Welcome to 2% with Michael Easter Today is Friday, January 26. I'm about to board a plane out of Costa Rica out of the jungle back home in a couple hours, but we are recording this ama before I jump on the plane. Today's ama because it is an AMA day, Friday, fourth Friday of the month is a key to mental toughness. So you are going to learn one easy way to be more mentally tough. Some quick housekeeping before we dive in. Thanks for being a member. If you're listening to this, you are a member and I really appreciate it. Second is that the Misogi event in Costa Rica is over, and it was epic. And we're not going to talk about it. And it changed me. And I would like to thank all of the people who joined it was super awesome. Okay, so in today's AMA, we are going to be tackling effectively one question. One, the question is, what are some ways I can be mentally tougher? And it's a good question. So what I'm going to talk about is what we get wrong about mental toughness, how I think about the concept and one key to mental toughness that I think is important. And that sort of manifests itself yesterday on our group Misogi, that I think is a good anecdote. Now please recall that we voted to have our AMA's be sort of off the cuff podcast answers rather than written pieces. So that is why it's gonna sound a little more off the cuff. Before we get into the actual law question, some quick sponsor love because they're a great great they keep this thing alive. We got go rock maker, the world's finest rucksacks we got Maui Nui venison, who provides the world's healthiest meat, the research is insane. I got the link to and then momentous nutrition, the company that made me feel good about supplements again. And we got the discount codes in the piece em Easter 10, ForgeRock and Easter for Maori Nui and momentous. Okay, let's dive in. So the question is, what are some ways I can be mentally tougher? So this is a this is a really good question. And you see a ton of focus and language and marketing being put behind this idea of mental toughness. Now, the term it originated in legitimate psychology to describe basically a person's ability to keep their shit together and push through adversity, right, it's like when the going gets hard, this person is going to keep going. And so kind of got associated with the military with Navy SEALs, with all that kind of stuff. It kind of had this like moment. But what happened, according to scientists, anyways, is that over time, the term sort of got bastardized, it got a little bit commercialized and got sort of given magical powers, right. And we were told that you could do all these kind of strange things. Like it yelled at in the surf by, you know, some soldiers, I don't know some of these camps, you see people now it automatically build mental toughness. But scientists who studied mental toughness, and how it got positioned in popular media, they basically concluded that the way it's sort of being talked about and the qualities that people are after, they called it a pseudo concept. It's not sound psychology, but rather, it's become sort of a catchphrase that sells us a sort of vision of ourselves as a hero in our in our own narrative, which totally fine, but I think that that sort of simplified, what does it actually take to become mentally tough, because it's kind of a series of steps. And we can talk about all these different steps in a future post. And it's a series of decisions and calculations, basically, the way to think about it is, you know, a lot of people will just keep going and keep going and keep going. But certain things are holding them back. And they haven't they haven't fixed that, or they're just doing a hard thing, just for the sake of it being hard. What it could be easier, and they could end up going further and be able to help others along the way. So let me give you an example. And this is from the masovia. This is why I wanted to talk about this today. We were maybe three hours in and please remember that we're in Costa Rica, it's summertime, it's super humid, it's super hot down here. And we've been in the jungle for Yeah, about three hours. And we had a guy we had some of us kind of split into groups to cover ground again, I don't want to give too many details on what we actually did. But
I look back from our group. And notice that the
guy wasn't there and said, Alright, you guys, go ahead. I'm gonna go find a friend. And so I just hiked back a little ways. And eventually I found the guy and he was not a good shape. He was he was super gassed. We started the tree. And he was like, Look, I gotta, I gotta quit. And this was not that long into the day. We weren't at the halfway mark of the day or anything yet. And he was like, Look, I gotta quit. I, you know, I wanted to push through this, he wanted to express mental toughness. He didn't use that language, but I'm using that language for the sake of this piece. And yeah, he was he was pretty much gone. And so, yeah, we just kind of sat and I said, alright, well, don't tell yourself, you're gonna quit. Yeah, cuz, you know, you might need some rest, like, what do we need to do here. And so we kind of started working through a checkbox. And basically what had happened is that the guy hadn't, had not had enough calories. And he just needed, he just needed sugar, he needed electrolytes. And he needed, he just needed calories, and he needed water. And, you know, out here when you sweat that much, and if you haven't eaten a ton, and you start losing water, like it gets really, it can get really bad. So we just sat there and drank, he drank a bunch of, like momentus fuel, I had that on me, which is pretty calorie dense. It's like 120 calories with a bunch of different electrolytes and stuff in it. He ate a little bit of food, he had drank some water chilled out for like 20 minutes. And another guy on the trip, came along up behind us and had no context that this, you know, this guy was, was not in good shape 20 minutes ago, and was just like, what's up, you guys are ready to go. And the guy just sort of popped up, and he's ready to go. And he frigging hold off. Those to hold off, there was a team behind them that I clung to. And the guy hung up, hauls off, any freaking smokes the rest of the thing. He just absolutely smoked it. So the point I'm trying to make is that, you know, always just trying to push and grind and do all these things. You kind of need to ask some bigger questions. I'm going to give you another example before we get into what I mean here. So there was a guy who I used to know his name was Craig Weller, and he was trying to be in the Special Forces. He's a totally brilliant mind in military training. And he had to take a swimming test, like this time swimming test to get into the special forces. And he kept failing it, like over and over and over. And the advice that his sergeants were giving him was swim harder and don't quit, right, be mentally tough, you're not mentally tough enough, swim harder, don't quit. So that's what he did. So he just started swimming so hard that he literally passed out, sank to the bottom of the pool, and had to be rescued in the pool. Now, his problem, obviously, was not a lack of mental toughness, this dude passed out and sank to the bottom of the pool on the swim. And so his point to me was that you can work really hard doing something badly for a very long time and brake yourself doing it, you're just applying an inefficient, broken process harder, is not helpful. And so one day, what happens to this credit, well I did is that a new Sergeant shows up at training. And Craig gets out of the water. And the guy says, looks at him and just goes, you know, it's your parents fault for raising you somewhere without the ocean or water. And his point was that Craig didn't really know how to swim that well. But she didn't. And he didn't, he didn't know that there's like, very specific technique you need to do to be efficient. Like if you just try and swim harder, and you don't know how to swim, well, that's not going to do anything for it. It's just gonna bury you. So really, rather than nonspecific, just try harder advice. This Sergeant basically said, Look, we need to get you swimming lessons, were gonna give you specific, measurable things you can do to swim better. And what do you think happened? He learned to swim better, and he passed the freaking test. So chemists call the least efficient step in a reaction, the one that most hinders an entire process, the rate limiting step. Now, we're often unaware when we are approaching challenges inefficiently. And this extends to tons of domains in life from weight loss and exercise to productivity to learning. If something isn't going the way we want it, instead of being like, I just need to try harder, right? I just need to like push through this, whatever it might be. It's better to take some time to scrutinize every part of the process and look for your own rate limiting step. If you're trying to get through something, and it's not going well and you keep pushing and it's still not going well and you keep pushing, still not going well look and see what you haven't done. Have you have you drink the water and the gotten enough food to eat in the morning and the calories if you're exercising? Have you learned to swim. So the point is that, you know, a boxer doesn't improve by taking punches for the sake of taking punches, right? They don't just stick out there John say hit me. Now that's not how a boxer improves. But a boxer improves by practicing their craft and along the way, they are probably going Take a couple of punches. So there's a difference, right? Things are gonna be hard in order to improve. But we're not just trying to stick out our chin and make them hard for the sake of it, you want to dial things in to make them to make the hard things you do, as a reasonably easy as possible. So you can go much further. And I think you'll see this yeah, I've talked to a lot of other people about this. For example, my friend, Doug contagion said, virtually every selection and training scenario, and the Special Operations community is designed to reinforce teamwork. So that's, that's the other thing. Like, we've used soldiers as the sort of solo, you know, mentally tough people. But the reality is, is that everyone becomes tougher by a larger human ecosystem by being part of a team, right? If there were tons of moments out there were in our Misogi where people had to lean on each other, they had to share water, they had to do XYZ to get everyone through. And that, to me is like a much greater expression of mental toughness, and being willing to either slow down or speed up or share with other people than it is to just come out of the gate hot and try and win everyone and just like don't quit, basically. And you see this in selection camps, the soldiers who behave like Mavericks, according to Doug, they don't fare well, and they don't get chosen for teams. So that is actually counterproductive. And when people suffer together to they get stronger bonds, it's a key to military training. So TL Dr. Next time you are trying to push through something, for the sake of mental toughness, make sure that your process is efficient in the first place, because you will go far farther that way. Try and break down do I have all my ducks in a row? What is the rate limiting step holding me back? And the thing if you if you choose an appropriately hard task, it's going to be tough no matter what, but you don't want it to be tough because you have an inefficient process. So that's all I got. Thanks for listening. And we will see you will hear I will you will hear me on Monday. And check out our sponsors. We love them. And thanks again to everybody who came down to Costa Rica for the Misogi that was awesome.
