Trained On The Wrong Thing

One thing that I’m obsessed with listening to at the moment is founder podcasts. There’s a specific channel (20VC with Harry Stebbings) that is run by a venture capitalist who interviews some of the biggest founders in the world, particularly in the tech and AI space.

Sometimes I stop and think how crazy it is where you can just sit and listen to an hour of lessons from people who run the biggest companies in the world

(Or - if needs be - you can copy and paste the transcript into Claude, and it can summarise the lessons from each one… Although I think there’s benefit in listening sometimes.)

What interests me is that I know coaches listen to podcasts that are interviewing successful people. And I think they should - the old advice used to be to read the autobiographies of successful businessmen, which I think is still a great thing to do - but podcasts are much easier to record, meaning you’re closer to their current wins / failures / lessons.

The issue with coaches is that they train their brain on the wrong bit - they love the rags to riches, underdog story.

Which is great - your brain is trained to love that - most people feel like underdogs, the brain constructs an underdog narrative, probably to drive us to beat the odds and push ourselves towards doing more in order to ‘survive’ (sounds dramatic but correct from an evolutionary perspective)

So we cling on to the amazing story of the person who lived on their friend’s sofa for a whole summer while they built, but now own a billion dollar company. Or the person who had a massive bereavement and went down the wrong path, only to pull themselves out and become successful

Sure - that’s inspirational.

But there’s also a huge amount of tactics in these pods - how they scaled, how they thought, mistakes they made to avoid. But we don’t register them, because our brain isn’t trained to see them

Why? We don’t have anywhere to store them. So why would the brain keep track of something it won’t use?

Build a system for remembering ideas - your brain will start seeking them out and finding them everywhere. You’ll be able to use ideas from the best thinkers in the world.