Why Your Search for Freedom Is Actually Enslaving You

Sean Weisbrot: Julian Torres Gomez is the co-founder and COO of on top, a global payroll provider that has recently raised $35 million and as a global team of over 250 employees. I wanted to talk with him because we. Seemed to be kindred spirits on creativity and Buddhism and meditation among other things. And so in this conversation we talked about the interplay between spirituality and meditation and creativity and running companies and what we've learned from them. Some of the experiences we've had with. Anxiety and panic attacks and how he's overcome them and how I am working on overcoming them and so much more. So if you like episodes that are more on the psychology of entrepreneurship and a little bit of the founder journey, then you are going to love this episode. So I hope you are ready for it. Why do you think spirituality. Is important something that Buddhism and meditation is all about.

Julian Torres: I think you need a guiding star. I think going through life and thinking that everything you do is solely because of your effort and your presence here is ignoring the rules of nature. It's ignoring how incredibly lucky we are, uh, when living this mysterious life. Right? So when you go through life. Don't really stop to think and realize that there's a lot of things going on around us that we can't explain a lot of mystery, and that it all plays out in different ways. You can get into very, very deep and dangerous mental states because when, when something fails. Something go, something goes wrong. You can eventually end up blaming yourself, judging yourself, way too hard and end up in a negative spiral. At least that happened to me several times during my lifetime. Panic attacks, extreme anxiety, completely lost in life. So having meditation, spirituality in my life. Has been a sort of like a cane that I use to guide myself through the difficult paths. It's something I can rely upon when things get really tough and when there are no apparent answers, uh, outside of yourself, there's a place where you can go be silent. Really reflect on what it all means to be here, and it can give you purpose, and purpose is completely necessary. To be able to fulfill the entrepreneurial journey in the correct way. It's not all about money, it's at all about fame. It's about the why you're doing things, and I think that why is hidden behind silence, reflection, pondering, and seeing behind your thoughts.

Sean Weisbrot: I got involved in meditation years before I became exposed to Buddhism. I got into meditation because my father insisted that I learn because I had been diagnosed with A DHD like every other boy in the US in the 1990s, and I didn't want to take it as an adult. And so he said, okay, fine, but you need a way to manage this energy. And then I found it to be quite helpful. And then years later ended up in Asia where Buddhism is. How they live in some cultures and without kind of being force fed, Buddhism kind of discovered Buddhism and some of the ways in which it could be beneficial for you. And I found that it was very different from Western religions because Western religions are generally saying, you need to do this, or you're going to hell. Where Buddhism is like, Hey, if you wanna live a good life, consider doing that. You don't have to. But try it and see what happens. And I, I loved that There's no kind of forcefulness to it, it's just a suggestion for how you might wanna live. How did you become exposed to these two things and, and did they add value to each other once you kind of stacked them together?

Julian Torres: For sure. I grew up Catholic in my own household, but I had many questions when I was growing up. I was really afraid of death. I had a heart surgery when I was three years old. So from a very young age, I got exposed to the idea of death, sadness, being scared about things. So eventually you start growing up and you start asking questions, and you start feeling afraid at night when the lights go out. And I began a very introspective kind of journey, kind of asking, okay, where do I find my base? Am I going to pray? To something that I don't really know or understand or believe in or is just there's something else where I can control how I feel, or at least try to understand it better. Because there's really no controlling your emotions or thoughts. There's really just seeing them and seeing them as a natural part of yourself and Don, don't letting that scare you. So part of that invested and investigative journey began trying to look at all religions. Seeing how it all works and how it all relates. And then I landed with literature around meditation and the benefits for the mind and how Buddhists could, could find happiness even with the simplest of things and how they didn't tell you that you were going to hell or to heaven, but rather they told you, okay, you're living this life. There's a lot of mystery around it, and there's a way around life where you can. Get yourself out of samsara the wheel of suffering, and actually live your life to the fullest. Like really enjoy being here, but from a different perspective where you don't have to be a slave of your thoughts, of your desires, of other people's opinions, of your yourself, where you can be present at every moment. Not necessarily having like this weird trip or, or journey that's, uh, supernatural, but rather something that is very natural and very here. Because one of the things that puzzled me is, is this real? Where are we? Why am I here? What the hell am I doing in this world? And how do I fit in? How can I be more real? How can I make better use of my time? And once I started reading about Buddhism, I thought. Oh, wow. Here's a very ancient practice, a very ancient, uh, thought, uh, process that comes really close to science, to quantum physics, to a lot of things that are talked about in the modern world, and it's incredible how it's all related. So I started investigating, trying out meditation myself, seeing how it could impact my life. It made a difference. So that's really how it got initiated in the journey, and I've always been super curious and then started seeing slowly how it could impact my life as an entrepreneur, as a musician, as a creator.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah, we, we talked previously about the creative part of it, and I think it's only natural to kind of wonder if. Those things have enabled your creativity. The reason why I am curious about it is because I feel like when we're constantly looking at a screen, we don't have the time to be present with universe, whatever you wanna call it, and when you take time away from those things. There's so much more time. There's so much more that you're capable of doing. I actually read something yesterday that said the average American has four hours of free time a day, but they don't know what to do at that time. And I found that very interesting because I meditate between 35 minutes and and 60 minutes a day, and. I feel like that time passes so fast, even though my eyes are closed. There's no music, there's no light. Just complete sensory deprivation. I mean, I, I use the headphones they're on, but there's no, no noise. It's just on, so there's white noise and my, um, eye mask or is on so that my eyes are covered. So, can't see anything. Can't hear anything. I have no idea what time it is. The lights in the room are totally pitch black. The time passes by so fast. You're like, damn, how did the time pass? And yet all you're doing during that time is nothing. And yet somehow you feel so much happier and. Calmer at the end of that period, that even today is the first time I missed my meditation in very, very, very longing years. I, I didn't miss it. I missed it this morning and I just feel awful. I have this, the worst headache right now because of, of missing it. Um, I guess it's kind of. Not really to the creativity part because of the, what I just explained, but I guess we'll, we'll go, go to the creativity in a minute, but I guess, how do you feel before and after meditation and, and all that?

Julian Torres: It's been great because the whole philosophy around meditation is to let go of expectation. A lot of people say, okay, meditation's gonna be like the magic pill that's gonna solve a lot of things for me. And they go into it with that expectation. But the whole thing is to just to let go and surrender. I. To whatever's in front of you when you do that, that in itself enables creation. You know, apart from being a business person, I'm a musician and a writer, and you know how sometimes writers talk about writers block or they just sit in front of the screen and they, they go blank. It's the same in music. You start trying to compose a song and then you go blank, and I really, really got interested. And why is that? Why is it that we get blanked out? Why? Why are the creative juices flowing? And the thing is that as humans, we are too focused on the end result. We have expectations. Are people gonna like this? Are they gonna enjoy it? Does this phrase make sense? Is that the correct musical note? Is that the correct phrasing for that verse of the psalm? And the truth of the matter is creation is a messy journey. So you can't create a book. Edit it at the same time. You cannot compose a song and produce it at the same time because you're that editing and producing are acts of judgment, of fixing things. Rather you have just to let it flow. Don't judge it. Let go of the expectation of whether it's good, bad, or if people will like it or not, and then it will start to flow. And that's what actually Miha and Miha, the famous psychologist calls a state of flow. State where you are nonjudgmental, you just go with whatever's happening in front of you without expecting anything. And when you get to that place, things just seem to move in the correct direction. So meditation is actually practicing that when you sit down and you try very hard for something to happen. To levitate, to enter Nirvana? Well, probably you're gonna get into a loop of frustration, whether as if you go there with no expectations and just willing to look at whatever's going on through your, your mind, understanding that it's natural and sort of like becoming an observer. Things just naturally start to clear out. We live in a day and age where there's a lot of noise in our mobile phones, in our computers. There's distraction everywhere. If you feel a little bit uncomfortable, that's okay. You can distract yourself with your mobile phone. You can order food. You can look at a screen, you can turn on Netflix. It's all very easy. But we ra, we, we rarely get the chance to really stop everything and just be with ourselves because it's scary and it's boring, but more of it because it's, it's scary. We're not, we don't know who we are without all those distractions. So it's desire trapping us constantly. So I've found that meditation. As a routine and a habit that I can adopt every morning reminds me of this, and it reminds me of how I should approach it situation. If you ask me how I prepared to this podcast, for this podcast, I didn't. I just sit down here and talk about whatever comes to my mind. If people like it, that's good. If they don't, well, too bad. But I'm just trying here to give you a little bit of insight on how I think about business and running a company from that perspective. See, you can apply this to salespeople. If you measure salespeople only buy their output, how much they're converting and selling, as opposed to how much input they're making. It makes a whole lot of a difference because you teach them to control what they can actually control and let everything else take care of itself and don't judge it. And in that way you get less frustration, less turnover from employees and much more fulfillment because they know that when they show up each day, they're just putting in the work. They do what they have to do. The rest is sort of out of their, their control. You see, that's a nonjudgmental kind of approach, sort of like sitting down to meditate without expecting anything to happen, and the fruits just begin to come naturally because when you work from this perspective with less stress, less cortisol in your system, you start to be more creative, more resourceful, resourceful. You start daring a little bit more. You take a little bit more of risks because you're in it. You're not afraid of what they're gonna say. Inevitably that produces things. That's an act of creation.

Sean Weisbrot: Do you teach all of your salespeople meditation or do you have a sort of training program that teaches them how to not judge themselves in this regard? I talk about this a

Julian Torres: lot. If you take a look at it, how I run my company, it looks more like a religion more than, uh, a business. And I, I don't mean it in the bad sense, but I usually talk to them a lot about this more than. Let's take a look at the p and l. Let's take a look at the hard numbers. It's, Hey, let's work with your mind. So I hold a weekly meditation open session to whoever wants to join and try to remind them of about this. And I try to remind them how to be better employees by letting go more. And it doesn't mean being lazy and just going to sleep, but actually showing up with discipline, doing whatever the hell they have to do, and then leaving it everything. To the universe and to life and to the markets so that it can take care of itself. In that way, you avoid burnout. You avoid people feeling frustrated because they're trying, trying, trying, and the result is not coming. And in startups, you really need to be able to fail a lot.

Sean Weisbrot: I don't envy you. I, I believe at last count you have about 200 and about 60 employees. 260 employees. Correct. How do you do a weekly meditation session if they're not all in the same place?

Julian Torres: Uh, we do an an open Zoom invitation. We have it scheduled there and whoever wants to join the room can join the room. And then we start the meditation with a few words from, from me, and then we do it all together. And it's kind of a nice bonding exercise, which they know they have at hand. Whenever they feel stressed, whenever they feel they can't do it or they're, they're frustrated or whatever, it's a space for them to just relax. And in the end we hold a little bit of a session where they. They say how they feel, you know, and that's a different kind of management where we're, we're not always asking people to hold their mask or their appearance and seem like they're the best, the best, and that they're always, they always have to be delivering, but rather understand that we're humans, we're flawed. There's different opportunities where we won't make. We won't make it to where we need to be. We won't meet the results and that's okay. So that that generates like a sense of community and a whole new approach towards. Risk taking, creating, making bold bets and just living the startup life. A lot of people, the burnout in our company is they truly don't get into that mindset, the growth mindset, but instead keep themselves into something called the fixed mindset. Where, where they think they need to be perfect, right all the time and they think they can't fail. And falling into that category of thinking, the fixed mindset kind of thinking. Usually leads people to places of high stress, high burnout because they can't understand they that they, that it's okay to fail, that it's okay to try that. It's okay to be confused, to not know. The important thing is what's your attitude? Are you gonna learn? Are you here now present, ready to embrace and open up your e energetic channel so that information can flow through? Or are you the kind of person that believes. That you have to know it all and that you've always known all and that you were the best at university, at school, and that your family has always praised it because of your intelligence. Are you gonna be that kind of person that is not willing to learn? Or you're gonna be open and that makes a whole of a difference.

Sean Weisbrot: Is it part of your company culture when hiring to tell people, Hey look, we're not like that. You know, this is how we are. And you know, there's these weekly meditation sessions. And do you, do you get people that kind of get filtered out because of that or do you just not tell them and it's kind of a surprise when they get into the company, or,

Julian Torres: my interviews are super weird. So I always interview new, new hires and I onboarded onboard them to the company and everything I say. Has a little bit of this message come through, and most of what I've seen is it's a relief for people coming into a place where they can really open up, be humans, give it their all, without trying to impress anyone, without having to meet that expectation. And even though I say that, a lot of people usually fall into the trap of trying to demonstrate certain things, and I have to remind them, Hey. I already hired you. Don't worry. You don't have to show me why. You're the best of the best and you're summa, cudo, whatever. We're here to battle something through together, and I didn't need the best of yourself so that we can figure this out in the midst of the shit show. So usually people like it and they're drawn to it, and I think that's actually why we have so, like our turnover is so little. People usually like to stay because we provide them with several things, an open culture.

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Julian Torres: and freedom, which is more valuable than money. We'll let them work from wherever they want in the world. They know where our company driven by discipline. Discipline involves showing up at the place and time that we require them to show up to, and then they're given back the gift of time. If they're disciplined, they're know where they're standing, their results are measured, their team is aligned. I usually don't care wherever they are in the world or what they're doing. People like that nowadays more than money. It's incredible. Some of my team members have turned down like very, very good opportunities, high paying jobs just because they say, Hey, there's nothing like having time with my family. There's nothing like going to the gym at 11:00 AM. That's something I truly value and I think that speaks to a lot of the philosophy behind the company is discipline is freedom. Once you achieve discipline of showing up every day and doing the work you need to do. A lot of space opens up. People think that discipline is usually very rigid and it will trap you, but actually discipline will free you because you'll do whatever needs to get done at the point in time. Knowing that then. You'll have that reward, which is time. Getting your time back.

Sean Weisbrot: Do you ever feel stressed from having raised all that money and having all those employees? 'cause I know it was stressed me out.

Julian Torres: Sure. I mean, stress is a natural, a natural thing to come. I've, I've managed to control it and understand it better, but. I used to suffer from heavy anxiety and panic attacks and you know, kind of feeling a very, very heavy pressure on my chest, sleepless nights, whatever, and that, and that it really takes a toll on you. But through meditation, reading about this stuff, I've learned to let go. You usually get stressed out or panicked or whatever because you think society is expecting something from you. Oh my God, what will my investors say? They gave me all this money. They're expecting X or Y, what will my parents say? Or my friends, I have all these employees and I, I'm not able to create a profitable company, blah, blah, blah, blah. Chit chatter. It's all about how you think people are viewing you. So when you. Detach yourself from that and just say, okay, I have a business. I have a good idea. There's people here, valuable people, there's money, there's resources. I'm gonna try my best to do everything I can with those resources at hand to make a great business out of it. Will we make it? I'm not sure. No one knows. It's impossible to know. Of course there's a high failure rate in startups. I don't know if we were gonna make it, but at least I can try to make the journey interesting, fulfilling. I can try to make it exciting for people. I can try to make a great company culture and a great work experience so people can grow and flourish. And when I start thinking about it that way, I usually surrender to the experience and just give in to whatever might come. Things become so much easier. Problems don't feel that heavy anymore. You don't feel like the world is against you and you're, you're being thrown shit at all the time. Because when you're a founder, that's what happens. You get thrown shit day by day. If you take it too personally. And if you play victim. You'll have a shitty time, but if you see it as part of the game and kind of draw a little bit of fun out of it, the stress goes away and you enter into the playful state, remove the expectations again, sort of like a meditative state where you learn to play the game. Know that it's fun to play with shit right when it gets, gets thrown at you and dance with shit. So that's, that's at least what I try to say to people and it gets like the edge off. But

Sean Weisbrot: the concept is understood and appreciated. I had anxiety and panic attacks from my last company. It's been almost two years since I shut it down and I still suffer from those, uh. Meditation helped, helps, but I still suffer. And it seems like you figured out how to get through it and I, I dream of the day that I can get through it because before I ever had that ex started having those experiences, I never had it before. I mean, one of my first businesses, I was organizing events in China and I had 700 people attending. In person at like it was a single event with 700 seats. There's 700 butts in those seats. Not once did I feel any sort of anxiety in the preparation of the event, in the management of the event on the day, standing in front of the audience, no anxiety giving speeches to them going on national television and China and radio. I never had any sort of anxiety. And this freaking business, I feel like kind of destroyed me in a way. And I've been struggling for the last few years to kind of regain that level of confidence that I used to have, but I still have confidence, but it's different. Um, and so even right now I feel anxious even though I've had hundreds upon hundreds of hours of conversations with people and I love people and. And yet I still have this anxiety over the quality of the podcast and making sure that the interview is great for the guest. And, you know, it's, it's one measure. I mean, I don't get panic attacks when during the podcast, but, um, but yeah, the panic attacks were just over the company and the investors and the team and the, the nonsense and why we couldn't move forward in a way. And, um. COVID was happening at the same time. I was going through, uh, I was going through marriage at the time. You might say divorce, but I was trying to go through marriage at the moment, uh, when all this stuff was happening and, and that was quite difficult. So I think all those things kind of came together and made it difficult and I. You think meditation would help, but no, it didn't really help. Um, you know, not having a life anymore helps. Not having a startup anymore helps Not having a team or investors also helps. And, and yet the,

Julian Torres: well, there's no magic formula.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah.

Julian Torres: You know, it's there. There's no magic pill that, that you can take. And again, that's an expectation. Okay, I'm gonna meditate and it's all gonna go away. That don't usually happens. It's something that you can do. That will help. But by all means, it's no, it it, it's not the magic formula. So in a sense, we do have to let go again of thinking, meditation will solve our problems. What you really have to know that is that it's okay to feel this way. It's barely normal, it's human. Try to see it with different eyes. Once you, what happened to me at least is I, I used to be very scared of my anxiety and my panic attacks, and what you're scared of usually overwhelms you once you understand it and you're not that scared of it, and you know, okay, I've got this, I've been through this multiple times, it loses its power. I'm not telling you that I'm, I don't get panic attacks or serious anxiety at any moment. I do get, get it, get them, but I know that they last less each time. And one thing that really hope is getting perspective with different situations. Last year was pretty hard for me. My wife was diagnosed with cancer. Pretty scary time. And once you get faced with an uncomfortable situation such as that one, you really know that you have two ways which things can go. Either you play victim and you say, all this shit happens to me. My life sucks. Whatever. Or you step up to the situation and say, okay, this is where I'm at. This is the hand I was dealt with. Let's play with it. So let's. Let's see what I can do with this moment. It's up to me how I react. I cannot control what happens, but I can control my reaction to what happens. There's a beautiful book that I read, it's called Man's Search for Meaning Viktor Frankl, and it talks about how even in the deepest, uh, caverns of human existence being at a concentration camp. You can still find meaning in whatever is happening to you. And instead of playing a victim, you say, okay, this is where I'm at and I'm gonna play with what is given to me. And play with the concept of hope, of knowing that there's something out there that's for you and that you're pursuing and a way for you. So I think in that sense, it's very important. Call it faith. Purpose, whatever you have you want to call it, you need to be, um, believing in something as Steve Jobs once said, karma, whatever, but trust the process because once you trust the process again. You're surrendering to the experience. You know that you show up, put, put the work, and actually have faith or surrender to something that might happen. There's a, an amazing book that I recommend also called The Surrender Experiment, and it's all about this how you can, how someone just meditating out of Gainesville, Florida actually built a very powerful business and iPod all by meditating and surrendering to whatever came. Just accepting it. Okay, so I have anxiety. Let it be. Let's look at it. Okay, so my business shut down. Let's see where this takes me. And not playing victim or just giving yourself a hard time because of that, but just accepting it and playing with the hand you're dealt. I think that's something that's helped me in the last year. Really taught me that. In the end, man, it's just. Business is business. Business go up, go down, they fail, they thrive. Nothing is forever. The most important thing is that you're here, you're healthy, you still have your eyes, your voice, your podcast equipment. You still have a roof. So if you go from there, from gratitude, all things stem out of it. You, we, we usually as humans, think about what we're lacking all the time. Oh my God, I wish I had a Lamborghini. Oh my god, I wish I had a nicer house. I wish I had hotter girls. I wish I had a, a business that raised millions of dollars. We all we're always lacking, lacking, lacking. But if you start living from a place of what you already have, you begin the other way around and actually look, life stops looking that scary and you actually feel a little bit blessed. So something I do every morning after meditating is hold a gratitude journal and say, Hey, I'm really thankful because. I'm not blind, right? I'm really thankful because I have delicious coffee in my kitchen that's waiting for me, whatever that might be. And once you start from there, you trick your brain into generating fins, dopamine, oxy, a bunch of this chemical co uh, cocktail of chemicals that will eventually take your arousal level down and make you. Be just enough aroused to be at peak performance. That's the yurts and dots on law, because the problem really with anxiety and being extremely aroused is at some point it's diminishing returns. So the more anxious you start getting, the less you perform, the less creative you begin to be. So the trick really isn't to combat anxiety or stress, it's just to learn to take them to the optimal level so that you're. Um, awake so that you are there present, ready for the challenge, but you don't let that overwhelm you. So that's at least how I see it.

Sean Weisbrot: I've heard of the gratitude journal from a few people, and it's something that I tried for a time, but I only tried it when I was feeling the panic attack. And it, it helped because I was trying to identify what was causing this. What was it that was subconsciously on my mind that was making me get stuck in a loop that I. If I just start to talk through all of the positive things, I'm thankful for all the, the things in my life that are good. It's like, well, why are you anxious? Like, why, you know, there's no reason for this. Like, you know, as you said, I can see, I can walk, I can hear, I have all my senses. I, you know, I, I'm not homeless. I. Have good, uh, life experience. I have good family, right? I, I know so many people who've been physically or sexually abused by their families or psychologically abused, um, by partners or, you know, I, I know so many people that have had a much worse experience in life than I have. And yet, you know. Sure they might have depression, but like, why do I have anxiety? Why do I have panic attacks? I haven't had any of the problems they've had. Surely the problems I'm facing are nothing compared to what they're going through. Right? So, which is, which is funny actually, because typically you tell someone, don't compare yourself to others. Only compare yourself now to who you were before and who you wanna be. But for some reason to make yourself feel better, you'd compare yourself to somebody else and go, well, it's not so bad. Right? If I look at, look at where I'm at, it's, it's not so bad. That's true, that's true. Um, I, I think that's a, a funny kind of take. Um, I, I wanna go into the creativity a little bit. So you said a few times that creativity is really important to you, that you're a musician. How does this meditation, this spirituality, this way of living, enable you to bring creativity to your work? And how does it affect your business, whether that's positive or negative or, or both, or whatever.

Julian Torres: I see building a business. As the exact same process as writing a book or composing a song. It's actually very similar because you need to be able to experiment, try out a lot of stuff to be okay with it sucking while you're making it right. So for instance, when I sit down and try to record a song, I hate it. It sucks. I, I have to usually go back to my meditation and everything and say, Hey, it's okay. I don't have to judge myself because once I start singing the first thing. That comes to my mind is, oh my God, I suck. No wonder I didn't make it in music. I don't know how to sing. I can't tune a fucking note. Oh, that guitar does not sound well. I can't come up with any ideas. You, you know, I knew it. That's why you couldn't study music. Well, because you don't, you're not good enough with your music theory. So, and once you start hearing those voices come to you, you start getting. Feeling hot, feeling sweaty. You say, ah, I can't do it. And then sometimes I remember, okay, this is not, that's how not how it should go. And it happens the same in business. You start with a business plan or whatever. You start building an MVP, you launch it and the voices start talking to you. You see you're not good enough. You should have learned how to code. You should have learned this or that. Once you start seeing how all those voices in your mind talk to you, in the process of creating something, you start to understand how to hack the creative process. And it's in the way I mentioned, and it's very similar to sitting down, meditating and just seeing what happens and being okay with it. So usually what, what I do when I sit down to write or to write music or whatever, is just let it flow. I let it suck. I embrace the suck. I let myself be as bad and as untalented and as dorky as possible, and I, I don't care because I know it's a compounding process. I know that if I show up each day and make it a little bit better, just 1% better and correct and change that word, it will eventually get to the point where I have a piece of music that I really enjoy. The other day I looked at my Spotify metrics and. I, my favorite artist is myself. It's the one I listen to the most, and I realized something very cool. I'm actually creating this music for myself because I like my songs and I love listening to them. I'm not creating them for anyone else, and this has been a time in my life where I've generated and created the most music. And you know why? It's because. I'm not trying to get the approval of others. I spent the last 20 years of my life since I was 15 trying to get everyone else's approval. Oh my God, your music is amazing. Oh, I, I love you as an artist, blah, blah, blah. I was making shit for them. So how do I translate that to business or the business is also for me. I want to create something cool that I like, that I found useful and. Something that I enjoy, and if it's something that I like using, chances are people will like it too. And that gives me the opportunity to be really open to experimentation, to failing, to not being right all the time, to having things that suck. And when that happens, when you're that open, creativity just starts springing out of you. I can't. Tell you about the, like enough about the days where I've gone out on a 15 minute run, got in sunlight, gotten a cup of coffee, and just sat down to write and things just start springing out. I start vomiting words and I don't care, and I'm just connected. I go into the state of flow. So the question is how do you hack your way into a state of flow each day? Get to that level of performance. I think that's where the trick is. And tying it with our last subject of having stress, anxiety, panic attacks. I now believe that there's a strong relationship between feeling disconnected from your purpose in life and those very strong feelings of inac inadequacy, and of stress and of anxiety, because now. I enjoy what I'm doing, creating music, business, writing. I know this is where I'm supposed to be and I can't tell you how good it feels. I don't know if it's, it's the meditation or it's the combination, but I just feel connected. I feel like I'm supposed to be here, and maybe it's because I found that my purpose is not to be rich or famous or whatever, but to create and to enable myself to be wrong, to experiment. To put new things out there, inspire people, help them get better. I don't know. There's something there and there's kind of a magical thing happening. That translates into my business. So music and writing actually helps my business a lot. A lot of people would say, Hey, that satisfaction, get focused on your business, work, work, work, work, work. But if you do that, then you're pressing the accelerator too hard on the machine and it eventually will give out. So I see music and writing as an outlet. That can remind me how the creative process is supposed to be whenever I get too embezzled in my own business and things not working, and the product not being what it should, I remember. Okay, this is part of the process. Respect the process, honor the process. Let yourself be wrong. Let yourself suck. Let it be horrible before it's beautiful. Because everything has a natural flow and a natural process that we need to let happen. But humans, we want to take control and force it. And that's other way.

Sean Weisbrot: I don't know if I mentioned to you before, but I wrote three non-fiction books for fun. Oh wow. For fun. I didn't know that. Um. I was, uh, I was an HR manager of a school in China at the time, and I was writing it because I wanted to have something that would, I'd be able to give to the teachers that we hired because we were specifically hiring people who weren't living in China, who were gonna move to China to teach our kids at our school. And I wrote it about what you need to know to live in China. And how do you get a sim card? How do you get, uh, you know, a job? How do you get an an apartment? And I actually went and I translated contracts, I translated forms, I translated WeChat. I did everything I could to like show them and actually did it in a way that you can learn some of the, the words in Chinese and you can learn some of the culture as you learn about how to survive in China. So I, I ended up writing a, like how to survive the first 30 days, how to survive long term. And then I did another thing for Chinese that wanted to go to the us. Um, never sold any copies, but it was a ton of fun. And before that, about 10 years or so ago, or? No? No, like. 15 years ago or, or 16 years ago when I had first got to China, I was still playing my guitar then. It's been many years since I played and I for some reason got inspired to write a song. Now, the kind of music that I like to play typically is classical, kind of, there is no words. And I wrote a song. I don't have a mastery of any of the chords or anything like that. Like I ne I never learned, like I, I've learned like the pentatonic scale. It's like the, it's like it. Um, and yet I was able to like, write out the score for, it was like 50, 60 seconds, something like this. And, and I was able to produce it and I recorded, there's one recording of me playing it. And, uh, and I like it. Um, I feel like it's unfinished, but. I like what it is, and when I was even younger, I had ideas for novels. I, I had five novels, uh, that I wanted to write, and I, I would always get to the cent, basically the end of the second chapter. I would know what the whole story is gonna be. I know what the ending's gonna be, but I'd only write one or two chapters and then I would stop. And I, I feel more recently. The pull to get back into writing or even possibly finishing something that I've written, not because I have any sort of desire to make money from it, but because I feel like when I'm writing, I'm expressing myself when I'm doing this pod, these podcasts, when I'm talking to people, those are the things that make me happy is just the communication, the expression. And the work, like I don't really care about the work. The, I don't really care about work. Like, I think work is something you, you do. Um, and in my business I connect people, so I get to actually do the thing I like to do, which is, Hey, you've got a problem. I can solve it. Right? Let me introduce you to this person. They're gonna help you solve this problem. But I feel like the, the play. Is the thing that's more interesting for me than anything else. And, um,

Julian Torres: you know, I think that could be, that could be the, that could be the outlet towards the energy that you're feeling trapped as anxiety. I al I've also felt that when I'm disconnected for, from things I love to do, like playing music, writing or whatever, when I don't do them. I feel that that anxiety sort of like builds up and that's why I get anxiety. I, I, I, I bet. And then it would be very interesting to know this, that anxiety and panic attacks and everything is just trapped energy trying to get out. Because remember, we're, we're energy. At the end of the day, the day we're energy and there is creative energy and ideas that wanna get out there that are not finding the outlet. They'll, they'll get out there via other places. Thoughts, weird. Feelings, weird, whatever. And it's just like, exercise is a way of just letting things go and just bringing wellness to your body because you're letting energy go out. I feel that creative people, at least like you, you'll have to write, you'll have to travel, you'll have to play music. You need to let that energy out or else you'll be trapped there and it'll, it will be telling you, Hey man, like I need to get out. Uh, and it, and it starts expressing itself in different forms that make you uncomfortable. So maybe. That's like the calling that maybe you're not listening to and you should, right?

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah, definitely something to think about. Very, very interesting. I. Yeah, I, I want to do those things again. I miss playing guitar. I, I always really enjoyed it. I, again, I, I was never amazing at it. Like, I've seen some people that are just, you can tell they were born for playing a guitar, but it was something that I enjoyed, you know, 30 minutes a day, hour a day, just screwing around, playing different songs. Like, it was cool. I liked it. Um, but. It's, there's all these things. An

Julian Torres: expectation. Expectation. I have to be good, I have to be better than them. I have to put my videos on Instagram. Who gives a fuck?

Sean Weisbrot: No, no, no, I didn't. I don't feel that kind of perfection. It's just something that I liked to do. Um, you know, I never expected I would write, I. Books or novels or, or songs. But it was just something that kind of was like, yeah, like it was a spur of the moment. Let's do it. Like I need to do this. Um, and then I would obsess at least the nonfiction. Like I, I obsessed for three months, four months, until I had everything I wanted in it. And then okay, done. And they're like 80 pages. It's not 90 pages, but it was something that I just felt. This urge to do the books are harder because you have like character development and monologues and dialogues and there's character wise, like that's like, it's hard to write that stuff. I bet.

Julian Torres: That must be super interesting that that must be very, very interesting. I, I don't know if I could write a novel or a fiction book or whatever, that must be a whole different story. I'm curious to try one day. Maybe it's something that would really, really. Like spur up another creative side of, of me that I've never explored. So you should really develop that. I, I think it's, maybe it's the, you know, I believe maybe it's ideas trying to get out there and manifest themselves into the universe and you need just to let them out and not, not interfere. You know, the whole concept of wwe, I told you about this, uh, this Chinese concept of WWE is action by non-action. So what that means is acting but not interfering. Right. So it's the whole concept of just doing the things but don't interfering with whatever happens next, not resisting. Right. So like using your opponents energy or force to give you more force. Right. So it's that whole concept behind. Just show up, do whatever it is that's calling you, and then see whatever the hell happens. Because in the end, I think we're not in control. It's the universe that is in control and we like to think that we're in control. And once you figure that out, it's, it becomes so much easier and enjoyable. Enjoying the ride and letting go and letting something else take care of whatever's supposed to happen.

Sean Weisbrot: What's the most important thing that you've learned so far in your life?

Julian Torres: The most important thing I've learned so far in my life is to not pursue perfection. Perfection does not exist. Perfection is boring. Remember that for music to be enjoyable, you need to have high notes, low notes, silence. Variation. You can't enjoy a single sound. If I play a major repeatedly, you'll go crazy, right? So remember that looking for that perfection, that node, constant node that will hold itself true for long periods of time will only give you boredom in life you need. This kind of dynamics, lows, highs, silence for everything to be enjoyable. So seeking perfection actually does not make sense. Seeking perfection will only only give you more stress, anxiety. Try not to look for perfections, but rather get sun and see what happens. Just flow with it. And when I started doing that, I started. Feeling like life was magical, and that has really helped, helped me. Thinking life is happening for me and not to me, actually helps me cope and get through and just make sense of the adventure that I might have to travel at any given moment. Life will get weird. Life will get hard, but in the end, it's all about accepting. The journey you're at accepting the hand they dealt you. And I learned this playing poker. It's not the hand that you are dealt with, it's how you play it. You can even beat a pair of ACEs with a seven and a two. It's just how are you gonna play it? Are you gonna play it all in? Are you gonna play it with your heart and soul? Are you gonna show up to the world not scared, but actually entitled and bluff your way through and actually win the hand? Or are you gonna say, oh no, these are the Shitiest cards you can get amount.