I'm a note taker and I would have to say one thing that was interesting

about it is, it's his notes.

I take paper notes still, if you look here notebook after note.

And I have them from when I was early in my twenties.

I have all of them and I have them dated, and I can always go back into my thoughts.

I was a writer already when I was 13.

I can go back and read my poetry, what I wrote, and so what I found really

interesting about the book, it's just as if he was having a daily note that

he was writing down to maybe even help him stay focused on his objective or

his moral or his I need to be stoic.

Therefore, it was a hard read because it's not the same as reading a book

where you can get lost in the story or, that there's like a narrative that's

going over, but it was his notes, but every one of them was like, damn was

he really living his life like this?

Or was this like the dot on his horizon to remind him, this is my, this is

why I'm doing this is my purpose.

How much do you know about the back story to the whole book.

I don't know a lot about the backstory.

So he was the Roman Emperor.

He was of Noble family, but he wasn't in the lineage.

And his dad died at three.

And he was raised by his mother and then later his grandparents.

And he was obviously around the court and the Emperor Hadian called him

the truest boy because he was the one, like the emperor's new clothes.

He was the one who would speak the truth.

He used to go hunting with him and he obviously saw something in him.

He didn't have a male heir, so he took this other like public

servant who was in his fifties to be the emperor on the condition.

That he would then make Marcus Aurelius.

Emperor.

And Antoninus ended up ruling for 23 years.

He has this kind of humbleness about him where he is really focuses on

how he serves others rather than, this is my title, this is my role.

This is he's a rare male with no ego.

Yeah.

And that, that really touched me when I was reading his words, it could

be like getting into my own mind.

Like it is oh, why do I even need to write a book?

Seriously, there's so much modern thinking in his approach.

And it's really nice to hear the backstory on it, that he has

this really humble beginning.

And also you can see it.

He has adversity, he has struggles, and what I found really interesting too

was for him it's, the struggle is like worth it because he lives with purpose.

Like the struggle is the pathway so that I can serve others

and make the world better.

I just really resonated with it.

Yeah, I sat this morning and I thought, what do I wanna say about it?

What's the point?

And I just thought, there's nothing to say.

It's like you said it all

exactly.

That's what I mean, you know how I am writing this book and I'm just like.

Of course, my, my book has a narrative and it has storytelling,

but he knows it all already.

It's all there.

And know, the Enneagram types, right?

I think he is a reformer.

Which number is that?

That one

one.

Oh, okay.

Need to be perfect.

Very

purpose driven.

It's all about transforming.

The reformer can have, of course, be leveled down or leveled up.

Yeah.

But he uses the term like on the right way.

Of course, it depends on what right is So reformer can be toxic.

Yeah.

If they're right.

Is not, let's say, matching the values of the people in the room.

But I feel like he had this at least a right.

Or his values really overlap with my own.

And he's extremely purpose driven.

But he also has a bit of achiever in him because it's

also about you are what you do.

Yeah.

I mean he was very inspired.

From the age of 12, he studied philosophy.

Yeah.

And so the two examples he had Hadian and Antoninus, he compared them.

And Hadrian was like, he stabbed a secretary's eye out in a fit of rage.

And he was a bit of a tyrant.

Whereas Antoninus was his example.

He talks about that in the sectional appreciation.

He doesn't mention Hadian, but he mentions Antoninus was my example.

He was the one that I live with and wanted to live up to.

So he was very.

He's also talked about this he studied Epictetus, another stoic tutor.

So he was, yeah, very much driven by that.

So the number ones are driven by I always look at what's the fear and

the fear is that there are bad person.

Yeah.

But that is the fear

Of the reformer.

I am a reformer.

You have this deep seated fear that you're bad and it's not that you are bad.

It's what's in your core.

That's the dragon you live with.

And because of that, you're so moral, almost to the extreme.

In youth, of course, it comes from trying to prove that you are not bad,

but at some point you become good.

That's where you get to the power.

From those those deep seated fears.

But when I read his let's say monologues or how you say it, it felt somebody

that is walking a similar path as my own, of course it's different.

It's from a completely other part of history or something.

But I heard his fears or his dragons in his words underneath it.

Yeah.

God, there was, I don't know if you remember, there was a quote, he

said something even about a baby.

If the life that you have whether you live one day or many, doesn't matter.

It's really, you end up in the same fucking place.

I didn't know there's something really intense about him.

Like almost oppressive, but powerful.

I don't know.

Yeah.

I've never read the power of Now.

I've always had it, but it doesn't appeal so much.

But I think that's the message he's got is it's now it's do the

thing that's in front of you.

It's

today.

Yeah.

It's really that stoic groundedness of, he has a whole section about and I say

it all the time, learned the lessons.

You've probably even seen me, in the chat, but learned lessons from the

past that let go to the attachment of past, but he also talks about future.

You can't do anything about it.

It might not even come.

Yeah.

So he's so grounded and present and I think that's a kind of

calm that you want in leadership.

You want this, instead of being a reactive leader, he is a responding leader.

He is present, and he's the kind of leader I would want.

Yeah.

I was thinking why can't we have world leaders like that?

He was the most powerful man in, in Rome.

But he also made a point that he was never going to, he was never gonna kill someone

who opposed him because Hadian had been full of temper and killed lots of people.

And obviously Nero.

Even when, one of his generals was, he was fighting for

eight years off in the Danube.

And one of his generals, told everyone he was dead and he was the new emperor.

They were gonna cut off.

All the supply is from Egypt to Rome.

So he had to make peace and bring his army over and fight the war.

But even then he said I don't hold it against you.

You were working on misinformation.

I'll talk to, what was his name?

Claudius whatever it was.

Yeah.

I will talk to him.

And because of that, his own men killed the one rather than

have to fight this huge war.

And he didn't punish any of them, even the conspirators.

I talk often about a real leader can differentiate,

they're really self-actualized.

They know the difference between you and me.

Such a leader is able to handle someone in the room that has a different conviction.

It's because he's very values based.

I think that's where his stoicism is.

And and that's why he's not reactive in a way it can feel, dissociative or

disconnected sometimes because he really, he doesn't get into the drama of things.

But that's also powerful when you can connect emotionally without taking

over the drama of someone else's story.

I think that is something which I wish I could see in more leaders.

If you compare to, oh, I shouldn't bring up Trump.

Let's avoid it.

But this reaction, like every single thing that you say, it's like an

attack to me, and I've got to show my force, and instead it's like he

knows himself, he knows he's okay.

He knows his values, he knows his core.

He knows you have something going on over there, but it's not going to

throw him off because he's grounded.

And I love that calm.

That's someone I could follow.

And I bet the people when they followed him, they trusted him.

'cause they could just be,

Yeah.

He was away for eight years and they when he came back, the people all went like

eight, you've left us for eight years.

He was loved and there was mourning and crying when he died.

Part of it is perhaps, he obviously innately had that sense of wanting to

be the best and one of his teachers told him, don't be like the Sophists.

At that time they were very eloquent and it was all about rhetoric and

about being able to argue well, and he said, I don't wanna be like that.

I wanna be like, so someone who speaks plainly and but has logic and makes sense.

But to be that patient, to know that you are the one.

And 23 years, so many, we look through history and they killed them.

But it's that patience and that ability.

But actually then in other parts, he wanted to be the philosopher.

He didn't want to be the emperor.

Yeah.

And that's the lack of ego.

He had this like crazy drive to do right by the people.

For him it was all about duty service.

I don't feel like in any of his quotes or what he wrote a sense of I'm this

great leader, or I'm the king, like emperor, there's nothing of that.

It's like really stripped of ego.

And you can see in his statements, he's deeply philosophical.

Like he really he reflects deeply about the words behind the words.

Yeah.

That was the Greek and the Roman ideal, wasn't it?

A philosopher, a king and a king who's philosopher.

I love the part where he breaks things down and he says, like all it is a

robe with died shellfish or something.

This great feast is just dead bore and dead bird.

He has this direct transparent, like I said, sometimes he's even

depressive and sometimes he's like aggressive in not like a horrible way.

But I love the blunt just getting to the point.

That's the human in him that I can imagine people felt they

can be human too around him.

Yeah.

He has this deep philosophy and he's deeply moraled and he has purpose.

And in a way those kind of people can be scary as fuck because there you can easily

put them on a pedestal like, oh my God, you're godly and I can't be anything.

But you can also hear in his words this raw like human feeling.

And I think that's the connection, which I can imagine, oh, I

can be human with this person.

I can be real with this person.

He's not gonna cut my head off.

And to have that kind of leveling up in our past.

I like to think that as humans we're getting more evolved.

That sometimes when I read, I love to read by the way I take moments in the past,

these books, and I think what happened?

Are we de evolving?

There's a few of us that are still evolving, but we're not

as far as we think we are.

Yeah.

I do think when you look at, we've evolved to a leader like Trump,

and yet, we had, in the past

and of course we had such a leader in the past in Germany.

Yeah.

When I see what Trump is doing, I often I see so much of, the

Stalin and the Hitler stuff.

Yeah.

And I know people are like, we can't say that but in the buildup, silencing

the press and all of that stuff.

He reminds me when I think of it and I think of America as

being powerful for a long time.

And I think of Nero.

Collapsing empire.

Yeah.

And if you look at Nero and Marcus Aurelius, they had a similar upbringing.

They both lost their parents young.

They were both given power young.

Although Marcus Aurelius had to wait.

Had he been more like Nero, he probably wouldn't have waited.

But the irony on it all is he passed on to his son.

And his son was more like Nero.

That's probably the one part is his succession, is he passed it on to his son.

Maybe that's, you have to leave people, you do your best for them and then let go

in a way that's, again, back to learning the lessons and

letting go of the attachment.

It's part of my process as growing up and getting wiser.

I used to have a really hard time to let go of people, like even a toxic partner,

they would always linger in my life.

And I think it has to do with that early life abandonment.

Like you have this extreme need for attachment.

That this feeling of letting go is also I'm abandoning someone.

Like, why would I do something to someone that hurts so much when it happens to me?

Yeah.

But sometimes you outgrow the lessons that can come from that person in your life

or you're moving to someplace else, and it's not that those moments are not worthy

or that they weren't great or even maybe bad, but it's just a piece of our history.

Yeah.

And we're meant to be present.

Part of my evolving as a human is learning how to really be present

and enjoy this moment, and I feel that in everything that he writes.

It's always been a challenge, but I think it's especially a challenge now when you

have your phone that's, constantly seeking for your, and actually, that is old

people contacting you again and again.

Facebook connects from high school.

That kind of leads onto what I think is the core point for me.

There was two parts where I really connected to, and the first was people.

Today you all wake up and there will be, today you all meet people

who are surly, who are rude, who were awkward, all of that thing.

I thought that was, and that reminds me of

Yeah.

I remember the awkward statement.

I like that he used it.

Yeah.

'cause of course, these were his notes.

He was never writing a book.

It was his journey.

But the

fact that awkwardness existed then.

That hit me when I read that too.

Ah, that's really interesting.

It's like a human condition.

And I was struck, I thought it was Mother, mother Teresa had it up, but it was

someone else, Kent m Keith who wrote it.

A poem called People, and whatever you do, basically, people won't appreciated.

People will be awkward, people will be nasty.

But whatever it is, just do that.

And that's basically the message he had.

I'm quite new to coming across Stoicism and Marcus Aurelius.

I've not heard of him before.

And yet

stoicism.

Okay.

Leadership.

That was my notes from the, he's a stoic.

He's a real stoic leader.

I checked it off.

He has this, he has that, he has this, he has that.

He has that.

Okay.

He is the stoic leader, so self-mastery.

So that's where you respond and you don't react purposeful actions.

So you focus on what you can control, not what you let go

of what's out of your control.

Of course, you expand your influence, but that's something else.

Moral integrity.

So aligning actions with your values and ignoring about, let's say the

popularity or the the outcomes.

It's really about aligning actions with values, emotional clarity.

Acknowledging your emotions without being let's say led by

them into everything you do.

Service over ego.

Lead for the common good, not for personal gain.

The resilience and adversity.

So all challenges that you face are part of growing your virtue

and reflection and discipline.

So proactive self reflection and intentional habits.

So that's a stoic leader, and he has all of the points.

So that's was my notes.

I noticed halfway through he is the stoic leader, and the stoic leader,

of course, stoicism can be sometimes, like I mentioned before, can feel

dismissive if it's incorrectly executed because it can be dissociative.

I'm in my calm here.

I have no feelings.

That's a, what a lot of people think of when they think of sto stoicism.

Yeah.

But the stoic leader is instead grounded in your presence, knowing your core,

having that integrity in everything you do, integrity with your values, and

different, being able to differentiate what's happening around you with

what's really important, and not being in that reactive state all the time.

Yeah.

There's so many lessons.

I've not got them from there.

They've come through and I think it's because so many people have

read Stoicism throughout history.

Did it come

after him though?

It wasn't before him.

Was it?

What?

The let's say the movement, stoicism is a movement.

No.

Yeah,

no, he was, after him, he was a student.

He was a student of Stoic.

Ah so he was a student of, he never identified as a stoic, but

he identified as a philosopher.

Okay.

Okay.

So that makes sense then.

Yeah.

His teacher, Rusticus he mentioned that, gave him the book of Epictetus,

which is one of the big stoic, the free core stoic philosophers are

Epictetus Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius.

Oh, you're so good with names.

I love that.

I remember details.

I just can't pronounce them.

I am trying to remember.

You're an investigator, right?

Five.

Yeah, exactly.

So I'm trying to remember.

It was a couple years ago or something.

Yeah.

That you wrote that.

But I think investigators always know the facts and I love that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think it's five thing probably being a little bit dissociative as well.

Yeah, fives

actually it's your biggest before you level up, so almost all fives

and there's a lot of engineers that are fives by the way.

They can be dismissive and dissociative and their behavior and not on purpose.

It's because facts are really important to you.

And you get into that, let's say processing of it has to be

like this, et cetera, et cetera.

But when you level up, of course the way a five levels up is

getting in touch with emotions.

But it's harder, it doesn't come as natural as perhaps someone

like me, a one which is very much connected with the inner purpose.

I have chats with Tony and Clark.

We have on a different group.

And I remember, yeah, it was Clark asked are you emotional?

And I was like, no, I don't think I am.

And then I thought about it and I thought, I'm very emotional actually

because it's not like emotions wrong.

If something's wrong I'll be really, like this has to be

right and it has to be right.

Yeah.

And you go into the

fact gathering, but that is driven by emotion.

Yeah.

But one of the things.

So I'd always looked, I think there's three ways that people get off course.

And that is because of emotion, because of ignorance and because of dogma.

And so

ego,

yes.

So for me, the emotion ego is tied in, or it's

so funny, you tie emotion with ego.

Yeah.

Because what does the ego want?

But certain emotions,

see, I don't tie emotion with ego.

Ego for me is it's all about you, but emotion is about feeling,

but then you are the one feeling the emotion.

Yeah.

But it's not bad to feel

No, I don't

There's ego driven emotion and then there's deep core level emotion,

like from your DNA level and that's does not need to be ego driven.

So that's interesting how you tied emotion with ego.

'cause I was like yeah,

But there's also empathic emotion.

So we have emotion, but the emotion is I think Marcus would

say, it is tied to the opinion.

For me, that's what he's saying in, that's the core of it is to be yourself.

And there's a quote for EE Cummings, that I always remember.

To be yourself in a world that wants you to be everything but

yourself or wants you to be, everything else is the hardest thing.

And to keep fighting.

I'm not sure if I'm mix up two quotes, but that for me is what, marcus

Aurelius's message is in this is, it's all about how do you be yourself?

Yeah,

he's really connected to core.

The way he talks about the core is fluent.

That's really probably the key for leadership.

I look at leadership, relationships and public speaking.

And they're three of the hardest things because they're infinite games and

they're infinite in the deeper you go, the more you have to reveal and the

more vulnerable that you have to be.

And that's what makes us uncomfortable.

Yeah.

And of course I do think that a lot of people that are new to vulnerability, they

mix it up with oversharing vulnerability.

And it's interesting 'cause it, it goes to being able to recognize your

feeling, be able to state it and be able to ask for what you need.

That's really vulnerability.

And so many people struggle with that.

They use the word we, or you are doing this.

It's always based on that outer layer of how you trigger me instead of getting

to that place where, for example if you know anything about me, one of

my biggest dragons is abandonment.

That it comes from my early childhood and I can feel something like let's

say we would have this book club planned and you didn't show up.

It would be very easy for me to go into, okay, you are

unreliable, you are not caring.

You make me mad.

But the vulnerable place is when I showed up and you weren't there,

it's because you didn't want me.

There's something innately not good about me.

It's I felt abandoned.

That's vulnerability.

It's not going into the whole stories as to why I feel that,

but really that's the feeling.

And if more people could talk like that, imagine hearing that when your

friend not showing up to your party.

It sounds different.

Fucking a wow that, so when I don't show up and I don't give you a call.

You have that feeling.

I don't want you to have that feeling.

So what can we do here?

And that's something which I think the best leaders can do,

especially the ones that micromanage.

Usually they micromanage from a place of panic.

Panic that they aren't doing a good job or they're not going to achieve

their goals or they're going to look like they're a bad leader.

But the way that they stand in the room is, you're not doing what I want.

It's almost like a panic.

And they put it on the entire team instead of standing there and being

like when I'm unsure about the progress.

Or when I don't have the data, especially people that are very data focused.

I think a lot of investigators, they want to see the numbers, I feel scared.

I feel weak.

I feel like I don't know what to expect and it derails me.

I can't function right now, and I know that you don't deserve me to come in here

and to tell you that you're not doing a good job because I don't have what I need.

But it would really help me to feel more grounded and to be able

to be the leader that you need.

If I could have that, and it's a different conversation, people connect with that.

It's also the fact that you can be vulnerable and get to

the root of what the issue is.

And you don't need anyone to change.

No.

It's not at all understanding.

It's just to know it, it's a story and it's a story that's come from

your past and it's this good story.

Exactly.

But we don't need to, you don't need anyone to be different.

You just need to, it's an acceptance.

Yeah.

And one of the issues I've had in when you look at dealing with conflict

I have a frustration with emotions.

So if someone is emotional, you get

no, I'm fine with anyone being emotional.

I actually there being emotion in I like anger.

You like anger.

I wish I could be more angry sometimes

because when you get anger, you get the truth.

At the root of anger is a fear.

And all I need to get to is what's the fear.

What I struggle with is I really dislike politics or anything.

So in order to resolve conflict, you need to get to that place of what is

that, when you're talking about the vulnerability, what is that thing?

What is the thing, right?

Let's just talk about what the thing is.

Let's just rip it apart and find out what is the real problem.

People don't wanna talk about that.

People wanna talk about, oh yeah.

It's because of this.

And they go, no, what is the thing?

Just tell me the thing you want and I can resolve the conflict.

And they go what is this?

And it's, oh, but they should be, but sometimes people

don't know it.

That's the problem.

Yeah I am emotional.

And I understand emotion, but I'm very ordered in I don't know why, but very

young I intentionally said I'm not gonna do something from an emotion.

I understand like emotion is why you do something.

Emotion is the motivation, but logic is the path.

So let's talk.

Okay.

What is the emotion now in order to get to where you want to get to?

We need to talk about logic.

But so I am frustrated because if people could be honest and if they could

identify, this is the real core thing.

Conflict doesn't need to be, it can be about that.

Something that I've discovered.

It's very easy for me to say I have no problem being vulnerable, by the way.

Vulnerability is something I can connect with.

My emotions, I can talk with that's not a problem for me.

But when I was younger, imagine I'm the reformer so I can be judgy because I'm

all about what's right and what's wrong.

And when I was young, I was very judgy.

I used to judge when people were not authentic.

Because authenticity it's one of my core values.

So when you're not authentic, then I struggle to be with you.

And what I learned in my leveling up journey, it's not that people

are on purpose wearing a mask.

It's not that people are on purpose being inauthentic or dishonest about

their trigger or what's going on there.

It's that they don't know how.

They don't know what it is.

There's so many people living on the surface of their personality.

They haven't dug into the core of it that it's so far away that they need help.

They need help to get from here into here.

And that's where I focus my life work on, is how to peel back those

layers and help people discover what's going on here so that they can

change from the in towards the out.

But it's not coming from being stupid or being narcissistic.

Or of course there are people with narcissistic personality disorder

out there and they're psychopaths, but it's actually very rare.

Most people want connection.

Most people want a good life.

They want to have a good conversation with you, but they get stuck on that

hour, outer layer of behaviors and triggers and maybe even convictions.

And they don't know what's sitting underneath that.

They don't know where it's coming from.

So you have the wrong conversation and you get stuck on this layer.

And part of a good leader, and I think every leader needs to have

this ability, is to help somebody that's struggling with that noise on

the surface, help them get to what's really going on without reacting.

It's hard because sometimes the things that they say, it's

something that triggers you, but you have to be able to stand there.

In calm and help them figure out what is underneath that, what is

underneath that, what is underneath that, and then address that.

And like you said before, it doesn't mean anything has to change in the room, but

it can be that just recognizing what it is that's making you feel like that's the

thing that makes the conflict dissipate.

Yeah.

See, I think so I'm not very judgmental.

I'm very accepting.

Yeah, because you accept what is because there's no point.

Yeah.

The problem always is that

people expect that you are judging.

People have these, because of they're so used to it from other people,

they've interjected all of these voices.

And it's such a waste.

And, it's like

that's their own dragons though, talking to them, it's try to give me a gift.

Okay.

So try to do a nice thing for me.

I had a neighbor, she was a wonderful neighbor.

When I lived in Switzerland.

She was from Argentina and she used to bring me dinner, she would have an

extra plate and she I lived by myself.

I was a single mom with my daughter, and she would bring it

to me and I would be in a panic.

What does she want from me?

I can't make her a meal.

I can't give her beck what she's giving to me.

So I started to get really awkward, really uncomfortable, like really avoiding her.

I think at some point I even decided to move 'cause it was so much stress for me.

Like that's my own fucking dragon in my own past from a mother that gave me guilt

trips or, everything came with a hook.

And it took me, that was what in my early thirties, now I'm near 50.

It took me time to figure out what's going on there.

When you are in that instinct or that reaction mode, you think what's going on?

But there's this bias where they say, trust your instinct.

But the thing is our instinct often can be tied to our own inner biases

that we haven't discovered yet.

So our instincts can lead us sometimes to these like negative loops to

these negative reactions to these where we are recreating our traumas

from our past over and over again until we can step out of that.

And it starts with accepting that yes, we probably judge, even though

we think we aren't judgmental, there's something underneath.

And until we've been able to figure that out it's hard to say

that we don't judge that we don't have something that is driving our

behaviors and how we respond to things.

Yeah, we're filled with bias yeah.

I've lost count of how many, psychological biases.

But yes, people are so driven by what other people think.

And it's the big barrier.

And

he addresses that exactly in the book.

That was so interesting.

It was like he was addressing a high school teenage do you remember that part?

He really talks about, a avoid the

clacking of tongues.

Yeah.

Really?

Like you were talking about your neighbor, reciprocity Yeah.

Is so powerfully ingrained into humans.

We are social, we're part of a social pack.

Our status is linked to our survival.

And it's just interesting that we always think this new

invention or the world's changed.

It hasn't, people don't change.

All that changes, it's not that much, is like the clacking of tongues.

It sounds like today, you know, if you've put on some reality show or

something, like it's of course maybe different slangs and different words,

but it's exactly the same thing.

And that's why I think more people should read.

I feel like more people should pick up a fucking book from the past

and see, especially people that are very fearful that this is the end of

days, just take a look at history.

Like people think I'm banging on and they glaze over when I talk

about the industrial revolution, but everything changed with the industrial

revolution because we lived, even Marcus, really earliest time we lived

in villages, we lived with 150 people.

Yeah.

You suddenly, you take people out of their natural life.

And so kids, were feral.

Now we have schools where you get trained, sit there, do this, which is unnatural.

Yeah.

You work in an air conditioning environ, especially if you're

neuro divergent, try to focus.

Yeah.

You work in an air conditioning environment.

You are close to people that you don't know who they are.

In the past, before the Industrial Revolution, you knew everyone,

everyone had a reputation.

And if they stitched you up, they would be exiled.

Everyone would know not to go to do business with this person.

They would be exiled from the community.

Now we have none of that.

We sit on a train and we are overwhelmed and nobody looks at each other

because we are overwhelmed by it.

Environmental psychology tells us how alien it is to us and how it creates

more aggression, more all of this stuff.

And so we live in a world of anxiety because of that.

So like I always say to new managers, it's not starting from zero.

You're starting from negative because

people are

stressed automatically.

They're

stressed when they enter the office.

Yeah.

And then when you have the dynamics of most people work for companies

that are looking for profit.

Most of 'em are big companies.

They don't care about you, it's just about numbers.

Yeah.

And that gives people, that was a hard learning

for me in life.

Like early in my career, I was so loyal, to, and I would stay too long

in every but that realization that in the end they just let you go.

It's all, it's a numbers game.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And collect your stuff and will it escort you out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I also had to shift my thinking, otherwise, yeah.

You're stuck in your career, yeah.

You really you can be loyal to a cause, but you don't need to

be loyal to the organization.

Yeah.

I have a bit of a strange way of looking at things, but I look at

organizations so they don't exist.

They're shared beliefs.

They're a vehicle to gather people together and they're a

vehicle for economic progress.

But the only thing that matters is people, because people are the only

thing that are always around the ideas, the kings and all of this stuff.

And in the end,

they're the ones we're doing the stuff for because it's

the people that buy the stuff.

Yeah.

Okay, so we're running short on time, let's just sum up, key lessons, key

insights, and your biggest takeaway.

I wrote down two quotes that I think are the big takeaways of the book.

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should

fear never beginning to live.

And the other one is, you could leave life right now.

Let that determine what you do and say, and think.

And for some reason, those two quotes summarized the book for me.

And that's everything, of course, was going around that about how to

do it his methods what drives him.

But in the end, our life is fucking fleeting.

And maybe because I'm a reformer, I'm all about purpose, but I could die tomorrow.

I want to feel that the life that I did live and the things that

I did and chose to do and the connections that I made that I've made

something better while I was here.

That I served that community and the greater world and my children.

And their children.

It's something that I felt in his purpose.

That's something which it's nice to read that and remember that.

Yeah.

It's such a leveler.

I like where he talked about, Alexander the Great, and he Julius Caesar and

all of these people, they died, so did their footmen and no one remembers them.

The people who you want to remember you, they will die.

Yeah.

It's a powerful leverage and fear of death is such a huge,

it's huge for someone like me.

But for me it's not even about the legacy.

I don't care if you don't remember Sarah Gruneisen, but I care that I made enough

ripples in the world to improve it so that my, my effect expanded and changed the

world in the end to be a better place.

I know I'm just one person, but I believe in those ripple effects.

Yeah.

I often had I would often look at businesses and I'd look at you at

tobacco and pharmacy, food companies.

They all do something that's damaging.

So I always had like the hippocratic ideal first do no harm to do

something that wasn't any harm.

I've always also had I suppose it's a five thing of not wanting to

change the world, that's interesting.

So if you look at Donald Trump, he wants to impose his will on the world.

And I've always felt not to impose, but to understand to understand

this more also comes from a five is driven by uncertainty and feeling

Yeah.

The investigator versus the reformer.

Yes.

And needing to understand rather than actually change anything.

And together reformers and investigators make great teams.

It is been a great conversation.

Yeah.

I'll just share my last thing.

My highest value is to live with honor.

Yes.

If I can clean my teeth at night, every day and feel that I can look

myself in the mirror and I feel okay with myself, which going back to

what you said about, how hard it is, like when you talk to people and they

don't know, they've never done much introspection and they don't really know.

I think so often people chase things and they distract themselves

and they don't realize that, they're, we're swayed by emotions.

We're swayed by this, and we're torn all over the place.

We are shipwrecked, by the world.

And we never.

Get to do what we think is right.

And so because of this, we're always making bargains.

We'll do this for, we'll do this because I'll get the promotion.

Yeah.

We'll do this because it will make them feel better.

And then, oh, I've spent too much time at the office, so I better

do this and I'll buy this thing.

And all of this thing is swaying us off of actually being who we are.

And so for me, and I

think that's the purpose, that everyone can be who they are, that every human

being's life is purposeful and everyone can leave this world feeling that a

kind of contentedness that's my purpose.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So for me I just think you make the choice.

You have to be true to yourself.

It doesn't matter who else you disappoint, but you have to be true to who you are.

That was my key takeaway.

And I think for leaders that's the key as well.

Yeah.

Is the ability to know yourself and be comfortable in yourself so that you

aren't forever ridden by anxiety or feeling that you're behind or feeling.

Really spoke to me the who, to be a human being.

Who is this what you're built for?

To lay in bed?

I'm not a morning person, I I'm wake up at night.

The morning is and it takes me a little while to go, just be you.

Actually it's here.

It's my quote.

I say it all the time.

I started saying this when I was a teenager.

Just be you.

Be who you are.

Like that's the ultimatum of if everyone can just be you without be you and

let's say destroy the whole world being you like some people we know.

So I think all of that is a distortion.

Yeah.

I think if you look at Trump that is I need to show people I'm better.

You don't need to, you just, no, just be you.

You don't need to shout.

Yeah.

Beautiful.

Yeah, it's it's been a great conversation now.

It's been fun.

Yeah.

Really great.

This has been really wonderful.

I really enjoy speaking with you, Rob.

You're so deep and introspective and the conversation flows.

I like it a lot.

And I've loved everything that you've brought to it.