA statistics and research and data that
feels very much like an extroverted Pursuit but then you're bringing it back to say like well let me let me un uncover and unravel some of the limiting beliefs the myths that we have around our mindset around creativity so maybe we're both just truly amberverse you ski a little bit more extrovert maybe
a lot more honest skill a bit more on the introversion side any thoughts on that Joey well you you I will say you don't come off as a introvert you come off you come up as um you know I think naturally someone's going to assume someone who hosts a podcast probably extroverted in
some sense or comfortable enough and I like that you said you're you're a loud introvert you know or extroverted introvert and I think I said I'm an introverted extrovert so we are like in that 60 40 which is I think where we probably exist somewhere in there right we're the inverse 60 40.
um but it is interesting that you mentioned Philosophy for a moment there did I wanted to dig in a little deeper are you who do you like or your wife said that you know religion and philosophy is something she's really into and she kind of brought this to you how what is your
perspective sense you know being with your wife has it changed is there a different appreciation or what it came from that and if it's nothing that's totally fine too I feel like this question could set me up for a fight later today [Laughter] yeah so my wife has a collection of books that
I would probably never touch but I'm fascinated by the names on the books you know uh in what she'll do is she'll say honey I can't believe it but this person thinks exactly like you I'm like you had to read a whole book to find out what I already told you like years
ago so I I really do appreciate that she's a curious person that she's going to find things and introduce names and Concepts that I thought about have told her have told other people but they phrased it better or they're better known for something and so it's very validating for me to hear these
Concepts sometimes fear infuriating for me like oh you can't be um he can be a prophet in your own land but you won't believe anything I say until you read it from a stranger and then all of a sudden it's like gospel to you so that that is kind of frustrating for me
uh but I I enjoy the dynamic that we have because we're it's a push and pull relationship always and in those uncomfortable moments I think I learned so much stop telling lies Chris how good are you at um getting advice getting advice yes receiving advice because you just mentioned a profit in your
own land but what about if you're in the another prophet's land are you able to receive the advice I think so and I'll tell you why I can answer that question this way uh well first I had a business coach for 13 years I met with him every single week and he changed
a lot of the ways that I thought and I really believe in this expression like hold opinions Loosely or something what is it have strong opinions but hold them Loosely yeah so I have this thing like and this is I think the scientific uh principle which is Pursuit Of Truth Above All Else
and so to be consider to consider myself a critical thinker I have ideas but I need to be critical of my own ideas and so when I meet someone whether they're accredited whether they're experienced or not whether they're young or old doesn't matter to me if they offer me a different idea I
I fight internally like don't shut that idea down because it's foreign to what you believe in and it's an antithesis entertain the idea have the idea do combat in your mind and see which one wins and then if I feel like that's a superior idea I just throw out 35 years of attachment
to an old idea and in that way I think I can grow the fastest and learn the most by becoming detached to my past oh I love that uh having combat in your mind is a really cool picture and so you're essentially able to learn from other people's lessons if you can do
this and you feel like you're good at that I think so yes I think that is a rare um trait because they're like you said you know profit in your own land which is a cool phrase I'd never heard before but there there are so many people out there who have to first
uh even if they hear the advice they have to still go and make sure it's um they learn the hard way right is the phrase and I think there's the people say about advice those who need it don't take it those who take it don't need it and you know it's sort of
a bummer that that's the case but I was asked earlier in a podcast um what is I think it was like what is something that you attributed you know success to it and I I stopped them and I said well first of all I still have 20 years to screw this up because
I'm you know only 35 but second of all I think it's taking advice and running with it and not needing to learn the hard way and you said it exactly how I said it which is it's I am able to go so much faster because I'm learning your lesson rather than relearning the
lesson that I I appreciate that I don't even know why I brought that up but I felt like we were going in that direction well I'm going to nerd out with you a little bit and I'm going to take it to the extreme when you say can you take advice from other people
I take advice from trolls people who who have no good intent for me at all and the way that I do that is because this this question comes up if you're a public figure if you create content on a regular basis you're bound to attract lots of people to support you and a
couple people who who can't stand you and what I do is when they leave a really negative comment I filter out all the personal opinion and the judgment and I just really look at it like is there a Learning lesson here for me so when someone says this is a dumb video like
okay you have a problem with it I I just hate the way you blabber on about this and they go on and on they just rip you a new one and what I interpret from that is this style of communication doesn't work for you so if I want to reach people like you
I have to find a different way and so perhaps part of the video the problem is it's taking us too long to get to the point so I'm going to try other content to see if that works for you or not so even in that way negative feedback can actually be a great
teacher and the opposite is everybody loves your stuff I don't know what to learn when everybody loves my stuff it's just confirmation bias right it's it's good it feels good but it doesn't really teach me anything yeah I recently did a live uh Workshop or whatever it's called for um thinking processes and
afterwards the host sent me um some responses from the feedback form and it was all positive and they said you know well done we're glad to have you and I responded to him and I said hey man that's really cool but do you mind sending me some of the negative ones I'd love
to learn you know what people may not have liked and it's the same reason even if I disagree or maybe it's just not right for them I still want to know so that I can personally process that because there is a lot to learn from negative nancies yeah so I have a way
of thinking that I try and teach my my boys it's too difficult to try and get my wife to think this way but whenever something bad happens I ask them to reframe it in a positive way like uh what is another way of looking at this situation that is something that's a gift
for us not something that is is designed to hurt us like how is this a gift like when your teacher makes you take a physical edu like a physical test like how many pull-ups or chin-ups that you you can do and you do less than what you think you should be able to
you feel embarrassed and you feel terrible about that you feel humiliated what what is a possible lesson like how can we learn from this how is this a gift maybe the gift is it's telling us that uh we need to take our physical health more seriously and integrate exercise as part of our
daily habit so what we want to do is reframe and so it's constantly reframing things and he's gotten so good at it we play the insult game I try to insult him and he deflects it like Teflon nothing sticks to this little boy that's right and it's incredible so just a little personal
story here we're hiking and we're walking up and he's like coffee and puffing I'm like boy you you are a young person you are less than half my age I'm 50 you're 16. you should be able to run past here go down and see me run back up how is it that you're
more out of shape than I am and then he's like Dad but you're wrong about this one thing and we we debated about it and it turned out he was wrong yet again and I said to him do you ever think to yourself like why do I disagree with that because you're always
wrong like your record is not like 50 50. your record is zero and 533 right I just want to put him in his place Savage brutality finish kill and I'm thinking there's nothing else this boy can say back to me and you know what he said to me he goes dad I only
need to be right one time and then you'll be wrong I'm like I raise you well boy so you can't even hear you can't even hear and process that he's wrong all the time he's still looking for the one time in which he's right and I've been doing this with him since he
was old enough to understand words and so I'm like okay my job is done I can die now things are gonna go right with this kid I love that wow yeah I I hope I can be as good a dad as you sound I mean that you definitely have some good habits man
that's awesome well check in with my kids are like I like that dad likes to cherry pick the best of what he brings but yeah Joey it's been a pleasure talking to you how do people get a hold of this book and when does it drop Chris it has been a pleasure man
thank you it's coming out October 18th you can snag a pre-order or grab yours at uh go to joeycafone.com book and there's all sorts of ways of getting it if you want to check out what we're up to at Baron fig go to baronfig.com and finally last but not least if you want
to connect say hello show me what you're doing and creating follow me on Instagram reach out on Twitter both of them at Joey Cafe
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“What makes you weird makes you wonderful.”
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