Shane Parrish

Steven Kotler was bitten by a tick on a walk through an arboretum at a friend's wedding on Long Island, then spent three years in bed. He was one of the first cases in California, so nobody knew what was wrong or how to fix it. Doctors kept him on doxycycline for a year and a half, until his stomach lining bled, and then told him they were done. He was functional about 10 percent of the time. His memory was gone, and he could not walk across a room.

A friend refused to leave until he went to the ocean. He expected to sit in the sun. Less than 30 seconds after a wave came, he stood up, time slowed, his head cleared, and the pain was gone. He caught four more waves, then could not get out of

Shane Parrish says the best people in the world learn in the dark hours. Nobody is watching, there is no boss, and the field does not matter. The work happens after 5 p.m., and it can be 10 at night. The session is an Excel spreadsheet, a wave, or whatever the craft is. Failure has no consequences, so playing and learning happen in the same stretch. He does not like being bad in public. When he skis, he gets far from the chairlift and iterates in the woods, out of sight.

The privacy is how a craft gets honed. Steven Kotler keeps the same kind of privacy on a different clock. He starts writing around 4 a.m., because nobody owns the hours from 4 a.m. to 7 a.m. When he was a poor West Coast re

Steven Kotler says frustration while learning means a person is moving in the right direction, not that they picked the wrong path or should stop. The feeling is still awful. The direction is still right. Frustration is feedback that working memory is overloaded. Colleen Seifert at the University of Michigan found that the more frustrated someone gets during the struggle, the better the chance they later solve the problem and enter flow. The same pattern shows up when someone wants an intuitive breakthrough. More frustration, a better chance of later seeing the answer.

Learning needs a little norepinephrine. Low levels are curiosity. High levels are anxiety. With none of the chemical, learn

Steven Kotler says the change that raises learning and peak performance is to be more playful. Defense Department research found that people learn 230 percent faster than normal in flow. The familiar 10,000-hour figure is a fantasy number. The number he gives instead is 10,000 iterations, and even that depends on the domain. He knew Anders Ericsson. Deliberate practice, Ericsson's method, is repetition with incremental improvement. Deliberate play is repetition with improvisation.

In tightly bounded fields such as mathematics and the violin, the disciplines Ericsson studied, deliberate practice works. Outside bounded fields, which is almost everything else, deliberate play wins by a wide ma

Steven Kotler treats ADHD as an evolutionary superpower because it is hyper-focus, not an inability to focus. The problem is work you do not care about. On work you do care about, the lock-in can last for months. He has met very few people at the top of business, athletics, or the arts who do not have it, and he calls it a superpower in business and everywhere else. Ned Hallowell, the Harvard psychologist who coined the term ADHD, shares the view.

Autonomy and attention are coupled systems in the brain, so focus cannot be maximized unless the person is the one driving. When a boss assigns a hated task, reframe it. Most of the task can be irrelevant, and the remaining slice can be the skill

Steven Kotler says people pay the most attention when the challenge of a task sits just above their skill, a stretch that does not snap. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and a Google mathematician tried to put a number on the balance and landed on 4 percent. They called it a back-of-the-envelope calculation, not science. Emotionally the spot sits between boredom, when stimulation is too low to hold attention, and anxiety, when the load is far too high. Flow scientists call the middle the flow channel.

A properly set hard goal gives an 11 to 22 percent boost in motivation. The task in front of someone still has to sit in the 4 percent spot, so a huge goal gets chunked down. A hard-charging person wil

Steven Kotler calls a primary flow activity the thing a person has done since childhood and still gets lost in. Skiing is his. About 90 percent of the time he skis, he enters flow. The shared version shows up as group flow with an editor he has worked with for 25 years, or as a conversation where an hour disappears.

Adults drop the activity when a job and a family arrive, and quitting it is the single worst thing they can do for focus. Flow is a trainable focusing skill, different from meditation but the same kind of skill. A Sunday in flow makes flow easier at work on Tuesday, and the activity lowers the anxiety that blocks it. Two to four hours a week is about what it takes. In real burno

Steven Kotler defines flow, the term Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi introduced, as an optimal state of consciousness where people feel their best and perform their best. It is rapt attention and total absorption. Focus gets so tight on the task that everything else fades, and mental, physical, and emotional performance rise together.

Csikszentmihalyi asked people around the world when they felt their best and performed their best, and found six core characteristics: complete concentration on the task, a merger of action and awareness, a smaller sense of self, distorted time, a feeling of control over things usually out of reach, and an autotelic quality. Autotelic means the experience is an end in

Shane Parrish calls the learning loop a path from experience to action. Someone has an experience, reflects on it, creates a compression, and then acts on that compression. When people communicate, they often pass along only the compression, and in a lot of cases that is an illusion of knowledge.

A cookbook makes the gap plain. He can go home, pull out a cookbook, and make the recipe, but if something goes wrong he has no idea what went wrong or why. The chef who had the experience, reflected on it, and then handed over the recipe knows exactly what went wrong. There is too much salt, the oven is not the right temperature, or the cook did not start enough. The chef knows all of that at once

"Don't act like the person you used to be. Act like the person you're going to become." Ryan Serhant says that mental shift alone will carry you forward, because the world is attracted to confidence and competence. Be competent while being humbly confident, and people will give you the things you want and the things you ask for. You will do more business, and you will be happier.

The choice is the same as sitting where you can look left and see rain and clouds, or look right and see sunshine. You have to pick every day. The approach worked. He did that TV show for 10 years, then three spinoff shows, and now there is a Netflix show. He started a company. He wakes up, follows his calendar, an

On The Knowledge Project, Ryan Serhant divides success into micro success and macro success. He counts the conversation itself as a success. Big-picture success, he says, is a happy legacy: leaving something behind, whether with his daughter or with people he has been able to help at work.

On the personal side, he names family and legacy, and maybe leaving the world in a better place than they found it, along with opportunities they otherwise would not have. At work, he was asked about the chip on his shoulder. He says the chip could rub people the wrong way because it might feel incredibly ambitious. He then points to how many other people win when he wins, to the thousands of percent, and

Ryan Serhant says the most valuable asset in any business is distribution. You can have the greatest product of all time, and if no one knows about it and no one buys it, you have an unknown product that does not sell, and that is a bankrupt business. He says he got super lucky on the back of early Instagram and early YouTube, building a real estate brand on personality that ran from content to community to commerce.

He doubled down on YouTube to be first to market, capture consumer mindshare, and turn the brand into a business. By 2015, 16, and 17, every seller and every developer he worked with was writing addendums into standard old school exclusive listing agreements. The clients includ

Ryan Serhant split the workday in 2013 into building the brand, expanding the business, sales, and doing the work. After the show came out, he waited for the phone to ring. It did not ring, because no one calls the people they see on TV. He saw the power of content to commerce right away.

On Twitter and Facebook, before Instagram, he saw early social growth among buyers, sellers, and other people in real estate. Instagram comes out in 2013. Real estate is incredibly expensive, not like selling 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, or 100 dollar goods. He sells homes from 500,000 dollars to 20 million dollars, and he is not really selling homes at that price on Instagram. The more people who know what he sell

On the show, ego kills more deals than anything. It kills more careers and more relationships too. People put themselves first all the time, carry a much higher sense of self than the world does, and everyone wants to win.

Asked how to handle a large agent ego, buyer ego, and seller ego on a sale of 20 to 100 million dollars, the answer is to over-communicate all day, every day, respect everyone, and kill bees with honey. Partner with the ego and praise them constantly. In the NBA finals, someone has to lose. In most business transactions, you only win if the other side wins too. A real estate sale works the same way, and even a short sale is a win for the bank once it is off the balance sh

On the show, the first move is the two Cs: find something in common and give a compliment. The goal is to disarm the other person. People like compliments, even when they say not to sell them. Common ground is often the house, the street, a job, a birthday, or an astrological sign.

Next is the question game. Never ask a question someone can answer with no. Ask questions and let people talk. Adults, especially men, love the sound of their own voice. Let them talk, learn about them, find more in common, and talk about everything but the sale.

The closing method is CODO, close on day one. Lay out how the work goes and what happens next, so making a friend does not leave the next steps unsaid,

Ryan Serhant wakes up and writes that he is the CEO of his own bank of time. He has a thousand fresh dollars and has to use them wisely. Unused dollars get invested into tomorrow. If someone ruins them, it is fine and it does not mean anything. The habit helped him become so much more productive. Meetings turned into 15 to 30 minutes, and days became 15-minute increments, so he could do 10 times more in one day than anybody else. He was not necessarily doing more. He was valuing his time more. He held himself and his time to the highest regard in as humble and nice a way as he can, and he never walks in to announce 14 minutes and say go.

Offering somebody less time means they take less time

Ryan Serhant left the people booked for his next showing in the apartment because people want what they cannot have. Surprise them, he says, and they do not know what to do, so they double down their focus on you.

He went to the bathroom and broke into a full sweat, with the whole plan set and no idea what came next. He remembered a date in New York about a year earlier. They talked for about five minutes, she left for the bathroom, came back, said something had come up, walked out, and ghosted him before ghosting was even a phrase. In the bathroom he decided to do what she had done to him. He told the group he knew they were booked and scheduled for the next showing, that something urgent

On the show, fake it till you make it implies lying, and lying is the worst thing for an independent contractor, an entrepreneur, or anyone who has had to sell. Everything sounds great until someone lies to your face. The alignment is with future me. The person on display is the person he will become 12 to 24 months from now. He has written it down and he will manifest it. He says he might not become the exact person he thought he would be, and he does become some alternate reality version of that person.

In 2010, Bravo held an open casting call for the New York version of Million Dollar Listing. The network was franchising the show and wanted the best, brightest, and hungriest real estate

Charlie Munger almost worships reason. Charlie Munger said you can argue that Henry Singleton did too, and certainly Warren Buffett does too. The people Charlie Munger knows that are good feel you have a duty to become as wise as you can by constantly studying and thinking about it.

Positioning happens earlier than decisions and determines which options will be available when the decision arrives. Berkshire Hathaway never found itself forced by circumstances into a series of bad decisions. Buffett and Munger wanted to remain in control no matter what happened in the world. People do not need to be smarter than others to outperform them if they can outposition them.

Investors should find the exceptional few businesses and then concentrate behind them. Buffett's 20-card punch idea illustrates the point well. With only 20 investment opportunities in life, one waits longer, studies harder, and acts only when an opportunity is worth using one of the 20 chances.

Concentrating almost 100% of the playing time on his top seven players allowed them to get better and better during all the extra playing time. John Wooden had the best basketball coaching record in the world and nobody else was even close. Applying the Wooden system by giving power to a Wooden or Buffett works like gangbusters. Investors can find a mini Wooden or a mini Singleton or a mini Buffett and benefit when they have a hell of a run.

Parents should teach kids 3 things. First, be digitally savvy (starting from age 5), be civil, be safe. Through the early teen years, it is important to know usernames, passwords, etc. in order for parents to help their children. Commonsensemedia.org and stopcyberbulling.org are both great resources for parents.

Parents should keep in mind that the goal is always to increase responsibility and decision-making and reduce limits and boundaries. Chores may be more dependent on where a child is at developmentally vs. their age.

Remember the 3 "Cs" of feedback: compliments, comments, and constructive criticism.

A parent should stop everything they are doing and ask the child to talk to them about it and understand what occurred. Teachers can become involved in helping stop the behavior by changing routines or patterns in classroom procedures.

On The Knowledge Project, Barbara Coloroso, author of Kids Are Worth It!, tells Shane Parrish that routines matter more than threats, and that by eight or ten a child should already be inside one. She does not mean a brick-wall rule that lights go out at 8:00 no matter what. With her own three children, born within three and a half years, she and her husband took turns. One did the dishes while the other stayed, humming, naming something from the day they were grateful for, and reading a story. Make bedtime pleasant, she says. Rubbing a child's feet or back can settle them. "Did you brush your teeth?" is a silly question. Brush alongside them and model it.

They should learn to stand strong with a non-passive posture and assertively name the cruel behavior they were the recipient of. They should then remove themselves from the situation.

The target must be safe, a witness must be safe, and then the child doing the mean and cruel activity must be dealt with even if that means delayed justice.

Conflict is inevitable, violence is not. A parent's job is to teach kids to handle conflict non-violently. Help kids come up with a peaceful plan to resolve the conflict.

Utilize 3 "R's" of restorative practice: restitution, resolution, and reconciliation. A child must own and fix what they did, determine how they will keep it from happening again, and find a way to heal with the person that has been harmed.

Show the child what they have done wrong, give them ownership of the problem, and give them ways to solve it with their dignity intact.

Own it, fix it, learn from it, and move on.

First, it is important to distinguish between choices and decisions. A child does not get to decide if they want to go to bed or not, but perhaps they have the choice to pick which pajamas they would like to wear. Age appropriate and ability appropriate behaviors and choices are important to keep in mind. Additionally, increasing responsibilities and decision-making as a child grows older helps them advance in independence.

It depends on age. If a child wakes up on their own without an alarm clock, they are getting enough sleep. Parents should be cognizant of children who might be sensitive to light, though, and waking too early as a result. Crankiness is usually an indicator of this.

It is very important as children find security in routine. They also learn best practices for living, such as brushing teeth and packing lunches. Additionally, it provides time for parents and children to reconnect after the day.

Often, parents allow the step-parent to do the disciplining for their step-children. There is not always trust between the two parties. Stepping out of the role of disciplinarian allows the step-parent to connect with the child in a warmer manner. Start with the relationship, not with the discipline.

On The Knowledge Project, Dr. Laura Markham tells Shane Parrish that a child will arrive with a list of fears about a blended family. Parents should think those fears through in advance and build structures for them. They should also expect a rocky adjustment, and leave room for the child to say when something is wrong, instead of requiring silence. The failure she sees most is handing discipline of your children to the new step-parent. Nobody else, she argues, will give your child the same benefit of the doubt, because they do not know the child as you do. Her rule is that each parent stays the final authority for their own child.

Research shows that when humans are in green spaces, it calms people down. The immune system is about 50% more effective when spending 2+ hours outside.

No shame, no blame. Help child understand responsibility and be very involved with helping them master situations. Create a household that preaches solutions and not blame.