11 Lessons From 900 Episodes - Alex Hormozi, Mark Manson & Winston Churchill - #900

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
All right, what's happening, people? Welcome back to the show. It is the 900th episode of Modern Wisdom. Big number. Didn't think that I would do 900 of anything. I don't know whether I ever have done 900 of anything. But today, I'm going to go through some lessons I've learned over the last 100 episodes from life, and from reading, and from the show, and from other stuff. So you're going to get to learn that. You're also going to get to indulge in this beautiful facial hair for a while. I don't know how long this mustache will last. So it's a limited time offer for you to be able to enjoy it. So bask in the reflective glory of my upper lip, and let's get into it. So the first one, I was trying to put a name to this idea for a while, and I came up with Unteachable Lessons. It's a special category of lesson, one that you can't discover without experiencing it firsthand. So there is a certain subset of advice that for some reason, we all refuse to learn through instruction. No matter how arduous or costly or effortful it's going to be for us to find out for ourselves, we prefer to disregard the mountains of warnings that we get from our elders and songs and literature and historical catastrophes and public scandals. And instead we think some version of, yeah, that might be true for them, but not for me. We decide to learn the hard lessons, the hard way over and over again. And unfortunately, they all seem to be the big things too. It's never insights about how to put a level shelves or charmingly introduce yourself at a cocktail party. Instead we spend most of our lives learning firsthand the most important lessons that the previous generation already warned us about. Things like money won't make you happy, or fame won't fix your self-worth, or you don't love that pretty girl she's just hot and difficult to get, or nothing is as important as you think it is when you're thinking about it. You will regret working too much. Worrying isn't improving your performance. All of your fears are a waste of time. You should see your parents more. You'll be fine after the breakup, and you'll be grateful that you did it. It's perfectly okay to cut toxic people out of your life. And even listening to that list back, I find myself sort of rolling my eyes at how fucking trite it is, because they are all basic bitch, obvious insights that everybody has heard before. But, if they're so basic, why does everybody so reliably fall prey to them consistently throughout our lives? And if they're so obvious, why do people who have recently become famous or wealthy or lost a parent or gone through a breakup start to proclaim those facts with the sort of renewed grandiose ceremony of someone who's just gone through religious revelation?
It's strange that stuff everybody kind of accepts as being true, we all are surprised about when it happens to us. And the other thing is, it is a very contentious list of points to say on the internet. So, if I have an interview with a billionaire who says that all of his money didn't make him happy, or a movie star who says that her fame felt like a prison, the internet quite reliably will tear them apart for being ungrateful and out of touch. Don't you know that there's people that are struggling? Oh my God, how tone deaf could you be? So, not only do we refuse to learn the lessons, we even refuse to hear the message from the people warning us about them. And even more than that, for every single one of those lessons, if I think a little bit deeper, I can probably recall a time, including right now, where I convinced myself that I was the exception to the rule. That my particular mental makeup, or life situation, or historical wounds, or dreams for the future, render me immune to these lessons being applicable. No, no, no, no, my unique inner landscape would be fixed by skirting around some of the most well-known wisdom of the ages. It's like, no, no, no, no, I can thread this needle properly. Watch me dance through this minefield and avoid all of the tripwires that everyone else has kicked. And then you kick one. And you then share a sort of knowing luck with someone else who also learned one of these unteachable lessons. And it's the kind of luck that can only occur between two people who have been hurt in the exact same way. And a little voice in the back of your mind will say, I told you so. And these unteachable lessons, I guess, play into a broader idea of the certain areas of life that you just can't expedite. I wonder whether it's because it's so alluring, you know, fame, sexiness, adoration, money, the distraction of doing something that isn't seeing your parents and forgetting how sort of time moves and that one day they're going to be gone. A lot of those lists, that list of questions and points, all play on things that we really, really want, stuff that feels urgent, that gets in the way of things that are maybe more important. And you will reliably kick the tripwires of many of those throughout your life. And I get the sense that this is a unique category of lesson that just comes along for the ride as a byproduct of getting older. That trying to expedite it, trying to get there a bit quicker, maybe you can do it, but there's very few people I know who have been able to say, I don't want the pretty girl who's difficult to get. I don't want money, fame. I don't get distracted from seeing my parents. I don't work too much without burning myself out first. There's very few people who get to that realization without having been burned so painfully and maybe that's it as well, that the allure of the success of these things or the distraction away from stuff that's important is so strong that it takes a ridiculously painful event to actually drive the nail into the coffin of whatever this lesson is. But yeah, unteachable lessons, I think it's when you see it, you can't unsee it and I'm watching them pop up everywhere. I do think as well, the sort of audience that listens to Modern Wisdom is cool because the nuance and the ability to sit with this person who's rich is saying that being rich didn't fix their problems. That makes me who wants to be richer feel upset, which like everybody, right? Everybody wants to be richer than they are. And there's only a few people who have said, I've reached like fuck you money escape velocity, post money life. But I don't see that so much on the channel anymore, which is good and makes me feel proud of you. So hooray, well done. Another lesson, this was one of my favorites. I've been trying to put a name to for ages as well. I'd been trying to work out what sort of friends I wanted to spend the most time around and whether they were charismatic or sort of engaging or what it was about them that made them magnetic to me and I came up with this idea called reverse charisma. So Jenny Jerome, who is Winston Churchill's mother, who was Winston Churchill's mother, dined with both Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and his rival William Gladstone on consecutive nights, back to back, and she got asked about her impressions of the two different men. She said, when I left the dining room after sitting next to Gladstone, I thought that he was the cleverest man in England. But when I sat next to Disraeli, I left feeling like I was the cleverest woman. And I think most people assume that they want to be charismatic. They want their energy to be compelling, their stories to be electric. They want to walk into a room and everybody be impressed, magnetized to them. But when I started to think about the friends I love and want to spend the most time with, they didn't necessarily have charisma. They had reverse charisma. And I guess the question is, why do certain people make us feel boring, but others don't? Why is it that we feel full of stories and inspiration around some people, but around others we've got nothing to say? And we try to assess other people based on how interesting they are. And because of that, we miss a much more important issue, which is how interesting they make us feel. Like how engaged is this person? And how much of us can they tolerate? And how much of our reality can they handle without us having to edit ourselves? How encouraging and reassuring are they? And how much do they make us want to dig deeper and talk more? And how comfortably can we sit in silence without needing to fill it? And basically, how much of us do they get? And if it's not a lot, then we're inevitably going to be cautious. And a person feels interesting precisely to the extent that they have become familiar and at ease with the things that are extreme and sad and dark and agonizing and shameful and joyous and exciting. And if they are at home with their own strangeness, then they help us to feel at home with ours. Where they have gone, we can follow. What they have felt safe exploring in themselves, we will be able to safely unpack around them. And this was the sort of realization that architecting your charisma is a nebulous and scrappy task that autistic pick-up artists gave themselves existential crises failing at. But building reverse charisma is something that anyone can do by being curious and patient and encouraging. Some people feel interesting, some people make us feel interesting. And there's a place for both, but on average, our favorite people are the latter, not the former. And it's way easier to be someone who makes people feel interesting than it is to be interesting.