Alex Brogan Interview
I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with Alex Brogan, who is a champ thinker and creator on content surrounding mental models and first principles thinking. I have been following his work for a while now and really enjoy his content. It’s thoughtful, thought-provoking and tends to appeal to those with a thirst for knowledge to better navigate the modern world.
He was so kind as to do a written interview with me where we cover topics such as productivity, technology, his background and personal evolution in life and views on cryptocurrency and decentralized finance.
It’s quite a read, so grab some coffee and without further adieu, enjoy!
Question 1: Alex’s Background
Could you briefly talk over your background and how you found yourself working on the “game of life”, mental models and productivity?
Previously, I worked at Goldman Sachs for 2 years (2019-2020) in the Investment Banking Division, helping companies grow and raise capital. I also played Water Polo for Australia (2015) and was Valedictorian of my graduating class at the University of Western Australia (2017).
I also spent time at an NFT Art Studio in growth, and at a Growth Marketing Agency called Ammo Marketing, focusing on organic and paid social.
I am a Go To Market Lead at Zipline, a Series A B2B healthcare startup. Zipline aims to solve some of the most pressing challenges in the healthcare industry throughout the United States and Australia.
A few years ago, when I was 21 years old, I was growing increasingly frustrated with the amount I felt that I had to learn—and feeling like I knew nothing. Charlie Munger, Naval Ravikant, and several other brilliant minds all suggested focusing on fundamental ideas, which I internalized as 'a great idea'. One that would help me make sense of a very complex world and the high-density of information constantly thrown at us.
Focusing on mental models was my lifeboat, and I realized a lot of other people felt the same way. Sharing what I was—and am still—learning became a very obvious choice.
The game of life became a term I had for a growing realization that you have control over your outcomes in life. I’d sum it up like this:
A movie is passive. You're a spectator. What happens happens. You can’t do anything to control it—nor should you even try? The outcome is a foregone conclusion. Destiny. It will be what it will be.
A game is different. The rules are set, but the outcome is not. You have the power to control your own destiny. The better you learn the rules and start playing to them, the better chance you have of winning. Neglect the rules and failure will ensue.
Over time, I’ve realized that some people live as if they’re playing a game, and some live as if they’re watching a movie.
Ultimately, the people that reach the highest levels of fulfillment and happiness are those that play life like a game. Not just any game. But a game that sits squarely on the “skill” end of the skill vs. luck continuum. (See Howard Marks' You Bet! for a detailed explanation). They internalize that they have control over their outcomes—an internal locus of control—and they move through life accordingly, believing they can get to higher levels with increased effort and thoughtfulness.
I’ve found that for me, life is much more fulfilling when I treat it like a game, believing I have autonomy over my outcomes. I want as many people to recognize this as possible and ultimately find their own version of fulfillment. You can play a number of different types of games in life—positive and zero-sum—what’s key is that you’re aware of which ones you’re opting into and out of at all times. Also, whatever games you choose to play, make sure you’re playing them to the extent of your ability and don’t let other people draw you into theirs. A common example of this is when people opt into the game of financial success and get cut down by those who have opted out. If you've asked yourself the question, answered it honestly, and are living accordingly, you shouldn't feel like you have to apologize for the games you choose.
As a side note, usually you’ll find zero-sum games (one winner, one loser) in highly competitive arenas: sport, financial services, the education system, etc. A positive sum game is one where you win without causing someone else to lose. Technology and knowledge sharing are some examples. Building a technology that improves people's lives makes everyone a winner. The sharing of knowledge consolidates the learning of the teacher and improves the lives of learners.
On personal productivity, I’ve always felt that self-management and personal development are upstream of basically everything else in your life—the lead domino if you will. As Dee Hock says, “When we fully attend to the management of self, excellent management of all else is unavoidable.” If you can master yourself at the micro-level, your day to day actions, the macro- level—relationships, career success, everything you do becomes far easier.
For those looking to kickstart their personal habits, my recommendations are Atomic Habits by James Clear, Essentialism + Effortless by Greg McKweon, and Deep Work by Cal Newport. If you read and internalize these, they will change your life.
Question 2: Mental Models
What are a few of your favorite mental models? Which have you applied in your life and how have you used them to make a positive difference in the way you live and think?
Let’s first define mental models, since they are often confused. The simplest way I like to think of them is as a “mental hook” to a fundamental idea about the world. One that helps you reason through the various situations you encounter. Mental models can be thought of in multiple ways and are the overarching term for:
Methods
Concepts
First principles
Building blocks of knowledge
Worldviews (including biases)
Frameworks for thinking and making decisions
We can't store all of the world's details in our brains, so we use mental models to simplify complexity into understandable and organized chunks.
They help us make better decisions without needing to know everything about a situation.
The most useful mental models have applications in a wide range of disciplines and can help you navigate challenging situations to solve complex problems.
Take this example. Imagine you're standing next to a large white lattice. It's nighttime and pitch black. Behind the lattice is a projector screen. Writing on the projector screen is a problem. You must solve this problem. But, you can't see the information needed to resolve the problem because it's pitch-black. Luckily, you notice some small light bulbs at each of the intersections on the lattice. You figure that if you can turn enough of them on, you'll be able to solve the problem effectively. Each additional lightbulb will illuminate a different aspect of the problem. The more lightbulbs you have, the greater your chance of solving the problem.
We can consider mental models in a similar light (Ha!). The more you can bring to problem-solving and decision-making, the broader your perspective.
When we do this, we solve problems more effectively. When we solve problems more effectively, we get better outcomes. When we get better outcomes, we have a better life. A better life is what we want, isn't it?
Why are mental models helpful?
Think back to school or university. In each of your main subjects, try and recall what you remember.
Do you recall isolated facts (names, dates, statistics)? Or, do you recall overarching concepts?
If you recall isolated facts, you're in rare company. If you're like most people, you'll remember the core concepts. Now consider that for each field, there is a similar set of core concepts that carry >80% of the weight of that field.
If you can identify and learn those concepts whilst disregarding all the trivial information, then you'll have a recipe for learning highly efficiently. Not only that, but you'll build substantial, lasting knowledge that will enable multidisciplinary thinking. You'll be unstoppable.
In my life, the most useful mental models have been:
At the macro (life strategy) level:
Temporal Discounting & Delayed Gratification
Humans typically discount the distant future and put a premium on the ever-present now. The ability to delay the gratification of present pleasures is one of—if not—the biggest drivers of long-term success. “Delaying gratification is a process of scheduling the pain and pleasure of life to enhance the pleasure by experiencing the pain first. It's the only decent way to live.” — Scott Peck. (See The Marshmallow Test).
Inversion
When applied to life planning, inversion means starting with the end state that you want in life. It allows you to work backwards to figure out what you’re liable to need to get there, and it helps set a direction for you to head in. My preferred inversion process is the 10-year vision exercise by Debbie Millman.
Leverage
Leverage is working smarter, not harder. You can achieve considerably more when you give up the false pretense that simply pushing harder is going to make you successful. Working hard is a seat at the table, working smart is what gets you to the head of the table. Two examples of using leverage in my life at the moment are with an awesome virtual assistant and artificial intelligence tools. They allow me to achieve far more than I could alone. For those wanting a primer on leverage, I recommend The Life of Leverage by Eric Jorgenson.
Bezos’ Regret Minimization Framework
A few years ago, I was faced with a difficult situation. I had a revered job at a global investment bank that I’d worked incredibly diligently to get. As far as banking stereotypes go, I had a very fortunate setup, working with highly competent and kind people that I learned a lot from—with reasonable hours too. The problem was that I knew my heart wasn’t there and I couldn’t see myself doing it when I was older. It was very challenging to rationalize the merits of leaving on a short-term basis as it would mean considerable pain: an immediate, significant cut to my earnings, lots of people asking me, “What the hell are you doing?”, and no clear idea what I was meant to do next.
I needed a way to consider more than just the short-term impacts of my decision. And so, there was the Bezos regret minimization framework: when deciding what to work on, ask yourself, which action would my 80-year-old self most regret not having taken?
Asking this question allows you to shake yourself out of the present and focus on what really matters in the long-term. I told myself that I had to keep this front of mind and remember that it was a long-term decision I was making, not a short-term positive one. After I’d set that expectation, it became one of the easiest decisions I’ve made in that I knew it was the best thing for me on a long-term basis, and that’s the basis I valued most highly.
At the micro (day-to-day actions) level
Activation Energy
In chemistry and physics, activation energy is “the minimum quantity of energy required for a specified reaction to take place.” In day-to-day terms, it’s the cost in terms of effort or time that a task requires to be completed. In general, the higher the activation energy, the easier it is to procrastinate on a task. A helpful example of this is exercise. Think of the times that you missed exercise. Typically it will be because, a) you haven’t defined what you’re doing in your exercise session, or b) the exercise you’d planned takes a level of energy that you don’t quite have within you. In a), there’s mental effort required to figure out what you’re going to do in the session—that increases the activation energy. In b), there’s more physical effort than you can bear at that moment—the activation energy is high. So, what can you do? Well, with a), you could make sure to explicitly define—before—what you’’ll be doing in your exercise session. This means that when it comes time to exercise, you’ll only have one barrier to overcome: the physical barrier of exercise. If you hadn’t defined what you’re doing, you’ve got a mental hurdle and a physical hurdle. This means the activation energy is high. As it relates to b), the best way around this is to complete a micro-version of the exercise. That is, instead of a 60 minute exercise session, just do 15 minutes. You’ll lower your perception of the activation energy required to do that, and it becomes very easy to do. (Side note: very often when you do a 15 minute version of a habit, you’ll feel like continuing for longer—you’ve hacked your psychology!).
Now, take this habit and apply it to all areas of your life. Say you’ve got a large, fuzzy project that you need to complete. You’ve got two problems: 1), the mental effort to define what you need to do, and 2) the effort of actually doing it. So, how can we reduce the activation energy? Well, again, we can define explicitly what we need to do to complete our project. Write before action. Tackling the parts of the project independently—the planning and the doing—makes it a far less gruesome problem.
Decomplication
We’ve been led to believe that our everyday problems—weight loss, productivity, saving money—require complex solutions. This is called ‘artificial complexity.’ Decomplication is the process of boiling problems down to their simplest form.
Some good questions to ask to get away from ‘artificial complexity’ are:
Am I making this harder than it needs to be?
What is the simplest way to achieve this goal?
What is the 80/20? If I only had half the time I have to do this, what would I actually do?
To escape artificial complexity on an individual level, you must recognize when a problem is truly simple, and then seek out the simple solutions.
To lose weight, “eat whole foods, mostly plants, not too much” in the words of Michael Pollan.
To network with interesting people, do interesting things. Don’t worry about all the BS.
Question 3: The End Goal
What is your end goal with consuming and disseminating all of this valuable information?
When you're doing things that are inherently interesting and meaningful to you, the journey becomes a significant part of the end goal. It's pretty simple for me: I want to achieve better outcomes in all aspects of my life, and improve the outcomes and experiences of those around me and the collective. I am an advocate of egoistical utilitarianism. When you do what you think is best for you, it's usually best for others as well.
My end goal is not defined, but I know I want to keep increasing my impact in as many ways as possible, and to increase my freedom to do whatever I want. By doing so, I hope to positively impact as many people as possible!
Question 4: Past vs Present
What was Alex like 5 years ago compared to you now? Do you feel like you’ll be very different in 5 more years?
5 years ago, Alex was unsure of himself and what he would be doing in 5 years. Despite my energy and desire, I had no direction. Many of us have 'things' that happen to us in our childhoods and teenage years that can really bite us in our early 20s. Throw in career choices and leaving structured environments, and it's not an easy transition! I was squarely in this boat. I spent a lot of time reflecting on where I had been, what I wanted, and focusing on self development and creating good habits.
There were some very specific resources and principles that helped me get closer to what I wanted to do, but I’m still working it out!
It is common for our personalities and habits to be set by the age of 25. My experience is similar to this. Compared to the past, I expect the change to be less dramatic in terms of personality and habits. Still, I need to continue to level-up in so many areas. The main way I’d like to change is through further developing my knowledge and improving my soft skills to become an excellent leader.
Question 5: Crypto and DeFi
What do you think of cryptocurrency and decentralized finance? Can you see any advantages or disadvantages in personal productivity coming from the further interoperability of technology and finance?
DeFi can aid personal productivity by enabling faster, more efficient, and automated financial processes. For example, smart contracts can remove the need for manual intervention. This means that tasks like loan approvals, insurance claims, and investment decisions can be made quickly and accurately without the need for human intervention. Obviously, this frees up time for us to focus on other, higher value tasks.
There is also hope for crypto in serving as a payment layer for AI applications that fulfill human-like activities across the internet. For example, Adept is building an application that can do everything you could do on your computer. For crypto to win out as the preferred payment layer, it will need to be lower friction (cost, speed, user experience) than other available payment layers—of which there are many. In this way, crypto may become one of the key enablers of the use of these agents by facilitating the micro transactions that are likely to run them.
The downsides to crypto are clear to all who have been involved in the space. Unfortunately, there are still many bad actors and this won’t change quickly until there’s sufficient regulation in place.
I see the net adoption of crypto quite simplistically. I’m equal parts pragmatist and optimist. Until it out-competes on friction (cost, speed, user experience), security, and utility with other available consumer & business technologies, it won’t become mainstream. We’ve seen the evidence of this phenomenon in the recent launch of ChatGPT. It’s already providing massive utility across multiple domains, and has been adopted as such. Theoretical arguments about crypto don’t matter. If it’s to have the impact some believe it can have, the proof will be in outcomes and value creation for society.
Do I think it will become mainstream one day? Yes. How long? My guess is at least 7 years away.
Question 6: Technology
How has technology helped and hurt your productivity?
In my late teens, I'd say 70% hurt, 30% helped. When you haven't learned how to manage yourself, it's hard to avoid the downsides of technology in a school or early college environment. As I have matured, technology—in particular the internet—has become my most valuable asset for learning and productivity. At the age of 18/19, I developed the habit of believing that all my life problems could be solved by Google, and that someone else had already solved them. With time, this habit has accelerated, but now I use ChatGPT first and Google second! In addition, I've learned to ask questions to those who have already accomplished the things I wish to accomplish. This makes life better, and progress towards goals so much faster!
I use Cold Turkey and One Sec to manage the bad aspects of technology. Additionally, I don't have any social media apps on my phone (apart from messaging apps like Whatsapp and Messenger). I've been doing this for 2-3 years. I'm amazed at how much time you 'feel' you get back when you make this change.
Question 7: ChatGPT
Do you think personal brands and the dawn of creators are here to stay? How does ChatGPT factor in now with it perhaps taking a share of the entry-level knowledge worker or even creative jobs?
There will be a healthy level of skepticism and fear surrounding AI for the foreseeable future. ChatGPT is the tip of the iceberg. We're about to witness one of the most significant disruptions in history. Artificial intelligence will increasingly augment, and sometimes replace, human abilities.
The good news is that humans crave authentic relationships with people rather than with machines. This bodes well for creators and personal brands. In my opinion, augmentation is the most likely scenario. As machine learning advances, models will be able to replicate writing style, tone, and voice, allowing creators to increase their output significantly. I am less optimistic about models being able to outperform humans in connecting disparate ideas to form coherent narratives, stories, or arguments in the near future. As a whole, there is still hope!
Question 8: Daily Routine
Is your daily routine something you like or something you learned to like because of it’s positive benefits?
I wish I could say my daily routine just happened to be the case, but that's not true. It came from experimentation and reflection. Every person has their own version of an ideal day, and there's no way to discover it without testing and reflection. In order to answer this question, I am considering who I want to become and what I want to see in my life in ten years. The more aligned I am with that, the better. My advice to everyone I speak to about personal development is to set a 10-year vision (See Debbie Millman Exercise).
If you can claim that you're living in alignment with who you are and what matters to you, that's all that matters (i.e., you've chosen your game and you're playing it, not others).
Question 9: Maintaining Yourself
How do you keep yourself mentally and physically fit? Any secrets or life hacks you can share?
It's not secrets or life hacks that keep you mentally and physically fit. It's a decision you make. It's a game that you play. As soon as you make the choice, you need to create the systems for doing these things consistently.
As far as principles go, Atomic Habits by James Clear was my most influential book in establishing good habits. Particularly the ideas of cornerstone and 1-minute version habits. Two other mental models that have helped immensely are decomplication and activation energy (related to 1-minute version habits). Doing the things you know are good for you will become much easier if you can internalize these ideas.
But, to answer directly: everything for me is downstream of great sleep. When you’re tired, all of your other habits—eating, exercise, maintaining great relationships—suffer. So get that right first. Good sleep is not just going to bed on time and having a high-quality sleep. It’s also waking up properly. Devices and technologies cause what's called anticipatory anxiety. When you wake up in the morning and the first thing you do is check your phone (Emails, texts, social media, etc.), you're essentially training your brain to anticipate that wave of anxiety every morning. Avoid this at all costs. To do this, I put my phone on do not disturb and never leave it next to my bed. I won’t check it for 2-4 hours after waking.
I also exercise 4-5 times a week with Freeletics. I’ve found that the flexibility of the app allows me to stay consistent. When I eat, I stay away from carbs or foods that make me feel heavy. I optimize for a 'light' mental state.
I also have a strong belief that the majority of people should be seeing a therapist proactively. It’s the single biggest accelerator to self-awareness and discovering what you need on your life journey to be happy and free. We also all need someone to knock us out of la la land sometimes, so that helps!
I spend a lot of time thinking, journaling, and reflecting—mostly because I’m introverted—which helps me stay true to myself and in tune with what I need and want. Recently, I’ve started walking in the mornings which I find to be a huge amplifier of my energy and mood during the day.
Ultimately, the most valuable advice I have for staying mentally and physically fit has nothing to do with what I do. It's about finding the unique mix of things that work for you. One exercise I’ve been following recently that’s working well is a daily energy audit. I was introduced to this concept by Jim Collins on the Tim Ferriss podcast. It’s one of the most effective ways to figure out empirically what’s going to keep you mentally and physically fit.
Feel free to follow Alex on Twitter and you can check out his website for more content and media.
