Shane: I want to start with this book, Inner Excellence. So, you wrote this book. You wanted to put together a manual on mental toughness and performance under pressure. And the first thing I highlighted in this book, it's it's not even on a page number. It's in the preface here is the quality of your life is based on three elements. your inner world of thoughts and feelings, beliefs and desires, your frame of reference, mindset from which you see the world and your relationships. How did you hit on that?

Jim: Well, I mean this was the book was 5 years of full-time writing and research. And so that is a very holistic approach and that and I think that's what you need if you want human optimization. We need to be holistic. We need to get deeper than just the mind. We need to go into the heart into the subconscious.

And so that's one of the in the 5 years of full-time writing and research that became inner excellence. That was one of the first things that I realized is that if you want to really help anybody, whether you're a counselor, a parent, a coach, yourself, we need to get to where your greatest fears are and your greatest dreams. And that subconscious, heart, spirit, neuro level is where we got to get to.

Shane: Is there a moment in your life where you realize this or was it this slow sort of awakening?

Jim: Well, I think my background kind of all played into it and and I think everything that I've been through has been training me. All the all the hard times, the really scary times and low times in my life, God's been training me. I didn't know it at the time, but now I can see it much clearer now. It was not just the five years of writing the book, but there was all my experiences and, you know, my mom's background and community background that my dad got into with the Hutterites and my brother and the spiritual background, all of that.

Shane: The key realization of the book seems to be that the pursuit of extraordinary performance and the pursuit of the best possible life are the same thing.

Jim: Yeah, that was that was really a life-changing thing for me to realize in the desert. So, kind of how that happened was I give away over half my possessions to go live in a life of solitude to figure out what to do with my life. I wanted to find something that I could devote my life to. And when I was there, I decided to become a personal coach to pro baseball players and teach them how to have peace and confidence under pressure.

And so then I started to put together this manual for future clients after my first two clients did amazing. And what I realized in the research was that what good is it if I spend my life making people really successful? Whether it's winning an Olympic gold medal or being world number one or making millions of dollars, if it doesn't make a difference in their heart and in the world, if it just makes them more successful, like that may not even be a good thing.

And then when I found out that to teach someone how to have the most poise under the most pressure is the same path as living the best possible life, a meaningful fulfilling life with with amazing experiences and deepen enriching relationships where you're learning and growing and making a difference. It's the same path, a wholehearted path. When I when I realized that, that's when everything changed.

That's what inner excellence is. is to teach someone how to be wholehearted, how to walk in love and not fear and develop yourself as a person and optimize that and become your true self. And then you're better at every you're a better athlete, you're a better parent, better coach, you're more present, more gracious, more aware.

Shane: I want to dive into this developing ourselves as a person and use this episode as a a means to sort of teach people inner excellence and how they can perform under pressure and also live a life of more meaning. But before we get there, I want to talk about the book. How did the book come about? Let's spend a beat on this for a second because my understanding is you wrote this book and then almost nobody read it.

Jim: Yeah, that's right. So the book came out in 2009 and uh I wrote the book because I wanted to write the best best book ever on mental toughness and I wanted to use that as a manual for my clients to use that that I can give them and say here's how you train your your mind and your heart. It worked great for that. It wasn't a big seller but it worked great for that.

And interesting enough I had on my phone I I I recommend to all my clients that they they have these reminders silent reminders that come up these affirmations every day throughout the day. And one of mine was that I'm a New York Times bestselling author and it had been 15 years 16 years and so and that had happened. So after a few years I took it off. The book was was doing great for what I wrote it for as this manual and and for other clients to to get other clients. So that was amazing but it wasn't a big seller.

And then so 2018 I got the rights from McGraw-Hill and then I spent two more years of of uh part-time maybe 20 hours a week revising it. So that came out in 2020. The book I I thought it was going to be 15% different, but it turned out to be about 85% new stories and same concepts, but new stories.

Shane: And then I assume most people found it the way I did. I was watching the NFC playoff game and saw AJ Brown on the sideline reading this book and then that became the focal point of what everybody was talking about all of a sudden. Where were you? What happened there?

Jim: Yeah. So, I was in Dallas, Texas. Um, I was there to write to do an international retreat and uh I'm in my hotel room. What was amazing about that week, it was such an intense week for many reasons. So January 12th was that Sunday. My mom died January 16th and she was 91. She had an amazing life, had a huge impact on my life and taught me so much. So it was an answer to prayer because she was suffering. But it was a very somber week and also kind of a slow week um in my life.

and and just it'd been years of kind of my both parents died and my sister died and trying to care for them and things were slow and business was slow and I actually didn't pay off my credit cards in January. I had money in investments but I didn't have any in my checking and I look up at the skyscraper in downtown Dallas that Sunday afternoon and and I had just written a book called The Best Possible Life: How to Live with Deep Contempt, Joy, and Confidence No Matter What. It's a a a much smaller, easier book to read and on the spiritual life and kind of a summary of inner excellence.

And so that book had just come out and I remember looking at the skyscraper that afternoon and and the thought came to me was Jim, would you rather own that skyscraper for whatever hundreds of millions of dollars it's worth or would you rather have written the book the best possible life? And I thought, no, I wouldn't trade it for hundreds of millions of dollars. And so I thought, well, at least you got that. That's pretty cool.

And then a couple hours later, everything changed. My whole life changed. I'm watching Penn State play Notre Dame, a bowl game that had already happened. I look at my phone and I see all these texts and I thought my mom died because why all the texts? And then obviously someone said, "You need to turn on the the Eagles game." And so I turn it on and I see it. And that's when I found out with the rest of the world that that he was reading the book, you know, bringing the book to every game, reading it before games to get centered and reading it after every drive. I saw him with a picture of him with a book on the sidelines a month before, but I had no context. And so, yeah, that's when the barrage of interview requests and and everything started happening.

Shane: It's interesting to me in a couple things. I want to go back just for a second. One of your affirmations was to be a New York Times bestselling author. That sounds like an outcome.

Jim: The way I think about this is so I get paid to help people achieve outcomes. They don't come to me to feel better or have a more spiritual life. as far as my the way I've been paid the last 10 20 years, but we do it through a a spiritual approach. When I say spirit, a heartfocused much deeper approach than the transactional world that we live in.

And so I have what I call third world goals. I use I call the the world that we live in of of results and circumstances the first world. And the second world is your inner world. And then the first world is the unseen world that's uh eternal and has every good thing like love, joy, peace, inner inner strength, mental toughness. And so the third world of results and circumstances, I have goals there. Like one goal was to be a New York Times bestselling author.

But the crucial thing is those are just temporary things that I don't even know if it's good for me. I mean there's we all have goals, but are they good for you? Are they the best thing for you? We don't even know if they're good for you. And so I try to hold them loosely knowing that that yeah, I have these desires and goals, but they're nothing compared to who I'm becoming. And uh to share God's good news with the world, his love, wisdom, and courage. I that's my purpose.

Shane: and how did you feel after you made so your goal came true? You hit the New York Times bestseller list. Not only did you hit it, you were number one, you sold 100,000 or more copies of the book, which is just a runaway success by any measure of any book ever. And it's sort of like this dream, right? Like you wrote this book, you went to the desert, you put your head down, and then nothing happened. And then one day suddenly somebody recognized how amazing this work was. Did that feel satisfying to you or did it feel empty?

Jim: Very very surreal and extremely incredible. It it it it definitely didn't feel empty. It wasn't like oh now I'm somebody. It felt amazing because it was like God and I are doing something together. That's what was amazing.

Shane: When you tell me that story, I kind of feel bad, not for you, but for myself. And I'll put this in perspective. And maybe this is self-centeredness. And you know, my friend Brent Beshore has this idea of clean fuel versus dirty fuel. And how are you powered? And your fuel sounds very clean. It's purpose- driven. It's meaningful. And my fuel is more a mix. It's dirty. It's a chip on my shoulder.

It's I also hit the New York Times bestselling list. But the first thought that I had was not positive. It was I remembered a comment on an article in the New York Times from 2018 saying, you know, I hope Mr. Parish is enjoying his 15 minutes of fame. And to me, that's more of a dirty fuel.

And I've been thinking about a lot about clean fuel versus dirty fuel and motivation lately. And the people that I admire a lot is Tom Brady. And you know, he's got a mixture of fuel. It sounds like, you know, there's definitely a chip on his shoulder from Michigan driving him and pushing him. And what I find with the dirty fuel, if you will, at least for certain personality types, myself included, is it just never burns out. Like it never expires. I remember things that my grade nine teacher told me, you know, back in the day. They don't do this anymore, but they used to write what they actually think. And she wrote in my report card that went home to my parents like, "Shane will be lucky to graduate high school." [snorts] And I like still think about that. Every like few weeks that pops in my head.

Jim: What's your reaction to that? We're all human. And so our greatest need is for love and and acceptance. And so we all have a mind that's that's always threatened, always comparing, and never satisfied. the the part of the mind I call the ego.

And so it's something that as humans we're always battling with. The ego says if you're more successful, you're going to get what you want most. It doesn't say this out loud or or in certain words, but it's that's what it's always implying is if you're successful, you're going to get what you want most, which is that love and connection. If you sell more books or get more followers or more money or more promotions, you're going to get this thing that you need most. But the flip side is if you fail, you're gonna not only are you not going to get that, you're going to get the opposite. You're going to get rejected.

Shane: I would imagine I'm very similar to most of the athletes you've worked with in terms of like how far this has gotten me but maybe it doesn't get me and maybe failure and you know I've failed million well millions of times I mean my failures are public you know everybody watches them uh everybody sees them and in my mind you learn from that and you just move on you let it go like you don't hold on or attach to it but you do the same with success so the variance between sort of like happiness and sadness is like so narrow because it's like you never get too happy and you never get too sad and you just sort of like stoically go forward.

Jim: What I've seen with people that are very talented like yourself is that exactly what you said is just next next like let's get another goal let's achieve something else. It's it's really like productivity is is really really important uh because achievement is is the whole the end goal. It's a dangerous trap. The more talent you have, the more likely that you can get in this trap.

And the trap is I set a goal, I work at it, I get a result, and then I process that result in my mind. Do I like it? Was it good or bad? Did I win or lose? And then after I process it in my mind, I'm going to get a feeling. And that feeling is going to be if I got what I wanted, it's going to be positive but temporary. If I didn't get what I wanted, it's going to be negative. And that's going to impact my beliefs because beliefs are feelings.

And then I'm going to be like that belief will be oh maybe I can achieve my dreams or maybe I won't. But because if you're talented now what are you gonna do? It's another goal. And so say you achieve the first one you're like okay maybe I can. You process in your mind yeah I can do these things and and I'm going to be somebody and I'm going to achieve these things. You set another higher goal and then you don't get it. Then you process in your mind like oh this sucks. So you get a negative feeling impacts your belief maybe I can't do this.

And but the the more talented you are, the more tears you're going to get when you do achieve these things because they're going to be bigger than most people. And that sucks you in to just this cycle of I just got to keep achieving. If I can feel okay about myself if I keep achieving. It's like Jerry Seinfeld. He's uh maybe the most famous successful comedian ever. And uh he said, you know, why do I work? He's like, well, I I keep working because that's the only way I can kind of really feel. I don't remember the words he he used exactly but it was it's the same story I hear over and over and over like when people retire they lose their purpose because the work in essence kept them distracted

Jim: and busyness is one of the biggest things that we do so we don't have to get deeper and face our fears and and look at life at a deeper level and that deeper level is what you alluded to in the very beginning we're created for relationship and when you understand that you're either walking in love or fear then love is is this willingness to sacrifice for others and fear is this these walls that we naturally build.

It's this self-centerness that's inherent in human nature that um that is important to take care of ourselves and and be safe, but also we build these walls that imprison us. So that's why it's it's so important to think deeper deeper about your life and and get out of that busyness, go into solitude and really think why do I want these goals that I have and what is at the end that I that I want to look back on my life and and have

Shane: the busyiness brought to mind something that I observed many years ago with certain people and they would dive into work as a means of escape. They were escaping their family and their life that they've created and it's the same as you know vacation. And I often have these conversations with people and they're like, "Oh, I can't wait to go on vacation." And I'm like, "Why?" You know, for me, it's like, "Why do you have a life that you've built that you want to escape?"

And so that part I find interesting. And how do how do you help somebody who's avoiding something? And I did this when I first got divorced. I mean, I avoided dealing with what I needed to process and what I needed to look at and how I needed to go through this. And the way that I did that was diving into work. And so I notice it in other people as well. How do you take somebody who's avoiding something like that?

Jim: was interesting you mentioned vacation because the second you said vacation that's the exact same thing I was thinking about. I wrote an article called how to be on vacation and what I've experienced most people it's actually it's interesting so two years ago I had a friend of mine and his his wife had just died he invited me to be to go sailing with him in French Polynesia and um for two weeks and my first thought was I don't go on vacation but then I started thinking about it was going to be him and his son who had just lost his mom and I thought you know maybe I could go and be something positive in their lives

but this this thing about vacation the article how to be on vacation is the idea that most people go on vacation to escape their lives. Like you said, they're what they the common thing is I'm going to go on vacation. I don't want to think about work. Let's not talk about work. Let's not talk about anything back home. We're just going to relax. That's a very common idea, right? And it's it's kind of like escaping your life. And like you said, why do you why do you have a life that you want to escape from?

So the gist of the article is rather than going to escape your life on vacation, the best vacation is one where you go to enhance your life. Well, how do you do that? Well, first of all, we need we need to to stop all the busyiness. So, stop all the thinking and all the doing and and uh stop all that for a day or two and then think deeply about your life purpose and why you're here on this earth and how can you move towards that when you go back to your regular life.

Shane: How did you find religion?

Jim: It's interesting you say religion. I grew up in my mom is full Japanese. Her family became a Christian family when her father was dying. And well, it it kind of started with with um I talked about this in the book with with the samurai and how my great greatgrandfather his father was a samurai. When the samurai era ended, he became an alcoholic because he lost all his power. And so his son started to think about what is the meaning of life and he realized that he wanted to live a life where he empowered others instead of having power over others. And that kind of changed the trajectory of my life, you know, obviously my mom's life.

My journey was was I I believed in God my whole life. But my life greatly changed when I met this homeless harpist in in downtown Denver in 2010 cuz I I spent 5 years full-time writing in the writing inner excellence, 50 to 60 hours a week. But I came out of that with a near mental breakdown. I had spent my life savings $90,000 in debt.

There came a point where I was speaking to these these high schools in Denver, Colorado. I was thinking, "Okay, yeah, the book is in bookstores around the world. That's great, but you've got no money to hire someone to market the book. You don't know how to do marketing, and you don't like promoting yourselves. This is not a good marketing plan. If no one hears about the book, no one's going to buy the book. If no one buys the book, then Barnes & Noble will pull it off the shelves and 5 years of full-time work is going to go down the drain plus all that money. And I just could not see how that was not going to happen.

Shane: And effectively that did happen. Correct. The Barnes & Noble pulling off the shelves.

Jim: Yeah. Like it didn't eventually um I don't I don't remember how long it was on the shelves. It it didn't happen in a matter of weeks. After a while, they they pulled it. I was spiraling. And and when you isolate yourself, we're created for relationship. And when you isolate yourself and have no one to tell you the truth about who you are and what's possible for you, then then you can start to really spiral like I was.

So I called my friend Ricky Ricky Scruggs. I said, "Hey, tell me what to do." And he said, "Find a homeless Christian and help him." And so I I find this homeless harpist around the corner, this guy playing a full-sized harp. Really strange. I listened to him play the music. I look at my wallet. I had $100. So I must have taken a cash advance out. Most of my credit cards were maxed out. And so I took all the money and I I gave it to him and and I leave.

I go back to where I stand and run on the treadmill to try and breathe. I come back to that same area in Denver. I'm sitting in the Starbucks just staring off into the abyss. So much anxiety. And the homeless harpist walks past me, stops in his tracks and says, "Are you the guy that gave me that money?"

When I was writing the book, I asked this girl from my church. I said, "Can you read this book and make sure it lines up with the Bible because I want to make sure it's filled with wisdom. It has no falsehoods in it." And she reads Interex and she says, "Have you ever heard of the word Zoe?" And she said, "I read your book. Have you ever heard of the word Zoe?" I said, "No." actually said it's a a Greek word that means life. It's in the Bible a lot. It means fullness of life. I said yes, that's what this book is about.

My whole life I've obsessed about these transactions of be about being successful when what I've always really wanted was to feel fully alive. So I started to revolve my book around pursuing fullness of life and letting everything else be added to you.

And so I'm in the Starbucks and this guy, the homeless guy, he left and he came back and he gave me a bracelet that he made and a card and a box of chocolates. And I open up the card and it said, "Thank you so much for caring for me. love Zoe. His name was Zoe.

I said, "Do you know what your name means?" And he said, "No." I said, "It means absolute fullness of life. I've studied that for five years. I just wrote a book about it." Grabbed a book and I wrote Dear Zoe, thank you so much for sharing your beautiful music with me today. You don't know what that meant to me. Love, Jim. I give it to him. I never see him again. And that was the start of a complete transformation in my life.

Shane: Where does ego and sort of selfcenteredness and self-confidence interact?

Jim: Yeah, that's a great question because what happens to most most people, especially young athletes, is they have this confusion like I know that for me to achieve my goals in sports, I need to be confident. And so, does that mean I need to talk about myself? Do I need to be brash and boastful?

I had this great conversation with a major league golf star a year and a half ago. I said, "Pro althletes, they come to me because they want confidence." And that's great. Confidence is super helpful, but there's something even more powerful than confidence, and that's being fully present. I said, "If you have two athletes that are or performers that are the same talent, I'll take the fully present person over the fully confident one every single time because when you're confident, you can get careless."

Shane: What does it mean to be present?

Jim: That's a great question because a lot of people they take it they don't go far enough. They just like just don't think about anything but what you can see or be where your feet are. And that's such a limiting view for me. It's super important if you're a coach to explain what this is. What is what does it mean?

Are you concerned about yourself? Are you self-conscious? What what are people thinking about me? What if I don't do this right? There's no thoughts of self when you're in that moment. And that's when we're at our best. There's no self. It's as Tim Keller says, self forgetful. And that's why selfless is fearless. There's fear is a self in general. It's a self-centered future thing. What will happen to me next after I do this performance? After I perform, play the violin, give this talk, what will happen? What will people think? It's a but if there's no concern for self then there's freedom and freedom was one of the biggest things that that are lacking in performance today.

Shane: How do we teach people to have courage or self-confidence to to take that space? Like it

Jim: that's the selflessness. That's that's the master of the ego. That's the willingness to look foolish and and understand. So here's how I'll give you an example. So I was at this playoff um PJ tour playoff in this in practice round and the golfer that I was with they're playing $100 a birdie and the other two golfers birdie the first two holes. Now he's behind. He has a short birdie putt in the third hole and he missed it

and he said it was a short one and he said he was nervous and I said you missed that because of your ego and he said what do you mean? I said would you have missed that in in practice um at your home course? He said probably not. And I said, "Yeah, you were thinking about them and you were concerned what they would think and you really did not want to miss this in front of them. And that's what caused the nervousness and the tension that caused you to miss."

What happens to most people is that they come to these points in their lives where they're really uncomfortable. Maybe they're giving a speech or playing pingpong in front of a bunch of people. It doesn't matter what it is. You if you're nervous and other people are watching, they come to those moments where they're really uncomfortable and they back away because they're too uncomfortable. They're too afraid of of looking foolish in front of others.

Whereas the most successful people, they're willing to look foolish. They're willing to make mistakes. And so I think a lot of people know that, but how do we get there? And so in that moment, it's ask it's realizing that when I'm the most uncomfortable, that's the moment that's the key for you. And it's it's principle number one for inner excellence. Everything is here to teach me and help me. It's all working for my good.

So we're going to go look for those moments when you're most uncomfortable and and say and remind yourself, this is my teacher. And inner excellence is about expanding what you believe is possible. There's three pillars of inner excellence. Belief, freedom, and focus. To be fully engaged in the moment, have freedom to play like a child and and expand what you believe is possible to become to do things you've never done and become someone you've never been.

And to expand what you believe is possible. Kind of that crucial pillar is we need to find those moments where we're uncomfortable and we need to embrace that moment. And the way we do it is we understand that the key thing here is not the outcome. But it's my willingness to be in this moment and not back away. It doesn't matter if you fail horribly. You do that 10 times and fail horribly 10 times. Eventually you're going to get comfortable in those moments and then your skills will be able to match and and break through. But people don't break through because they come to those moments and they shy away.

Shane: How much do you think the modern world has really played with that comparison? It used to be like I I'm just picturing you go back to like 1920s, 1930s. It's like your your reference for comparison was basically like your street maybe your town. People lived reasonably within the same socioeconomic status. George or Beth might have got a new car, but by and large everybody's sort of in the same boat. But now we live in a world where you flip open Instagram and these celebrities who are flying on private jets or people like you remember the Scrooge McDuck thing. They're like they're swimming in their money or rappers burning sort of money on videos. And how much does that mess with us?

Jim: Oh, it's huge. It's huge. Yeah, it's it's very very difficult now. 24/7 comparison and you can you can see what anyone's doing all over the world now. It creates anxieties of mind with too many thoughts from too many concerns and that's what it brings. It's just way too many thought. We need if you want to be good at anything for a long period of time. We need to have way less thoughts and even way less breaths.

Shane: One of the things that stood out to me, you know, when I when I thought about this before reading your book, and I'm still mulling this over, so this conversation is part of my processing. I was like, "Oh, I don't know if that's really bad." On an individual level, it's probably bad. It's bad for mental health, you know, for Shane or for Jim. Uh, but on a society level, it actually results in really good outcomes because it motivates Jim or it motivates Shane to work harder, to push more, to challenge more, to be more aggressive, to push our limits.

Jim: I think that's very well said. that drives the world forward in many ways. But also, so there's the benefit of technology. Someone has an idea in China and we can see it right away in America. The ability to be more productive and efficient and and achieve more is so much higher now. So that's amazing.

Shane: But it comes at a cost,

Jim: but it comes at a huge cost.

Shane: And the cost is individual, but the benefits are largely societable.

Jim: Well, look at pornography now. Pornography is everywhere. It wasn't like before the internet. It wasn't everywhere. You had to get it from a magazine. This negative thing now is infiltrated every single place because of technologies. Technology can really help with productivity, but it can really spread evil fast. It can spread conspiracy theories and and uh negative ideas and falsehoods.

Shane: What's the process if I'm an athlete, I come to you or I come to you and I'm shamed? Like what's that first conversation like? Jim, you know, I've been successful but something doesn't feel right, doesn't feel sustainable. What does that first conversation sort of look like?

Jim: I want to know um what you really want. like why did you why did you contact me? What is it that you really want um besides being world number one or whatever it is? I want to know how you want to feel in your life and how you don't want to feel. If we work together, I'm going to help you learn principles and tools and develop habits of thought and action and how to get that feeling more often. What adds to it? What takes away from it?

Shane: You know, I want to be driven think I want to be driven more by clean fuel. And yet just tying that back, it's like the dirty fuel has been very effective.

Jim: Yeah. And so that's such a crucial thing to understand is that the that quote right there, the dirty fuel has been very effective. Fear can accomplish a lot. So can anger. You can that can really drive people. But the long-term effect is something that a lot of people don't want. For example, losing inner peace and joy.

I don't tell people what to do. I try never to tell people what to do. I just want to help them clarify what they want most. And and this is a good example is is people that are very talented. They get caught up in what I call this competitor's trap. It's just I'm going to be more productive because every time I achieve something, I'm getting that sort of love from like my kids are excited, my family, my co-workers, the world, they're like, "Oh, great job." I get the cheers. And that's the trap is that we we aren't able to think deeper about our lives.

Jim: What happens is most people, especially in Western culture, they're they're just constantly trying to get better and better circumstances for themselves and their kids to make life easier. That's what most people do, isn't it? And that's the great illusion. An easier life is not the best life.

Shane: I mean, to push back on that just for a second because my mind just naturally goes into yes and no again. Yes. I there's a part of me that agrees with that. There's a part of me that looks at these cameras here and is like these would not exist without people pursuing a dream and ambition. Yeah. and doing that perhaps at the cost of social relationships, at the cost of being a parent, at the cost of being the best partner they could be.

Jim: For sure.

Shane: And I don't advocate for those things for anybody unconsciously. However, consciously, they're the reason we have medicine. They're the reason like society

Jim: people have sacrificed.

Shane: Yeah. people have or you know I look at what happened where I used to work post 911 is like people worked 16 hours a day 7 days a week for 7 years and in that process what they were doing was sacrificing for something larger than themselves they felt a part of something and it wasn't religion or God it was but there was meaning and purpose to it and the byproduct of that was sacrificing being a parent sacrificing the relation relationships with other people in order to achieve that, in order to push that forward. And so I have these like dueling sets to my mind where on individual level I'm like, you're 100% correct, but on a societal level, I don't know if that's the best outcome for society. But I do think on an individual level, it's probably the best outcome for individuals.

Jim: Okay, let's look at the um the best possible life has one foot in joy and one foot in suffering. Mhm. First of all, this is not how I would prefer it. I'm not a fan of suffering. What I'm saying is that I believe that this is just how the universe works.

It's not something I'm advocating for. I'm just explaining what I found. Um, and first just the basic one is is um physical fitness you're talking about. If you want to build stronger muscles, you have to break them down. This just is how the universe works. You you can't do it sitting on the couch. You have to you have to make the muscles sacrifice and suffer to get them bigger. That's just how it works. And it's the same thing with wisdom and courage. You can't gain courage by constantly uh just making yourself more more and more comfortable.

Shane: It sounds like a lot of what we're doing is changing the area of focus from our mind. And I'll give you an example. I was talking with Emily Balcetis. She's a doctor. And one of the things that stuck with me about this conversation was she talked about how runners who are running a marathon or athletes who are doing any sort of sport and they hit a wall while they're in the competition. and what do you do when you hit this wall? And she said the the world's best performers, like you know, in her research where they change the area of focus. Like if you're halfway through a marathon, your legs start hurting and you're focused on the finish line, like you're never going to make it. But if you focus on the stop sign that's 50 m in front of you or the red light that you can see or the next visible and then you you focus on the next thing once you achieve that, you'll finish the race and you'll do it in great time.

Jim: That's right. Yeah. Lewis Gordon Pugh, he swam a kilometer at the North Pole and just a speedo, which most people said would would be impossible. They'd die. And he didn't die. One thing about the cold, I think, is very similar to the running when you're really hurting. The problem with the cold is the mind that's thinking of the future. If you're super super cold, but if I asked you, can you last one more second and then we're going to put you in a a hot tub or a sauna? What would most people say? Or even five more seconds.

Okay, there's a sauna right there. Can you go five more seconds? I think most people would say yes. Right? It's the fear of, oh, how long is this going to last? I don't it's it's this projection and the expectation and how all those circumstances do we look at the past and the pain that we've had and project to the future and what's going to happen that's the problem but when we can be in this moment and embrace whatever pain and challenge we have in this moment right just right now and then take the next step that that's the power that she was sharing you know

so what Lewis Gordon Pugh did was his performance coach said you're never going to make it if you just think I'm going to swim one kilometer we've got to break this down into smaller steps. And so they had a flag every 100 meters that represented a group of people on his team. Then his coach said, "I don't want you to think about anything except for that flag. You just got to get to the next flag. Just the next flag."

Shane: you have mantras and one of them I found really powerful which is but I also have a question about you say give 100% of what's available.

Jim: Yeah. So if you have 40% today, you didn't sleep well, you were up late last night, you had maybe too many drinks with your friends, whatever, you give 100% of whatever that 40% is,

Shane: the question that comes to my mind immediately when I hear that is like I have relief. That's my first feeling. It's like, h finally, like somebody understands me. On the other hand, it's like that's an excuse.

Jim: This morning I drove here from central New Jersey and uh the GPS said it was going to take under two hours and it was all close to four hours and through rush hour traffic into Manhattan and I've been working on a book and um not a ton of sleep lately and so the thoughts on the way here the one I was really working hard and not getting caught up in my circumstance of rush hour traffic for 4 hours. Um, but the thought of what if I'm forgetful or it doesn't go well and and I don't um share some good ideas and uh I was in the bathroom as soon as I got here and then I thought about that idea of of goal number one. Give the best of what you have. And I thought, you know, today could be today's like a 30 or 40% day. I don't have a lot to give, but I'm going to give the best of what I have. And that was very helpful to me as I just before I walked into this room. It's empowering in a way.

And then there's this side of me that on the other side like the two sides of my brain if you will like fighting about this this um mantra and I'm like you know one side is like yes this is perfect and the other side is like well if you do that like two or three days in a row like what are you what is that? Who are you like why would that be okay?

Jim: And so I think and well there are sometimes some weeks, some months, some seasons where it's going to be like that. And I think it's super important to know. But I think about your personality. I think it reminds me of people that are um talented and driven and have you called it guilt. Whether it's guilt or some other that part of their mind says you're slacking.

Shane: That's a really good point. We always end these interviews with the same question. I'm so curious what your answer is going to be, which is what is success for you

Jim: right now? There's so much um pain in the world, suffering and starvation and and um in in America, so much division and and need. So I think of success for me and in two things. One is um to become the person that I was created to become to live my purpose to to share God's love, wisdom, and courage with the world. And then in doing that to provide uh um tangible help to people that are hungry and and imprisoned and and uh refugees and widows and orphans to help them.

Shane: That's a great answer. Thank you so much for taking the time today.

Jim: You know, I was not expecting such amazing questions. Uh thank you.