Bill Perkins
speaker
1,205 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 5 Jun
Bill Perkins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
That is the hardest one to break because they've been brainwashed into thinking that this is what I want to do. And it's one of the hardest things to extract somebody from. And so I have to explain to them, where do you socialize? You know, we just go through it. Where do you eat? Where do you eat lunch? Well, I like the people at work. I like hanging out. I don't want to quit work.
I like hanging out with the people. I'm like, you can quit work and take the people on a trip with you. You can vacation with them. You can still visit them at night and play bingo games. The people don't go away just because you don't show up at work. You can still spend time and you can actually spend more quality time with the people at work if you exercise that muscle.
But they don't know how to invite people over their house or, hey, we're going to go see the Chris Rock show tonight, which I'm going to go do.
No, here in Austin tonight. I didn't even know. See, there you go. A new experience you might have. But anyway, they don't know how to do that. It's a very long conversation. You can do this. You can do that. Everything that you're getting out of work, that social benefit, all these little excuses, the mental stimulation.
I'm like, John was like, these real life problems are more mentally stimulating than the natural gas puzzle. I still like the natural gas puzzle, but these are more mentally stimulating, more purposeful, more fulfilling to me.
And so I have to break down brick by brick and show them how they got habituated and how they haven't exercised these other muscles and how they can replace it and realize work is not the unique thing to get the things you're getting out of work. It's actually a bastardization of it. It's minimizing those experience.
You're not actually getting the most quality time with your coworkers in the working environment. You're actually not getting the most mental exercise. That's not necessarily the best mental exercise for you in the work environment. It's just you know nothing else because you've been stuck in this lab running on this type of wheel.
It's really hard because people will be extremely, extremely resistant. Change is painful. You get somebody who hasn't worked out forever and you're like, hey, let's go in the gym. We're going to work out. It's like, oh, God, why am I here? I don't like this. You know what I mean? Just to develop the muscle to do the thing, to play the tennis, the filming thing, it's a process.
You have to show them the reward that life is rich. It's fat. It's wonderful.
One of the things I took away from the habit books, like Tiny Habits by B.J. Fogg is a great book, is that they're powerful. They're extremely powerful. And so we get habituated in many different ways for good or bad. If you have the snacks in your house and you eat 200 calories a day, in two years, you're like 40 pounds heavier, right? 200 extra calories. How did that happen? How did I forget?
How did my life pass me by? How did I not go on these trips? How did I not have these experiences? How did I not call my mother? How did I not say I love you to these people, even pick up the phone? Because my habits took over. They took over towards this purpose and it just absorbed my life. And so... Outside the book with my friends, I really talk about the good of habits.
You can form good habits that keep you healthy, but some of the habits, the consequences of some of our habits to be successful and how it takes away from other things. Has that been a struggle for you? Oh, yes. I wrote that book for me. You know, the first life I wanted to save was my own. Put your life mask on first. I am just as guilty as the next person as being on autopilot.
I constantly have to remind myself that I'm going to die, that life isn't forever. This period ends. These seasons with my daughters and these seasons with my startups and all these things. And I have to think about like, what do I want? How do I balance them? What's optimized? And I don't get it exactly right. But I do it better than if I was just completely on autopilot.
And then sometimes I was like, oh shit, I was on autopilot. Why didn't I think about this?
The first macro thing is the death clock. Right now I have this calendar up and it's 4,000 weeks and you mark off each week. And it's a very visceral representation about life is finite. Not only will you die somewhere around here, but this period is going to end. A lot of times when people go on vacation, knowing that the vacation ends on Friday snaps you up.
You're like, oh shit, I'm going to go here and do this and I'm going to stay out. And we only have a couple of days, so let's do the cafe and let's do X, Y, and Z. And you actually get more out of the trip knowing it's going to end as opposed to living obliviously. And all of a sudden, time to go. Wait, it's time to go.
I forgot to do this or go see the Eiffel Tower or go whatever it is on your trip. And so same thing with life. When you know life is going to end, it becomes more urgent. Even the segment in your life, when you know your early 50s are going to end, you're like, it becomes more urgent. You become more deliberate. You get off autopilot. So that's the first layer.
Each week I check off. Now I've been to Austin and traveling, but when I come back, I see it in my closet. So I walk by it every day. It's a constant reminder. Where'd you get this calendar, by the way? Online. There was like some sort of stoic reflections out there, a memento mori, remember death. I used to have it on my phone and you used to count down backwards. to my estimated death date.
That app no longer works, but seeing it every time is great. If I get another widget that counts down, I'll have both of them, right? And I used to do it for other things like till Christmas, till your daughter's 14, till the job, the 15-year anniversary. Well, my daughter's going to be 16. She's going to be driving. How am I going to pry experiences out of my daughter?
Because your daughters don't want to know you before she's really gone. She gets a car and she's, see ya, deuces, you know, that type of thing. So that really helps me. It gives me kind of an alarm that wakes me up out of autopilot. And that's the thing I personally use.
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