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This is a very special edition of the podcast in the final episode of 2021.
We're looking back at some of the very best conversations that we had on The Knowledge Project this year, covering a wide range of topics with some fascinating guests.
There are 10 different conversations in this very special episode and I think you'll find there are lessons to be learned from all of them.
To start us off, we're going to hear from Kat Cole who appeared on episode 117 in August.
Kat spent nearly a decade in leadership roles with Focus Brands, the global multi -channel franchisor that operates Cinnabon, and a few other brands like Ante Ons and Jamba Juice.
She started as a waitress at Hooters and climbed her way through the ranks of leadership to eventually become the COO of a global brand.
I asked her about the first person to ever bet on her and our conversation took off from there.
She outlined how her belief in the power of possible shaped her incredible career arc.
It's time to listen and learn.
Who is the first person to ever bet on you?
Well, I would say my mom.
Maybe by default, I had to watch the girls.
I was nine years old and she was working three jobs.
She fed us on a food budget of $10 a week for three years, which meant she wasn't home a lot.
And so she trusted me.
Outside of my mom, what feels like the first person to bet on me was Bonnie, who was the person who hired me at Hooters.
She hired me as a 17 -year -old hostess and she was the general manager at the store.
She herself had been a waitress, a Hooters girl, then moved her way up to running the restaurant.
And she is the one who gave me the ability to move into being a waitress.
And she's the one that came to me when the corporate office called and said, we're looking for really great employees to travel around the world to go launch the franchise.
And maybe as importantly, she's the first person to call me out and treat me like an adult.
I was working three jobs in the early days and I was late pretty often because I was working three jobs and it was impossible to juggle getting from one place to the other given the shift time.
And she sat me down.
I'll never forget it.
I remember the exact words.
You're great with your peers.
I'd love to give you more shifts.
I would love to give you more opportunities, but I depend on you showing up on time.
And if you're late, other people have to stay later and I need to know that I can depend on you.
And if this isn't enough of a priority for you, that's okay.
We can scale back your shifts or you can quit and work other jobs, but I need to know where you are on this.
And it was the first time I was 18 and it was the first time that I really felt like an adult, like a working adult, it was just a job.
You know, these were just jobs up to that point.
And she's so skillfully with so few words said so much and it, I quit my other two jobs.
I never thought I knew what I was doing.
Never. Not once did I think, yes, I'm going to do that because I know what I'm doing.
What I thought was I can figure it out.
You also believe in people.
And I thought that this was interesting.
You called yourself a positive note was an optimistic.
What was the term you used?
I've used a few terms, but either a pragmatic optimist or an optimistic pragmatist or a practical optimist, you know, any of those things that don't seem to belong together.
I thought that was really interesting because I also sort of like by default believe in people.
And sometimes it comes with a cost.
And, um, you know, you called it a tax earlier.
I'm wondering if you can expand on that a little bit.
Yeah. I really do believe humans are mostly magic and that, that we are all just unfinished magic and we're more likely to be the fullest extent of our magic if other people see us that way first.
And, um, I've certainly learned that when I see people for their potential and their possibilities, that they seem to live up to that more quickly than when they interact with others.
And I have felt that benefit of being looked at as my potential and felt the need and the ability and desire to grow into that.
So the upside of believing in people is so high and not but, and some will let us down.
And the frequency that I'm let down is so low compared to the frequency that I'm proven right in people's potential.
And so it just feels like this tax, it's like a single digit percentage tax that is a small price to pay for getting all the upside that comes from looking at people as the great things that they are and the possibilities that they have in front of them.
One of the stories that you told that I really want to make sure that we draw out when you mentioned the positive intent before was about chicken wings.
And I love this story, so I'm going to get you to get you told it once.
Yeah. So I want to hear this story again.
I think everybody will benefit from this.
Yeah. So I was a waitress at Hooters and there was a customer that started coming in with some friends every Friday and he would order 50 chicken wings, which is one giant plate of a mountain of saucy chicken wings and a couple pictures of beer for he and his friends.
And he would eat them all.
They would eat them all and then call one of us over and say, excuse me, there were only 40 wings here and you need to take it off my bill or give us a discount.
And I remember thinking, what do I do in this moment?
Because if there were only 40, maybe we screwed it up.
So having that default of yeah, okay, that can happen.
But then he did it again the next Friday and again the next Friday.
And it became apparent that this was either a game or a scheme to get a discount.
And so instead of fighting with him, which some managers and servers were starting to do, because there's no way that was happening.
So consistently to only him on a shift, instead of fighting with him, I just decided before they finished the plate of 50 wings, I rang up with my employee discount, a plate of 10 wings, had the kitchen produce that and before they were finished, brought them a plate of 10 wings and smiled and said,
I'm sure we got it right this time.
I'm sure there's at least 50 here.
And his friends who clearly know he was being a bit of a difficult customer, all laughed and like, oh, she got you, man.
And, and it was the first time someone didn't fight him.
It was almost like customer service judo, where I was using his energy in a way to play the game back to him, but in a giving way.
And he never complained again.
And he gave me a really big tip.
So moving from the restaurant world to the world of professional sports, we're going back to episode number 120 to hear from Chris Bosch.
Bosch is a two -time NBA champion and was inducted to the NBA Hall of Fame earlier this year.
He played on some of the most iconic NBA teams of his generation.
One of the most interesting things he shared in our interview were some of the subjective factors that separated the championship teams.
He was a part of with the other teams he played on what made a good coach and the difference between losing and being beaten.
That was the main thing that I found.
Like Pat Riley said it best is either winning or misery.
Coming with that idea from the first day in camp and then, you know, the day to day work, knowing that we need to win, we're going to win.
And this is how we're going to win and having that attitude.
And even for myself as a leader in Toronto, those were things that I had to learn eventually.
You know, setting the tone, being that person, you know, that has to lead these group of teammates into something hopefully that'll materialize into something.
But I saw how the attitude, just the attitude in embracing the tough situations.
If you watch the finals or watch playoff basketball or any championship in any sport, every team goes to a moment where they want to quit every time.
You know, that is indescribable.
How about not quitting?
How about you keep doing your job?
And matter of fact, let's do it even better.
Let's turn it up a notch when it gets hard.
That was the main difference that I saw that was really a huge, huge, had a huge profound impact on me, just seeing like, okay, I've learned to use cliches, right?
I used to hate them.
Now I love them. When the tough get going, going get tough.
Boom. There you go.
Take that witch. I gave that to you for free.
Take heed to that one, man.
What do you think makes an effective coach?
Being prepared, being ready, having a game plan and being ready to deviate from that game plan whenever, if it's not working.
There's that fine balance of sticking with what you said you were going to do and just, all right, guys, hey, that game plan, throw it out.
This is what we're doing now.
You have to know, you know, you kind of have to know in my opinion, went to deviate from that.
But I think overall, just someone who can connect with their team, can communicate effectively with each member of the team and that's including their staff as well.
And that can get everybody on the same page and keep everybody on the same page.
I think, you know, that's really what a coach does because at the end of the day, the players are going to go out there.
It's about the players.
It's nothing a coach can do outside of saying the right things to get the right response out of their players.
Other than that, it's just all preparation and thinking ahead.
Is there a difference in your mind between losing and being beaten?
It's all the same to me.
It's all the same. A loss is a loss, man.
And that's to say, you know, I never hold on for a sec because I remember this thing.
It was a couple of years ago that I forget what happened, but it's sort of like losing is, you know, you didn't put in the work.
Getting beaten is like the other team was better than you.
And like, yeah, objectively speaking, you're still losing either way.
But is there a difference between like, man, if I practiced harder this week, we probably wouldn't have lost that or?
I mean, you said the word already right there.
You said we wouldn't have lost.
We lost. We are losing.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
I don't want that to have a negative connotation on the thing.
You know, and I was brought up in a harsher reality when I was, you know, being taught the game of basketball around extremely competitive people.
So there are very extreme competitive thoughts that I have in myself.
But this is how I think losses a loss, you know, whether it's by one or 100.
I've, you know, one of that makes me think like somebody like, would you rather lose like on the last second shot or just like lose by a hundred?
They said lose by a hundred.
I said, man, I'm losing on the last second shot.
That doesn't even mean you had a shot.
If you didn't have a chance, like you won't even want a chance, you know, I'm that person and yeah, a loss is a loss.
If you get beat, okay.
A loss. And that's okay.
And that's okay. You got beat.
That is a loss. It's a win column and a loss column at the end of every game.
You either win or you lose.
You can take whatever you want to, whatever lessons you want to afterwards, but let's not let's keep it.
Let's keep apples to apples, orange, oranges, loss and wins.
Okay. That doesn't mean that doesn't necessarily, uh, uh, you know, speak to your character or speak to your approach.
And yeah, if you're not successful, if you lose, that doesn't, you know, mean that you can't take away.
Well, if I would have done those things, no, no, no.
How about we do those things this time and how about we don't lose the game this time?
How about we win that joke?
That's what I love.
And then when it, you know, that's the attitude that's required to be successful in my opinion, to go for the win.
And if you don't, all right, I'll be back, you know, until I win.
And then when I win, we're going to keep it going.
Next step, we come to a more touching subject that I'm sure has affected a lot of us in some way over the past few years.
Loneliness back in episode one 14.
I spoke with Norena Hertz who is honorary professor of the university college of London and the author of many books, one which came out in 2020 called the lonely century.
I asked her what the difference is between being alone and feeling alone and how you can still be lonely in a marriage or relationship.
And also about the role technology has played in causing loneliness, but also helping to cure it and loneliness shaming.
We explore that too.
Being lonely has a sense of powerlessness attached to it.
It's a sense you lack agency.
It's about wanting to feel connected.
Typically, we think of loneliness as being wanting to feel connected to friends and family, but I actually broaden it to include also feeling, wanting to feel connected to your government, wanting to feel connected to your employer.
So loneliness, for me, is about feeling disconnected in a much more existential state about feeling that you're not cared for, that you're not supported, whether it is by those closest to you, but also whether it's by your government or your workplace.
And is it technology that's causing us to feel lonely or do we go to technology because we feel lonely and we seek out technology as a way to feel connected or find people like us?
So when I started my research, I was agnostic about the role that technology and social media played in today's learning this crisis.
But the more I dug into the academic literature and there's by now, of course, a vast body of this, the more I came to believe that technology was net, a problem here.
Up until about a year and a half ago, it was hard to actually establish definitively whether it was just correlation that people who were lonely were spending more time, for example, on social media, or was it causative?
And there was a landmark study that was carried out by Stanford University about a year and a half ago, a real gold standard of a study where they had 3000 participants, 1500 in a control group and the other 1500 were expressly charged to go off, in this case, Facebook.
The results were very clear.
The group who went off Facebook for two months were significantly less lonely, significantly happier, and interestingly, spent significantly more time doing things in person with friends and family.
So it wasn't that they just migrated onto other platforms.
And since then, there have been a few other studies which have supported this, saying that social media actually makes people feel more lonely.
But even our devices play a part here.
We've all done it. We've all been in a room with our partner or our family, heads in our phones, not even really hearing them, not present with them.
And there was a study where they put a smartphone on a table between a couple, even when the smartphone was turned off, even when neither person was touching the smartphone, the couple felt less empathetic towards each other and less connected.
And so there's lots and lots of research on why technology net is making us feel less connected to each other.
Although I'm actually quite optimistic about the role that social robots and virtual assistants will be able to play in alleviating loneliness.
And in my research, I've kind of looked into this a lot.
And one example is an Israeli startup.
It's a company called LEQ.
They have a social robot specifically designed for elderly people.
And during the heights of the Covid pandemic, they shipped thousands of these LEQ robots to the United States and the stories of people who were holed up, isolating, self -isolated, saying, I would be feeling so lonely if I hadn't found a companion in my LEQ.
And of course, we know from Japan where this has been going on for much longer that people can be really become very attached to their robot friends and carers, even knitting bonnets for them in elderly people's homes.
So it doesn't mean that we need to have a relationship with people to feel less lonely.
Go deeper on that. So that's a very interesting and important question.
How I see it is that on an individual level, social robots technology can help alleviate our loneliness for sure.
But what does this mean for society?
Because if we choose to hang out with our Alexa rather than Alexis, if we choose to spend time with LEQ rather than Elianne, we're not going to invest in our human.
There are dangers we won't invest in our human relationships.
Moreover, the danger is that we'll get very used to having relationships with essentially servants who do what we want and laugh at our jokes and are much more submissive than any human relationship would be.
So whilst I do see it as a cure for loneliness at an individual level, I do worry about the ramifications for society should we wish to migrate our friendships to social robots and virtual assistants.
I want to come later to a little bit of the with or without robots, but it seems like one of the major problems with loneliness is that there's so much shame in admitting that you're lonely.
Why is that? There is a stigma.
It's, I'd say, especially nowadays when popularity, when the market for popularity has never been more visible.
And again, social media clearly playing a role in that it's, you know, you scroll on your feeds and everyone looks like they have more friends than you and is having more fun than you and is more popular than you.
And so it's easy to believe that others are more popular than you.
And there's something that feels quite shameful about feeling like no one wants to be your friend.
So I think there is a stigma.
I do think something, one of the positives that has come out of the our shared COVID experience is that we are talking about loneliness much more today than we were in the past.
And we should be because the scale at which it's affecting us collectively is immense, rich, poor, young, old, male, female, are lonely people.
Is this a Western, Eastern culture thing too?
Like does this transfer across all these cultures?
It does. Even though the more individualistic society is the lonelier it's likely to be.
And also I argue that the neoliberal capitalist mindset, so the doggy dog, me first, self -interest first mindset, is also inimicable ultimately to a world in which we feel connected to each other and feel part of a community.
And of course, the East as well as the West has been becoming more neoliberal and more individualistic.
You even see this in pop song lyrics.
So there were studies done with pop song lyrics which show that in general in the West pop song lyrics from the 1980s to today have become increasingly individualistic with words like we as and are supplanted by words like I, me, my.
And this is even going on in China, fascinatingly, where you're seeing a lag but you're also seeing this trend.
So more individualism, more loneliness, more neoliberalism, more loneliness and the West doesn't have the monopoly now either.
That's really interesting to think about how this will play out and I mean we can anticipate some of the consequences.
I just want to go back a little bit more to the individual and acknowledging loneliness and I was talking to a friend about this and she said simple things like filling out a form made her feel lonely when it asked like who's your emergency contact or who's your next of kin?
What's your response to that?
I think we have come to see the family as the all -important support network in our lives.
And I would argue that we really need to redefine support networks for the 21st century so that friendship networks are viewed as meaningful as ones where we have blood ties and that ideally we should be moving to a whole system whereby we're able to invest in our friendships as much as in our blood
relationships. And wouldn't it be fantastic if at work people didn't just have mothers and fathers increasingly now getting maternity pay when they have children but also if people were allowed not only to take off paid time to care for an elderly relative and some companies are pioneering this but also if you
were able to take time off to help out a friend in need, help out a neighbor, do something for your community.
So I think part of our challenge and part of the reason your friend probably felt so lonely is because she you don't really think I'll put her my friend as the next of kin or as my emergency contact and yet and yet how great would it be if we could but of course in order to do that it's not just about companies
doing things it's also about us prioritizing our friendships more ourselves.
And it's hard to do that because we're many of us are so busy working all hours so overstretched and care takes time to nurture relationships don't just happen on the fly.
So we're partly culpable of course too.
Rethinking is something more people should do which is why we had to include a section from episode 112 with celebrated psychologist Adam Grant.
Grant is professor of psychology at the Wharton School and the author of five books including his most recent Think Again.
In this conversation Adam explains the importance of rethinking ideas separating what we believe from who we are and what happens when we get into an overconfidence cycle.
The conversation picks up after I ask him why it's so difficult for us to rethink our ideas.
There are probably multiple reasons for it but I think two of the reasons why people are really hesitant to rethink things are one it makes the world feel much more unpredictable.
If my views aren't fixed then who am I and how do I navigate a really confusing and often turbulent world and two it makes me feel like I am not an expert and a lot of us take pride in our knowledge.
When I think about power there's a classic French and raven framework where they said look you know there's expert power there's what's called referent power which is basically being liked in respect and then there's coercive reward and legitimate power and most of the basis of power that people have in life
come from a position that they happen to hold right so my ability to reward you or punish you my ability to get you to listen to me because I have a role of authority is not something I can carry with me and so the knowledge I have is one of the few things that I get to hold on to and the idea that that might be
fragile it not only questions my identity it also I guess questions my status and my standing in the world which is something pretty uncomfortable to do.
Let's double click on that identity concept because I think that you sort of said our views are almost tied to our identity and that gets in the way sometimes.
This is something I'm always puzzled by and I feel like I see it in every field.
There are professionals in almost every field who not only are interested in in particular ways of being or particular practices but they actually define themselves by living those practices.
You know this already but when I was writing the book I started thinking through you know how terrible would the world be if some professions had not rethought some of their convictions.
So imagine for example that you went to a doctor whose identity was to be a professional lobotomist that would be extremely dangerous and yet there was a time when a lot of physicians define themselves by that method by that set of tools.
We've seen the same thing with you know with police officers right who who identified themselves as the kinds of people who would stop and frisk because you never know where a criminal could be and we know from the evidence that that just had horrendous effects particularly when it comes to you know
disproportionately arresting and and prosecuting people of color particularly black people here in the U .S.
You know we we've had teachers and parents who identified with with practices that were just highly ineffective and maybe even harmful and I think that it's dangerous right I think that for me an identity is not about what you believe it's about what you value and so I want to have a set of principles
for me my highest values are generosity excellence integrity and freedom and I am completely flexible on the best ways to live those values and so you might come tomorrow and tell me you know what the randomized controlled experiments that you do the longitudinal studies you do there's a fatal flaw
in them and there's a better way to be helpful and excellent at your job and I would be skeptical because I believe in science but I would be open to hearing the idea.
How did you get to that point like how do we convince ourselves to attach our identity to values and not beliefs like that's a that's a tricky path isn't it?
Do you think so? I don't know like how do you it seems like it is otherwise we'd just be rethinking all the time.
I mean that isn't that part of the fun of being human though to me rethinking is it's code for learning isn't it?
Well it is but we don't update our views very often that's that's part of the issue our own and others right it's hard to see it when we don't do it it's really easy to see when others don't do it.
What is the process by which we update our views?
That's a great question.
The the way that I've I've landed at thinking about this is to say look when when you have a belief you have two options.
One is you can subject it to a rethinking cycle the other is you can fall victim to an overconfidence cycle.
So an overconfidence cycle is you know something we've all both committed and and witnessed probably too many times but the basic idea is we start by being proud of something that we think we know and that leads us then to feel a lot of conviction that kind of launches us into confirmation bias where we look
for information that confirms our expectations as well as desirability bias where we look for information that that basically reinforces what we want to be true and then we see what we expected to see and what we wanted to and we get validated and that only makes us prouder of what we know and less
open to rethinking.
The rethinking cycle is is very much the opposite.
It starts for me with intellectual humility which is about knowing what you don't know.
You know no matter how much of an expert you are in a given field or a given topic you have a long list of things that you're clueless about and being aware of of what your ignorance is leaves you to doubt your convictions.
It makes you curious about what you don't know and that opens your mind to new discoveries and then every time you learn something new it's not this sign that oh now I'm an expert.
It's this sense that well there's so much more to learn right and I've I've made a tiny tiny dot of progress in you know a whole universe of knowledge and I can't wait to see what I learn next and so I think one of the things we need to do is we need to give ourselves permission to enter rethinking
cycles and there are a lot of ways to do that we could we could talk about but Shane I'm going to ask you about this because a couple a couple years ago you wrote a post about how we should have more second thoughts and I had literally started writing about that.
I think it must have come out around the time that I was writing the Think Again book proposal and I had proposed a tentative title for this book as Second Thoughts.
This is amazing you're on the exact same wavelength as me and this is what you do for a living right.
You you rethink things you also ask the Farnham Street community and your whole audience here at The Knowledge Project to rethink a lot of their convictions.
So where do you start your rethinking cycles and how do you know when it's time to enter one?
I think like I've just summed this up as like outcome over ego and so I usually try to wrap my outcome or wrap my my sense of identity or ego in the outcome and that's something I learned when I was working for the intelligence agency right like it wasn't about me having the best idea it was like who's
got the best idea because that's going to get the best outcome and then you sort of grow up in an environment where that becomes I would say the norm by and large.
It's hard in a knowledge environment though right because you have so much of your your worth you you want to contribute to something.
I think there's a biological need to contribute to something larger than us and if your identity you're not mechanically making something you can't see there's nothing tangible to what you're producing then you you you effectively are a knowledge worker in one way or another and then you're paid for your
judgment. So if your judgment isn't right what is it?
And then what you do is you you you force your way right like you you don't intentionally sabotage other people but you only look for confirming evidence.
You you're not open to changing your mind because your sense of identity is tied to being right because that's how you contribute to the organization.
It's it's interesting but not at all surprising to me that that you really learned this in the intelligence community because the way you're describing your process of rethinking is exactly what what I learned from studying super forecasters right which is they they will often come in to making a judgment
and say okay the only way to have a better shot at being right is to recognize all the places where I'm wrong and I love this practice in particular that they came from one of the super forecasters in the book Jean -Pierre Begum who when he forms an attentive opinion will actually make a list of the conditions
under which he would change his mind and I've actually started doing this over the the past few months because I don't want to get locked into something that was you know maybe sort of a soothing belief but ultimately one that's not going to serve me well.
One of the I want to end with sort of like this question that people say a lot in organizations because I think you'll have a good response to this is people say I'm entitled to my opinion and you know that's their way of ending the conversation and saying you know you can't change my mind on something
how do you respond to that?
Yeah you're entitled to your own opinion if you keep your opinion to yourself if you decide to say it out loud then I think you have a responsibility to be open to changing your mind in the face of better logic or stronger data and so I think if you're willing to voice an opinion you should also be
willing to change that opinion.
The next conversation comes from episode 108 of the podcast which is one of my personal favorites with Dr.
Thomas Zurbuchen I call him Dr.
Z. He's currently the Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA where he seeks big questions about the universe and our place in it.
When something goes wrong with a mission he's the one answering to Congress about what happened so naturally I had to ask him about his decision -making process.
The conversation picks up after I ask him how he manages a three billion in public resources and what strategies he uses to decide when to launch and when to stop a mission from deploying.
So first of all you recognize that the launch is an irreversible decision like of the moment I say go it's done you don't get it back it is over right so it's irreversible so basically whenever you make a decision like that and many people do that in the business world too right kind of these kind of one
-way doors I think as others call like that you only go through it once the way you do it I believe is you recognize that you want to make the decision well -informed and with all the scrutiny up front so the way I make that decision is first of all I don't make it alone I put in the room the people the best
people that I know kind of from the engineers but also the policy people and you know and I actually have people who are don't report to each other like I have an engineering organization just the way we built NASA over decades that we have an engineer organization that talks about just engineering
without any other encumbrances right the question just is will it work what's the likelihood for it to work there's one that talks about safety just that way is it going to be safe right kind of no other if thens that's their focus and so you basically the way you make the decision is you you bring
together that kind of of course you work you'd recognize by the way the most important thing is to empower the team right kind of I mean frankly I'm not the most important guy in this I'm just making the decision to live with it you know and I'm the guy in the congressional hearing right if something
goes wrong so everybody knows that right so I will make the decision it's one it's not a vote it's one decision by one signature the only signature that matters there for most of these missions is mine right kind of because I take the accountability right but I would be a fool to not listen to the others
so for me you you really get to know with big decisions I actually spend a lot of time meeting the teams I want to I've built space hardware I can sense how good it you know I listen to the team I listen to the things that are not sad I listen to I basically figure out whether they're scrutinizing each
other whether we have a lead that squashes opposition you know those are all warning signs you want to see whether I look at mistakes people are making are they by the way I don't care if they make a mistake but are they making stupid mistakes and over and over again are they are they disciplined right
so so all that stuff kind of it's it's years of work that come together to that decision where I said yes we launch where are you when you make that decision are you in a room with other people are you alone are you walking are you running what are you doing when you actually make that call in many
cases I'm in a room with other people but if I'm not sure I will take a break and I think well when I run I think well in the shower in the morning so I mean there are kind of points of clarity if I'm not sure I will never push into a decision I mean I the way I always go is I go backwards right suppose
I'm sitting in the congressional hearing and I just blew up x and y can I explain how I made the decision in a way that it made sense there space is hard and by the way every once in a while we will fail and I remind everybody of that if you want to not fail you're in that safe space over here that's
irrelevant that's not how NASA got to where it is it's not because people's played it safe it's because we do take risks we do leave the launch pad even though we know it's dangerous you know with 1 .5 to 3 likelihood it will not make it out of out of the earth gravity statistically speaking so so we
take that risk right so just that itself I will never one of the things I really believe in is don't don't get pushed I I if I'm not sure I don't mind being the only guy who is not comfortable you know and I will I will back off I basically said thanks we're stopping the meeting I appreciate that if anybody
has anything that is not being said I will not make a decision for 24 hours send it to me by email and I will go back and if I if I find that there's more information I can gain that really is relevant I'll do that if I find you know like you get into a place where more information actually doesn't
help you because it adds ambiguity to the team I make the decision right on the spot because frankly I'm I'm ready for it because I I did the work so it's not because I came in unprepared I did the work for years in advance I know kind of have all these data points and I've discussed them with my with my
group of kind of diverse leaders who look at them from different perspectives is there examples where you made that call and it's turned out to be wrong but you got a good outcome yeah so so I want to I want to I'll talk about two decisions the first one is I was the one of the first decisions I made
as a billion dollar assets it's the June mission I was in orbit or is in orbit around Jupiter and so we were in an orbit of a 50 -day orbit and we wanted to drop the fire the engine and drop it down to a 15 -day orbit what that does and I may have to date slightly wrong but you get the point I wanted
to to get I have over 100 missions so sometimes I mix up dates I did not want to think we're going to talk about this but but anyway I wanted to kind of increase the frequency of encounters by a factor of three that that's what I wanted to do the question was do we want to do that so the entire team
look at them from their point of view they're frankly perfectly fine in a slow orbit they say we need 20 flybys it costs a taxpayer 50 more million dollars to just stay where you are the principal investigator everybody's like let's just leave it where we are there's risk we want the minimum risk and I'm
like well what's the opportunity cost you're spending 50 more million dollars to do the science and so what I had to do is is unentangle that kind of natural inclination which I understand because I was in his role before from the actual technical question is it is it is it important so in that room
there were very few people wanted to fire the engine but I took the decision to fire the engine and then we prepared for it and as we prepared for it all of a sudden we realized that the engine had a problem it had a leak it was something was wrong with it and and frankly what we needed to do is basically
look at that you know as we prepared for this exact but what I believe is the exact right decision we actually realized that that we couldn't do because now we would have to fire the engine so I made a second decision we would have to fire the engine in a state that it had never been tested now I have a billion dollar
asset that's basically working and I need to take a risk is it worth that risk so so actually the second decision had to reverse that the first decision to fire I actually decided not to fire because of the because of that kind of enhanced and unknown risk we thought the the engine people said we could probably
do that we just have never done it and there has never been a burn that long in that configuration in any test environment okay that's crazy right you don't I mean of course I'm pulling it down to the the quintessential 30 seconds of the meeting right once you learn that it's like you don't fire so ultimately
we ended up not firing because we did the scrutiny in the first and the second decision we set ourselves up in a way that actually made the science way better because we actually we actually had I had asked him to bring you know yes there's opportunity cost but tell me what you can do extra science
that you weren't able to do so we actually moved it up so so by failing in my first decision we enhanced the mission significantly I appreciate you sharing the details of that you said there was two decisions that you recalled what was the other one so the first one was let's fire even though everybody
opposed it the second uh was uh let's not fire because you know even though some of the technical people said we could do it but we put enough scrutiny together that basically uh basically again I was wrong on the first decision I you know kind of you could say well you know I'm sure somebody says like
well you could have just not fired and we're exactly where we are it's like no that's exactly the right scrutiny because in a congressional hearing I could actually now explain to you how I cost I costly spent that extra 50 million dollars it's not because I just I'm not handling the the pressure well
we actually learned something that really matters learning is an important part of innovation how do you disseminate what you learn within the organization like how do you share that knowledge that's actually a really good question and I struggle with it and basically what happens to me on a given day
I make multiple decisions right and and for me what I've started to do is sit down and talk people through the decision kind of it's almost like see what I'm seeing this is what you know and really create that rigor in the organization and kind of show where how the decision path goes right I asking
questions out loud and talking through it and and so that's what I'm sharing in the leadership team I worry sometimes just because NASA is so hierarchical right kind of because of the fact that only one signature matters you know kind of my schedule is always subscribed by a factor of 10 every every
week right so so I say know a lot more than yes relative to my time that's my most impression most important good right so so for me the question I'm asking I'm spending enough time to actually disseminate things into the organizations because I'm you know it would be helpful for them to actually know
this is the scrutiny we're putting on it I try to do it and I ask people to do it but I just want to tell you it's a question on my mind that I'm currently thinking about you know I just a notch and that reason I'm saying it it's like I see some of the same mistakes over and over again it's like no no I
don't want like for me what I really hate if you really want to tick me off come show up and tell me everything is low risk that makes me believe you haven't understood your job right don't make me laugh don't make me feel good make me feel scared and then make me feel comfortable because you're dealing
with all the risks don't come and say it's all low risk it is not low risk it's rocket science and so for me it's like you know and at the beginning everybody came with this because you know you know these organizations have their histories their leaders you know like some leaders don't sleep well if they
have problems you know so they have pain aversion it's a big leadership weakness like you know did not be able to carry worries with them you know and those worries pulling them down so you know that the whole organization behaves in a way that they never bring a worry to you you still have them but you
don't know them right so you get surprised you know and I'm like no no no I want I need you to be worried more than me then I'm feeling comfortable I don't want you to be calm I need you to be worried that's what I want from astrophysics and NASA to video games our next conversation from episode 101
features Jane McGonigal a world renowned designer of alternative reality games and a New York Times best -selling author.
In this conversation she shares the three questions parents should ask their kids about the video games they're playing as well as the ideal amount of time we should spend playing video games and how gaming at night can help with nightmares and even certain traumas.
This conversation picks up as she starts explaining how most video games can help people learn tangible life skills.
The most important thing is this is my life researching you know the potential benefits of games played you know by the right person at the right time for the right reason and the number one thing we know any game that you love I don't care if it's League of Legends it's Fortnite it's Candy Crush whatever
whatever you feel drawn to we know that there is a transferable benefit which is you get better at learning new things at dealing with systems that are frustrating and having to adapt you know you're learning new rules you're learning new interfaces it's designed to frustrate you and you have to adapt
and get better and you build confidence in your ability to get better and every game does this and it's something that we shouldn't trivialize we shouldn't pretend that that games are you know just escapist or just a pastime that they actually build you know this kind of growth mindset they build this resilient
way of dealing with challenges and they especially for young people for kids who grow up learning game after game I have five -year -old twin daughters who just got their first tablet this year and they've already taught themselves to play over 100 different games on this tablet and every day they come
and show me like mom look at this game I learn want to watch me play this game and just the confidence that you can build and I can learn anything I can teach myself I can get better I can develop new skills even if I'm terrible at this the first time I tried it that's something your whole life until
you're like a hundred years old and desperately trying to keep that neuroplasticity going and how do I keep my you know brain healthy and active and where's that gray matter going to grow you can grow it by learning something new that's hard for you so from you know five years old to a hundred years
old any game that's designed to be challenging is going to give you that benefit so how should parents think about that with kids because there's a lot of questions around screen time and whether I should let my kids play certain video games or not how do you think about that okay so the number one
thing is you have to be in conversation with your kids around what they're playing and there are three really powerful questions that I ask my kids and anybody I'm trying to get to know better and like understand their relationship to games and understand their personal strengths so you ask them about whatever
their favorite game is right now what does it take to be good at this game what skills does it require what kind of personality or temperament does it require you ask them what have you gotten better at since you started playing this game and you ask what's the hardest thing you've accomplished in this game
and ask them to tell you about how they did it you know what what did you have to do in order to meet that challenge because it turns out that people who can talk about what they've gotten better at what real skills whether it's you know being able to manage my breathing under pressure my heart rate
under pressure if they're a competitive e -sports player or if it's creativity maybe it's I don't give up when things are hard it's communication the stressful situations with my teammates it's I can get I know where to look whenever I I don't know what to do I'm a really good information finder whatever
it is people who can talk about that they tend to bring those skills to their work to their learning to their relationships to their hobbies and all you have to do to get somebody to transfer the benefits of games to real life is just have that conversation and you can do it with yourself too like just
have a little game journal every time you play a new game you're like what am I getting better after playing this game what's the hardest thing that I have achieved by uh when I've been playing this game and what did it take to do it um and so if you're having those conversations with your kids I don't
care what they're playing I don't care if they're playing Fortnite you know for 20 hours a week and that stresses you out um by the way 21 hours a week is like the tipping point where we do start to see it can get in the way of physical health or mental health so you know okay less than 21 hours a week
but other than that it can be anything the killing zombies you know like it's stuff that you don't understand why they enjoy it you can still ask those questions and you can still have that conversation and you can reflect back um to anybody like when I watch my husband play a game you know I can I
can tell them what I think what strengths I think he's showing and I can show him that I see all of those great things and those great qualities in him games are just a great way to tell each other you know what we're good at and what we want to be appreciated for and what we value in each other and so we
should just have more of those conversations are there better times a day for kids to play yeah so okay there's a really counterintuitive study that um I parents always go like oh when I tell them about it because it's it showed the opposite of what most parents assume is true which is if you want kids
to retain what they study better you should have them play video games first and then do their homework and then study before they go to sleep because if you study first and then as your reward you get to play games when you go to sleep your brain is going to focus on the most salient problem it was recently
trying to solve I'm sure I don't know if you've ever had this experience you go to sleep and your brain starts like just it's working on whatever you were just really fixated on so you want that brain to be fixated on you know the calculus or well you know the whatever the foreign words you're studying
are not on the level that you were trying to solve in a game so actually reversing the order is is a really good tip the key is just to setting a hard time limit so that you know they play for 90 minutes and they switch to work or whatever it is um but yeah you don't you don't want to have the game
right before bed unless you're you've recently been traumatized which is this is like can we do a psa a little public service announcement um if you're having flashbacks of a traumatic event or you're ruminating on something that it's making you crazy like you can't get this bad experience out of your
mind you can't get this you're replaying this conversation over and over again because you you feel like you said the wrong thing and you just feel fixated on it playing a game right before bed will essentially hijack the attention center and especially the visual centers if it's a game that's very
visual I mean Tetris is like the golden game and in clinical trials when they study this effect it's like Tetris is the best option because it literally hijacks your brain like you close your eyes and you see the falling you know Tetris blocks but any game that can really focus your attention will make
it less likely for you to be then lying in bed trying to fall asleep with all these negative thoughts or having nightmares and flashbacks that you can't control so yeah you should play the game right before bed if you're if you're dealing with that problem but otherwise you know do something else like
you're learning or your whatever your growth stuff is read do that before bed instead it'll stay in your brain better is there a difference between the benefits we get from single -player games versus multiplayer games yeah it's you know I say right game right time right person you know if you're trying
to control your attention you might have an easier time with a single -player game if you're trying to manage anxiety or you want to you know slow your heart rate down or you you need some you need a positive emotion because you're having a hard day you know just pull out your phone or your switch or whatever
and do a little solo gaming that gets you in the right frame of mind and then you know social gaming I mean we know that people who spend a lot of time playing the same game with the same people report getting more social support in their everyday lives so even if it's a game like Pokemon go where you
might not see the other player you might not be speaking to them maybe we're doing remote raids together we're just sending each other virtual gifts every day you're more likely to text somebody that you've had an interaction within the game or pick up the phone and ask them for help with a problem
or just feel like you have a rich network of support if you need it it's sort of that safety net that you feel like you have in your life that makes us I don't know less anxious or feel less alone if you play the same game with the same people League of Legends whatever it is and so yeah you know I
try to have a balance in my life you know if I'm super anxious I'm not gonna and I'm trying to like focus my mind I'm not gonna do Pokemon go because that's not quite you know stimulating enough I might need to do something a little more challenging but you you start to learn and curate a set of games
in your life that plays the right role for you and I you know I think the more that you can articulate this game gives me this benefit and I play this game because you know it helps me in this way we don't see people like that developing you know pathologies around gaming they're not the people who are feeling
overwhelmed they're playing 40 hours a week 60 hours a week it's taken over their lives you know the people who run into the problems tend to be escapist gamers who just feel like games are the only thing that you know keeps them sane they want to avoid reality but they're not thinking about the benefits
that it can give them to make them stronger in real life or more capable of meeting those challenges next up is episode 108 with my friend Nier Iwal.
That was released in February.
Nier is the best -selling author of Hooked and Indestractable and he was named the prophet of habit -forming technology by MIT.
Here Nier explains the leading cause of distraction and it's not what most people assume it to be this conversation picks up as Nier starts to explain the moment he had an epiphany about distraction.
There was one seminal moment that really made me reconsider my relationship with distraction.
It was when I was with my daughter one afternoon and we had this just daddy -daughter time plan just this afternoon to play together and I remember we had this activity book that daddies and daughters could could you know play different games so there was Sudoko make an air paper airplane and there was to
get to know each other ask each other this question like a conversation prompt and the question was if you could have any superpower what superpower would you want and I remember the question verbatim but I can't tell you what my daughter said because in that moment for some reason I decided to look
at my phone and have to check something and my daughter got the message that I was sending that whatever was on my phone was more important than she was and when I finally looked up for my device she was gone she left the room to play with some toy outside and I blown it and Shane if I'm really honest
with you it didn't just happen once it would happen on multiple occasions not just with my daughter it would happen when I said you know I would go exercise and I didn't I was going to eat right but I wouldn't I would get to my desk and say okay I'm gonna write I'm gonna work on that hard project I've
been delaying and yet 20 30 40 minutes I'm checking the news or scrolling Twitter or doing whatever else that's not the thing I said I would was going to do and so that's when I decided look I really have to reassess this problem and my first instinct was to do exactly what most people do well it's
the technology distracting me you see I was looking at my phone instead of being with my daughter it must be the phone's fault and I actually I read every book I could find on this site I did the digital minimalism I did all that stuff I got rid of it I did the digital detox and it's amazing I got myself
a flip phone from Alibaba I had to have it imported from from China because they don't really make it like 1990 style exactly exactly this flip phone with no apps no internet connection I even found on eBay a word processor that a library was selling from the 1990s no internet connection just an ethernet
cable that's how you like downloaded whatever you typed into the word processor and I sat down at my desk I said great no internet no apps no Facebook no Twitter no email now I'm going to write and I would sit down at my desk and I'd say you know before I start writing uh there's that book that there's
that chapter in the book I think this might be helpful with my writing and uh boy my desk is cluttered let me let me just clean up my desk real quick and you know the trash the trash needs to be taken out and I still got distracted because what I discovered was that distraction the leading cause of distraction and research
bears us out the leading cause of distraction is not what we call external triggers it's not the stuff outside of us but rather distraction begins from within what we call the internal triggers that is the leading cause of distraction boredom uncertainty fatigue anxiety if you don't understand this principle
that I live by that time management requires pain management time management requires pain management you'll always be distracted by something right if it's too much news too much booze too much football too much Facebook it doesn't matter something is going to distract you unless you understand what feeling
you are trying to escape procrastination distraction it's not a character flaw it's not some kind of moral failing it is the inability to deal with emotional discomfort go deeper on that like why are we unable to deal with emotional comfort where does that come from yeah yeah so fundamentally um is there
gender differences too I haven't seen gender differences but I think the reason why we uh why distraction and procrastination is always an emotion regulation problem is because the root cause of all human behavior is not what most people expect that most people subscribe to this this pop psychology
notion that has you know Freud actually proposed that he called it the pleasure principle that everything we do is about the avoidance of pain right uh Jeremy Bentham said something very similar we all know it as carrots and sticks right this is how you motivate turns out neurologically speaking this is not true
that human motivation is not about carrots and sticks it's not about pain and pleasure but rather it's just about one thing all human behavior is spurred by the desire to escape discomfort everything we do we do for just one reason the desire to escape discomfort even the pursuit of sensations if you
think about it craving desire wanting lusting these sensations are themselves psychologically destabilizing they feel bad in fact the brain spurs us to action by creating this discomfort that gets us to act so this is called the homeostatic response we know this to be true physiologically it's pretty
much common sense right if you think about how uh if you go outside you know you live in Ottawa if it's cold your brain says that doesn't feel good it's too cold you should put on a coat if you come back inside with that heavy coat your body says oh this is uncomfortable it's too hot take it off if you're
hungry you feel hunger pain so you eat and if you're stuffed you ate too much oh the body the brain says this doesn't feel good you should stop eating so those are physiological responses to discomfort the same holds true to our psychological responses so for example when you feel lonely check facebook
when you're uncertain before you scan your brain to see if you know the answer google it when you are uh board oh my goodness tons of solutions for boredom right sports scores and stock prices in the news right let's think about somebody else's problem halfway across the world so we don't have to think
about what's going on in our own lives right so lots and lots of solutions commercial solutions are offered for these emotional discomfort that we seek to escape so that's why the first step to becoming indestructible is not to blame the technology it's not to shame yourself it's to claim responsibility
for these uncomfortable sensations by mastering the internal triggers and this is this is worth talking about for just a minute that most people out there when it comes to distraction they tend to fall into these two buckets of what i call blamers and shamers right the blamers they say it's facebook
it's the iphone it's my boss it's my kids that's why i i'm not doing what i said i was going to do i don't accomplish my goals i don't you know i i missed this deadline or i did this and i didn't do what i said i'm going to do it's because of this stuff outside of me they blame or this is what i hear
all the time these days it's the modern world right as if you can do anything about any of that stuff you you can't change any of that stuff there's no magical time machine to go back in time before these these technologies existed so that's futile the other extreme and this is the camp i used to fall
into is what we call the shamer the shamer doesn't blame things outside themselves they shame themselves right they say oh there i go again getting distracted i have a short attention span i have an addictive personality i'm a more i'm not a morning person right they label themselves with all of these
uh self -defeating uh images of themselves self -images that that make it even worse why because the more shame we feel the more of these internal triggers shame is a very uncomfortable internal trigger the more we feel of that internal trigger the more likely we are to seek escape with guess what more
distraction so we don't want to be a blamer we don't want to be a shamer we want to be what we call a claimer a claimer claims responsibility not for how they feel this is a really important point you cannot control your feelings this is a myth right you can't control your urges anymore then you can control
the urge to sneeze if you feel the urge to sneeze it's too late you already felt that urge what you can control is how you respond to that feeling how you respond to that urge so when you feel the urge to sneeze do you sneeze over everyone and get them sick or do you take out a tissue and cover your
face so you don't you know you don't uh infect others so that's where the word responsibility comes from it's how we respond to those internal triggers to those uncomfortable emotional states so that when we feel boredom anxiety fatigue loneliness whatever the case might be do we escape that discomfort
in a unhealthy way by getting out of our heads turning on the tv uh you know reading the reading the news uh going on email or facebook or whatever or do we deal with that discomfort in a healthy way that that propels us forward a couple things you said there strike me as really interesting and maybe
you can pick up on one of these threads which is like one we we sort of have habitual responses to things even though we control them you know when i'm looking at facebook in line at the supermarket or something that's a you know it develops a habit and then the other thing that you said that really
struck me was how when we shame ourselves our identity becomes within that shame and then that becomes self -reinforcing because if you tell yourself you're always distracted you're always the person uh that does this i mean that just becomes more and more of the case that's what you see what you expect
and you become powerless in a way i'd love to hear you sort of like riff on those two things right and and this is definitely something that the tech companies take advantage of that the internal triggers are part of the hook model that i describe in my book hook that they attach themselves to that uncomfortable
emotional state the board and the uncertainty the fear they know that you are looking for a south you are looking for some kind of solution and so whatever you habituate to whatever you turn to with little or no conscious thought will be uh what your brain will look for to solve that problem as quickly
and efficiently as possible which is something to be aware of we have to be careful with that now the way we short circuit that is to understand what is that discomfort and this is of course nothing new plato talked about this 2500 years ago the greek philosopher he called it acrassia the tendency to
do things against our better interests and he he asked this question he pondered why is it that even though we know what to do why don't we just do it this isn't a modern question this is an ancient question this is this wasn't a question that just came up with facebook and the iphone people have always
been distracted by one thing or another and the answer is it's always this inability to deal with discomfort in a healthy way and i think part of the problem particularly today it's a it's a relatively modern phenomenon is that we have this this aversion to discomfort in in an unhealthy extent what do
i mean by that of course you know pain doesn't feel good it's not meant to feel good it's meant to spur you into action but that doesn't mean that feeling bad is bad that in fact feeling bad can be very good that if we think about you know how many books today have happy in the title and preach contentment
and you know tell you that if you follow this five -point plan you're going to reach nirvana as if if you're not constantly happy something's wrong with you and that's totally ridiculous that i would argue that from an evolutionary basis you wouldn't want a species of homo sapien to be happy and contented
all the time if there was ever a group of homo sapiens that was happy continuously our ancestors would have killed and eaten them right that would not be a beneficial evolutionary trait you want people to be perpetually perturbed you want them to want more that's what gets us to hunt to invent to create
that that discomfort that wanting more can be rocket fuel to propel us forward and so that's why it's very important not to run away from that discomfort but to harness it to lead you towards traction rather than distraction so how do we learn to deal with that discomfort like how do you teach your
daughter to deal with that rather than solving your problems how do you teach adults to deal with discomfort instead of running away from it or thinking that it shouldn't happen at all because a lot of people seem to grow up at least in the western world where they feel like uh you know it's somebody
else's responsibility to make them happy or take care of problems for them right no i think that this is this is i think the the aid that the question of our age um and i think you know this is this is a good place because we i realized we jumped into the conversation without kind of defining some terminology
i think words are really really important when it comes to the subject so let me just back up just for a quick second and talk about what is distraction really i mean we use this term but what does it actually mean and i think the best way to understand what distraction is is to understand what distraction is not so most
people will say the opposite of distraction is focus right i don't want to be distracted i want to be focused but that's not actually the opposite of distraction the opposite of distraction if you look at the origin of the word the opposite of distraction is traction that both words come from the same
latin root trejare which means to pull and both words also end in the same six letters a c t i o n that spells action so traction by definition is any action that pulls you towards what you said you were going to do things that you do with intent things that help move you towards your values and help
you become the kind of person you want to become so those are acts of traction the opposite of traction is distraction distraction is any action that pulls you away from what you plan to do anything that is not done with intent anything that moves you away from your values and pulls you further away
from becoming the person you want to become so this isn't just semantics this is really important because i would argue that any action can be traction or distraction what do i mean by that let me give an example i would sit at my desk every morning before i embarked on this line of research i would sit
at my desk and i would say okay i'm gonna work on that big project i'm gonna finish that blog post i'm gonna work on that proposal i'm gonna get to work at that thing i've been delaying no more procrastinating i'm gonna do it here i go but first let me check some email right because that's a worky task
right that's something i have to do at the end of my day anyway right so let me just go do that right now and what i didn't realize is that i was letting distraction trick me into prioritizing the easy and the urgent work as opposed to the important work that this is the this is the most pernicious
form of distraction the kind that we don't even realize is pulling us off course because if i sit at my desk and i start playing candy crush well obviously that's a distraction but if i'm checking email thinking i'm productive but really i'm not working on that thing i know i should do that's more important
that is also a distraction because it's not what i plan to do with my time conversely anything can be traction so don't believe these chicken little tech critics that say video games are melting your brain and facebook is melting your brain and everything is melting your brain ridiculous the science
doesn't support that at all right that if you plan to spend your time playing a video game or scrolling social media or watching a youtube video great there's nothing wrong with it as long as it's done on your schedule not the tech companies so the time you plan to waste is not wasted time any distraction can be
turned into traction by simply making time for it in your day so back to your question about how do i teach my daughter this there's a whole section in the book about how to raise indestractable kids and this is something i feel really passionate about because if you think the world is distracting now
just wait a few years right it's only going to become more distracting with virtual reality and augmented reality and who knows what else reality it's only going to get worse mastering distraction is the first step to creating great work but once you've mastered that you have to actually start creating
for advice on that we took to episode number 105 of the podcast with Seth Godin which was our most downloaded episode of 2021 Seth is the author of 20 best selling books founder of the alt nba and runs one of the most popular blogs in the world where he's written thousands of entries every single day
of the year the most interesting part of his episode begins as i ask him to expand on something he said before which is creativity is a choice it's not a bolt of lightning from somewhere else what does it mean that creativity is a choice well first thing have you ever been creative once in your life
have you ever solved an interesting problem told a funny joke said something to somebody else it needed to be said i've never met anyone who said no everyone has been creative at least once so what does it mean to be creative more than once it means that you have to extend yourself with empathy to the person you
are seeking to serve to the person who the work is for and you have to extend yourself not just through space but through time into the future announcing something that might or might not work you don't know yet that's what makes it creative if you exert the emotional labor to do those two things sometimes
you will have a successful creative outcome that's a choice so the people who say i don't have any questions well no it's impossible you don't have any questions what you're actually saying is i don't care enough to ask a question that might embarrass me that's what you're actually saying and that's
a euphemism for i don't want to make the choice to be creative i have this theory that one of the biggest things that holds us back in life is that we're unwilling to look like an idiot in the short term to be successful in the long term yeah that's brilliant you should write that one down what does
it mean to trust yourself so the original title for my book was trust yourself i even own trust yourself .com which is lying mostly dormant and it wasn't inexpensive when we say i am talking to myself nobody thinks that's a weird thing to say who is i and who is yourself why does it feel so normal to
have two voices in our head because we all do one voice is hyper literate and verbal and vocal and a critic it is responsible for getting us to fit in all the way the other voice not that good at being verbal that self is the one that wants to make things better that's curious that's inquisitive that might color outside
the lines and it's the first voice that is mostly in control and so when we look at great shortcuts and hacks like morning pages they exist to bypass the first voice that so many of the things that creative people do as part of their practice exist to make the first voice the monkey mind be a little
calmer so that the other voice can be trusted enough to speak up that doesn't mean it will always work and it doesn't mean we should let that voice do whatever it wants to but it should at least be allowed to present its agenda so that our more cognition focused brain can make a decision what does it
mean to be a professional you said doing what you love is for amateurs and loving what you do is for professionals can you expand on that and then explore some other differences okay so there are very few amateur surgeons right you want a professional surgeon you want the surgeon to show up and do her
work beautifully even if she's in a bad mood uh and you want her to keep going to continuing education classes to be understanding the state of the art not because they are fascinated by how the knee works but because they said to you i'm really good at knee surgery and i will take care of you a professional
makes a promise and then keeps the promise whether or not they feel like it amateurs get to be authentic whatever that means amateurs show up when they want to and make what they want to make i love being an amateur at some things don't sell your hobbies do your hobbies for you but if you're going to
be a pro it means you need to understand the state of the art means means you need to raise the bar you need to understand who it's for and what's it for what change do you seek to make there's a whole bunch of obligations that go with being a professional that put you on the hook and for years i've
had uniforms at work i don't usually wear them in public they change from time to time the beginning was a lab coat uh lately i've just been trying the uh japanese volunteer fireman hoppy coat because when you put on the uniform you've just sent yourself a message do your work at your workspace do it
at the appointed hours never ever miss a deadline never ever go over budget because professionals don't miss deadlines don't throw tantrums and don't go over budget and every once in a while a creative breaks through because they're doing their hobby for money and they do those things they miss their
deadline blah blah blah and people applaud them and then eventually they fade away because the industries we work in they want to work with professionals how do we define work well there's the work and then there's work the verb for me the work is what the professional said they would do and there are definitely
times that i the permission marketing the phrase that enabled me to be an author came to me in the shower right but it didn't come to me in the shower accidentally it came to me in the shower with intent i went into the shower and i was getting close to the self -appointed deadline and i said i'm going
to stay in the shower until i have a name for this thing we do here even if the water gets cold and we only had a 40 gallon hot water tank at the time so i knew i didn't have a lot of time i was in there to do work and i think as we get more and more privileged where our work looks so much more like
what people used to think of as hobbies we can get confused by the fact that our work is a hobby it's not and treating it like our work i helps us make it better you mentioned earlier something um and i forget the context but uh maybe you can expand on it or about meeting the spec talk to me about that i
know i've been ranting so thank you for giving me this platform this is beautiful keep going man there's there's lots to be said about spec first let's talk about uh edwards deming and what spec and quality mean quality is not luxury quality is not expensive quality is not that you love it quality is just
one thing it meets spec so if i look under an electron microscope at any part of a lexus which is by any measure the highest quality car there is under an electron microscope it's filled with defects but they're not defects that matter because they're defects that are within spec and so we begin by understanding
what is the spec of the work we're going to do if it meets spec not only is it quality but it is good enough and good enough is not a slur good enough is a definition it met spec so once it's good enough we ship the work if you're not happy with that change your spec but let's be really clear about what the spec
is that what it meant for a lexus to be good enough when they first came out was it had to be a standard deviation better than a mercedes that was their definition and if someone's going to say no no we can't ship this lexus because it's not perfect the product manager should say no no no no it was never
supposed to be perfect they never can be perfect it simply met spec the hard work was in defining the spec a spec that will get you to the next step two questions about spec do you think that applies in a world of leverage where the difference between something that's you know meets spec and something
that exceeds spec can be massively disproportionate yeah no i think that we're having a semantic discussion here but if the massive shift that you're looking for that comes from leverage is important that should be part of the spec okay and do you think we hide behind perfection oh yeah all the time
talk to me all the time double click on that so if we've had a hundred years of industrialism and industrialism has been all about don't ship things that are defective if we have brainwashed every human being who is alive who has been through organized schooling into understanding that an a is better
than a b and there are wrong answers and right answers on the test well then it's super easy to say good enough and perfect are the same thing so when i was in college the logic symbolic logic was one of my favorite classes the symbolic logic exam was not only open book open note it was unlimited time
in the room so you got there at 8 a .m you could stay as long as you wanted i decided when i got to college i would take as many classes as i could because it was all the same price and i wasn't going to care about my grades because i didn't want to be tempted to go to law school and so if i could take
a class pass fail i would because spec was easier to meet right and after three and a half hours at the in the logic exam i said i could probably get a few more points here but i have met my spec and i left and i was one of the first people to leave but someone stayed there for i think it was 18 hours
and the question is what did they get in exchange for that focus on perfectionism because i know what i did in the other 15 hours that were free to me and i think unless you believe you're immortal using your time wisely is probably a good practice ...
Continuing with the theme of choice as an adult we look back on episode 109 of the podcast with Angela Duckworth.
Angela is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the founder and CEO of a non -profit whose mission is to advance the science and practice of character development.
Our interview covered a wide variety of topics including the mindset we need to take on challenges in life and how to teach those strategies to our kids but this portion of the conversation picks up after i asked her about the things we can control versus the things we can't control and how those affect
us. Let's start with the mindset of like hey i can change something i've done these research studies on this self -control technique called situation modification and this work was done with collaborators including James Gross at Stanford.
James Gross actually originally and mostly studies emotion and one of the things that's interesting about regulating your anger is if you have a bad temper or your sadness if you tend to work melancholy or your happiness if you want more of that or i guess if you wanted less of that is that people can you
know use these like sort of mental strategies like what i pay attention to how i'm going to frame things my self -talk but also you can just change your actual situation so for example if you constantly get into arguments at thanksgiving with your brother -in -law then maybe you should sit at the other
end of the table or like not go to thanksgiving with your brother -in -law or like make sure that like you're watching football while your brother -in -law is like cutting up the pie right so we extended that in a study of um uh middle school we've done it in all different age groups i'll tell you about a study
we do with high school students where we randomly assigned high school students to watch this little video was about five minutes long um and then we told them some more things but the intervention wasn't very long and we were like you know you can change your situation you know like people think when they
have to exercise self -control to like study or do on school they think it's all willpower but like actually like you could for example put your phone in another room like you could make sure that you study in a place that people aren't walking into and out of all the time so in that study there was a control
group that learned about willpower and how important it is to like you know use willpower to accomplish your goals and then there was a neutral control group and what we found is that the condition that increased academic goal attainment best was the one where you just explain to kids like hey you can modify
your situation and i think that idea that like your situation isn't just like fixed or set but something you can agentically intentionally modify is one of the most important lessons that you could learn in life i love that i think that there a lot of people are passive about life it's like life just
happens to them and things just happen to them and it's sort of like you can you can put that in the victim mentality sort of mindset but it's really it's deeper than that no way right it's like i have no agency over anything it's not necessarily but the story it's just sort of like this general passiveness
too and i i believe in a very active life where did you where did you learn that like why do you think you have come out on that end of the continuum i don't know i mean i first got that phrasing i think it was from grim duncan uh in a conversation we had in new york and he just sort of recounted this story
to me about um one of his friends actually was driving with this portfolio manager and they i think he actually wrote up with this on his blog too um but they were driving and then this car swerved out and almost hit him and the guy driving the car was like why does this stuff always happen to me and it
was just a very revealing sort of mindset right and it comes back to sort of that question which is like what are the mindsets that are going to enable us to capitalize on life in part in bad situations capitalize on bad capitalize on good intelligently prepare to put us on the path to success i think
you're on to something very important and i guess i have a fondness for like you know great psychologists in their 90s um because i have been calling al bandera a lot he is the psychologist at stanford i think he's 96 now who um coined the term self -efficacy to describe the belief that you can do something
if you try right so self -efficacy about physics would be like i can learn physics if i tried and i had this conversation with him you know a couple weekends ago actually where i asked him i was like um al you've spent your whole life studying self -efficacy but there was this other person um whose like
name is spelled r -o -t -t -e -r but i think it's like dot sure german is anyway so i'm gonna mispronounce it as roder but roder studied locus of control and locus of control was uh to me like super similar so i asked al like what's the difference because in locus of control theory you either have an internal
locus of control or an external locus of control right so life kind of happens to you or um that would be the external or like you know you're in control and he said oh there's a very important difference i'm more interested in saying that like i can control you know my behavior not necessarily that that behavior is going
to like magically make everything the way i want what what locus of control is about is more just like in the grand scheme is the actual outcome going to be you know my doing or not because like all i want to say is that people have agency over their behavior over their um performance not necessarily
like that you're going to get higher just because you are the most qualified candidate but that you could control like your own behavior and performance so i think that's a very important nuance here because i don't think that we want to teach our kids that they have like control over like whether the coronavirus
vaccine is going to be made available in their municipality you know in one month or another or you know or whether they're going to get into a certain college because those things are a bit downstream but where i really agree with bandura first of all that we do have control we do have agency and that it's
dramatically more productive to when you think about your own behavior that you think about that you you you really pay attention to the things that you can control and i wonder you probably haven't or maybe you're more well read than i have you ever heard of howard thurman no okay we need to resurrect
howard thurman even before froyd okay right so howard thurman was um like the mentor and the pastor um for martin luther king jr and howard thurman i had never heard of because i'm deeply illiterate but i was reading arthur ash's memoir so arthur ash for those who are younger than us maybe you know
he's a great tennis player and i believe the only black male to win wimbledon so he wrote this memoir called days of grace which i recommend and and and in it he talks about how so important in his life was howard thurman so that led me to howard thurman and the reason i bring it up is that howard thurman has all
these sermons about how there is um the final consent he was like you know you cannot like change that you were born into a racist society you cannot change that you are born into a certain family but you can always change how you react to it right like you and you're responsible for how you react to
it and in victor frankles said the same thing about his experience in the concentration camps right that that terrible things can happen to you over which you do not have control but you can control your reaction and and i don't want to even say that you can control it 100 but i do think you have some
control over your reaction and i i think this agentic view is um accurate and adaptive how do we as parents instill that mindset in our kit i asked al bandera this um i said you know do you think that you could learn as much from failure as you could from success right because there are all these like
adages and aphorisms about failure especially in startup land and he said oh this one i 100 believe mastery experiences success success experiences um are what really build this you know sense of agency if your kid has like a teflon life where you know everything comes easily in part because you make
it that way and there are a lot of parents who like sort of just make their kids lives frictionless right like oh you know you're struggling for 10 minutes like i'll get you a 500 per hour tutor like like oh your your teacher is not so great i'll get them fired like that's not the kind of success experience
that al bander is talking about because he's talking about um success after challenge success after struggle so i think al bandera's advice is the best advice which is the the number one thing and there is more than one thing but the number one thing is that people develop confidence when they have um
struggled to overcome something and they have come out victorious um and the the engineering problem for a parent is then to figure out the right size of challenge for the kid like in the next moment in time and i think that we often get it wrong like the challenge is just too big or the challenge is too
small it's sort of monitoring and adjusting based on your particular child and the circumstances involved how do we do it as adults do we seek out these opportunities to be challenged do we i think that we are benefited um in large part by having a surrogate parent i mean i what i mean by that is you
know whether you're 50 or five right it's good to have somebody who is a little older and wiser than you who is like helping you figure out the next challenge um and and most of the people that i study like they never get out of being mentored you know like they have a they have a management coach they
have like a personal coach they have a therapist the ones i'm most jealous of have a peer for whom they coach each other right they have somebody who's like you know you should write a book it's like oh no i can't write a book no you should really write a book like and you know it's that it's that kind
of um challenge setting that of course you can try to do it on your own but i think we're always benefited by having like another human being um whose advantages are multiple but one of them is that they're just not us right so they have a psychological distance from our situation they have a better
a different aperture into our situation one that removes a lot of the nuance and the nuance in our case might be holding us back right and the ego right sort of like and sometimes you know the people who are looking at us have a better sense of our strengths as well finally we go back to one of my favorite
interviews of 2021 and hear from a guest who came on for a reappearance which is jim collins jim collins is a renowned business researcher and author but beyond that he's a deep thinker about his personal relationships and he's thought hard about what it means to be a great friend and live a meaningful
life this conversation from episode 110 picks up after i asked him to explain a lesson he's learned from his late mentor bill azir on the importance of building relationships and not transactions if i stand back and i think about what are my absolute most primary values um and particularly ones that i
got from bill they are curiosity and relationships and the curiosity i think has kind of been with me all the way along but the relationships when i got from bill bill's basic view of the world was number one life is short uh you never know what's going to go away and in the end um what does that up
to what is meaningful and bill believe that people break into two buckets there are those who kind of come at life as a series of transactions and there are people who come at life as building relationships bill believe that the only way to have a great life you can have a successful life doing transactions
but the only way to have a really great life is on the relationship side and so bill just pounded in me instilled in me modeled for me in the end it is really deep relationships and doing things you love with people you love and those connections and so we got into this conversation though about relationships
one day and i asked bill so okay so what makes for a great relationship and bill said oh a really great relationship is one where if you ask each person independently who benefits more from the relationship they would each say well i do and i said well isn't that a little bit of a selfish way to look
at it and he said well no let's think about this for a minute jim let me ask you jim who do you think benefits more from our relationship i said well clearly i do i mean with everything you've done for me he said well isn't that just great because i would answer that i do and he said see the reason both
people can answer that way is because both people are putting into the relationship not for what they're going to get from it but for what they can give to it and because both people are doing that both people would feel that they are the ones who are the ultimate beneficiary because of how much the other
person gives everything we do here the good to great project is relationship oriented i mean there's not a single day that goes by that we don't think about what is the relationship element of this decision of how we handle something of whether we how we say yes or no everything goes back to relationships
one of the other lessons you learned from bill um was the trust wager talk to me about that bill had this really interesting stance on trust that ultimately affected me and so let's make this both human and and intellectual when i left stanford to launch out on my own and in our last conversation you
know i described launching out on my own and the fear of that and the fourth and and and when i sort of left the relatively cloistered world of a place like stanford he kind of hit a broader world and um certain assumptions about how trustworthy people are might get dashed by events and i i don't want
to call people out on this but just suffice it to say that to my great shock i discovered that some people actually genuinely weren't trustworthy i was i mean i'm just naive in some in some level right but you know when i've had people like you know bill lizzier in my life or i've met people like jim
stockdale or you know peter drucker or people people that just they're just such a character caliber that i was in a very rare group of folks and so i asked bill uh have you ever had your trust abused he said oh yeah of course i've been i've i've had my trust abused uh it's just part of life but then
he gave me this you know it was one of this great mentor moment he said this is jim this is one of now that you're starting to have this experience and really experience it you need to decide what is your opening bid when you are establishing a relationship with someone when you're interacting with the world
is your opening bid to assume trust to assume that someone is trustworthy and to grant them the full benefits of that that's your opening bid and that trust can be lost but the bid is trust or is your opening bid to not trust but the trust can be earned so many aspects of your life will be affected
by which fork on that you take that's a stance on life and i said well it to me bill you've chosen the trust bid as the opening bid and he said yes i have i said but but bill brutal facts not everyone is trustworthy and the brutal fact is some people abuse that trust so have people abused you trusted
trust and he said of course they have and he went on and he described a situation of somebody who was quite close to him uh who um had abused his trust and it cost him enough that he said it hurt right not just emotionally but financially as well and then there's this little kind of cul -de -sac on the whole
thing that bill has which is the notion of you don't leave yourself exposed to a catastrophe right in such a way that if you if you trust your let's say your your cfo and you never look at the books and then you discover one day that you had a problem and your your company is bankrupt you know you you
always pay attention to the cash flow you always watch the numbers you always keep an eye on things like you don't it's not like you become disconnected from reality but he said but you know i never left myself open to catastrophe beyond that yeah that that one hurt i said well did it change your your
approach to trusting people he said no it's just part of the cost of living and then he went on and he described it as upside and downside and this is it sort of gets into the you know it just simply hard -headed this was a hard -headed view he said i've come to the conclusion when i think across the iterative
relationships and interactions and aspects of life that there is far more upside in an opening bid of trust and there is far more downside in an opening bid of mistrust it all goes to the question of people if you really basically want to have your life whether there be people in your company whether
they people in your life whether they be your friends whether they're people you rock climb with whatever it is the very very best people will respond to the bid of trust the best people will be attracted to that and and you want the best people to be attracted and the second is he said have you ever
considered the possibility jim that your opening bid affects how people behave if you trust people you're more likely that they will act in a trustworthy way so it's a double win it's the best people and they'll behave in a trustworthy way the flip side is if you have an opening bid of mistrust the best
people will not be attracted to that if you have this opening sense of you have to earn my trust now you may have to earn my trust how good you are at something right or earn my respect for your performance or that sort of thing but if you if i basically like i don't trust you you have to earn it well
some of the best people are going to be like i don't need to put up for that i'll go do something else and for bill it was always about again people and relationships right that that's where the trust trust comes from and and he just came at it as a as a very hard -headed and warm -hearted approach to
the world and that's why i think there were so many people whose lives were affected by bill is here he trusted them and he responded in very trustworthy ways in the world the the other thing though that on an intellectual front on this is i as i i think you know i'm a huge fan of this thing called
the great courses series where you get college level courses 60 lectures 40 lectures whatever and i've been doing them for years and years there's one called games people play and it's a course on game theory and of course i know you know game theory well if i remember it right the essence of it was that the best
strategy is an opening bit of cooperation now the game can unfold from there right but that that is a good place to start so i was very sort of like bill had this sense of game theory that was in his approach to relationships and humanity i don't know if he ever took a course on game theory i think
that's a really interesting way to approach it and i definitely agree with with that personally and my friend tobi has this concept that i think might help people it's very visual it's called the trust battery and you can do things that increase your trust or decrease your trust but if you start that trust
battery at say the 75th percentile um then you know you're starting from a different place than if it's the fifth you know your five percent uh your trust battery is full and it's been my experience that the benefits of reciprocal trust and the speed and not living with your guard up all the time is more
than worth letting yourself occasionally get screwed another friend of mine had this really good concept about when to forgive and when to sort of like and he said as long as it's not malicious just always forgive one of the things that bill always emphasized was that sometimes you don't know the whole
story he said sometimes it may not be mental intent it could just simply be a misunderstanding or it could be just incompetence right somebody might not actually be untrustworthy they might just be incompetent or they made a mistake right and so be careful there's this um uh this moment i call it seeing
the hat it's a it's a weird thing but uh driving down a road in in boulder and and imagine a car all of a sudden veers into your lane from the the lane next to you you're you know both going the same direction and you're like oh you know the idiotic driver or whatever and then um you notice that what had
happened was uh when you went on past further is somebody's hat had blown off in the middle of the road and they were going to maybe step out and grab it and but you couldn't see that i think joanne had this experience and you sort of think about it as like well wait a minute you know maybe you don't
see the whole situation you're jumping to a conclusion about why somebody is doing something when actually if you can see the hat you'll look at it a little different i think that's a great place to end this conversation i really appreciate you taking the time and explaining it and i think it's perfect
perfect point to leave on till next time yeah and i appreciate you man i appreciate it yeah my pleasure thank you i've really enjoyed it oh my pleasure this is great shame so good to see you again no we can't end it you haven't told me what i should rethink i'm gonna push for this the knowledge project
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