116. One Habit That Could Change Your Life

Start listening to podcasts.

If you’d like one easy good habit to start this year. Start listening to podcasts. Lots of them.

Why? Simple. To learn more.

To get smarter. To become a better thinker. To hear different perspectives. To expand your worldview. To become a stronger leader. To collect stories. To start new conversations.

In this world that changes as fast as it does, we do ourselves a disservice by not adapting and growing alongside it.

Get more voices into your life. Listen to what people are saying. Find out what the latest and greatest is. Don’t be ignorant to what’s going on out there.

Your better future is at stake.

Now hold on a minute. Let me keep you before you plug in the headphones. After you start listening to all these podcasts, don’t do anything.

Yeah, you heard me. Don’t do anything. Don’t change. Don’t take on the day any differently.

Not yet.

That’s not the point. The point of new and more information is not to abandon old and incomplete information. The point is to ponder. Think on it a while. Don’t go shouting from the rooftops all your epiphanies. You probably don’t understand them yet. In fact, you probably don’t know enough about your new knowledge to explain it to anyone else yet.

Go back and learn more. Listen more. The more you learn, the more you’ll realize there is to learn. And you can never know it all. It’s like my favourite definition of what it means to be a lifelong learner: it’s the constant pursuit of wisdom, knowing that you’ll never be wise.

The good news and the bad news is that there’s never ending information for us to acquire. Good news because with enough focused effort, we’ll be able to find everything we’ll ever need. Bad news for the same reason.

How do we know when we’ve found what we need? When should we stop looking? If there’s always new information, how do we know what to trust? With so much information, how do we filter through to the most important bits? How do we know when to make the changes our new knowledge suggests we should?

By developing the ability to come to our own conclusions.

Don’t let a podcast tell you what to do. Don’t let me tell you what to do. Come to your own conclusions.

At the same time, recognize that you’re likely to draw a better conclusion if you listen to thousands of hours of intelligent people talking about interesting topics. Humble yourself and consider that there may be a few other perspectives out there that could improve your process.

You might be thinking that there are a lot of dumb perspectives out there, and I would agree, but you need to hear the dumb stuff too so you know what not to do. The problem here is that podcasts aren’t labeled with a dumb or not dumb stamp. You’ve got to sort through it yourself and again, draw your own conclusions.

Practice critical thinking.

Practically, start with the Jordan Harbinger Show. If you’d like to do yourself a favour this week, binge listen to all the latest Friday episodes. Expose yourself to wild people and their wild stories, then earnestly listen to what Jordan and Gabe have to say about it.

I never used to enjoy these feedback Friday episodes, but more recently I’ve concluded that I find these to be the most valuable. Ironically, often I don’t actually find myself on the same page as the hosts and their commentaries, but I find it so valuable to hear about how other people think. How they respond to a variety of scenarios and the advice they give. I think about what I would say or recommend. I imagine myself in the shoes of the storytellers and what I would do if I were in their crazy lives. I’ve found this to be useful.

If you’re wondering why I think the Jordan Harbinger Show is a good place to start, my answer is the intro Jordan reads at the beginning of every episode:

As a result of listening to many many thousands of hours of podcasts, I’ve found I’m slower to accept new ideas. The more I’m exposed to, the more arguments I have both for and against many different topics. I don’t jump to conclusions, I’m less judgemental, and my interest in people is far greater than it once was because I’ve gotten smart enough to know that I can learn something from anyone.

I’ve found this to be useful, and as time has passed, it has made taking action when necessary much easier. As stated earlier, it’s not about listening to what some podcaster advises and immediately applying it to your life. It’s about the repetition of collecting new information so that new thought patterns become automatic.

Listening to podcasts is a mechanism for strengthening your curiosity muscle. Again, this has been incredibly useful for me. I know that the way I know things to be is not necessarily the way things are. Being open to new and different is a skill to be practiced, and it can start with listening.

And I’m not saying you need to change your life, your perspectives or worldviews. But if you’re an active participant in learning every day, you might draw that conclusion on your own. If that ends up being the case, don’t hesitate to take that action I recommended you hold off on earlier. Now would be the time.

— Cody

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