4 Men Share How They Hit Rock Bottom (and got out) - Dr K, Joe Hudson & Connor Beaton - #1159

Chris Williamson (0:00)

People of the UK and Ireland, I'm coming to you live. Imagine that, me on stage in your city. Dublin is completely sold out, but everywhere else has got limited tickets left, and you can get yours now at chriswilliamson.live. This is a custom built live show. I absolutely adore it. I've spent over a year working on it. So if you're a fan of everything Modern Wisdom, come and see me on stage this October around the UK and Ireland, chriswilliamson.live. This is kind of like my Super Bowl. I hope the people that are watching realize just how much heat is in the room, because between you guys, you've been the basically top coaches or the SOS call to some of the best athletes, biggest musicians, CEOs in the world, plus probably a few tens of millions of normal people as well. It's a real avengers assemble of personal growth. So thank you for being here. This is awesome. I've been looking forward to this. So there's an idea from Naval Ravikant where he says the reason to win the game is to be free of it. So I want you to talk about how people, especially men, can win the game. Let's say that I'm someone who wants to maximize everything, achieve as much as possible, pull all of the ambition out of myself that I can. I want to wrangle every bit of motivation, discipline, raw masculine, crush the world energy that I can.

How do you guys come to even think about that? How should I achieve that?

Dr. Kamil Sattar (1:16)

Okay.

Chris Williamson (1:17)

Let's go. Y'all are looking at me.

Dr. Kamil Sattar (1:20)

Yeah. So, you know, I was...

Yesterday, you brought up this kind of idea that, okay, you like climb to the top of the mountain and then you kind of have to go back down, right? And so I'm sure that Joe and Connor probably have experienced all the same things. So there's like a... There's one set of challenges when you're nothing in life. And then as you go through the process of becoming something, you arrive at a different set of challenges. So, you know, I work with so many people who have difficulty finding a partner because they're a nobody. And then once they become a somebody, then they have difficulty finding a partner who wants them as opposed to what they've become. So I think it's a really good framing.

And my kind of overall take is actually like... So it's sort of a...

So there are things that we do that are adaptive, and then they become maladaptive. So that's the process of growing up and one of my mentors once told me, growing up is abandoning what works over and over and over again, because it worked back then. And unless you get rid of it, you're going to run into trouble. And I think the interesting thing about this framing of like climbing to the top of the mountain and then kind of having this different set of challenges is I think there's actually just one trajectory. The problem is that when we focus on certain things, right? So when we focus on willpower and discipline and all this kind of stuff, it actually creates problems in the future. So I think that there is a way when you kind of say like tunneling through the bottom, you know, like you can kind of bypass it all. But so what I've kind of found is that there is a set of things that you can do to become materially very successful. But usually doing those things, yeah.

Chris Williamson (3:06)

Trying to win the game. Like the guy at the bottom doing nothing, guy at the top, one something, guy at the bottom, transcended the game and then the game through the middle.

Dr. Kamil Sattar (3:16)

Yeah. So I'd say, I'd actually say that there's, there's the game is upward.

So I think that this is somewhat true. Like, so I'm sure these guys do too. I mean, I know they do. But you know, if you work with some very successful people, they have different challenges. They don't, they're not necessarily peaceful. They're not necessarily contented. And then we think about this thing like, okay, if I don't have ambition, then how am I going to achieve? But then if you use ambition to achieve, then you're stuck with this programming, which is ambition-oriented. And then you move the goalposts, and then you want more, and then you want more, and it's never enough. And so I think, like, my take on this, and I'd love to hear what y'all think, is like, yeah, this sort of works, but as we know, there's a problem that you end up with at the top that you then have to solve. And I actually think, fuck the game is the way to go. Like, that that's, there's one basic way, and a simple example of this is people think that contentment is something that you get from the outside. Like, I'm hungry, I eat something, and then I'm content. But there's piles of spirituality, which have now been supported by piles of neuroscience, that contentment itself is a cultivatable skill.