The 3 Things You Have to Stop Doing If You Want To Be Successful
The Amplified Impact Podcast
May 12th, 2023
Today, I want to talk about one of my favorite frameworks that I learned from Nicholas Naseem Tilleb, which is called Via Negativa.
It’s a framework that helps you figure out what you need to stop doing to achieve your goals.
Instead of asking what positive actions you need to take…you ask yourself what an absolutely horrible life would look like.
This helps you identify the negative aspects of your life that you need to get rid of. It could be anything from a bad relationship to unhealthy habits…like eating too many calories.
And here’s the kicker: progress in life is often less about doing new things and more about removing things that are holding you back.
So, if you want to achieve your goals, start by identifying the top three things that you need to remove from your life.
Take some time, sit down, and try this framework out. You won’t regret it.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“Progress in life is less about doing new things and what we implement into our life, like this new shiny protocol.” – Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino [00:00:00]:
What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to the podcast. Today I’m going to share with you one of my all time favorite frameworks that I learned from Nicholas Naseem Tilleb. This is a framework that you can use literally in any aspect of your life, whether that’s business, relationships, health, whatever. It’s so powerful. And it also is very closely linked with a framework that Charlie Munger, who, if you’re familiar, um, is Warren Buffett’s right hand man. He’s a brilliant individual who is all about mental models. Anyways, Naseem’s framework that I’m going to share with you guys is very similar to a Charlie Munger framework. So you’re actually going to get two for the price of one, you lucky duck.
Anthony Vicino [00:00:41]:
Okay, so this framework is called Via Negativa, and the idea behind it is when we’re trying to figure out what would be good for us in life, whether that’s, like, I want to live a good life, let’s just start there very broadly, what would it look like to live a good life? It can be very difficult sometimes to correctly identify what those things are that would lead to a good life, because you’ve never been there. You’ve never maybe had a good life or had the goal that you’re setting for yourself. You don’t necessarily know what it looks like or what it would take to get there. So it can be very hard to abstract what positive actions you need to take to get to the destination when it’s phrased as like, what would I do to live a good life or to be a great husband or a great leader. Right? These things are kind of abstract positive. However, our brain, as as it’s been wired in our human experience of evolution, is very good at being pessimistic, at looking at the negative and asking ourselves, okay, well, what would it look like if everything went to shit? What would have to happen? We could figure that part out. We’re really good at imagining worst case scenario. And so by leveraging this innate ability, we can then reverse engineer what it would look like to live a good life.
Anthony Vicino [00:02:03]:
So Via Negativa is to say, take the negative of the thing or the opposite of the thing. So instead of asking yourself, what would it look like to live a good life, we ask ourselves, well, what would it look like to live an absolutely horrible life, a life that I resented, that I regretted, that I did not enjoy? And then you can quickly start extrapolating ideas, like, just jump straight to mind. Like, what would a horrible life look like? While I would be lonely, my relationships would suck. Nobody would ever want to hang out with me. Everybody would hate me. They would think I’m a loser, or I would always struggle to get out of bed because I’m depressed or I have no energy, I am overweight, and I don’t like the way I look when I see myself in the mirror. I always have a brain fog. I have no money.
Anthony Vicino [00:02:43]:
I’m always stressing about putting food on the table or how I’m going to pay my rent, or what happens if I get sick. And you can just come up with all of these things so easily, right? And now that you have this list, you’re via negativa of what it would look like to live a bad life, we can take some of these things. We can start to problem solve them, right? So if the problem is that you have terrible relationships, nobody likes you, that you don’t have loving interactions with people on a consistent basis, then what can you start doing right now to start making meaningful progress in that? Or if you’re waking up in the morning, you have no energy, or you don’t like the way that you look in the mirror, these are problems that can be solved. So instead of eating too many calories or eating bad calories, we start getting in control of our macros, we start exercising, we start taking control of our levers of energy. And so through this framework, we can figure out, what do I need to stop doing that is going to move me forward towards my goal. And this is one of the really interesting things that comes from this framework to me, is that progress in life is less about doing new things and what we implement into our life, like this new shiny protocol. We’re always looking for the millionaire morning routine and that new thing that we can add like, oh, now it’s cold plunging. Oh, now it’s electrolytes and all these things.
Anthony Vicino [00:04:05]:
And I’m guilty of this. Too often, progress, the most progress, is to be had when we remove things that we’re currently doing rather than implementing. And that’s all we have to do sometimes is just remove things. So what are the things right now that if you were to remove? Like, what are the top three things that if you were to remove from your life, would move you towards your big goals for the year, for the decade, the fastest? And so for me, I sat down recently and I did this exercise because I was like, okay, I’m not making the progress that I want to make towards my goals. I have very ambitious goals and they’re very hard to hit. And so I need to be very focused and intentional about my actions that are going to get me there. And what I determined was there’s three things. Three things that if I stopped doing, would move me towards my goals the fastest, just by consequence of no longer wasting time or energy or mental bandwidth on those things.
Anthony Vicino [00:05:01]:
And this can be a really powerful exercise. I’m going to share with you my three things that I came up with for this quarter. If I can stop doing these things, it’s going to pay massive dividends. Okay? And I bet that there’s some things that immediately come to your mind that you’re like, if I could stop doing that, for sure, that would be beneficial. Okay, number one, video games. I don’t play video games in the traditional sense. I play chess, and chess is a very interesting activity. If you guys don’t know, I played very competitively when I was a kid.
Anthony Vicino [00:05:29]:
I won the south dakota state chess championship, the governor’s cup. I was very into chess. It was a thing that my dad and I we bonded over. He was in the military. He was gone a lot. When he was back, he was kind of emotionally distant. There weren’t a lot of ways to connect with us because he was kind of emotionally stupid. So how do you connect with kids? And he’s like, he taught me to play chess, which is a weird activity for a kid with ADHD, but I became very hyper focused and obsessed with it, and it’s a game that has a lot of meaning to me.
Anthony Vicino [00:05:58]:
With that said, I tend to go down this rabbit hole of chess and playing bullet chess, which is a very fast type of chess. It’s like a minute for each side that you can play online. And I am very, very into it. I love it as a way of just kind of emotionally and mentally disconnecting shutting. It’s a way for me to shut my brain off and go into white noise. However, I spend way too much time doing it. It’s too easy just to pop open and start playing. So it’s not like the traditional video game where I’m sitting there and spending for hours, but I might open it, want to play one or two games.
Anthony Vicino [00:06:31]:
Next thing I know, 20 minutes have gone by that’s just 20 minutes vanished in the blink of an eye. And it’s interesting because chess has a bit more of a positive connotation as like an intellectual sport, so it’s easier to justify, but at the end of the day, I’m just playing a video game. It’s really all it is. And so that’s one thing I need to cut out of my life. If I did that, that would free up a ton of time. Number two is analytics. Compulsively checking analytics. This was something that I did in my very first couple of businesses, was like, every single day obsessively checking the analytics on our sales, on our leads, all of it.
Anthony Vicino [00:07:10]:
I was constantly in the dashboard, and I was like, spending most of my time in the dashboard rather than actually out in my business doing what I needed to be doing. And that’s really important to keep your finger on the pulse of the company. So I’m not going to say don’t look at those things, but when you’re on that, like, 14, 1520 times a day, just like, obsessively refreshing, like, you will look at the dashboard and then close it and then immediately open it, because you didn’t really process what you were looking at. You were just doing it almost out of, like, default. Then it’s no longer beneficial. And that’s what I’m doing right now. I’ve noticed in my behavior around social media because one of my big goals for the year is around building the YouTube audience with podcast or the Instagram, or Twitter, whatever, like, all these different things. And so there’s so many analytics to dive into, and it’s a bottomless well that you can lose a lot of time and energy to.
Anthony Vicino [00:08:01]:
It’s important. Again, keep finger on the pulse, but you need to get out of the analytics and actually back into the game, doing the things that matter. So that’s a really big one for me, is I wish I could just push a button and just be done with the urge to check analytics, but it’s still very much there. Number three, the third thing that I need to cut out of my life is it’s kind of a twofer. It’s gluten, but really what it is is oversleeping and feeling lethargic throughout the day. So, over the last month, I’ve been oversleeping, getting up around like, 637 in the morning. I’d like to be getting up closer to 530 when I’m feeling good. My body is energized and I’m eating well.
Anthony Vicino [00:08:40]:
I have no problem waking up at 5530, so I can notice as I sleep later, because I don’t wake up to an alarm clock as I start sleeping later. It’s usually tied to my nutrition and my exercise and all these things. And one of the things I’m noticing is that gluten seems to have a very negative effect on me, on my energy levels, my brain fog, my clarity throughout the day. And there’s some interesting studies that correlate gluten with ADHD, and there being some very interesting side effects there. So I’m starting to notice that in my own world right now. So I’m trying to cut gluten out. I’m trying to stop oversleeping so I can get back to that place where I’m waking up feeling fresh and energized and excited to tackle the day. But those are the three things that need to be cut out.
Anthony Vicino [00:09:23]:
Chess, analytics, gluten, oversleeping, however you want to define it, but I encourage you to go through this exercise, really think about your life, and lay out what are the big goals that you’re trying to achieve, and then what are the things that are currently holding you back from achieving those. For me, I only have so many hours in the day. So, like the chess and the analytics, those are hours that I could be spending more beneficially, more productively on things that would bring the world more value, rather than just zoning out, just generally trying to stop zoning out. I think that’s a good place to live life. But the way that this framework via Negativa from Naseem Tleb kind of ties into a Charlie Munger framework is charlie Munger always says invert, always invert, which is to take whatever you’re doing and then look at the opposite of it. And I think this is just a really good idea in general, because everything in life, every aspect of our actions is there’s just two sides to it, right? It’s always a coin. And so if you’re looking at the one side and you’re having a hard time problem solving it, then invert. And this is a practice from mathematics.
Anthony Vicino [00:10:29]:
I can’t remember which mathematician Charlie Munger is quoting. Maybe blaze Pascal. I don’t think that’s right. But really, that line invert always invert, is from a mathematician who’s saying to solve these math problems, sometimes the easiest way to do it is just to invert it and then solve it and then revert it. And I find that has been very, very beneficial in my own life. So hope you got some value out of this, guys. I’d be really interested. What are the three things that you need to cut out of your life? Find me on social media.
Anthony Vicino [00:10:56]:
Anthony Vasino on Twitter. The Anthony vasito on Instagram. Shoot me a DM, let me know. What are the three things that you need to cut out of your life? Or leave a comment down below. I’d love to hear from you guys. I want to engage with you, so drop those, and I really appreciate it. As always. Psyched to have you here.
Anthony Vicino [00:11:12]:
Looking forward to seeing in the next episode. Until then, my friend, stay hyper focused.
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