This is part 1 of 2 with one of my all time favorite thinkers Adam Robinson. 

Adam is the Co-Founder of The Princeton Review, a rated chess master, an advisor to large hedge funds and financial institutions,  who uses a unique approach that combines game theory and behavioral economics to outthink global markets and anticipate when major trends will change. 

This is a wide ranging conversation exploring topics such as:

☑️The epiphany he had that has forever changed his life.

☑️Getting clarity around things that don’t make sense.

☑️The ideas Adam feels have been most impactful in his life.

☑️The most important questions you can ask yourself.

So get ready to expand your thinking and learn how to go from theory to action with Adam Robison!

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Adam Robinson Part 1

[00:03:40] Sean: Adam, welcome to What Got You There. How are you doing today?

[00:03:43] Adam: I’m doing great. Very much looking forward to our conversation. 

The Concept of Inhalation and Exhalation

[00:03:47] Sean: I’ve been really lucky ,because  over the years I’ve had some in-depth, mind-opening conversations with you but what I love about the conversations with you, is that you always up-level whoever you’re talking with or to. And I hope we can do that with the audience, and provide them with some practical rules that they can apply to their own lives. But I would love to start with the concept that you opened my eyes to and that’s around inhalation and exhalation.

Idea #1 Divide up the rhythms of your life into periods of  “Inhalation & Exhalation”

[00:04:12] Adam: There are all kinds of books on productivity, how to get more out of your day, how to be efficient, how to manage your time, and time is a more fluid concept. I’m talking on a practical level. So, I divide up the rhythms of my day and even weeks and months and years with the notion of inhalation and exhalation and even in a conversation, like I’m speaking now, I’m exhaling, and then you’ll start speaking and I’ll shift into inhalation mode. I’ll be listening, reflecting on what you’re saying as I prepare to exhale again. I work in the world of ideas and make them a reality. Any idea starts with an inspiration, right?

You consume information intending to, as you say, uplevel, get inspired and that’s the inhalation phase. Then you’ve got to work out the inspiration, the logical ingenuity parts of it, and implement it in the world, just at the exhalation stage. And that applies to me even geographically, for example, I bounced back and forth between LA and New York. LA in the Mountains of Bel-Air, it’s very isolated. There I go to be alone and just in inhalation mode and I just came back to New York, now I’m in exhalation mode, things to do. I think it’s a helpful metaphor for people to navigate the rhythms of their day.

For example, even within a day when I wake up, I’m in inhalation mode, getting ideas, getting inspiration. I wake up every morning at 3 AM because I like quiet time. From 3 AM, till about 6:30 or 7:00 fully inhalation mode, and then time to start executing on those emails or that presentation I have to give. If you think about it, even someone like Buffet who reads non-stop is all inhalation mode. Exhalation mode, okay, we’re going to buy that company, good, and then back to inhalation mode.

It’s a very helpful metaphor for navigating the rhythms of your life and your energy levels and everything. So it’s not, how do I get the most use out of my time? It’s how do I divide up my time? Like right now I’m feeling kind of lazy. I don’t mean at this moment, but someone might say, ah, but I’m feeling inspired, okay, let’s just do inhalation stuff then exhalation.

Inhalation is a Strength

[00:07:25] Sean:  I’m just curious. Do either of those have a greater benefit for you? Like you mentioned ideas and inhalation, do you view that as your strength?

[00:07:42] Adam: Yes. The short answer is yes. And my strength is in an edge in the world. I’ve cultivated that part, the execution, I can now pass that off to people that that’s their strength on the executing and exhalation. And but there’s a part of execution that I never realized until recently, Sean. I say recently in my life only about six years ago. I’d always lived in a world of ideas and I succeeded based on those ideas. And I was very much an introvert and one day I woke up, there was no catalyst, it’s about six years ago and I woke up and I went, wow, there are people in this world, I could have a lot of fun.

It was an epiphany and I was wide-eyed about people, the way a child would be walking into a candy store like, oh boy. So, I set out to engage others in the same way that someone might train for the Ironman and in CrossFit, or trying to do this to shoot free throws. I trained to engage others and went about it systematically. If you want to do anything in the world, Sean, it’s going to involve other people, and this doesn’t matter whether it’s on a personal level or a professional level, really it’s the ability to get someone else excited about the vision that you’ve created.

So somebody says, yeah, I want to do that with you, Sean, whether the person is an investor or a friend or whatever. That’s the key, getting people excited about your vision. They go, oh yeah, I want in on that. I want in on you. That was a big shift for me. You asked about ideas. I’d like to offer up-leveling, a framework for you and anyone listening. All human creation goes through four stages, and when I say human creation, it includes problem-solving. Because problem-solving is, I don’t like the state of affairs now, so I’ve got to create a better state of affairs.

4 Stages of Human Creation

• Intention

• Imagination

• Ingenuity 

• Implementation

All human creation doesn’t matter whether you’re creating a birthday party for your best friend or launching a company or whatever you’re doing. Human creation of all types goes through four stages. I call them the “four Is”. The first “I” is intention. You can just, oh, I want to go to Mars. I want to throw a surprise birthday party for my best friend, whatever it is doesn’t matter. You set an intention and I could write a whole book just on that part, but okay, that’s pretty basic, set the intention. The second “I” is imagination. We imagine, okay, what’s this going to look like?

What’s going to Mars going to look like, or what’s launching my startup going to look like, or a birthday party for my best friend or dinner date with the person I love, whatever it is, I can imagine. And then the third “I” is ingenuity. Okay, I have imagined what I want to do and I know what I want to do. How am I going to pull this off? Okay, if we’re going to get a rocket to Mars, I guess I’m going to need some rocket scientists and I’m going to need some funding for that company. Or if I’m throwing a birthday party, the ingenuity phase. And the fourth phase, the fourth “I” is implementation.

I know I need rocket scientists, which ones do I go after? Or I know I wanted to do a birthday party for my best friend, what restaurant do I do it in? And then enroll the restaurant in your plan like, Hey, we’d like to throw a birthday party. I realize you don’t stay open after 10, but could you once this one time. Enrolling others. Inhalation and exhalation, and the exhalation are very much on the ingenuity and the implementation phase. And to tie that into the previous thought about success in life always involves others. Think about someone like Elon Musk, he’s able to excite everybody about anything.

He can say, Hey, I think I’m going to go camping in Canada, and everyone goes, oh my God, what’s going on with camping in Canada, let’s all go camping in Canada. He’s mastered that ability to get people excited. And again, it doesn’t matter whether you’re trying to get someone excited about going on a date with you or investing in your company or someone to work for the company that you just started, the ability to get others excited always involves images. Wow. Yes. That would be cool. And then the listener plants, him or herself or the audience, Oh yeah, I could see that happening.

Yeah, let’s do that. Let’s go to Mars. Let’s go to Canada and camp, probably would be a wild time with Elon Musk, but camping in Canada. So that ties those thoughts. And I think everything’s pretty simple in life. You have to boil it down so that you can function at the highest level. You think about the highest achievers, they’re always really simple people. They’ve got like one or two ideas and they’re just working it to death, and everyone else is complicated.

Focusing on the Simple Things

[00:14:45] Sean: Adam, I would love for you to expand on simplicity because I feel like today we see so many bullet points, blogs, tweets where it’s like, here are the rules for success and you study someone like Munger or like Buffet- take a simple idea, take it seriously.

[00:15:02] Adam: My favorite quote. That is my favorite quote. 

[00:15:04] Sean: It’s the years of thinking that they’ve put towards that simple idea that they’re taking seriously, I’m wondering how do you get to the other side of complexity where it is simple? I’m wondering how you think that through.

“For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn’t give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.”― Oliver Wendell Holmes

[00:15:26] Adam: You just quoted Oliver Wendell Holmes, his famous quote. I don’t care anything about the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I’d give anything for the simplicity on the far side of complexity. And Steven Jobs wrote about that. He said simplicity is so hard to achieve. I was about to say, you have to say no to so many things, but it’s not that. And even Buffet said that and with respect, because there’s no one better, he’s such a genius, and he said that the most successful people say no to many things and I would reframe. I’d say you’re saying yes to a couple of things that are so important.

You’re not saying no to that, it’s just, I’d love to, and then focusing on that simple thing. And the simplest thing is the ability to focus on a single thing or two, which is also a real superpower edge. For most people that’s okay, that’s nice, that one thing, but if that’s good, why don’t I just add a couple of things to it? Boom. You’ve already lost it. You read about anything, it doesn’t matter whether it’s sports, science, or entrepreneurs that got a couple of key ideas that they just keep applying and they get good at applying it.

If we were Batman, we wouldn’t need many gadgets in our utility belts. He’s got all these little gadget things, you only need one or two. I think it was on with Tim Ferriss, I said, you only need one hammer, like Thor’s hammer, that’s it. And then over the years, you hone that hammer, and you get good at it. And then really their genius, the top achievers are just waiting for the opportunity to use the hammer.

Getting to What You are Good At

[00:17:43] Sean: You mentioned being able to chisel away and get to that excellent hammer as years progress here, and I’m thinking about what that exploration period is like. You’ve done such a miraculous job in that apprenticeship up to mastery, and I’m wondering for someone who’s trying to reach that level of mastery, how do you approach those early days? Should you be testing more things to chisel away or is it a singular focus?

[00:18:17] Adam: I think there’s a natural process that goes on. That’s such a profound question. When I was setting out on this journey, life wasn’t like I had any path. This is a lot of stumbling around, oh, I’m pretty good at this, or why don’t I try that? And then you begin to call and realize what you’re good at, what you enjoy spending your time on, the people you enjoy spending your time with, and slowly something begins to take shape, a career or a life path or a mission, really a mission.

As that begins to take shape, then that provides a north star and a winnowing away of everything else. Because you go, okay, I kinda like what I built here, is that going to fit in, is that going to up-level what I have here, which is working pretty well. And so then you can get ruthless about it. I think it’s an organic process like that and I know you have to be mindful of it. Initially, there’s some casting about, and if you don’t know what you’re good at yet, or what you like doing, then the world presents opportunities of one sort or another.

There’s that sort of mix between what you’re good at, and what you like to do, and then the opportunities are presented to you. You get the sense that if any of the greats have chosen something else, some other field, they would have been good at that field too, maybe not, like Michael Jordan was not a great baseball player. That was pretty good, you know, and it’s silly to move away from basketball as it turned out, but it’s the same drive and the principles, and a lot of it is self-management. I think you keep coming back to it just gradually and incrementally, you just get better and better at the thing you discover you’re good at and love to do.

Every Encounter is an Invitation

[00:21:01] Sean: Similar to Joseph Campbell’s Follow Your Bliss. You said something a second ago that just piqued my interest. You said it’s something they keep coming back to. You’re such a beautiful thinker, I would love to know what ideas do you keep coming back to?

[00:21:13] Adam: Okay. I’ve never thought about that. I’m just going to throw out some things as they occur to me spontaneously right now. There’s the notion of who am I in the world? What statement is Adam making to the world? And I say statement, if you view the world as a conversation, everybody’s doing their thing, a conversation is a metaphor thing, Buffet is adding something to the global conversation, and so is Elon Musk. Everybody for better or worse is just making a statement to the world, about what they view as important. 

And if everybody is saying X or many people are saying X, you’re not adding to the conversation, like, yeah, I agree. I’m with X. I agree with that. And then the question is what are you saying to the world, right? For example, you, Sean, who are you in the world? And even in our contact, and that you have this podcast, you have an idea of who you are in the world, and sharing knowledge, for example, is very important in finding best practices. Oh, that’s wisdom. I want to share that with people who like me are seekers. I think that’s been a part of my journey, like ideas, what am I saying to the world?

Idea #2 Every moment, every encounter is an invitation.

I think more in terms of framework. So let me throw out some frameworks and ideas. I gave the concept of inhalation and exhalation. Here’s another framework I like, every moment, every encounter is an invitation. For example, there are other invitations I’m receiving right now. Like the couch behind me, it’s inviting me, Hey, you want to use this moment to take a nap? And I declined that invitation because I’m spending it with you. And anyone you meet that person is an invitation. Could be an invitation to, Hey, you want to have a coffee. Or, Hey, want to get into an argument with me, right? 

That’s the invitation of the moment or an opportunity, anything is an invitation, and then you have to decide, do I want to accept that invitation? Or maybe I should make a counteroffer? No, no, I don’t want to get into an argument with you. I decline that invitation to fight but I will counteroffer with an invitation to discuss this or whatever. And so you have to be aware, I, Adam, have to be aware of what others are inviting me to do. Most of the time they’re not even aware of it or they may be aware on one level, but not on multiple levels, and I have to be aware of what I’m inviting them to do. 

The Playful State is the Powerful State

I’m generally more aware of what they’re inviting me to do than they are. For example, for most people, I invite them to have fun, to play, that’s another key theme of mine, the idea that the goal in life is to play. That’s the highest gratitude for the life we’ve been given, play, and the importance of play. I said once that we have to learn how to take serious things more playfully, and playful things more seriously. You think about sports, there’s nothing important about kicking a ball on a field. It seems ridiculous if anyone didn’t know that that was an organized game, but we take that silly thing, kicking a ball around very seriously.

The philosophers and ancient Greece talked about pleasure being the highest goal in life. And they meant spiritual pleasure by the way. I would say play, which brings me back to my epiphany about six years ago of others, you can’t play alone. For example, notice that my dear Sean, these are things that I live. They’re not ideas, I’m living the idea. I go to a restaurant, I arrive before my date, and the waitress comes over and I’ll say something clever, some clever banter to invite her to play with me. But this little moment, she’ll either detect the invitation and accept it, she may detect it and not be interested again, just to play no other agenda.

I get into a cab. I can take my step into the cab, as an invitation. I could close my eyes for the 20 minutes it’s going to take, I could pick up my cell phone. My cell phone is inviting me to check my email messages or whatever, and there’s a person in the car that maybe it would be fun for me to play with this person. I’ll make some random offhand comment meant to engage in playful banter, some kind of play, and the person will either be preoccupied with driving, I don’t want to interfere with their driving and will decline, that’s okay. That person declined my invitation to play.

There are all kinds of meditations in every moment and even life itself is an invitation in the grand scheme of things. Your life, Sean, and my life is an invitation to make of it what you will. And for me, that revelation about five or six years ago played. You’re a master quoter, one of my favorites was Churchill. He said war is a game played with a smile. This is during the horrors of World War II. War is a game played with a smile, and if you can’t smile, step aside. And again, it’s the most serious thing you have to approach playful. And you’re not making light of it, it’s precisely because it’s so serious you have to be playful with it.

Again, my ideas are not in here, I’m living them. The playful state is the powerful state. You watch any old Bruce Lee movies and you watch him moving around, he’s playful. He’s not serious or Muhammad Ali dancing around. They know, if I get hit I’m in trouble. And yet they’re playful because they know that’s the most relaxed state and the most powerful state. Those are some of the important ideas that I live with and trying to support. You mentioned there are these big thick books, like how to do X, Y, and Z’s oh man. I’m not going to mention any names, but there’s a very big, thick book written by a very successful person about how to live life.

And if it’s that complicated, that big and thick, the subtext message to the reader is I am screwed because I’m gonna have a hard time understanding that big thick book, and there’s no way I could remember it in real-time, day-to-day. It’s no good having the ideas in your head and you’re not using them as we camp in Canada with Elon Musk or go to Mars with him. It has to be ideas you can use. 

If You Don’t Get the Results You Want, Change What You are Doing

[00:31:30] Sean: I’m wondering for those ideas you can use, how do you get to that understanding around play. Does it take years of almost doing the opposite? Going through that pain to come to the other side?

[00:31:44] Adam: I don’t know. That’s a very profound question. I don’t know. Give me a second, I’m going to process this. I think most of the time that does become the concept. In other words, there’s got to be a better way of doing things, to living than pain and suffering, being serious. This brings me to another one of my ideas, which is, again, it’s not ideas like in their head, but life principles, if you’re not getting the results you want, change what you’re doing.

Idea #3  If you’re not getting the results you want, change what you’re doing…

It’s that simple and just keep changing and tinkering until you find something that it works. And once it works, you find your hammer, stick with it. And you’ll see that we keep circling back to the same few ideas. It’s not that many ideas or principles, it’s a mindset. For example, Sean, when I sat down to have a conversation with you, I have been equally excited for this moment that the people listening out there, Sean and I have been dancing for like five years now, and here we are doing it.

[00:33:35] Sean: Talking about the principles.

[00:33:38] Adam: Yes. It’s a mindset. And so when I sat down today to have this conversation, my only goal was to play with you. That’s it, play. And then I’m going to talk to an investor, looking for funds. My goal is to invite that person to play with me. And by the way, that signals a lot that I’m confident enough in what I’m doing that I’m not even pitching the person. What the hell, he is not even asking me for my money, he just keeps telling jokes and we’re having a great time. What the hell, I want to spend more time with this dude.

And that comes back to getting people excited. And so they want to spend time with you. Yeah. I want in, on whatever Sean’s doing. Yep, let’s do that or Adam or anybody, Elon. It’s not thinking so much as just having ideas simple enough that you can use in your day-to-day life. And again, in real-time. No good being a principle up here that you can’t use.

[00:35:05] Sean: Absolutely. I’m wondering because you do think so deeply and you get such clarity around your ideas. What do you make of the epiphany six years ago?

[00:35:20] Adam: What do you mean by, make of it?

[00:35:22] Sean: You said it kind of came out of nowhere, such a life-changing realization.

[00:35:29] Adam: It was a complete pivot, totally different from anything I’d done in my life ever before. Now there’s been a lot of work around the creative process. Bear with me, I’m going to get to the point. There’s a great book that I’m going to recommend. It’s the Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler. It’s a big old thick book, but one very well worth reading the Act of Creation. Don’t be daunted by the thickness, it’s a very interesting read. Much work has been done on the creative process, by which I mean, solving a problem. It involves usually like you attack the problem logically and you’d think, and think hard as much as you can.

And it’s such a daunting problem or challenge you thought it through, and then all of a sudden, one day you’re taking a bath or you’re walking with your best friend or camping in Canada, or you’re just doing something and all of a sudden, boom, it just occurs to you out of nowhere. And so the epiphany was related to a prior process because your unconscious the whole time has been working on it, even when you’re not working on it. Oh, your unconscious is working on it.  It wasn’t like I had set myself that I was working on and I went, oh yeah, play. That’s what I got to do. 

I just have to play, and invite others to play, not even necessarily with me, but in their own lives. And that is, I think the highest form of being. And if you think about it at the end of the day, what’s civilization for, to free us up so that we can play more, that ought to be the goal. People get caught up in this or that, and they’re not having fun. I just use the word fun. If one were to look at all the interviews of Warren Buffet, all of them over the decades and more in his public speaking, but also in his letters, the shareholder letters, and stuff, there’s one word that occurs more than any other, FUN.

He’s having a blast, it’s really clear he’s just having a blast. If you’re not having a blast there’s something wrong, and anyone who’s not playful and looking forward to their day, when I say looking forward, I mean, it like this, when I’m by myself, I’m in inhalation mode. Then when I go outside in a sense it’s a kind of exhalation, but also I can’t wait to walk out my door. Because I know there are lots of people out there I can play with even passing strangers on a street, raise an eyebrow, just acknowledging another human being. That little half-second is a form of play, and it’s a whole philosophy.

There’s a term for it. It’s called the homo animal est quod ludit, the Latin phrase. There are homo sapiens, which is the intelligent animal, which we have to question these days. But homo animal est quod ludit is the animal that plays but most higher animals play. And in fact, if you look at how, say a lion cub learns how to be a lion, like an adult lion it’s by play. Play is a great learning mode. It wasn’t an epiphany. There was nothing attached to it. And it was night and day for me, a life lived in my head and ideas, and pretty serious. I would have a good time, but then it shifted one day and that’s just the way everything I do now is related to that.

Training the Unconscious

[00:40:38] Sean: I appreciate the articulation of the creative process and aha-type moments and how you need to let that subconscious mind go to work. Can you even go further on how you think about using the unconscious or the subconscious mind?

[00:40:52] Adam: That’s a good question. I’m just pausing for a second, which entry vector into that topic I’m going to choose. The way to think about it, we exalt our conscious minds, right? We go to grade school and high school and college and grad school and spend a lifetime developing our conscious minds, and logic. And we’re proud of it as individuals when we acquire a certain facility using our minds, consciousness, logic, and stuff. But at the end of the day, it’s pretty clunky as a tool to grapple with reality, and reality is very complex. Now that sounds like you’re rolling your eyes, but what the hell does that mean?

Of course, it’s complex, but in fact, it’s so complex that we don’t deal with reality. We deal with the construct of it that we can grapple with. And there’s a dude, his name is Donald Hoffman who wrote a book, really brilliant book called The Case Against Reality. We’ve evolved with a good misunderstanding of reality. I say misunderstanding because we can function at a very high level. I say all that by way of preface that there’s no way logic and our conscious mind can cope with the amount of information and the complexity of the world, just no way.

And also our ideas can be mistaken. But I’ll tell you what’s not mistaken, is feeling states. How do we tap into our unconscious mind? And I’m going to share it with you because you asked me, I don’t think I’ve ever articulated this before. So now the trouble with our unconscious mind, which is the supercomputer, your unconscious mind, like everyone talks, oh, you only consciously use 1%. I don’t know how they come up with that number, but whatever it is, it’s clear that your unconscious is way more powerful. Think of your conscious mind as a simple Abacus or you could do simple arithmetic and your unconscious mind is this super complex, parallel processing neural net that could deal with thousands of variables simultaneously.

No problem. And again, if you think about it, our conscious minds evolved relatively recently in logic and stuff, you know, Aristotle and logic and stuff. We’ve gotten a little better, but not really it’s not like we’re that much wiser, but meanwhile, there’s the untapped unconscious mind. And so how do you train the unconscious mind as consciously as say you would train at a sport or playing the piano? How do I get in touch with the instrument that is my unconscious mind? And I’ve done it through my body. I don’t process ideas in my head, I process them in my body, and I’m not talking about mere muscle memory like you remember a movement without being conscious. 

I don’t know how I did it, but yeah, I remember the movement, like a stick shift. I remember as a teenager, I had to drive a stick shift car, but then I had not encountered one again in like 10 years. I’d always driven automatic after that, I get into a stick shift car and my muscles remembered what to do, even though my head didn’t. And so your entire body, your sensory apparatus your muscles, and everything, they’re processing all the information, whether it wants to or not, it just processing it. In our conscious minds, we have to filter out so much. We don’t have much working memory.

When I’m reading something or reading a poem or reading an idea, or looking at a financial formula, I’m processing it in my body. And so when I encounter a new idea, I notice how my body feels about the new idea. And then I go, “oh, yes, that works!” and it takes me a while to find the words and the ideas to support it. But it’s kind of infallible. Einstein, not comparing myself to Einstein, but he talked about kinesthetic awareness and I think he was getting at the same thing. You have to know in any given situation, again, even reading a book or an essay or whatever, the 10 K report, whatever it is, allows your body to process along with your head.I’m not saying don’t use your head, but I don’t use my head too much. I rely more on my body and that’s the unconscious mind, but then it’s doing whatever calculations it needs to do. 

So there’s a fellow Daniel Tammet, he’s a mathematical savant, and I remember seeing a documentary on him, I guess he’s in his early forties now, something like that. And Thank I when he was five years old he had a brain seizure, and it rewired his brain. So before he’s a normal five-year-old kid, afterward he’s a mathematical savant. For example, I could ask him, Daniel, what’s the 17th root of four, not the square root? What’s the 17th root of four? 

He would just go, oh, 1.1 sticks and just reel it off like that, quickly. And you think, wow, he’s like doing all that in his head. No, this is his process. It’s so cool. So, he’s being interviewed on this documentary and they said, how the hell do you do that? And he said, well, every number is a bit of a colored blob. Well, think Play-Doh so the interviewer says, so what’s the number eight, just throwing out a number. I can’t remember what he said exactly, but he went, oh yeah. Hey, I kinda like the number eight. It’s sort of a bluish ball in there, two yellow sorts of ears like things on it, that’s eight.

And if you were to ask them a year from now, what’s eight, he’d say exactly saying, oh, I told you, I said blue thingy, the two yellow. And what’s 12? Oh, 12, that’s interesting. It’s kind of black, red on the bottom and green on the sides. How do you do your calculations? He said, I just see the shapes that kind of mixed into each other, and out pops a new colored blob. And I’m just reading off what the blob is. He has no idea. It’s not like he’s doing calculations you and I would understand fast, he is not. He has no clue how he’s doing it and clearly, that’s his unconscious mind and is incredible.

I think that’s important, like anyone interested in maximizing who they are. The instrument that they’ve been given, born into this world with, the body, the head, the emotions, all of it, making the most use of it, you got to train the unconscious because it’s so powerful. And for me, the access is through my body. And I think that’s a pretty easy one for most people.

[00:51:02] Sean: Adam, I know your background with chess. Did you have an intuitive kinesthetic feeling around pieces on the board?

[00:51:12] Adam: It’s interesting. No, I didn’t. I say interesting because one of my non-gifts is being able to visualize. I can feel things right in my body but have a hard time visualizing them. There’s a kind of chess it’s called blindfold chess and the world record, think how complex a chess board is with all the pieces you’re playing a game or lots of things you’ve got to remember, I think the world record is by a guy named George Koltanowski, who’s good, never like a world champion or something, but boy has blindfold chess. I think his record for blindfold chess is like 424 games simultaneously. Imagine that in his mind he is walking to the next board, he’s got his eyes closed, so it’s not walking, he’s in his seat and he goes, okay, board number 217. And you see it perfectly.

[00:52:28] Sean: That’s remarkable.

[00:52:29] Adam: Remarkable. I don’t have that. It’s hard for me actually to visualize the board, even the board in front of me. It was kind of hard to visualize even though I’ve acquired, I’m a pretty good chess master. And to get much better, I’d have to train in it, but you have to be able to do that and be able to visualize. There are mental shortcuts I use to do that like I’ll verbalize things and I can remember the words, but I can’t remember the sequential things as you say, so the answer is no, I have a hard time doing that but you find workarounds.

Turning Weaknesses into Strengths

[00:53:23] Sean: I’m wondering for you then did that weakness turn into a strength for you within chess? 

[00:53:30] Adam: It’s so funny you should talk about weaknesses turning into strengths. I think all the greats, that’s what they did. They took a weakness and turned it into a strength. I’ll give you an example. Wayne Gretzky, the Edmonton Oilers, I think was his team, entered the NHL, and to get into the NHL, you are pretty good. You get to the professional leagues, you’re very, very good. And he realized physically there’s no way I’m going to last that long in this game. Because by normal human standards, he’s a pretty big guy. 6’1, 6’2 is not that big, and there are lots of bigger guys and hockey is a brutal sport. 

Idea #4 Your weakness can become your strength.

So he’s thinking, okay, I got to develop a style of play that minimizes the number of hits I get. His weakness is the lack of strength. I think he was the weakest man on his team in the weight room. His style of play evolved out of that weakness and it became the best. And it evolved out of avoiding contact with others. And for me, we talked about simplicity, I have a very limited working memory. I can’t think of too many things at once. I know many people remember thousands of things, for me, I have a hard time functioning.

Remember, your thinking, your consciousness, you have your working memory and it’s the ideas. The more ideas and things you’re trying to think about the less processing power you have leftover to kind of deal with it. I was always keenly aware of that, so I was trying to simplify things down to like one or two or three ideas, max, and then I can go deep on those ideas. So the weakness is I can’t think of too much at one time, it’s forced me to simplify things because this is the only way I could operate. You look at anyone, for example, Bruce Lee. 

[00:56:16] Sean: One of my favorites. 

[00:56:18] Adam: Mine too. I know his daughter, Shannon who’s devoted to passing on his legacy. Bruce Lee was not a big guy and he was physically as strong as you could be, probably pound for pound of any human being ever. So what can he do to deal with that weakness? Small, very strong, but not strongest, much bigger with speed, so he focused on developing his speed. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Bruce Lee’s videos slowed down like 10 X, but even when it’s slowed down 10 X, it’s still hard to follow. When it’s 10 times slower than he’s moving, his fist is going out and coming back so fast that even when the film is slowed down 10X, you have a hard time following it, that’s how fast he was.

And of course, velocity is a component of power. And so his weakness, lack of size, I don’t know what 5’7 something-ish, and he was again, pound for pound, super strong. But if he was up against a guy, 250 pounds is not as strong as that guy, but he was probably 20 times faster. So the power advantage he had was he was 10 times more powerful than the bigger guy. Mugsy Bogues, the basketball player is 5’1, that’s a pretty big weakness, I say weakness in professional basketball, but for him, it was a strength because all the other players now have to play his game. 

He was always getting foul because you didn’t see him. They are 7’1 and so one thing he developed because he knew he would be fouled a lot is he was the best free-throw shooter in basketball, like 90 feet because, okay, I’m going to get that ball. I’m going to be at the free-throw line a lot, and I want to nail every single shot. I think his throw percentage was 93 or something. I can’t remember exactly. His weakness and lack of height was his strength. Your weakness forces you to find workarounds and those workarounds are so powerful that you’re better off than someone who didn’t need the workarounds.

Adam’s Chess Journey

[00:59:28] Sean: Adam, there’s a story of yours that I think provides some really interesting insights and it’s about weaknesses and workarounds, and it’s your freshman year in homeroom playing a game of chess.

[00:59:42] Adam: Oh yeah. 

[00:59:43] Sean: Can you tell the story? I’m more curious about what it led to.

[00:59:48] Adam: It brings back memories. So it’s a freshman year in high school and again, take a simple idea, all of these things are going to come back to us. And so it’s freshman year in high school, it’s the first day, and then it was homeroom and homeroom is usually 20 minutes of nothing administrative, no one pays attention. It’s kind of like when in a plane they tell you to tie the seatbelts, no one’s paying attention, and they have to go through the motions. So homeroom was that. On the first day and the kid in front of me, I was in the second row, he was in the front row, he turns around, we got 20 minutes to waste and had a little magnetic chess set, pretty small, like six inches by six inches. 

He turns around with the board set up, these little magnetic pieces, and he said, Hey, you know how to play chess? And I said, yes, I do. My father had once explained the rules, but I had never played a game of chess. It was like someone who says, do you want to play baseball? And you go, yes, I do. Like you looked at the rules in a book and you saw a couple of games. I didn’t know anything. I knew how the pieces moved, I knew the concept of checkmate, but I didn’t know anything else. And so beats me in like five or six minutes and he kind of gloating.

And I said, oh, I want another game, and he beat me in another probably five minutes. And every day that week that’s how we would spend our homeroom, play a game or two or three. And he beat me every time, and at the end of that week, I resolved by the end of the year, I’m going to beat him. I’m telling you that was the sole goal. By the end of the year, I want to beat that kid. All I cared about back then was swimming, and I was training for a max of four to five and a half hours a day, seven days a week, most of the year. My only goal was I’m going to beat this kid. He was so gloating about it, loser.

I went to the local bookstore, I’m going to buy a book on chess. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I’m 13 years old. I buy a book, there’s only one chess book, it was called Profile of a Prodigy. The people who are listening to me talk right now don’t care about Adam’s chess, but the story is very interesting and you know it, Sean, about how a simple thing can lead to really big, cool things in your life. It’s called Profile of a Prodigy and it was a book on the life of Bobby Fischer, four years before he was to win the world championship. So there’s a book on his life story, but he’s not even a world champion yet.

I picked up this book and it’s a biography, but at the time he was 25 years old, that’s it? Again, four years before he was going to win the world championship. I pick up this book again, not knowing that it’s not a book on how to play chess but it’s a book about a chess player. It was the only one in the bookstore. I lived in Evanston, Illinois, right outside Chicago,  we’re Northwestern. So, I pick up this book and I read this story about this chess player, dude, Bobby Fischer. I didn’t know who he was but I was so impressed. I thought, wow, he’s the best chess player ever. 

What did I know? It wasn’t like I was a student of the game. At the back of the book, there were 75 games that he had played. He started winning when he was six but the tournaments that there were records of it were when he was, I think, 10 or 11. He’s now 25 years old, 14 years worth of games, 75 of them were in the back of this book. So we’re getting close to interesting punchlines for those of you listening. So the games are without any explanation, it’s just a list of the games, On the way, if you were a music student, oh, here’s 75 songs, the lyrics written by John Lennon or whatever.

I would play over the game. I didn’t know anything, didn’t say, oh, this is why he made that move. I just played the games over and over. I’d come home in the afternoon, get home, I’d eat dinner, and spend like three or four hours at night playing over those games. I didn’t know what I was doing. And again, my only goal was I’m going to beat this kid in homeroom. And then there was another book that came out about the same year called My 60 Memorable Games. And this was by Bobby Fischer, he annotated 60 of his games. Again, people, who are listening now you’re going, oh, okay, it’s about these games. Well, I was so impressed by those games, again, I don’t know anything.

I’ve been playing chess with the kid in homeroom for a couple of months. And I said, oh, I got to find all of his games. There were 60 in the second book, but a lot of them were duplicates. In book form, those two books were the only two books that had his games. They’re about a hundred games. Every weekend I’d take the train to downtown Chicago and go to the public library and I’d go through back issues of chess magazines. There’s also a library in Evanston, I would go through that, but I’d gone through all the magazines. So imagine like prospecting for gold, I’m reading through hundreds of magazines to spot a game that he had played say five years ago and I’d write it down.

So now I have a notebook of about 700 of his games that he had played that I transcribed and I’d just play them over and over and I started to get good. Then I became really good, and it turns out my chess team was also very good my high school chess team, and when I was a junior, just two years later, I’m with seven other guys flying from Evanston to New York City for the high school nationals. And again, I had never had a coach ever, any books on how to play the game, all I did was just play over his games. It’s kind of not an efficient way to learn.

It’s now the high school nationals and there are seven of us. The top four of us will be a team consisting of four players. The top four of us would be the team from Evanston High School that would represent Evanston, the top four scores by the end of the tournament. This is a very cute, fun story even if you don’t care about chess. It’s an eight-round tournament, and after seven rounds, we were so far ahead of the next place team that we went out and celebrated before the final round. We were three points ahead of Stuyvesant which is a high school in New York and which is a whopping big league because only four scores count. 

So we had three already going into the final round, if we just won one more game we’re national champs. For Stuyvesant to win they’d have to win every game, and it’s very hard. So our first board draws quickly, so now we’re three and a half points ahead of the second-place team. I’m getting to Bobby Fischer in about 60 seconds. So one by one, every one of us lost. So in the final round at eight points, we scored a half-point out of eight potential points and Stuyvesant won every single one of their games which is very hard to do because the odds are 50-50 that you’re going to win a game. 

The odds are one in 16 that they would win every game. Such a flip and we’d celebrate it the night before because we thought, yeah, there’s no way Stuyvesant would catch us, and we lost by a half-point. By the way, the next year we went and we set a record that stands to this day. We crushed everything. But anyway, so it’s now the next day, we’ve just lost the national championship, like, oh, really pissed, it was a Sunday, it was Easter Sunday. The rest of my team flew back to Evanston from New York, and I stayed in New York because my parents lived in New York.

I was living in Evanston going to high school there, but my parents lived in New York. So it’s Easter Sunday, I’m 16 years old, and I’m spending it with my mother. It’s a beautiful April day, and we’re heading towards Central Park we were at 34th and sixth. If you know New York, this is a very busy intersection near Macy’s not far from the Empire State Building. Very busy, and it’s Easter Sunday. I don’t know, probably on that corner, 10,000 people, packed. So we’re waiting for the light to change, and to this day still, I don’t know why my eyes traveled slightly to the left, so diagonally across Macy’s and in that sea of people, I spot Bobby Fischer, my hero, and spotting him, what are the odds. 

So I’m turning to my mother and said, mom, I know I said, I would spend today with you, but see you later. I’m dashing across, dodging cars like a cop chasing because I have like a few seconds because he could get lost in the crowd. He was 6’2, 6’3, he was tall, but I still thought, oh, you’re going to lose him in the crowd. And I’m never going to get this chance again. My hero, all I had done for the last three years was play over his games. I ran up to him. You might think that somebody would say, oh my gosh, Mr. Fischer, you’re my hero. I think you’re the best, right? That they gush something like that. But no, I’ve been playing his game so many times, that’s all I did, I knew each one of them by heart.

I had all these questions, and here’s the dude who played the games. I said, Mr. Fischer, Mr. Fisher in 1962, when you played Reshevsky in the US championship, why didn’t you play pawn kind? He looked at me like I’m some alien, how does this kid know who I am, a year later, he was the most famous person on the planet, number two was Muhammad Ali. So when he won the world championship, he was the most famous person, but this was a year and a half before. And so no one would have recognized him unless you played chess. So here’s this kid who not only recognizes me in a crowd but is singing a game off the top of his head that I played years and years ago.

 And he said well, I don’t know, I’m going to have lunch, want to join me? Just like that. I said, yes, I would. He was my mentor after that. The next year before we won the national championship, we had to fly back to the New York team and he was preparing for the Spassky match, the World Championship which is a pretty serious time. World Championship is on the line and I got to spend two weeks with him as he prepared. I was with him in his room as he studies for his games, for two weeks. And we played a lot of blitz chess, which is like, you have to finish your entire game in five minutes.

 And because I knew all of his games by heart and all his openings, in fact, in some ways, some I did a little better than he did I would play his moves against him. And so he’s playing himself. The only reason it was worth, now I’m addressing someone listening to this, is how a simple passion you really throw yourself into, and then you’re open to possibilities and amazing things can happen. It’s a really special moment for me that I had earned because I knew all his games by heart. It wasn’t just that I was a fanboy. Well, this kid knows everything I’ve ever played, and I knew only a few of those games that have been published in books. How the heck has he done this?

[01:15:23] Sean: When opportunity meets preparation. Subscribe to the What Got You There Podcast to hear part 2 with Adam Robinson.