Rich Mulholland on Gamifying Your Life

00:58
Erin
Well, I have a sneaking suspicion that things are going to get a little messy today. And for that I am both super excited and a little bit terrified. And this is all because today I get the chance to talk to Rich Mulholland. Rich is a rock and roadie turned entrepreneur and the founder of Presentation Powerhouse Missing Link, as well as the co-founder of 21Tanks, HumanWrit.es and The Sales Department. He has written three books, Legacide, Boredom Slayer and Here Be Dragons, and is a global public speaker, having spoken in over 40 countries across six continents. Mostly though, he’s a husband, dad, brother, son and uncle, and in his words, a bit of a punk really. So buckle up because this should be a fun ride. Welcome Rich.

01:48
Rich
Thanks so much, Erin.

01:50
Erin
Thank you for being here. So we’re going to dive right in. You and I talked briefly a few weeks ago about the fulfillment equation foundations and right now there are 10 of them. Happiness versus fulfillment. Rewiring your brain. Finding freedom, adventure, feeling and intuition. Creativity, nature and solitude. Purpose, health and community and connection. I was curious, and we didn’t talk about this at the time, which one of these sparked the most immediate thought for you? And what was that thought? 

02:23
Rich
Rewiring your brain. Because I think it’s the most important and most difficult. 

02:28
Erin
Okay, tell me more. 

02:31
Rich
So there’s a lot of people talk about the idea of playing an infinite game. You know that James Carse wrote the book and Simon Sinek kind of wrote a follow up take on it. And I think when I understand it philosophically, it makes a lot of sense to me. But it’s a really boring way to look at your life, because actually what your life is a series of finite games. You go through different phases of your life with different victory conditions and you’re in this state of solve something in play, but then you solve it and you got to move on. The problem is we take the mental tools from game one into game two, three, four and five. And the older I get, the more I realize that I require different mental tools because I’m playing different games. 

03:13
Rich
The challenges, the more successful they were in the past, the harder they are to change going forward. So it becomes this tricky thing to do. The way to do it is to be very clear in the problem you want to solve and then you start looking for new tools. But it’s something I certainly haven’t mastered and hope to get better at. 

03:34
Erin
Okay, I want to understand this better because I found the concept of infinite game to be really interesting in my own transition from more of a, you know, kind of. Well, firstly a very academic environment where, you know, throughout school there are all sorts of boundaries and clear rules and it’s a very kind of finite game. And then into a corporate environment that was somewhat similar. And then in the last five years I’ve been transitioning into an entrepreneur environment and getting to know other entrepreneurs and learning about the skills that entrepreneurs seem to have both, you know, innately and also building them through experience. And so the idea of an infinite game made a lot of sense to me because there seemed like there wasn’t this kind of these clear boundaries around the playground like there were in these other environments I’d been in. 

04:45
Erin
So does that, like, is there a way for me to, you know, kind of connect what you’re saying about a series of finite fixed games with the observation I had about moving between those environments? 

05:00
Rich
Yes, I think we have to understand the play state what you might find too. I always talk about this idea of freedom in a framework nobody wants complete freedom. Complete freedom is chaos. Even in creative briefs, when people say to you the worst thing you can say to a group of people, there are no bad ideas. Whatever ideas you want stick up there. Actually, the best creativity comes from constraint. I like to play within a fixed set of parameters, even as an entrepreneur. However, generally in entrepreneurial run businesses, the framework is wider and broader than it might be in a large corporate. And so the play state of the game that I’m playing might be wider, but the timeframe is shorter. And the reason for that is I lose interest quite quickly. 

05:44
Rich
So I want to be solving for a specific thing so I can move on to something else exciting. 

05:48
Erin
I see what you mean. So creating little steps like the whole, the bigger piece might be infinite, but you’re deliberately creating little finite Steps within that is that. 

06:02
Rich
Yes, that’s exactly what it is. And I do that all the way down. So every single day, I set an ndr, a new day’s resolution, and every single following morning I, I give it either a thumbs up emoji or a poop emoji. And at the end of a week, if I’ve had five out of seven thumbs up emojis, then my week was a win at the end of a month, if I’ve had three weeks with thumbs up emojis and my month was a win at the end of the year, I’ve had 11 months as a win then my year, my. So I think it’s, I think in any game state it’s definitely good to break in, to build in some degree of failure and to allow that as part of your system. And so no matter what I’m doing, I’m always playing for something. 

06:45
Rich
I always know what I’m moving towards. So a lot of people, in an infinite game, you’re only moving forwards. In a finite game, you’re moving towards. And forwards can be confusing. And in fact, the success and failure of an infinite game is boring to us because the score is only revealed upon death. So if we look at ourselves as living within this infinite structure, which I do agree is true, it’s interesting by observation, but it’s not interesting as a player. As a player, I recognize that I’m playing many different games at many different times. Each one of those has to be interesting and exciting. And the wins of those micro games or bigger games that I’m playing is what equates to my fulfillment. 

07:27
Erin
Okay, so let me test something else with you then. I love, I love this. Would it be fair to say that traditional finite games have rules imposed by your environment or by others? And what you’re describing, when you’re describing these series of finite games is one where you’re designing your own boundaries around this. 

07:50
Rich
Yes. Even in games, the rules are actually quite uninteresting. Okay. So I go to war with strategy quite a lot as a concept in a business. Let’s go straight into business for a second, then we’ll bring it up. Sure. 

08:02
Erin
Yeah. 

08:02
Rich
So I think strategy is a data to technology. It made sense in the 1980s when it was taken from military and applied to business. You know, the 1970s, 1980s, before that we didn’t have strategy. People were very tactical, but. And people like Michael Porter realized that, hey, you know what, that’s fantastic. But we can look further because we know that 1985 is going to look a lot like 1980. So we can kind of plan for this and work better. Fast forward today. We have no idea what 2029 is going to look like, and yet we still plan our strategies in that way. What’s quite nice is to have a shorter view. So what I’ll say to people, and I want to explain to them that strategy is all very well, but. 

08:48
Rich
But let’s think about in a slightly different way, strategy almost is the rules of the game that you spoke about. So we must do this, then we do that, then we do this, then we do that. What have we thought about in a different way? And I’ll say to them, I mean, you know, I’ll say to an audience, sometimes think of a board game and somebody shout monopoly. And I’ll say, okay, cool. You know, do you know how you play Monopoly? And they say, yes. And you know, you roll dice, you move it, then you can choose to either buy something or not. If somebody land to somebody else, you pay them. It’s very simple, very deterministic. And I said, the victory condition is very simple. And I’ll ask them what it is. We have a bit of a laugh. 

09:20
Rich
And then it’s basically when your spouse and your kids are completely broke and you’ve got all the money, you win. But actually we all win because we’re no longer playing Monopoly. So that’s Monopoly. It’s not a bad game. It’s just an old game. The game was invented the same year that the Wright brothers flew. Right? Yeah. 

09:38
Erin
But anyway, did you ever find, by the way, with Monopoly that it stopped being fun around the time once you’d bought up the different properties? We would always quit at that point. Like the actual playing out of the game was so much less interesting than trying to secure those properties. 

09:53
Rich
So this leads exactly to what we’re saying about the infinite game. 

09:56
Erin
Okay. 

09:57
Rich
The creation of the engine is the important bit. Once the engine is running in large big businesses, they want to get. In fact, the best businesses in the world are boring businesses. They have an engine that’s running and they keep on running steady more efficiently every single year and it comes out of it. That’s fantastic. But for entrepreneurs, we often get bored with that because once we’ve solved for the engine, we don’t want to play that game anymore. We want to move on to the next one. So that’s exactly what happened there is you built up, by the way, I’ve never reached the point in which Monopoly started getting fun, let alone stopped getting fun. 

10:31
Rich
I’ve got over a thousand board games and outside of Monopoly Deal, which is a little card based version of it, I don’t think there’s a Monopoly game I like. But I digress. Let’s say for example though, that I said to you, instead of waiting till, you know, somebody has all the money, let’s say you go around the board four times and at the end of that the person who has the most balanced portfolio of properties will win. Would you make different decisions? 

10:59
Erin
Right? Yes. 

11:01
Rich
Okay. They say we change it. You go around the board three times. At the end of three times, the person who has the most dominance of a single color would win. Would you make different decisions? 

11:10
Erin
Yes. 

11:10
Rich
Right. So it is the victory condition that dictates how you play the game, not the rules. 

11:16
Erin
Yes. Right. 

11:17
Rich
The rules are a guideline. But, but what makes human beings do things is because we are trying to get to a point. That’s actually why we even break rules at times. Because for us, getting towards what we want to get towards is always more important than sticking within a framework of rules. Strategy is like a set of rules. Victory condition or strategic destination is a point in the future in which people can move towards and it’s easier to solve for. Now to bring this back into where were talking about personal fulfillment is there’s more. In a finite game, there’s just basically live a good life and die and it’s wonderful and it’s beautiful and there’s, you know, everything continues and there’s a continuum when you think of things in terms of small, little infinite games. 

12:05
Rich
And sometimes you could be playing multiple games at once. All of a sudden you’re able to flip over to being playing one game in your work and then changing again later without feeling like you’ve lost your way. But you’re also able to go home in the evening and play a different form of game there. But I love the idea of checking off that little thing in the morning when I wake up and I open my app and I go in there and I put my little emoji and I mark off that I’ve won. That feels really satisfying for me. And when in a week it feels great. And so I like to be doing that. And even within my businesses we want to be solving for something. 

12:42
Erin
So I feel like you’re touching a little bit on James Clear’s Atomic Habits where it’s. Are you talking about, you know, putting in place those rhythms and those you know, you’re talking about kind of checking something off every day like that. Your, your system is the foundation of your ultimate success or you’re reaching that victory point. 

13:05
Rich
Yeah. So I think, I love James Clear’s thinking generally, but I think habits are the wrong word. You see, habits are the goal. Habits are the hard bits. Habituating something is difficult. Once it’s habituated, it’s easy, right? You go to the toilet, you wipe your bum, right? This is. We don’t have to. There’s no thinking about it, there’s no rewarding of it. It’s not difficult, it’s just the habit. Right, so this all exists, the difficult bit. Not in that particular instance, but it was, I guess for a small child, the difficult bit was remembering to do that. The difficult bit was remembering, you know, any number of things. Once it’s habituated, then you’ve won. For me, I think that the streak is more important than the habit. So if I wanted to get into a habit of doing something, I want to gamify it. 

13:51
Rich
So let’s say I said I want to drink a full glass of water every morning before I set, you know, start doing social media. And I could say that and I could do it for a couple of days and feel good about it. And then I stopped doing it. I’m like, oh, well, oh shit, that didn’t last very long, I forgot it. It isn’t habituated in the way you go or what I could do is I could start a streak. And on day one, I drink of water and I mark it off. And on day two, I drink a glass of water and I did it again and mark it off. And I might say to myself, for me to maintain my streak, I’m only allowed to fail one day a week. 

14:21
Rich
So, and then, you know, on this, on the Sunday, I forget, but I think, well, that’s okay. And I carry on going and it gives me. I took my free pass and I keep going. And eventually what happens is after day five, well, now if I fail the day before, well, then I have to. The next day, then I have to go back to zero again. And that’s frustrating for me. So now what happens is every day I succeed and I get to mark off and make my streak longer. Then all of a sudden there’s a sunk cost because the streak now has inherent value to me. It’s a game that I’m playing and I don’t lose unless I don’t drink my glass of water. So then in the morning, if I’m reaching for my phone. 

15:02
Rich
I’m not saying, well, I’m just not going to do it today. I’m saying, if I do drink this, if I play my phone before I drink my glass of water, then I have to reset everything. And because I’ve built this up to a degree of value, well, I have a score. I generally want to keep my score running more than I want to do that. So I think, and I go get my glass of water, I drink my water, or do what James Clear would do, and put the glass of water beside you in the bed the night before. So I think we are in agreement about many of the things, but I think what makes humans do things is slightly different. And the habit is the goal. Once something is a habit, we’ve won. 

15:39
Erin
Do you think that works universally for everyone, or is it more for people who are inherently achievement oriented? 

15:51
Rich
Loss aversion and the endowment effect is psychologically true for everyone. We value losing something a lot more than even we value gaining something. So once you own something, it’s worth more to you than it was when it was at the shop. You’d be more bummed if you lost something than you would be if you didn’t buy it in the first place. Because once we own it has more value. This is called the endowment effect or loss aversion. Now, when we are trying to create a habit out of something by creating something that we could lose, we naturally in tune to that part of the brain that doesn’t like to lose things. So I think for every rule, there are people who turn around and say, that just wouldn’t resonate for me. And I’m not arguing with them. I absolutely believe them. 

16:37
Rich
I’m just saying, for if were to think about this, the average human being. Now, human beings don’t like losing things. Therefore, they want to actually feel like they’re gaining and winning and playing. And it also brings a sense of play into everything. And play is wonderful. And I think we’ve lost too much of it. 

16:54
Erin
Tell me more about that play. 

16:57
Rich
Yeah, I think the more we see things as games, the more we see things as play, it changes our relationship with everything we’re doing. And you show up and you have a lot more fun. So I’m a professional speaker, I get to travel and speak. But being on the stage is very much being on the playground. And the first rule of public speaking, we always say to everybody, we call it the Amsterdam principle, which maybe we won’t go into today. It’s a Bit naughty. But the Amsterdam principle says your audience can never enjoy receiving a presentation more than you enjoy delivering it. I have to get onto stage and I have to have a good time. If I’m having a good time, my audience has the chance to do that too. So everything should always feel like playing. 

17:38
Erin
You mentioned you have a personal mission. Can you remind me what that is? 

17:43
Rich
Yeah. So to live a fun life while empowering and provoking people to make their mark on the world. 

17:50
Erin
Oh, neat. And how did you discover that for yourself? 

17:54
Rich
There’s a gentleman by the name of Ross Drakes. He has a personal purpose journey he does. Now, I go to war with this. I think personal purpose is a bit of a trap, but. And that’s why, in this case, as a mission, I think, largely speaking, as a guideline, that’s what I want to be doing. I want to be living a very fun life, first and foremost. And then I do want to be provocative. I want to be pushing people to better versions of themselves and to really make their mark in the world as, you know, put themselves out there and their ideas out there. 

18:23
Erin
So I’ve read that as humans, we have a basic need for certainty, like predictability and safety, and we also have a basic need for uncertainty. So novelty, change. So far, it seems to me that the requirements for these two, the proportions of these two, vary widely from person to person. Do you have any observations about that tension? 

18:46
Rich
Yes, I think there’s. For me, I talk about novelty and utility. Sometimes people trade too much in novelty, so they move from everything. They get excited about something, they let it go and they go on to the next thing, excited, and they get into the next thing. This is problematic. I think new technologies say, like AI, it’s very easy to see the novelty of them, and we use them for the novelty. It doesn’t change your life much. And then we get excited. We kind of pass on. The goal for all novelty is to turn it into utility. That’s how we grow. So we have fun with something until it becomes boring, until it stops being exciting, then it just becomes how we do things, and then we get excited about something else. 

19:22
Rich
Moving too slowly, then you’re stuck in a sense of utility and you’re not progressing. Moving too quickly and you’re not really growing. You’re just jumping from excitement to excitement. 

19:35
Erin
What proportion of novelty, if we think about your novelty versus utility, what proportion would you say is true for you? 

19:47
Rich
I’m not sure what the right ratio is, but what I will say is I’m probably If there was a percentile score, I’m probably 10%, maybe 20% if I’m honest over correcting on novelty. So if I could be a little bit less novel and a little bit more utilitarian, I think that I would have been better off. I think I get that’s that shiny penny syndrome where I get excited by things and there’s this tension in business that is about the boring and the interesting. Good businesses are boring businesses. We mentioned this earlier. They’re repeatable, they’re understandable, they’re wonderful. That’s why you can sell them. Because you can’t sell a business that isn’t boring. Investors want to have a fair sense of what you’re trying to do. Same with your bank. 

20:34
Rich
If you’re going for a home loan, if you’re a commission only rep, the bank doesn’t like that. Even if you’re shooting the lights out most months, they’re kind of a little bit worried because they don’t want to give you a mortgage based on the fact that you might not earn any money next month. Whereas if you had a slightly boring salary that was even less. The bank likes that because they understand it. But we do want to grow. So we need to. When we get something to be boring, we need to find the next thing that’s interesting. We need to take our utility, then we need to seek out new novelty, find something else to get passionate about. Because as humans we need to be doing, we need to be passionate about things. We’ve got to be solving for something cool. 

21:10
Rich
Once we understand that, the job is to get that to the point where it’s boring again. And once we get that to the point where it’s boring again, we build on that. So my new keynote is called Relentless Relevance. And I really do believe that we need to become fixated with this idea of remaining relevant. And in order to do that, it’s managing the tension of these things. It’s get something to find something, the world needs a problem worth solving. Find a novel way of solving it. Solve it until the point that it works perfectly and is boring, and then solve something new and build on it from there. 

21:43
Erin
And how does that all fit Rich with the topics of creativity and innovation? Because I know you wrote about that in your first book, Creativity and innovation, is that always within the novelty realm or how does that fit? 

21:58
Rich
Creativity is one of the tools that you utilize to get there, but innovation in and of itself isn’t creativity. In fact, I would like to suggest that innovation doesn’t happen when you start doing something new. It happens when you stop doing something old. So in many ways, innovation is deconstructive. This goes back to your very first question about rewiring your brain. In order to innovate, we need to create gaps inside ourselves, so we have to turn something off in order to turn something else on. So the core premise of Legacide in my first book is that innovation happens more when we stop doing stuff rather than when we start doing new things. We have to create a vacuum in which the new can emerge. 

22:39
Erin
Oh, interesting. So you almost have to create that void. So you’re eliminating all of those preconceptions and linkages so that people have the space to be able to think more openly. 

22:54
Rich
Yeah. And we have to question things. So we’ve got to change the culture of our business as well. You know, during COVID we built a version of our presentation company, Missing Link. We built a version of that business that was all online. We called it Cloud Crew and it was amazing. At the beginning of COVID went to revenue zero. By September of 2020, we had our best month we’d had at the time, our 23 year company history. So it was absolutely amazing. And so I was all Cloud Crew is where it’s at. This is it. And the next year I was still gung ho, but the profits were going down and I was like, no, no. But it’s okay. The online is where it’s at. Stick with online. 

23:31
Rich
And eventually Sam, who runs my business, she threw my online back at me and she said, Rich, I’m not saying you were wrong when you started Cloud Crew. I’m saying you’re no longer right. And this is a very important permission that I think leaders have to give. And I talk about this a lot, that if you want to slay legacy, thinking Legacide, you have to give your people permission to explain that something wasn’t wrong. It just may no longer be right. You could have put software in your business six months ago. That was absolutely the best decision for the business. But I could come to you today, looking at it and say, hey, Erin, do you know that this now exists? That can do this? 

24:10
Rich
It was only invented six months ago, but it’s really brilliant and it could actually cut down in half. And we have to let go of the endowment effect we mentioned earlier and detach our ego from something that we solved for already and realize that we can do, you know, new things now. Obviously not every. We don’t want to be in a constant state of chaos. So we’ve got to have to manage how many better solutions we do. But the easy question is always just to ask yourself, what problem were we solving when we did this? Then the first question followed up question is, does this problem still exist? If the answer is no, stop doing it. And the second question is, if the problem still exists, is the way we’re solving it still the best way? 

24:49
Rich
And the easy way to look at that is, if I was starting a new business tomorrow, brand new, and it had to solve this problem, would we solve it using X? And if the answer is no, no, if were to do it that way, we’d use that. Well, then solve it that way and ask that constantly. Seek out legacy. 

25:06
Erin
What advice would you give budding entrepreneurs? 

25:09
Rich
I’d say more advice. Okay, my standard advice for all of that, there’s two parts to it. Part number one, don’t get a mentor. And part number two is start today. Yesterday would have been easier, but tomorrow will be harder. If you’re waiting for the right conditions under which entrepreneurship feels like it’s the perfect storm, it’s not coming. There’s always going to be chaos. So the sooner you get started, the better it will be. That’s not to say that it’ll guarantee success and you could start today and fail in six months, but then rather know that earlier than later. 

25:43
Erin
If you could go back in time, what advice would you give your 25 year old self so much? 

25:50
Rich
But it’s tricky because. So first of all I think I would have taken, in retrospect, I should have taken advice from my 25 year old self. So 25 year old self was an arrogant asshole, right? I bought a Porsche and I had a stretch limousine literally with flames down the side of it that picked me up and took me to meetings. I was baller and part of me wants to look now and I now understand what enough looks like. And I, I live a much different life and actually the knee jerk reaction is to go back to that person, say, don’t be an asshole. Actually the real advice I would give is at some point your 30 year old self is going to tell you to stop being an asshole. Don’t listen, hang on for five extra years because we need to. 

26:36
Rich
This idea of work life balance, that is a condition, it’s a, it’s something, it’s an achievement that you unlock. And when I turned 50 this year, when a 50 year old tells a 20 year old about work life balance, you break them. In fact, I really do believe the biggest single problem that this generation, the next generation is facing is that they’re going into balance too early. If you want to have an easier life later. And I promise you, spoiler alert. Having fun is so much nicer when you are wealthy or wealthier, right. Than when you’re young. When you’re young, you can’t afford to have fun properly. So fun is just kind of silly. But you don’t stop enjoying your life just because you turn 45. It can still be every bit as fun and entertaining. 

27:25
Rich
In fact, in many ways it can be more fun because you can whimsically go on a snowboarding trip with your friends and it’s a beautiful thing. Which that was not an easy thing to do when you were 20 or if you were doing it, you were, you know, doing it on a budget. The second thing is when you’re young you have two things going for you, two assets and nobody tells you about them. Asset number one you have is delusional self belief. Now a 20 year old is going to argue with me and say it’s not a delusion. And then I would say cynically ask your 30 year old self. So there’s a point where you wake up and you realize, oh my God, I’m not that smart. Well that sucks. 

28:02
Rich
And you start realizing how clever everybody else is and then it’s that Dunning Kruger effect when you start thinking, oh no and then you start questioning yourself. Everything was easier when I had delusional self belief. And the other thing you have on your 20th, stamina, you have the ability to work all night. You can literally work all night. I don’t drink. I stopped drinking at like 19. But theoretically you could go out with my friends or my staff, they could go out and get absolutely hammered and then till three in the morning, wake up at nine o’clock in the morning, have a shower, probably even manage to work out. Come to work and put an eight hour day and then do it again the following night. If I don’t go to bed by 9 o’clock now I’m broken. 

28:43
Rich
I need, I need a rest day at a 49. So everything is easier. The amount of delusional self belief and stamina you need to start a business is massive. They’re the two biggest, that’s the two biggest capital buckets you need and you have way more of those when you’re younger. It diminishes and you lose it. So there is some huge value in starting earlier in your life. 

29:10
Erin
I love that. Let’s build your equation yeah, let’s do it. Okay, so we’re going to start off with defining the things that bring you fulfillment in a week. The way that you like to spend your time doesn’t all have to be want to do. Sometimes there are have to dos in there as well. A great example, Rich, is I had heard you say one of your videos that you spend an hour reading every morning. So that’s. That would be like a bucket that we would be identifying here would be your reading. So what other components do you have in your week? 

29:45
Rich
So there’s multiple components of reading every day. So I want to read fiction every night and I want to read and stuff to make me think every morning. Not to say sometimes that could be fiction. But like at the moment I’m reading that Dao de Jing and then I’m reading some other book about the ministry of time travel in the evening. So I want to have a bucket for both. For the escapism and the. In fact, if it was up to me, there would be two parts fiction to one part non fiction, as it may be a point. Okay, let’s stick with the selfish stuff first and then we’ll get into. Because although selfishly, I do love to spend time with my family. But let me stick with the kind of more me centric, just me things. Board games. 

30:23
Rich
I always wanted to be playing games. It was at one stage really hectic. So in 2017, I played 992 instances of a board game in one year. So that’s an average of like close to three a day. Whereas now I’m happy if I play once or twice a week. 

30:38
Erin
Do you have favorite board games? 

30:40
Rich
So many in so many categories of favorites. 

30:43
Erin
Oh yeah. Do you want to give me one? 

30:45
Rich
Res Arcana. I love the game Res Arcana. 

30:49
Erin
Okay. 

30:49
Rich
It’s an engine building. So my favorite mechanism of board game is engine building. It’s building an efficiency machine so it runs better. Res Arcana is a great example. An easier one that is very accessible for people is called After Us. It’s a very easy game. People understand it in seconds. And it’s really good fun when your engine starts running. 

31:12
Erin
Neat. Is this a physical board game? 

31:15
Rich
Yeah, absolutely. 

31:15
Erin
Yeah. Okay. So we’ve got reading for learning purposes. We’ve got reading as an escape. We’ve got board games. What else? 

31:23
Rich
Exercise. Exercise is critical. So I train five days a week. I’ll do different things. So different kinds of training. Up until I moved to the Isle of Man, probably one of the biggest buckets was Jiu Jitsu. So I’m really stuck at the moment because I think hobbies are the most important thing. I think there’s a correlation between hobbies and happiness. I think it’s fundamentally important. I call them recreational obsessions because when people think of hobbies, it’s almost childish. But I think that one of the biggest mistakes we make is when somebody says to me, I just want to go home and switch off. That is the saddest existence ever. I never want to switch off, I want to switch over. 

32:03
Rich
And for ages that was Jiu Jitsu, but I was a bit injured when I moved here and so I’ve not had the courage to start again and I need to do that, but I know it’s going to be sore. 

32:13
Erin
Is there a link between what you’re describing as hobbies and the concept of play that you were talking about earlier? Is it the same thing? 

32:23
Rich
Yeah, absolutely. It also ties to learning. Right. And to growth. So for me, a hobby, the hobby is going to be interesting. And so I want. My hobbies I like to do are ones where I get to feel like I’m learning and getting smarter. So playing games is a massively intellectual challenge for me. It’s got to solve interesting problems. And it’s actually why instead of. Some people want to learn and be the best at chess. Chess is their hobby. So my favorite game for years was Tak. It’s a chess like game, but more modern and I think it’s got a lower skill floor. So if you play against somebody who’s really brilliant at chess, they’ll always win. There’s no point playing, you know, it’s like. Whereas if you play somebody in tag, you can, you know, there’s a. 

33:04
Rich
If you play a really brilliant person, they’ll get it, but the average game, you’ll be able to, after a few times, learn it. Now some people want to get better at one game, like tech or chess, whereas I like learning and mastering or at least mastering the basic premise of multiple games. So I want to be playing new games every month. So there’s a growth. With Jiu jitsu, there is a ranking system. So I’m getting smarter and better. And Jiu jitsu for me is very much like a board game played physically. Every. It’s a very intellectual sport and I absolutely love it for that. So I want to be doing something at the end of my workday. If you’re spending your most interesting brain time at your office and then you’re going home and letting your brain fry. 

33:46
Rich
I don’t understand how you can be happy. And I guarantee you those people who are like that, if you ask them about their purpose, it would always be tied to their vocation. And I think living a life where your most interesting thing you do is what you get paid for, I think that’s problematic. 

34:01
Erin
What else have you got? Family. 

34:03
Rich
You said family is huge. For me, family is. I mean, I would say it’s the center of everything. But spending meaningful time with my family is critical. Particularly meal times. 

34:12
Erin
Yes. Oh, man, those are important. Especially with kids. I find our best opportunities for connection are around the dinner table. 

34:22
Rich
Yeah, the most important room in the house from a family point of view. It used to be if I said to you, just go to the family room. In old days, when I was young, the family room would have been the lounge or the TV room because that’s where we sat as a family. But now the family room is actually the kitchen or the dining room, depending on how your house is laid out. Because actually more family happens there. And the reason for that is we no longer have synchronous watching. We watch asynchronously. There’s very few episodes, a few TV shows where my kids are 21, 16 and, you know, so there’s very few times where we’re all watching the same thing. It’s really an occasion. It’s like, guys, we should have a movie night next week. Okay, I don’t feel like doing that. 

35:03
Rich
And then there’s an argument and then we find something. And then somebody always leaves mildly unhappy, but we usually get it right. And so the big joy area for us is actually the meal and then the board game that will often follow. Because it’s something where there’s a beautiful shared state of relevance that is as relevant to my 16 year old as it is to my 21 year old as it is to me, nearly 50. 

35:29
Erin
Work. We don’t have anything for that yet. 

35:32
Rich
Yeah, work is always something for me. It’s super exciting. It doesn’t, you know, I really enjoy what I do. I enjoy solving meaningful problems. So that is my, you know, I don’t know what, nine, ten hours a day that I would spend doing that. 

35:46
Erin
And would you call it work? 

35:48
Rich
No, because even so, like our number one for work, nine to ten, that’s always craft hour. So that’s working on my craft. So there’s no meetings, there’s nothing. There’s only learning about understanding persuasive communication in a better way. Or we’ve just launched a new business called Too Many Robots. So I can spend some things mastering the craft there. It’s about getting not generally smarter, but specifically deeper. What may be Cal Newport would call deep work, except there’s not necessarily deep work. It’s just intentional work around getting better at what I do. So that’s a part of my day. I have meetings with my team, I have sales meetings which are, you know, if I’m behind a computer, the most fun I can be having is selling to somebody. So there’s that. Then sometimes I’m doing coaching, sometimes I’m doing presenting. 

36:35
Rich
So all of it really doesn’t feel much like work other than the fact that I’m at the office. 

36:40
Erin
Should I call it business? I feel I don’t want. 

36:42
Rich
You can call it work. I don’t mind because I don’t think work is. I don’t, I don’t see work as. 

36:46
Erin
It’s not a dirty word. 

36:47
Rich
Yeah, it’s not a dirty word. It’s fulfilling. 

36:49
Erin
Right? Okay, cool. Okay, so we’ve got learning, we’ve got reading for escape, board games, exercise, family, work. Did I miss anything? 

37:00
Rich
Or friendships. Yeah, well, there’s two categories for that as well that I think is important, right? So there’s for me, there’s maybe male to male bonding. So being able to chat to another dude about dude things and guy things and things like this friendship things, talk about life, universe and everything. How can I be a better person, a better husband? Those kind of deep conversations. And then there’s also, and I don’t want to belittle the relationships to say acquaintanceships, but there’s things that we do where the connection is both with my wife Jaz and I and other couples. And those are friendships, but they form a different form of friendship. And I think both are critically important. 

37:36
Rich
And if we don’t think about friendships in the role of a partnership as well as friendships for self, we can first of all get caught up in completely selfish self fulfilling friendships, which is nice, but not nice for the broader people around you. Or you can get caught in a slightly tier higher but you never cover the really deep stuff. So I think we have to have both of those categories available. 

37:57
Erin
What if I called it one one and community? 

38:00
Rich
Yeah, let’s go for that. 

38:01
Erin
Yeah. Okay. 

38:02
Rich
Yep. 

38:03
Erin
Anything else? 

38:04
Rich
So I think the outside of the next thing, which I would have said community, but I would like to just say EO, which is entrepreneurs organization. So at any given week I will interact with peer entrepreneurial peers where the context is not necessarily friendship, but it’s shared context. And the shared context is we run businesses, but we will talk about business, personal, family, and community. But that EO is. I never have non EO weeks, and I certainly have a bunch of blocks for EO there as well. It’s a significant part of my life. 

38:37
Erin
That’s great. I love it. So now what we’re going to do next is just quantify it, because, like, a good recipe, some things you want two cups of, and some things you just need a teaspoon. So when it comes to your learning, I know we talked about you do an hour every morning for that. So if I was to give you a block for an hour of time, would that be like seven blocks for a week, or is it more on the weekends? 

39:01
Rich
Well, there’s two learning blocks here because there’s the. Before I come to work in the morning, when I wake up, that. That’s my self development. And then the 9 to 10 block is craft hour. So that’s getting better at my craft. So it’s probably 10 hours. Because I also. I do the self development on the weekend, but I don’t do the craft hour on the weekends. So if you were to give it a total, it would be 12 blocks. 

39:28
Erin
Okay. But here’s what I’m gonna do is actually keep them separate. Seven, self development and five, craft development. 

39:35
Rich
Yeah. 

39:35
Erin
And the reason is. 

39:36
Rich
Oh, I see. Because it makes a difference in the equation. 

39:38
Erin
It does, because you may find that you’re doing 12 hours, but just at some point, you’re feeling like, ugh, something’s missing, and you can go and realize, like, oh, I’m doing all self development and I haven’t done any craft development lately. That’s what’s wrong. Yeah. 

39:52
Rich
In fact, I will argue that. I think that is what’s wrong. I think every spending so much time reading books about self development, and we’re not spending nearly enough time getting better at our craft because we think we’re already good enough. We’ve closed that neural gate pathway. So we’re like, we know everything we need to know. Let’s learn something new. 

40:10
Erin
Right. Meanwhile, the craft is always changing externally anyway. So even if at a point in time you knew it all, you’re not going to know it all a year from now. 

40:18
Rich
Right. And that’s how we stay relevant, is that we pursue our craft with a beginner’s mind. 

40:23
Erin
What did you say? Relentless. 

40:24
Rich
Relentless. Relevance. 

40:25
Erin
Relentless relevance. I love it. Board games. How many blocks in a week where. 

40:31
Rich
A Block is an hour. 

40:32
Erin
Yeah. 

40:33
Rich
Let’s say four. 

40:34
Erin
Okay. Oh, and I missed escape reading. 

40:39
Rich
An hour a night. 

40:41
Erin
Okay. Exercise. 

40:44
Rich
An hour, five days a week. 

40:46
Erin
Okay. Work. 

40:48
Rich
Actually, that’s not really true. I would wish I did an hour five days a week. I did when I was doing jiu jitsu. But I would probably say it’s 30 minutes to 45 minutes if you’re happy to give me the 15 minutes off for honesty. But in truth it’s probably more like 45 minutes a day. 

41:07
Erin
I love the accuracy with which you’re bringing to this exercise. But you know, well, for now I’ll just put it as I’ll give you the hour. But that’s another great example of how you can use this. If you’re working towards a change in your equation, you can actually identify that and look to purposefully and deliberately move in that direction. 

41:30
Rich
Yeah. So what’ll be interesting for me afterwards is if you send me the equation, what I want to turn around and measure this against is okay. If this is the idea of a victory condition is I will sit there and I’ll turn around and say, okay, I want to have my equation being X by six months from now. And so the question is how? What do I. I’m not going to move every dial simultaneously. So I might say, well, if I want to get my exercise up, then I’m going to start doing jiu jits again, which is going to allow me to get to there. Cool. And it’ll fix my ratios. 

41:57
Erin
Yes. And your concept of victory is absolutely where we’re going with this because we track and we don’t track for, I guess maybe where there might be a slight difference. But I think that the give here is in. You talked about kind of a creating a tolerance for failure. But the intention isn’t so much to, you know, kind of whip ourselves into checking all the boxes. It’s really more information to help guide our decision making. And you know, we can be flexible within it, but it’s giving us exactly what you described in terms of those boundaries and that framework. 

42:39
Rich
Yes. 

42:40
Erin
Freedom in a framework. 

42:41
Rich
And why this is so nice is that then. So let’s say I look at the average week in the in for a day to day basis. The equation you give me must be my yardstick for the end of the week. So on Sunday I should journal with my equation and I should look at my week and just say, to be honest, this week I really was a little bit let myself down on this or I didn’t do that. Or maybe on a Friday evening, because then I’ve still got the weekends to catch up to say, hey, you know what? You didn’t spend enough time reading fiction. You know what? I’m going to treat myself to three hours of just really having fun with it. Going to sit outside. Amazing. Or go for a nice bike ride or whatever. Yes, that’s wonderful. 

43:15
Rich
Whereas so by allowing yourself to do that. That’s great. And then you use this as a yardstick for your week. However, what is nice is, for me anyway, is I want to look at it and say, okay, well, this is where I am now. And if I’m still the same person a year from now, well, that’s pretty shit because so I hate the idea of when people say to somebody, you’re dying. Well, nobody’s dying. You’re living and then you die. Right. So I want to feel like. In fact, I think the worst thing that can happen to us as humans is when we stop living. But that means that we’ve got to the precipice of death and we’re waiting. So I never want to be waiting. In order to be living, I’ve got to be playing. So I’ve got to be. 

43:50
Rich
In order to be playing, I’ve got to be improving. So I love the idea of having a future formula equation that I’ll be working towards. Anyway, I digresses. I’m sorry, I got excited. 

44:00
Erin
No, I love it because I feel like we’re now coming full circle to a lot of the stuff we talked about earlier. And what’s new for me, Rich, is I understood why this works, but I’ve never looked at it in the context of a game. And I love that you’re bringing that gamification into it because that’s exactly what this is. All right, so we’ve got five exercises work. 

44:26
Rich
So because part of work was the craft hour, I want to take that out, let’s say just seven hours per day. 

44:35
Erin
Okay. Five days a week. 

44:36
Rich
Yeah. 

44:37
Erin
Okay. 

44:38
Rich
I mean, I always work on the weekend, but that’s like that maybe that should be bonus time. And then, yeah, for me right now, that feels right. 

44:45
Erin
Okay. Often with kind of big chunks like that, I give it a different a capital letter, which is for like a larger block. Friendships. Oh, and let’s split this one into your three categories. 

44:56
Rich
So one one, friendships, one, friendships. Two or three per week. Knocks. And those could be in person or online because some of my obvious, you know, I had a two hour conversation with a very close friend of mine in Portland the other day. 

45:13
Erin
Great community, which is like your partner friendships. 

45:18
Rich
At least one group interaction per week. 

45:23
Erin
Okay. In business, this is like your EO group. 

45:28
Rich
So it depends because there’s some very fixed things. But I feel like I should be spending on average of maybe half an hour a day on EO things and it will never come in those blocks. But over the course of the week it would work out to that. So an average of 30 minutes per day should be EO. 

45:47
Erin
Okay, I’ll just round down to three over the course of the week. 

45:52
Rich
Yeah, that sounds good. 

45:54
Erin
Okay. Family. 

45:57
Rich
It’s a very interesting one because it’s so easy to say, oh, we’re going to spend two or three hours together every night. But for me that’s not true. We’re going to eat together and spend maybe 45 good minutes of all of us together. And then on the weekend we’ll do more so on the weekend. But even then we all respect our own space. So we’re all readers, or at least my daughter and I, for example, we love reading and then we’ll maybe play a game. So I think it’s a trap to get caught up into lots of time. I would say an average of 1 hour per week day. That’s not including like driving places together and things. That’s like doing stuff. 

46:34
Erin
Yeah, this is like holiday time. 

46:36
Rich
And then I would like to add, make that another three hours per day on the weekend. So that’s six plus five. 

46:46
Erin
That’s great. Amazing. Okay, so we’ve got your equation. We’ve got seven self development, five craft development, seven escape reading, four board games, plus five exercise, plus 11 family, plus seven big blocks of work, plus three one one friendships, plus one community friendships and plus three business friendships. 

47:15
Rich
Wow. Super cool. 

47:17
Erin
That’s good. Yeah, I like the specificity on that one. You can track, you can gamify this one quite easily. That’s great. 

47:24
Rich
Thank you. 

47:25
Erin
So I have one more question for you now that we’ve done this, because I think you’re going to be able to answer this one easily. And I think that this is hard for a lot of people. What is a dream that you have for yourself in 5 to 10 years and how do you trace that back to what’s in your equation today? 

47:46
Rich
The most truthful one at the moment is going to sound like the most boring. We’ve just moved from the southern hemisphere to the northern hemisphere. We’ve gone from a long time of being debt free to having to go back into debt. Try and build In a completely different economy and definitely within five years again, I would want to be completely debt free and comfortable again. So the goal is to get to a point of maybe, let’s say by 55. I want to get to a point of complete financial stability where my everything else. From that point, I want to be post economic. So any. Any decision I make from that point is made because it’s something I completely desire to do, not something that I have to do in order to make money for my family. 

48:22
Rich
And at this life stage, getting to post economic is. Is important for me. 

48:27
Erin
Yes. Well, I was going to say I think a lot of people can relate to that goal. 

48:31
Rich
I think it’s a relatively boring goal, but I think it’s an important one and it really is the new business we’re launching different business models, things like this, the intentionality around more speaking in the United States. All of that is geared around. It’s all things that I want to do. Those are the micro victory conditions that will equate to the end state. The if this then that which is financial independence by 55. Well, I like how that sounds. 

48:55
Erin
So it’s in the craft development blocks and it’s in the work blocks. 

49:01
Rich
Yeah. Yes. It’s what? It’s also in the don’t buy unnecessary stupid blocks. I forgot to add, like Alibaba and Amazon. Remember all of those fun things and hobbies. There’s. There’s a. There’s a micro block which is buying fun things for them. 

49:16
Erin
Yes. Okay. A few quick rapid fire and then we’ll let you go. Here we go. Finish the sentence. 

49:24
Rich
Fulfillment is solving interesting problems. 

49:27
Erin
Give me an example of a small moment of joy you had in the last 24 hours. 

49:32
Rich
Seeing my wife. When I woke up this morning, she was lying next to me and she just looked absolutely beautiful. 

49:37
Erin
What is a book you read or a podcast you listened to that changed the way you think? 

49:42
Rich
90% of books change the way I think, but I know what you’re going for. Recently, I reread a book called the Power of One, which is a. It’s a book about 1950s, 1960s South Africa. And I grew up most of my life. I lived 40 years of my life in South Africa. I was born in Scotland and I just moved to the Isle of Man. And rereading a book that I read in my early 20s that shone the lights on apartheid South Africa made me understand just how completely and utterly I had my blinders on around what was happening to people there. And even reading the book then Iread it as a different human than I was when I read it a few months ago. 

50:19
Rich
And I genuinely thought to myself, how these people didn’t rise up and murder me in my sleep or murder an entire group of people in their sleep shows so much about their character. And I learned so much about the character forgiveness of African people in South Africa and so much about what our ignorance is bliss of white people in South Africa that it completely blew my mind. So that’s an immediate thing that changed the way I think. But there’s a lot of books that certainly do that. I just read the book the Five Invitations, and it’s a book on Zen Buddhism and facing death. And I think that was a wonderful book that changed and reframing the way I think about death. 

51:00
Erin
In one sentence. What does freedom look like to you? 

51:06
Rich
Boring one again, freedom is not having a financial necessity to do anything and to do everything because you choose to, not because you have to. 

51:15
Erin
What is the coolest place you visited or a place you visited that exceeded your expectations? 

51:21
Rich
Iceland. 

51:22
Erin
Yeah. 

51:23
Rich
Yeah. Iceland’s amazing. It’s wonderful. It feels like. So it’s. Iceland and Tokyo are the only two places. Well, and Japan are the only two places in the world. I’ve gone where I feel like I don’t know the rules of the game because they play differently, which is really wonderful. Whereas everything else is somewhat homogeneous. And that’s obviously an oversimplification. In fact, to be honest, the Isle of Man is kind of like that. They play the same game, but they play it at a completely different speed. And that changes everything. And it’s wonderful. I had to rethink who I am as a human in order to enjoy it here. And as soon as I realized, oh, I prefer who I am when I’m here, I realized that it’s a great game to play and a great place to be. 

52:05
Erin
I love that I prefer who I am when I’m here. That’s when you know you’ve found your home. 

52:11
Rich
Right. That’s what I think. When you say I love you to your husband, or when I say I love you to Jazz or the kids. Anytime. Did you feel that feeling to say I love you to someone? What you’re actually saying is, hey, I love who I am right now when I’m with you. And so you’re attributing a feeling of self to the person you’re with. And if you stop loving who you are when you’re with somebody you’ve not, you’ve fallen out of love with who you are when you’re around them, you can rekindle that, but it’s not about them. It’s about you. And I feel that way with everything. 

52:39
Erin
What is something you do regularly to fill your own cup? 

52:42
Rich
Games. 

52:44
Erin
Yeah, I think that came out. 

52:45
Rich
Yeah. 

52:47
Erin
Oh, I love it. Thank you so much, Rich, for being here. This has been so interesting, and I just. My brain is on fire now with all of these thoughts around games and victory conditions and setting boundaries and moving along, you know, these finite games within the context of a larger infinite game. I just love it. Thank you so much. 

53:11
Rich
Thanks very much for having me. It was such a fun conversation. It was a game. 

53:16
Erin
It was a game.