Adult drive often comes from undoing childhood debris

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 58:10

   every day in my work. It shows up all the time. And it's not even a question. It's an observation, a very keen observation by Sigmund Freud. We spend our adult lives undoing the debris of childhood. So just pause there for a minute and think about your life. When you ask somebody, why do you do what they do? On a surface level, they're going to give all these answers. It's like, oh, because I love it. If you actually have deep conversations with them, what you come to realize is the fuel itself, the motivation is rooted in experiences that they had in their youth. Lance Armstrong. Why? What gave it Lance Armstrong the fuel to ride his bike while he had cancer? What was he trying to overcome or solve for? Talk to him or read his book. The trauma of his youth. Tiger Woods, trauma in youth. They didn't want black kids playing golf. They made

2. 59:05

   fun of them. That's the fuel. Now, one of the things I often have to say, your parents did too good of a job. You're too well-adjusted, right? But that's not the case for most of us. Most of us are trying to solve for things that happened during those formative years. Here's where it gets dangerous. I had a Wall Street guy who I was working with. He was, at the time, his late 40s, had made $500, $600, $700 million. He was miserable. He was married with two kids. He was at 4 a.m. every day, worked relentlessly, his family was falling apart, relationships weren't great, massive insecurity. I'll never forget this. Through our work together, it was in our second year, he told me the story about a girlfriend he had in high school. He grew up, my client grew up really poor, with a brother, he was like a drug addict, in a very sort of low income, low SES

3. 59:59

   family. dysfunctional parents drug addict brother and then there was him high school had a girlfriend she was the it girl of the town her mother if i remember correctly mother drove a white jaguar she was on a tennis team country club so imagine a scenario where you know lower you know lower ses class gets to date the it girl that validates you as a person right because nothing else in your life is validating you then the time comes it's almost like the archetypal movie the notebook and she breaks up with him and of course he's like but why and the answer is the story we've seen in millions just like you know at the end of the day like mom and dad are never gonna let this happen you don't fit like we don't belong together that broke his heart we come from different worlds come from different worlds you can imagine the kind of pain because that

4. 1:00:45

   that validates what he always thought about himself like i'm a loser i'm never gonna get out of this mess. So what do you do at that point? Essentially, what he told himself is no one's ever going to hurt me again because I'm too poor. And he went to Wall Street and he worked 20 hours a day and he was relentless. And even people who worked with him was like, that guy's animal, relentless. And I start working with him because he knew something was broken. And it was his identity, by the way. So what happened was, going back to Freud's observation, we spend our adult lives undoing the debris of our childhood. He had never stopped for that, even after the hundreds of millions of dollars. When we finally traced back that story, it was catharsis. And I remember having to say to him, I said, hey, you don't get a do-over. She's never coming back. And oh, by the

5. 1:01:30

   way, look at your life. And from that day forward, I have a text on my phone he had sent to me a couple years later. He's like, his family was intact. His wife loved him again because he stopped trying to solve for the pain of an 18-year-old self. But most people never do the work to do that. Most people never do the work to go into their psychological cellars and try