16 Lessons From 2024 - Chris Bumstead, Elon Musk & Alex Hormozi - #879

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. It is the end of 2024, and to celebrate, I thought I would run you through some of the best lessons that I've picked up over the last 12 months. This year has had over 10,000 minutes of episodes produced, so there was quite a lot to choose from, but I ended up settling on 16 insights from some of my favorite conversations, both inside and outside of the podcast. So expect to learn what the insecure overachiever mindset is, whether success has to be painful, why men aren't seen as having problems, how come so many people in shape have an issue with people using Ozempic, whether you can be good if you can't be evil, Elon Musk's reflections on being a CEO, what to do if you don't believe in yourself, and much more. Coming up on Christmas, you've got Christmas special arriving very soon with the boys this week. No episode on Boxing Day because it is the holidays and you should be spending time doing other things than being on the internet. But I just wanted to wish you a very festive period. Hope everything's going well. This episode is brought to you by 8 Sleep. I have been using my 8 Sleep mattress for years and I literally cannot imagine life without it. Having a actively cooled and heated mattress is the game changer. Now they've launched their newest generation pod, the Pod 4 Ultra. The Pod 4 Ultra can cool down each side of the bed up to 20 degrees below room temperature, keeping you and your partner cool. And for those of you who snore heavily, it can detect your snoring and automatically lift your head a few degrees to improve your airflow and stop it. This is your 3000 stuff. It cools, it heats, it elevates, and it is clinically proven to give you up to one hour more of quality sleep every night. Best of all, they ship to the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Europe and Australia. You can get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to 8sleep.com/modernwisdom, using the code ModernWisdom at checkout. That's eightsleep.com/modernwisdom and Modern Wisdom at checkout. If you haven't been feeling as sharp or energised as you'd like, getting your blood work done is the best place to start, which is why I partnered with Function. They run lab tests twice a year for you that monitor over 100 biomarkers. The team of expert physicians then take that data and put it in a simple dashboard and give you actionable insight and recommendations to improve your health and lifespan. They track everything, from your heart health and your hormone levels to your thyroid function and nutrient deficiencies. They even screen for 50 types of cancer at stage one, which is five times more data than you get from your annual physical. Dr. Andrew Huberman is their scientific advisor and Dr. Mark Hyman is their chief medical officer, so you can trust that the data and insights you receive are scientifically sound and practical. Getting your blood work drawn and analyzed like this would usually cost thousands, but with Function it is only $500. They've got a 300,000-person waitlist, but every Monday they open a few spots for Modern Wisdom listeners and right now you can get Function's expert blood work analysis and bypass that 300,000-person waitlist by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com/modernwisdom.
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What's happening, people, welcome back to the show. It is an end of 2024 lessons episode. I like to do these toward the end of the year, recapping some of the best lessons I've learned from the podcast and from my reading and from my newsletter and everything else. And I kind of bundle them all together. So there'll be some greatest hits that you're familiar with and maybe a lot of stuff that you missed. Apparently 66% of you only started listening to the show this year, which is pretty wild. Spotify wrapped, told me that. So lots of new things and I love doing these. I'm so fired up for today. I fucking love doing these episodes. They're so good. So yeah, let's get into it. First one is the insecure overachiever mindset. When faced with a challenge, your nature might be to worry and obsess and grip tightly. The sort of classic insecure overachiever mindset. And because worrying is so common in every pursuit that you attempt, your successes are seen as proof that worrying is a performance enhancer, and your failures are seen as proof that you should have worried all along. So you end up with unfalsifiable negativity, kind of a walking anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity, like Andrew Wilkinson says. You build this link between worry and performance, belief that your performance would have been markedly worse if you hadn't worried so much, and that the worrying is precisely what motivated and enabled the outcomes that you wanted. Even when you reach black belt status and you've got confidence in your capacities, there's a lack of enthused energy. I think it seems like maybe the worries left you, but it's not been replaced with excitable enthusiasm, just higher expectations. And I have been thinking about this an awful lot this year, and kind of want to propose a radical new approach, which is assuming that things will actually go well. Basically, after a while, I don't think that the fear is aiding your performance. You're primarily running on habit and skill and experience, and maybe the fear was needed in the beginning to narrow your focus and create the obsession. But now you've reached escape velocity and you're drifting in space. So why are you holding the controls just as tightly as you were when you were on the launch pad, instead of actually enjoying the view? And it's a realization that we all need to come to, that this is all going to be over pretty soon. And I need to remind myself to realize that, that this thing isn't going to last forever. This is one day you will do your final sports match or your final trip to give a presentation or a concluding project at work or whatever. And you can look back on a great run of miserable successes or actually try to embrace some enjoyment, perhaps even try to prioritize it. One thing that a lot of high achievers do, especially people that care a lot about their pursuit, is they confuse relentless dour severity with seriousness and sophistication. I don't think it's more noble to treat your pursuits so sternly that the only positive element is the end result and absolutely none of the experience.