So let's start with the easy way. FOPO shows up when you're at a social event and you don't really want to be drinking, but you're holding a cocktail just because you don't want to be the odd one out.
want to be the odd one out. FOPO is checking your phone at a social event so that you look like you're in demand or you're busy or you got other things that are important in your life. FOPO is when you're in your closet choosing which clothes you're going to wear, you're choosing based on what you think somebody
FOPO is checking your phone at a social event so that you look like you're in demand or you're busy or you got other things that are important in your life. FOPO is when you're in your closet choosing which clothes you're going to wear, you're choosing based on what you think somebody will approve of or not.
And I want to be really clear, Mike. FOPO is not about not caring about what people think. That's not this conversation.
uninteresting um I don't know if anyone's ever seen these glasses or heard of this experiment but this kind of feeds into my idea of U fop and the future of of human perception so there's been these experiments done these are called prism glasses where it takes all the light and
And we had fun with it. We named it FOPO, Fear of People's Opinions. And it's this excessive worry that sits right underneath our programming-- our internal programming.
Sometimes we leave and sometimes we just shapeshift a little bit. That's FOPO. So the first order of business is just to bring it to awareness. And I'll tell you, David Foster Wallace, one of the great poets and writers, says-- he sets this up brilliantly when he says,
So we are intricately connected, and there's a fabric to how well you're living your life and how that impacts other people. Did they think about FOPO or they focused on what FOPO meant to other people about them?
Like there's still Jews? I'd love to play a fop , some sort of mincing fop .
So going to get there. We're going to get to FOPO and performance-based, the social norms of that. I want to hear a little bit about the challenge of a book versus the other mediums that you've had.
you don't want to be kind of pushed out of the group. So those are very slippery ways that FOPO shows up, and it informs our decisions and how we respond. So that's the fun way to think about it.
Can you talk about the different types of those performance and purpose-based personalities that you wrote about and a little bit about how that impacts part of this FOPO? 100%. So I love that question because we are in a culture where we are obsessed with performance.
So we are intricately connected, and there's a fabric to how well you're living your life and how that impacts other people. And when you start to hold FOPO up against awareness of your mortality-- your morality, I'm sorry, your mortality,
So we are intricately connected, and there's a fabric to how well you're living your life and how that impacts other people. How do you think they thought about FOPO?
So we are intricately connected, and there's a fabric to how well you're living your life and how that impacts other people. And so did they have FOPO?
There is all this ability of having notifications come to your wrist on a smartwatch or things buzzing in every device around you doing-- telling you all these things that's just adding to that FOPO. So when you think about the evolution of that, how do you start with that unmask of, is it just the recognition it's there that that's happening?
So we are intricately connected, and there's a fabric to how well you're living your life and how that impacts other people. So how does your research and your experience of this FOPO fit into that kind of phenomenon that's happened so frequently with such a population of people?
And that's the way we went at writing this book. Yeah. All right, let's get into FOPO. How do you define it?
OK. So, I mean, I think the answer to your point is yes, that there are many ways to think about how we go about talking about FO, but I think that-- FOPO. The number one way to start is to just ask yourself the question like, is this happening?
you have that. How is that challenge-- how'd you overcome that challenge of having to mix and match all these different stories for a broader audience? OK, so the origin story is I wrote an article about this thing that I was struggling with, FOPO, and I wrote it for "HBR." And 12 months later, they called and they said, who are you?
Let's see if there's something there for you. Maybe there's not. And that's either for-- my experience is those that do not have any FOPO are sociopaths. So it could be one of those.
It's why it's the great fear for so many. Now, I think what we can do is translate that to-- if that's an on-ramp to FOPO, what's an off-ramp? One of the off-ramps would be to go from performance-based identity to purpose-based identity.