The Ancient Secret to Modern Discipline
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Summary
In this episode of the podcast, I talk about how to deal with a lack of discipline in your life, and how to overcome it. I discuss the story of Odysseus and the Ulysses Pact and how it can be applied in all areas of your life.
Transcript
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You're a man of action. You live life to the fullest, embrace your fears, and boldly chart
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your own path. When life knocks you down, you get back up one more time, every time.
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You are not easily deterred or defeated, rugged, resilient, strong. This is your life. This is who
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you are. This is who you will become. At the end of the day, and after all is said and done,
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man i want you to think about the last time that you broke a promise to yourself it may not have
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been dramatic maybe nobody else even noticed but the odds are is that you noticed you said you're
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going to wake up at five and instead you hit the snooze you said you weren't going to drink this
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weekend and you did you said that you were done with that relationship or that job or that habit
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And then one text later, one bad day, one weak moment, and there you were into the same habits that you were before, right back at the starting line, over and over and over again.
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Now, here's the question that most men will ask themselves after something like that.
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And I'm going to tell you today that I think you're asking the wrong question.
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because the problem, it's rarely discipline. The problem is design. You're trying to fight
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a battle in a moment of weakness that should have been decided long before the battle even started.
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You are trusting a potentially weaker, more compromised, more tired, stress-tempted,
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emotionally compromised version of yourself to make the same good decision that you made when
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you were level and clear headed and motivated. And that is not a strategy. That's hope. And hope,
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as we know, is not a plan. And the man I want to introduce you today, he understood this.
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He was a warrior, a king, and one of the most strategically intelligent men in the history
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And over 3,000 years ago, he solved this exact same problem, not with more willpower, not
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with more motivation, but with a very simple, ruthless act of what I would call pre-commitment.
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And by the end of the discussion today, you're going to know exactly how to use that in your
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life. So here's the story. It comes from Homer's The Odyssey, and it's obviously one of the oldest
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pieces of literature in the Western world. If I remember correctly, it was written somewhere
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around the 8th century BC, but the man at the center of it, Odysseus, the Romans called him
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Ulysses, Latin for Odysseus, is the kind of character that he doesn't age, right? He's
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timeless. He's not necessarily the strongest warrior in the story. He's not the fastest or
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the most powerful, but what makes Odysseus legendary is his mind and how to use his mind
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effectively to accomplish what he wants to accomplish. So after 10 brutal and devastating
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years fighting in the trojan war uh odysseus and his crew are finally sailing home and what should
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be a return trip turns into a 10-year odyssey of its own it's storms and it's monsters and god's
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working against him all the things that we have to deal with in different form today and plenty
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of men of course dying along the way but there's one stretch of water that every single sailor in
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that world feared above everything else and they were the sirens. The sirens weren't monsters as
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you might know in the traditional sense anyways but they were creatures I guess you could say
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half woman half bird by some accounts and they sat on this rocky island and they just sang and
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tempted sailors and men and the song it was it was perfect it was everything that a man wanted to hear
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it called to something deep inside them it told men whatever they were that whatever you were
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searching for whatever you needed whatever you lost it was right there on those rocks with the
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sirens just beyond those rocks all you had to do was get there and so every ship came near
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and they wrecked and it's and it's not because the sailors were cowards and it's not because
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they were undisciplined the same way that you might scrutinize modern men today but because
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once they heard that music all rationality left the building and how often do we hear this story
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whether it's tempted by a woman or tempted by alcohol or substance abuse men would grab the
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helm. They'd tear it away from whoever was steering, and they would drive the ship straight
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into the rocks, in a way, self-sabotaging themselves. Again, it's a story as old as man
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himself. Men would throw themselves overboard. They'd swim towards the sound. They'd do whatever
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they could to get to that sound, and they could not stop themselves. And you see it in yourself
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when you self-sabotage, you blow up a relationship. You make choices that you know are not the best
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choices for you. You're tempted to be weak or lazy or immediate gratification. And what's
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interesting is the sirens, they weren't killing weak men. They were killing all men, every man,
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because every man is tempted by something. And Odysseus knew this. He'd been warned about it.
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and here's where his intelligence i think separates him from all the other captains
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whoever sailed that route and drove their ships right into the rocks he didn't try to just simply
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resist the temptation he didn't try to willpower his way through it in the moment he didn't just
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say i'm strong enough i'll just hold the wheel tighter he didn't stuff his ears excuse me he did
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stuff his ears with wax and pretend that he wasn't curious. He actually wanted to hear the song.
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He just knew that he couldn't trust himself once he did. And have you ever felt the same way?
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Again, tempted by a woman, a toxic relationship, substance abuse, bad habits, poor decisions.
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So before Odysseus' ship even got close to that water, he made a decision because he knew once he got close, he wouldn't be able to make the decision.
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So he ordered his crew to tie him with rope to the mast.
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so the song couldn't reach them and then he gave them one very important almost iconic order
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and you probably have heard this that no matter what i say once the music starts no matter if i
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beg if i command you to if i threaten your families you do not untie me and not until
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we're past the rocks and his crew they they followed the order and those sirens like they
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had before, all the temptations that the men are dealt with. And that's just a representation of
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temptation, right? So all the temptations that the men had to hear and deal with,
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they were there, they were present. And Odysseus lost his mind, just like every other man who'd
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ever heard them. He screamed at his guys to let him lose. He cried. He ordered the men to release
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him. He was furious and frankly, he was irrational. And we get like that, right? When we see what we
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want, we become irrational. And he was in that moment completely, totally compromised, but his
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crew held the line and they sailed through. And that act, making that binding decision, so to
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speak in his rational state to protect him from his irrational state is the same thing that we
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men can adopt today in order to ensure that in hard times or in times of temptation and weakness
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that we can hold the line that we can do what we said we wanted to do and that's what behavioral
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economics uh economists uh and psychologists even now call what what i said earlier is the
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Ulysses contract or the Ulysses pact. It's, it's a pre commitment strategy. And the principle is
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very, very simple. The, the version of you, this is the principle that the version of you
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who makes the decision should not be the same version of you who's in the middle of the crisis.
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So if you think about what Odysseus did, he made the right call on a calm sea before that song
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even started because he knew that once it did, he wasn't the right man to be making the call
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anymore. Again, I don't, I don't consider that weakness. Although a lot of men would say,
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if you can't just resist temptation, you're weak. No, it's, it's not weakness. It's actually
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wisdom. And most men have never applied it to a single area of their lives. And, and here's why
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men, why they struggle without it. And we don't, I don't think we talk enough about this in men's
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spaces. Willpower is not a virtue when, when you can store it up or that you can store up
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indefinitely. It's, it's a resource. It's a finite resource. It depletes your willpower will
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deplete over time and throughout the day. And it depletes the fastest, probably when you need it
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the most. It's under stress. It's under pressure. It's under the deadline. It's under emotional
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weight. It's when you're tired or impatient or angry, or maybe when you're feeling lonely,
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when the easy option is right in front of you. It's like hitting that easy button.
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That's when your willpower is depleted. And the science backs this up. When we are under
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emotional load, our prefrontal cortex, that's the rational decision-making center of the brain,
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it just goes haywire it goes offline and and what's called the limbic system kicks in it takes
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over and it doesn't care about your goals it doesn't care about your wife or your kids or
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your mission or your ambitions or your objectives or even the man that you're actually trying to
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become down the road it cares about relief right now it just wants to feel better it wants what
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it's after. And that's why we're tempted by sex and alcohol and drugs and pornography and gambling
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and gluttony and binge watching the latest Netflix series because it gives us relief.
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So the man who's relying purely on in the power, in the moment willpower, he's, he's playing a
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game that he can't win. He might do it temporarily, but he won't do it indefinitely because that
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moment that he needs the discipline is, is the moment that his brain is actually least
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equipped to supply it. And so here's what makes it worse. And this is, this is devious. It's
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unfortunate, but it is most men compound the problem by then adding a bunch of shame to the
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equation. You know, they break the standard, right? And then they beat themselves up and then
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they recommit with even more just emotional intensity, but they don't have any structural
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change. And then they break it again. And the cycle repeats itself over and over and slowly
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men stop trusting themselves. And I want you to ask if that's you, are you the kind of man who
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has stopped trusting yourself? Not because you're bad, but because you've been trying to solve
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what I think is a design or functionality problem with just effort, right? It's that
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whole thing of just do it harder. Well, if you're doing the wrong thing harder without structural
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or design change, you're just going to achieve failure faster. And this psychological phenomenon
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called again, the Ulysses pact is the design or structural solution. So let's, let's bring this
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out of the realm of myth and lore and put it somewhere where you'll recognize and ask yourself
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if you've, if this falls in line with the way you felt about, about your situation, about your life
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at some point. So let's do scenario one. Let's assume it's a man who's rebuilding his finances.
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So you've got credit card debt and you know it, you've done all the math behind it. You've seen
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it. It's not flattering. It's not fun to talk about, but you've made a commitment to stop
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spending money that you don't have. And for three weeks, you do it. You're solid. You knock it out
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of the park. You're budgeting. You're tracking your expenses. You're working with your wife.
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And then Sunday comes around and all the guys are going to go out and there's a deal on something
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that you've been wanting. Maybe it's a new computer, a new toy or a new gun or a new knife
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or whatever. And, and your mood is low, right? Like you're, you're tired from the week or maybe
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you're exhausted or maybe you're frustrated. Maybe you, you and your wife got into a fight.
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Maybe you're dealing with something with your kids. And so you're compromised emotionally.
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And that, uh, that retail therapy, so to speak is calling. And then what our brains do is we
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start negotiating or rationalizing. Well, I'm just going to do this. I'm just going to buy this one
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thing. I've been good. I've been good. I deserve it. I'll make it up next month. If you have no
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pact, then you're just relying on willpower. You're probably going to spend that money
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because again, that version of you on that Saturday is not the right guy to be making
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financial decisions, but the Ulysses pact, it looks like this. So I'll give you an example
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on on a sunday morning when you're calm and you're clear and you're level-headed and you're rested
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maybe you sit down and you write four categories of spending and you just put your your discretionary
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cash your extra money into a completely separate account and and you can give your wife or maybe a
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friend, an accountability partner, the ability to actually see your purchases. So you remove the
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credit card from your wallet, you lock it up somewhere, it's where it's inconvenient, you give
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it to your wife, or even cut it up if you have to. And then you write down, down the rule, the pact
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outside of these four categories, the answer is no, it's not maybe it's not in this circumstance
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is just no, if it falls outside of these categories, it will not be spending on these
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things. And then you let other people see it. Now you made that decision in, in what Odysseus's
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calm sea would look like. So when Saturday night rolls around and those sirens, the temptation
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starts singing, there's, there's nothing to negotiate. You can't even do it if you, if you
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wanted to. The decision was, was already made by a better version of yourself. All right. So that's
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the financial scenario. Let's take, um, let's take a drinking scenario and, and maybe you're,
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maybe you're drinking a little too much and you're not in denial. You know, you drink too much.
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I knew I was drinking too much and you've made a promise to yourself a hundred times. It's my last
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drink, my last drink, my last drink. Tomorrow's my last drink. Saturday's my last drink. I'm never
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going to do it. And you actually mean it. That's the hard part. Every single time you say, I'm
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going to stop drinking, you actually mean it. But what happens? Friday rolls around.
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The work week was hard. Your boss jumped down your throat. You missed a deadline. You lost a
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client and somebody cracks that bottle, right? Or hands you a beer. And the version of you that
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made that promise on Tuesday morning, nowhere to be found, completely gone. So the pact here is
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direct and it involves again, other people, which is essential. This is why it's so important that
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you have good people in your life because this pact doesn't work without it. It's, it's a
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significant, a significant other. It's a band of brothers. It's men in your corner. And so you
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might do this. You might say to your wife, Hey, when we go out, I'm going to have two drinks or
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one drink or no drinks. And if I reach for a third or reach for a drink at all, you don't ask me
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about it. You just tell the server that we're ready for the check. Or maybe you tell your best
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friend, Hey, if you see me ordering past my number, whether it's zero or one or two, you pull me
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aside. Don't do it in front of everyone, but you pull me aside, just you and me. And you tell me
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or, you know, maybe he calls, you call your doctor and start keeping a drinking log that
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someone else reviews. Okay. Like whatever you need to do to get other people involved in the
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process who know what you're trying to do and also have the courage they do, they have to have the
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courage to be able to honor that pack, that commitment that you're making with them. Okay.
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Again, you're not relying on the man at 10 PM who's exhausted and beat up and tired and frustrated
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on Friday to make the right call. You're letting the guy from Tuesday, the version of you on
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Tuesday morning, run the meeting. And that's the guy who's equipped to run the meeting.
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All right. So let's, let's talk about scenario three. Maybe it's, um,
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and by the way, I've, I've had all of these. So it's the, it's maybe not the alcoholic,
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but it's the workaholic who just can't seem to turn it off. You know, he says he's present with
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his family. And he, and he, again, he means it. He thinks he's present with his family,
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but at 7 PM, the phone buzzes and he's back on email. His kids have stopped asking him to play
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because they know he won't. His wife stopped reaching out to him. The intimacy, intimacy is
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dead. And then he keeps saying that he'll change next week or, or after this deadline or after
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this big project is done once things settled down. So here's, here's the pact that you can make
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on a Sunday afternoon, maybe you remove your work email from your phone entirely.
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There's a novel concept. Just remove the temptation. Or maybe you set an auto reply
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that goes out after 5 p.m. every weekday. Or you tell your team, hey, I'm not available anymore
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from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. If it's a genuine emergency and here's what the emergencies are,
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then you can call my cell phone and then maybe you create a
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Even a physical ritual. I had a friend who did this years ago. He told me about it
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But when you walk through the front door, maybe you put your phone in the basket by an entrance
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Maybe you don't pick it up until the kids are in bed
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One of my friends would literally hang from a tree limb before he walked in the door
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I asked him what he was doing when he told me he did it and he said i'm hanging my troubles at the door
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rituals and practices will help with this pact. Again, the man who creates those rules
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is the man who should be running the show, not the man who's responding to that notification or
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that chime or that buzz or that email or that quote unquote emergency on eight o'clock on a
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Thursday while his daughter is trying to show him her latest dance recital. All right, I'll give you
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more. This is the guy who just blows up in arguments, right? He's frustrated. He's angry
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and he's maybe impatient. And so he just goes nuclear during arguments. You love your wife,
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right? Of course you do. But when conflict arises and escalates, something in you crosses the line
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and you find yourself saying things you don't mean. Maybe you shut down, maybe you leave,
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or maybe you even stay and worse you escalate it and you keep pushing and pushing and pushing
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until there's actually real damage done to the relationship and then every time afterwards what
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happens you hate yourself you're mad you're frustrated that you that you did it on top of
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being frustrated about whatever the argument was about again guys you cannot negotiate that in the
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middle of the argument your nervous system is flooded the chemicals are just pouring through
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you. It's not the time to be thinking logically about what you're doing. You're just reacting.
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So the pact, the Ulysses pact at that moment might be this sitting down with your wife on a,
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on a neutral, calm afternoon and agree together, both of them, you and her, that when either one
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of you says, says a specific word or a phrase that the conversation just stops for 20 minutes.
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It's just timeout conversation stops for 20 minutes. No exceptions. Nobody gets to override
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it. Nobody gets to say, Nope, we're finishing this. The rule was made again. When you and your
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wife were sitting down, you were both calm and level-headed about it, level-headed about it.
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it, the, the pact runs the meeting when, when you're not. And maybe you also tell
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an accountability partner, a brother, Hey, I'm working on this. I want to ask,
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I want, I want you to ask me about it every single month, not as a gotcha moment or like a,
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but just as accountability, because that pact has to have witnesses.
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People have to be witnessed to the decisions that you're making in those scenarios.
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Guys, this is so crucial and I could talk on and on and on and on about
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But i'm sure that there's already scenarios running through your head that you can think where I might need to make a pact because every time
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My my weakness my my temptations get the better of me. It goes bad
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So here's here's five principles that I want to give you
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On this pact and this will help and then even jot these down and think about how they might apply to your unique situation
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Okay. So number one, the pact, and I already said this, the pact has to be made before the pressure.
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The commitment made has that in the middle of a temptation, that's not a pact. It's just,
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it's just wishful thinking. The entire power of the strategy is from separating your decision
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in the moment of crisis from the action itself. You make the call on a Sunday morning, you make
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it after a workout. You make it during a quiet time in your life when your head is clear and
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your values are right in the front of your mind. Not when the bottle's open, not when the arguments
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are already started, not when the spending is already happening before. It's always got to be
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before. All right. Pack number two, it must have friction built in. A rule that's really easy to
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break, I don't think is a rule. It's kind of like a boundary that you're unwilling to enforce is
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really just a suggestion. When we go back to the story of Odysseus, he didn't tie himself up with
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a loose knot. In fact, he didn't tie himself up at all as men did. Those ropes had to be strong
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enough to hold that man, hold Odysseus as he was screaming to be released. And your pack needs the
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same thing. That means removing access, giving people codes involving other people, creating
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consequences or just making the bad decision genuinely harder than the good one. You know,
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one of the most simple ways to look at this, and you've often heard this example, is if you're
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trying to stop drinking, the first thing that you do is remove all the alcohol from the house
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because you make it harder. James Clear in Atomic Habits has some great information on creating
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friction for these bad habits. And that's the mechanism. Friction is the mechanism. And without
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it, the pact has no, no power. All right. Number three, the pact has to involve accountability.
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You can't be the sole enforcer of the commitment that your, your compromised version of yourself
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is going to try to break because you know, you know yourself better than anybody else,
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even subconsciously, which means you know exactly what you need to do and say to do what you know
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you want to do, but no isn't good for you. So again, going back to Odysseus, he gave the
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authority to his crew. They were the ones holding the line, not him. Every serious Ulysses pact in
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your life needs a person attached to it. Someone who knows the commitment, someone who has permission
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to hold you to it. They won't flinch. Again, I told you earlier that they've got to be courageous
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enough to uphold it. And I don't think guys accountability is weakness. Again, it's the
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mechanism that saved Odysseus's and his crew's life. Frankly, it's not weak. It's wise. All right.
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Number four, the pact has to be specific, vague commitments, weak, soft language is going to
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produce vague, weak, soft results. Uh, I'm going to be better with my money. That's not, that's not
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a pact. I will not spend outside of these four categories. That's a pact.
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That's what you need to do. Okay. The more specific the rule that you have, the less room
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there is for your compromised self to wiggle around it, to negotiate it, to massage it,
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to manipulate it, to do, to not do its job and let you do what you want it to do all along.
00:27:08.180
specific specificity is what removes the argument in in the moment where you need it to hold up
00:27:16.080
all right number five the pact is an act of respect it is an act of respect for your future
00:27:23.680
self and this is the one i want to leave you with today because some men i think i worry that some
00:27:29.260
men will hear this concept and they'll feel like it's some admission of weakness or flaw or failure
00:27:35.660
Like like if you have to build a structure around yourself, it means that you don't trust yourself
00:27:47.060
A sign or evidence that you're weak. It's evidence that you know yourself well enough to protect
00:27:56.420
That you're trying to become from the man who might come into your life
00:28:04.160
frankly, pathetic under pressure. That's important to know because you need to be aware that there
0.98
00:28:13.700
is temptation, that there is a version of yourself and you should be aware of this because you're
00:28:18.720
familiar with him, but there is a version of yourself who will do the wrong thing in a moment
00:28:24.540
of compromise. Again, I don't, I don't think Odysseus, Odysseus was the smartest man in the room.
00:28:30.020
i don't think he was he was the strongest or the best the the best warrior but he was he was wise
00:28:40.820
and and he was wise and i guess maybe he was the smartest man in the room but he was he was wise
00:28:47.780
not in spite of the ropes that were bound around him but because of them guys when you build a
00:28:54.180
you're saying, I respect my future self enough to make my decisions easier. I respect my mission
00:29:04.240
enough to protect it from the worst, most compromising moments. I respect my wife and
00:29:11.980
my kids and my friends and my colleagues and my clients and my coworkers enough to build systems
00:29:18.000
that keep my commitments even when my willpower doesn't show up.
00:29:25.680
I think that's how grown men operate and how they make good decisions.
00:29:30.340
So here's the challenge that I want to give to you this week.
00:29:33.000
I want you to identify one area of your life where your future self
00:29:45.240
You don't need to overthink it, but just write down the pact again, make it specific, build,
00:29:50.740
build the friction into it. Tell somebody what it is not tomorrow, this week, because guys,
00:29:57.320
those sirens, the temptations in your life, women, alcohol, drugs, porn, gambling, idleness,
00:30:05.520
slothfulness, gluttony, they're, they're always out there and they don't stop singing because you
00:30:12.160
want them to. The temptations in your life, they don't take days off. They don't care about your
00:30:19.440
goals. I already said this. They don't care about your family or your mission, but you can still get
00:30:23.600
through them. You just have to tie yourself and let other people tie you to the mess as Odysseus
00:30:31.700
did before that song starts. So guys, I hope that serves you. You might've heard some background
00:30:41.440
of noise. I'm sitting in a, uh, in a lodge up here in Kalispell, Montana, uh, visiting with
00:30:47.620
some friends. And this was introduced to me by a friend of mine, Ryan Partain. And he talked about
00:30:53.340
this Ulysses pact. I'm like, man, that's really good. I want to research that. I want to study
00:30:58.060
that. I want to learn about that. And I want to share. So some of these concepts I'm learning
00:31:02.520
for myself. I don't stop learning. Um, but I think it's important that we take this information in,
00:31:08.040
we process it, we ponder on it, and we figure out how to improve our lives. We implement it to the
00:31:13.980
best of our ability to make ourselves better and the people around us better. If it serves you in
00:31:18.920
some way, please share this episode with someone who might want to hear it. That's how we grow this
00:31:23.920
movement. That's how we get the word out. And it's the most effective, powerful way to get a good
00:31:27.880
message to other men. And also because I'm up here in Montana, I just dropped some guys off at the
00:31:32.800
airport, spent three days up here. Unfortunately, one of our good friends lost his wife unexpectedly,
00:31:39.720
so we wanted to be up here to support him for that. That's why brotherhood is so important,
00:31:45.560
and brotherhood is part of the Ulysses Pact. Odysseus had his crew to hold the pact in place.
00:31:52.760
They would have all died had he not done that. If you guys don't have a brotherhood and you're
00:31:56.960
looking for one, or you're looking for a better, more effective one that helps serve you and the
00:32:02.140
people in your life better, then go to orderofman.com slash ironcouncil. I'm up here with my
00:32:07.620
ironcouncil guys, some of them at least. And that's where I learned about this, the conversations
00:32:13.340
that we had around the campfire. We went to a friend's ranch and helped him build some of his
00:32:18.300
fence. And that's just good when you have other good, strong men in your life. If you don't know
00:32:23.060
where to turn, then go to orderofman.com slash ironcouncil. All right, man, I hope that helped.
00:32:29.540
We'll be back tomorrow for our Ask Me Anything.
00:32:33.040
Until then, go out there, take action, build in Ulysses Pax,
00:32:40.020
Thank you for listening to the Order of Man podcast.
00:32:43.000
If you're ready to take charge of your life and be more of the man you were meant to be,
00:32:47.060
we invite you to join the order at orderofman.com.