#309： Going Blind to See More Clearly
Episode Stats
Summary
Isaac Litsky went blind when he was a teenager, but over time, he learned that losing his ability to see the physical world actually allowed him to see reality from a sharper perspective. In his new book, Eyes Wide Open, he talks about his experience of going blind as a teenager and the lessons he learned about resilience, humility, and Theodore Roosevelt s manhood.
Transcript
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Brad McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast site. Something
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we all take for granted until it stops working the way it's supposed to. While most of us will
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only have to deal with the annoyances of less than 20-20 vision, my guest today went from
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fully sighted to completely blind when he was a teenager. While terrifying and debilitating at
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first, he learned that losing his ability to see the physical world actually allowed him to see
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reality from a sharper perspective. His name is Isaac Litsky and his new book is Eyes Wide Open,
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overcoming obstacles and recognizing opportunities in a world that can't see clearly. And today on
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the show, Isaac and I discussed how he went blind and his initial reaction to losing his sight. We
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then dig into the insights he gained about resilience, humility, and Theodore Roosevelt's
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man in the arena that allowed him to move forward in life. Among his accomplishments since going
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blind are graduating from Harvard Law, clerking the U.S. Supreme Court, working at a high-powered
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law firm in New York City, and turning around a struggling construction business that now earns
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over $70 million a year in revenue. Oh, and while he was doing all that, he was also busy being the
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dad of triplets. If you feel like your ability to move forward in life is hamstringed by limitations
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or you struggle with being resilient to setbacks both big and small, Isaac is going to show you that
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it's all in your mind and what you can do to see things as they really are. After the show is over,
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check out the show notes at aom.is slash Litsky. Isaac Litsky, welcome to the show.
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So you just published a book called Eyes Wide Open, overcoming obstacles and recognizing
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opportunities in a world that can't see clearly. And I got to say, it's one of the most inspiring
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yet grounded books I've read in a long time. It's all about your experience of starting going blind
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as a teenager and learning how to thrive. I wouldn't say in spite of, but also because of
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your blindness, taking that into account. And we can talk about that here in a bit. And you've also
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had a really interesting career spanning entrepreneurship and the legal career. But before
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we get to your adult career, and before we get to you going blind, we got to talk about,
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for nostalgia's sake, your stint as a child actor, because I'm sure a lot of people are
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listening to the show, seeing you on this short-lived show that happened in the 90s. So can you talk a
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little bit about your stint as a child actor? Sure. So I grew up acting. I did a diaper commercial
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when I was about six months old, and it was pretty much all downhill from there. So I did, you know,
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maybe 100 to 150 commercials growing up. Some big parts and some very small things, some small parts
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and some big things. And then my lucky break, so to speak, was when I was cast as the role of Weasel
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Weasel on NBC sitcom Saved by the Bell, the New Class. So I moved out to Los Angeles at the age of
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13 to star on that sitcom. And it was quite an experience. It lasted a season, right? Or two
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seasons? The show, I only lasted a season on the show. I think the show went on three or four seasons.
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I'm not entirely certain. Gotcha. Well, looking back on that experience as an adult, are there any
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takeaways? Like, did you see something that was sort of like, did you learn any life lessons from that or
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about this whole idea about seeing things clearly that you write about in your book?
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Were there any takeaways you took from that experience being Weasel on Saved by the Bell,
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the New Class? Sure. So, you know, I was diagnosed with my blinding disease also when I was 13. So
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right around the time that I moved out to LA to do the show. So I had kind of a lot going on in my
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world and in my mind, frankly, in those times. So I think that the sort of a juxtaposition of those
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two things going on really sort of highlighted for me, emphasized for me, the sort of odd
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character of, you know, celebrity or quasi-celebrity and the tendency in that industry out there to
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focus on, you know, appearances and what others think about you and what success should look like
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and all that. And it seemed to me, it's almost a cautionary tale. It seemed to me a reminder that
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I should live my life really more focused on what was important to me and what had value,
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you know, for me. Right. I mean, you talk about in that experience, I remember it stuck out to me,
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was that you were like instantly famous from the get-go because like they announced the show,
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the cast live, or they did something special for it. And you were on these teen beat magazines all
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over the place. And you instantly gained this following without even doing the show yet. Like
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people knew who you were and they had, you had a fan base. That's exactly right. So the original
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show Saved by the Bell was wildly popular. You know, those actors kind of grew up and went off to do,
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you know, a show called Saved by the College Years or left the show or whatever. And so with
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the Saturday morning time slot, they sort of basically did a redo of the show with, you know,
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with a new class, which I was on. And yeah, because of the popularity of the original show,
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they did this nationwide search and it was all publicized. And we did, you know, weeks of publicity
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photos and, you know, public appearances and fan mail and all sorts of stuff before we had
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taped, you know, a minute of the show. It was very strange.
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Yeah, it is very strange. We can get to the whole idea about appearances over reality here in a bit.
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So you mentioned at 13, you found out you had this degenerative disease that would cause you to go
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blind. So what exactly caused you to go blind and how did it progress to where is the point you are
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Sure. So I have a disease called retinitis pigmentosa or RP. What RP does is it causes a sort of slow
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deterioration of your photoreceptor cells. So if you picture like a jumbotron screen in an arena and
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imagine like sort of all the, you know, millions of bulbs that, you know, make up the image on that
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screen, it's kind of like the back of your eye. The retina has these photoreceptor cells that,
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you know, respond to light and produce this little biological magic. Imagine you're watching
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my life kind of as a movie on that screen and the bulb starts to randomly break over time.
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That's what it was like for me. So, you know, at first you might not even notice that it can be
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a little bit annoying. Parts of the screen get worse than others. And depending on what you're
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looking at and where it falls on the screen, it might, the image might make sense to you or not
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make sense. So sight sort of gradually went from, you know, the, the illusion of sight is this sort
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of, you know, objective reality, the sort of universal truth that's out there. It's sort of
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passive. And, you know, we even say seeing is believing, right? That's kind of how we experience
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sight. That illusion, you know, really was sort of, you know, shattered for me in a remarkable way.
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And I literally saw firsthand that sight is this creation of the mind that is personal,
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that is virtual, that involves far more than just information from the eyes. And that in an
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interesting way, the disease was almost kind of part of the cure. I mean, I literally saw,
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you know, the power we have to create a reality that we then, you know, experience, live, feel
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as, as truth as something beyond our control. And that insight is really what ultimately
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brought me, you know, tremendous joy and fulfillment and success in my life. And it's
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why I think that going blind was really one of the best things that ever happened to me at the end of
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the day. That's amazing. But before you got to that insight, what was your initial reaction when
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you learned as a 13 year old boy that you were going blind? You know, at first I was terrified
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and I knew that blindness was going to ruin my life. I didn't think it, I knew it. You know,
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I knew that I was not going to be independent, that I would cease to, you know, achieve. And I
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would, you know, I was certain I was going to live an unremarkable life, kind of small and sad and
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probably alone. I didn't think any woman would love or respect me because I wasn't going to love
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or respect myself and sort of on and on and on and on. And, you know, these were lies. I mean,
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these were fictions born of my fear, but I believed them. They were my reality, you know,
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until I learned to see through them. And, you know, we all, all of us, you know, confront fears
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and then all of us sort of awfulize. It's a term psychologists use. I love it. I think it's a
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perfect term. The really pernicious thing about fear is, you know, like I was saying, we, you know,
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we can experience our fears as truth and then they often become self-fulfilling. They perpetuate
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themselves precisely because we believe them. Yeah. I've experienced that awfulizing firsthand. Like you,
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I went to law school and I remember after exams, I would awfulize, I would get done and I would do
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the postmortem in my head and think, oh my gosh, I missed that issue in the essay. And because I
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missed that issue, I'm going to make a D and because I made a D, I'm not going to get a law
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review. And because I don't get a law review, I'm not going to like get a law firm job and my life
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will be ruined. It felt real, but it's not real. It's not real, but it feels so real. And, you know,
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the sort of remarkable moment in my life and the development of kind of this vision that I was
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blessed with is really when I was able to make the connection between the way we experience the
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sort of fundamental contradiction between sight being sort of a creation of our own making.
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And yet we feel it as sort of truth, right? We create our own reality and believe it.
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And I was able to kind of make the connection between that and the way I was experiencing my
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fears. And that was really an aha moment and led me to think, well, wait a minute, you know,
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what are all the other ways in my life, in our lives that we all are, you know, really shaping
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our lives without necessarily knowing it. And the truth of the matter is we're doing it every moment.
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I mean, literally all day long, every moment, whether we understand it or not, whether we like
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it or not, whether we believe it or not, um, we are choosing who we want to be and how we want to
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live our lives in every single moment. Um, you know, that was such an empowering and liberating
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realization for me that, you know, again, it's, it's, it's turned out to be one of the best things
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There was this point you made in your section about, you know, these fears, this awfulizing
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that I thought was counterintuitive, but it just made a lot of sense to me is when you and your
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family first learned that you, and I guess your siblings also had this disease as well, or some
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Yes. Two of my three older sisters have the disease.
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Right. Well, you, you all threw yourselves into finding a cure. Like you and your mom started a
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foundation to raise money for research to find a cure for this and you did fundraisers and things
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like that. But you write in the book that this quest to find a cure, you were just playing into the
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hands of your fear of blindness, which seems counterintuitive because you're thinking, okay,
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you're actually taking action. Like you're facing your fear by trying to take it head on, um, by
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trying to find a cure and raise money for it. But how would you say that that quest was playing in
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Yeah. You know, our fears can perpetuate themselves by kind of, uh, keeping us on the sideline,
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right? The, the way fear spell remains unbroken and by kind of tricking us into playing our own
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part. And often, you know, that happens with sort of, we manifest for ourselves sort of perceived
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heroes and villains and people or forces or circumstances that we, you know, we believe
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have control over our fate and we kind of outsource our destiny. So, you know, my heroes were these
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research scientists, you know, my villain was blindness. And, you know, I thought, as you said,
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I thought I was sort of proactively sort of charging, you know, forward and doing something
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productive about my disease and the fight to cure it. And in reality, I was really playing into this
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narrative of fear of my fears. That blindness was this awful fate, this death sentence, right?
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Like these scientists just had to save me. I had to find this Hollywood ending, you know, where I
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would, you know, get the cure, right? You know, just in the nick of time, so to speak. I don't regret
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for a second, you know, by the way, my efforts on behalf of the research community, and I would very
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much love for them to be successful in curing the disease. However, you know, I really was playing
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right into the hands of my fears by committing myself to, you know, to cheer on these heroes of
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mine and fight against the villain. And meanwhile, where did that leave me day in and day out? You
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know, it left me not doing a darn thing to learn about going blind or being blind or to, you know,
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take control of my life. So you talk about you had this aha moment. What was that moment? Was there a
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specific moment you can remember where you stopped running away from your fear of blindness? You
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stopped seeing it as the villain and sort of just let it go and try to embrace it?
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Absolutely. So in my late teens, early 20s, I went to visit with an occupational therapist,
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a low vision rehabilitation specialist, someone who works with folks who are losing their sight or
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have lost their sight. I, at this time, was very much living this sort of race against time and
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blindness as a villain and science as my heroes. And I showed up kind of assuming that we were going
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to be sort of talking about that narrative, right? Blindness and this awful fade and doom and gloom.
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And Chris, her name was Chris. She wanted to talk about specific, you know, concrete,
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actual solution for my everyday life. So, you know, I walked in the door, she wants to talk about,
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do I use a cane? And I'm, you know, I'm thinking, no, I don't use a cane. I mean, I see too well to use a
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cane and she says, well, do you bump into things? And I'm getting frustrated because I like, I want her to
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understand how little I care about bumping into things, right? I'm thinking, you know, bumping into
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things is not my problem, right? The cane is a, was like an arbitrary detail here, right? Like I can handle
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now, I can handle today. You know, the problem is I'm losing my sight and there's nothing I can do about it.
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You know, one thing led to another, but there was this moment when she said to me, you know, Isaac,
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if you use the cane, you would bump into things less and you would hurt yourself less. It sounds
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like such an obvious point. It is an obvious point. But for me, that was really the, the sort of epiphany
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moment where I just, it just hit me that everything I thought I knew about going blind or being blind
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was the lies of my fears. And worse, I hadn't done anything to learn about going blind or being
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blind. So in essence, I was choosing, choosing to believe and choosing to live, you know, this awful,
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you know, doom and gloom, terrifying life that hit me hard to realize that it was, you know, it was a
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choice I was making. I wasn't aware of it, but it was a choice that I was making. And, and it really hit
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me, you know, in the heart in her office that day that I, I'm going to make some better choices for
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myself and I'm going to take control of my life. And so besides the cane, she introduced things like,
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I guess, text readings. And I guess at that point you were like, had to like make your screen really
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big on your computer to read text, but now they had software to help that read things to you. Right.
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Yeah. I mean, it was awesome. Uh, you know, when we can, uh, when we can stop focusing on,
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you know, the, uh, you know, the, the, the doom and gloom scenarios and when we can, you know,
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you know, take discrete specific challenges and look for solutions, there's just no end to,
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you know, what we can accomplish and how we can make our lives better. So yeah, I mean,
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you're absolutely right. The cane was one thing, you know, she taught me about screen reading
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software, which is software that I use now to interact with my computer, you know, like voiceover
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on Apple products or something people might be familiar with or whatever. It's amazing. I can do
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anything with my computer or iPhone or I gadget, but you know, that a sighted person wants to do.
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She taught me about that. She taught me about a technique called sighted guide where you can use
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to walk with a sighted person naturally and safely, right. Where they can kind of get really great
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information from them about kind of what's going on. She taught me about ways to organize my shoes
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and my clothing so I could, you know, pick out what I wanted to wear and on and on and on. And,
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you know, like I said, I mean, it's not easy. It takes a lot of effort. It takes discipline,
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you know, it takes commitment, but the choice is ours to confront the real, true, discreet
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problems or challenges that we face, as opposed to sort of staying off on the sideline and this
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sort of fantasy of our fear. That whole insight was really powerful to me because I think all of
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us, I mean, I'd be going blind, but we have other things that we see as a constraint and we think our
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lives would be better if we can just get rid of that constraint. And maybe it would be easier,
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but instead of spending all that energy trying to tear down this constraint that might be impossible
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to get rid of, it's better just to embrace it and try to work within those constraints that you
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have. There's no doubt. I mean, every single person has challenges, has fears, has struggles in their
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lives, you know, loss of a job, loss of, you know, ending of a relationship, loss of a stuff, whatever it
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is. And we all confront this stuff. And, and then, you know, beyond, beyond sort of a fear or, or, or
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crisis, you know, we all make self-limiting assumptions about ourselves, right? We tell
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ourselves what's, what's wrong with us. You know, we tell ourselves what other people think about us
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when we really have no idea. We think we have, you know, we don't necessarily embrace and appreciate
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our strengths, but we certainly, you know, perceive weaknesses in ourselves. And we think we
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understand the role of luck in our lives and on and on and on. And all these things, as you say,
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are really within our control, you know, to really look at, to explore with awareness and
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accountability and, you know, shape the lives we want. I mean, that you think of the circumstances
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that people have confronted, I like to say that always you'll find people who have done far more
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with far less and been far happier doing it, right? I mean, you hear stories of, you know,
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concentration camp survivors, you know, POWs who spend years in the most, you know, unimaginable
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conditions, you know, and yet there's always examples of people who thrive and transcend and
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even find joy and meaning in, in circumstances in which, you know, you'd think those things could
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not possibly exist. So, I mean, if that's true and it is true, it can't be the circumstances we
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confront that dictates the quality of the life we live. It just can't be. It, it, how those
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circumstances manifest themselves in our reality, in our lives is within our control.
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You're kind. I'm passionate about it. I mean, you know, we, we have this awesome power. We really
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do to shape the lives we live. And it's also our responsibility. You know, I wrote the book because
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I really want other people to see what I see. It's brought me to a great life. I want my kids to
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read the book, you know, when they get a little older too.
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All right. So let's talk about the great life you've had after you had that aha moment. Let's
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talk about your first tech startup. You started right out of college. So I think there's some
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interesting insights from that as well. So you started a tech company right out of college,
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right? How did that go? And what lessons did you learn from that experience?
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Yeah. So I started a internet advertising technology business with my brother-in-law in June of 1999.
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I was, I was 19 years old and I graduated from Harvard with a degree in math and computer science.
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And, you know, it was right at the height of the internet craze. And we thought, you know,
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you know, it's our turn. Giddy up. So we started this business and very quickly, you know, found a
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fancy loft space in Silicon Alley in Manhattan and attracted some venture capital and started hiring
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like crazy. And then the bubble burst, so to speak, violently. And the term sheet, I said,
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we secured capital. We didn't secure capital. We had a term sheet. We had a signed letter of intent.
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Well, that was pulled because the world fell apart and suddenly we were broke and not paying
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ourselves and had to figure out a way to actually make money, right? It wasn't about, you know,
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eyeballs and volume and an ad impression, you know, like we needed actual dollars. And ultimately,
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I, you know, I think that's the reason the company survived because instead of making the same mistakes
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that a lot of folks made in the industry of continuing to, you know, raise exorbitant amounts
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of money and spend it on, you know, marketing and craziness and not really actually focus on a
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business model, we had to, you know, roll up our sleeves and focus on making some money.
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It was a real rough couple of years, but ultimately we turned it around and we did raise some venture
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financing. You know, we hired our own bosses at that point and it became kind of like a real job,
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which I was never looking for. So I split after a couple of years to go back to Harvard for law
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It didn't end up selling and like you didn't make any money on that deal, right?
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Like people thought like you made millions of dollars, right?
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That's exactly right. Years later, years later, um, the business sold for $230 million.
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A lot of folks in my life assumed that I was, you know, very rich when in fact, uh, at that point,
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I no longer had any equity interest in the business. It's a long and complicated story,
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but basically, uh, uh, I didn't have, I didn't make a penny off of it.
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Was that tough? Like thinking like, Oh, I missed out on that. Like that. Do you have like
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feel that loss aversion or were you just like, ah, whatever?
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Uh, no, I mean, I, it wasn't, it wasn't mine to lose. I mean, I, you know, I made all the
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decisions that I made along the way and, and, you know, I was really pleased that the company,
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you know, found some success and I was pleased for the folks who were still there and you can't
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really lose something you never had, you know? And frankly, by that point, I was doing my own
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thing, you know, I think it was living in DC, either clerking at the Supreme court or practicing
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law for the justice department and, you know, doing my thing.
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Yeah. You went on to Harvard law, graduated, you clerked for, uh, Sandra Day O'Connor, correct?
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Which is fantastic. Phenomenal. A lot of law students aspire to that. What happened after
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So I was blessed to even, even before I got to court, I had this awesome job. I worked for
00:20:58.620
the justice department and I litigated appeals on behalf of the U S in the federal appellate courts.
00:21:03.420
So, you know, I'm a year out of law school and I get to brief and argue my own appeal. And then
00:21:06.820
kind of, I wouldn't say lifelong dream, but certainly a very longstanding dream of mine
00:21:11.380
was to clerk at the court. I would, I'm fascinated by the Supreme court. And anyway, I really wanted
00:21:15.880
to do it. So I realized that dream. And then I kind of do the sort of obvious thing, I guess,
00:21:22.780
or, you know, the, the easiest thing, you know, frankly, and, and, and took a big, you know,
00:21:27.220
huge signing bonus from a big international law firm and got the fancy job in office and all
00:21:31.820
that. And I was, I was miserable. Now I want to be crystal clear. There are, you know, there are
00:21:37.560
plenty of folks who can and do find value in practicing law and find success in it or meaning
00:21:43.880
or, you know, enjoy it. And, and they're built to do it. And that's great. I have no problem with
00:21:48.000
that. The problem is I'm not one of those people. It just, it wasn't, it wasn't for me. So I made a,
00:21:54.180
I guess an unconventional move and basically abandoned my legal career to buying a small
00:22:02.000
residential construction company in Orlando, Florida. My wife and I moved with our then
00:22:07.760
infant triplets. They were maybe, what were they like six months old? We moved from a apartment
00:22:12.920
in Manhattan to a home in Orlando, Florida. I think that's an important point to make.
00:22:16.960
The idea is going along with this idea of being able to see clearly, right? I think a lot of people
00:22:21.920
in your situation, they would have done the exact same thing. If they just got down to the Supreme
00:22:26.180
Court, of course, that's what you would do is you would go to a big firm because you think that's
00:22:31.120
like, that's, that's right. And the money's great. It's prestige, it's money. It provides a comfortable
00:22:36.400
living, but yeah, you're right. There's some people are made for it, but there's a lot of people who
00:22:40.320
aren't made for that sort of life and realizing that and having the courage to shift course. I mean,
00:22:46.500
that, that takes a lot of, you know, chutzpah to do that. You know, you have to see clearly.
00:22:50.780
Yeah. I mean, or am I wrong? Did, did it not take a lot of chutzpah? Like you just knew what you had
00:22:55.340
to do and you did it. No, no, it certainly did. It was not an easy decision to make, but at the core
00:23:01.020
of a living and leading eyes wide open is an uncompromising, almost a brutal honesty with
00:23:08.780
yourself and introspection and certainty about what has meaning to you, what has value to you,
00:23:17.900
what, what your definition of success is. I mean, folks, uh, so often labor to meet someone else's
00:23:24.620
definition of success or without any, any sort of goal or definition of success in mind to begin
00:23:29.600
with. And that's just such a shame. So, you know, I, I really sort of drive, try to put my money where
00:23:35.660
my mouth is. And, you know, I have this vision, I have these ideas about how I want to live my life.
00:23:39.600
And, you know, sitting there at my desk in the, you know, skyscraper right off Bryant Park in
00:23:45.060
Manhattan, I, you know, I could, there was no escaping the fact that I was unhappy and I didn't
00:23:50.460
like what I was doing and I couldn't come up with a good reason to keep doing it.
00:23:52.840
And so going on this theme of facing constraints instead of running away from them and embracing
00:23:58.920
them, um, you bought this construction company in Orlando, but come to find out it was sort of a
00:24:04.540
limit of a business that had a lot of work you had to do in order to make it profitable. So,
00:24:08.560
I mean, he talked and just sort of summarize the trials you and your partner went through to turn
00:24:12.720
this business around. Sure. So my college roommate and closest friend, Zach,
00:24:17.440
and I decided to partner up on this deal. He would keep his fancy day job in the world of finance,
00:24:25.260
but he'd help me, you know, look for the business and pay for it. And, uh, and I'd leave behind my
00:24:29.660
fancy day job and run it, you know? So we, we spent five months looking at businesses all over.
00:24:34.860
It was my sort of primary focus. He was certainly very involved too, but, you know, we found this
00:24:39.940
business and meticulously analyzed, you know, the financial data. And we thought, look, this company's,
00:24:45.060
you know, not breaking any records by way of success, but it's getting along. It's kind of
00:24:49.340
humming along at the lifestyle business. And we got very excited about our vision for, you know,
00:24:53.380
what we could turn this company into and kind of change the value proposition and all that kind of
00:24:57.580
stuff. So what could go wrong, right? Two Harvard guys are going to buy a construction company in
00:25:02.040
Orlando. Well, about three months in, you know, we realized that, uh, all that data we had,
00:25:06.880
you know, modeled was really just nonsense. It was sort of garbage in, garbage out. In actuality,
00:25:12.280
nobody really had any idea what was going on with the business. Uh, really, frankly,
00:25:16.420
you didn't even necessarily know what was going on on a job by job basis, you know, whether you're
00:25:19.900
making or losing money on a project. And that turns out to not be a very good way to run your
00:25:23.880
business. So we found out pretty early on that we were in dire straits and the company was basically
00:25:28.720
hemorrhaging money. And it looked like we were going to lose everything. My wife and I, uh,
00:25:35.760
talked about, I'd probably have to go through bankruptcy. And we worried whether, uh,
00:25:40.960
law firm would be willing to hire me after a bankruptcy. It's a tricky thing to have a
00:25:44.580
big law firm, hire a bank, uh, for a bankrupt lawyer or whatever. But, uh, we even talked
00:25:48.720
with her father and her mom about not moving in with them if it came to it with our now,
00:25:54.240
you know, year old triplets. So those, that was, those were some really dark times and very
00:26:00.240
challenging. And in the midst of all this, my mom kind of reveals that she's been squirreling away,
00:26:06.280
you know, cash over 40 years. I do. I literally mean physical cash. She herself is a Cuban immigrant
00:26:11.920
and her father had to start over from scratch, you know, several times in life. So, you know,
00:26:15.060
he taught her to just save for that rainy day. And for him, you know, banks come and go
00:26:18.780
governments come and go, you save cash. So anyway, in the middle of all this,
00:26:22.300
my mom kind of reveals she's got 350 grand in cash. You know, she's just absolutely convinced that I
00:26:27.660
should take it and use it to save my dying business. So that led to, uh, a few days of real
00:26:37.660
soul searching and, and, and analyzing the situation and deciding, you know, whether I
00:26:41.880
could possibly take this money, but I eventually I did so. And with her sort of, you know, very,
00:26:49.400
very, very urgently needed infusion of capital, we were able to turn the business around and it took
00:26:54.120
years and it took a phenomenal team of very dedicated people. But, you know, today the
00:26:58.560
business has grown to more than 10 times the size it was when we bought it and it's profitable and
00:27:03.120
it's just an excellent company. I'm extremely proud of it.
00:27:05.560
That's fantastic. Again, it's that whole idea you talked about earlier about, you know,
00:27:09.060
vision being virtual, right? You saw these numbers from this business and you thought they were good.
00:27:14.380
You had this image in your head like, oh yeah, this is a slam dunk, but, uh, that wasn't the reality.
00:27:19.760
No. And I had, I mean, that's a very insightful point. And, you know, I looking back, I had
00:27:27.060
absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into. I had no idea, but you know, I was sure
00:27:33.440
eager to, to learn and I did, and that's life, right? Life is constant growth. It's constant
00:27:39.000
improvement. It's constant momentum. That's really the joining.
00:27:42.400
I think this is a nice segue. You have this chapter in the book, you devote to one of my favorite
00:27:46.860
speeches, Theodore Roosevelt's man in the arena speech. Yeah. Yeah. We're big fans of TR over
00:27:52.420
here, the art of manliness for obvious reasons. Okay. Me too. I love it. Fantastic. But you kind
00:27:57.500
of go through his speech and, and draw some insights about it from your own experience.
00:28:01.840
And I thought it was interesting that you, you talk about how ideals can be the tools of that
00:28:07.580
metaphorical critic. How so? That's again, that's counterintuitive. You think ideals are great,
00:28:12.080
but the critic can actually turn those against you. Yeah. So the critic, the critic in our
00:28:16.720
mind, it's a nasty voice, man. And it's quick to pass judgment, tell us what we can't do. Tell us
00:28:22.700
what other people are thinking about us. Yeah. Like you said, so the critic idealizes, the critic
00:28:27.660
sort of presents this lofty view of the world or of our endeavors kind of soaring high above it all,
00:28:34.160
you know, where the paths of progress down below are too small to see the rate of progress is,
00:28:39.200
you know, appears to be glacially slow. You know, I'm just the sort of the towering magnitude of,
00:28:44.680
of our aspirations is just, it's just overwhelming. And the critic, you know, often will,
00:28:49.660
will keep us off the stage, will keep us from even, you know, from even trying by virtue of this,
00:28:55.220
of this sort of pernicious perspective, you know, for the, for the critic, perfection is,
00:29:00.880
is the only standard. As we all know, perfection is impossible. So the, you know, the critic in our
00:29:07.600
mind conveniently, you know, guarantees our failure, right? For, for ordains our failure.
00:29:14.200
Oh, we talked earlier about definitions of success. Well, I mean, one of the things the
00:29:18.080
critic does is it's almost like a, you know, a sleight of hand wizard, right? Like, you know,
00:29:22.120
a three card Monty game where the other, that critic in our head will swap out someone else's
00:29:27.140
definition of success for our own and we won't even notice it. And yeah, it's a, it's a pernicious
00:29:32.500
thing. Yeah. I love how you talked about too, in the book that quote unquote, tough love
00:29:35.460
is another tool of the critic, you know, just telling you, Oh, you know, look, here's, here's
00:29:39.380
the, here's the scoop here. I'm going to lay it to you straight. You should just give up. You know,
00:29:42.060
this is not going to happen for you. Yep. Do the, do the sensible thing, do the practical thing,
00:29:46.120
do the responsible thing, just kind of surrender gracefully. And that could have happened all
00:29:50.220
throughout your life with the blindness or with the business. Uh, it could have been, you know what,
00:29:55.320
just, just give up, you know, move on to something else. No doubt. We all confront those moments
00:30:00.460
all the time in our lives, but big and small too. You know, sometimes those small things don't
00:30:03.620
turn out to be that small. And so instead of ideals, what should the strong man, what should
00:30:09.120
the strong man in that speech embrace? Is it just day-to-day action? Yeah. The strong man's focus
00:30:14.860
is the moment is now strong man's focus is the next step, right? And who glanced up at the peak
00:30:23.180
of the mountain from time to time casually. Right. But it's just focuses the next grip, right? The next
00:30:28.940
pull. The strong man has absolutely no, no use for perfection, right? The strong man values effort
00:30:37.040
and growth. So for the strong man, success comes in actually striving toward a worthy pursuit.
00:30:45.020
Now, the remarkable thing is that we are all born strong men. That's in our nature. It's in our DNA.
00:30:52.680
It's at our core. You know, for me, that's the profound truth in Nietzsche's line, right? What doesn't
00:30:57.740
kill you? It makes you stronger. It's true. You know, every single moment of our lives can yield
00:31:02.220
insight, knowledge, and wisdom. It's a beautiful thing when you can keep your focus in the moment
00:31:06.680
and then harness your strength within and quiet that internal critic and ignore the sort of circus
00:31:12.680
of noise that that critic choreographs. That's where we kind of get into that. Some psychologists
00:31:17.240
call it flow, I guess, that sort of heightened state of really being in the moment. And that's just
00:31:22.440
pure oxygen. I love it. So another theme throughout your book is trying to figure out
00:31:29.340
one of the challenges of life is trying to suss out what is determined by luck and what is determined
00:31:33.980
by skill. I think oftentimes we think our skill or the breaks we've gotten have been attributed to our
00:31:40.920
skill, but it's actually luck. Or sometimes we think they're attributed to luck, but it's actually
00:31:46.420
skill, right? You dove over this whole chapter talking about poker. You're a poker player.
00:31:50.580
What can poker teach us about trying to figure out what the difference between skill and luck is
00:31:55.660
and why is that important? Oh, that's a great question. So, you know, poker can teach us
00:32:01.960
everything about luck in life, I think. I mean, poker, so I love No Limit Hold'em. It's a game I
00:32:07.080
like to play. It's a very pure form of poker. And if you look at that game and you look at a single
00:32:12.020
hand and you said, is this a game of luck or a game of skill? If a perspective is a single hand,
00:32:17.000
it's pretty easy to conclude it's a game of luck. If, however, you looked at folks who play poker
00:32:22.620
professionally or folks who are passionate about it and played a lot and play, you know, tens of
00:32:28.000
thousands of hands over, you know, years of their lives, there's just no question that poker is a
00:32:33.880
game of skill. It absolutely is a game of skill and you can be better at it. You can be worse at it.
00:32:38.080
The same, you know, people who are great at it tend to, you know, over time achieve better results
00:32:42.800
and yada, yada. But, you know, it's, again, it's about that perspective of how you look at the
00:32:48.320
game. You know, I think the same is true in life. You know, Thomas Jefferson, the same as for, well,
00:32:52.980
the courts attributed to him, who knows if he actually said it, but something to the effect of
00:32:55.820
I'm a big fan of luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it. And it's just so true.
00:33:01.480
I mean, life is about the strategy, the play of game, the sort of the tactics that will sort of
00:33:07.440
optimize your performance over time. And it's not about any one hand. And it's very hard to see that
00:33:12.640
when you have, for example, a bad beat, right? In poker, a bad beat as well. You know, you're the
00:33:17.880
10 to one favorite to win the hand. Well, you know, one out of 10 times you're going to lose
00:33:23.020
that card. That's not supposed to, you know, get flipped over at the end. It's going to be that
00:33:26.640
card. You're going to lose. Does it mean you played the hand wrong? No, you played it perfectly.
00:33:29.440
It's just the one in 10 shot that you lost. And that can be very hard to see. We beat ourselves up
00:33:34.040
all the time or decisions that we made that were great decisions for us in the moment at the time we made
00:33:40.540
them, but they didn't pan out. And that's just life. Similarly, it can be just as dangerous to
00:33:45.860
get hot, to get on a roll, right? Playing, playing, uh, hold of you. You win a couple of big hands,
00:33:50.060
maybe, uh, you loosen up your play and, you know, you pick up a pot and you shouldn't have,
00:33:53.760
and you kind of feel like luck's on your side, quote unquote, you know, a big pile of chips can
00:33:57.700
get you into a big pile of trouble. So, you know, for me, I love poker as a sort of metaphor
00:34:02.840
for, for life and, uh, how we tend to oversimplify this distinction between good luck and bad luck.
00:34:11.280
And, and, and, you know, frankly, even think that that distinction, you know, has meaning.
00:34:14.940
It's kind of a meaningless thing to me, you know, and then also really grossly tend to
00:34:20.400
underestimate the extent to which we do control events or circumstances of our lives. Again,
00:34:24.520
we think there's a sort of bright line things within our control, things that aren't in our
00:34:27.300
control. And it's really, it's a gray line. It's nebulous. There's a lot of, uh, subtlety
00:34:32.080
there. And for the most part, a lot more is in our control than we, than we realize.
00:34:36.840
Well, Isaac, this has been a great conversation. There's a lot more we could probably get into.
00:34:40.220
We'll let folks go get the book to get those insights. Where can people learn more about
00:34:44.560
your work? Sure. Thanks a lot. So the easiest place to go is probably just my website, which
00:34:49.200
is my last name, Lidsky, L as in Larry, I, D as in David, S as in Sam, K-Y.com. If you go there,
00:34:56.580
there's information on the book. I have a blog, there's a link to my Ted talk and all sorts of stuff.
00:35:01.780
Now, the one thing I'm going to ask though, is if, if you are interested in this, you know,
00:35:06.920
does make a connection and you read about this stuff, please let me know what you think. You
00:35:11.260
can do it on my website. And I am, this is a passion project for me and I genuinely read every,
00:35:16.660
every submission I get and I think about it and I want to know what you think. So please do let me
00:35:20.300
know. Isaac Lidsky, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:35:25.020
My guest there was Isaac Lidsky. He's the author of the book Eyes Wide Open. It's available on
00:35:28.700
amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can also find out more information about his work
00:35:32.080
at lidsky.com. Be sure to check out his Ted talk. It's called What Reality Are You Creating
00:35:36.600
For Yourself? It's really good. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash lidsky where you can
00:35:41.200
find links to resources where you can delve deeper in this topic.
00:35:50.620
Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. For more manly tips and advice,
00:35:54.600
make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com. If you enjoy this
00:35:58.080
show, have gotten something out of it, I'd really appreciate it. Take a minute to give us a review
00:36:01.440
on iTunes or Stitcher and helps that a lot. As always, thank you for your community support.
00:36:04.620
And until next time, this is Brett McKay telling you to stay manly.