Ep 32 Crafting an Unforgettable Presence - The Columbus Story - Dirrty Chai with Chio

In this episode of the Dirty Thai Podcast, the host discusses the importance of thinking again and reevaluating our circumstances, goals, and habits. He uses the story of the frog in boiling water as a metaphor for staying in situations that are slowly becoming detrimental to us. He emphasizes the need to have a mindset of questioning and rethinking in order to avoid being the frog. The host also shares a personal example of how identity played a role in his own decision-making process. Overall, the episode encourages listeners to pause and reflect on whether they are truly where they want to be and take action accordingly. Hello, hi, welcome to this week's installment of the Dirty Thai Podcast with me, Dhruv. The podcast where we focus on holistic, professional and personal success by growing and developing the common denominator to all your successes or your failures and everything in between. It's about the mindset, emotional regulation and the intentional personal development that underpins holistic success. Today's installment is the third installment in the Crafting an Unforgettable Presence series and this is the Columbus story like you have never heard it before. It's actually quite amusing to me that when I started the series, I was at great pains to try and explain that I wouldn't be running the series as a sequence, that I would be telling stories as I found stories that I thought should be added to the series, not necessarily in a week-by-week order. To my surprise, and perhaps I shouldn't be surprised at this point because we now know how the reticular activating system of the brain works, but to my surprise still, the stories keep finding me right on time for the next installment. If you think you know the Christopher Columbus story that I'm about to tell you, let me tell you with the greatest of confidence that you have no idea. Let's have some fun with this. This story is told and inspired by multiple lens. Because I'm doing the 75-Hard Challenge and I have to read 10 pages of a personal development book every day, I find myself reading multiple books in different mediums, but one of the books I'm reading is obviously How to Make Yourself Unforgettable, which is generally the inspiration for this series. Then there are some other books that are in play. So you have Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic, you have Adam Grant's Think Again, and you have Yuval Harari's Sapiens. All those books have come together with a piece of this story, which is what I'm finding particularly serendipitous. I don't know that choosing this combination of books was intentional. It really wasn't, but each book has contributed a significant part to this story and what makes it pertinent for our Crafting an Unforgettable Present series. So let's start with Adam Grant's Think Again because that is the backbone of the story. In addition to Adam Grant's book Think Again, I also listened to Adam Grant talking about the ideas in the book in a TED Talk that is based on the frog in the boiling water. And what I'm going to tell you is a combination of info from the TED Talk and from the book. We all know the story of the frog in the boiling water. In the story, the frog lacks the ability to reconsider. So this is what happens in the story. There's this story that goes around that if you put a frog in boiling water, it will jump out immediately and survive. But if you put the frog in cold water and you slowly heat the water to boiling, the frog does not realize that the water is heating up and that it is dying. And eventually it dies without taking the necessary action to escape. But Adam Grant is arguing in Think Again. And Adam Grant is a professor of industrial psychology at Wharton University. He's highly respected in his field. He has written multiple books that are heavily research-based. He is an awkward nerd. I love everything about him but especially his brain. And I love that his books are so layered and so well thought out and so well researched. And that's why they form the backbone of the idea that we're discussing today. And when you read his books, you see the same idea in different ways the more you read the book because the books are layered in that way. It also gives a lot of credence to the idea that you should go back from time to time to read the books that you've considered great, not because they have changed but because you have. Anyway, so what I got in my first go around with Think Again was this story about the frog. But what is it that he's trying to tell us? So he's trying to tell us that without the key ability to think again in a situation, we as people end up in situations where we are the frog in the cold water that is slowly heating up, where we don't recognize that the circumstances that we're in are changing, that they're changing to our detriment and that perhaps we should exit. So it could be an employment relationship. It could be a love relationship. It could be a friend relationship. It could even be your relationship with yourself. It could be failing to recognize that a goal you've been pursuing should now change or the manner in which that you're getting to that goal should now change. It is quite easy for human beings to look at the frog story and think how is that even possible when we are living that experience day to day to day. And Adam is arguing that we should keep a mind that is always in a state of saying, what about, or maybe I don't know, or maybe this could be looked at differently. And when you do that, you mitigate the risk of being the frog in the boiling water. And he points out that his research has shown that people are quicker to rethink outfits, to rethink their kitchen, to rethink renovating, to rethink decorating, but they are very slow to rethink their identity, their goals and their habits. And this is very easy for all of us. Now I was listening to a podcast in which Stephen Bartlett, diary of a CEO, who wrote a book of the same name possibly, I'm not sure, but he wrote a book recently and he was interviewing Ali Abdaal. Ali Abdaal is a wildly successful, wildly successful YouTuber, right? He earns millions. He's a millionaire from this business. He's also a trained doctor. And the discussion around why he became a doctor is the perfect illustration of the point that Adam was making here. Ali became a doctor because both his parents were doctors and everybody who he knew's parents were doctors. And he learned early on to say that he wanted to be this type of doctor or this type of doctor as early as six. I think he was saying he wanted to be a gastroenterologist. I'm not even sure I'm saying that correctly, but a six year old was saying it. And he said he learned very early on that when he said that, the adults would be like, oh, oh my God, look at this one. And they would admire him for it. So Stephen actually makes an effort to change the point he's making for him. So he says, are you saying you wanted to do it for external admiration or? And he says, yes, because that was the only value that was associated with it in my mind. And now as he grew up, right, he realized he had an affinity for creating programs, but also and coding, but also that he had an affinity for teaching and he loved to teach. But he had to be a doctor, of course, because that's what one does. And that's an illustration of some of the ways in which you can become a frog in the boiling water, where your circumstance slowly heats up around you. In other words, you are setting yourself on a path that is not necessarily the one that you should be on, because all of your circumstances are gently nudging you in that direction. And as your discomfort increases over time, so does your comfort with that identity and that way of thinking. And the idea that you should forever you should you should be a doctor because everybody around you is a doctor anyway. He does go on to become a doctor, but he continues to pursue his passion on the side. He sort of stumbles into his passion. He starts then teaching. And I think this is key as well. He starts then teaching people how to pass the exams because he's exceptionally clever. And he came top of his class in all of his in when he graduated, he was top of his class, which is no mean feat. Right. So he starts teaching other medical students how to pass the exams on YouTube. And eventually one video goes viral and it all goes viral. And then he becomes a wildly successful YouTuber. But what's interesting is his vocation was always to teach, but he didn't necessarily need to step into the classroom to fulfill that vocation. He found an alternative way to deliver or to fulfill his purpose. And I thought to myself, in some ways he might have failed to think again in the way that Adam Grant has in mind, but in others he did. And when he did start thinking again, he coincided with his purpose and also with wild success. That was a very it was a revelatory moment for me when the story from Think Again and the story from the podcast came together. Now, Adam Grant, to go back to his point, says we struggle with identity. We struggle with rethinking identity, rethinking goals and rethinking habits. This is for many reasons. And all that he's asking you to do is to pause and say, is this really where I want to be? Am I comfortable? Why am I uncomfortable and what can I do about it? So as far as your identity, there are things that are frightening. So let me use a personal example here for when I got married and subsequently divorced. When I look back now, I can see myself as the frog in the hot water. But also I can see how identity played a part. It wasn't the only reason, but it played a part in me not thinking again. Just before I got married was the first time I saw a side of my would-be husband that scared me a little bit. And I thought, oh, my goodness, danger, danger, danger. But I also was the engaged woman who had already paid for the wedding. And the wedding was maybe a couple of weeks away. Who would I be now without this? And the fear of letting go of that identity, even though the best advice I received in that moment, because the characteristic that was displayed was so fundamentally unsettling and scary that my friend said to me, my closest friend at the time said to me, either postpone or cancel this wedding. That was the right advice. But I thought, but everything is paid for and I'm engaged and I'm about to be a married woman. Do I want to give it up, all of it up for this one incident? The answer is I should have, but I wasn't prepared to say I don't know the answer and take the time needed to think, right? Then I subsequently got married and obviously the particular difficulty escalated, ultimately resulting in a divorce, right? But it is the fact that I was so beholden to the identity at a point when I could have made the choice earlier that resulted in me having to let go of that identity, not necessarily because I wanted to, but because the situation became untenable and then subsequently let it go. But a lot of pain could have been avoided and a lot of experience perhaps, maybe, maybe it's, all I'm saying is, what I'm trying to say is, it's not that the experience had no value. It's just that the experience could have been avoided by simply giving myself space to step back from my identity at the time and say, what else is there, right? What else is there? And possibly even what is safer? He also talks about habits. We get entrenched in our habits and in the way that we do things and we fail to ask ourselves whether this habit is a good one. And here he gives an example of how he found a way to deliver his classes because he's an awkward introvert. He found a way to deliver his teaching material at the university in a particular way using a little magic trick and memorizing his student's name. And he would do the same thing year after year after year until one day after a lecture on thinking again, one of his students who possibly was retaking the class just casually pointed out that he was hypocritical because he didn't rethink his material. And he realized you also get caught in a habit either because it's good or it's bad or because it works so much so that you fail to innovate. And the idea is be able to every so often look at your situation and your circumstances and to question the big things, your identity, your goals, your habits, and ask if they're still serving you. I remember someone talking about eating healthy and how they decided that instead of a greasy breakfast, they would have a protein bar. And then they picked up a protein bar and they would eat this thing every day, eat this thing every day. And everything was going great until someone eventually maybe a couple of years down the line says to them, maybe you should see a nutritionist, they see a nutritionist. And it turns out this protein bar, which is a health item sold in a health shop, turned out to be the most unhealthy thing that this person could have been eating for their body, that it didn't agree with them, it had allergens in them that were making them sick. But the point is this, they thought that they were implementing a good habit, and they doubled down on it, and they held on to it with zero questions for years before somebody else forced to think again on them. And I'm giving a wide range of examples so that you understand that this applies to all areas of life. Adam also points out that intelligence can be a handicap, because people who are super intelligent, and who are critical thinkers sometimes tend to think that their way of thinking is without limitation, that there is no way they could get something wrong. And because of that, they don't check their blind spot. Adam himself tells the story of how he and his friends saved some money when they were younger. They went to Panama, and they wanted to climb up the mountain and look inside the volcano. That was the goal. And so they checked the maps, they did everything they needed to do, they carried some food that was appropriate for their trip, or their walk that was going to be two hours, then they started climbing. They had been climbing for four hours before they thought maybe something's wrong here, right? Like, why is this taking long? But even though they had the inkling that something might not be right, they didn't act on it. They continued going, because A, nothing was going to get between them and their goal, and B, they were gritty. They were going to look over the lip of that volcano, and they were going to see what it looks like inside. And as it turns out, they had been reading the wrong map. They were poorly equipped. Instead of going up the two-hour volcano, they had gone up the eight-hour one, which was the highest one on the Panama Island. And they did not have nearly enough water or food to even survive this kind of trip. But they realized that when they got to the top, which was eight hours later and sunset, with no food, no water, no cell phones, and no plan, right? And this is called an escalation of commitment to a losing cause. It's also recognized as sunk cost bias. When you make a poor decision at the beginning, and the decision starts to show itself as poor, but you've already invested in time and energy and effort, and you keep telling yourself, no, no, no, no, no, I'll work it out, I'll work it out, and I'll work it out, this can be seen in relationships, it can be seen in business investments, it can be seen in many aspects of life. Sometimes even in friendship. It can be seen in any area of life, maybe even in the school you selected for your child. But once you are in there and you've made this commitment, a lot of people have what is called sunk cost bias, or an escalation of that commitment in an effort to fix it. Sometimes this escalation of commitment also affects gamblers. And that's how some people end up losing everything they've won again, because they're just like, if I just put a little more, I can win more. If I put a little more, I can win more. And I'm not talking here about addicted people, I'm talking about people who are misguided in the idea of escalating commitment, in the idea of failing to think again. There are businesses, actually, there are lots of businesses that I can give as examples of failing to think again, Blockbuster, Kodak, Blackberry. Kodak competed with Fiji at the time, Fujifilm, Fujifilm, yes, at a time in our lives, I'm sure the people who are my age or older will remember. Fujifilm has gone on to become a leading skincare brand. They thought again, just as the cell phone developed the camera, Fujifilm was just like, oh, there's a problem here. What else can we do? And they experimented with other products. And they tried other things while Kodak stuck to the script, right? And I'm going with the Kodak Fujifilm story, because I've told you the Blackberry story before, you know, the Blockbuster story before Blockbuster refused to buy Netflix, because they refused to think again. Blackberry was ahead of the field by a mile, but because they refused to think again, they were overtaken and left in the dust and left for extinction, right? And Kodak is the same. There's the odd Kodak shop here and there, still doing the same old things, still not evolving. And their days are already numbered, whether they know it or not. But they continue to escalate their commitment, because we live in a society that worships hustle and grit. And where we should pause to think again, we don't, because we're just like, oh, I'm a hustler. Oh, I can make it work. Oh, I've got grit. But sometimes we fail to understand that you need, it's not a, the grit that is applauded is not a commitment to failure. It's a commitment to finding a workable outcome. It's a commitment to finding a workable result. And often we actually commit to a failing method. And that's what we need to think again. Goals are great. They can also cause short-sightedness, because what happened in the Panama story is that they were going up, and they were going up and they had decided what it was going to look like and what they were going to do, so much so that they failed to look around and recognize something was wrong with the process. Something was wrong with the process. The same thing applies to routines. And we've talked about this, I've explained the routine thing, that picking up the protein bar and thinking that it's healthy, this is called cognitive entrenchment. This is when you have placed yourself in a routine and in a habit, and you're unable to see any other way of doing it. I've actually been seeing it recently as I talk about 75 Hard to people. I don't think everyone should do 75 Hard. It's a choice, right? But what I am very aware of is the way people are quick to declare that they could never do it. And I think to myself, it's one thing if you don't want to do it, but why do you think you can never do it? Why do you make the declaration that it can't be done? Because you're cognitively entrenched in the way that you think and the way that you do things. So, the idea that you could possibly find time to read 10 pages or to take a photo every day becomes an automatic impossibility because the script that you've given your brain already is it can't be done. And the invitation today is purely to open your mind to the possibility. And I'm going to step away from Adam Grant for a little bit and tell you a different story from the book Sapiens. And I was telling you that all of these things brought something. All of these books that I'm reading and all of the material I've consumed this week has brought something to this episode. So let's talk about Sapiens. So in Sapiens, there is a section, this book is 500 pages long, but somewhere around page 319, when Yuval, who in this book talks about the history of humans, the history of Sapiens from inception to current. There is a section where he is now talking about the rise of imperialism and the marriage of science and the empire. And there he starts to talk about maps. And he starts with and I'm going to take it from the book as it is because I think it's very well told. So he talks about how the modern explore and conquer mentality is nicely illustrated by the development of world maps. Many cultures drew world maps long before the modern age. Obviously none of them really knew the whole world. No Afro-Asian culture knew about America and no American culture knew about Afro-Asia. But unfamiliar areas were simply left out or were filled with imaginary monsters and wonders. These maps had no empty spaces. They gave the impression of a familiarity with the entire world. During the 15th and 16th century, Europeans began to draw world maps with lots of empty spaces, one indication of the development of the scientific mindset, as well as the European imperial drive. The empty maps were a psychological and ideological breakthrough, a clear admission that the Europeans were ignorant of large parts of the world. The crucial turning point came in 1492 when Christopher Columbus sailed westward from Spain seeking a new route to East Asia. Columbus still believed in the old complete world maps and completers in quotes. Using them, he calculated that Japan should have been located around 7,000 km west of Spain. In fact, more than 20,000 km and an entire unknown continent separate East Asia from Spain. And on 12 October 1492, at about 2 a.m., Columbus's expedition collided with the unknown continent. Juan Rodriguez Bermejo, watching from the mast of the ship Pinta, spotted an island in what we now call the Bahamas and shouted, Land! Land! Christopher Columbus believed he had reached a small island off of the East Asian coast. He called the people he found there, Indians, in quotes because he thought that he had landed in the Indies, what we now call East Indies or the Indonesian archipelago. Columbus stuck to this era for the rest of his life. The idea that he had discovered a completely unknown continent was inconceivable for him and for many of his generations. For thousands of years, not only did the greatest thinkers and scholars agree with him, but also infallible scriptures had known only Europe, Africa and Asia. Could they all have been wrong? Could the Bible have missed half the world? It would be as if in 1969, on its way to the moon, Apollo 11 had crashed into a hitherto unknown moon circling the earth, which all previous observations had failed to somehow spot. In his refusal to admit ignorance, Columbus was still a medieval man. He was convinced that he knew the whole world and he discovered a significant part of the world, but this momentous discovery failed to convince him that maybe his world view was different. What blew my mind about this is the realization that Christopher Columbus died with empirical evidence that he had discovered a new continent, but he refused to admit it to himself. He refused to accept that this could be anything more than a tiny island. The first modern man was Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian sailor who took part in several expeditions to America in the years 1499 to 1504. This is long after Christopher Columbus has done this. Between 1502 and 1504, two texts describing these expeditions were published in Europe. They were attributed to Vespucci. These texts argued that the new lands discovered by Columbus were not islands off of the East Asian coast, but rather an entire continent unknown to the scriptures, to classical geographers and contemporary Europeans. In 1507, convinced by these arguments, a respected mapmaker named Martin Waldseemüller published an updated world map, the first ever map to show the place where Europe's westward sailing fleets under Columbus had landed on a separate continent. So it was the first map to show that land as a separate continent. Having drawn it, Martin had to give it a name, and erroneously believing that Amerigo Vespucci had been the person who discovered it, he named the continent in his honor, America. That map became so popular and was copied by so many cartographers, spreading the name that he had given the new land far and wide. There is poetic justice in the fact that a quarter of the world and two of its seven continents are named after a little-known Italian whose sole claim to fame is that he had the courage to say, we do not know. Isn't that mind-blowing? We live in a time, and Columbus lived in a time, where confidence was mistaken for competence. And because history repeats itself, we are living in a similar time. There is grit, and there's knowing when to quit. There is confidence, and then there is competence. There is fear of saying, what's going on here? And committing to an idea so that we can simply sound informed. Great thoughts are great, according to Adam Grant. But the ability to rethink, a confident humility that pervades your ability to lead, your ability to talk to others, your ability to engage with others, that is what really distinguishes you. That's what makes you an unforgettable presence. Think again is a value system. It's a skill that you learn. It's the ability to say, hmm, what could be different here? Hmm, is the story the right one? Hmm, is this factually correct? Do I know the answer? And if I don't, am I comfortable to say, I don't know the answer, so that we can begin to figure it out? So just to close, an interesting thing. Adam Grant actually went on to recreate the frog experiment. And of course, the frog that went into the boiling water jumped out immediately. But an interesting observation was, the frog that sat in the pot that was slowly heating up also jumped out when the pot got hot enough. In other words, the story that has been used for decades to illustrate this point is not entirely correct. But how many of us have ever paused to think again? Have a great week. I hope this story has brought you value. I hope you've enjoyed the podcast. And if you have, please share, like, subscribe, please leave a review. I'm getting all the reviews that you guys are leaving. Thank you so much. It's making such a great difference to my numbers. I appreciate every person who takes their time to listen, and who makes their way to the end of every episode. Have a beautiful week, and let's grow together.