Gio Valiante on Performance Psychology, Fear, and Mastery

Gio Valiante

Yeah.

Gio Valiante

There's a term I came across many years ago called the central governor hypothesis, and it essentially conveys the fact that most people underperform — and any observer of the human condition, going back forever, would agree that's probably true. Why is that? You have to delve into human biology and genetics. What's the purpose of the brain, generally? To keep you alive long enough to reproduce. At a fundamental biological level, we're not designed to overperform — we're designed to survive. Overperformance, or achieving one's potential, requires a cognitive decision to push oneself there.

To illustrate it: look at marathon runners or any extreme athlete — triathletes, ultramarathoners — people who design their lives around pushing human potential. It begs the question: how many of them push themselves to the point of death? The answer is a very small percentage, single digits. If you have, say, five million marathoners, maybe five or ten die in a year, and most of the time it's because they got hit by a car or some other condition — not because they pushed themselves too hard. They cross the finish line, they're still alive, they carbo-load. Why? Because the brain has built-in mechanisms to shut us down so we don't do ourselves harm. Those are the same mechanisms that, at a drive level, govern our conduct. Underperformance is built into the human condition so we can stay alive.

That's why they do these interesting studies with single-cell organisms — you put them in a petri dish, make the conditions uncomfortable, hot on one side, too cold on the other, and they gravitate to comfort. At a fundamental biological level, we're all programmed to seek comfort and safety. Comfort and safety are the exact opposite of overperformance, of realising one's potential. So the starting point, table stakes, is the old adage: you have to get comfortable being uncomfortable. But that's something you have to train yourself to do.

The central governor hypothesis suggests there's a governor in the human brain, built structurally by a few things. Number one, the survival instinct. Number two, the desire for comfort. Number three, the desire, at a fundamental biological level, for our DNA to replicate itself. There's a view among geneticists — we talk about human agency, the degree to which we have conscious control over our lives, acting on our own behalf. The fundamental question is: do human beings have free will? William James and the pragmatists asked that question, and most observers of the human condition suggest we have less control over ourselves than we believe we do. William James concluded: 'My first act of free will is to choose to believe in free will.' If you go down that rabbit hole and look at the studies, people think they're thinking when they're generally just rearranging their prejudices. The few acts of agency we really have — one of them is to decide our path and then cultivate the habits which become unconscious and push us to the tail end of the curve in any domain. But we all default to underperformance. So becoming really good at something requires an act of agency, a choice. That's table stakes, the opening bid. From there, the work begins.

Gio Valiante

The research on New Year's resolutions: ninety-five per cent of them are over by the end of February, and the other four per cent are over by the end of March. So the choice is just the beginning. The first thing to understand is that we're all creatures of habit. As Albert Bandura said, behaviour is a cause of behaviour — the more you do something, on a probability scale, the more likely you are to do the same thing again.

If you want to get out of your situation and do it differently, there are a couple of things to think about. Number one, it's in the doing, not the thinking or the saying. It doesn't matter what you say, what you feel, or what you believe — it only matters what you do. Taking that action step, that behavioural step, is a huge part of it. John Dewey, the American philosopher, had a beautiful insight: 'We don't think our way into a pattern of living. We live our way into a pattern of thought.' Just really think about that. What he meant is: most people think that if they're going to change, they have to change their mind first. Dewey is saying no — changing your mind is one route to change, but the real route is that we live our way into a pattern of thinking. Change what you do, and as you change your behaviour, you change your mind. So it isn't what you think, feel, or say — it's just what you do.

So, to your original question: find the comfortable habit that's holding you back. Whether it's your phone, your food, or the excuse you tell yourself — pick one thing. Change that, and hold yourself accountable to it on a repeated basis. There's an everydayness to excellence. People often ask me, 'I want to write a book, Dr Gio — how do you write a book?' You sit down and you write. You don't wait for inspiration. You sit down every day, and on the days when nothing's coming, you stay in your seat and write it badly, because you have to write through the bad days to get to the good days. I've run writing workshops for master's students at Rollins College and Emory University, and that's what they talk about: if you want to be a writer, writers write every day. Say it badly, write it badly, but don't get up. That everydayness is the hallmark of excellence in every domain.

Gio Valiante

You say 'some people' — I'd say everybody. One of the earliest studies I did in sports psychology was interviewing two hundred golfers — some on the PGA Tour, the LPGA Tour, good amateurs, regular amateurs. The question was simple: why do you play golf? What emerged was one of the most profound insights into human motivation, with golf as a petri dish for humanity. Some people play for love of the game. Some play because they're competitive — they want to beat the other person. Some play for money. They use golf as a vehicle to solve other things in their life.

Extrapolate that: ask doctors why they went into medicine, lawyers why they went into law, teachers why they went into teaching. People tend to bifurcate into two camps. People with a mastery motivation engage in their craft for its own sake — it's intrinsic motivation, not a vehicle to get somewhere else. The satisfaction is in the doing. The alternative is an ego orientation: you do it to enhance the ego, for money, to feel important, using the thing as a vehicle to feel better. If you go into medicine because you want to make money but don't actually care about medicine, you'll burn out. If you go into law because you want to be rich but don't love law, you'll burn out. Same with sport, same with everything in life.

At the very tail end of the distribution — the top one per cent of one per cent, the origin of greatness — the first domino to fall is that they gravitate toward their calling intuitively, for love of the craft itself. It's a calling, and they protect that purity. You also see people have a rebirth or renaissance in their careers — 'I fell in love again.' Kelly Slater: 'I fell in love with surfing again.' Brooks Koepka in golf recently: 'I love golf again.' Musicians practising their craft late in life. The developmental path starts with a mastery orientation — you do the thing because you love it. Then you start getting rewarded for it, and the rewards become more powerful than the thing itself. Then you lose yourself. Then you rediscover yourself and find your way back to mastery, back to the calling.

Gio Valiante

That's a great question, and it goes back to human agency and free will — what do we actually have control over? There's a book called Finding Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi — the idea of a flow state, the highest form of the human condition. If you want to see what human beings are capable of, go find people who've been in flow. The research on flow is fascinating. Number one, we can get into flow doing almost anything — gardening, cooking, great conversations, playing sport, being in love, reading a book.

Gio Valiante

What are the hallmarks of flow? Time is transcendent — you get lost in a great book, look up, and three hours have gone; a great conversation, and two or three hours have gone. Athletes tell me it's like that in a flow state: you look up and the game is over. There's a paradox of effort — hard things feel easy. There's a paradox of perception — you're so lost in the moment, so present, that you forget you're being watched, that there's an audience, that there's an outcome. Human beings who transcend their limitations typically get lost in a flow state.

If you ask what advice I'd give to people stuck in the middle of the distribution, or just average, who want to be great: number one, be mindful of your habits. Number two, get comfortable being uncomfortable. Number three, get good at being fully present — get in the moment. John Dewey, in a book called How We Think, said there's no greater enemy to effective thinking than a divided interest, a fragmented interest. You partition your hard drive: you're here, but thinking about something else; you're never fully present. The best of the best are present for everything, all the time. It's a bit of a Buddhist tradition, but the habit of being present is a hallmark of excellence. If people want to be great at their jobs: get into flow. How? Get present, challenge yourself, fall in love with the details, and love the mundanity of your work.

Gio Valiante

Mhm.

Gio Valiante

Like everything else, being present is a habit, and like any other habit or skill, you can practise it. You can't hope to call on deep immersion, presence, or flow if you're not in the active habit of being present. So it begs the question: what gets us out of the present moment? Distraction. Attachment. The good news is that a little practice, consistently, goes a long way.

For example, what do I do in my own life? Every Friday, at the end of the day, I take ten or fifteen minutes and ask myself a simple question: what are the attachments that have attached themselves to me, that are interrupting my thoughts, that I didn't put there by conscious choice? What am I thinking about that I didn't choose to think about? What am I feeling that I didn't choose to feel? As we go through life, by default of the structure of the human brain, we attach to things, or things attach themselves to us. It goes back to what Nietzsche and Carl Jung both said — we don't have ideas; ideas have us. We don't often choose to think or feel the way we feel; things happen to us, it's conditioning. So my active practice is detaching from the things shaping my thoughts, feelings, or behaviour. What fills in that space is psychological freedom and presence.

Gio Valiante

Incredible question. There's a song by an old band called Sister Hazel — I like the band, and I loved that line — the lyric goes, 'If you want to be somebody else, change your mind.' But the reality is the line is wrong. If you want to be somebody else, change your environment. Why is that true? There's an idea in psychology called situated cognition — the human brain is constantly interacting with the environment around it, on both conscious and unconscious levels, primarily unconscious. When we're hot, we sweat, but we don't choose to sweat. When we're cold, we get goosebumps, but we don't choose to get goosebumps. The unconscious interaction with the environment is the primary vehicle of human conduct.

In the book Atomic Habits, the author has a beautiful line that's getting a lot of traction: 'We don't rise to the level of our goals, we shrink to the level of our systems.' What does that mean? Let's say you aspire to greatness, but you're in a school system, a classroom, a company, or on a team that doesn't support your path to excellence. When you go to take risks, you get slapped back. If you're a hedge fund portfolio manager in a place that's so risk-averse — governed by a risk manager or risk officer who's just trying to keep their job and plays it safe — every time you ask for more capital, or want to go outside your risk limits, it's an automatic no. All of a sudden, that becomes your ceiling.

If you really want to understand human potential, ask yourself this: what's greater — the difference between two individuals, or the difference within an individual, at their best versus their worst? Say a company is deciding whether to hire Shane or Gio. They profile us, look at the differences, and realise we're pretty close — similar IQ, similar education — it's a hard choice, but they go with Shane. They never ask what Shane looks like at his best or his worst, and where he sits in that range.

Gio Valiante

Research shows that the differences within individuals are typically greater than the differences between individuals. In society today, we spend so much time comparing candidate A to candidate B — there's more psychological alpha within individuals than between individuals. Teams, organisations, and schools spend so much time comparing student A to student B, instead of asking: what can this person be? Someone comes to me and says, can you help me? I say, okay, let's look at where you're at right now.

Gio Valiante

What are the mechanisms of suppression — the things that keep people from overachieving? They're largely known. You start removing them, helping people identify them, and all of a sudden they start to blossom. That's where the greater difference within an individual than between individuals lies. What contributes to it? A mission that had meaning, and being part of a system of collective problem-solving — solving hard problems together.

Gio Valiante

More and more, when I speak to leadership in various fields — and this is true in schools too — a job description everywhere I go boils down to one sentence: be good at solving hard problems together. Learn how to be great at solving hard problems together. That's an easy thing to say and a hard thing to do, because ego. Put a hard problem in front of two people — never mind ten, especially smart people used to being right — and when they're wrong, but they've never been wrong before, they get defensive, and it leads to argument, people closing themselves up. But if you can build a system where people are competent, capable, open, and willing, and their highest calling is to be great at solving hard problems together, that's the path to an autotelic state of being. It's the path to flow, the path to greatness and excellence.

Two stories illustrate that. Einstein was stuck on a problem for a very long time. He was on a walk with a younger colleague, trying to explain what he was working on, and in the process of deconstructing and dissecting his own thoughts by explaining them to someone else, he had his epiphany. Over the next three months he wrote two papers that led to the Nobel Prize. He was stuck, stuck, stuck — it was the synthetic function of language, the process of trying to articulate his thinking, that led to the epiphany. Crick and Watson, who discovered the structure of DNA — same thing. It was the interactive process; there were four researchers on that team, and it was the interaction of problem-solving that did it.

So if people want to elevate and realise the full expression of their talents, the first place to look — I said earlier, your habits and behaviour. The reality is the first place to look is your systems and your environment. Is it a place with the hallmarks of excellence: honesty and truth-telling, challenge and skill development, no ceiling? Daniel Coyle, in a nice little book, calls these places talent hotbeds — they graduate a disproportionate amount of excellence. Great singers tend to come out of a little school around Dallas, Texas. Great tennis players, for a period, came out of Russia. Great baseball players out of the Dominican Republic. Great female golfers out of South Korea. Historically, great golfers out of Texas and California. One of the hallmarks of talent hotbeds is what people do with mistakes. By and large, the primary mechanism of suppression — why people don't achieve what they're capable of — has to do with how they're conditioned to deal with mistakes and failure. If you really want to be great, put yourself in an environment that allows the freedom of challenge, accountability, and rigour, but that isn't overpunitive of mistakes.

Gio Valiante

Of all the variables psychology measures, the two I think are most important are confidence and motivation. People think it's intelligence, but it's actually not. The story of intelligence — the way we define it — is a muddled one. The idea of IQ, intellectual quotient, started in the early 1900s in France. The French government asked Alfred Binet to help identify kids who were struggling in school, so they could intervene early. That's all it was. Binet went and interviewed a bunch of people and came up with his intellectual quotient — these are the kids who will struggle in school. When the research made its way to America, America did what Americans do: commercialised it. They started selling people on the idea that the higher your IQ, the smarter you are. It's undeniably false — a higher IQ doesn't mean you're smarter. People went maniacal for intelligence tests, which became a multi-billion-dollar industry — the SATs, the ACT, educational testing systems. That's the reason the idea hasn't died. It's financially driven. It's a nonsensical idea, though you can argue there's a thing called G, general intelligence.

A Harvard researcher, Howard Gardner, who started in developmental and then cognitive psychology, posited the idea that humans have multiple intelligences, challenging the status quo of IQ. Human beings have individual, autonomous intelligences — verbal intelligence, mathematical intelligence — each with its own characteristics. Interpersonal intelligence, for instance, which you're a genius at: the ability to read someone else in real time, sense where they're at emotionally and cognitively, and steer them. Great politicians have great interpersonal intelligence, great school teachers too. The fourth kind is intrapersonal intelligence — the ability to know yourself. How smart are you, really, if you have a perfect memory but no self-awareness? That's not intelligence. Gardner also talks about bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, the ability to know your body in space. Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Martha Graham the great dancer — knowing your body, having that proprioception. And spatial intelligence, which great architects have, to see things dimensionally.

Anyway — what do I look for when screening people? I want to understand the entire profile: where they come from, the source of their motivation, how they handle failure, and the degree to which they tell the truth. In most cases, particularly in an interview, people present a version of themselves they want you to see, but that's not the version that's going to show up in the workplace. So one of the most important questions is: tell me a time in your life you had to work with somebody you didn't like. Could be elementary school, middle school, a project in college, your last company — somebody you fundamentally disagreed with and viscerally didn't like, but had to work with. How did you handle it? Ask a version of that question, sit back, and it reveals the kind of person they are — and how they'll respond to adversity in the workplace, particularly in a hard industry solving hard problems. How do you handle conflict? To what degree do you blame others? To what degree do you shut down? To what degree do you stay engaged?

Research shows that companies which put brand management or image management over problem-solving tend to deteriorate quickly. It has to be a culture where smart people are empowered to solve hard problems, but care more about the mission than about the self. So I look for all of these things, and it depends on the role, because a lot of people are capable and competent, but if you put the right person in the wrong role, they'll never flourish. It has to fit the exactness of the role.

Gio Valiante

What is the biggest obstacle you've ever had to overcome in your life? The follow-up is: what resources did you lean on to overcome it? In other words, how did you overcome it? Most people stop at what obstacle did you overcome — where it gets interesting psychologically is how did you overcome it. Did you go to other people? Do you have a network? What beliefs did you engage? It's important to understand the method by which people overcome obstacles.

This is what Tiger Woods was great at for a period. His self-talk was: you got yourself into this mess, now get yourself out of it. That's the best version of Tiger. We've seen other versions of Tiger, obviously, but the best version is Tiger telling himself that.

Gio Valiante

Often, in golf, when things aren't going well — 'this came in this morning, first time in my career I'm in a slump,' 'first time I'm in a draw,' 'I'm not making money' — these are the messages I get. How do you walk someone out of a draw? Say you're running five hundred million dollars, you're down twenty against your limits, and you don't have a lot of room left, but you need to put on risk, because scared money doesn't make money. But if you're wrong again, you're out of a job. The path out of a draw — step one is to get in the habit of making money again. Where people make mistakes is looking at the size of the drawdown and trying to make it all back in one swing. They panic. In panic, people lose their rationality; they see threat instead of opportunity.

What I say is: we're not going to make it all back. Let's make a hundred dollars this week. Bring down your risk, and get in the habit of making money. 'But I'll never get out of this if—' I understand that. But as Vince Lombardi famously said, winning is a habit, and unfortunately so is losing. So is making money. So is doing well in golf.

A confident investor, when he looks out at the world, sees a place of abundance — sees opportunity everywhere. I don't have enough time to get to it all, I don't have enough capital, there's so much money to be made in this market. When we lose our confidence, we see the market as a place of threat — everything is dangerous, landmines everywhere — and you lose your ability to take any risk, because all you see is danger. That's why you have to protect your confidence: fear distorts our ability to see the world accurately. Fear means danger is everywhere, or at least we perceive it everywhere.

So the first thing with a portfolio manager is to get them in the habit of making small dollars, because the biggest source of confidence is success. If you get in the habit of making a hundred dollars, next you make a thousand. Now you're confident again — you see opportunity, you deploy capital into better opportunities, you're more patient. One characteristic of confidence versus fear: if you deploy money into an idea and it moves against you, do you cut the position or add to it? If you love the thesis, the work, and the idea, you double down. When you're scared, you see threat and danger — you pull out at the wrong time, you overtrade. You have to protect your confidence, and your motivation, at all costs. When you're scared, you never see that path.

Step one for anybody in crisis — a golfer, a PM, people in private markets, venture capital, or runners, as you said — is to start finding small wins, things you know you can do, and celebrate them, because it changes the emotional profile. You start stacking incremental small wins, and that leads to greatness.

Gio Valiante

There are different flavours of confidence. In the research on the self in modern times, there are three self-constructs: self-esteem, self-concept, and self-efficacy. Self-esteem is how I feel about myself — high or low, an emotional feeling about oneself. While it's important to have healthy self-esteem, it's not empirically related to excellence in any way, shape, or form. Some of the highest performers don't feel good about their performance — the best in the world never feel good about it — while underachievers can feel great about themselves regardless. That's overconfidence.

Self-concept is how I view myself — identity. When I look in the mirror, what do I see? That's somewhat related to performance. But then there's self-efficacy, essentially operationalised confidence. There are two forms of it. Confidence as a personality trait: some people are born with it — that swashbuckling confidence they've had their whole life — but that doesn't necessarily do much in life; you find it in failures, in successes, and in everyone in between. The way modern psychology defines confidence is self-efficacy, and the beautiful thing about operationalised confidence is that we can measure it — we know how the dominoes fall and what creates it.

Gio Valiante

For example, this is another question I ask in almost every interview: tell me something you think you're good at. If someone answers, and I ask why they believe that, what emerges — categorically, across the human condition, in every domain — boils down to four kinds of experience.

Number one is what's called a mastery experience: simply success and failure. How many times have I done this and failed, how many times have I done it and succeeded. But it's not arithmetical — it's the interpretation of success and failure. When Michelle Kwan lost the gold medal to Tara Lipinski at the Olympics, the media said, 'Michelle, you just lost the gold medal, you must feel terrible.' She said, 'No, I didn't lose the gold — I won the silver.' Both are objectively true — Michelle Kwan won the silver, but she did lose the gold. The interpretation allowed her to protect her confidence, and later that year she won the World Championships.

So the number-one source of confidence, the first place the brain goes when it asks, can I do this thing, is prior experience. But you have to be mindful that the pain of failure hurts more than success feels good. We tend to index toward our failures — we bring the pain of past failures into the moment. That's why most people are underconfident: because they're remembering all the things they've done wrong, all the mistakes. Golfers always want to talk to me about their bad shots. Portfolio managers always want to talk about the money they've lost. It becomes an anchor — their ceiling.

The second source of confidence is verbal, or social, persuasions: the feedback we get from other people. Why do you think you're good at something? Because people have told me I am. And here again lies the bias: criticism hurts more than praise feels good. Combine mastery experiences, where failure hurts more than success feels good, with verbal persuasions, where criticism hurts more than compliments feel good, and over a life cycle, people index toward the pain of their past failures and criticisms, and start living in anticipation of more of the same.

The third source is vicarious experience: how I compare to other people. We judge our abilities relative to others, and when we see someone effortlessly do better at something we work hard at, that lowers our confidence. That's called vicarious learning.

The fourth source, in the literature, is called physiological states: the butterflies in the stomach. Shane, why do you think you're great at interviewing? Because you can feel it, it's a feeling. But the butterflies you feel interviewing an important person, that get you excited, are the same butterflies people feel when they choke physiologically. It's the interpretation that differs.

So, in aggregate, confidence is an amalgamation of prior success and failure, what people communicate to us, how we compare ourselves to others, and how we feel about what we're doing.

Gio Valiante

If you want to become great at something, you have to understand — take your objective, measurable skill and ability: your verbal intelligence, your mathematical intelligence, your skills as a hedge fund manager, or as a podcast interviewer — I know how to construct questions, how to listen, how to follow up. A little bit of overconfidence on top of that is a really good thing, because it takes those skills and abilities and elevates them. You see opportunity, you take more risks, you put yourself in more challenging situations. Where does it get dangerous? A lot of overconfidence, too overconfident, leads to sloppiness, arrogance, laziness, self-delusion, deception. So you have to protect confidence.

Here's what else happens: when our confidence falls below our ability, we index toward that belief. It doesn't matter how many skills and abilities you have — they'll find a way to conform to that belief. What's the primary mechanism of underachievement? People index toward their past failures, toward criticism, toward what other people are going to think about them, because we can't help it.

Where does this show up? Look at the data on risk-taking among investment professionals over a career — the curve diminishes over time. It's not that, once you've made your money, you don't want to put it at risk — that's not actually true. What happens is we accumulate enough failure, even as our skills get better, that we don't want to feel that pain again, so we lose our appetite for risk. This happens across every achievement domain.

So it goes back to the fundamental question: how do you live at the tail end of the curve? You need a playbook for what you're going to do with mistakes and failure, because the four sources of confidence mean the brain will experience failure as more painful than success feels good. You have to use your agency to flip the script. That's why visualisation works when it works. That's why self-talk works when it works. Number two, verbal persuasions: you have to decide how much you're going to care what other people think about you, because that becomes your prison. If you go through life overindexing on caring what people think, that's your ceiling. Physiological states: if you never want to feel uncomfortable, that's your ceiling. Vicarious experiences: if you spend your life comparing yourself to others instead of indexing toward your own full potential, that's your ceiling.

Gio Valiante

They do, when they work, so long as they're not delusional. Why do they work? People misunderstand the dynamic between cognition and language. People think the words I use are a reflection of what I think — I have a thought, I use words, the word describes the thought. That's not what actually happens. It's developmental. Language and thought are separate early in life — think of an infant, who doesn't even have language yet, and then starts using words in the second, third, fourth year of life, at first almost randomly. Then words start to reflect thoughts, and eventually language and cognition blend into the same thing. That's why certain words are charged with emotion — the beauty of a great lyric in music, or a great sequence of words in therapy or coaching, where you try to give people empowering language. When we're young, developmentally, the language others use becomes our own internal dialogue, typically our parents'. How our parents talk to us becomes how we talk to ourselves, or our teachers, or our coaches, and if that's not functional, healthy, and directionally conducive to success, it becomes our self-talk, and then we talk to our own kids that way — generational trauma, or generational excellence. So self-talk absolutely matters, because of this interaction between language and cognition.

Do affirmations work? Yes. Where do we see this most prominently? In prayer. If you think about all the major religions, they've had several thousand years of trial and error to get it right. Whether or not you believe in God or religion, these are institutions that have had thousands of years to refine what they do — and what do they all have? Prayer, in some form. Why? If I sit down to dinner with my children and every night we say something approximating grace, articulating the words 'I'm thankful for the food before me,' they're practising the habit of gratitude. In religious tradition, if you articulate the words, a profession of faith, just say them, whether or not you believe them yet, the more you say it, the randomness of experience will eventually confirm it, and you start to believe the things you say. Self-talk absolutely matters, but not immediately — it doesn't work automatically. Over time, the process of articulating and using words carefully galvanises the beliefs that lead to success, failure, happiness, or misery.

Gio Valiante

Do you know why that is?

Gio Valiante

Absolutely. Evolutionary psychology, another branch of psychology, has done wonderful research unpacking this — that belonging to a community is safety, and to be excommunicated is death. Now, the brain does not evolve as fast as changes in society; natural selection doesn't keep pace. I always say to golfers: your brain did not evolve for you to be a PGA Tour golfer or a hedge fund manager. Your brain did not evolve with the intention of you being a professional investor. That's not how natural selection worked — it wasn't directional. So you're trying to do a hard thing with an imperfect instrument, the human brain.

This is the one thing that separates humans from every other animal on earth: we get to engage in abstract thinking. It's called metacognition — the ability to think about your own thinking. No other creature can do that. You get to think about your thinking and make adjustments. The beautiful thing about abstract thinking is it gave birth to forethought — I can anticipate. If I want to be comfortable in ten years, I save my money today. We anticipate a potential future thing, and it governs current behaviour. No other creature can do that. That's the good part: we get to anticipate and plan.

Gio Valiante

Here's the bad part: forethought tends to lead people to overindex on the future. We start asking what-if questions. What if this plane crashes? People who are anxious live in the future — they create their own anxiety. What if I lose all my money? What if I get fired? Golfers: what if I lose my— we camp out in the future, and we go to the worst-case scenario.

This is one of the weird features of the brain. I had a girl call me — I'll never forget it — the morning of her wedding. A friend of mine from college. She said, 'I'm so sorry to bother you.' I said, no, no, what's going on, shouldn't you be busy today? She said, 'What if I'm making a mistake? What if he cheats on me? What if he stops loving me?' That's one of the tells: ask people what what-if questions they ask themselves, and you find people almost always go to the worst-case scenario. They bring that future state into the present moment, and then react as if it's real. I can't tell you how many hedge fund portfolio managers go through this — they could have made tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in their life, they start losing a little money, and it's 'oh my God, what if I get fired?' The story is always the same.

So when we talk about the powerful things about the brain — abstract thinking, forethought, hypotheticals — you have to learn to leverage that to your advantage, because the natural human default reaction is one of the things that pushes us to the middle of the distribution and prevents us from overachieving.

Gio Valiante

When we talk about evolutionary psychology and survival — the reason I talk about forethought and abstract thinking is that it emerges at the same window of time as adolescence and middle school. We get to think in hypotheticals and abstracts, and for the first time in our lives — this happens to every human being everywhere on earth, a universality of the human condition — we ask the most important question in human existence: who am I? That question doesn't arise for young children, because their identity is largely part of their family's.

Freud identified this process, called individuation, where we separate from a family identity — that's where rebellion occurs, because kids need to answer that question. You also start to see a need to belong, conformity, all over middle and high schools everywhere in the world: I need to be part of this group, wear the right clothes, make the cheerleading team or the football team. It's that need for belonging.

There are two psychological insights I think are probably the two most important I've ever come across. Here's one: we try on different faces until we find a face of our own. For a large middle period of life — middle school, high school, college, even an extended adolescence into the twenties and thirties — there's this process of trying to find yourself. It used to be a healthy process: the search, the travel, the moratorium — 'go west, young man,' Jack Kerouac, the open road. There's a great line in the film A River Runs Through It, where one of the sons comes home from college to his father, played by Tom Skerritt. The father says, 'So, son, you've had four years at college — what do you want to do?' He says, 'I don't know.' The father says, 'But you've had four years to know.' That's what college is supposed to be. Think about the etymology of 'university' — it's the word 'universe.' The university was born to be a repository of everything in the known universe, a place with civics, mathematics, theatre, astronomy, language — a place of learning where the vehicle was critical thought and the pursuit of truth.

This need for belonging is born out of evolution and natural selection, most pronounced in adolescence and middle school. In a healthy identity, you get to a place called an achieved identity: you've tried on different faces, done the search, done the exploration, tried different things, taken some risks, and finally arrive at 'I know who I am, I know the real me — that's not the real me, I won't participate in that, this is who I am.' Erik Erikson says that when we talk about finding a partner to love in life, psychological intimacy, you can't give yourself to someone if you don't have a self to give. If you haven't developed a full sense of yourself, what are you giving to the person? So work on yourself, develop a healthy sense of self, who am I, and then go forth to your ultimate destiny in life.

Gio Valiante

The second most important question — usually I have an idea, listen to it for a while, and then move on to a new one. This one has never left me, because I see it every day in my work. It's not even a question, it's an observation — a very keen observation by Sigmund Freud: we spend our adult lives undoing the debris of childhood.

Pause and think about your own life. When you ask somebody why they do what they do, on the surface they'll give you all these answers — 'I love it.' But if you have deep conversations with them, you realise the fuel, the motivation, is rooted in experiences from their youth. Lance Armstrong — what gave him the fuel to ride his bike while he had cancer, what was he trying to overcome or solve for? Talk to him, read his book — the trauma of his youth. Tiger Woods, trauma in his youth — they didn't want black kids playing golf, they made fun of him. That's the fuel. One of the things I often have to say to people is, your parents did too good a job, you're too well adjusted. But that's not the case for most of us. Most of us are trying to solve for things that happened during those formative years.

Here's where it gets dangerous. I worked with a Wall Street guy — late forties at the time, had made five, six, seven hundred million dollars, but he was miserable. Married with two kids, up at 4 a.m. every day, worked relentlessly, family falling apart, relationships not great, massive insecurity. In our second year working together, he told me about a girlfriend he had in high school. He'd grown up really poor, with a drug-addict brother, a dysfunctional, low-income family. Then there was him. In high school, he had a girlfriend who was the 'it girl' of the town — her mother drove a white Jaguar, she was on the tennis team, country club. So imagine that scenario: he gets to date this girl, and it validates him as a person, because nothing else in his life is validating him. Then the time comes — almost like the archetypal scene from The Notebook — and she breaks up with him. 'But why?' The answer, a story we've seen a million times: at the end of the day, mum and dad are never going to let this happen, you don't fit, we come from different worlds. That broke his heart, because it validated what he'd always thought about himself: I'm a loser, I'm never going to get out of this. So what did he tell himself at that point? Essentially: no one's ever going to hurt me again, because I'm too poor.

He went to Wall Street and worked twenty hours a day, relentless — even the people who worked with him said, 'that guy's an animal.' I started working with him because he knew something was broken, and it was his identity. Going back to Freud's observation, we spend our adult lives undoing the debris of our childhood — he'd never solved for that, even after hundreds of millions of dollars. We finally traced back that story, and it was catharsis. I remember having to say to him: you don't get a do-over. She's never coming back. And, by the way, look at your life. From that day forward — I have a text on my phone he sent me a couple of years later — his family was intact, his wife loved him again, because he'd stopped trying to solve for the pain of an eighteen-year-old self.

Most people never do that work — never go into their psychological cellars and understand the formative experiences that put them on their path. If you don't, you spend the rest of your life compensating for childhood insecurity. You make yourself miserable, you make everyone else miserable, and you never become the fullest version of yourself. So what I'd ask everyone to do, at some point, is ask: to what degree do I spend my life undoing the debris of childhood?

There's a whole other level of dysfunction: the billionaire class, the trust-fund kids, the heirs and heiresses who've never had to earn money. It's an absolute disaster setup for life, because they never learn self-reliance — it imposes an identity on them. They never actually become themselves. That's called identity foreclosure: this is who you are, you're an heir or heiress. All of a sudden they have a crisis later in life — I never chose this life. So the poverty path and the wealth path can lead to the same kind of dysfunction, because there's no self-discovery in the identity. The best identity path is where you do your own work: you try on different faces, and then you choose who you want to become.

So the convergence of those two observations: we spend our adult lives undoing the debris of childhood, and that debris can come in the form of extreme wealth, extreme poverty, trauma, or growing up fragile in a country club, and everywhere in between. The secondary thing is when you finally come to that awakening — who am I, and who do I want to be? That opens everything up, and it defines most of humanity, in almost every domain.

Gio Valiante

Success for me is a little different, because I was successful pretty young in life. I graduated from Emory University first in my class. I was a young professor at Rollins College, the youngest professor at the time, one of the youngest to ever get tenure. I had a best-selling book. I was being celebrated by the sports world, Sports Illustrated. I had two jet skis, a house and an apartment — materially, the veneer of my life looked like I had it all.

I was with my friends from undergrad at the University of Florida — we'd all gone to an Irish pub, catching up. One of my friends' girlfriends, now his wife, and we're all still really close, she said, 'You're killing it, I'm so proud of you, you must be so happy.' And Shane, it was one of those moments in a film where you hear the record scratch: oh my God, I'm not that happy. I have all this stuff, all these superlatives, but my life doesn't feel the way it looks. Even the articles people were writing about me — young, all these relationships, flying in jets — it looked great. I wasn't happy.

So I went to the dean at Rollins College and said I needed to take a sabbatical, which I'd earned. I went out to Austin, Texas, got a one-bedroom, unfurnished apartment, and set out to solve for this. What came out of that period of self-exploration — I went to a bookstore and started buying books. Michael Crichton, the great author and film-maker, went through the same thing; he wrote a book called Travels about it — material success, but not happy. I spent, I think, four or five hundred dollars on books at a bookstore in Austin, and made a point of buying books in everything outside my area of expertise, anything. I loaded the apartment with books, and I got privileges at the University of Texas library because I was an academic — they gave me a little office. I spent four months in Austin, back when Austin was weird — the catchphrase in the nineties was 'keep Austin weird' — where the artists and creatives and poets and musicians went to have a bit of a hippie journey. I wanted to immerse myself in that culture. I was hanging out with a bunch of comedians; my best friends at the time were stand-up comics.

What came out of it was self-understanding: there are essentially four things that make me happy. Number one is working out — I know I don't look like it, but I work out every day, I love the process of it. Number two is books — working out doesn't cost money, and you know what else doesn't cost money? A library card. Number three is having really good conversations with smart people — I could do this all day, every day. And the fourth is a little indulgent: I love hitting golf balls, not playing, just hitting balls, getting lost in the repetition. At the end of an hour of hitting balls it's cathartic, therapeutic, it clears my brain. Books, conversations, working out, and golf balls cost no money. So what I learned, unfortunately for me, is that more money doesn't lead to more happiness. I want to be comfortable — and I love abundance for people who love money, I want everyone to make as much as they can if that's important to them — but what's important to me is: if I have those four things, if hot water comes out of the shower when I turn it on in the morning, a hotel to me is just a bed and four walls. I don't need incrementally more stuff — it doesn't lead to more happiness for me.

So happiness for me is essentially those things, and then I added a fifth: raising kids who are resilient, not fragile, who want to be global citizens, lifelong learners, who have the full expression of their talents in life, and who do what I hope to do — be a light in the world rather than darkness, elevate others. I know it sounds corny and cheesy, but on some level, make the world a little bit better, ease others' suffering because you can. That's my definition.

Gio Valiante

Thank you, I appreciate the time, man. This is awesome.