YouSaid · the spoken record

Josh Waitzkin

lines on the record: 121
first: 2024-07-19
most recent: 2024-07-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And this is so important. We think about a core part of how I train people is around the interplay of themes or principles and habits. The habits are what we can actually train at. The principle is what we're trying to embody. And so we'll train it two or three or four or five habits, which are the embodiment of a core principle. But the idea is to burn the principle into the hundreds of manifestations of that principle become our way of life. And so in this case, we're talking about Marcello talking about or embodying the principle of quality in all these little ways these little ways you could say don't matter, but they add up to matter hugely.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I love that when people are running, are doing the warm-up, if they're cutting the corner a little bit, he tells them to run the full circle. If people are doing a certain drill in a sloppy way, he refines it. It's the little things, right? As you watch Marcelo doing the warm-up, there's a way that he'll have his hand and just brush against the mat as he passes it. You can feel him engaging his tactile, feeling for the room. He's someone who embodies and teaches qualities way of life. So if you're in your fourth or fifth round and you are looking for a way out, you feel that you're fundamentally violating this principle which you've been cultivating.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“His ass is on the line all the time, and he's getting a little bit older. He has two kids, and he's a wonderful dad. His life is not just one hundred percent jiu-jitsu anymore. He has all of these young twenties at this point world class students who want to go at it hard with him, and he goes out of hard with them. He wants to. He doesn't mind getting exposed. He brings it. He's living it, but he's also creating an environment where people are present to quality little things. If someone is, it doesn't have their gion straight. If they haven't tied their belt, if they're sitting in a way that's sloppy.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You need this everywhere. 100%. I mean, I think that we think about this principle of cultivating quality as a way of life and the big things and little things. And you look at the way Marcelo runs that training environment is pretty exceptional. I mean, if people don't have keys.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they're completely guessed. The ones who are in the steepest growth curve look for the hardest guy there, the one who will beat him up or who might beat him up. While others will look for someone who they can take a break on, right? And so there's that constant search for exposure. That's kind of a parallel to what you're describing in terms of not having an ego to protect. Or a, you said not having”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, if you look at the learning curve of the people in the school, the ones who put themselves in the line as way of life just learn much faster than the ones who are protecting their egos, right? Most schools, what happens is someone gets good and then they have to win to protect their status as being very good or dominant. Usually happens with martial arts instructors, which is that they reach a certain level, they open a school, they get a little bit older, they get a little fatter, they have a reputation, so they stop trainings that want to be exposed by the young students who are coming up and they sit in the sideline, but their egos get increasingly large, but riddled with insecurity and this brittleness tends to then splay down to the students and the whole school becomes a joke, right? Versus the way Marcello runs our school is so magnificent. Everyone's on the mat training so hard as a way of life. Everyone's on a world-class growth curve. And it's very interesting to observe who the top competitors pick out when they're five rounds into the sparring sessions.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they call him the King of the Scramble I mean, he's the greatest transitional player in the history of sport, maybe. He's incredible. I mean, the essence of his game is to not hold, to allow people to move and to, again, embrace the chaos and get there first. He just has cultivated the transition so systematically that he has ten frames in a transition where somebody else will just be moving from one position to the next. But that transition itself is something which is like, that's his ocean. It's a beautiful thing to see. But if you look at the school, Marcelo runs the school so beautifully. And we've got, at this point, a lot of world-class competitors. A lot of the school tends to win pretty much all the tournaments. A lot of the guys who you've trained with.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's really powerful. The fire of competition plays that role as well. I mean, you look at people who compete. Let's talk about martial artists. So I own a Brazilian school with Marshall Garcia. We've discussed Marcel a lot.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think you're actually really, and my observation, you're really evolved with this. I mean, I mean, you have so much external pressure and external awareness on you. I'm consistently find it stunning and impressive how you're able to embrace your funk, how to live a life that is attuned to your kind of inner ripples. I mean, I think it's actually rather unique. I think it's a core strength of yours, in my opinion.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Might not be perceived as impressive by others. The problem is that the others usually aren't world class artists. They're the armchair professors. They're the philosophologists. And so you have the man in the arena who's compromised by a sense of self-consciousness of how the critics are going to perceive him or her, which is ridiculous because it's like an A player thinking about the approval of a C player. And that's disastrous. That's external orientation. That's like thinking that we're going to get food poisoning from something and something's off and then dismissing it because of, I mean, first of all, there's the incredibly subtle sense is how strongly intuition is. No one else at that table there. And we had some pretty high-level dudes sitting at that table, had that feeling that we were about to eat something that had food poisoning, right? So it's very subtle. You had a very subtle sense. It wasn't banging you over the head, right? And then there's the feeling of the social pressures and everything. It's a very interesting, subtle example. The subtle pressures were louder in that case than the really subtle intuition.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So most investors check P&L hundreds of times a day. In fact, it's constantly because it's on their screen all the time. And so having these little adrenal hits all the time, right? Whether it's dopamine or cortisol, whether they're making money or losing money, they're constantly bouncing off of these things. That's the ultimate external orientation. So if you think about internal plus proactive versus external plus reactive, this is how I would tend to frame this out. We want to build a proactive way of life that's fundamentally moved from the inside out versus a reactive way of life where we're constantly reacting to all these inputs which we may or may not want and where we're constantly beleaguered by or oppressed by a sense of how we're going to be perceived. Social pressures. And so when you're talking about a really high level artist who might have a really subtle intuition about something and they should listen to that intuition or they should at least deconstruct that intuition and investigate it and see if it's the right way to go. But they're aware that that intuition”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it's so interesting for me, like watching people watch their Instagram accounts. I see it with buddies all the time. It's natural. It's completely human. But then we're aware of how we're perceived. One of the major reasons that I stay away from these things is because I can feel how susceptible I am to this stuff. You publish a book, and it's on Amazon. It's so hard not to go look at the Amazon numbers, right? And then a book comes out and you're tracking them. Even if you know it's ridiculous and you shouldn't be doing it. Now, someone like you, you're such a world-class and you've so systematically trained at and cultivated the ability to market these things. This is actually a very important scientific input for you. It's not for most authors. Most authors is an addiction, right? So that's a completely different point in my opinion. You're actually gathering data and using it. Most people are just constantly feeling”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From them, how they'll be perceived, or how people are looking at their Facebook post or how their tweet is being responded to, right?”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, thematically, the first thing I would say is that we need to think about cultivating an internal locus of control or an internal orientation versus an external one. So as an artist or a performer, we have all these external pressures on us. Let's say, for example, again, let's talk about investors again. An investor is running a $1 billion investment vehicle. And they have partners. They have people who invest in that. And they have to write investment letters. They have all the partners, say they have 30 or 40 or 50 partners who are institutions, maybe endowments, educational endowments, charities, whatever, who have put their money into this investment vehicle. And maybe that person has his own money as well or her own money in this investment vehicle. Well, for them to be successful, they have to operate from the inside out. They have to bring out the essence of who they are as a performer like we were discussing or as a human being to bring that out through their art. But if they are constantly feeling pressured by what others expect from them, what others want.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And embodying it themselves first, and then through that embodied intelligence working with the kids on how they can embody it. We have to walk the talk.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You would praise a kid for the process versus the outcome, and so you would say, I'm so proud of how hard you worked at your math. Not you're so smart at math. Or if someone has a failure, the other side of it is not to say that don't worry about it, you're just not good at math. You'd do something else. It's to say, well, how can we practice this to get better? And so we're focusing on the process and not the outcome. That's like the fundamental principle. And it's so easy to say it, but it's very hard for people to live it as parents, especially if they don't embody it themselves. What you see often with kids in parents is that the parents, they have an entity theory of intelligence themselves. They're fixed. They're stuck. But they've read the material of Carol Dweck or somebody else. They want to parent their kids around a growth mindset, but the kids see what they embody, not what they say. So we have to embody it. I mean, one of the most important things that I think that we do with My Foundation and our work with schools, with programs around the world, is that when we're working with teachers, it's not just this is the material you should teach your students. It's working with these core principles.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they're told, and the sad thing is that when they are even when they're praised, they're told how smart they are. Or you're such a good writer. You're so good at math. And the kids will say, I'm smart at this, or I'm dumb at that. But if you're very smart at one thing, then that means that if you fail, then you must be dumb at it. And so it becomes very static. And the kids are often quite brittle when they have a fixed mindset, right? Or an entity theory of intelligence. Well, a growth mindset or a mastery-oriented mindset is one where we understand that the path to mastery involves incremental growth. We don't have an ingrained level of ability at something. We're going to have successes and failures. We're going to work at things, and it's work, it's practice, and it's an open-mindedness to life's experiences that makes us succeed.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Carol Dork, mindset. Yeah. Yeah. Entity theories of intelligence versus incremental or growth mindset. Carol Dweck's one of the most important foundational developmental psychologists, I think, around this distinction of a fixed perspective.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thematic dialogue, principle driven dialogue, and we're cultivating somatic awareness, cultivating the ability to feel these little ripples inside. I mean, Jack's telling me his dreams in this beautiful way. He tells me how his emotions feel in his body. It's a great journey. I'm learning so much from him.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“disciplines that any of us can cultivate or ways of being, and it's something that Jack and I have from a really young age, we began to cultivate this from when he was really small around this principle of go around. Initially it was like the first thing time it happened is that he was trying, he was really tiny, he was trying to get in, we were in a little cottage singing a little cottage on Martha's Vineyard, tiny little cottage in a big field, and he was trying to get in one door and he couldn't, but he could get in the other door. And I said, Jack, go around. And he looked at me and he went around. And then go around became a language for us physically. If you can't go one way, you go around to another way. But then it became a language for us in terms of solving puzzles and in terms of any way time you were running an obstacle, go around. And then working with the metaphor of go around opened up this way that we would just have dialogue around connecting things, right? Taking away of principle from one thing and applying it to something else. And we've had a lot of fun with that. And so it's fascinating to see this game little dude.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I encourage him to grab the wheel all the time. I mean, a huge part of my relationship to parenting, and this is from my mom, and I watch my mom with Jack, and I think this is maybe the greatest gift that my mom gave me is having a sense of agency in the world, the idea that having a sense that I can impact the world and that my compass really matters. So when I grew up, I wasn't seen but not heard. I was from five and six years old they were having adult conversations with friends and I was part of it. They wanted to hear my ideas. And I felt that they mattered. And that's a big part of how I believe in, and my wife and I believe in raising Jack. And so he plays a really active role in everything that we do. And so it was sort of a natural thing. And it was all fun and play. I wasn't pushing any of these things on him at all. This is stuff that he wanted to do. But then him naturally, I've been kind of blown away by how he's been transferring this stuff over. I mean, lateral thinking or thematic thinking, the ability to take a lesson from one thing and transfer it over to another, I think is one of the most important.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I always tickle him. He laughs uproariously. But we were lying in bed and I was tickling him very slowly. And he said, I'm going to do my meditation. He would meditate. And then he said to me. Then the next day, he said, Dad, will you tickle me slowly? And I did it. And then he said, can you pick me a little bit faster? And I didn't suggest this to him. He said suggested it to me. And then we played this game where we would say one to ten. And I would tickle him slowly and he'd start doing his meditation. And we'd move it from one to two, and we'd go up to, he'd be doing his meditation. And finally, I'd be full tickling him. He'd normally be in hysterics, and he was just sitting there meditating and not laughing. And he found this so interesting. And he's now guiding the process in this beautiful way. Now we're turning it to talking about quite a lot.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, right. But the flip side of this is to learn the way I talk about living on the other side of pain. Pain being like mental or physical discomfort. And much of life that's so rich comes from the other side of it, the other set of challenge, internal or external challenge. And with Jack, of course, I'm not using that, but it's a little child's embodiment of it. We started to play with turning on the cold water, and he would say, it's so good, da-da-da. And we'd kind of be in the hot bath and play in the cold, and he would say it's so good. It's so good. And he began to have this gorgeous, blissful smile meditating through it. And he would say, I'm meditating through it. It's so good. And we were reframing cold. Cold was a metaphor from something that you bounce away from to something that you can learn to sit with, to be neutral in, to find pleasure in. Just like the weather. And then we had this experience the other day where he said to me, you know, dad, will you tickle me slowly?”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we kind of reframe this thing. I have this, you know, people tend to bounce off of discomfort, whether it's mental or physical. And so they run up, whether if they run into internal resistance, whether it's a meditation training or someone exposing a weakness, or if they're training and someone might be better than them, whatever it is, they bounce away from things that might expose them.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was watching me do the Wimhof training, and I'd be putting my hands in ice buckets and doing this interesting breath work through cold water, and he would initially watch any come over and stick his finger and put his hand in. So this is a great moment a couple months ago we were out romping in this huge snowstorm, and Jack, about ten minutes into it, we just gotten this long search for the right carrot to put on to make the snowman with. We found the nose the nose. We found it. And then Jack got, he was in this huge drift and he got his boots just loaded up with snow. And he looked at me and he said, Dad, my feet are cold. They're filled with my boots are filled with snow, but that's okay. I'll just do the Wim Hoff and make them warm. And I looked at him. And then for an hour and a half, we played after that feat just covered with snow, and he was completely fine. Never mentioned it again. And then he got increasingly interested in this internal terrain. And we would take hot baths together. We take a bath together every night. And then he would want to turn on the cold shower and get in it. And we would play what we call the itso good game.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Other than maybe one when he was sick. I don't think we've missed a single storm, rain or snow, going outside and romping in it. And we've developed this language around how beautiful it was. And so now whenever there's a rainy day, Jack says, look, Dad's such a beautiful rainy day. And we go out and we play in it. And I wanted him to have this internal locus of control, to not be reliant on external conditions being just so. Now he's four, he's getting older, so we've been playing with these things. We've began meditating together when he was a little over a year just doing breath work. Initially, we started doing meditation work when he was in that kind of most pure state, when he'd be taking a warm bath and he was lying on his back and being completely relaxed, blissed out, we would just naturally breathe together. I wanted the habit to be formed in something that was the initial experience to be in conditions that were most conducive to just natural peace. And then we have in recent months been taking it to an interesting, funky place.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Creating chaos everywhere to train at being able to be at peace in chaos and organize things in, that was kind of part of my way of life. And I found it to be a huge advantage that I had competitively. And so one of the biggest mistakes that I observed in the first year of Jack's life or year two of Jack's life that I've observed with parents is that they do have this language around weather, whether being good or bad. When it was raining, they'd be like, it's bad weather. You'd hear moms, babysitters, dads talk about it. It's bad weather we can't go out, or it's good weather we can go out. And so that means that somehow we're externally reliant on conditions being perfect in order to be able to go out and have a good time. So Jack and I never missed a single storm. Every rainstorm, I don't think we've missed one storm.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, like if you have like three sevens or like. Jack Quinn Quinn of Arts or whatever. I would keep everything out of order, so I'd have to reorganize it in my mind. I'd keep my room messy.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I would play cards like a cards, a card game, playing like Jinrumi, a card game. I would never organize my hand. I'd always keep it”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The need for control is something that inhibits people in life. The need to have external conditions be just so in order for them to be able to, Timbo's pointing at my grandmother's painting, that was my grandma's painting. It's a beauty, right? Yeah, Stella, Stella Waitskin, that's her self-portrait.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, parenting, Jack. Well, Jack's the love of my life. I mean, this kid is such an awesome dude. And parenting has been the most fantastic learning experience I've ever gone through. So from when he was born I tried very hard not to go in with it with a lot of preconceived ideas and to be attuned to him to listen to him. When he was just days weeks old he was teaching me. You know, you talk about teaching presence. Our eyes would be connected. And if I would think about something else, his eyes would pull me back. If there was any distraction that set in, he would pull me back. And as he got a little older, he would just take your face and pull it back in the sweetest way. And so the depth of connection, you know, being deeply attuned to a young spirit that hasn't become blocked, that is in that state of unobstructed self-expression, that is just this unbelievably game learner, unblocked learner. And Jack is the gamest little person I've ever known in my life. But of course, I have been thinking about learning and education for a lot of years. And so I had some thoughts. And so, for example, I think that control is...”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, let's dig into this one. All right, so then let's remember to loop back after this to finish this discussion of, first of all, we were talking about how to cultivate the somatic awareness and then how to listen to it. So let's go back to how to train to listen to it.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I cultivate empty space as a way of life for the creative process. So, Timbo, you're the one guy who brings me out of the cave where we had a lot of fun together.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're the only person Once a year or two, you're the one guy who brings me out of my Hermetic. I live a bit of a strange life because I'm not on. It doesn't feel strange to me. It feels completely natural, but I'm not on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or any of these things. I don't even know the names of most of them. I have an email account, though. I do have that.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“their child's mind or their student's mind, and then build a way of life around that. People are used to teaching the way they learned. Think about martial arts instructors. Almost all of them trained a certain way and then teach that way, which alienates 65, 70% of the students by definition. It's very rare that you have someone who can take the time to, and it takes a lot of time to know someone deeply enough to build a training program and a way of life around who they are. I mean, for me, and what I only work with eight teams, I don't take on new clients. Very seldom do I take on new client. And I won't work with more than eight people.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we have to embrace our funk. We have to figure out, you think about the entanglement of genius and madness, right, or brilliance and eccentricity. Understanding that entanglement is always a precursor to working with anybody who's trying to be world class at something because that entanglement is fundamental to their being. And they have to ultimately embrace their funk, embrace their eccentricity, embrace what makes them different, and then build on it, right? And so we think about self-expression. It's not trying to take everyone and put them into the same mold. It's trying to understand someone very deeply and build a training program, a way of life that helps them bring out the essence of their being through their art, whatever their art is. I mean, and that's how I relate to the path to excellence in chess and martial arts, in different arts, very actively in the investing space when I work in education with children through my nonprofit. It's again the movement to unobstructed self-expression. But the problem is the teachers don't listen. They don't know how to listen, right? They don't know how to sit or parents to sit in empty space and observe the nuance of”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the point that you bring up, I think, is right on about meditation, that when you're building training programs for elite mental performers, the most important thing is to understand them so deeply and build programs that are unique to their funk, embrace their funk. That's a term my buddy, Graham, who's a dear friend of ours who comes on our surf adventures with us. He's a brilliant thought partner.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's just a little context here Timbo and I have been on this great adventure stand up paddle surfing, taking it on together. And we found this, we got a great friend down in Costa Rica, Eric Antinson, who actually has the other podcast other than yours I listened to in life, the Padaluk podcast. Paddawu. Eric's awesome. He's a great dude. He runs Blue Zone Sup. He's a brilliant teacher, really fascinating mind, deconstructing stand-up paddle surfing on increasingly small boards for us, and we've been going out there, and we've had some hilarious close calls. Our last trip a couple weeks ago, we almost destroyed each other”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because we don't ultimately want to be meditating in a flower garden. We want to be able to meditate and have a meditative state throughout our life in hurricane, in a thunderstorm, when sharks are attacking you any moment.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I enjoy meditating on the commute a lot personally. You've been meditating for a long time. I mean, I'm not sure how you feel about this. I find that if people can have the first two, three months of meditation practice in a quiet room, then if they start doing it in their commute, they've sort of built the foundation of it in this really quiet space.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think it's really important there. And I think it's really important to have a core meditation practice, which is, at least in the beginning, in the conditions in your life that are most conducive to deep focus and to not being distracted. Later in life, we want to be able to tap our meditation under complete in chaos, but we want to cultivate it initially in the most peaceful time possible. So if you have kids waking up before the kids are up or in the evening once they're asleep, or if you don't have kids, then life is much simpler.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So now what I'll do is I'll have them do the Stressner Cover interval training, then I'll have them do some form of biofeedback, often with, for example, heart rate variability through heart math, working with a specialist. And then when they begin to have a certain kind of consistency of their ability to enhance their emotional regulation, to observe these subtle ripples between stress and coherence. And you can see their biometric data. Then you layer in meditation and then the on-ramp is even more powerful. And so then they layer in a meditation practice. I think headspace is a wonderful tool for layering and meditation.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most foundational to develop a mindfulness practice, to cultivate the ability to sense the most subtle ripples of human experience. Now I've been trying to onboard people specifically in the finance space, for example, into meditation for a bit over eight years now. Initially, I would just try to get guys to meditate. They'd look at me like I was crazy. Then what I realized I had this breakthrough, which was that if I had them start doing stress and recovery interval training, so oscillating heart rate between 170s and 140s, say, so let's say someone does a six or eight or ten minute warm-up and then they're on a heart rate interval doing some kind of cardio bike or whatever, moving their heart rate up and down between 170s, 140s when they become aware of the quality of their focus on their breath during the recovery intervals, enhancing their ability to lower their heart rate more quickly. And they start to feel their heart rate, listen to it. When that awareness would kick in, I'd layer in meditation. And the on-ramp was just much more successful. And then what I started to refine that with is biofeedback.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Getting out of her own way, releasing obstructions. I think about the training process as the movement toward unobstructed self-expression, right? Obstructedness. We have so many habits that are fundamentally blocking us, right, from the phone addictions. People are constantly distracted. People don't have the ability to sit in empty space anymore. People are bombarded by inputs all the time. They're in a constantly reactive state. So one way that you could frame this out is cultivating a way of life which is fundamentally proactive in little things and big. And you can build day architectures that are fundamentally proactive. But then getting into the weeds a little bit more, I think it's”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These are two different points, right? So let's talk about developing it and then let's talk about listening to it because they're both so hugely important. And I'd frame them both thematically in different ways. And I'd build training systems around them both that would be quite different. So when we're thinking about cultivating the awareness, I mean, I think that a lot of this relates to a return to a more natural state. This isn't so much about learning as unlearning.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was amazing, but I heard that flushing happening taking turns. That was a brutal experience. I remember watching you sniffing. You had this expression of concern come over you at the dinner table. And I saw that moment. Maybe I wasn't present enough to you and you didn't, it's a great example of you didn't fully trust your gut. But you were right on. It was amazing.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The great part of it is you and I were adjoining bedroom. We were sharing the same toilet. So that was a hell of a night.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And the way that you would sense that, in this case, is that you would feel the slip away from dynamic quality. And then you would deconstruct that feeling, and then you would see what the bias is at setting in. So this is really important to say, right? It's not that we're going to intuitively develop the ability to know exactly what bias might be setting in at the moment, but we're going to cultivate the ability to have presence, right? I think about the idea of cultivating quality as a way of life, cultivating presence as a way of life, in little moments in small, when we're holding our babies, when we're reading a book, when we're having a conversation with a friend, when we're meditating.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you're emotionally still connected attached to having the slight advantage. Then what's going to happen is that you're sort of stopping. Your dynamic quality is becoming static. But the timeline of the chess position is continuing. The game's continuing. But what's going to happen then is that you're going to subtly reject positions that you should accept and you're going to stretch for positions that you can't for evaluations that you can't really reach. And you're going to fall into a diamond spiral. That's the onset of a cognitive bias. In that case, the cognitive bias would relate to the emotional clinging to a past evaluation.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That corresponds with the bias being present. And so we think about this relative to the language, again, Robert Persig. I like the language of dynamic versus static quality. If you think about the timeline in a competitive state, for example, in a chess game, there's a certain objective truth to a chess position. If you think of that as a timeline which is moving, think about Percy's term of being at the front of the freight train of reality. Freight train is pushing through. Dynamic quality is right at the front of that freight train. Think about that as a timeline. And then the others are the chess player's mind, studying the position. When the chess player is present to the position, it's continuing. You're just running parallel to the truth of the position, to the dynamic quality of the position. But if something changes, you make a slight mistake. You move from having a slight advantage to a slight disadvantage.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT