Ep 493 You Can't See the Diamonds at Your Feet with Lincoln Stoller

You Can't See the Diamonds at Your Feet

 

You've built the business. Hit the numbers. Earned the respect. So why does something still feel like it's missing? This episode doesn't offer a quick fix. It offers something rarer: an honest diagnosis from someone who has spent decades inside physics, entrepreneurship, mountain climbing, and the therapy room, and who keeps arriving at the same uncomfortable conclusion. Most high achievers aren't lacking success. They're lacking awareness. 

 

In This Episode: 

1. Why Lincoln views money as a resource, never a scarce one, and how that shaped a life driven by value over accumulation 

2. The spectrum between sanity and insanity, and why the ability to communicate is what actually separates them 

3. How our education system was designed to socialize and economize, not to teach fulfillment 

4. What it means to have diamonds at your feet and not be able to see them 

5. The commoditization of psychedelics and why Lincoln has grown disillusioned with the trend 

6. Creativity as the essential bridge between material success and genuine spiritual depth 

7. Why what looks like a small adjustment to you might be a seismic shift for the person you're trying to help 

 

Key Insights: 

1. Awareness is the root of everything. Lincoln returns to this word throughout the conversation. Before you can change anything, you have to honestly reckon with what you're actually doing and what role you're playing in the life you have. 

2. Creativity is the bridge to spirit. Lincoln argues that spirituality cannot simply be added to a rational or achievement-driven life, but creativity can. And from creativity, beauty follows, and from beauty, something genuinely transcendent becomes reachable. 

3. Negative mentors are as valuable as positive ones. Lincoln has had a handful of truly good mentors and hundreds of bad ones. He considers both equally instructive, and has long wanted to write a book about learning from failure and from people who get it wrong. 

4. A small adjustment to you may be a seismic shift for someone else. This reframe alone is worth the listen. It explains so much of why people appear stuck even when the path forward seems obvious from the outside. 

5. Legacy is the real measure. When asked what truth about success he wishes more people understood, Lincoln's answer was simple and arresting: you're going to die, and you're going to be left with your legacy. How do you want to affect people when you're gone? 

 

Money Lessons from Lincoln: 

Lincoln Stoller grew up in a household where money was present but never treated as the point. His father made enough that scarcity wasn't the lesson, and so Lincoln absorbed a different one: money is a resource, not a destination. What he came to care about instead was value, the quality of what a thing is actually worth in terms of insight, experience, and growth. "I don't care about quantity of money," he says in this conversation. "I care about quality of value. Hell with money, it's all about value." For anyone who has spent years optimizing for financial outcomes and still feels like something is off, that distinction is not just refreshing. It is diagnostic. 

 

Why This Conversation Matters:  

The version of success most high achievers are chasing was designed by someone else. Lincoln traces it back directly, to an education system built in 19th-century Prussia to prepare people for industrial participation, not personal fulfillment. The result is a culture full of people who have met every grade, hit every milestone, and built identities that feel hollow from the inside. Lincoln has watched it play out in his therapy practice for years. He watched it play out among his high school peers, some of whom achieved everything the system asked of them and later took their own lives. This is not a conversation about working harder or optimizing better. It is a conversation about whether the thing you are working toward is actually yours. 

 

About Lincoln Stoller: 

He combines science, spirit, economics, and mental health through an understanding of the hard sciences, the psyche, and the behavior of groups. He is trained and practice as an independent physicist publishing on topics in fundamental quantum mechanics, a past computer software entrepreneur in business automation, and now a professional psychotherapist. 

He began traveling across the US as a kid, assisting his father, an architectural photographer. Then he took up mountaineering, exploring wild lands on four continents, from the tropics to the Arctic. His graduate studies took him to six universities, during which time he traveled widely and became an ambassador to families in the Caribbean and Mongolia. 

As a counselor, he works with people on both the high and low ends of the spectrum using brain retraining, talk therapy, hypnosis, diet, somatic experience, and psychedelics. On the high end, he’s a coach; on the low end, he’s a therapist. He inverts these by making the able more aware of their disabilities, and the disabled more aware of their abilities. 

As a blogger, podcaster, and author, he publishes regularly on topics brought to him by his connections in work, physics, his teenage son, and reflections he sees in society. His emphasis is on getting people to think more deeply, become more self-aware, and to embrace radically different points of view. 

He is not an academic, not the usual therapist, and he rails against anything institutional. To evolve requires leaving everything behind, including the mind he has grown up with. 

 

Links: 

Website: https://www.mindstrengthbalance.com/  

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lincolnstoller/  

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lincolnstoller/  

 

Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@richersoul 

Richer Soul Life Beyond Money. You got rich, now what? Let’s talk about your journey to purposeful, intentional, amazing life. Where are you going to go and how are you going to get there? Let’s figure that out together. At the core is the financial well being to be able to do what you want, when you want, how you want. It’s about personal freedom! 

Thanks for listening! 

Show Sponsor: http://profitcomesfirst.com/ 

Schedule your free no obligation call: https://bookme.name/rockyl/lite/intro appointment 15 minutes 

If you like the show please leave a review on iTunes: http://bit.do/richersoul 

https://www.facebook.com/richersoul 

http://richersoul.com/ 

[e-mail] 

Some music provided by Junan from Junan Podcast 

Any financial advice is for educational purposes only and you should consult with an expert for your specific needs.