Smash Notes
9 Harsh Truths No One Wants To Admit - Shaan Puri - #1163
Shaan Puri is an entrepreneur, former CEO, podcaster, and angel investor. Expect to learn why the economy is basically run on insecure people, why it's better to ask for forgiveness rather than permission, what’s holding most young people back from achieving more, why you should follow your obsessions, the importance of leaving your hometown at some point…
People
Notes
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Shaan Puri's singing teacher did not sing until high school. He was afraid to sing and thought he could not. He grew up a black guy in a city where black guys like him played football, and singing was treated as gay, something you do not do. He got made fun of, assumed he must be bad, and felt even worse for liking singing than for being bad at it, so he shut it down.
After he moved schools, he waited for his ride in an empty practice room while talent show auditions went on. He liked the song and sang along. The choir teacher poked her head in and asked if it was him. He asked her to be honest about whether he could sing, and she asked who told him he could not. He has been on American Idol. He needed that choir teacher to give him permission to do the thing he really wanted to do inside. Shaan Puri asked whether he had always wanted to sing. The teacher said it was killing him. He had not realized it and had thought not singing was just what life was. Once he started, a weight came off, because not doing the thing he was called to do had been killing him.
Shaan Puri says fear is the only reason a person skips what they are called to do. Ask why enough times and the answer is fear of failure. One more why, and underneath sits a fear of not being enough and of not being loved. Nobody says that part out loud, but it is the true part under the fear of failure. Stress is a fancy word for fear and a code word for fear. Anxiety is a code word for fear. Procrastination is a code word for fear. Everybody has it.
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Shaan Puri says courage is feeling fear and then going through with the action anyway. People assume motivation means wanting to act or knowing it will go well, and they assume courage means no fear, uncertainty, or doubt. He says both are the same move: feel it, then go through it anyway. Nobody calls a person courageous for taking a sip when nothing is on the line. The same sip looks brave only when that person is actually afraid.
Shaan Puri's son would not walk into jujitsu, tennis, or basketball. The boy was born during COVID and froze at the door: let go of a parent's hand, meet a stranger, join a bunch of kids. Shaan Puri had driven him, paid, and gone inside the last three times. A teacher emailed that parents should stay outside. The boy did not know what email is. Shaan Puri felt frustrated. The boy felt afraid and wanted to stay with his parents.
Shaan Puri changed approach. He told his son he used to cry all the time at gymnastics, and his mom says crying there is super common. He asked if the boy felt scared, said the feeling was okay, and said sometimes the fear wins. Courage sits in the heart, fear sits in the stomach, and they fight.
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Shaan Puri retells the opening of Robert Bly's Iron John story. The prince is a good boy headed for the throne: he dresses properly for court, says please and thank you, and listens to his parents. A golden ball, a gift from his father and his favorite toy, stands for the boy's vitality and life energy. The ball rolls into Iron John's cage. Iron John will give it back only if the boy lets him out.
The boy has no key. Iron John says the key to the cage is under the mother's pillow. Robert Bly says that for every good boy, the key to the wild man sits where the mother rests her head at night, among her hopes and dreams for him. Mothers do not dream of a young boy becoming a pirate or a wild man. They want something safe and proper. The boy steals the key and lets Iron John out. Iron John returns the ball and turns toward the forest. The boy fears the palace will kill him for setting the wild man loose. Iron John will not go back in the cage. He tells the boy that the boy is the one who is trapped, says the boy may live in a palace but Iron John knows far greater riches, sets the boy on his shoulders, and carries him out to the forest.
Chapter one ends there. Shaan Puri asks what the ending means, and the lesson stays on chapter one: in life there are three types of men, good boys, wild men, and great kings.
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Shaan Puri says the move from wild man to great king happens when a king stops serving only his own needs and takes on a kingdom. He wants the people in the kingdom happy and thriving. The kingdom can be a family, friends, a neighbor, strangers on the internet, a community, or people with a rare disease he decided to serve. Fierce wild energy goes toward something worth more, in meaning, than comfort and lifestyle.
A baby cares only about milk, a diaper, and a nap, and cries without them. Shaan says care might later reach appearance or grades, then more of life. Each new care forces growth to meet the new need. He applies the idea to getting bullied and deciding to build a self: the person had to become more, because the new aim mattered more than comfort, safety, and familiarity. When the scale tips, change is forced. Letting the wild man out carries tremendous power, energy, and ferocity. In another story, a man chewed off his leg to save his life, then lived as a three-legged wolf forever because he lost something, and as a free wolf and a fierce wolf. Letting Iron John out of the cage is a one-way street. A person becomes more and is not the same again.
The message hit Shaan because he already had a beautiful lifestyle. He was told he has three kids, a happy marriage, his health, all the money he needs, hobbies, a podcast, and fame, then asked what he wants and why they were still talking. They were still talking because something more sits beyond him.
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Tom Hardy says Charles Bronson told him to cut a little piece of himself off, no matter how much it hurts, in order to grow and move on. While Tom Hardy was training for the movie Bronson, the first time he spoke to Charles Bronson he laid out a pattern with women he could not break. Tom Hardy says he probably had a relationship with his mother that had infiltrated all his relationships with women.
Charles Bronson used to leave message after message, going back about three years, right through message 18. Tom Hardy finally picked up at six o'clock, just after he split up with his girlfriend. He said he was not in a good space. He could not be with a woman and he could not be without one. He was stuck in a triangle, repeating the same pattern and expecting a different outcome. Charles Bronson asked if he remembered the floods in Oxford, and the boy whose foot got stuck in a grate while the river kept rising until the boy drowned. Charles Bronson said the drowning would not have happened to him, because he would have said, cut it off.
Charles Bronson then put the point in plain words. Sometimes you have got to cut a little piece of yourself off, no matter how much it hurts, in order to grow and in order to move on.
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Shaan Puri says that as guys get a little older and touch some success, the promise was that fears, insufficiencies, and the need for validation would be sated if the castle got big enough or the mountain climbed high enough. A lot of people arrive and find the win did not fix the problem. Something was achieved, and a much bigger challenge is waiting. The fuel source has been spent and the destination has been reached. What follows is the founder's existential crisis: where to go now, and how to get there.
He says he is pretty sure Andrew Wilkinson told him about a men's group made up exclusively of nine and 10 figure founder exit people, living in the most salubrious version of PTSD imaginable. He calls it entrepreneur PTSD. People who achieve everything encounter more challenges than beforehand because they are cast adrift, directionless and rudderless. They ask what fuel got them there, what parts of themselves they sacrificed, what calluses built up, and what coping mechanisms let them avoid things they needed to feel. With no destination left, they either get rid of the calluses, the patterns, the fears, and the insufficiencies, or they run it back with gold medalist syndrome and do it twice, because one win could have been luck.
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Chris Williamson says plain success is low skill because a formula can get you there, while success kept connected to the rest of life is much closer to art than to science.
Chris Williamson is much more impressed by success done with balance and fun. Success is hard, and it is nowhere near as difficult as doing it while having a good time, being a good person, feeling good, staying in a community, helping family, and not using people in a transactional way. No formula shows how to build a good business and keep a good marriage, how to avoid denying parts of yourself, or how to turn past pain into anything other than a chip on the shoulder that becomes an identity. The vacancy after achievement is sometimes called the arrival fallacy. On average, success is the precursor to doing the work, so someone who arrives successful and has done the work at the same time has held two full time jobs. The pairing is significantly rare.
Shaan Puri says the standard Chris Williamson just laid out is winning: the science of success meets the art of fulfillment, plus being a good dude, a good friend, a good dad, and a good husband, still doing cool shit with friends, and holding ambition without letting it get the best of you. Shaan Puri shares the same blueprint. One man's heaven is another man's hell.
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Shaan Puri says a trainer told him, in the middle of an argument, to ask what they are trying to do here. The question is about the relationship, separate from the disagreement that started the fight. Even if the surface fight is Mexican food versus Italian food, he means I love you, you love me, a great time, and an awesome relationship.
The sooner Shaan brings his own awareness to whether he loves the other person, whether he wants the relationship to be amazing, and that they are on the same team, and away from the wrongs of the situation, the edge goes off. It is never really the situation. It is how people are reacting in the situation. He says the difference between a reaction and a response is the make or break of a life. People who are truly great respond versus react. Something is always happening, and everyone has an impulsive reaction, but the ones who bring awareness to what they actually want long term, how they actually feel, and what the other person might be thinking, then get into response mode. People give better relationship advice to others than they take in their own fight, because their own fight drops them into fight or flight reaction mode versus being able to respond.
When Shaan dislikes a reaction, he says he is not proud of it, calls the reaction stupid, and tries again. At his house he makes a rewind sound, which lightens the mood, then asks to try the moment again real quick. He shakes the tension like an etch-a-sketch with something goofy, because carrying the bad reaction forward is too hard.
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Shaan Puri says the thick and meaty version does not have to be that serious. Change the music behind a video and people feel totally differently. Put a laugh track behind the piece and people think it is funny and start laughing more. People are not as sophisticated as they hope to believe.
People picture themselves as intellectual creatures, then the music still moves the feeling and the laugh track still gets the laugh. Accepting the limit hands over new tools, so the piece can be played other ways. Heavy work and deep work stay available, and sometimes the move is to sit down and grind, but neither mode can run all the time.
Life is not supposed to be a grind. Shaan Puri says the other arts are fun and they make things easier.
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Shaan Puri says his happy place is the boys, the people he wants to spend a bunch of time with and find excuses to be around. He picks work by three questions: which projects bring the best out of the group, which bring something new out of them, and which have some meaning in the world.
On meaning, he draws two paths. One is making people have a lot of joy. The other he leaves unsure, saying maybe have them be great in a way they were not otherwise, like pushing people. Shaan Puri thinks people aim far too low. If he can help people aim a little higher, toward going for it and whatever their version of going for it is, he would feel really happy.
He says he does not know the next step for sure. He is going to play around with projects like that and do projects with the boys.
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