Today on the podcast I revisit one of my all time conversations with Adam Robison for our Classics Series! Adam is the Co- Founder of The Princeton Review, a rated chess master, an advisor to large hedge funds and financial institutions. The breadth and depth of Adams knowledge and curiosity is on full display in this conversation! You’ll see why he’s one of my favorite thinkers!

3 things you’ll learn from this episode:

• The ideas Adam feels have been most impactful in improving his life.
• How to get people excited about your vision.
• The 4 stages of all creations.

I am Sean DeLaney, the executive performance coach with over a decade of experience working with CEOs, executives, and leadership teams, guiding them beyond traditional definitions of success.

Interested in working together? https://seandelaneycoaching.com

Adam Robinson Episode Transcript

Sean: Adam, welcome to What Got You There. How are you doing today?

Adam: I’m doing great. Very much looking forward to our conversation.

The Concept of Inhalation and Exhalation

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

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

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?

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

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.

Adam: My favorite quote. That is my favorite quote.

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

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

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?

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

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?

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 #2Every 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

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?

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 #3If 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.

Sean: Talking about the principles.

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.

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?

Adam: What do you mean by, make of it?

Sean: You said it kind of came out of nowhere, such a life-changing realization.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

Sean: That’s remarkable.

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

Sean: I’m wondering for you then did that weakness turn into a strength for you within chess? 

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 #4Your 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.

Sean: One of my favorites. 

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

ean: 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.

Adam: Oh yeah.

Sean: Can you tell the story? I’m more curious about what it led to.

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?

Sean: When opportunity meets preparation.That has me thinking, Adam, you’ve been remarkable at understanding the impact of questions and asking incredible questions, this is going to be a little bit out there. Say you were someone’s current day, Bobby Fischer and your 13-year-old self runs into yourself on the street corner of 34th and sixth, what is the crucial question that 13 year old should be asking of you?

Adam: It’s an interesting question. And I don’t know that a 13-year-old or anyone would get that interested in what Adam has to say or do, because it’s such an eclectic path that I’ve had.

Sean: That’s why I see so much beauty in it.

Adam: Anyone who said, what’s the common denominator? You’ve done so many different things, what links at all? That would be an interesting question for me. But that’s a really good question, you think about the power of questions. The first time I met Buffet was at a fundraiser. It was a sit-down dinner, 12 of us at a fundraising dinner. I’m not going to mention any names or anything, but it was a fundraiser. So I’m not going to say what it was for, but it was sorry, 10 of us with Buffet. And each of us had paid a fair amount of money for the fundraiser to have this dinner.

And each of us got to ask one question. The whole dinner that was it, you could ask one question and not surprisingly, everybody asked him investment questions. It’s Warren Buffet, let’s ask them about investing, it’s something he knows about. And the reason we only got to ask one question is that we’d paid a lot of money to have dinner with Buffet and everybody at the dinner knew that everybody else would like to start to hog the conversation. I wouldn’t have, but everybody knew that somebody there would start to engage too much and we had paid to hear Buffet speak. That was the rule, one question.

So everybody asked him about investing this and that, and I asked him, my question was this, what keeps you up at night? This is a man who’s thought about the world very deeply. And he’s been through a world war, a depression, many economic cycles, many cultural cycles, he’s seen it all. And one of the wisest men who ever lived, he and Munger. And so what keeps you up at night? I remember him saying, oh, let me think about that. And because he’s seen it all, not much keeps him up at night. I think the question that you asked, anyone in that kind of situation like that you just asked me, it’s a non-obvious one and it’s an authentic one.

When I met Fischer, who was my hero, I’d done nothing in the last three years, but spend three or four hours every night playing his games. And I wasn’t trying to memorize, it’s just that they were so beautiful. I knew them all by heart as it turns out, and so when I went up to him at that moment, I was authentic. There’s something else at that moment. And this is a really important thing to go back to your earlier question about the ideas you live by, is that my attention was focused on him there was no room to be self-conscious.

And when I was with my mother, a hundred yards away, I didn’t hesitate for a second. I didn’t go, okay, wait, there’s Bobby Fischer. Okay. Let me think about it. It was like, oh. And then when I was with it, when I immediately ran up to him, mind you, this is my hero, it didn’t even occur to me to think about myself, like, oh, what would he think if I ran up to him and asked him something. I wasn’t aware of myself. I was only aware of him and the question I had. And by the way, that was one question, I had hundreds of questions because I knew all of his games.

Your attention should either be in one of two places, either on the task at hand or the other person in front of you.

That was just the one that spilled out of my mouth first. That brings me to another powerful notion that your attention should either be in one of two places, either on the task at hand or the other person in front of you. You’re either alone working on something, and if you’re not, you’re with someone, that person has your full attention. I had an epiphany, I’ve always been that way, but about the power of that. Like right now, my attention is on you. I have no idea what you are thinking about me, so there’s no self-consciousness. Sometimes people say he seems so confident in public situations, but confidence would mean I was aware of myself.

I’m not confident, I’m only aware of the person in front of me or the task at hand. When you become aware of negative emotion, fear, doubt, anger, or any kind of negative emotion, it’s a reminder to refocus your attention on the person in front of you or the task at hand. Just do that, and other things will take care of themselves. And if you combine that with that earlier notion of inviting others to play. Now, if someone’s in front of me, they have a hundred percent of my attention and I’m just looking to have a good time, play, and with no agenda other than the play itself.

Sean: There’s a line I love, I can’t remember who it’s attributed to, but this makes me think of it, and that’s, “ecstasy is attention at its fullest”. It’s a line I’ve thought a lot about.

Adam: That’s fascinating. So the derivation of ecstasy you’re exactly right. Funny, you should mention that because ecstasy is to be outside of yourself. That’s literally what it means. You look up the derivation needs to be outside of yourself, that’s ecstasy. And again, my attention is on the other person or the task at hand, so each moment in a sense is ecstatic. This reminds me of another well, it’s a Greek word, “enthousiasmos”. People are always surprised by the derivation of enthusiasm, like the etymology from ancient Greek means to be filled with God.

The “thou” in enthusiasm is a derivation from Theo. In theology, Theo is God. And that the Latin word for that is inspiration, which means to breathe in God. You’re exactly right on ecstasy. You’re outside of yourself and to be liberated from yourself. Michael Jordan said that he never once thought about missing a shot. And he couldn’t because he was fully focused on making the shot. Because if you’re worried about missing the shot, your attention is misplaced. He missed lots of shots, but that never entered his head because he was fully focused on making shots. Attention is super important.

Uncovering The Through-line

Sean: I’m even blown away hearing about your 13-year-old self, that commitment, that dedication, that focus, was that a skill you had prior, or was that love for what you were trying to do in chess, did that bring that out of you?

Adam: So it’s interesting. Remember it was a pretty simple goal. I just wanted to beat a kid in chess, that was it. It wasn’t like, oh, I’m going to make the chess team. Swimming, I was dedicated to and it didn’t occur to me to go, oh, maybe I should find out someone who knows how to go about it. Maybe there’s a chess coach or chess tutor. No. And I didn’t think about it, I didn’t join the chess team until late my sophomore year, like a year and a half later. I just wanted to beat the kid, and then I really liked the Fischer’s games and I would just study them.

And so it didn’t set out to be any grand goal. You asked me something earlier, Sean, and you said about when you’re earlier in your career, you’re casting about like, what is this, what am I building here with my life? And I had a recollection only a few years ago about something when I was 12. So you mentioned the age of 13, so I’m now addressing, I know you have men and women in your audience, listening, I know this is true for men because I was because I am a man. I don’t know if the same thing applies to women, but it’s this, and I would assert it, that men know who they are, males know who they are and will be in the world by the age of 12 before you’re 13.

For example, Buffet, when he was 12, his dad took him on a trip from Omaha to New York. He was 12 and this is 1942, depression, World War II raging and stuff, and his dad takes him from Omaha to New York, and on that trip takes him among various places took him to the New York Stock Exchange. And after that trip, Buffet turns to his dad and he revered his father, dad,  I’m going to become the richest man in the world so that I can give it all away. That was a statement he made to his dad when he was 12. So get this, and I only realized this a few years ago, it was a memory.

I remember when I was 12, it was a mid-spring day, say April or May. It was a Sunday and I was walking with my dad, all 12 years old, and I used to have really deep philosophical conversations with my father, always like hours. And anyway, I’m talking about how much I hate school. I hate school. Why do I have to go to school? I always just wanted to be left alone so I could daydream or read whatever I wanted to read. So I’m with my dad and I’m talking about how much I hate school. And he turns to me and asks, “So what are you going to do about it?”

He meant that as a philosophical problem. Okay. You Adam, he was saying to me, you’re in a situation you don’t like, and you have to go to school. You’re not getting out of that, buddy. So what are you going to do about it? In other words, how are you going to frame this? How are you going to approach this? How are you going to deal with the fact that you’re stuck going to school? That was embedded within the question? And kind of frustrating, I said, I don’t know, maybe one day I’ll start my own. I had no entrepreneurial inkling at the time, I’m all at 12 years old. It’d be like someone saying, oh, I hate food, and my father turned and said, what are you gonna do about it?

I don’t know, maybe one day I’ll start my restaurant, but that’s what I said, like for a 12-year-old boy who hated school. And it wasn’t like, oh yes, I could do school better. I hated it. I didn’t like it. And I think anyone else would like, it’s not like, oh yeah, I want to torture your kids too. So mind you, I’m sharing a memory that I only had about three or four years ago and you know because you know me and my background. When I was 25, I got out of Oxford and a law degree don’t know what I’m doing, and a year later I co-founded a company called the Princeton Review.

So I started a school 13 years after I said, I was, and that still goes on today. Millions of kids have read things that I developed. I remembered that memory only a few years ago and I went, wow, I did start school, just like I told my dad. And it wasn’t like a vow, like Buffet, that statement to his father, that was a commitment. I’m going to become the richest, he was proclaiming that. I wasn’t proclaiming it. Oh yes. I’m going to start school. No. And, I’ve asked others, my male friends and they go, yeah, it doesn’t have to be at the age of 12, but by the age of 12. And I say this, so if you are a male and you’re like, oh, what should I be doing in the world, that when you were a boy, you knew stuff about yourself.

And I say, the reason 12 is so important to cut off is by the time you hit 13 and enter puberty, all of a sudden, you begin to compare yourself to other people, dating and, oh, I got to look good for them. It muddies the core authentic proclamation. As just a boy I want to do that not to prove myself. I think it’s worth everyone and it may be true also for girls, women, you know, that their path is theirs. It’s worth revisiting your childhood memories, the things you loved to do. So there, that’s another invitation, I’m inviting people to go back to their memories. Okay. Let’s see. Yeah, let’s try it. I always liked riding horses. What was that about? Whatever it is.

Sean: That’s beautiful. I feel like it is a very important exercise to do that. One of the things you hit on there that has me thinking right now is around 13, you hit puberty, you’re comparing yourself. It’s almost that childlike, unobstructed authentic self-expression at that age, and that’s how you uncover that through-line, those golden threads.

Adam: Exactly. So well said, that’s where you discover the through-line. You’ve just started it, it was very odd that through-line because I was an introvert. It wasn’t like, I’m going to start school so I can talk to others. This is how much of an introvert I was, so in high school, yeah, I’m on the chess team and I’m on the swim team, but those are the only people I talked to. And some people told me after I graduated, that they had never seen me speak not once in four years of high school, not once, just in my little world. Again, I had that epiphany and I’ve been very much informed my whole life, and then something shifted about six years ago, people, Adam’s in a candy store with lots of people, just have fun, play. And I’m doing serious stuff in the world, and yet it’s all a form of play.

Sean: With that, one of the things that you’ve brought tremendous clarity to for me and my life is deciding to not ask yourself the question, what do I want to do? But more importantly, who do I want to be?

Adam: Yeah. And unless you love doing something, I go, yes. Brady, ah, football, I love football, I want to be a football player. But then becomes, who do you want to be in the world? Which goes back to that earlier conversation we had about what statement are you making to the world? And the statement I’m making with much of what I do is, play is really important in everything you do. I mean, philosophically important, not just, oh, you should have a good time. That’s the highest form of gratitude for the gift of life, is play. It’s the highest form of reverence. The most serious things should be approached playfully.

Finding Clarity Through Distillation

Sean: You mentioned some of the things you’re doing in this world are pretty serious and they are, but what I have such deep, profound respect for what you do is the clarity you can bring to those things where things don’t make sense to the majority of people, somehow you’re able to find clarity there. I would love to just hear you talk through this.

Adam: Well, I mentioned before about my weakness, the strength that comes out of weakness, is that I have a hard time understanding complexity, complicated things. So I’m always taking complexity, I have like a cocoa puffs brain and I reduce it down to something that I can understand. And in that process of distilling it down, I get to court truths that are denied to people who can deal with complexity. But at that complexity is unwieldy which is why you need, again, whether in performance, sports, or art or anything, boil it down to a few things, and then you can use those things very well.

It’s all about distilling and I just don’t have to create a process, and much of it comes down to deconstructing it and looking at it in the simplest possible way. I remember as a boy, my father, again, we had these deep philosophical conversations, and I remember he was saying something, he said, if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it. So, language use, and most people explain things really in complex ways. I alluded to a very thick book by a very famous person on how to live your life, could you boil that whole thick book down to a few rules that I can use?

And so it comes from a ruthless insistence on making things simple enough so that I, Adam can understand that. I figured if I can understand them, then other people can. When I started the Princeton Review with my friend John Katzman, I had no idea what I was doing, I was like, oh, maybe I’ll tutor a couple of kids a day, write novels on the side, and it grew and became the Princeton Review. Now that you said, I’m just thinking about this for the first time, it’s the same thing that I threw myself into the chess. You just throw yourself into it and you just keep digging, digging, and from that, you get some few core principles, and Ahas.

Think about it like this. When Wayne Gretzky was playing hockey, he was playing a very different game from everybody else on the ice. Same with Michael Jordan or anybody in any of those or Bruce Lee fighting. His fighting is very different from whoever his partner is. You just get the idea that they’re looking at things very simply. It’s the only way you can function at a very high level.

Anti-confirmation Bias

One of my favorite questions, which I stole from Steve Cohen, the Met owner, I was talking with him about something and his friend and he said, “What would you need to see to know that you were wrong?” And there that’s a boom question. And because most people, when they’re presenting ideas, whether it’s to buy gold or invest in this or buy NFTs or whatever it is, they have a view, and they’re trying to convince you to do something. And always the question is, what would you need to see to know that I should be shorting gold? If they don’t have an answer to that question. They haven’t thought it through.

And that’s a great internal check, like what would I need to see to know that I was wrong and, of course, you know about confirmation bias, right? Human beings are designed to look for information that confirms what it is that they already believe. I’m doing exactly the opposite always in real-time. Once I form a belief, I am now actively looking to disprove it. If I believe that gold will go up, I’ve done the analysis gold will move higher. I don’t look for information to confirm what I already know, that would be a waste. All I’m doing is, I’m looking at very specific things.

What would I need to see to know I should be shorting gold, like oh, interest rates just spiked, gold is going down, but the dollar just jumped 2% this week, gold’s going down. I have very specific things and you can do that even in your personal life. Like what would I need to see to know that this person is committed to what I’m doing or what we’re doing? What would I need to see to tell me that that wasn’t the case? Again, it’s anti-confirmation bias. I think that’s a really important tool to add to our Batman utility belt when we go camping with Musk in Canada.

Living The Timeless Principles As Opposed To Capturing Them

Sean: This question is fascinating to me, and I hope you don’t view this as “too in the weeds”. You do such a good job at deconstructing these timeless principles. And I’m just wondering for you, like, are you capturing these? Are you writing them down so you revisit or once you reach a deep truth, you just know it, and it is just in your head?

Adam: Remember, it’s not in my head, I’m living it. It’s not something I have to remind myself of. This is a very profound topic. So all of your questions are good, being in the weeds with you. For example, when I saw  Bobby Fischer and changed my life in a pretty significant way. How often does somebody bump into their hero?  And that person was a famous recluse. I’m like literally one of 10 people in his whole life that he ever let in because he massively distrusted everyone, unfortunately. What was I talking about just a second ago?

Sean: So I was asking in terms of when you’re deconstructing these ideas, you live them as opposed to just having them.

Adam: Okay. Now I remember. Someone listening to that story, or if they were right in the room when I was saying, they might say, well, Adam, you know, there are no coincidences. How often have you heard someone say that there are no coincidences? So the person asserting that, do they live their life by that statement? Like if you believed that there are no coincidences, and I’m confessing to you now that I don’t. For example, what are the odds that you would bump into your hero? I did in New York City and I wasn’t even living in New York City.

I was living in Evanston and he would just happen to shop when you’re at a corner that you rarely on with your mother crowded. And I would say the odds looking back on it were a hundred percent, which is another interesting topic, maybe we’ll get to it. There are no coincidences, but they don’t live their day-to-day life by that. And so any idea that I get I ask can I use this in real-time? So for example, I’ve told you that, and you know this from other times we’ve spoken about this, about creating fun and delight, like inviting others, be playful and invite them to play with no agenda. How do I live that life?

So there are times when somebody says something I want to go, eh, that’s not true. And I will find myself at that moment in real-time going is what I’m about to say going to increase the fun and delight in the situation, or is it going to do the opposite? There are a lot of times I catch myself, Oh, I can’t say that even though I’m tempted. There are a lot of times I want to say or do something and yet I know it violates that principle. By the way, I’m not perfect at times I just go aah but as often as I can, as a human being, other things equal, there I optimize around maximizing play in any given situation. That’s what I’m optimizing for.

And someone else might be optimizing to get noticed or, oh, this or that, and I’m not judging those whatever, but I’m very clear about optimizing around something. If an idea doesn’t help you live your life or help others that you can share their lives. Like you started this off and said, oh, we’re going to uplevel here in this conversation, we’ve discussed lots of things. So I don’t write them down, I live them. I don’t think there’s much to be said. I think that all that can be said about life and would constitute all the wisdom that is known, can be reduced down to a very few principles, like not much to be said.

And then everything else is sort of a corollary of those few principles. I think it’s about just living in and doing so mindfully. Do you really, this is so cliche, but walk the talk? Do you embody that principle mindfully in real-time, minute-to-minute? It’s vitally important, like, you know, anything you’ve read of Munger and Buffet that they are living that day to day, minute to minute, that’s how they live their lives. There’s no doubt. I think that’s important to live mindfully around optimizing whatever you’re trying to optimize in the world, this gift we’ve been given as a planet.

Pascal’s Wager & Adam’s Wager

I mentioned that I’m doing some serious stuff in the world, and so one of the things that I’m doing is I pose myself the following quiz, and it’s a pretty serious one. What if humanity, our species was at a critical existential crisis right now? What if we don’t get this moment right, this moment, next few years we are likely going to spiral down into a very bad situation, possibly the end of our species? Pascal, a French philosopher, mathematician, something known as Pascal’s wager like he chose to believe in God because there’s four by four matrix, I believe in God or I don’t and God exists or doesn’t.

So again, you go through the matrix. If I believe in God and he exists, yes, good for me. I’m lucky forever. If I believe in God, but he doesn’t exist, no foul, no harm. If I don’t believe in God and he doesn’t exist, no foul, no harm. If I don’t believe in God and he does exist, I’m in trouble. So you just go through the little four-by-four grid, mathematician philosopher he was, so therefore I choose to believe in God. So, here’s Adam’s wager. So here’s my conjecture, we are either at the end of times for our species, humanity or we’re not. Do you believe that or not? And if we are, and we don’t do anything, we’re screwed.

If we are, if this is the end of the road, and I know people, of course, they go, oh, you’re just being alarmist, in the past we’ve dealt with very serious things, World War II, depression, lots of serious crisis, at the moment it seems it’s never been worse. And I’m asserting after a lifetime of thinking about things, I can think of no other time in history ever, that was this serious. And we don’t intend to go in it, but I am either right in that assertion or I’m not. Punchline coming in about 60 seconds. So if Adam is right and we don’t do anything, we don’t change what we’re doing, remember you’re not getting the results you want, got to change what you’re doing.

So if we don’t change what we’re doing, we’re screwed if Adam is correct. And if Adam is incorrect, that it’s not the end of time, and we don’t change what we’re doing, okay, still not a great world. They’re big problems. If Adam is incorrect, it’s not the end of time and if we don’t change and if we do change well, that’s also good because things could be improved. So either way, it argues that we, as a planet need a change big time, big time. Everyone listening to me right now has the sense that the world is flying apart. There’s a great poem by Yeats written in 1917 in World War I called The Second Coming.

He said the world is flying apart in anarchy. He said the best lack all conviction, and the worst of us are full of passionate intensity. And that’s like such a description. If you’re listening to me right now, you should look up the poem The Second Coming, it’s very short, very short, and that’s 1917. So 105 years ago in the aftermath of World War I, which was horrific. So now I’ll make the following statement or ask the following question, if you thought it was the end of time, in other words, for our species, as humanity, we have really messed things up, and we have the technology now to do a lot of damage quickly, what steps would you take? And you have to get it right.

I’ve been pondering that question for five years and  I’ve come up with an answer. What would you do if you knew you had to get everyone to change what they were doing, and you had one shot at it? Do you remember the movie Armageddon? So in Armageddon, those of you who haven’t seen the movie, a comet is headed toward earth, and if Bruce Willis and his ragtag team of wildcatters don’t stop that comet, it’s game over. So they have to stop the comet. I look at the world with that kind of urgency and have for the last five years and have addressed it.

I think I figured out an answer. It takes a little while, I’m about to publish a white paper called the Renaissance Project. You in the weed questions, they’ve been so good because it all circles back to who do I want to be in the world, share, and there’s play and there’s a world that’s falling apart. There is a lot of pain in the world clearly, and it’s getting worse every day. When I think back about history, I look back at the difference between now and then is the technology. We can do a lot of harm, really fast, really fast. Genetic engineering just takes one virus to get all wiped out or a new life form.

AI is a very serious threat. There are all these technological threats, not to mention the social, political, and economic unrest in the world. I’ve been thinking very deeply. And again, here’s the question, what would you do if you knew you had to succeed, not make your best effort like you had to stop the comet? That’s a question I’ve been working on as deeply as the other questions you’ve heard me think about. And again, have to succeed, not just good college try. That sounds like a really serious topic and it is but I’m playful when I approach it, and I’m gathering resources to make it happen.

Long-form Conversation with Anyone Dead or Alive

Sean: Adam, thank you for this, for the wisdom, the insights, the tales along the way. This has just been as we mentioned five years in the making, this was a true pleasure for me. I would love to know one final question, if you could do this long-form conversation with anyone dead or alive, just not a family member or friend, who would you want to spend an evening with just asking questions?

Adam: Wow. Wow. A bunch of names comes to me. Oh, that’s so tough. Okay. Here’s the thought experiment, I get to meet Jesus Christ and have dinner with him. I get to talk to him today, I say, knowing that much of your wisdom has been misinterpreted would you say anything different? Seeing the world that you see today if you could go back and say things differently would you say things differently? That would be a very interesting conversation because here’s a man clearly, and he’s not the only man in history or woman in history who was dedicated to up-leveling as many people as he or she could, and yet if they were to look at the world in all the wisdom that they imparted, has it made a difference?

And of course, it has, every piece of advice is an invitation to accept it or reject it. And they can only invite people, here, that’s the door out of your jail cell human beings. There that’s the door, you can open it, you can go right out or you can choose to be inside a jail cell that you call life. You can only point the way. I’d want to know that because it comes back to me like trying to help as many people. So given what you now see, what advice would you give yourself, and what advice would you now give me, Adam? I can think of other people.

Sean: Adam Robinson, that is a beautiful place to close out what I hope would be one of the multiple conversations on What Got You There. So, thanks again.

Adam: Let’s go back in the weeds and get a tweet and invite Elon, must go camping with us, and ask lots of questions.

Sean: You guys made it to the end of another episode of What Got You There. I hope you guys enjoyed it. I do appreciate you taking the time to listen all the way through. If you found value in this, the best way you can support the show is by giving us a review, rating it, sharing it with your friends, and also sharing it on social. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. Looking forward to you guys, listening to another episode.

Who am I?