Two Friends Talking About Things Nate Green and Jason Lengstorf

Nate and Jason are back in Portland, which means we no longer have excuses not to record new episodes! 😅

How do people make choices? What mental models, frameworks, and other factors go into making those choices. And more importantly, _where the hell do those mental models come from_?

In this episode, Nate and Jason talk about how they built their own decision-making frameworks by borrowing ideas from business, doing concentrated exercises to help them identify what they’re especially good at, and doing the meta-work to decide what they really care about in the first place.

Discussed in this podcast:
- Yak Shaving/Meta-Work: https://lengstorf.com/yak-shaving
- Eben Pagan: https://ebenpagantraining.com/
- Refocus: https://getrefocus.com/

When the shit hits the fan and your back’s against the wall and you’ve run out of other dramatic cliches, what habits, mindsets, and material things do you need to have in your life to continue on your path and be successful?

That’s what this episode is all about.

Although we go on our normal huge philosophical rants, this episode of 2FTAT is extremely tactical.

We talk about:

- how much money is enough, and how much debt is acceptable
- investing in yourself by building skills and networking
- defining your own version of a “successful life”
- getting rid of unnecessary things (both physical and mental)
- and a lot more

Referenced in this podcast:

- Ramit Sethi's blog, I Will Teach You To Be Rich — http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/
- Total Money Makeover, by Dave Ramsey — http://amzn.to/2eKg2g0
- The Minimalists — http://www.theminimalists.com/
- Freedom — http://bit.ly/2eT2ug2
- Phil Caravaggio — https://twitter.com/philcaravaggio
- Marisa Morby — https://marisamorby.com/blog/
- Meetup.com — https://www.meetup.com/

According to Derek Sivers, you should be optimizing your life for one thing — but that one thing is a different thing for each person.

In this conversation, Nate and Jason discuss what they’re currently optimizing for, what they’ve optimized for in the past, and how those decisions have evolved over time.

Additional topics (tangents?) include:

- giving yourself the freedom to continue
- avoiding mediocrity
- the unexpected side benefits of optimizing our lives

How do the ways we describe ourselves influence our behavior?

In this conversation, Nate and Jason discuss the effects of changing our minds, how the labels we choose for ourselves can hijack our behavior, and whether or not a five-year plan can work.

Referenced in this podcast:

Nate's (young and naïve article about) 4 foods he'll never eat again: https://nategreen.org/4-foods-ill-almost-never-eat-again/

Jason's article about the stages of learning: https://lengstorf.com/learning-trap/

This quote from Bruce Lee:

> "Before I studied the art, a punch to me was just like a punch, a kick just like a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick no longer a kick. Now that I've understood the art, a punch is just like a punch, a kick just like a kick."

This quote from Steve Jobs:

> “I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

Tony is just about ready to close his business and start working at Starbucks.

After ten years in the fitness industry, he feels like he’s lost the spark, and he’s not sure what he should do next — he just knows that what he’s doing right now isn’t making him happy.

In this conversation, Nate Green and Jason Lengstorf talk with Tony about what we can do to find direction without having to burn it all down and start over. How can you tell if it’s time to make a major change? If something feels wrong, what would make it feel right? We cover all this, and in the end come up with a surprising experiment for Tony that just might set him back on the track to happiness.

NOTE: The audio on this call is a little janky, with some background noise and lag, since everyone was calling in from different corners of the world. If you can forgive the quality of the recording, we hope the quality of the content makes up for it.

0:40 — “I’m just at an interesting point … I’m at a standstill.” – Tony

5:07 — “When you talk about your business, you talk about it like you’ve kind of lost the spark.” – Jason

9:20 — “I lost that beginner mindset.” – Tony

10:59 — “Would that fix this thing, or would there still be a big piece missing?” – Nate

12:33 — “Do you have a picture in your head of what you would like to be doing?” – Jason

16:05 — “I feel more connected with who I am and all the people around me.” – Tony

17:32 — “How would it feel to not run your own business anymore?” – Nate

19:14 — “To be honest … I’ve put in applications just for part-time jobs.” – Tony

20:11 — “If you found a way to make it work, would you still want to do it? Or is it something you need to cut?” – Nate

21:41 — “I had a couple conversations with Nate where I was like, ‘Man, I think I might just quit and get a job as a bartender.’” – Jason

26:05 — “How else can I contribute to this field?” – Tony

29:29 — “If you’re ready to walk away, then there’s no harm in trying something.” – Jason

32:39 — “My thought behind the part-time job was to test out something different, and work in a different environment.” – Tony

35:04 — “You don’t need to make it big. … You’re just testing the waters.” – Nate

38:07 — “I don’t actually schedule time for myself.” – Tony

40:24 — “When I get better, it spills out into other areas of my life.” – Tony

41:46 — “You’re creating space for you to live up to your own expectations for yourself.” – Jason

45:58 — “It didn’t even feel like I had to schedule the time. I just changed my mindset about how I was going to do it.” – Jason

46:43 — “I do that a lot, where I’ll lose myself in social media or something, and that could be time where … it’s just time for me.” – Tony

49:58 — “It’s really easy to say, ‘That doesn’t seem like progress.’” – Nate

52:02 — “You control your schedule; your schedule doesn’t control you.” – Jason

54:56 — “I don’t want to be the best fitness coach in my life; I just want to be the best person I can be.” – Tony

57:07 — “Keep a pulse on yourself, and see if just that little change starts to make you feel a little bit better about things.” – Jason

Lindsay always thought she’d eventually know what she wanted to be when she grew up.

But after changing majors, grad school, getting married, and working in a job for three and a half years, she’s still not quite sure what “grown up” means, or what she wants to be — and the fact that she just got laid off is making that question a little more pressing.

In this conversation, Nate Green and Jason Lengstorf talk with Lindsay about building skills instead of putting in time at a job, creating routines to keep us on track, and whether or not knowing what we want to be when we grow up is actually a good thing. At the end, the three of them devise an experiment for Lindsay to try that will help her keep the good stuff going, even when she starts a new job.

NOTE: The audio on this call is a little janky, with some background noise and lag, since everyone was calling in from different corners of the world. If you can forgive the quality of the recording, we hope the quality of the content makes up for it.

1:37 — “There’s a part of me that wants to believe that all of us really know what we want to be when we grow up.” – Lindsay

2:35 — “I have now muted Jason.” – Nate

3:52 — “How can you get as good as possible at a very specific skill?” – Nate

4:40 — “I found the unmute button.” – Jason

6:41 — “The only way you could ever know exactly what you want would be to stop evolving.” - Jason

8:46 — “With careers it always seems so dire. … Our interests don’t align with our careers.” – Lindsay

13:58 — “The people who seem to be happiest … is it because of an overlap of those skills and interests?” – Jason

15:27 — “What do you feel like you are very, very good at?” – Nate

16:02 — “It feels like I’m gloating, and I feel like I’m going to say something and then suck at it.” – Lindsay

17:21 — “You know when you see those forwards that go around on Facebook that are like, ‘Pick the 5 people who would be on your team during the zombie apocalypse’?” – Jason

19:14 — “Anything that I do — and I don’t know if this is a skill — I’m damn well going to try to make it good.” – Lindsay

22:48 — “When the rug got pulled out from the pipe dream of being a rock star, I woke up to realize, ‘Holy shit, I accidentally built a practical skill set.’” – Jason

24:13 — “As long as it’s in service of a skill that seems really interesting to you … that’s a really, really good place to start.” – Nate

25:12 — “Does this skill serve me? And in what ways does it serve me?” – Lindsay

26:23 — “Someone can take a job away from you. But no one can take a skill away from you.” – Nate

27:58 — “I remember researching, ‘What to do if you hate your job and you can’t leave it.’” – Lindsay

29:11 — “It removes that mental burden of feeling like you’re wasting time.” – Jason

39:41 — “Ostensibly — ob-stensibly? That’s a horrible word to say out loud.” – Nate

40:37 — “They’d feel like they were doing work that matters. … That’s just my hunch.” – Nate

44:27 — “What concerns me? … Not knowing what the fuck I’m doing. … Feeling like an impostor.” – Lindsay

46:32 — “I know I keep bringing up the cat.” – Nate

47:34 — “I definitely like the quiet, and the peace — the stillness of the day.” – Lindsay

49:48 — “Where I started to get it corrected was when I built new routines that I could carry with me.” – Jason

51:42 — “We have a little bit of downtime, and we start rekindling some of these passions … and then we get back into the routine of working and those things just fall away again.” – Nate

53:43 — Jason references this article on staying consistent using rituals: bit.ly/1SsZeGv

54:26 — “How can you create a similar type of ritual that will allow you to do that stuff, and would you be willing to let