MentorBox Podcast

“The one most important thing to do is to not try to find the one most important thing to do.” - Jared Diamond(click to tweet) We’re raised around the people most genetically similar to us.  This makes it very difficult to isolate how much of our identity comes from DNA and how much is driven by our environment. To complicate things even further, the field of epigenetics has shown that gene expression can be altered by the environment around us.  That’s why on today’s episode of MentorBox’s Book of the Day series, we are joined by the American geographer, historian, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond, to discuss the nature vs. nurture debate. Jared is the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997, awarded a Pulitzer Prize), and in today’s episode he sheds light on this elusive human phenomenon.  Tune in to situate your understanding of the nature vs. nurture debate with the findings of research! “In general, friends that you know longer are more unique. They can’t be replaced.” - Jared Diamond(click to tweet) Points to Keep In MindIn the nature-nurture debate, look at resistance to malaria between Swedes and West Africans, and use of metal tools between Europeans and New GuineansTemperate zones have higher agricultural productivity because of richer soilCosta Rica has gone from the poorest country in Central America to now, the richestThe Cuban government has invested more heavily in education and health than the American governmentWithin the last two decades, most communication has shifted from face-to-face to indirect and through digital screensRemember that new friends are good, but old friends are better“The thing about smart people is that they seem like crazy people to dumb people.” - Albert EinsteinRead Walden by Henry David ThoreauThe difference between function and dysfunction is level of specificity  

Is there such a thing as originality? When we examine creativity, we can see that constructs like language and education have us undoubtedly building off a foundation that’s already been thought of before. This is the predicament the artist finds himself or herself in. To be truly unique is both impossible and very possible. We must understand what base we’re building on top of, while trying to transcend the limits of that foundation with energy that comes from an unknown place.

Succeeding online requires more than great content. We can spend all the time in the world perfecting the marketing video or blog post, but if search engines aren’t motivated to drive traffic there, it is a futile effort. Today, no matter the business, publishing content online is necessary for survival. But embedding SEO-rich keywords into the content is what will push you past survival into actual success.

A career is a series of lessons to learn from. But often times, it’s hard to see this big picture. At each job, we are met with new challenges that keep us up at night. The anxiety and frustration can be overwhelming, but these momentary obstacles are actually the moments that deepen our learning and understanding to become a bigger force in the marketplace.

The pet industry speaks for the changing times. It used to be that if you built a big enough business, you could just mass message consumers, and those seeking your product would become your customers. But today, a corgi owner only wants to know about corgi products. Technology has broken the messaging infrastructure, and now social media allows for niche brands to more pointedly target their audience.  

We check email, message our friends, and scroll through social media. This is the story of us using our smartphones. But the camera inside a smartphone offers something far greater than what we’re using it for. We can actually shoot professional quality visual content (photo and video) with just a few taps on our smartphone’s screen.

Doing the right thing sounds too simple. In the pursuit of self-help and self-development, we often find ourselves in the rabbit holes of complex, over analytical thinkers. But what if the best way to move through life was as simple as locking into as reductive as of a mantra as, “Do the right thing.”

McDonald’s can ask Wendy’s, “What do you think about Trump?” And then suddenly, Wendy’s has to voice its stance on the sociopolitical climate. It never used to be this way; corporations would hide behind the mechanics of the marketing and advertising machine. But today, a company must voice its authentic message to the market through the megaphones on social media.

When we don’t pursue our goals, our minds spiral. The energy and ambition that wants to push us to a greater future gets displaced to areas it doesn’t belong. We begin overthinking our situation, second-guessing our relationships, and crafting stories about why we’re not doing the things we want to be doing.

They say that the world is a confusing place. Is that true? Or are we just letting external stimulus dictate our perception of it? When we mindfully choose to perceive the events around us in a more positive and thoughtful light, our reality becomes simplified.

Some companies are started in a vacuum. The founders draw up a business plan, seek out investment, and go to market on the gamble that their idea will fit into the market. And then there are the companies that constantly push their product  to the public, and iterate based on consumer feedback. Which company does better?

Monday morning means back to work. And as we sit down at our desks, we’re faced with the question: why does this feel the way it does? Over the weekend, we laugh and hang out with friends, and at work we find ourselves rigid and straight-faced. Tailoring dimensions of our personality for the workplace is inevitable, but just how much is too much?

We all want our future reality to be superior to our current reality. But very few of us are actively choosing that course on a daily basis. We are swayed by the temptations and peer pressure of our friends, coworkers, and social circles. To pursue our goals requires a type of sacrifice that means endlessly keeping our eyes on the prize.

Real estate is all over the media. From TV shows like Million Dollar Listing to news reports about the fluctuating real estate market, we are undeniably being served a narrative about real estate. This story, more often than not, touches on the points that it’s easy to “flip” houses and that our national real estate market follows macro-trends.

Are you working for a company or for a person? This question is more important today than ever before. The current landscape calls for businesses and products that are lead by people. Social media is structured to serve the person at the forefront of the company, the voice of the product, and the brains behind the business.

We must equally experience and observe. A healthy balance between these two forces is the recipe for success. Leaning too far in one direction will shift the balance into an unhealthy space. Those who observe too much often fall into the traps of analysis, and those who solely experience never take the time to zoom out and examine ways to improve oneself.

Approximately half of all marriages end in divorce. So then why does it carry such a stigma in today’s world? If one out of every two marriages in our network are bound to end in a split, then we must adjust our idea of what it means to be married. According to the data, the likelihood of a lifetime partnership is just not in the human being’s favor.

Innovation is required for survival. But most companies forget this in their pursuit of profit. They lock on to strongly to the safe bets, those that ensure a steady gain month-to-month. However, this path plateaus over time, and the organization will become stagnant. To experience growth, resources must be allocated to innovation departments that aren’t constrained with concern for the bottom line.

It’s hard to know when to work hard and when to relax. Today, more than ever before, the stress on productivity is constant. We feel we can do more with our days, squeeze more commitments into our free time, and then we will live a more fruitful life. But the reality is that we don’t. Increased productivity comes from a different perception of time, not squeezing more obligations into it.

Success is marketed as something that happens overnight. But the truth is that behind every success story is a narrative of continuous hard work. Those who solely focus on getting a tad better with each day in front of them are the ones who end up at the top.

Success doesn’t happen overnight. Our craft is a continuous grind, one that requires relentless and deliberate practice. As long as we stay focused on improving, we will eventually manifest the future of our dreams. However, this is easier said than done.

The 21st century attention span is short. With our Macbooks and iPhones calling for every fiber of our attention, we’ve become conditioned to instant responses of information. But education isn’t this. To thoroughly learn a subject matter requires thoughtful and deliberate practice.

We can’t just read. As tempting as it might be to endlessly get lost in books, we must also choose to live our own lives. A healthy balance between life experience and reading gives us the flexibility is the secret to success. Books teleport us to new realities, but experiencing the world ourselves is what gives us the superpower to write our own realities.

Everyone is starting a podcast. It seems that with each week, somebody you know is posting about his/her podcast. Dogs, religion, weather—the topic of conversation doesn’t matter, anything goes in this new medium. But before you dive in and start your own, it’s important to take a step back and make sure you’re approaching it as deliberately as possible.

We’ve all watched a bad speech. There we are sitting in the audience, either twiddling our thumbs in boredom or squirming in our chairs from anxiety. Public-speaking is no easy task, so we must make sure we do the prep work up front to best prepare for the limelight.

We all have strengths and weaknesses. So we’re left with the decision: do we spend time working on our weaknesses or do we pursue our strengths instead? By pursuing the former, we create a more well-rounded individual. But if we choose the latter, we are able to cut through the noise by specializing and being that much better than the competition.

We are bombarded by advertisements all day long. Most we ignore, but some catch our eye. It is these advertisements that we must take note of. Understanding the robust design process behind them can help improve our messaging for our own product or service.

Our alarm clock gets set to 6AM. We say we’re going to wake up early to go the gym before work. But then the alarm clock beeps, and the voices in our heads convince us that pressing snooze is okay. This is the core of the human condition; we must negotiate the conflicting interests of our internal monologue.

The voices in our heads are convincing. They will elegantly apply the stories we know to the events in our lives to make sense of the world around us. This process is inevitable, so we must make sure that the narratives we choose to tell ourselves are holding us to an honest reality.

Our brains are hardwired for story. When we are exposed to a compelling conflict with engaging characters, our minds become enraptured by the events at play. The science shows that we remember stories roughly 22 times more than non-story content. This means we must infuse this story-based content into each vertical of our personal brand.

Fake it until you make it. Early in our careers, we’re told this expression countless times. It’s supposed to be an antidote to imposter syndrome, but is it actually effective? If you’re experiencing that feeling of not being worthy of your accomplishment, there’s something else you can do. Work harder.

Traveling is scary. You pack your bag, hop an airplane, and have to find your way through a foreign country. But traveling is only scary because we’re so embedded in our routine of comfort. When you travel, those known variables of your day-to-day (where to eat, how to get from A to B, etc.) get ruptured by the spontaneity required for the adventure.

We can’t let go of our smartphones. No matter where you go or who you look at, it seems everyone around you is glued to the device in their hands. While this may seem like society is shifting into technological addiction, the rising force of Generation Z says otherwise. While yes, they lean heavily on their devices, it is actually that exact behavior that has caused them to become particularly skilled at forming opinions and thus, a rising force for sociopolitical change.

Rom-coms paint a specific picture of love. Happy couples skip through a city holding hands, free from the weight of jobs, worry, and stress. This reference point confuses more than it helps, as what we, in the real world, end up experiencing is something far different.

We don’t like Wall Street. Financial institutions are heavily stigmatized in today’s world. Movies like The Wolf of Wall Street and current events like the financial crisis of 2008 leave us distrusting the economic powers that run our world. While this may feel like the appropriate response, that distrust fuels ignorance, as we reject the institutions on principle and don’t try to find the deeper truth and connection behind them.

A full-time job no longer means 40 hours per week. Instead, it asks you to be committed to the company mission, available on Slack at all hours of the day. We, as a society, have accepted this shift because the companies we work for are no longer the soul-sucking corporations of the past. Today, more than ever before, companies must have a socially conscious backbone for employees to accept the greater working demands.

Success means nothing if we’re unhappy. But this is hard to accept in a society so conditioned to believe in the merits of climbing the ranks. When we lock ourselves in our office, we turn off our ability to put positive energy into the world.

People don’t read anymore. Instead, we listen to audiobooks on our commutes and watch Netflix at night. Traditionalists view this as problematic, that the written word must be visually read and silently digested. But the tides of the world are moving this way, and it’s our duty to adapt to them.

Adversity is inevitable. But what you do with adversity is a choice. We have two options when something unfortunate happens to us. We can either sit and wallow in the misery, or we can transcend the circumstances by reframing our experience to be something positive.

Eating healthy and exercising are difficult habits to maintain. If your office orders pizza for lunch, your body gets stuck metabolizing the rest of the day. Your workout that night is cancelled and the whole week is thrown off-course. But what if you had the mental fortitude to resist that office pizza party? What if you thought about health in a different light?

Most of us do the same thing every day. And with this monotonous routine, it can become difficult to stay motivated. However, we can hack this complacency by figuring out what our greater goals are and what metrics lie beneath those goals. From there, we can track those analytics to monitor our progress along the way to success.

Dreaming is tricky territory. That’s because visualizing our dreams can sometimes feel like we’re living them in the physical reality. If we’re not careful, this illusion can lead us astray and we will spend our days dreaming instead of doing. However, once we become mindful of this, we can start to visualize our dreams with an emphasis on making them happen in actuality.

A business has many different moving parts. But they can all be categorized under one of four umbrellas: product, advertising, sales, and customer loyalty. When each of these pillars is maximized to its potential, the business runs by itself and produces a profit to sustain its operation.

Machine-learning has never been smarter. With our smartphones predicting where we’re going and our social media applications feeding us a curated news feed of our friends’ updates, we are becoming less and less responsible for our choices. It is no secret that we are becoming part-human and part-robot; however, instead of being frightened by this shift, we must understand and cease the opportunity it presents.

You can’t win if you don’t have the right resources. But sometimes we lose sight of this fact. We try with our current setup, and often fall short because of the lacking infrastructure around us. Giving yourself the best shot at winning requires more than just working hard.

We all have that one goal we’re too scared to attempt. But why are we scared to go after it? Is it actually because we think the goal is too challenging? Or is it because we’re scared of what we’ll learn about ourselves if we accomplish the goal? If you achieve the impossible, your other excuses for not accomplishing x,y, and z are exposed as hollow, and you can no longer listen to them.

Watching TV used to mean watching commercials. But today, we’re either bingeing on commercial-free platforms like Netflix and Amazon or turning to our smartphones when the commercials play. Research shows that 89% of TV ads are ignored today. So what does this mean for the brands who can no longer interrupt us with their messaging?

Intellectual humility opens the gateways to productive conversation. But those who are certain in their beliefs don’t see it this way. When we find ourselves in discussions with these individuals, we are unable to push the needle, trapped in their bounds of thinking. Progress in any political conversation, business decision, or personal conflict requires an intellectual humility, that openness to accept that you and your opinion may in fact be wrong.

We are evolutionarily hardwired to focus on the negative. But that doesn’t serve us well in today’s society. We no longer need these sensitive receptors to stress or violence because our world has removed lions and tigers from our lives. However, we can’t remove the hardwiring, so we displace it onto things that don’t deserve it (i.e., work, relationships, etc.) The antidote to this is learning how to focus in a way that allows you to be present with what really matters.

When you believe your dreams to be unique, you won’t achieve them. That’s because you have the perfect excuse for inaction. How can you know how to accomplish a dream if nobody has ever done it before? But that’s where we go wrong. No matter the industry, profession, or success story, somebody has done what you’re dreaming up. And as the Chinese Proverb so clearly states, “If you want to know the way, ask somebody on the way back.”

It used to be that authors wrote books to be authors. But today, any profession is welcome to try the medium. Whether you’re an entrepreneur telling the story of your business or a professional YouTuber writing a how-to-guide on viral video marketing, the book welcomes all those looking to turn to the page. It is, after all, just another medium on the list of platforms your brand must have a presence on.