YouSaid · the spoken record

Todd Herman

lines on the record: 111
first: 2023-11-28
most recent: 2023-11-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Stood up for others or whatever their values are. That's what success is to me is now personally if I can end my day feeling good and smiling on my pillow at night and I have my own little metrics that I would concern myself with regarding wife and kids and business and self, then that's success to me.”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So again, in the debate, I'm not going to accept the frame of success, unfortunately. No, I'll tell you what it is. My mission in life is to create as many smiling pillows as I possibly can. The reason I say that is the most honest place in your home is your pillow because where you take stock of your day, where you take stock of like how you dealt with your kids or you beat yourself up because you snapped on them when they didn't really need to snap on them. And so I'll have led a successful life if I can leave as many smiling pillows behind as I possibly can. And that's through sharing good ideas with people, encouraging people, maybe holding people to a higher standard for themselves so that when they lay their head on their pillow at night, they feel really good about the way that they showed up, maybe what they accomplished in that day, how they might have.”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For the NBA guy who has three games this week, when I'm first working with him, I'd say, hey, Shane, can you pick which one of these games you're going to be average at? And they're like, wait, what? Like, no, I need you to pick a game this week that you're not going to push yourself as hard as you would in the other games. Like be average. You're kind of trying to index towards what your normal kind of average median score would be, okay? 77% of the time, that was their best performance of the week. Why? Because they relaxed into it. They weren't forcing anything. There was more of an allowing mindset that was there. Is it really you being complacent right now? Or maybe is it a reflex of your human system to just want to like go into a state of like”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But if you are noticing or feeling like you're being complacent, put yourself into the identity of an amateur somewhere. Start something new. And it could be in your personal life. Start building a new skill. Start a new hobby where it's challenging you in some new way. The other thing, too, is I highly encourage people to schedule average. What I mean is there are times when you might be pushing in one area of your life and it's like, you know what, in these other areas, the amount of energy, effort, emotion it would take for me to be world class in like four different domains of my life, you'll burn yourself out. NBA, Major League Baseball, and NHL players will play multiple times in a week. NHL and BBA, typically the most would be three games. Major League Baseball could be upwards of six.”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The most important part of that mission was the returning the person safely to Earth, right? That's two and through to the moon, through the moon was bringing the person back. So your goal wasn't to make it to the NBA. Okay, so you got drafted, made it there on day one, and they cut you on day one. Is that what you actually wanted? No. What you wanted was to make it to the NBA and have a 10, 12, 15 year long career. Where you were a leader on the team and you were a top producer as well. And then some people might go, and I want to be the legend. I want to be the greatest of all time. Maybe that's it. So the complacency thing, I would say doesn't typically set in when people reach that kind of. Okay.”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, do we want to simply land the people on the moon? I would like to return them safely to Earth. Like, you know, when JFK said, you know, by the end of this decade, we will have landed a man on the moon and returned to him safely to Earth. That's my best. It's going to be the best.”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those are the people who don't make it though. Because when I say to people in the context of there's goal setting two and goal setting through.”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Terrible I am or how I'm not good enough, or I don't know how that person thinks so inviting in a very different conversation into my mind. That's been the most meaningful thing for me”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The final thing is I would highly encourage people to do what I call fly on the wall visualization. And that is imagine yourself as a fly on the wall. With the people that you might respect or would love to hear talking about you in the context of whatever your role is. And what are you hearing them say? What's the conversation? That seems to anchor inside of people's hearts even more is the words of other people. And what I found after sharing this concept for two decades and saying like, why does that one feel different for you as a strategy for your visualization? And I said, because my imagination for what I see other people or thinking about what other people are saying about me doesn't sound like that. I think people are talking about how”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People make it sound like, oh, everyone can visualize. Well, yeah, we all use forethought every single day. When you think about, oh, you know what, I need to get eggs and milk. And so, yes, we do it, but most people do not use visualization or imagery skills in a dynamic way for what you want to achieve and feel in life.”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Make it holographic. Bring yourself into it. I call it scripting. It's one of the things I became known for. Is writing is the doing part of thinking So I found that when I get people to write out their visualization in the process, not the outcome, in the process. So when I walk towards the gate and my glove and hand grabs onto the boards and my skate blade feels the ice beneath me. Can feel myself gaining more confidence. And now the sound of my blades as they cut through the ice as we do our warm up with every single stride, I feel more and more of the power of the rink sort of soak up inside of me. So that's what I'm talking about. So write it out. So people who struggle with visualization just know that A, it is a skill like anything else.”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The name itself is misleading, visualization. Reality is there's about 20% of society that can't form visual pictures in their mind. But they're very auditory so they can hear things. Everyone, there isn't many people I've ever found that can't hear things. So the first thing is technique-wise is you want to engage all of your senses. Are you going to hear? What are you going to taste or touch or feel like on your skin? Make it real.”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was challenged throughout his life with, say, some mental health and some depression and stuff, but he wanted to make it to Hollywood and he had this vision in his mind of being debonaire and charismatic. And so he built Carrie Grant. That's not his original name. And at the end of his career, he was getting interviewed. And he said, I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until I finally became that person or he became me. But at some point, we met. And that's when you feel very, very fulfilled because you realize all of a sudden one day the actions that are now habitual to you. Become unconsciously competent at them, you become unconsciously competent at the identity that you actually wanted to have. And the way that you know that is because your performance is living up to your capabilities.”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do even Kobe. We created it in 2004. He didn't tell the world about it until 2009 when he won the World Championship or when the NBA championship, even Beyonce with Sasha Fierce. Sasha Fierce wasn't revealed to the world really until 2008 when she was retiring her. No one is going to go to the press conference after the game and say, oh, my alter ego so-and-so crushed it today. These are all creative mechanisms that we do to help us pursue the things that are difficult or challenging. It's not just one concept and one idea of we're only doing it to help us get past some sort of traumas or it's also an extremely playful thing. There's many different reasons why someone might be employing the Alterigo. But at the end of the day, it comes back to the quote that I share all the time from Carrie Grant, the Hollywood Golden Era actor, who was grew up in Bristol, England.”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Meaning. It's not Kobe that's getting trash talk, it's the Mamba that's getting trash talk now when he goes into the arenas and everyone's got these slurred chants because he's someone who's just an abuser or whatever the case was. We had to create that for his own mental well-being.”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If I actually put on a doctor's coat, I will enclot my cognitive traits in the abilities of smart, detailed, methodical, and careful. Now, if I'm about to go do something that demands being careful and methodical and detailed, I've just elevated my performance, my ability to go and execute that because of wearing the thing. So for me, it was wearing a pair of non-prescription glasses when I was 22 years old because I felt like I had a baby face. I looked like I was 12. It was getting in the way of me even believing that I was credible. And so I went and bought a pair of non-prescription glasses for my alter ego super Richard so I could step into a new identity that wasn't so worried about rejection. And Super Richard was specifically hired to do sales calls because I wasn't doing them. I was good at coaching, but I just wasn't good at promoting myself. So those rituals are, rituals is when routine or habit meets storytelling because that's”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's that trigger that's happening. And the great thing about triggers in the book I talk about in clothed cognition. And what enclothed cognition is, is Because I have a story about what it means to have a white doctor's coat on, you're detailed, you're methodical, you're careful, you're smart”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the rituals of transitioning out and onto the field of play, you had mentioned Kobe before. So when we were building the Black Mamba, now we needed to find a way to trigger that sense of that character, that self going out onto that court. And part of the process for me is building that mental movie theater for people. And for him, his words, I wanted to commune with the Black Mamba. So in many other people's worlds, maybe they would build a cage. This is very much for athletes. We'd build a cage and that thing lives inside the cage. And then they would open the cage and then the thing gets unleashed. Kobe was different in that he wanted to commune with it. So he got into the cage with it. And that's all the mental thing that's happening in the locker room before going out onto the court. And there's that.”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because it's just really just fundamentally, it's accessing a different part of your brain anyway. It sort of bypassing so much of your critical thinking factor because your creative imagination is active.”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The preparation of Transitioning into their role or their field of play that we're going to get into like now talks about imagery, visualization. This is where this stuff really plays a part. Language does. We haven't talked about this yet, Shane, but one of the things that makes the alter ego concept so powerful is it reunites people back into their creative imagination, which I think is the great superpower of human beings. Our creative imagination is what sets us apart. Creative imagination is also the one thing I have found that helps people move by the resistance that lives within, whether it's your ego, whether it's the fear of something, creative imagination night is the ultimate sword that slays resistance.”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And ritualization is very much lost in our culture today. We don't put young boys and we don't put young girls through the ritual of graduating from childhood into womanhood or like we used to do in tribal days.”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Me doing this practice, this activity, is taking you to where I want to go. That alignment between the vision of what you want to become, what you're trying to create. A, it actually removes a whole bunch of the friction from staying focused on that thing. Because you know desperately why you're doing this. So I would say if people are struggling with focus issues or even discipline issues, I would say that they're very detached from the meaning that they could be adding to this thing, which then gets me to a lot of people talk about habits and routines and the delta difference between the people who get orders of magnitude difference in their world versus people who do do the rote active habit is we talk about rituals”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Say one of the things that is very different from an elite level client versus someone who could be even great, whether it's in their sport or they can be great at what they do as well. There's a very different level of meaning and intention that this person over here has behind what this activity means to them. We throw around the word focus you just got to focus more. And what I would say to people is I think you need to add more meaning to the activity. What it's doing for you and where it's taking you. Because when you really somatically, so your physical body understands”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Poor driver. It can drive a lot of our behaviors and attitudes and paradigms, philosophies about the world. Your religion is a core driver. It can shape so much of how you show up in the world, the choices that you make, your gender or your race. Those are core drivers. And sometimes people don't look at those things and really analyze them and say, what do I tell myself about what it means to be a black person? A lot of my clients over the years, whether it's NBA or NFL or other sports, Black. And so, what is it about, like, is that sometimes getting in the way of your, or is it an empowerment? Because not everything is negative. Because then I'll say like, is it actually true? Is that true that all Jewish people can and can't do this or all people from farms in Can't do this?”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not necessarily the parts of us that drive our behavior that we don't realize are driving a lot of our behavior. They're core that are sometimes unseen. So our being a Canadian, one of the things as someone who's lived and traveled around the world, and Canadians have this moniker of being like a shucks and modest, I'd say. It's the thing that I, you know, I'm not going to say I dislike the most, but I'm like, no, like own it. Like I want to see more people who are Canadian say like, no, I want to hear someone say it. No, I am the best at this. But American friends, they will easily index because that's a very American, right? You know, greatest place in the world, greatest country. So those things are a part of our language that ends up seeping into how we see ours. That's a core driver is country where you're from, even city, region, being a farm kid. I'm from the farm. So that's a core.”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What are the skills or what are the attributes or what are the traits or what are the qualities that you have that have not been lost? I want to bring things back into the process of the person because that feels like they can own something now. And then you can also take these traits and attributes and qualities into other domains.”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, one of the trapping questions that we ask people, and this comes from spiritual traditions and it comes from self-help books, we're asked to answer the question of, you know, who are you, Shane? More concerned about what you. And when we say what am I? Oh, well, I might say you could respond in the context of while I'm a dad to three little kids. I'm an owner of business. Or I go, what I'm thinking about is, you know, what skills do you have? What are you made of? What characteristics do you bring out? Specifically answer the question if I have a CEO who is moving out of that and they are retiring or they did lose something or they got fired or whatever and they do have a crisis of identity say like those are labels that can be easily gotten in the future again”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would be fine with doing that. I'm fine with going and plugging myself into the world of someone else because I'm still applying my entrepreneurial traits and abilities over there. I want to try to create rules in my life so that those ideas of losing things don't exist with the same weight on me as they would someone else. And so one of the things I discovered in super overending early on on identity is like, oh crap, I'm trapping people in some ways because these identities are like causing them in some ways to stay too long in their sport because I'm a hockey player. That's my entire. I'm a golfer. And yet they do have other interests. And then they sort of retire too late or something like that. So I want to build up new.”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, you're not an entrepreneur, you're entrepreneurial. So if I lost everything, lost my businesses for whatever reason, I didn't lose my entrepreneurial nature. And I can come back to maybe before I go in, and if I'm an entrepreneur, well, then that means I can go back out and start another business right away. And then you get trapped inside of something that you didn't actually want, but you went and did it because your identity says that I'm supposed to have that. So instead, I could ping you and say, hey, Shane. Everything just collapsed around me. I don't know what I'm going to do next. But if you've got anything going on in your world, I'd love to come and lend my hand to those things in that. And you might go, oh, shit, shooting star. I'll grab some of that while I can.”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You had said, like, the types of people who come to you, like, I talk about, there's people who are coming to work with me or buy our stuff, whatever, I find are people that are mature enough to know that they're the ones getting in their own way. I like to use identity with people to help them perform, but I also want to be very cautious with people that they don't fall into a fixed idea of who they are with their identity because that gets to the point of losing things. Going back to the person who's an entrepreneur, listen, there have been phenomenal entrepreneurs that have had things taken away from them. They've lost their businesses. And if you've lost your business, you've lost your identity.”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Framework to view themselves with or view their performance with. So I've been doing this though, like I loved your stuff. And exactly 2015 was when I learned about Farnham Street. So I was kind of sorry, I was a part of that Legard group, I guess, that maybe found you. But I'm always fascinated. I'm always fascinated with that first breakthrough area because it's not really investigated very often. And so I'm sure it probably would have been email back then.”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But when I say breaking out, like, Was it being passed around through email saying like, hey, you got to read this? And then was the need because you were one of the first people to sort of more ubiquitously talk about the idea of mental models. Because I'll be frank, I was very jealous of you because I was like, oh my goodness, like this is what I this is what I basically give people is a better mental model”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why did you do it publicly though? Because I'm sorry, I'm not to interrupt you again, but you don't have the sort of public avatar of someone who needs to be followed. Like there's many people that are like, I can tell by the way that they show up on social media that they need to feed off of the energy of other people to validate their existence in life. You don't because you have far more sort of stoic way about you. So it's just fascinating to me that you chose to Write in public”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Even just practically, Shane, look at how you did it so brilliantly with the naming of the site, Farnham Street, right? That was isolating the map of the territory down to, hey, this is what we think that this area means. Like they think in a different way. And so this is where we're going to index our content towards in the very beginning is, you know, great decision making, great thinking skills, great frameworks, great mental models.”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the moment I say to you, Shane, what is your mission as a father? If I let you sit with it and say, like, I got you four hours. What's your mission as a dad? You'd be able to come back with a response. It's going to be pretty good. And you're going to iterate on it because no statement should ever be just baked in time forever. And that goes to the power of isolating our identity. If I say like, hey, what's your, what, Todd, what's your mission as a coach? Todd, what's your mission as a CEO? What's your mission? And then at the end, when I maybe write out these eight different missions, like what's your mission, Todd, as a husband of Valerie, my wife? I feel like I can answer that a lot easier and it's more simply just pragmatically, Shane, it's so useful to think of yourself through the many lenses of many different identities.”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Man, a mission statement for my whole life. That just I could never, and then I felt like I was an idiot. Like, man, everyone else is just so much better than me. And so here's a great example of, you know, Todd just doesn't get it. That's very much an honest take of my assessment of myself.”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, the neuroplasticity of us, well, the plasticity of our identity is just as shapable. And so the moment we sort of collapse ourselves into, oh, no, this guy or this girl meant to go and do this role, it becomes so much easier to shape that self. And the sort of rhetorical question I get to people when I'm standing on stages and doing speeches is how many of you have ever been asked to create a vision statement or a mission statement for your life, right? And I'm like, I did because I consumed a lot of self-help stuff when I was very young. And I was still consumed because there's a lot of great smart people out there.”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Another way of looking at it is it's the disassociation from your current ego state that you have, the current narrative that you tell yourself about who I am and what I'm capable of, that disassociation and then being able to act through a new idea inspired by someone or something else allows us to more freely tap into the traits and abilities and qualities that we have within us that we just don't access because we have this hard crusty exterior of like, no, this is who I am. This is my explanation of like why I'm this way because as I have proven to my own self through the work of thousands of tremendous people, we are so malleable. Like we are, I mean, I don't know how many more times we need to hear about gray matter, right?”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was you become a really whole human being when you can actually bring to life all of the different attributes of these archetypes? And so that's how I think about developing my different identities is I'm trying to be as whole as I possibly can. And I think the more whole I can be as a human being, that's going to make me more valuable. That's going to make me more useful to other people. It's going to also make me more useful to myself so that I don't just fall into the same trap of thinking of only solving things a certain way because there can be a more caring way that I go about it. There can be a more challenging way that I go about it. There can be a more fun, funny way of going about it, like the Jester would.”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It helps me then, Shane, bring to the surface more traits, more attributes, more qualities that could have laid dormant. And I think about Carl Young and his work on archetypes, because he formulated this idea of the 12 different archetypes. There's like the ruler archetype and there's the warrior archetype and there's the jester archetype and there's the everyman or everywoman archetype. And there's all these different archetypes. And most of us will get trapped inside of living through one to three main archetypes in a lot of the ways that we operate. And his sort of theory”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the other one very explicitly was Mr. Rogers. Because I can't think of anyone that sits on the other end of the spectrum of being a challenger personality type than Mr. Rogers. So that becomes my source of inspiration for that role and identity that I have. And then even in business, and this is why I think entrepreneurship, even more so than careers inside of companies is just so challenging. And it's because there are so many roles that you play. There's the marketer role. There's the PR guy. You got to sell Farnham Street. You got to get some backlinks when you're starting out. Like, you got to get some people or whatever your process was to grow the demand of Farnham Street and even inside of my own business. I think of myself having three very distinct roles that I operate. And then, oh, how is that guy showing up over there to win on in that particular domain? And what that does for me, because I operate through these worlds of identities is”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like a bicep curl. Every day I'm waking up and I'm a challenger personality type in the way that I coach people because it works for the clientele that I have. Now, it would be very easy for me eight to ten hours a day for decades to believe that that's who I am. I'm just a challenger guy. That's just who I am. Like if you don't like it, too bad. But instead, when I think of like, well, who and who do I want to show up for my kids? What are the qualities that I want? Well, I want to be patient, funny, and I want to be silly for them at this age and very loving and caring. This is kind of me going into the Alterigo side of things and me indexing towards mentors and apprentice. I'm like, well, who already embodies that? And my dad had some of those qualities. So automatically, okay, well, and I don't need to trick myself into loving my dad.”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I have the identity because I have the role of being a dad. A long career in my business and coaching long before I became a dad. And so that built up a certain level of skill sets and worldviews and ways of operating in my day, which are really”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The identity that I have as a business person or a career person or whatever, you're going to actually be able to answer those questions, A, a lot faster. You're not getting confused by all of the different selves that you've got with you. And so for me, one of the things that I index towards highly with helping people navigate their lives or their performance is I look. That you've decided.”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Need to take on a new identity. And people will argue against it. Well, I'm not an operator or I'm not a leader of people. It's like that's just not my strength. My natural strengths are this. Well, like I love to poke holes in personality assessments because most people who take personality assessments like Myers Briggs is a good example. I mean, I don't know how many more articles need to be written about how it doesn't carry very much efficacy in the world. But the reason they also don't carry much efficacy is because when you're answering these questions, you're like, hmm, you know, I'm a really good planner when I'm at work. But when I'm at home, I'm not that good of a planner. So you start automatically. You start separating your life. And then all of a sudden you just put a three down. But if you were to sit there and say, I'm going to take this assessment.”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The CEO who's really struggling with managing and leading people. Maybe they carry with them a great identity of, oh, I'm a great doer. I'm great at executing. And now, though, based on the stage of what their business would be at,”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That you're bringing onto a field of play, that you're designing, not one that's been designed by someone or something else. Because our influences for how we perceive ourselves were very much created before we ever had any volition or choice in the process. Because our concept of me and myself and stuff is a lot of times carried out and formed before the age of eight. Now, a child has no concept of me. They don't think of themselves as having an identity until around seven and a half when the frontal lobe starts to kick in and we start to develop reasoning and judgment skills. So I say all this because I like to help design identities for people that are specifically designed to help them win on a field of play that's very important to them.”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The role that you're taking into something, who's in that environment with you, how you operate with your family or your parents. I mean, hey, I'm never going to not be the forgetful kid because I left my wallet on an airplane once coming from Disneyland when I was 10 years old. And my mom to this day thinks that I forget about everything, right? So whatever, that's the role I get to play with her or the character. We have many roles that we play. And I like to give people this frame of understanding that the moment you become a lot more intentional about the who.”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this comes into a bit of a language trap that we have in our world, Shane, where we refer to ourselves in I, me, you. We think of some people, if you have a maybe a little bit of an unsophisticated understanding of identity, which is not a judgment. It's just the nature of things. We think of that there's one me. And then in our world nowadays, Shane, now there's an authentic self there's the authentic version of you. And I love to break that frame with people because I can't look under the microscope and find one you. Is no one you because we operate in the world in many roles that we have. Even our behaviors and our attitudes, they shift and they change based on situation. So that could be, I call it the field of play that you're going into or the”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So one of them got to open up my laptop that day and I punch in the passcode to get in. The other one was able to grab at the time the blue snowball mic or whatever and bring it to the front of the desk. And the other one got my journal out and put it on the desk too. So they're helping me set things up. And I thought it was like, that's the equivalent of me loading the bales on the back of the truck, right? Like they were, and once they felt like they had contributed, then they would leave and they wouldn't quote bug me. And so I think of that idea of how can we best integrate these different ambitions that we have so that they really overlap and do double, triple duty for ourselves?”
2023-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Todd Herman: Unleashing Your Secret Identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT