Changing the world is a task unfit for the faint of heart. But before we can embark on a challenge this great, we have to make sure that we start small, improving and organizing our own lives before we try to enact change on a grander scale.
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Here’s a transcript of our conversation:
Brittany: Hi Connor.
Connor: Hey, Brittany.
Brittany: So, we have talked a lot on this show about people making a difference, what we can do to make a difference. People like Ron Paul making a difference. Now, this is kind of a big task, like, we’ll say thing like, go, change the world. You know, we’ve told you how to make a difference. Now go make everything different. This is a very big task, obviously. So when it comes to talking about how we can actually enact change, I thought it would be interesting or, helpful even to talk about what that first step is. And this is gonna be a little gimmicky, and I almost wanted to play a Michael Jackson song while introducing this episode. And if you haven’t heard Man in the Mirror, please go listen to it after. But the first step into changing the world is actually, changing yourself, kind of saying, what can I do to be the change I want to see in the world? I kinda wanted to throw this to you, Connor. What do you think about that? Would you say that’s an accurate thing or an accurate first step to tell people to do?
Connor: Yeah, I, think that’s definitely right. Like, if we want to be an example to others and be a leader to others, you have to be the type of person who other people want to listen to, who other people think, you know, is credible. like they believe you, you’re persuasive, you, know, things like you’ve put in the time and the effort to learn. you’re, you’re not a hypocrite, right? People don’t wanna follow a hypocrite, someone who claims that let’s say, you know, I’m gonna be, the next Elon Musk, and yet I know nothing about business, right? And like, the only business I’ve run completely failed, and I didn’t learn anything from that. I didn’t try again. And so you don’t wanna be a hypocrite. you, have to be someone that other people can see. Like, okay, the principles you’re talking about or the things you say, you know, I see in your life that you live those principles or that, like, it’s clear that you are, you understand them, you’ve lived them, you’ve benefited from them. So I do think it’s important to first work on yourself for sure.
Brittany: That’s something. So Leonard Reed, who we’ve talked about before, he wrote Eye Pencil, which is the premise for the Miraculous Pencil. so he talked about how character matters, that even if you are really principled about your beliefs, so let’s say you’re a very good, I don’t wanna say, I’m trying to think of a political party, but I don’t think any political party is really good. So we’ll just skip that example. If you’re very committed to whatever it is you believe in, but your personal life isn’t great, like maybe you’re stealing from people on the side or doing bad things, it’s gonna be really hard for somebody to look at you and say, I want to believe what that person believes, because this person isn’t a good person. So, Leonard Reed always talked about how character matters, so that when we’re selling things that we think are really important, we need to remember that people are judging us kind of on how we’re leaving our life too. And I think that’s really important, and it gets me into my next point. So there is a psychologist named Jordan Peterson, who talks a lot about self-improvement and how to like, make the best out of your life. And he talks about how we really shouldn’t even try to fix the world until we fix ourselves. But he goes even more detailed than that and says that the way we start is by cleaning a room. And so I wonder, and I know our audience can’t answer back, but I wonder how many of our listeners have clean rooms right now? And I would be scared to know what the answer. And I’m sure if we asked their parents, not enough of them would have clean rooms. I don’t know what your kids’ rooms look like right now, but my is a clean,
Connor: I can envision in, my mind’s eye listeners in the car at home. the parents are right now turning to their kids, giving them a little knowing, glance the importance. So, why the big deal about room? Like, can’t you have a messy room, but still make a difference in other people’s lives? Why is that an example like that, you know, indicative of something else, or why, does it kind of symbolize something else?
Brittany: See, and I’m glad you asked that. So it’s like training, it’s like mental training almost. So starting with something big, let’s say you’re cleaning your house. Let’s, equate changing the world to cleaning your whole house and that you are a seven year old. And that’s a really big task. That’s a big task for me. Now, I won’t tell you how old I am, but it’s a big task, So if you’re gonna just clean the whole house, that’s a big, thing to, reach for. So instead, not even just cleaning your room clean, maybe a small corner of your room, you start training yourself. You start practicing. You say, okay, I’m gonna wake up every day and I’m gonna keep the room clean. Every time I get on a book, I’m gonna put it away. And that’s training you to be more disciplined, to be more organized in your life. And once you do that, you can say, okay, now I’m gonna do my room and I’m gonna do the living room. And then maybe you do that for a few weeks, then you say, you know what, I’m gonna do my room, the living room and the kitchen. Then maybe you throw in the bathroom. So you’re kind of building up your resilience or your strength. You’re learning how to be a tougher person. And so by the time you get to, you know, maybe the fifth room in the house, you’re ready to take on the whole house. So I don’t know if that resonates or makes sense with you, but that’s, that’s something that I’ve always found very useful.
Connor: I think it makes a lot of sense, especially because, big things are accomplished through lots of little things. Yes, right? we wanna change the world. But you know, that’s never like any massive project. I mean, let’s use another example. Let’s say you wanna run for President right? Like, that’s how you think you’re gonna change the world. Great, goal to have, more power to you. But when you’re running for president, there’s like 20,000 things you have to do, right? Like, I’m just gonna think literally off the top of my head, I haven’t prepared any of this. So let’s just kind of, use this as an example. You need a website, you need a logo, you need a set of issues, you know, like your platform, things that you believe in. You’re gonna need to hire a lot of people. So you’re gonna do a lot of interviews. You need to figure out how to, you know, market to other people and say, Hey, come work for me. You need to fundraise to get people to support you. So you need to have a lot of relationships and know who to talk to. you’re gonna have to travel
Brittany: Networking. We’ve talked about that before
Connor: yeah, yeah. Networking for sure. you’re gonna have to travel, right? A lot. You’re gonna have to know where to find people, where they gather how to market to them. So marketing is gonna be a big thing. You’re gonna have to know how to debate. You’re gonna have to know how public speaking all of these things and so many more that we could just spend time rattling off. Point out that a big goal changing the world by running for president is really just a whole ton of little things. And so I like the cleaning a room example, even though side note, I’ve never been very good at that room for opportunity for me. But, you know, the cleaning a room example is, a good little symbol because we need to get good at the little things in our life. We have to be, you know, disciplined. I, like that word that you use. We have to, you know, be able to be committed. We have to follow through with things. We have to finish the jobs that we start. We have to do a good job at these little issues because then they kind of build like, they’re like legos, right? Like, you kind of have your foundation and your, you know, you lay your, your first bricks down, and then on top of that you can build and then build and build, go higher. But it’s a lot of those little kind of puzzle pieces that you put together that lead to a really big, you know, Lego tower. It’s one brick at a time. And it’s like that in our life. Let me ask you this, Brittany. So when I was younger, I was very impatient, right Because I’ve wanted to do big things and I’ve had goals, and it felt like it was going too slow. It felt like I wasn’t moving very quickly towards the goal. So how does this principle plan if we wanna change the world, why is, you know, maybe patience so important if we’re, if, a big goal is comprised of little goals, to talk to me a little bit about patience and how that plays in, to how the younger people listening right now should be focused on themselves and kind of, you know, putting their life in order so that down the road they’re gonna have some of that bigger success.
Brittany: So I think it goes back to what I said about training, right? So young people especially need to do this now because I love the, what is the saying? it’s not, practice makes perfect. It’s practice makes permanent. I think that’s really, really good. And so things you get into now, even as a kid, the, the habits you get into right now, you’re not gonna magically grow out of those. I wish you were, but what I became an adult, that was the worst part, is realizing that my bad habits stayed with me if I didn’t make an effort to change them. So I think that can go in a positive way too if you train yourself now to be really good at I think the way that Peterson says it is like mastering your own domain, right? Taking care, getting your own house in order, as he would call it, making sure that you are doing everything you’re supposed to do that’s going to train you and set you up for success later on in your life. But I think it’s important to be patient because there’s only so much you can do right now. Imagine being a baby, maybe who’s crawling and wanting to walk. I mean, as much as that baby wants to walk, it has to master crawling first. So I think it’s really important to one, not get discouraged that you can’t do everything at once, right? It is going to take time. But to also realize that you do need to be patient. It’s, like a marathon, not a sprint, right? You’ve gotta pace yourself and be making progress and moving in the right direction, but you don’t have to do it all at once.
Connor: I think that’s exactly right. you know, it’s something that I kind of had to tell my younger self, or looking back, I’m like, oh, I wish I understood these things more because, now at a point in my life when I’m a bit more successful, I can look back and realize that all of those little things I had to learn how to do all the stumbles, all the hard work, all the minutia, right? Like the tiny things and and so forth was kind of preparing me for the bigger things where I, think of like muscle memory, right? Like, that’s such an important thing. I’ll give you this example. I’m just thinking of this on the fly. I type very fast. Like really fast.
Brittany: How many words per minute did Mava Beacon? I don’t remember that old program.
Connor: I was a big Mava beacon thing right now. My kids use typing.com and, it’s a really great, website and they have fun little games and, stuff that you can do as well. I remember Mavis Beacon had some very kind of silly games as well, and that’s fun for kids to learn how to do. And so when I was younger, I wanted to be a faster typer than my mom. My mom is a lawyer and she like
Brittany: She like a stenographer? No, no. She was a lawyer, not a stenographer.
Connor: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. She’s just a lawyer. but she, so she worked a lot on the computer and she always typed very fast, and I’m kind of a competitive person, so I wanted to beat her. I think I typed something like 130 something words a minute,
Brittany: Not too joby. Yeah.
Connor: And so, but I, practiced a lot and you know, I think practicing the piano as a kid helped with my finger dexterity, right? To be able to move your fingers very quickly. And so I spent a lot of time when I was younger, practicing typing, learning how to type really well, because I was motivated and I had that goal and I spent a lot of time doing it. Well, now in my life, for example, I’ve written a lot of books like you, I’m a writer, I write a lot. I’m communicating with people a lot, and I’m able to work at a very high rate and be very productive because I can type so fast. I see other people who are using like two fingers, you know,
Brittany: Yeah. My parents
Connor: Yeah. Or maybe they’re doing home row, like all their fingers, but they just kind of go slower. And I think, oh my gosh, like you can’t type as fast as your brain thinks. You’re having to like, go slow and, take your time. Whereas I can just kind of like, as I’m thinking of things, you know, and pump it out, what that means is that I can do a lot more, I can serve a lot more people, I can write a lot more, I can get a lot more of, myself and my ideas out there because I invested that time, you know, early on the little things that maybe even at the time I didn’t think, like I didn’t, when I was learning how to type, I was just trying to beat my mom, right? I wasn’t thinking like I’ll be able to write books way faster and that will be great. But, it’s that little investment early on in our life that even if you can’t foresee how you’re gonna be able to use those skills later on in life, right? If you’re learning how to write really well, you’re reading a lot of books. You’re, you know, doing musical instruments, you’re, you’re doing, you know, trying to do like persuasive writing and things like this. It’s hard to see how they’re gonna apply in your life, but there’s so many ways that it can, and that’s why I think, especially for the younger people, really investing in that stuff early on can be so helpful.
Brittany: That’s true. It’s also, so I wanna share a story and I’ll back up here before I share it. that is absolutely true. There’s also a bit of humility that I think this really important when it comes to, you know, cleaning our room and getting our house in order. And I wanna share a story of somebody named Elavadev butcher his name, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn I actually think I said it correctly and I’m amazed, So he wrote a book called the Gulag Arch Leggo, which really helped change the world. And by doing so, or how he changed the world, was it kind of exposed what was going on in these Russian Soviet, I guess you’d call them labor camps? Yeah. Where people were sent out into the cold and Siberia and just worked to death, essentially. Well, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was on in the Soviet army, so he was part of the people doing the disciplining here at these camps originally. But he had spoken out against his, the leader, I, was Leonard, Stalin at the time? Do you happen to remember?
Connor: I don’t remember.
Brittany: Okay. It’s one of them. And we talked about censorship in an earlier episode. it was censorship and its finest. They were opening up all their soldier’s letters and reading them to make sure that no soldier was saying anything bad against the government. Well, Alexander had been very critical, and so they found it and they threw him in one of the labor camps. And while he was in the labor camp, he got cancer. He almost died freezing. This was a terrible time. And when he was in there, he realized that his participation in, you know, the army and what he was doing was, not good. And he had to have this moment of, oh my goodness, I, you know, get my own house in order. He had to have this moment of, I contributed to this, like, part of the reason that I’m in here suffering right now is that I helped enforce these bad laws that I helped, you know, this regime get to power. And he had this moment of, oh my goodness, before I can even, you know, help other people in this camp, I’ve gotta kind of reconcile what I did, what role I played in this. And through doing that, he was able to kind of, you know, make peace with himself. he did not die of cancer. He got out of this prison camp and he ended up writing this book, which exposed to the evils of, you know, the Soviet regime to the rest of the world. it always reminds me of saying humble. You know, here’s a man where nobody else would look at him and saying he did something wrong. How dare he? But before he could even attempt to remedy his own situation, he kind of had to realize that, you know, maybe he hasn’t always been the best. Maybe he contributed to it. So that’s a really powerful story that I think is important.
Connor: Yeah, it’s so important for us to think about this topic, I think because, you know, when I was younger I had no idea that my future would be what it is now, right?
Brittany: Like that’s a good thing, right? You said that. wasn’t sure if that means the future is better or worse.
Connor: No. Yeah. Like, I, had no idea. Like I, initially I was a web developer, I built websites. I never thought that I would ever start my own organization or write books or, you know, like any of that kind of stuff. We don’t know what our future holds. And so, working really hard when we’re young to gain some of those skills, can be very important because we don’t know what our mission in life is gonna be. We don’t know what our path in life is gonna be. And, being the type of person that when the moment calls for it, you can stand up for what’s right. You know, you can speak out in defensive truth or against something that’s wrong. When you can make good decisions, when you can lead other people because you understand history, you can point out a logical fallacy, you can identify a bad idea. It’s so important to be learning a lot at a young age so that we’re better equipped in the future. Cuz we don’t know, you know, what opportunities are gonna arise that, you know, we create, we don’t know what the world is gonna be like. you know, we don’t know. Like I know, one guy who talks a lot about how the job he works in right now, didn’t exist when he was in school, right? And so there’s no way he could have prepared.
Brittany: That’s interesting.
Connor: What, he does now in life because it’s a totally new industry as a result of technology. And so that the world is changing. We don’t know what the future’s gonna be like. We wanna change the world. We wanna do a lot of good, but it’s so important to work hard when we’re younger and, get our life, in order so that, you know, however the world turns out, whatever happens in the future, we’ll be ready for it. We can adapt. We have a lot of kind of general knowledge that’s gonna help guide us and make good decisions. So really important topic to think about. guys, check out Tuttletwins.com/podcast for the show notes. Make sure you share the podcast with a friend. We love you guys for subscribe and hope you guys enjoy Brittany. Until next time, we’ll talk to you later
Brittany: Talk to you later
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