Don’t Feel Good About Bad Things… (2367)

I was on the treadmill today doing my cardio and when I'm on the treadmill there's

this channel I like to watch and it's all about the downfalls of businesses and

today I learned about Jason Penny in their downfall and how human feelings

essentially put them out of business. I think the downfall of every business is

arrogance, hubris, entitlement but I'm curious to hear Kevin's take today.

Welcome to next level university. I'm your host Kevin Paul Mary and I'm your co-host

Alan Lazarus. At NLU we believe in a heart driven but no BS approach to holistic self-improvement

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Next level nation today for episode were 2,367. Your feelings affect your success. Okay.

JC Penny was known for their red tag sales. You remember back in the day? Go to the mall.

Oh yeah. JC Penny had to walk right through. Had to walk right through, right? Had to.

They essentially hooked people on the game of coupons and saving money.

Okay. As we've said before, like when somebody gives you a coupon for 20% off,

it's not really 20% off. They just jack the price up 20% and then they give you a coupon.

It's the same fucking price, right? But you feel like you're getting a deal.

So they brought in a new CEO. We're going to turn this company around. We've had some rough

times. He said you know what we're going to do. We're going to get rid of all the coupons.

Fuck the coupons. We're just going to give him rock bottom pricing.

And everybody hated that because their feelings of I'm not getting a deal here,

went away. And they just went to other places and JC Penny went out of business and they

filed for bankruptcy and all this heavy jazz. That's not the only reason they went out of business.

I look first of all. We only have 15 minutes. I can't explain the whole fucking thing. You got to

give the context. Also, business because they got cocky. That's not to e-commerce as well.

Amazon back in the day. That's fair. When I was in college, Amazon was on its rise and we did a

Harvard Business Review of said companies. Anyways, question for you. Did you know the one

Sam Walton worked at JC Penny? That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense.

This is a business. Sam Walton, he started Walmart. He started Walmart.

This is in a business episode. The point I want to make with this is people's feelings

affected their decision making and that company went out of business. That's not the point.

The point is our feelings affect our decision making. And if we don't understand how,

we're going to be Jeff'd. So I thought we could do it episode on it. This will be a quick one,

a quick episode on it. This is one of the reasons why I say you can either get better or feel good.

I said this to you behind the scenes. And I don't know if I can provide context necessarily. Yeah,

so Kevin had a business idea that I thought was unintelligent.

See Kevin's face on YouTube is great. Okay. Suboptimal. Suboptimal. I bring

I'm an idea guy, right? A couple are going to get through. Only a couple are going to get through.

You throw a lot of ideas. A couple. A couple of against not all going to be gold.

No, it's all good. Can't keep throwing it against the wall. Always see what sticks. Well,

this one didn't stick. No. And I said to him verbatim right before we did this episode,

was before I knew you wanted to do this episode, by the way, I said is very clear that your feelings

are not tethered to reality in this case. And what I would argue is a better saying would be your

feelings are not tethered to objective truth or or what's optimal in this case. Remember,

all right, I was in the car on the way home from the gym today. Emilia is checking her aura ring

score. She got a 4.8 DM score. My lord. That's what I'm saying. Unbelievable. 4.8 hours of deep

sleep and REM sleep. Best I've ever personally seen. I have at least a dozen people that are tracking.

Okay. I turned to her because the car is driving itself and I was paying attention.

And I said, you have so much positive association with PRs.

I'm always setting people I'm always noticing. She doesn't care much about certain things that other

people do. What's a good example? A good example would be, oh, I got a, that was 30% off. You'll never

hear her say, oh, I got it, but it was 40% off. You'll never hear her say that. But you will see

her celebrate in a big way about a PR. You versus you is something she takes very, very seriously.

And I'm always looking at what people associate self-esteem with. Because if you look at what people

associate their self-esteem with, you can determine a lot of where they're headed, their trajectory.

So self-esteem and feelings go. Self-esteem and feelings. What do you mean go? What are you looking for?

The connection will tie their self-esteem to the wrong thing. It almost guarantees they're not

successful. Her tying her self-esteem to a personal best is much more effective than yes.

Because at 4.8 is, if she was comparing to me, she's like leagues ahead of me that wouldn't be

useful. She's comparing to her old best. Yeah, I don't know if I know how to unpack this well, but I

do know that everyone should check in with what they tie their self-esteem to. I think self-esteem

of feelings often save people. So I think it goes a couple of ways. One,

your feelings protect you from actually altering your self-esteem. So you pretend like what's a good

example of this. I've said this before. Amy, one of our one of the most popular girls in our

school back in the day, I dated her in second grade. No big deal. It's not a big deal. You don't

have to say anything about it. Not a big deal. She broke my heart. She broke my heart. My buddy

Nate, I was walking back from gym classes. You know, Amy broke up with you, right? I said,

I don't care, man. I don't even care. I am so flush with women. It doesn't even matter.

I was devastated. I didn't want to show that because my self-esteem took such a big hit that I

wasn't ready to show that yet. So I pretended I didn't have any feelings. I think we,

they're so connected. They're so connected. Now, why is that detrimental to what I did? Yeah.

Why is it because I think you can tie your feelings and your self-esteem to the wrong thing.

You make it a losing game. Well, because if it's tied to something that makes you feel good,

not do better, you're always going to be Jeff. You're going to feel good and then you're

going to get the wake up call and then you're going to dilute yourself into feeling good and

then you're going to get the wake up call. And eventually, you're either going to stop seeing

the wake up calls completely. You're just going to be, quote, unquote, too late to fix it.

Okay. Here's an example. You open with this. If you tie your self-esteem to a certain coupon

and you think you're saving money, you're just going to spend more money because every

business essentially has to use coupons now because they have to compete with the other companies

using coupons. That's why industry has changed. You and I have purposely opted out of certain things.

But there's certain things that we can't or will go out of business, right? You have to walk

the line of integrity. So we have 30% off on group coaching. Okay. Now, well, if we're sitting here

saying 30% off coupons aren't real, then why do you do that? Because we found through doing this

21 times, it takes, it works a lot better when you have 30% off. That's it. Simple.

997. It's actually a thousand dollars. 997 is a psychological thing. You can't, you can't

compete with companies if you aren't willing to understand human psychology. People need to

feel good about their decisions. We just happen to be selling something worth way more than that. Like

yeah. Well, you'll feel good about the decision eventually. But you might not right away. That's

the hard thing. How do I even explain this? You can't, if everyone's used to, okay, you talked about

remember when Black Friday used to actually be one day? Yes. Now it's a whole week. Eventually

it should be a whole month, Monday, and Black Friday, and whatever. All of those are just ways

to get you to purchase more things. That's all that is. And at MLU, we're going to say, hey,

it is 30% off, which we could have just sold it for 138 flat instead of 97 a month for three months.

But that didn't work as well. So it's 97 dollars for three months, comes to 294 across the three

months. You can do it all at once. You can do a three month payment plan, six month payment plan,

your payment plan. It comes to less than $25 per session. Boom. What's my point of this? If you

if you allow other people to get you to feel good about a decision that isn't a good decision,

you're in trouble. Group coaching is a good decision. It's a great decision. Now if you're a

podcaster, it is. If you're not a podcaster, it's not as good. Okay, even though the value there,

what's my point? You can't tie good feelings to bad decisions. That and we need a good example

of this, dude, we need to find some good decisions that actually don't make you feel good. And we need

to make some bad decisions that actually do feel good. The best bad decision that makes me feel good

is DoorDash. It's a terrible decision. Now again, there's intricacies, right? If I'm working a 12-hour

day or a 16-hour day, and I don't have time to cook, whatever, I can I could spend the money

get DoorDash. That's fine. As long as the time is going into growing the business, it's Sunday,

and I'm hanging out and it's my R&R time, I should just go pick it up. But I was going to DoorDash

something not long ago, like last week. And I had everything it was in the cart and I was like,

how the hell is this going to cost me $60? Like what the fuck is this? $60? I didn't realize,

and this is my own lack of intelligence. I didn't realize that DoorDash also

jacks the price of everything up 15 to 20%. I didn't know that. So it's 20% more there.

Delivery is free. I must buy their annual thingy thing, in which case you save that each time.

You don't? Then you have to use it. No, I do. If you use it in a certain amount of times, there's an ROI.

I pay the fucking whatever it is. I pay for DoorDash Plus.

Oh, okay. So they have an additional fee on top of the? Yes. Of course they do. My goodness,

it's wild. So I would have felt, so there's a, if you buy, if you spend a certain amount of money,

you get a free item. That makes you feel good. But it also makes you, it's like, well, I only have

$37 in the cart. I got to get under the 13 in here so I can get a free side of fucking fries. Okay.

Let me add, I'm going to get an orange juice and I'll get an apple juice and I'll get a cookie.

And the next thing you know, you went from $37 to $50, so you could get a free $5. But like,

it's not necessarily optimal. Also, the difference between you now and you back then is you

used to feel good when you made bad choices. And again, I'm not, I know I'm beating you up a little

bit. I used to feel it lately, but I used to feel better. It's like, it was still a bad choice,

but I felt better about the bad choice because it seemed less bad. That would that, okay. So

a couple of minutes here, one of the things that I'm doing in coaching and I bring up coaching

because I think that this, I want to see everyone on the other side of this podcast,

every listener to be more successful is I'm getting them to associate negative feelings

with bad decisions and to associate positive feelings with good decisions. So if you buy a subway

sub and you buy three of them for the next three days and they're all turkey clubs with great

macros, I want you to feel good about the $28 that you spent. I want you to feel good about that.

Again, assuming you live in the US and in Massachusetts and New Hampshire where Kevin and I live,

that's actually a good price. It's all relative. I get that. My point is when you make bad decisions,

this is what I'm watching for at all times. When I see someone who makes terrible choices and

celebrates it, that's like a watch out, watch out, watch out. And I've done that before.

I can rip six shots, no problem and get the perfect amount of buzz in order to go. I was

positive association with negative thing, right? And again, you know, in college, I have some fun.

I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but you got to keep it reasonable. And what I will say is what

someone ties their good feelings to and their self-esteem to is very much dictating their decision-making.

Like I try really hard to time myself a steam to my effort in, not my results out.

And when I make a bad decision, you've heard me talk about regrets a lot.

You've probably heard me talk about my regrets more than anyone else. Let me try to unpack this.

How many times have you heard me talk about terrible decisions I've made?

Many, many, many, many. Have you ever met someone who talks about terrible decisions they made more

than me? Older people. People like later in life when they're like, I'm going to die soon and I

regret everything. Okay, got it. Cool. Anyone, my age. Okay. I think a lot of people see that and

they think like, oh, wow, you make terrible decisions. Nope. Nope. No, no. It's a paradox.

I know better now and I look back and go, oh, my goodness. That was suboptimal. That was suboptimal.

That was suboptimal. There's this weird paradox that happens. When one person is like, oh, I don't

regret a thing I've done. I immediately am skeptical. Emilia, she is always listing out

all the terrible choices she's ever made to make sure she doesn't keep making them.

Not because she wants to beat herself up, not because she was the worst person. As a matter of

fact, I'll talk about Emilia because she's amazing. And I don't want to talk about myself. Emilia

has made better decisions than almost anyone I've ever met. And she talks about her bad decisions

more than almost anyone I've ever met. They're correlated. She doesn't tie herself a steam

to anything other than effective choices, optimal decisions, getting smarter, getting better,

getting stronger, getting more capable, and PRs. She ties all of her self-esteem to inputs

and effective decision-making. What you do and what you say and what you think and what you

feel and what you believe are inputs, outputs are the results. People tie so much self-esteem

to a big payday. I don't care about your big to payday. I don't. I care about what caused it.

I care about the causes and the decisions. What's the bridge to get there, though?

Start noticing when you feel good. Dude, I'll show the story. There's someone. I'll go quick

with it. There's someone that I met probably six or so years ago. And I noticed this.

I'm trying to keep it anonymous. He was like, no, unlike him, I know how to rest. And I was like,

oh, you have very strong positive associations with being lazy. You ever meet those people?

They're like, they're like brag about how fucking lazy they are. I said, unsuccessful.

Gonna be unsuccessful. You can't be that proud of a bad trait.

My work ethic is what matters most to me. Like, if you ask, like, what are you really the most

proud of? It's my intentions and my work ethic. Like, how much I'm putting on the court?

Not my results, not the $18,000 day, not the, we're amazing. Go, no, my effort and my intentions

and my capabilities and my intelligence. I tie all my self-esteem to that because those are

the inputs. I'm proud. I have a great body. Awesome. I care way more about the four years straight

of exercise. How does someone get there? Start noticing your inputs and outputs. Most people tie

self-esteem to the output. I want, I got a new fucking jacket. Congratulations. Was it a good

choice? I don't care about the jacket. Can the jacket? Was it a good choice? Do you feel good

about the choice? Do you feel good about the money? Do you think it was a good deal? Do you think

it was intelligent for your future? Is it going to keep you warm? Is it effective? Does it look good?

Is it utility? Some people spend a lot of money on things that have very little utility.

And in their life suffers. What would you say though? We're so good. Humans are just so good at

justifying. That's the problem. Exactly. You know, it's so hard to like, break that.

Without more awareness, I think that's the pieces like the second I knew.

Yeah, but I have to know more. I'm not necessarily watching these videos about businesses because I

want to learn about the business specifically. I'm just looking for patterns. There was a thing

that happened when, I don't know if it was McDonald's, they went from quarter pounders to third

pounders and people thought it was less. So they had to stop doing it. That's interesting.

Devastating. That's interesting. If you don't know that a third is larger than a quarter,

you need to go back to kindergarten. I'm not going to say that. I know that's, but

it's hurting you for sure. There you go. It's hurting you. That's probably a kind of way to say.

I used to do stuff that required measurements. So I always knew third quarter, eighth,

like whatever, right? Half. If you're an adult, like where is the expiration date on being

on not knowing a third versus a quarter? I think if we were to do the, I don't know what the

exact set is, but there's like a giant, maybe the majority of the US has below an eighth grade

reading level, but that's don't we have to like, I know we can go. It has to, yeah, it has to,

it has to change. It would be beneficial to change for sure. So a nicer way to say that is,

if you don't know that a third is larger than a quarter, it would wildly change your life

to study mathematics. Like even basics. Well, what else don't you know on that same level?

Yeah. And you're not going to, if you don't know a third is bigger than a quarter, not a half,

a third is bigger than a quarter, then you probably don't know your finances. And if you don't

know your finances, you're probably being taken advantage of. I know someone loved this person

to death, wonderful human, got a loan for a 72% interest rate, 72. That is straight criminal.

But if you don't know the math, it's impossible to pay that back if you don't do it right.

And I can't see people suffer from ignorance anymore when it's like not that hard to learn that

a third is bigger than a quarter. Like this isn't rocket science. You know what I mean? This is

basic as shit. And I care about listeners long enough enough to actually call it out.

And I think Kev will be more compassionate. Well, because I understand like I've met people

that for sure don't know that for sure. Well, I'm assuming their life isn't going very well.

Well, that's why we're trying to build the bridge. Like what's the bridge between where they are

and where they need to get to? All right, we get a pop. My my my takeaway to leave this is

it's yeah, maybe to Alan's point. Every time you feel good about a decision,

is it helping you or is it hurting you in the long run? Today, it probably feels really good

to order food. But you do that every day for a week. You're going to spend a lot more money than

you should have and you could have put that money to something more valuable, more logical.

Yeah, my takeaway is play the long game and and try to tie yourself a steam to great long-term

choices because most of our dopamine and our neurochemistry is salt sugar fat like quick quick fixes

they they will destroy your life if you let them. If you're looking for something that's not a

quick fix, but that will help you tremendously. Alan has coaching slots available reach out to Alan.

We'll also have his link in the show notes for a free 30 minute break through session. If you

have not done it yet, next level nation, all the stuff next of alive, April 11th, a bunch of

stuff coming. We will keep you in the loop. As always, we love you. We appreciate you.

grateful for each and every one of you and if you are as committed as you say you are to

getting to the next level, make sure to tune in tomorrow because we will be your every single

day to help you get there. Keep leveling up to reach your full potential next of the nation.

Thanks for joining us for another episode of next level university. We love connecting with the

next level family. We mean it when we say family. If you ever need anything, please reach out to

us directly. Everything you need to get a hold of us is in the show notes. Thank you again and we

will talk to you tomorrow.