Hi Sophie,
This step is about ‘forgetting who’s in the room’… avoiding this success ‘faux pas’.
The first principle here is that when it comes to getting the good life in all 4 areas of life, and achieving the kind of success that most people never get close to achieving or even aspire to, one of the main causes is that
we listen to ourselves and our own beliefs, and stop listening to and learning from experts or people with more wisdom and experience than we have.
He says the cause is that at some point in our lives we ‘put ourselves out there’, and got some advice from someone we trusted, and then were betrayed, conned, or unintentionally got bad advice to the point where we were somehow traumatized.
That’s interesting, I’ve never thought about that before… as I look at this, I recall getting more and more entrenched in the church my mom joined, which was all about striving to be this perfect person that none of us could be… but more than the sermons and the doctrines, it became a place where everybody judged everybody else, and so many people pretended to be that perfect person, and put on their nice clothes and their fake smiles and presented a ‘show’ for the other churchgoers every week.
As we got older, into our teens, mostly through talking with the other teens and finding out how other people lived, we started finding out the ‘dirt’ on some of the ‘higher ups’, like the deacons and ministers… one guy was physically abusive with his wife, one was physically abusive with his wife and children, one ended up being arrested for molesting his daughter for many years… and on and on. Then we started seeing how controlling some of the very top guys in the church were.
At one point the power-hungry guys at the top couldn’t get along any more and there was a massive split in the church, and to this day there are 7 or 8 ‘splinter’ churches from that one, because they all desperately wanted to have their own church.
I never gave this all that much thought other than determining that’s how most churches must be, but many people got violently angry about it all, because many of them had quit jobs, left spouses, and made monumental decisions based on the advisement from these guys, only to find out they were a bunch of egomaniacs that got obsessed with the power they had over people.
Is that when I decided that I would make up my own mind, and prove things to myself, and decide what is right and what is wrong? I’m not sure… I definitely carried a lot of the ‘right and wrong’ that I learned in that church with me, but somewhere I determined it was my own, and that I had proven it to myself, and I became unbendingly rigid about it. I’ve never thought about that… .
he goes on to say that since we are an adaptive species, after whatever trauma we experienced, we ‘reprogrammed’ a bit, to not listen to other people any more but to listen to and trust only ourselves. Hmm. I guess that’s what I did.
At any rate he gives this as one of the main reasons so many of us never accomplish much, we’re resigned to our own ideas and beliefs, to where we never even aspire to achieve much. How interesting.
The point here, which is a pretty powerful principle, is that it’s not what we say or feel, but what we DO, that dictates how our lives go. That is so true. And in my case what I DO is much different than what I say or feel.
The people in my church seemed to be the same way. There’s another principle in this quote from Charlie Munger – ‘what you think may change what you do, but more importantly, what you DO changes what you THINK.’
Wow, this is what you keep trying to get through to us, Sophie… that we can read and study and absorb all we want but none of that changes what we actually DO, until we can bridge that gap… that ‘mind-to-action’ gap, as you called it. And through practice, through building the habit from DOING, the change in the mind happens… we are so programmed that it’s the other way around, it seems our entire lives are set up to learn and THEN do.
Go to school to learn what to DO. Go to college to learn how to DO what you decided to do. Take a course, read a recipe, look at what your mom did, learn first and then go do, which ingrains all of these ideas and habits that become so hard to change, probably the biggest being ‘you don’t have to think, someone will tell you what to do’. Ugh.
No wonder self-help books and self improvement courses make millions, yet nobody ever seems to make any big changes.
I think what he mentions in a prior step is so true, wealthy people teach wealth habits to their kids, but outside of that nobody learns those things. This is why the projects, why the just taking even tiny steps towards a goal with whatever time we can find, becomes so critical… the reality is we’re not even capable of the big grandiose steps that we imagine we have to take to attain our biggest goals. You have been saying this all along.
Going back to his ‘know who’s in the room’ concept, he mentions that when we reprogrammed ourselves and came to the conclusion that other people’s advice isn’t always in our best interest, what happens is we determine that we know it all ourselves, and we violate this ‘know who’s in the room’ concept.
As an example, a young and eager person who walks into a room full of people with more wisdom and experience, and he starts talking and talking, completely missing that this was their chance to get input from someone much wiser and more experienced than they are. Ugh…
I have done this many times, blurting out about what I know about the subject, what books I’ve read, what limited experience with it I thought I had… never even considering there might be a different way of looking at it, or more about it that I don’t know.
Even while I was listening I was thinking up other things I could say about it before they were done. It’s so ugly to look at that. He gave an example where he did the same thing at an event where there were many super successful people and experts, and he talked all evening long until Allan Nation said to him at one point, ‘sometimes there’s just nothing to add’. That was very well-said… sometimes there’s just nothing to add.
Meaning, if we are aware of who’s around us in the room, we become aware that there is probably some wisdom and some life-changing or at least extremely helpful lessons to be had, from people who are way beyond where we are. What I did instead of that was try to measure up, try to convince people that I was on their level through talking…
I’m sure in every case I professed my own ignorance, nothing else. He mentions here that conversely, being surrounded by people well below that level of where we want to be, they can drag us down if we listen… they can ‘muddy the waters’ in our minds.
The principle here is that no one is an island… we are all immensely affected by people around us, whether we know it or not.
Another principle is ‘don’t give those people much time to talk, in this case YOU do the talking. Turn it off all the way.
It’s clear here that it’s our own responsibility to be aware of who and what we surround ourselves with, and to protect ourselves from what can drag us down, with other people just the same as when we turn off the TV from the stupid mindless programming.
Nobody else will do this for us… we’re on our own with taking care of ourselves this way, just like that Hillel quote says.
He goes on to add that when we’re with people more on our own level, we can balance it, and not always be the know-it-all. There would be plenty to learn in those cases as well, plenty of other viewpoints to listen to and consider.
Another thing we can take the responsibility to do for ourselves is to invite someone out who has immense knowledge in one way or another, and just let them talk, and just listen and hear. Know who is in the room.
He mentions here the ‘hammer error’ – that when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. In this context he says that most people have had some traumatic experience, and we use the ‘hammer’ from that and dominate any conversation, no matter who is in the room… the principle he gives is ‘don’t have ‘man with the hammer’ syndrome’… that would be the opposite of knowing who’s in the room.
He gives another interesting principle, from a book about The Moral Landscape – that our minds and our brains are belief-generating machines… I’ve never looked at it that way before, but I can really see that.
We generate ideas such as ‘go with your gut’, or whatever it is, and we stick with that. Ugh… like ‘being negative is wrong, being positive is the right way to be, busy people are important, I have to be busy so people don’t see I’m not important… I could fill up pages of these.
So many things I thought I knew beyond question, that now I have to admit I have no idea, but as much of those beliefs that I can come to admit I don’t know now, the biggest of them all (I think) is the hardest to let go, and that is just the one about myself… that I shouldn’t be how I am.
Something up there in my head doesn’t want to let that go. But I have seen first hand how this helps… I didn’t know it was essentially the same principle as ‘know who’s in the room’, but when you advised me to bring ‘quiet, attentive and interested’ to my interactions, I found that I started ‘hearing’ different views that I had never been open to before…
and when shortly thereafter you did an article about listening, real listening where you’re not wandering or thinking up what you’ll say next while the person is talking, it opened that up even more.
Suddenly I looked at the other person as someone who I might want to learn something from, someone whose viewpoint I am interested in. Suddenly I really wanted to hear someone else’s take. I haven’t done it enough to change my own mind yet, or to make it a habit that I no longer have to think about, but I got a glimpse of how it changes things, how it changed my mind in that moment.
I didn’t allow it to ‘stick’, but this step is a good reminder to keep practicing that. He gives a principle here, that sometimes the tool of LISTENING is so much more effective… the tool of submitting to the experts. I like the idea of seeing it as another tool that we can use.
He talks more here about the different levels of people we find ourselves surrounded with… as an example, if we have a broken leg in a room of babies, obviously I’ll be the one to take care of things however I can. In a room of equals, we would collaborate to determine the next steps. In a room of ER doctors, it would be my time to be quiet and let them do what they know how to do.
It’s a good depiction of this concept of knowing who is in the room, and conducting ourselves accordingly. The principle is there is a hard-core listening tool, a NO listening tool, and a tool of give and take, three social skills we must have for the good life.
There’s another principle in ‘when looking at the brain as a belief-generating machine, if we believe the best strategy is always a hammer, we’ll be very inefficient at getting the good life’.
But he raises another interesting point here… .that most of us have a poor image of who exactly the top 33% are. For example some people think their parents are, and parents RARELY are. If they were, we’d all have learned all of this already. I guess there’s no arguing with that point.
There’s another principle in that our health, wealth, love and happiness can suffer if we don’t become good at determining who that top 33% are. Additionally, things like reading books from experts is also about knowing who is in the room. Experts on many subjects.
I see that when we determine that we are in the company of someone ‘above’ our level, we can listen and learn and benefit enormously, while also giving due respect to them and the efforts they’ve made, even if we’re reading the books of people who have spent their life’s work on various subjects, but even more so if they can see how their efforts have benefited someone else or changed their life for the better.
He gives another principle here… that when we hear things we’re not used to hearing, our ‘gut’ feeling is to reject it. I have found that to be very true in my own case, I still have to catch myself when this comes up.
We can always have some respect and at least listen and consider… and ideally find ways to put it into practice, to translate it from hearing to DOING.
But I guess as I’m looking at this, it’s not about hearing something that changes your life… .it’s more about hearing habits, small things we can actually practice doing, to gradually change our minds, rather than vice-versa. I think it’s also a principle that the attitude of ‘what do they know?’ is a good attitude of knowing who is in the room,
Another principle is that we must gain the ability to find mentors, and create opportunities to be ‘in the room’ with the upper 33%, with experts that we can learn from. There’s another area where ‘if it’s meant to be, it’s up to me’, it would be our own responsibility to make that happen.
There are so many great principles in this one, this seemed to give me a little deeper look into ‘doing’, into how doing has to come first for the mindset to change.
I also feel a little stupid because you have had this theme in pretty much every call and course, and for the longest time I thought I was ‘doing’… but I see that it can’t be a set of specific rules someone gives you, you have to just go and do, like launching off on a unicycle with nothing to hold on to, to get the brain out of its regular ‘rut’, to get to something that ‘lands’ in a way that we can repeat it.
I know that seeing this here so plainly, for example, won’t change my mind… that will only happen through doing. This is another step worth revisiting.
-Jodie