Bo Bennett: Unlocking the Power of Critical Thinking

Summary

In this episode, Christian Brim interviews Bo Bennett, who shares his journey from marketing to psychology and the importance of critical thinking in decision-making. They discuss the spectrum of emotional and analytical thinking, the role of emotion in decisions, and the philosophical dilemmas that arise in business. Beau emphasizes the need for honesty in evaluating one's beliefs and the importance of education in critical thinking. The conversation also touches on the balance between analysis and creativity in business, and the necessity of facing reality to make informed decisions.

Takeaways

• Critical thinking is essential for making better decisions.
• Emotions play a significant role in analytical thinking.
• Rationalization often clouds our understanding of our decisions.
• Understanding cognitive biases can improve critical thinking.
• Education is crucial for developing critical thinking skills.
• We often don't know why we make certain decisions.
• Agency in decision-making is influenced by subconscious factors.
• It's important to face reality in business for growth.
• Quantifying variables can aid in decision-making processes.
• Balancing creativity and analysis is key to business success.

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Transcript

Christian Brim (00:02.691)
Welcome to another episode of the Chris project. I am your host Christian Brim. Joining me today is Beau Bennett of Archie Boy Holdings. Did I get that right, Beau? Nice. All right. Welcome, Beau.

Bo (00:17.838)
Thank you, good to be here.

Christian Brim (00:19.429)
I'm glad to have you here. tell the listeners your brief history, where you are and how you got here.

Bo (00:31.372)
All right. I graduated school, college back in the nineties, Bryant College, Bryant University, with a degree in marketing. I always had a passion for both business and psychology as well. But initially as a young guy, I really wanted to make a lot of money. And I knew that marketing was the better path for that as opposed to psychology. certainly is, especially as an adjunct professor.

Christian Brim (00:54.959)
Hard to make money in psychology.

Bo (01:00.854)
So I pursued business, pursued marketing, and I did very well in that area. And after about 20 years, I decided to go back to school, get my degree in general psychology, a master's, and then a PhD in social psychology. And since that time, I've been doing a combination of business and also focusing on the area of critical thinking, like helping people make better decisions and help.

people look at their beliefs, their long-term beliefs, and kind of distinguish what's true and what's not true. How not to be manipulated by other people, how to avoid those traps. All about thinking critically. so that's what I've been doing. And been doing business with book publishing, with artificial intelligence, writing books. And that's what keeps my days busy.

Christian Brim (01:58.007)
I want to dive into what you said there with critical thinking. So I had a guest on this podcast by the name of John Hewitt. I would go look him up. He's fascinating. But what was fascinating to me about him and in that conversation was how analytical he was in business decisions.

And I realized that so emotions, know, thoughts you have subconsciously. I, I feel like that some people are more, I don't know, prone to that or, or have more bandwidth or capacity.

I always worry about people that say that they make completely rational or analytical decisions, right? Because we all have emotions and we all have things that influence our critical thinking. But it seems like, and John, would put John in that category, is that that he recognizes when he has an emotion, he called it an emotional thought, and was able to

Set that aside to proceed with his his critical thinking so My question to you as a doctor of psychology What? What do you think about that is that is is my statement true that some people maybe struggle Or have more capacity for emotion than others

Bo (03:47.384)
So sure, several parts to that question. First, let's get into the part where are more people prone to emotional versus critical thinking? And the answer is definitely yes. We're all on a spectrum in terms of our level of emotion and also our level of analytical skills. We have like this baseline point that is strongly genetic and biological.

Christian Brim (03:58.744)
Okay.

Bo (04:14.23)
And that's kind of where we can hover. We can go a little bit up and we can go a little bit down based on environmental factors, like basically what we learn. So the answer to the question not asked is yes, we could become better at critical thinking. We could become more analytical. And yes, we could become more emotional. can get in touch with our emotions a little bit more, but with a limit. And that limit is that baseline.

that kind of genetic biological baseline that we all have. And that baseline is different for all of us. But when you look at those two elements, the emotion and the analytical skills, they are on a spectrum, like a bell curve, if you will, where most of us have a good level of both, a good balance. Some people are extremely analytical and very little emotional. And there's even names for that.

Christian Brim (04:58.959)
Mm-hm, okay.

Bo (05:12.206)
like conditions, maybe you have like Asperger's and levels of the autism spectrum. And there are people that are highly, extremely emotional. And that's also considered pathology in like general psychology, like in health psychology, there's problems with that as well. But, but most of us, we fall within that range.

Christian Brim (05:18.895)
Okay.

Bo (05:39.778)
So that's kind of where we can go. one thing that you said too that was interesting that may be confusing for a lot of people, it's kind of this idea that our analytical skills are not, they're not fluid.

Christian Brim (06:03.875)
Mmm. Okay.

Bo (06:07.187)
Let me back up a second, meaning that emotion can be left out of the decision. And that's not really the case. mean, if you think about it, this is really like a strong philosophical point. Emotion is always involved. We need emotion. There are very few analytical decisions that we could actually make without some level of emotion. It always comes back to, well, what do we want?

Christian Brim (06:13.625)
Yes.

Bo (06:34.552)
What are our desires? What are our goals? There's that level of emotion that cannot be divorced from analytical thinking and purely logical thinking. when especially like in business, when you're making business decisions, there's always an emotional component that you do have to take into consideration. The goal there, though, of course, is not to lead with emotion.

not to be overly emotional and bring more of that analytical decision making into the process. So that's kind of what you go for.

Christian Brim (07:14.11)
So I think about those theoretical situations where they say, well, OK, if you could kill one person to save 100, like, know, analytically, that makes sense. But, you know, emotionally, can you kill an innocent person? Right.

Bo (07:39.672)
Well, again, there's, I may have an issue with that when you say analytically, that makes sense. You have to go back to like, what is the goal? What rules are you operating under? Like, and some of those rules might be, you're kind of assuming in that statement, that 100 lives is of more value than one life. And therefore, we're looking the goal is to increase value.

Christian Brim (08:02.725)
true.

Bo (08:09.74)
So we have these we have these like unwritten goals, unspoken goals that we kind of all like as human beings, as like normal people, we kind of all recognize. But but they're not explicitly stated and they could easily be debated as well. So just like and again, this is like philosophy 101 basically. But when we're talking about killing one person, it's the whole train thing. The you you pull the lever on the train.

And the train switches the tracks and kills one person versus the five it was going to hit. But let's just stick with your simple example, killing one person versus 100. We could say, OK, well, what if these hundred people were all like murderers, like on death row, and this one person was an innocent five-year-old child? The moral equation shifts. that's the emotional part.

Christian Brim (08:51.109)
Yeah, right.

Bo (09:03.18)
That is the part that is divorced from the analytical reasoning because we need that information and we have to access our... I don't want to just say emotion because it's not just emotion. In psychology, it's called a irrational. It's not irrational. It's a rational. It's divorced from rationality, basically, and you can't really deal with that. So we need that extra information.

So you take that example, that great philosophical example that you just gave, and you could just kind of transport that to like any ideas in business. And we'll see a lot of the same issues. Like we need to know, well, what are our business goals? Is it to make as much money as possible? Or is it to do something good for the community? Is it to take care of employees? Like, is it a balance of like all of this? That's irrational.

Christian Brim (09:51.876)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (10:01.892)
Yes.

Bo (10:01.97)
We need to use our irrational thinking, our emotions, if you will, to set up these rules in which we could make these rational decisions.

Christian Brim (10:15.205)
So is it proper to look at those irrational things and try to quantify them? In other words, try to apply analytical thinking to them.

Bo (10:34.968)
Yes. Yes. It's always kind of a goal to quantify what you can. For those who aren't familiar with that terminology, what we're basically saying is we wanna put some kind of analytical value to these variables that we can kind of work into even like a mathematical equation. And this is done in what's called Bayesian reasoning.

Bayesian probabilities. What we try to do is we try to like actually assign values to certain things and then with those values we'll do like a strictly mathematical formula and come up with our answer. But you could always go back to how you assigned those values and you could debate that and like different people can. A good example of that is it's a formula commonly used

Christian Brim (11:07.503)
Okay.

Bo (11:33.038)
by some people to figure out like, does God exist? Right? So you have like the atheists who assigned very different probabilities, initial probabilities to the existence of God and where you have the theists who will assign very high probabilities to the initial conditions. And then when you put those different variables in the formula, you're going to get completely different values. So in a sense, there's utility to it.

There's a utility to the process of trying to quantify what might be otherwise non-quantifiable because it really makes you think critically about those different variables. Whereas a lot of people will argue Bayesian reasoning is worthless for that reason because you can get widely different values depending on how people feel, like, you know, off the cuff about the initial conditions. But I would argue against that saying

Christian Brim (12:23.747)
Right.

Bo (12:29.794)
Well, yeah, that's true. But again, there's utility in it because it really makes you think about how you're deriving those values and what the actual probabilities may be and so forth. So it is part of the critical thinking process.

Christian Brim (12:43.449)
Well, you know, as you're describing that, think there are some things that we feel and believe that maybe we don't know why we feel or believe them. So you were talking about a business decision that is your goal to make as much money as possible or is it to help others, for instance. And

You know, I have this strange aversion to it being about making money, which I've had several discussions with my business coach as opposed to helping others as a motivation in business.

But I don't think they're mutually exclusive, right? I think they can coexist, but I can't really tell you why I feel that way. And I've been pondering that for a long time, but I think your point is very valid regardless. I think dwelling on and contemplating those beliefs, those values,

that drive your emotions, like where do they come from? Are they valid? Are they just a reaction to something that you've experienced? As opposed to, you know, these are things that I may not be able to explain, but they are my convictions and I can't deviate from them.

Bo (14:30.974)
Well, here's a secret of psychology that most people won't tell you. And that's very rarely do we understand why we make decisions. Meaning, when we try to think why or how we feel a certain way, what we're doing very often is just rationalization. We just kind of make up things like, you know, why do I want to go out running later? Because...

Christian Brim (14:48.173)
Mm-hmm, yes.

Bo (14:59.362)
I want to be healthy. I don't want to be fat. You know, I come up with these ideas and the real reason is so like visceral. It's kind of like, like I don't even know this, but I'm guessing that like if there were a real reason, it has to do with just my chemistry. Like the body wants what it wants, you know, and getting exercise is one of that. If you sit for too long, you get very antsy.

Christian Brim (15:23.343)
Right.

Bo (15:28.406)
So it's just like this visceral feeling that I want to get up and move, but I can't explain that. I can't verbalize that. So what I do is I make up something and then I think of all the reasons why people like to exercise and I give those reasons. This is extremely common in success and wealth and business.

Christian Brim (15:37.188)
Yes.

Bo (15:55.446)
when people are asked, so, you know, what's the secret to your success? How did you, how did you do so well? And they say, let me tell you the story. Well, I'm a very bright guy and, I work hard and I'm persistent. There, people are just like parroting things that they've read in self-help books, you know, over, the ages. That's not the case. I mean, the, the truth is like so complicated that we can't, we can't even begin to understand like what

Christian Brim (16:07.098)
Right.

Bo (16:24.478)
are the true reasons. If we look at cause and effect, like how did we get where we are? It's like such a complicated story that we can't even begin to understand it. So we try to rationalize. We try to make a story that we can understand. I think the most honest thing we could do is kind of look back and look at our situation. We could try to explain it the best we can, but at the end we have to say like,

You know, I don't know. It's cause and effect. This is where I am. And whether it's a good place, then everything that happened was for good. Or if it's a bad place, then it was just like bad circumstances. making things up is extremely common. And we do that. And it's called rationalization.

Christian Brim (17:12.633)
Yeah, I've been asked that question of like, would you go back until you're younger self? And the thing I've said for a long time is beware the power of self-deception. Basically, exactly what you're saying, believing the story that you're telling yourself, right? You talk about success and you can look at the internal factors.

But that's not the whole equation, right? Because like to your point, there are lots of smart people. There are a lot of people that work hard. Not all of them are quote unquote successful. I look at Bill Gates as a prime example. I mean, there was a zeitgeist there that somebody was going to do what he did. I mean, it was time for an operating system to come into the world for micro computers. He happened to do it. Did he contribute?

Bo (18:07.736)
He was in the right place at the right time.

Christian Brim (18:09.175)
Right, right. And so nobody really wants to ascribe luck or divine purpose or whatever, you know, external factor that that you can't control to to the situation you're in. But to me, I think the most important part in my journey is is is having that agency to say, okay, here is what I can control.

and I'm going to own it for good or for bad. I'm not going to be of a victim mentality to say these external factors put me where I am. Yes, there are external factors, but do I have control over them?

Bo (18:53.336)
So these are very common biases, two very common biases that we're talking about are like the actor observer bias and another one that's similar. But basically what we're saying is like, when good things happen, we try to explain them as something like internalistic. it's happening because I'm a good person, because I did the right thing. When something bad happens to us, we blame it on external factors.

Christian Brim (19:18.979)
Yes, exactly.

Bo (19:19.436)
Right. And well, that's because my parents were horrible. And that's why, you know, whatever. And this is just, you know, common human behavior. This is what we do. And these very strong biases go into the stories and the narratives that we create and we tell others about ourselves and about our history and about our past. When, again, if you really want to know, it's just too complicated. It's we don't know.

Christian Brim (19:23.097)
Right.

Bo (19:47.914)
And you also mentioned something interesting about like agency. And this is where, again, the strong philosophical discussion comes in about like determinism and, you know, do we have agency and free will and what does that mean? And boy, is that a conversation I'd be had. But I do believe that whatever you want to call it and whatever happens, like we...

You know, we are in the position to do one thing or another thing. And we call these decisions, right? Like, do I stay here and eat a piece of cake or do I go out jogging? We've got these decisions to make. And it's just like it's mind blowing to think about because you want to say you could do whatever you want to do, but can you want whatever you want?

Christian Brim (20:29.774)
Right?

Bo (20:44.93)
That's another question. And what I mean by that is, like we have these strong desires and whether the desire is to eat the cake and do nothing, or the desire is to stay healthy and do something good for yourself, one of those desires is stronger. And one of those desires is going to manipulate...

Christian Brim (20:54.789)
Hmm.

Bo (21:09.674)
your mind into coming up with a reason and rationalizations and an excuse or a reason in the positive, if it's like going out running and you're going to follow that information. So it gets really, really confusing when you want to try to give yourself that level of agency.

But if you look at deterministic factors and the way things work in psychology and in neuropsychology, it's really hard to. But at the end of the day, whatever you want to call it, we feel like we have this decision making process and we certainly can choose to believe that we have the power to make a decision. And if we do believe that belief,

influences our decision-making ability and ultimately we can make a decision.

Christian Brim (22:08.965)
What I'm hearing there and the way I understand it is there are certain things that are hardwired into us, to your point, the genetic parts of us, that we can't change, right? And...

Christian Brim (22:37.081)
those genetic dispositions create a powerful force in the subconscious that I, my business coach had me read The Big Leap and I don't, you may know the author but he's a Stanford psychologist, written several books. But in that he talks about how the brain is wired for comfort.

and predictability. And when we are moving into spaces where we're not comfortable, our mind and sometimes our body will start to work against us. And I didn't realize that about myself. But what I found was there were certain situations, one of which was meeting with my business coach.

where I would notice my brain start to say, well, we've got more important things to do, you know, than, than meet with coach. We were, we're too busy. But what I realized was it was my brain working against me because oftentimes those conversations were uncomfortable, right? And they certainly were unpredictable. And, I, I, I,

I understand what you're saying because that feeling was not conscious. it was all I heard was just my brain, but there was something beneath it that that was driving it. And eventually I was able to recognize it for what it was that that that my subconscious not wanting to do something that I was not comfortable with. Is that what you're describing?

Bo (24:32.77)
Yeah, I think exactly it. It's what they call subconscious, something coming from within some kind of biological processes that communicates. mean, your brain is biological, right? So therefore, the mind is biological in a sense, or at least influenced by biology. And that's where we get our thoughts from, you know, when we're feeling uncomfortable, when we have to go to the bathroom after like 20 cups of coffee or whatever.

Your mind all of a sudden says, get up and go to the bathroom, right? It's because your body is, in a sense, talking to your mind, communicating, in a sense, and that's what we do. So yeah, subconsciously, whatever terminology one chooses to use, it's virtually the same message. We've got these strong biological factors that are unconscious, subconscious, whatever that...

Christian Brim (25:04.751)
Right.

Bo (25:29.282)
that influence our behavior and our decisions. And that's pretty much always the case. And it's inescapable in a sense.

Christian Brim (25:40.901)
So when you work with people on improving their critical thinking, what does that process look like?

Bo (25:50.766)
The first and number one thing that I would say to somebody is, look, you've got to be honest with yourself and ask yourself, do you really care about what is true or not? I mean, it's that simple. like reactionary, like it's typically like a reaction for them to say, of course I do. Like, why wouldn't I? But if you think about it, that's not always the case. We don't always care about what's true. We care about...

And just as we were talking about kind of what makes you feel good, right? What's comfortable, what's expected. And that's kind of what we tend to believe through the confirmation bias. We tend to ignore all that stuff that disagrees with us because it's uncomfortable. It doesn't make us feel good. It challenges us. It makes us think more critically, makes us think harder, which uses

more energy and our body doesn't want to use more energy. We want to conserve as much energy as possible. That's like the homeostasis. That's what we want. So we've got this aversion to information that we don't agree with. And then we have this tendency to believe information that already comports to our current beliefs and what makes us feel good. But we have to break that and we have to say, no, I don't want that.

I'm willing to invest the extra energy. I'm willing to invest the extra time. I want to know what's true. And I need to give you a reason. Like, why would you care? Why don't you rather feel good? Who cares what's true? Because I strongly believe, and it's been shown, that you are going to be so much better off if you believe in more true things than more false things. Every decision you make that's related to this will be a better decision. It'll put you in a better position.

And when you keep on making better and better decisions, it keeps on putting you like exponentially putting you on a better path. Likewise, if you keep on making bad decisions based on bad information, exponentially, it'll put you on an alternative path that takes you in a completely opposite direction that where you don't want to be like all the everything is going to be worse for the most part. So you're you're going to want to know what's true and you're going to want to believe what's true.

Bo (28:13.568)
And now, once you establish that and say, okay, okay, that's what I want. I agree with you. That's the right thing. Now it's a matter of actually just learning a lot of the techniques of critical thinking, learning a lot of the cognitive biases, what cognitive biases are, what they do and how they work, logical fallacies, what they are, learning manipulation techniques, how other people manipulate you, how easy it is to manipulate somebody.

And once you kind of have a good sense of this, and also education as well, lower levels of education, it's lot easier to manipulate somebody who doesn't have a good core understanding of the issues of which they're being manipulated on. So education is an important part as well. But those things are things that could definitely be learned, but you have to want to learn them. And that brings us back to the last point. It's about critical thinking. You've got to want to believe in what's true.

Christian Brim (29:14.221)
It sounds like that needs to be part of our primary and secondary education, the whole critical thinking. All three of my children went to secondary education where they taught from the international baccalaureate curriculum. And it's fascinating how much better thinkers they are.

in critical thinking. And I think that that is largely missing from our public education. It's more about regurgitation of facts, or understanding of concepts rather than actually thinking. Because you're right, thinking is hard. It's hard to teach, it's hard to learn, it's hard to assess. But going back

to when you start using words like truth, I wanna be clear because for me, those start to move into maybe a rational concepts when you start talking about truth. When you say learn what is true, what does that mean to you?

Bo (30:39.064)
Well, I want to make a distinction between truth and what is true or false. When we're talking about something being true or false, it's typically something that not necessarily has to be a binary decision, but it's something that that I'm referring to that can be demonstrably proven. It could be demonstrated true or false. Like there's there's virtually no question about it. I say virtually because you're always going to have people.

question something and even in philosophy you could question everything, you know, that's part of philosophy. When we're talking about like, typically when people use the word truth, they're talking about like bigger, larger truths of life, you know. So that's a little bit different. so that I just want to make that distinction like when I'm referring to what is true or not, you're saying is the proposition that's being

Christian Brim (31:09.55)
Right, yo.

Christian Brim (31:20.292)
Right.

Bo (31:37.506)
that's put forward, is this something that you can accept as true, or is it something that we have to reject as being false? So this is a of a multi-step process. The first part basically is to make sure the proposition being put forth is clear enough that it actually has like, it's something you can say is either true or false.

Christian Brim (32:05.167)
So like a true or false would be your business is making money.

Bo (32:10.574)
Yeah, sure. mean, that's even that I guess I would say, okay, well, what do we mean making money? Are we talking about revenue? Are we talking about profit? So you want you want to take like a statement and remove all the ambiguity. Right. So nothing's ambiguous about it whatsoever. It's it's extremely like straightforward. There's no two ways to look at it. So you might say something like, you know,

Is your business profitable on a month to month basis, like over the course of a year? So you're not saying, OK, it's profitable. It was profitable today, but the last three days it lost money. So like any kind of weasel, the ways to get out of there, because that's what people do, especially in politics. You can make virtually any statement and you could find a way to justify it.

by saying, yeah, the business is profitable, but it was profitable yesterday and it's not profitable today or the next day. So you can get away with virtually anything, but it's not just in politics, it's in business when people try to con you, when they try to convince you something that's not true, in religious contexts, social issues, like everything. So we want to remove any ambiguity.

ambiguity from the statement as possible, make it as crystal clear so we can understand it. We understand mutually what we're talking about when we're talking about this statement. And then once we have a nice, clear statement that we both agree, we know what it means, then we could look at the evidence. that's a whole, know, that's where like education comes in, because I don't believe that everybody

understands what evidence is and understands how to evaluate evidence. And this is very clear by just looking at like today's political environment and social environments and everything. You could see that the level of what some people consider evidence is mind blowing to people who understand what evidence actually really is. So that's kind of a learning process and people have to learn that. And the way to learn that

Bo (34:32.758)
is through comparing it to something that they already believe in and seeing like if there's any hypocrisy involved. So if you're saying, okay, so if you are accepting, let's say A as evidence for this claim, would you accept it as evidence for this other claim that would be maybe against something they believe in? And if they say, no, of course not, I would never do that. So for example, well, you're saying that this is true because some guy told you that you don't know.

What if some guy told you that you don't know that this other thing is true that they don't want to believe is true? And they're saying, of course, I would never believe that. Well, boom, you got a problem. You have to look at evidence in that light. It's got to be consistent. Evidence doesn't choose whether it's more true or not based on what it's talking about. mean, there's a standard and a level of evidence that's the standard, you know? So you have to look at all this different evidence and you have to apply it equally in different situations.

And again, that's one of the main parts of science is removing bias, removing as much bias as possible in order to get to what is provisionally true. In science, we don't say truth. We say what's provisionally true based on all the available evidence at the time and with the understanding that it could change at any time based on new evidence that comes along.

Christian Brim (35:58.561)
Yeah, and so when you're applying that in a business environment, that can get pretty sticky pretty quickly. I could see where you could potentially over complicate analysis. The way I'm hearing this is more of a practical application of

Okay, your business is not profitable. Accepting it rather than rationalizing it to once you accept it, okay, what are you going to do about it? Rather than just continuing to make excuses or rationalizations of why it is the way it is or that it's not really the way it is. And

I think my experience and many experiences of colleagues that I've seen is that just facing reality like that, that that blind spot like, you know, sometimes it's not necessarily that you don't want to believe it, maybe you don't even know it. Now, maybe you should know it. And you and you are filtering out things that you but but

whatever the reason, we all have these blind spots in business where we need someone that doesn't have an emotional attachment, doesn't have all the baggage to be able to say, this is where you are as I see it.

Bo (37:44.418)
Yeah, that's a great point that you made about the business when I was getting back to that idea of you have to want to know what's true. That's a perfect example, because if you're a business owner and you want to believe what's comfortable, right? You want to believe what makes you feel good.

Christian Brim (38:04.825)
Yes.

Bo (38:07.128)
You're going to believe that you're doing great in business and everything's wonderful and everything that's going wrong is just because of other people's stupid mistakes and that will fix itself in time. Versus if you really want to believe what's true and the truth is you're doing a lot of things wrong that need to be changed, the ultimate outcome is you're going to be much better off financially and much better off in business if you believe what's true. Right? So that's what you want to do.

Christian Brim (38:33.903)
Yes.

Bo (38:38.179)
Now, the other point you made is that some taking in somebody from the outside is generally better to to to be able to see this. And yeah, sure. But I mean, how many people actually do that? The percentage is ridiculously small for many different reasons. But you don't need to. You just need to, again, agree that I want to believe as many true things as possible, despite the consequences.

I want to know what's true. So I want to look at things as objectively as possible and do that to your own business. And now you start to see, OK, geez, the reason that my sales have went down is because I stopped supporting people. stopped being monitoring the live chat. I used to do that. It used to take me three hours a day, but it was getting really good results. And now I'm not doing that anymore. So it's my fault, you know, something that I could do to make it better.

Knowing these things is extremely important.

Christian Brim (39:38.233)
Well, that showed up for me when I was in a similar position that my client was in that I was completely burnt out with my business, right? And I went on a sabbatical. I left the business in charge of my brother who was my partner at the time and then I went and started another business.

But because I had to come back in the business because it was not performing and I had to come back in to save it, I realized at that point only one thing. And the only thing that I understood was that I had to do something different because what I was doing was not giving me what I want and the business didn't get what they want.

But I wasn't sure what that was. And through the process of that, I realized that the reason why I wasn't having any satisfaction in the business and frustration anymore, and the reason why the business wasn't going forward was because I personally had to grow. I had to change things about my behavior, my thinking.

in order to do that. And I've said many times that that process, and it was several years, was harder than starting the business. It was harder to do that work. But to your point, it is infinitely better because I did.

Bo (41:37.411)
Yeah, so I do want to mention one, I guess, subcontext that we've been talking about or kind of like another main point that I don't want your listeners to get the wrong idea. When it comes to like critical thinking in business and being analytical, we've talked about all the reasons why, or many of the reasons why it's very important for that. And that's a good idea.

However, I don't want to minimize the other aspect, the creative aspect of it. The part that makes you think that your business is going to do extremely well when statistically it's probably not, Like virtually all businesses fail. mean, if you were just to be completely analytical.

Christian Brim (42:19.749)
Right. Right.

Bo (42:26.53)
and think about like starting a business, you'd probably be stupid. Most people would be stupid to start the businesses that they do because statistically, it were strictly a numbers person, it doesn't look very good, right? The probability of our success within business is not too good. But we do it anyway. Why? Because we may have this overinflated self version of ourself.

Christian Brim (42:30.447)
Yeah.

Bo (42:53.132)
Maybe we have this level of confidence that other people don't see in us, which may or may not be a good thing. But you never know if it's a good thing unless you are one of those people. Right. Because because if you're not one of those people, you're not going to take the chance. And maybe you were one of those people that really did have that kind of confidence and really did have that wonderful idea. But if you're not the type of person to to try, then you're going to fail anyway. So I think.

I think that is really important to understand. And there's a reason why, like, accountants and lawyers don't make the best business people. Because these are these, like, they're mostly like the accountants and the numbers people, statistical people. They're extremely good at analyzing and analytics, but they're not the best business people for all the reasons, for all those qualities that makes, like, an entrepreneur somebody who could be fantastic. So there is...

Christian Brim (43:28.538)
Yes.

Bo (43:48.564)
more than an irrational component. Let's even call it an irrational component. Let's call it a component that goes against the analysis, that goes against the statistics. But we do it anyway because we feel like it's the right thing to do. We have this optimistic sense like something will work out. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, but...

Christian Brim (43:53.775)
Mm-hmm.

Bo (44:17.495)
If you don't try, you don't succeed.

Christian Brim (44:20.527)
I love that. Bo, how do people reach you if they want to learn more about being better at critical thinking?

Bo (44:28.578)
Well, that aspect, you can go to bobennet.com. That's where you'll find all my books that I've written, psychology, critical thinking, science. And if you want to learn more about me,

Christian Brim (44:38.723)
Where should we start? What book should we start with?

Bo (44:44.998)
I guess it depends on your specific area of interest. have a few books that deal with the topic. I've got a book called Reason, books one and two, and soon I'll be adding like book three to it. But basically that is a collection of many years worth of articles that have to do with critical thinking and reason. Like it's a way of looking at specific issues and applying these principles. I think that's like a really good start.

because I think that you may agree with some of the stuff, you may disagree, but at least you get to see the thought process, kind of like the process in works. And then the other books would be like Logically Fallacious, that's all about logical fallacies. And then The Biased Brain that goes into depth about the different cognitive biases that we have and how to overcome them. So those are three really good choices.

Christian Brim (45:40.203)
I have some new ones to add to my reading list. Bo, thank you very much for your time and your insights. Listeners, if you like what you hear, please leave us a review. Share this podcast with other entrepreneurs. If you don't like it, shoot us a message and let us know what you'd like to hear. Until later, remember you are not alone. Ta-ta for now.

Bo (45:42.787)
Yes.

Bo (45:46.968)
You bet.