[0:00]Have you ever noticed how some people control every room without saying anything? And other people have to be loud and seen to be heard, but the powerful ones just withdraw, they're silent, and then you watch as people chase after them. That is the point. How do you become the chased as opposed to the chaser? When you stop becoming available, the world reacts. It wants to latch and grab on and pull you in, and that is when you attract. It's when you realize that you're inherently more powerful than you think and you do not need everyone around you in order to get attention. In fact, you realize something really powerful that we're going to break in from the greatest philosophers of all time. And learn in order to control the room and not be controlled around it. There are a couple things that are going to be hard to hear here, but I think that is the entire point. And the first one is, you are not alone enough with your thoughts and creations to build the life you say you want. You'll realize eventually, you do not have enough solitude in your life, and your work is struggling for it. You need to sit alone in the darkness and watch as the world comes to you. I go back to that clip of Bane from Batman. You think darkness is your ally? You merely adopted the dark. I was born in it, molded by it. Literally all of history's greatest minds embraced solitude, long walks, isolated studios, late nights, early mornings, strict routines. You have to deliberately strip away the noise of the external world to examine the internal one. This is famous all the way from Nietzsche to Bukowski. You create space to process the chaos. So we're going to talk about something we've never talked about on this podcast before, but I consider the cornerstone of my success and the greatest builders of all time success. Learning to master being alone. I mean, the great philosophers and psychologists of our time have realized this, like Carl Young, who talks about what happens when you withdraw from others. You then see who is irritated, who comes after you, who doesn't allow it. Priceless information. This isn't about turning your back on the world, it's not about turning away from your loved ones. This is about choosing yourself. 2026, first lesson is this is not the year of explanation. It is the year of execution. Less talking, less chasing, more building. Let others wonder what you are doing. Let silence be your announcement. Young would call this individuation, which is the movement from living as a role, so what society, family, culture expects you, to living as self, what is authentically you. It's not self-improvement nonsense, it's self-integration. So Young would say the privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are. Ah, it's so good. Because you can't manipulate someone who likes being alone. The psyche, according to Young, works like this. Quick map. Ego, your conscious identity, what you say when asked who are you? Persona, the mask you wear to function socially, think titles, reputations, identities. Shadow, the parts you disown or repress, anger, ambition, vulnerability, when we shove it down deep inside. Anima, which is the inner opposite, so feminine in men, masculine in women, Young's original framing, symbolizing traits you haven't integrated. And then self, the totality of the psyche, which is conscious plus unconscious, the true center. So individuation is the ego's gradual alignment to self, to becoming you. Young would argue that what we deny in ourselves doesn't disappear, it ruins us from the dark. This is that like suppressed ambition, suppressed aggression. What do those turn into? Passive resentment, burnout, suppressed vulnerability is emotional numbness. Like until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. These days, a lot of psychologists call this shadow work, and it isn't about indulging in darkness, it's about owning it so it stops owning you. The thing is, you only have so much energy in your lives and in every day. And in each interaction that you have, you're allowing others to take it from you, which is why you end up at the end of the day feeling tired, frustrated, lonely. You've allowed yourself to become a shell reacting to other people's emotions. You know, have you ever been around someone who by the end of the conversation you felt like you have been sucked dry? Like you had run a marathon, but got no benefit from it? That is what happens when you are too available. And so Young noticed that people undergoing this process of individuation, they often produce mandalas, what he would call circular symbols of wholeness in dreams or art. And he believed that that's the unconscious, so a part of our brain, this speaks in symbols, not logic. And so he actually worked a lot on dreams and myth and why individuation is hard and rare is, you think about it like this. Society rewards you doing what other people want you to do. You know, personas are titles, etc. That's how we get all the applause. You know, that's why you see people on here going, I'm worth a billion dollars, right? That gets attention. And individuation often requires letting go of that old part of you that has to die. Disappointing people, standing alone in a crowd. And I'm obsessed with this lately because in a world of AI where we can make our little phone our constant companion, the winners will be those who learn to be by themselves. And so Young would say individuation does not just shut out one from the world, but gathers the world to oneself. Which, you know, often begins for most of us in midlife, like during crisis or burnout. When the persona story no longer works, and I've certainly had this, I was a journalist back in the day, and I thought that was my mission. I mean, I really wanted to give you bad news from a teleprompter, uh, every single day in a tight sheath dress. And when I look back on that and think that that was the highest level because I thought that meant that I was getting a ton of attention, I realized that that was a persona I never wanted. And so individuation, choosing yourself and necessary isolation, well, that is the highest and most decisive experience. So, if you were doing analysis of Young's work, you would note that because only when we are alone can we discover our inner supports and the indestructible foundation of our being. I remember one time talking to Eckhart Tolle about this, and he talked in circles around me. I could barely understand the man, actually. And I, I got so combobulated, discombobulated talking to him because he would use words like our indestructible foundation. What the fuck does that mean? But actually all he was really saying is that in order to figure out who you are, you have to be self-sufficient and you have to stand apart from the crowd and go your own way. And the more you like immess yourself with your wife, your husband, your partner, that best friend, the more we go by ourselves, the more we serve the greater purpose. And, and that is, I think something that most people don't realize. They think about loneliness as a bad word these days. Loneliness versus being unable to be by yourself. There's a sharp line between solitude and inner and alienation. Loneliness does not come from having no people about yourself, is what Young would say, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible. So for him, basically, choosing yourself means you choose loneliness and you're okay when your old friends don't want to hear what you have to say. That's not a bug. This is what the cost of authenticity is. And so I think choosing yourself means I am what I choose to become. I am not what happened to me a set of circumstances, but a choice. And so I've been obsessing about this because I think your past is like raw material. But the self is what you actively become, and this dovetails with the modern, you know, Youngian theme that when you finally choose yourself, your entire life changes. I've felt this before. Like, I'm sure you've felt it too, a moment where you stopped living for external validation and start acting from an inner center. And I don't think he's studied enough. You know, these days it's like we follow whoever has the most followers online and listen to them, but I like to go back to the greats because he would emphasize that when you turn inward and you dialogue with your inner parts, then you actually activate and meet this cast of inner characters. That your inner work is only possible with real alone time. And so, like individuation is not self-help. It's, you know, modern culture often makes mistakes, like thinking that you have to have status, productivity, optimism. And Young would say, if you're only stacking achievements without integrating your inner contradictions, the part of you you hate, you actually are just inflating the ego. And a simple way to recognize this is you stop needing approval for decisions that matter. You can hold paradox, so I can be strong and I can be kind. I could have a ton of ambition and I could pull back and have restraint. There's a quote I love that's you cannot be peaceful unless you're capable of great violence. That's because it is restraint, and you have the capability. Imagine, if every time you had a big decision, you could call an emergency board meeting, but the board was entirely in your own head. Not psychosis, we're not crazy people talking like psychopaths. But Young, he thought when you look inward honestly, you don't have like one self, you have a cast of characters. They have different drives and different fears and I know you guys know what I'm talking about. And when you talk with them, it's part of becoming who you really are, and that's why silence is so important and why you have to learn to speak to yourself if you want to be truly heard.
[10:07]So most people make decisions by listening to whichever voice is the loudest that day, usually fear. But here's a better way and how to run a board meeting with your own mind, Young style. So step one, you name the voices. So when you're stuck on a decision, relationship, move, business or whatever, you grab a notebook and you write down three inner voices you can actually feel arguing. For instance, you might have the visionary, which is like obsessed with upside, adventure, impact, maybe arrogance. The operator cares about risk, logistics, downside. The protector, worried about your reputation, safety, don't embarrass me. Then I don't want you to overthink it, just name the three that are clearly present for you. And then step two, let each one speak uncensored, so give each voice its own page. I always think, at the top of the page, I like to write, when I'm making a big decision and I'm really scared, the visionary. Then I let it talk. What does it want, what is excited by, why this decision is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for it? Second page, the operator. I list all the constraints, everything that could break, everything that would have to be true. Then the third, the protector. Let it confess exactly what it's afraid of in language a bit like a scared parent. The only rules, no judgment, don't try to sound clever, you're just letting the cast speak. And then step three, become the chair of the board. Now you switch roles. You're no longer any one of these selves inside of you. You're not the visionary, you're not the operator, you're the not the protector, you're the self, the chair of the board. Young was pointing out when he talked about individuation that the part of you that can hold all of these perspectives without collapsing, that's the whole of you. And read the three pages. Write a little synthesis that starts with here's what we're actually going to do and why. And like, I always find I need parts of all those little parts of me, the scared little girl inside, the big bad boss, you know, the wife. And so you might honor the visionary's upside. You might honor the operator's constraints and give the protect and give the protector a contingency plan. Or you might realize the protector's running the show and consciously decide not to let fear make the call. So what you've just done is stop one inner voice from hijacking your life. And so, you know, whichever mood is the loudest is typically the one that drives what you do. And with this little five-minute exercise, you've changed your life. This is not just a quote on Instagram. So next time you're paralyzed on a decision and you're not sure if you're going to be heard, I often wonder if it's actually that I am not going to listen to myself on this. So do me a favor, don't send another panicked text to five friends. Call a board meeting, be quiet, let them speak, and this isn't just Jung by the way who realized the power of the dark solitude. One of my favorite philosophers of all time, Nietzsche, talked about solitude as power not lack. And so he he says on the on the lines of my solitude doesn't depend on the presence or absence of people. On the contrary, I hate who steals my solitude, without it, an exchange offering me true company. Which basically means if I am going to spend time with you, you better be better than spending time with myself. And he talked about a thing I'm sure you feel in your life, which is, are you bored because you're trying to entertain yourself? Or can you also guard yourself against the most refreshing drought from your own innermost fountain, he would say. Meaning, like, what if you spent time alone and that actually felt like the elixir? He has this book where he has one of the main characters say this line that I love. He's like, flee my friend into your solitude. I see you dazed by the noise of great men and stung by the stings of the little. It's so good. And why I love this is because how often are we all that? How often do we put something in our ear just to entertain us, not to listen to our own voice? And there is a a solitude inside of great men, he talks about, that is inaccessible to praise or blame. You know, when I had to start over and change my career entirely, the world was really loud. Everybody was telling me, how could you leave this job? How could you go do a new thing? You work at the highest levels of finance. And I had to find a part of me, that like inner part inside of yourself that listens to no one. And I guess I want to ask you kind of a tough question, which is when was the last time you did that? When did you sit truly alone, as the kids say these days, raw dogging life without any entertainment? Because the danger and test of being alone, he often talks about, is that everything that you carry within you grows, including that inner beast inside of you. So I know solitude isn't automatically good because it magnifies whatever the fuck is in there. You know, and so oftentimes we think about loneliness poorly because we haven't actually integrated who we are. No founder exemplifies the path of solitude like Sara Blakely, you know, Shapewear brand's Banks, billionaire, huge business. But her path was lonely. Investors told her Spanks was dumb. The fashion insiders were completely dismissive, and manufacturers couldn't meet her small early quotas. She literally got told no continuously throughout her entire career. But she didn't workshop the idea, she didn't pull friends, she didn't go listen to people on the internet or any of the people that told her no. Instead, she literally cut the feet out of pantyhose in her apartment alone and scaled it into a unicorn company. And like it's a perfect example of this solitude inaccessible to praise or blame. The ability to think and build without constantly responding to other people's reactions, that kind of solitude is rare now. Most creators are exposed to feedback constantly. The result is work shaped by reaction rather than conviction, and this is why newsletters still matter. A newsletter lets you develop ideas over time in your own voice, without immediate judgment, and Beehive is built around the principles that your voice deserves direct distribution, audience ownership, monetization. I've been using Beehive for years. And Beehive has taught me one thing. As a great creator, I want complete control, a place to build deliberately, grow steadily, and eventually turn this into my own billion-dollar business. Whether you are looking for the million-dollar business that you have or you just want your voice to be heard to the mini and to stand out from this world where other people allow you to speak or not. That is why I'm obsessed with Beehive and why I'm invested in this company. So if you don't already have a newsletter, go to beehive.com and start one. If you do already have a newsletter, you should probably switch to beehive.com and use the code Codie30 for 30% off for 3 months. I can safely say to you that this business is one of my favorite in the world. If I could own more of it, I would. It's also spelled funny because, you know, we're weird here, which is b h I i v.com. So B hive, two eyes, no E at the end.com. Because the truth is, being alone and writing is probably one of the most powerful things you can do. And so Nietzsche talks about this at length. For him, being constantly immersed in the crowd means you're not actually thinking. You're running shared scripts. Solitude is how you reclaim original thought and as he would say, drink from your own cistern, which is, which is basically a a mechanism for, uh, holding water or or drink. Um, but I, I think about this a lot because right now I bet you can imagine, like, I know, for instance, I love my mom dearly, if she's listening, I'm sorry, mom, but she like, she doesn't understand why I want to be alone so much. In fact, like the other weekend, you know, they're like, we want to come with you next when we go to our our beach house, and I'm so busy right now, that the thought of another human talking to me during the weekend, when I am on my own time, is actually physically painful to me. Like, have you ever been in that moment where you're like, I just need to be alone more? And so I've gotten used to this. And it is going to piss off people around you. It pisses off my family often. They're like, you have time, we can come. I'm like, I know. The the problem is that I really love to be myself because as he would say, in loneliness, the lonely one eats himself, in a crowd, the many eat him. Now choose. So either you face yourself or you're consumed by the herd. There is no neutral. And most writers or uh Youngian followers or philosophers phrase it this way, what isolates us is not literal distance from others, but distance from expressing who we really are. So when you close that gap by choosing yourself and speaking from the self, you naturally become less reactive to surface slights. You're just harder to mess with. You know, this is how you become that unreactive leader we've talked about in other videos. You do what Yang, one of my favorite mentors taught me, which is pulling yourself on the balcony. That is a Youngian thought, which is how do I in the midst of chaos, if I am on a battlefield right now, I imagine anytime my emotion's crazy, I'm fighting with people, I don't like what's happening. I imagine a battlefield around me and I imagine myself going and standing up on a balcony and looking within it. This is how you pull yourself out, and the only way you can do this, not become a reactive human who has no ability to control your emotions, who acts unreasonably, who gets triggered and fired up, is to go into solitude. That's where you access, uh, that which is incomparable in you. And I think it is hard because it's dangerous and it intensifies whatever is inside you. But, you know, if we know that this is the most important thing that we can do, then it's really just what Jung says, I am what I choose to become, and I become that when I am by myself. You know, Nietzsche also talks about the higher type goes alone. And so this person is is indifferent to praise or blame because he answers to his own measure, not the herd. This is even Robert Green talks about non-reactivity and resentment. And how resentment is physiologically ruinous. You know, the the really strong see resentment as beneath them. The weak are consumed by it, right? And so you'll find weak-minded individuals, they hold resentment, and you can change, if you're weak-minded now, you can change that. But strategic non-reaction, which I kind of think of like a bear hibernating. Like, I might be having some feels while you're talking to me for a second, I might really have some emotion, but I kind of think about it like, I'm going to talk to that bear in a second, but I'm going to be here unemotionally in the meantime. And it's sort of funny because like the team the other day, I was doing a photoshoot, and um, there were snakes crawling all over me and tarantulas and scorpions and hissing cockroaches, my least favorite, for the record. And I don't like snakes, and I don't like uh tarantulas, and I don't like scorpions, and I don't like cockroaches. I don't like any of these. And I especially don't like them at the one point where the woman goes, sorry, the snakes are smelly because they peed all over themselves in the box while we put these huge pythons on top of you. I was not thrilled. Nor was I thrilled when one of the pythons literally slithered up and hit my face with its face. That's not thrilling for me.
[24:28]But I was like, the team was like, you're so calm. It didn't even bother you. I go, no, I mean, I have all the feelings about it. I just let it hibernate because I know I can come back and deal with that. And so I think you can just you become more of who you want to be. That strong leader in a sea of waves of emotion when you go to isolation. Because that comes with consciousness, instead of lashing out at the world for not mirroring you. I think loneliness actually comes from not being able to express what matters. Okay, so I want to talk about something that, you know, maybe I'm getting close to, I guess I'm midlife now. But during midlife, the psyche asks a brutal question, which is, is this all you are? When the answer is no, the persona begins to crack, meaning when you know that you're capable of more. And the crack shows up as you're unhappy, you're unhappy at life, you're impulsive, you're longing for meaning, not status, and this is why midlife crises often look irrational. They aren't about logic, at least according to to Jung, they're about identity starvation. So the crisis happens because the old identity worked super well, and now all of a sudden, there's some fissure that's happened, and it's obsolete. So what I try to think about is, what if this is your opportunity, not your disaster? If somewhere right now you're struggling in some aspect of your life, you're having a midlife crisis, I had a quarter-life crisis in my career. I'm sure I'll have another midlife crisis. I'll have to change something out. And every single time I've had one of those, it's the opportunity of a lifetime. What if it's yours? I want to talk about burnout, which he would describe as chronic shadow suppression, which basically means burnout is not your overworked. Plenty of people work hard without burning out. So what's the difference? Why can this person work forever and that person hates their life at the same job? Well, it happens when you live too long against your nature. You suppress parts of yourself to maintain this identity, and your shadow does all the labor while the persona takes the credit. So, like common shadow suppressions that lead to burnout, suppressed anger, you're exhausted. Suppressed ambition, you're resentful. Suppressed vulnerability, you feel nothing inside. Suppressed creativity, depression disguised as fatigue. You know, Young warned that ignored parts of the psyche, they don't disappear, they turn into symptoms. So burnout is actually your psyche saying, I cannot keep carrying what you refuse to acknowledge. An identity collapse is like your ego losing control, and so I think that feels terrifying for all of us because it removes the story you used to explain yourself. A lot of times in like the literature I've seen on, on Young, people describe it as, I don't know who I am anymore. Nothing I built feels real. And this happens when we've really confused our ego with the persona. And your unconscious is saying, these two things cannot live inside me at the same time. It's like oil and water, you just cannot make them come together. And so this old meeting kind of dissolves, and this isn't madness. It's sort of disorientation maybe before reorientation. And I think not enough people today because we can be so distracted. Like you might not even realize the phase that you're in. And I'm not a psychologist. I'm not saying you're not depressed if you're depressed and you should go and talk to doctors. And I'm not giving medical advice. All I'm saying is what I think some of the best philosophers of our time and the best psychologists of our time have thought about this. And how we can reorganize around the self instead of the ego. And that's been one of, I think, the main crises that often hit high performers. Like if you are a high performer, like I consider myself to be, you actually have a higher likelihood of this happening to you because society over-rewards competence. So we're really good at ignoring internal signs. Your persona is highly reinforced, aka, I am this because I got money and praise and authority and likes on the internet. But the unconscious doesn't give a fuck. And so, you know, Young observed the more one-sided a personality becomes, so if I just get too into YouTube likes or talking to people on a podcast, and I stop listening to the other person and I make it all about myself, well then the more violent the correction is going to be. And that explains why I've seen executives burn out after making it. In fact, I just saw one flame out live. And I remember watching and thinking, this is an adult, this is a grown man flaming out, and I could tell why. Um, because a lot of times if you mess with your persona, they didn't fail. They just he he outgrew the identity that got him there. And individuation doesn't ask you to destroy your life. It asks you to stop living only as a role, and if you won't do it, the universe will kick you in the ass, uh, another way. That's what I've found. So it basically is up to you or the universe. Because if you don't build a life that reflects your internal truth, and I don't mean that in a touchy-feely sort of way. I mean, like you know. And if you don't do it, then you're not going to have external rewards anymore. They will take it away. And so at some point, you are going to have to be the one to say no to the applause, to disappoint people, to let old versions of your life die. And Jung was explicit. This is so good. He says, there is no coming to consciousness, without pain. Buddha might say there's no life without suffering. So what can we do to become one with the darkness, as Bane says? So I stole some ideas from, uh, from Young and philosophers. And there's a couple things that I do. You'll see it on my calendar, I have a weekly solitude block, so schedule one to two hour block per week with no phone, no meetings, no input. You can journal, you can walk, you can read original sources, not on your phone. You can think about one hard problem, like, what am I pretending not to know right now? If I were not afraid of others' opinions, what would I do differently? What's the one decision I'm avoiding because it will isolate me? And your goal is to train what Nietzsche talks about with your ability to drink out of your own cistern instead of drinking from everybody else's. You know, the principle is basically as Jung would say, I am not what happened to me, I am what I chose to become. And so this is going to demand your segment from the crowd, and how you do this is something called the self contract. So once per year, I like to do it in the new year, you could do it right now, this is a good time of year. I write a one-page contract. And you'll see it on my phone, I keep it in my notes. I choose and and the contract typically for me goes something like this, I choose to become the kind of person who and I list three to five identity statements, not goals. No, no, no, these are non-negotiables I will hold up even if it costs me status, approval or belonging. So that might be like, you know, I am the type of person that gets up every day at 6:00 in the morning. I am the type of person that always puts my husband first. I am the type of person that does the things I say I will do. And when you sign it, end date it and review it consistently, it'll help you shift from reactive identity to a chosen identity. You are choosing to be this type of person, and this is based on decades and decades and decades of theory and study. Then you go to your inner advisory board, and anytime you're struggling, you talk to that inner cast of characters and voices, dialoguing with them. That's that part of becoming whole again. And if you do this, then your whole life will change. And so I think about it like um, I have something called the chair exercise. So, when I'm stuck on a decision, I write down my three inner voices, you know, I call mine, I call mine the, the visionary, the operator and the protector. And I give each a page like we talked about, I let it write uncentered. And then that short synthesis comes up about what I'll actually do as the head of the board of directors. I execute on it. That's it. It's what you'll actually do and why.
[35:07]And the goal, instead of being unconsciously driven by one voice, is that you listen to all of them after you really say what type of person you want to become. Because the sad part is, nobody cares about your potential. Potential is worthless. Everyone has potential, and what separates the greats from the wannabes is reality. Finished work, shipped products, written pages, solved problems. Stop talking about what you could do and go create proof of what you did. Even if all you do is just spend time alone with yourself, you might actually end up liking the person that you find. Thank you guys for letting me letting me yell at you today. I have been reading a lot of these philosophers and I keep coming back to this idea that all the great philosophies have been written. All the truths have been said before, and we go to this world where everything is just milk toast and oatmeal type advice. And when you go back to somebody like Nietzsche or Young, like their words hit you in the gut because they were from a non-PC era where it didn't matter how you felt, you just had to listen, and there weren't that many voices that were loud. Only a few got to really stand out, and those few tended to be incredible and deep and sophisticated. And so you'll have to tell me if you like this episode, because if you do, I'll do more like this. We'll call them Codie yells at you. Codie bullies you? Codie rants at you? I don't know. Put it in the comments what you guys want. But my hope for this podcast is you not only build a better business, a better bank account, a better community, but a better brain and a better life. Because what's the point of it all if we don't have that?
