Hello and welcome to the Potential Leader Lab podcast. I'm your host, Perry Maughmer. And today we're going to be talking about how we need to choose our boulders wisely. So I'm going to preface this with telling you a little story that I've told before, but it's one I tell over and over again. And I started telling it about. Oh, criminy. It's probably pushing 30 years now. When I first started telling this story and I have people that I worked with years ago that still come back to me and they remember it. And so essentially, it's the myth of Sisyphus and it's an ancient Greek myth. And I'll save you all the details. But essentially, Sisyphus angered the gods, specifically Hades, the god of the underworld. So what happened was that he drugged Sisyphus down to the underworld, and he put him in front of this huge mountain with this boulder. And so for eternity, Sisyphus had to roll the boulder up the hill, and then it rolled back down the hill. And then he had to push it back up the hill. Down the hill. So you get it right. And so this is all about futility. It was all about the absolute futility of the job of pushing a rock up the hill that always rolled down. Now, that was the lesson back then. And then in the 40s, Albert Camus, who was a French existentialist, had another take on that myth. And he said essentially that when Sisyphus got to the top of the mountain, top of the hill and the boulder started rolling back down the hill, and he's standing up there covered in sweat and blood and mud, and he's watching the rock roll back down the hill.
At that moment, Sisyphus is happy. And he's happy because he got the rock to the top of the hill. It doesn't matter that it's rolling back down the hill. What matters is he got it to the top of the hill. And so khemu, from an existential standpoint, said this is life like. This is the absurdity of life. And I love that. And I love it because we all have our rocks. I like I refer to them as boulders. Right. We all have our boulders. Now. We're going to get into why we need to choose those very carefully. And we're going to talk a little bit about we're going to go all over the place. We're talking about existentialism. We're going to wind up some physics with Newton. We're going to tie in a bunch of different stuff. But I want you to really think about that, that story, right? Because isn't that us? I mean, don't we all have boulders that we roll up the hill and they roll back down the hill? Whenever will we get to a point where we're like, oh, we're done? Like, we don't have to roll the rock up the hill anymore. No more boulders.
And I know people are out there going, Oh, I can't wait for that. I tell you, that's a recipe for disaster. In my belief. I don't believe you should. I believe every one of us should create a life we don't want to retire from. Because retirement. I had a previous episode. I can't remember what number it was, but it's retirement is not good. It's not good for you cognitively. It's not good for you physically, emotionally, it's not good for you financially. You know, pick something. I mean, retirement is an outdated concept, actually. And so if we strive to create if our constant thought process is I can't wait, I'm going to toil for 50 years doing something that is soul sucking so that I can not do that any longer and then go do what I want to do when I'm probably too old to do it. It just doesn't make any sense conceptually. There's a great song, by the way, great song by Kenny Chesney called The Life. So just just go listen to that song. Right? But the reality is we all have these boulders. And my argument here in today is going to be we need to pick them very carefully. We need to choose them wisely. There's a scene in one of the Indiana Jones movies, and it's the. The Grail. It's the Grail movie. And he goes in and the knight's in there that's been in there for hundreds of years guarding the Grail.
And he says they look around and they said, you know, you're choosing the chalice that the that Christ drank out of. And it says, all he says is choose wisely. Choose wisely. And that's what we have to do. We have to choose our boulders wisely. And I'll explain why. Now, technically, I guess it would be. For geologically. There are two types of boulders, round and angular. Right. Did a little research. So there's round boulders and angular boulders. Boulders. Now, what I'll say is I think of this and it makes sense, right? Because as you as you get if we if we consider the boulders in our lives, the things that matter to us, not necessarily I'm not going to say necessarily a goal, but I'm going to say there are things that matter to us. It could be a goal. It could also be people. It could be relationships, It could be whatever we want it to be. But it's the thing that we're going to roll up the hill. Now, I guess my first question would be. Just from a purely physical standpoint, how many boulders can you roll up a hill at one time? Now, here's the funny thing, and this is just a little aside. If they're Angular, you can roll a bunch of them because they'll stay, right? Because if you flip it over, like my wife, I don't know, 2 or 3 years ago, my wife, according to her, was lucky enough to find this great deal on this.
They were saying they were pieces, huge pieces of sandstone. And when I say huge, they weighed anywhere from some of them, maybe £150. Someone probably weighed £400. They were a foundation for an old house. So she ran across this guy who was tearing down the house and he's like, I don't want them. And he would deliver them. I came home and we had just talked about this briefly. I come home one day and my front yard looked like Stonehenge. I mean, the guy had brought all these pieces of sandstone in and he literally they were they were over the space of probably like my entire front yard. They were just everywhere because he couldn't he was just getting them off the trailer. And so then my wife's like, Oh, I want to build a little thing over here to the side of the house, a little patio, and we'll use these as the wall. All right. Well, I can tell you that those were they were cubes, right? So they were square. They didn't roll. That's what I'm getting to. They were more angular. So if you if you got one up vertical and then flopped it over, it wasn't going anywhere. Now, that's what I mean by angular boulders. If you have angular boulders and you're rolling them up a hill, if you get the if you exert the force and you flip it over, it'll just sit there and wait on you to come back.
But if you have a round boulder, like in the Myth of Sisyphus, then that requires constant pressure. Because if you unless you're going to chalk it right. But if you step out of the way and don't apply any pressure to it, where's that rock going? That boulder is rolling back down the hill. And so if we think about this kind of metaphorically, how many boulders can we roll at one time? And so now I'm going to bring in Newton, right? I'm going to bring in Newton's Law. So he has three laws. I'm going to talk about the first two. And the first one is much like us and our lives is essentially it says that a body at rest or at motion. So if a body is at rest or at motion will typically stay at rest or in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. And Newton said, okay, so if something's rolling, it's going to continue to roll until somebody stops it. Or if it's not rolling, it's not going to roll until somebody starts it rolling. Now, we could actually say to ourselves, oftentimes that's how we are as humans. We get into a groove and we kind of start doing stuff. And unless we're acted upon by an outside force, we kind of continue to kind of roll in the way we're going. Or if we're sedentary and we're not moving towards a goal unless something moves us, right, unless we're acted upon.
I have a theory. My theory is we only change because of one thing, and that's pain. Right. We only we only choose to move forward or or do something different or evolve. I'm not a big fan of the word change, but if we want to evolve, sometimes it requires a spark. And I say pain because it can. It's anything that moves us and it can be financial, it can be emotional, it can be physical, it can be psychological, it can be any type of pain, anything where my fear of the unknown is exceeded by my fear of the unknown. I don't know what's out there, but I know this sucks and I'm not going to do this anymore. And that moves us like we'll start, right? So we're acted upon by an outside force. Most of us, by and large, unless something happens to us, unless something motivates us, we don't go out and seek these things all the time. There are the few that do those, those relentless few, all can. Most won't. Few do. There are those few who do it, who seek out constantly the next thing. It's not everybody. And some of us in certain areas of our lives do that and others we don't. But it's it's challenging, right? It's energy. We have to constantly stay in motion because biology tells us when something stops growing, it starts dying.
Right now. When it comes to these boulders. The second part of is even more interesting His second, Newton's second law. So Newton's second law is about the fact that acceleration equals the force acting on the object and the mass of the object. So think about this. If we think about this in context of things we want to achieve in our lives goals, call them goals, objectives, call them whatever you want, things that are important to us, people that are important to us. If we want to attend to that, the acceleration of that achievement will be based on two things how much force is applied and how much mass the object has. And so if we want to just make another analogy or a metaphor, it's simply how big is the thing we're trying to do? How heavy is it? Right in context of effort because how quickly the acceleration right of that of the achievement will be dictated by the size, the mass of the goal itself and the force we apply to it. And so this goes back to choosing our boulders wisely, because if we're spreading that effort out amongst different boulders on different hills. Then what do you think's going to happen? Like if you're pushing again I think a momentum, right? If you get something moving that's heavy, you want to keep it moving. Because if you stop moving it and you try to start again, it's going to take all of that initial effort.
You've lost all momentum. So now it's like starting over again. And that's why I believe we have to choose our boulders wisely. And we should only have just a few boulders at a time. Because if we have more than a couple of boulders and Newton's second law does apply. Then the force that we're applying to it is going to be spread out. And so then the acceleration slows down, which means time. And I and I use all of this for an example because I think it's we're trading we're trading time and effort. And we have I think we have a little bit. We have this thing about busy. We have this thing about multitasking. We have this. We have this false belief in this. This slays me, right? We have this false belief that there actually is something called multitasking, although science is proven over and over and over again. Our brain doesn't work like that. It can't we can't work on more than one thing at a time now. And there's a bunch of research you can go out and find it. So we can do things. For instance, we can if we want to listen to a podcast and take a walk, we can do that. So technically, is that multitasking? Yeah. Okay. So but you're doing two things that don't take the same neural pathway. Right. But at work, if you're reading your email, working on a project, talking on the phone, if you're trying to do that and you're dividing your attention.
What they say is you're actually doing something called switch tasking, which is really what you're doing. You're quickly switching from one thing to another thing to another thing. And you can choose to do that, but you're not doing any of them well. And when it comes to these big things in our lives, these boulders, that's why I'm not even sure that we proactively choose the boulders. I'm not sure that we select the boulders wisely. There's that. And if you think about that, that story and I think it was in I think Covey was the one that that that actually publicized it, that made it pretty famous was, you know, the old story about the person that gets up in front of the room and they have the bowl and they put these big rocks. They're not boulders because boulders have a specific size, but they're rocks. They put the rocks in the bowl and then they ask everybody, is the bowl full? Is the is the is the container full? And everybody's like, yeah, yeah, it's it's full. And then he comes back with gravel and he pours gravel in all and falls in all the cracks. It was a full now. Yeah. Yeah. It's full now. Okay now, now he goes and gets sand and he pours sand in and so sand then fills up.
Okay so you get the idea right. It's we keep saying it's full and it's not. But the argument there is if you start with the sand, you can't get the you can't get the rocks in and the sand is all the all the shit that we do, that doesn't matter. Right. It's all the stuff that we do every day that isn't important. And so the whole part of that, the whole part of that analogy was make sure that you have those rocks and I'm going to refer to them as boulders because I want them bigger. I want them in your mind. I want them significantly sized because I want you to imagine actually pushing them. And that's what we're doing when we're trying to achieve a goal. We're pushing a boulder. And so the bigger the bolder, the more effort required. Right because bigger mass and we have those three things, we have acceleration force and mass. And so we have to be really understanding of that equation because physics applies. You know, we live in a physical universe. It applies. In. Part of this is this. This. Cult that we have that we're a part of with Western culture is about. Stuff. And it's always more. Right. There's this great quote by Allison Faulkner Enough is a decision, not an amount. Enough is a decision, not an amount. And so if you think to yourself, what are those? What are those boulders in my life? And then ask yourself.
Why? Why do I want it? Why is it there? What is it going to provide for me and those I care about? What's meaningful about it? I don't. And believe me, this I don't really care what the answer is to those you should. It's not the answer that's important. It's the question. That's the first question I ask people when I'm working with them and they tell me they have this, they have all these goals. I'm like, Well, why? Why is that a goal? And sometimes I just think it's even in businesses where this next year we're going to. I have a company that I work with and they said, Oh, the last year and the year before that and year before that they were all the best year ever. Every year for the past five years has been the best year ever. And I said, So that's the goal now. The goal is every year is going to be the best year ever. Why? What is that? Is that first of all, is that possible? Do you think that that we're just every year for the next umpteen years is going to be the best year ever? Because if that's the thought process, what happens when it's not? What happens to everybody? What happens then psychologically and emotionally? And that's why what you have to answer the question, how much is enough? And are you putting the things that are meaningful? Are those the boulders? Is stuff the boulder is a certain salary.
The boulder is a second house. The boulder is a boat. The boulder is a new job. The boulder is are all those things the boulders in your life or the boulders in your life, the relationships you have with your family or your spouse or whatever that is, or the time you spend with your kids or what? Whatever that is. If you think about that, what are the boulders you're pushing? What are the things that demand your attention or else they're going to roll down the hill? And are they the things that you want? Is it an intentional choice you're making to make sure those are the boulders? In. How many boulders do you have? That's the question we have. How many voters can we manage? And am I willing to answer the following question for myself? I want to know. What do I want most? Versus what do I want now? When we're faced with a decision. That's the question that has to drive our behavior. Because if we want to be healthier. We have to ask ourselves every day when we're picking something up to eat, when we're not going for a walk, when we're going home and having a bourbon, because it's been a long day. What do I want most versus what do I want now? And now is typically an emotional something that's satiating us emotionally. Right. I want this now. I want this now. And you guys can go Google the marshmallow test.
It's the it's it's hilarious. It's a scientific experiment where they put the kids in the room and they put a young child in the room. They're probably in there. They're probably six 4 to 6 years old. And they said, okay, we want you to sit here. We're going to be back in a minute. And they leave him a plate with a marshmallow, a big marshmallow. And they say, look, if you don't eat that, I'll be back. And if that marshmallow is still here when I get back, I'll give you another marshmallow. You'll have two marshmallows and they had a video camera and you'd have to Google it and watch it because it is hilarious just to watch the kids trying to. Some of them are trying to distract themselves. Some of them are like smelling it. One kid, just as soon as the door shuts, he just eats it. He's done like, I'm out. I got 11A marshmallow in the hand's worth two in a bush. Right? But what they did is they actually studied they tracked these kids for years after this experiment. And they actually figured out that the kids that were able to delay gratification were far more successful in their lives than the ones who couldn't. And so the ability to answer that question, what do I want now versus what I want most? Because those will drive different behaviors. And it doesn't. There's no wrong answer to it.
Simply making or holding ourselves answerable to the question. And making ourselves own the question. I want this now. Not I deserve it. Not I need it. Those are not what I'm talking about. You know, because everybody, when you get done, you had a particularly stressful day. Oh, I could. I need a drink. Now. You don't need it. You want it and just own that behavior. There's nothing wrong with it. But don't don't give away the power to make the choice. That's all I'm saying. Because I think that for us, if we think about we're all Sisyphus. We'll bring this all the way back around the barn to Sisyphus. We're all Sisyphus, and we get to choose. Unlike Sisyphus, we get to choose our boulders. Which is an amazing. All inspiring thing. We get to choose the things in our life that matter. We're the only species on earth that gets to do that. We get to choose what matters to us. We just have to be intentional with that choice. And direct our energy to those things. Because remember, acceleration equals force times mass. So the bigger the more mass the goal has and the more force we put against it, the quicker we're going to move that thing. And you can't do that across ten things. So everybody has seasons in their lives and nothing stays the same all the time. Just own the decisions, that's all. Just make be intentional about the boulders you're going to push.
And make sure that on that in whatever you do, if it's on a computer, if it's written, if you have a vision board, I don't care. However you track it, make sure you have it in front of you what those boulders are and why. And that they're meaningful to you. And that you're pursuing you're applying that force. Two things that are meaningful to you. Because that's what life is all about. It's about creating meaning. For ourselves and those that we care about. All right. So thanks for listening and I hope to see you back here soon. And I and I want to leave you with, as I most always do, I want to leave you with John Wesley's quote, because I do believe that if everybody would just follow his direction. John Wesley was a pastor back in the I believe it was probably late 1800s, early 1900s. If everybody would just do let's say there was one, two, three, four, five, six, there's seven lines. If we would all just do what John Wesley said, the world would be an awesome place. Just awesome. And. And what he said was this. Do all the good you can in all the ways you can, to all the souls you can in every place you can, at all the times you can, with all the zeal you can, as long as ever you can. Again, I thank you for listening and I hope to see you back in the lab soon.
