0:00

People are actually stuck in relationships, jobs,

0:02

financially stuck, becoming much lonelier

0:04

as a species, but there is a way to get unstuck.

0:07

And we're going to find out right now. Adam

0:10

Alter,

0:10

a New York Times bestselling author and psychologist.

0:13

This episode is for people who are stuck in their

0:15

careers, relationship or any aspect

0:17

of life. And how to become unstuck. The

0:20

career model for how we live our lives professionally

0:23

is broken. As you specialize, you have

0:25

less variety in what you do. There's a massive

0:27

rise in loneliness and depression and

0:29

anxiety. And part of the reason for that is we

0:31

don't share our stuckness. And they also have no

0:33

idea how common it is. So what is the relationship

0:36

between perseverance or knowing when to

0:38

quit? Research basically shows that it's a good idea

0:40

to persevere beyond the point where you say, this is

0:42

hard

0:42

and I feel stuck. How long you should do that is another

0:45

question. And the best example of this is an idea

0:47

known as the creative cliff illusion. And

0:49

it's this illusion where you... That's

0:52

when the good stuff comes. If you persevere.

0:54

How do you teach someone to be that kind of person? There

0:56

are two things. One thing is... I

0:59

remember reading about the studies where people would

1:01

rather take an electric shock than to

1:04

sit idly on their own. It's a brilliant study.

1:06

They've tried it already, so they know it hurts. But it's

1:08

so aversive to just sit with our own thoughts for

1:11

even half an hour. Two thirds of them go

1:12

and start playing with this machine. So what we found is

1:15

that we don't pay enough attention to what will be good for us.

1:17

And that's often when we get stuck. What do

1:19

we need to do then? If you want to be able to get unstuck

1:21

quickly, the best thing you can do is...

1:25

Have you ever been stuck? Are

1:27

you stuck in an area of your life right now? I

1:30

think you are. And I

1:33

say that because I think to some degree we all are.

1:35

Some of us more than others. And

1:38

that is exactly why I had to

1:40

have this conversation with Adam Alter. The

1:43

guy that literally wrote the book about

1:46

being stuck and how to know if you are. And

1:48

maybe most importantly of all,

1:50

how to get unstuck. Adam is

1:53

a master of what he calls the art of the breakthrough.

1:56

Which is really looking at why some people

1:58

fail, why they get stuck, and why they fail. and why others

2:01

don't. He's also a genius when it comes

2:03

to marketing and psychology. He's the professor

2:05

of marketing and psychology at one of the top schools

2:07

in America. He kind of just knows why

2:10

people do what they do and how to help

2:12

them do something else. How

2:14

do we know if the decisions we're making in our life

2:17

right now, in all the areas of our life,

2:19

are the right decisions or the wrong

2:22

decisions? Adam has scientifically

2:24

backed answers to all of these questions.

2:27

He is refreshing, he is positive and

2:29

he is full of just as many important

2:32

questions as he is valuable

2:34

life-changing answers. I feel so

2:37

much richer for having this conversation with Adam and

2:39

I know you will too.

2:41

Enjoy. Adam,

2:51

from an academic standpoint, who

2:53

are you? I am

2:55

a professor of marketing and psychology

2:58

so I'm very interested in business but also interested

3:00

in the psychological side of it. So how

3:02

do consumers behave, how do they think, what

3:04

do they buy, how do they spend their time and money and other

3:06

resources? I'm incredibly

3:10

interested and curious about all

3:13

of your books, specifically this

3:16

book here, Anatomy of a Breakthrough,

3:19

and also your your first

3:22

book, Drunk Tank Pink, because

3:26

this book helps people to get unstuck.

3:28

Why did you decide to write a book called Anatomy

3:31

of a Breakthrough? Writing books takes a huge

3:33

amount of time and effort and you're

3:35

a man that has many things he could be doing.

3:37

So why was this so important that you chose to write

3:39

about it?

3:40

It's something that I've been thinking about in some form

3:42

or another for years. Literally

3:45

I'd say 25 years. I've

3:47

been stuck a lot in my life and so even

3:49

before I became intellectually interested in the topic

3:52

it was a factor that had had a big effect on

3:54

the way I was living my life and I wanted to understand

3:56

whether there was maybe a roadmap

3:58

that I could present to other people that would help them get a job. unstuck.

4:01

But I think the real answer is there was some research

4:03

that I was doing in, I think this would have been

4:05

in about 2005, and I found this really interesting

4:09

cultural difference in how people anticipate or

4:11

expect change in the world. And so what

4:13

we found is that people in the West, people in

4:15

places like the US, Canada, the

4:18

UK, Australia, New Zealand, they tend to be blindsided

4:20

by change. So if you give them

4:23

five days in a row and you show

4:25

that it's been rainy for five days or sunny for

4:27

five days, they anticipate that that's going to continue.

4:29

And they think the same about the stock market and other

4:32

variables that can shift or stay the same. But

4:35

if you do that with people in East Asia, Japan,

4:37

South Korea, China, when they

4:39

see a pattern that's gone a particular way for a while,

4:41

they think that it's about to change. And

4:43

what that does is it means that they're much more nimble

4:45

in the face of change, whereas in the West,

4:47

people tend to be blindsided by it. And

4:50

it makes us especially slow at

4:52

coming to grips with the idea that the world's changed

4:54

and we need to pivot in order to get unstuck.

4:57

Can you give me, you know,

5:00

the most popular examples

5:02

of being stuck that my listeners now could

5:05

relate to? Yeah, I've been running this survey

5:07

for about five years on people all around the world

5:09

asking them with that definition of stuckness, are

5:11

you stuck in some way? And I find

5:14

that people usually within about 15 seconds

5:16

start typing a response, which means that stuckness

5:18

is very top of mind. And their responses

5:21

vary. So some of them are financially stuck, they

5:23

want to be able to save or they want to be able to earn more

5:25

money. Some of them are stuck in relationships,

5:28

some are stuck in jobs. A lot of them

5:30

are stuck quite narrowly in creative pursuits,

5:32

like I'm trying to learn this piano piece, I'm trying

5:34

to learn this new art technique, I'm a filmmaker

5:37

and I can't come up with creative ideas. I'm

5:39

a business person and I can't figure out what my next venture

5:42

should be. So there's a there's a very broad

5:44

range. And I find that almost everyone

5:47

in at least one respect, with a bit of time

5:49

comes up with something, they say I'm stuck in this

5:51

way and then they can express it.

5:53

Is there a trend in who's getting

5:55

stuck more often? Yeah,

5:57

so I have a pet theory, I think the

5:59

kind of career model for how we

6:02

live our lives professionally is broken for

6:04

most people. I think what happens is as

6:06

you specialize, you're supposed to get more and more narrow

6:08

in what you do and you have less variety

6:11

in what you do. And that's how you get stuck is

6:13

by doing the same thing every day. And there's

6:15

a huge amount of evidence for that in all sorts of different

6:17

areas. Actuarial science, for me

6:19

at least, very quickly put me into that little pigeonhole

6:22

spot where I felt I was getting trapped and

6:24

it was only going to increase. And

6:26

so the thing I've done ever since is

6:28

to try to create as much variety

6:29

in my professional life as possible because

6:32

then if you don't like aspect number one but

6:34

you have nine other aspects to your job,

6:36

you can go and do that for a little while. And

6:38

so bouncing around I think is critical for getting

6:41

unstuck. Often very smart people

6:43

get very, very interested in very narrow

6:45

topics. And that's essentially the definition

6:47

of a PhD is you spend a huge

6:50

amount of time becoming an expert in a very narrow

6:52

area. And I think that's fine

6:54

for a PhD itself, but if you're going to make a whole

6:56

life out of doing that, I think if you're a restless,

6:59

intellectually curious person, you're

7:01

going to get stuck really fast. You

7:04

almost become a victim to being good at

7:06

something in life, don't you? Because you get promoted and

7:08

promoted and promoted up in that direction

7:10

and your label, whatever it is, doctor,

7:12

dentist, lawyer, becomes reinforced

7:15

by your own success at that thing. And you can get 10 years

7:17

down the line at something and go, how

7:19

the fuck am I living next to the office?

7:21

I'm a lawyer, it's doing law 14 hours a day. What

7:25

happened to that violin I used

7:27

to play?

7:27

And you're right, we've become really narrow

7:30

individuals. And when you think about what

7:32

a human is, we're so multifaceted, especially

7:34

when we're younger, we're doing one of these things.

7:36

It's a real shame. I also think what happens

7:38

is you get promoted and it does get narrow, but

7:41

it also changes. So the thing that you were really good

7:43

at

7:43

is no longer the thing that you're doing. And a lot

7:46

of what happens in promotion, especially professionally,

7:48

is you become a manager

7:50

and you manage people who do the thing you love instead

7:52

of doing the thing you love. And so that's how

7:54

you get stuck as well, is by being promoted

7:57

out of the thing that got you passionate about what you were

7:59

doing.

7:59

and being told, no, instead you're going to watch other people

8:02

do the thing you love.

8:03

Now you suddenly have to be a people manager, which some

8:05

people like doing,

8:07

but a lot don't. And so that's also inherent

8:09

in the kind of professional models that we have in hierarchical

8:12

organizations.

8:13

This happens by, I

8:15

guess, in part by being a bit unconscious about

8:18

what you want. Yeah. And you just kind

8:21

of take what you're given. So you take the promotion and you take

8:23

this and you take the relocation to

8:25

this place. How do we prevent

8:27

that happening?

8:28

I think that's the job of people who

8:30

write about these subjects. And that's

8:32

kind of what I saw as the mission

8:34

for this book was to try to say, if

8:36

you don't want to be stuck or if you want to be able to

8:38

get unstuck quickly, there's a set of questions

8:41

you can ask yourself and let me just lay them

8:43

out for you. Here they are. In fact, the last

8:45

thing in the book is a hundred ways to get unstuck. It's

8:47

just a digestion of all these ideas. And

8:50

I think those are questions that people don't often ask

8:52

themselves. You're right. It's a sort of accidental

8:55

way that we live our lives and we take what's given.

8:58

And if someone says, here's a promotion, you hear that word

9:00

and you grab onto it and you write it as

9:02

far as you can. But

9:05

I think it's easy to be a little bit mindless

9:07

about where your life takes you. And

9:09

sometimes that's fine, but in a lot of cases

9:11

it's not. And

9:14

in the book, I try to distinguish those cases

9:16

from each other. Like when should

9:18

you let life lead you and when should you be a little

9:20

more purposeful?

9:22

From that exact point, I've mulled

9:24

over the last couple of weeks this idea that there's kind

9:26

of two narratives that prevail in our lives,

9:28

kind of two instructors.

9:30

One of them is this external narrative. It could

9:32

come from your parents or society's

9:34

expectation of you taking that promotion or thinking

9:38

that that job is a admirable

9:40

job for you to take. So you take it, that's the external

9:42

narrative. And the other narrative,

9:45

if I can call it that, is

9:47

how you feel.

9:49

And I think we're conditioned

9:52

to care more about that external narrative

9:54

because the rewards seem to be more aligned with the external

9:56

narrative than like how you feel. Because

9:58

if people really were oriented.

9:59

orientated by how they felt in that job,

10:02

in that relationship, in that city, whatever, in that

10:04

course at university,

10:07

they would make significantly different decisions. But

10:10

it's almost like we've tuned out of that. Yeah. I

10:13

think the problem is that humans don't know how they feel

10:16

in isolation as well. If I took

10:18

you and put you in a room for a week

10:20

and said, you can have food

10:22

and water and you can have your thoughts. And

10:24

I took you out after a week and said, so

10:27

what are you thinking? Like what's real? What's

10:29

not real? What do you believe? What are your

10:31

preferences and values? You'd struggle.

10:33

There's a lot of really interesting evidence that

10:35

if you isolate humans, they don't really know what to do

10:37

with themselves. So those external

10:39

forces, there's a kind of permeability between

10:42

what I'm feeling inside my head and thinking

10:44

and what these other forces are suggesting

10:46

to me. So I think it's totally

10:49

true that we don't pay enough attention to what will be good

10:51

for us

10:52

separate from what other people think we should be doing.

10:54

But I also don't even think many of us know the

10:57

answers to those questions, not all the time,

10:59

but about a lot of things. Like I know

11:01

deep somewhere, I know that

11:03

I love to draw, that I'm at peace

11:06

when I'm drawing and painting. I haven't

11:08

done that for a really long time. I'm too busy to

11:10

your point of being too focused. But

11:12

I know that that's something that preference wise, I

11:14

love doing. But then the question,

11:17

should I make my career and my life about

11:19

that?

11:20

The only way I knew how to answer that was by speaking

11:22

to lots of people who said it's very difficult to become

11:24

an artist. Here's the path. It's

11:27

probably going to be hard to make any money,

11:29

so keep it as a hobby. But knowing

11:32

just based on my feelings what to do, I wouldn't

11:34

have known what to do as a young person. And so I

11:36

think that's part of the problem is that it's

11:38

not just that we're

11:40

silly for kind of paying attention to others.

11:42

It's also that I don't even know if we know in isolation

11:44

without those inputs what the right kinds

11:46

of paths are. You said about putting me

11:48

in a room and leaving me with my thoughts. That sounded

11:51

like hell. It does, yeah. And

11:53

I remember reading about the studies where people

11:55

would rather take an electric shock

11:58

than to sit idly on their own.

11:59

Yeah. And they tested people and they said, would

12:02

you rather take an electric shock or sit here for a couple

12:04

of minutes on your own? And people took the... It's

12:08

a brilliant study. I mean, the way they set it up is brilliant

12:10

because they get you to sit in this room and they

12:12

do it with men and women, mostly college undergrads.

12:15

And they say to them, you're just going to be sitting here for half

12:17

an hour. There's a little machine in the corner.

12:20

It delivers electric shocks. They've tried it already,

12:22

so they know it hurts. It doesn't feel good. And

12:24

they're told, you know, you can sit with your thoughts or,

12:26

you know, the machines there if you want to go and use it, which

12:28

is a bizarre thing to

12:29

say to people. And they sit there for a while

12:32

and time passes. And

12:35

the vast majority of them go, I think it's two

12:37

thirds of them go and start playing with this machine. It's

12:40

so aversive to just sit with our own thoughts for

12:42

even half an hour that we need stimulation

12:45

even if it's negative stimulation.

12:47

And you wrote a book about this, this subject matter about

12:49

addiction and screens and all of these things. This

12:52

sort of incessant need for distraction that we seem

12:54

to have developed. What was your biggest sort of takeaway

12:57

and learning from that process of putting that book together?

13:00

I think the biggest thing for me was I always imagined

13:02

that addiction and the need for this kind

13:04

of stimulation was a sort of

13:06

personality thing. Like you either have

13:08

that personality or you don't. But I became

13:10

absolutely convinced by not only by the

13:13

book and what I was researching, but by understanding

13:15

how many of us fall prey to

13:17

these devices, that this is universal. It's

13:19

just about being human, that if you know how to push

13:21

the right buttons in a human, you can turn

13:24

that human as you can with rats and monkeys and

13:26

other animals into a bit of a fiend

13:28

for whatever the thing is that it needs. And

13:30

the people who design the platforms that we use

13:33

are so good at that job and they have

13:35

so much data

13:36

to perfect what they've done that

13:38

ultimately the platforms they design for us are

13:41

like crack. They're very, very difficult for us to resist.

13:44

You talk about in Drunk Tank Pink

13:46

how people behave differently when

13:49

they're in the presence of others. And I found

13:51

that really, really curious. Could you just give

13:53

me a flavor of the

13:55

some of the studies and insights you gained from that? Because

13:58

that kind of links to what you're saying there about how living behind screens.

13:59

might decay our humanity

14:02

a little bit. Yeah, well, I think part

14:04

of it is just that the best versions of ourselves come

14:06

out when we're around other people. We

14:08

are much more likely to be

14:11

civil and decent to other people when they're

14:14

around, when we see them and when we spend time around

14:16

them. That kind of shared social space

14:18

is really important. It's also really interesting

14:20

when we're around other people, we

14:24

tend to default to the thing that we are

14:26

most likely to do in any

14:28

moment. So there's a lot of good evidence

14:30

for this. Like if you take a champion cyclist,

14:33

you put

14:34

him or her on a bike, a stationary

14:37

bike,

14:38

that person will go faster in the presence of

14:40

other people than alone. And there's

14:42

something about this kind of, they call it latent

14:44

energy. This is a very old psychological study that

14:47

talks about latent energy that is liberated

14:49

from us when we're in the presence of other people. So

14:52

if you're trying to learn something new, you know, you imagine you're

14:54

in class at school and there's a teacher who's

14:56

staring over your shoulder. That's terrible

14:58

because we don't really know how to take on

15:01

board new information. We're just overwhelmed by

15:03

the cognitive load of that experience.

15:05

But if it's something you're good at, you will be extra

15:08

good at it in front of other people. There's something

15:10

about being energized by others. So if I work

15:12

out with someone, then I'm more likely to...

15:14

You'll lift more, you'll run faster

15:16

and so on. Yeah, pretty reliably. In

15:20

that book as well, before we get on to being unstuck,

15:22

there were some other things that I found really curious that I was keen to ask

15:24

you about. This is your...

15:26

That was your first book, Drunk Tank Pink.

15:29

You say how

15:30

our names have a huge bearing on

15:33

our outcomes across various facets of

15:35

our life. Yeah. That's quite... It's

15:37

quite shocking to me because our name is something

15:39

that we don't choose and it seems to be so simple and

15:41

slightly irrelevant. Yeah.

15:43

Yeah, it's true. I mean, there are

15:45

lots of different ways names influence us. One

15:48

of these little demonstrations that I do when I give talks

15:50

on this subject is I'll present the

15:52

letters of the Roman alphabet, the 26 letters

15:55

that we understand to be the letters

15:57

in the English language. And I'll ask

15:59

people...

15:59

So think about their three favorite letters.

16:02

And then I say, now put your hand up in the room

16:04

if one of those at least was the

16:07

first letter of your first name, middle name or last name

16:09

and almost every hand goes up. So

16:11

these are letters, who has preferences for letters? It's

16:13

a bizarre thing to have to answer, but

16:15

we do.

16:16

And it's because these letters

16:18

are such a strong expression of who we are, it's

16:20

a part of our ego that's contained in

16:23

the letters of our name. And so even

16:25

that alone shows the power of names over

16:27

us that they are such a strong reflection of who we

16:29

are and our identity. So

16:31

that's the first thing. And you find interesting effects from

16:33

this actually, if you look at the hurricanes that we name

16:35

in the US

16:37

or that you name around the world in other places, you

16:39

get much more donation aid if

16:42

the hurricane name matches your

16:44

initial.

16:45

So they found that when Hurricane Katrina

16:47

came through and devastated New Orleans, people

16:49

whose names began with a K donated way

16:52

more than people whose names didn't begin with a K. The

16:54

same for a whole lot of other hurricanes with other initials.

16:57

The other big thing is the ease with which people can pronounce

16:59

your name. So that seems to have a really big effect

17:02

on all sorts of outcomes. If people can pronounce

17:04

your name, there's this kind of sense of

17:06

familiarity. If that's the

17:09

breaking of the ice happens over that first pronunciation

17:11

of your name, obviously the easier it is to say the

17:13

name, the less anxiety you have about it.

17:16

I guess the more smoothly that breaking of the ice

17:18

goes. And there's a lot of evidence. From

17:20

some of my own research, we looked for example at how quickly

17:23

people rise up through law firm hierarchies.

17:26

How quickly do they become partners? And

17:29

there's a period in the middle of careers

17:31

in like the

17:32

about the 10th to the 20th year of a career

17:35

for a lawyer, where there's a premium,

17:37

you are much more likely to become a partner, several

17:40

percent more likely to become a partner earlier if

17:42

your name is pronounceable. And I think what's

17:44

happening there is

17:46

if I'm a partner at a firm and there are a whole lot of young

17:48

associates and I'm trying to put together a team,

17:51

if there's someone with a name that's easy to pronounce and someone

17:53

whose name I'm anxious about pronouncing, I don't

17:55

know how to pronounce it, I will default

17:57

to the one who's easy to pronounce. I'm not trying.

17:59

to be rude about it, but in that moment, it

18:02

just seems easier. It's the path of least resistance

18:04

and that's how humans act much of the time. Is

18:06

there not an element of discrimination

18:09

and prejudice associated with that? Because I think

18:12

if a name was easier to pronounce, it's probably familiar.

18:14

It's therefore probably

18:16

culturally popular. They're probably

18:18

like me, you know, like a Jack

18:21

or like a Steven. But if

18:23

it's a name that I've not seen, trying

18:26

to figure out causality here, it

18:29

could be because they're foreign. You know, my mother, I always

18:31

think about this, my mother's from Nigeria and

18:33

she could have given me like a traditional Nigerian name,

18:36

but she called me Steven.

18:38

And I think, you know, I was also

18:40

born in Botswana in Africa. I think

18:42

had she called me something else,

18:44

my life probably would have been quite different in all

18:46

honesty. I worked for four years on

18:50

phones doing like tele sales.

18:52

And when you call up and your name is Steven

18:55

in the UK and you sound like I do. Yeah.

18:58

I think any prejudice someone might have had because

19:00

of the color of my skin or where I'm from

19:04

vanishes. Is there any evidence to support that? Yeah,

19:07

so there are two things. One thing is absolutely

19:09

the prejudice that goes along with having a foreign sounding

19:11

name. And there's evidence, for example,

19:13

in the United States, there's a study where

19:16

thousands of CVs were mailed out and

19:18

applications for jobs, either with a traditionally

19:21

white name or traditionally black name, as we

19:23

think of them in the United States based on the demographic

19:26

naming trends. And

19:28

especially for the ones that were kind of in the middle of the pack,

19:30

not especially strong and not especially

19:32

weak, there's a huge premium to having the

19:34

traditionally white name. So there's a lot of prejudice

19:36

that goes on with naming. But also in

19:39

the studies we did, we wanted to partial out

19:41

this specific effect of fluency

19:43

of how easy it was to pronounce. So we

19:45

restricted our analysis in the one case to just

19:48

white lawyers who were born in that particular

19:50

country.

19:51

And so you find the same effect even

19:53

there, that the white lawyers with white

19:56

names that were easier to pronounce tended to do a little

19:58

bit better. But you're right. a huge

20:00

part of it is prejudice and discrimination.

20:02

What about our environment, our surroundings? How does

20:04

that have an impact on how we're feeling in our

20:06

behaviour from what you learned writing

20:09

your first book? Yeah, so I focused a lot

20:11

on physical environments, things like natural

20:13

environments, the power of nature to

20:16

replenish us in general, which sounds like

20:18

a kind of non-scientific idea,

20:20

but there's a huge amount of science to this idea

20:23

that

20:24

if you happen to spend a lot of time in urban environments

20:26

and then you go to a place where you have, say,

20:28

a running stream or wind

20:31

through the leaves on a tree or something like that,

20:33

it's deeply replenishing. It has

20:36

all sorts of amazing psychological and emotional

20:38

effects. I was also very,

20:40

very interested in the effects of

20:42

the weather and of colours around us

20:44

and how those shape our experiences of

20:46

the world. So some

20:48

of it's not all that surprising, but you

20:51

see even in baseball matches in the United States

20:53

when the game

20:54

is being played on a warmer night,

20:56

there is more aggressive behaviour. You

20:58

see huge rises in crime, things like

21:00

that on hot nights.

21:03

And then with colours, that's really the centrepiece

21:05

of the book. I'm colour blind, so I've always been

21:07

fascinated by colour, but the title

21:09

of the book Drunk Tank Pink is specifically about

21:12

this colour that is used to paint the inside

21:14

of jail cells in some places, and

21:16

it's a colour that's supposed to pacify people.

21:18

It's like this bright bubblegum pink colour. And

21:21

they found quite a lot of evidence for the last 30 or 40

21:23

years now that there's something about

21:25

this colour that does seem to calm people down,

21:27

at least initially. Pink. It's bright

21:30

bubblegum pink, yeah.

21:31

And it sedates people? Briefly,

21:33

and then they go, then there's a backlash

21:35

effect. Oh really? Yeah, they

21:38

found that if you leave people in there for too long, apparently

21:40

there's a backlash.

21:42

Hitchhikers should wear red.

21:44

Yeah, this is research

21:47

looking at how essentially attractive

21:49

we are to other people, depending on the colours we're wearing. And

21:53

the early studies were done on online dating platforms,

21:55

where you have the same picture of a person and you

21:57

photoshop the shirt they're wearing. This is

21:59

true.

21:59

for men and women, and it doesn't matter whether they're trying

22:02

to attract men or women, but there's something

22:04

about the color red in particular that's really attractive

22:06

to humans, and actually to other animals too.

22:08

When you see the

22:11

color red, it inspires a kind

22:13

of

22:13

approach-oriented behavior, so

22:15

where you might have passed that person by

22:18

if you're thinking about dating apps and you're swiping, there's

22:21

something about the color red that slows you down and attracts

22:23

you. In the context of hitchhiking, it

22:25

has a similar effect, especially when you have

22:28

a heterosexual male driving and

22:30

you have a woman wearing a red shirt, you

22:32

get a very strong effect. So if I'm trying to find a

22:34

girlfriend or a boyfriend,

22:36

you're saying? Make sure they're

22:38

not wearing red. Make sure they're not wearing

22:41

red. Well, if they're wearing red, you've got to

22:43

ask yourself, am I attracted to the red shirt or am I

22:45

attracted to the person? Whereas if they're wearing another color,

22:47

it's much more likely to be an unbiased, unvarnished

22:50

opinion of them. But if I want to attract the

22:52

opposite sex. Oh, if you want to attract, wear red, yeah.

22:55

Okay, that's useful to know. I

22:58

am

22:59

not single, but if I happen to

23:01

be. Yeah, yeah. But

23:03

even for your partner, this is probably why Conor

23:05

McGregor has this famous saying where he says it's red

23:07

panty night. Right. So when

23:09

he wins a fight, I think he said it on the

23:12

microphone to Joe Rogan. He said, oh, it's red panty night

23:14

tonight, which means that him and his wife are going to be intimate

23:16

tonight. Yeah, yeah. But red is always, for

23:18

whatever reason, in society, been seductive as

23:20

it's always been as it relates to lingerie.

23:22

I wonder if lingerie sales

23:24

are more in red than others.

23:27

Rogan, before we get back to this episode, just give me 30 seconds

23:29

of your time. Two things I wanted to

23:31

say. The first thing is a huge thank you

23:33

for listening and tuning into the show week

23:36

after week. It means the world to all of us. And this really is

23:38

a dream that we absolutely never had and

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couldn't have imagined getting to this place. But

23:42

secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only

23:44

just getting started. And if you enjoy

23:47

what we do here, please join the 24% of

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people that listen to this podcast regularly and

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follow us on this app. Here's

23:54

a promise I'm going to make to you. I'm going to do everything

23:57

in my power to make this show as good as

23:59

I can. now and into the future. We're

24:01

gonna deliver the guests that you want me to speak to and

24:03

we're gonna continue to keep doing all of the

24:06

things you love about this show. Thank

24:08

you,

24:08

thank you so much. Back to the episode. So getting

24:11

to the topic of being unstuck then, which is

24:13

what the anatomy of

24:15

a breakthrough is all about, what does it feel

24:17

like when someone is stuck? So how do I know

24:20

if I'm stuck? Is there an emotional sort of, you

24:22

know, sensation? Yeah, it's an interesting

24:25

question. So it's

24:27

subjective. You know if you're stuck and you can feel

24:29

it because you could be in the same situation and not

24:31

feel stuck. I'll give you a good example of this. I

24:34

had a conversation with Malcolm

24:36

Gladwell who was telling me about his dad

24:38

who was a math professor and his dad

24:40

was trying

24:40

to solve a math conundrum for 30 years.

24:43

By external definitions, he was stuck

24:46

for 30 years because he couldn't solve this math

24:48

puzzle, which

24:49

is a common experience for math professors

24:51

I imagine. But

24:52

he loved it.

24:53

He didn't think of himself as being stuck. That for

24:55

him was the process. That was why he went

24:57

to work and why he kept doing

25:00

what he was doing. And so, you know, if

25:02

I thought about being stuck in something and not making

25:05

meaningful progress objectively for 30

25:07

years, the idea drives me crazy.

25:09

But for his dad, for Malcolm's dad,

25:12

that was something that was really appealing. He really

25:14

enjoyed that process. And so I think

25:16

a lot of dealing with being stuck

25:19

at first is getting your head around what it means

25:21

to be stuck and figuring out that usually it's

25:23

not as big a deal as it seems it might

25:25

be. And once you come to grips

25:27

with the emotional part of it, you can usually

25:29

bring some sort of strategies and actions to

25:31

bear and to start to move yourself. I'm

25:34

convinced of that. And that's why I write the book because

25:36

I think there is a way to get unstuck in almost every

25:38

case.

25:39

What is, in your view, the relationship between

25:41

perseverance, becoming unstuck, or

25:43

knowing when to quit? Yeah, I mean, there's

25:46

an amazing cottage industry on both

25:48

sides of that spectrum of books that are being written that

25:50

I think are excellent books that make

25:52

the case for both of those ends of the spectrum.

25:54

You've got Angela Duckworth's Grit, which is all

25:56

about sticking through and continuing

25:59

on.

25:59

Let me have a breakthrough, leans in that direction. And

26:02

then you've got Annie Duke who wrote the book, Quit, which

26:04

is about quitting. The fact that we've got so many options

26:07

all the time, most of us,

26:09

why would you keep doing the thing you're doing if it's not working

26:11

out for you? You should probably do something else. Now,

26:13

they're both very sophisticated thinkers. They wouldn't say

26:15

you should always persevere or always quit.

26:18

But it's a great question. How do you know

26:20

when you are stuck that it's time to persevere

26:22

versus time to quit? And I think it's worth

26:25

thinking about, A, the opportunity cost.

26:27

So what are you leaving behind? Is

26:29

there something else that's very obvious that would be an

26:31

easy thing to jump to that would require

26:34

leaving behind the thing that's making you stuck? And if

26:36

that idea seems really appealing,

26:38

as it did for me when I was doing actuarial science

26:40

and wanted to jump away from that, then you

26:42

should probably consider moving on. But

26:45

the research basically shows that almost

26:47

always

26:48

it's a good idea to persevere beyond the point

26:50

where you say, this is hard and it's not feeling

26:53

good and I feel stuck. How

26:55

long you should do that is another question. I think one

26:57

of the guides that should be useful

27:00

in determining that is to ask yourself

27:02

if there's an end state that I'm trying to approach,

27:05

am I getting closer to it across time? You

27:07

know, if I'm learning a new skill, is

27:10

the delta between where I am and where I'd like

27:12

to be shrinking over time,

27:14

the gap between those two shrinking or is it staying

27:16

the same or is it even getting larger? And if it's staying

27:18

the same or getting larger, then I'm probably not getting closer.

27:21

And that's a good indication that

27:23

I should probably quit. It's time to move on. I've

27:26

thought a lot about this and in my last book, I wrote

27:28

a chapter about quitting and I

27:30

was trying to figure out why I appear to be quite

27:32

a good quitter. I'm well known

27:35

for quitting school, my first company,

27:37

my second company, university

27:39

after one lecture and this is the quitting

27:42

framework I tried to draw up. I'm going

27:44

to just slide it across the desk and please

27:46

ask me if you've got any questions and then I'll... So

27:49

there's two kind of routes you can go down the quitting framework. Are

27:51

you thinking of quitting because it's hard? You're running a marathon, it's the

27:53

last mile of the race. It's hard but it's worth it. Yep.

27:56

So if it's hard and it's not worth it, quit. If it's

27:58

hard and it's worth it...

28:00

Stay the course

28:01

Going down the other side. It sucks. That could be a relationship

28:04

a place. You're living the job you have as an actor you whatever

28:06

Yeah

28:07

So so this this framework seems to

28:09

me unassailable in other words

28:12

There's nothing I can't imagine that anything

28:14

here could be disagreed with because it makes total

28:16

sense and it's nice and broad It's it's nice and broad

28:18

right? Yeah, you can imagine any situation being folded

28:21

into it I the other thing I quite like about

28:23

it is that This distinction

28:25

between it's just hard and it sucks is very

28:28

central to a lot of the ideas in in my book And

28:30

I think if something sucks, it's emotionally

28:33

unrewarding and you hate it and you're grinding

28:35

through it Most of the time you should

28:37

quit and you have here this one limb

28:40

to your model that says if you can make it suck

28:42

less Continue on very often.

28:44

Yeah, right into your boss, right? Exactly. And

28:46

so there's there's great value in asking that question

28:49

But it's just hard part. I'm focusing

28:51

on because a huge part of this book is

28:53

about how Hardship is the first

28:56

step in making something good Yeah,

28:59

good stuff happens when things are hard and

29:01

because we're human and we have been Evolutionarily,

29:05

I don't know penned into the situation

29:07

where hardship is seen as a problem like we're

29:09

using too many resources Don't

29:12

do something that's harder than it needs to be we're

29:14

very used to that It's not true about everything we

29:16

do but it's true about enough things that we misinterpret

29:18

hardship or hardness for being a problem

29:21

Whereas in many domains

29:24

the good stuff only happens almost

29:26

every time after it gets hard Mmm

29:30

in in many domains for human

29:32

growth and otherwise in your book

29:34

you talk about how

29:36

You know you kind of debunk the idea that

29:38

young people start the

29:41

best most culturally valuable Companies

29:45

we tend to think that it's like 21 year olds in their

29:47

bedroom that are starting all the great Tech

29:49

companies for example, but you show that

29:52

A couple of failures is actually seems to correlate

29:54

with success. Yeah

29:56

And there's a you know, that whole section felt

29:58

like a bit of a narrative shift Yeah.

30:02

I mean, it was a big thing for me that

30:05

one of the ideas that's very prominent

30:08

in my field is this availability heuristic. It's

30:10

this idea that you pay a lot of attention to what's most

30:12

available in the world. This is an old idea

30:14

from Danny Kahneman and Amos Versky,

30:17

behavioral decision researchers. And

30:20

the thing that we see a lot of is

30:23

very successful young people because they're interesting.

30:25

They're fascinating stories. So you're

30:28

interested in them. And a lot of the biggest companies I think

30:30

are run, especially tech companies, by quite

30:32

young CEOs or people who began when

30:34

they were young. And so we fixate

30:36

on them and they're available in our minds. We see documentaries

30:39

about them. We read about them all the time, but

30:42

they're vanishingly rare. And

30:44

so what you find is that the age to

30:46

begin a company, if you want to maximize success,

30:48

if you look at the age of the CEOs who tend

30:50

to be very, very successful, we're

30:53

talking like mid-40s. That's the

30:55

sweet spot. Mid-40s, even into 50s.

30:58

And the thing that distinguishes a 22-year-old from a 45-year-old

31:00

is, as you said,

31:03

partly failure, that by the time you're 45,

31:05

you've doubled how long you've been alive. You've

31:08

had a lot of time to fail and to come back from that. And

31:10

so if you're still creating companies, you've learned something

31:12

along the way. But also your

31:14

life is deeply rich at that point in a way that

31:16

it isn't necessarily as a 22-year-old. You've

31:18

got a lot of other stuff going on. Good

31:21

stuff and bad stuff maybe, and maybe complicated

31:23

stuff. But all of it is adding

31:25

a spice to the mix that I think makes your ideas

31:27

thicker in some way and makes

31:30

you, I think, better at making certain calculations

31:32

that maybe when you're younger, you don't have all the information

31:34

for. And so that's what you find. Who's

31:37

more creative, young people or middle-aged

31:39

people or old people? It's interesting.

31:41

So

31:43

young people, and I'm thinking

31:45

especially about kids, because I have a five-year-old

31:47

and a seven-year-old, they are

31:50

phenomenally creative. And in part, they're creative

31:52

because they don't accept anything. They're curious

31:55

about everything. My kids will

31:57

not

31:58

ask a question without a follow-up.

31:59

or five or ten or twenty follow-ups. Nothing

32:02

is okay until we've explored it to the ends

32:04

of the earth and that's amazing and that's why kids learn

32:07

so much so quickly. They take nothing

32:09

for granted. There's no such thing as common

32:11

wisdom to a kid. You can say everyone

32:13

does it this way and they'll be like, why? But

32:15

you say that to an adult? Most of us say, oh,

32:18

okay. We assume that what's the

32:20

done thing, the way the hurt is behaving is that

32:22

way for a reason, even though often it's just

32:24

accidental or it's just the easiest thing or whatever.

32:28

I think very, very young people are tremendously

32:30

creative because they push back a lot. But

32:33

one of the really interesting things for me in

32:35

this book is that I found people from young

32:37

adulthood all the way through to very

32:39

old adulthood, very

32:42

later in their lives, who are experimentalists

32:45

by nature. They take nothing for granted

32:47

and they constantly question. They

32:50

are way more creative because they ask

32:52

more questions but then they say, okay, so here

32:55

are ten options. How do I know which one's the

32:57

best? I'm going to inhabit each one for

33:00

two months and then in two years I'll

33:02

know the answer. They do this

33:04

serially and some of them become Olympic athletes

33:07

even if they don't physically have the stature for it because

33:09

they're so good at finding new techniques.

33:11

I talk about one of them in the book. Some

33:13

of them become business titans because they say

33:16

that everyone else is doing this thing and assuming it's

33:18

right, here's a different thing that's way better and I

33:20

know that because I've tried all the other options. They

33:23

end up being really successful because that curiosity

33:26

that you have in childhood, when you carry

33:28

it over into adulthood, it's kind of like a superpower.

33:32

I think it's more about the

33:34

questions you ask than your age. I

33:37

couldn't agree more and it's one of the most,

33:39

the things I constantly am trying to figure

33:41

out how to get

33:43

my team. When you said to me that there's a group, there's

33:45

a certain type of person that just continues to keep asking

33:47

why is the age, I was like, can you introduce me? Because

33:50

I love to hire them. Because that's exactly, you

33:52

think about what innovation is at its core and it's that

33:54

kind

33:55

of rejection of convention

33:58

and that

33:59

half-

33:59

which is to try and reason

34:02

up from first principles, per se.

34:05

He mentioned an athlete.

34:06

Who are you referring to? He's an athlete

34:08

named Dave Berkoff. He was an Olympic

34:10

athlete in the 1988 and 92 games. 88 in Seoul and 92

34:16

in Barcelona. He's a backstroke

34:19

swimmer. He swims a 100m backstroke and

34:21

then some of the medley races. I spoke

34:23

to him for a while on the phone

34:25

to understand his experiences because

34:29

he doesn't look

34:30

like a lot of other backstroke swimmers. They tend

34:32

to be very, very tall. The average world

34:35

record holder is 6'3 to

34:37

6'4, so quite tall. He's about

34:39

5'10, which is a big

34:41

difference in professional avenues

34:44

if you're thinking about Olympic athletes. When

34:47

he was a student in the mid-80s,

34:49

he was at Harvard, which is not a place you really

34:51

go if you're going to be a champion swimmer. It's a place you

34:53

go for intellectual experiences, but it's

34:55

not the best athletic school, generally speaking.

34:58

But he had a coach there who encouraged

35:00

him to be curious, to ask a lot of questions.

35:04

Berkoff was naturally like this. He

35:06

would say to his coach, why do

35:08

I need to swim that way? Why don't I try 10 other

35:10

ways to swim? Let's tweak my technique in

35:13

all these different ways and see what works best. What

35:15

he ended up doing was he discovered that

35:18

you swim about 80% faster

35:20

when you're fully submerged under the water

35:23

than when half of your body is above the water and half

35:25

is below, which makes total sense from a physics

35:27

perspective. But most backstroke

35:29

swimmers, the way they swim is they push off the wall

35:32

and the minute they do that, their body starts to fight

35:34

for oxygen because they're under the water. So your

35:37

instinct is to pop up as quickly as possible. But

35:39

if you can train yourself to deal with the oxygen

35:42

deprivation,

35:43

you stay underwater for longer and you swim much faster.

35:46

So Berkoff developed

35:47

this technique called the Berkoff

35:49

blast-off it was known as, where he would

35:51

swim underwater for the first 40 meters

35:54

of a 100 meter race. So 40% of

35:56

the race, almost half of the, almost

35:59

a full lap of the Olympic

35:59

pool and then he would come up for air and

36:02

then he would keep swimming.

36:03

And he broke world records.

36:05

He wasn't the best swimmer in terms of his physique, but

36:07

he was the best swimmer strategically.

36:09

And he had spent years experimenting

36:11

to find this technique. And then,

36:13

of course, all the other athletes saw the same thing and

36:15

they started doing the same thing. And so it became more

36:17

competitive. But in the interim, he won

36:19

gold medals at two Olympic games.

36:22

He won a bronze.

36:24

He was the world record holder multiple times.

36:27

So that questioning

36:29

led someone who, in certain respects, at least

36:31

physically, shouldn't have been the world record

36:34

holder to be just that.

36:35

The question I ask is, how

36:37

do you teach someone to be that kind of person? How do you teach

36:39

someone to be more experimental and

36:41

to be more curious and to ask

36:44

why more? Because just from my observation,

36:47

from what I've seen over the last 10 years

36:49

in business, and I think about all the teams

36:51

I've had and all the people we've hired, which is more than

36:53

a thousand,

36:55

some people just have it. Some people

36:57

just have almost like a cognitive

36:59

but default towards

37:02

being curious about the

37:03

possibility of a better way. And then some

37:05

people, regardless of how many times

37:08

you ask for that behavior or you might write

37:10

it on the wall or you might say that it's our values,

37:13

they just don't naturally demonstrate that

37:15

curiosity. Yeah.

37:16

I mean, there's an individual difference variable

37:19

that you're describing that's real. And

37:21

with every construct, when we talk about a desirable

37:23

human trait, there's going to be variance, right? Maybe

37:27

addictive personality and so on. All of these

37:29

things are going to vary on a spectrum. Some

37:31

things that are educable, you

37:33

can sort of teach them, you can make people better at

37:35

them. So if you're at a three out of 10, you can become

37:37

a six out of 10, or maybe even a seven out of 10. This

37:41

curiosity question though, I think, and

37:44

I say this as an educator, I think it can be taught.

37:46

And I think that's essentially what we try to do a lot

37:48

of the time. That's my course. I teach

37:51

a marketing course. It's maybe

37:53

three months long. If you only

37:55

come out of that course with one thing, it's to know

37:57

the right questions to ask. If you're in

37:59

a business and you're trying to...

37:59

to promote a product or an idea or to create

38:02

a new product,

38:03

I want you not necessarily to know the answer,

38:05

but at least to know what the questions should be. And

38:08

so I think it's the job of educators, the job

38:10

of books, the job of whatever information

38:12

you get in the world to train

38:14

you in that direction. And so if I were going to say,

38:17

there's one thing we should train people in a business context,

38:19

you know, if you have a new employee, it's

38:22

certainly the on the job stuff is important,

38:24

you know, like learn the skills that are important to this

38:26

specific job if there are technical skills, but

38:29

the most important general skill,

38:31

know the right questions to ask and constantly

38:34

ask. So here's one way you do that is you

38:36

say, I

38:37

want you to look at this thing,

38:39

whatever this thing is, it could be

38:41

it could be your framework that you showed me the quitting framework,

38:44

I would take everyone who I'm considering hiring.

38:48

And as a diagnostic tool, I'd have them look at it and say, tell

38:50

me one thing that's not right with the framework or that you

38:52

think could be improved.

38:54

Do it again. Now, give me a second thing. What

38:56

about a third thing? If they can't do it the first time,

38:59

coach them through it, work work through it with them.

39:02

But don't just do it with your framework, do it with

39:04

find 10 ad campaigns. Say

39:06

imagine you're the chief marketing officer at this company,

39:09

what's one thing you could do differently that maybe

39:11

isn't better, but at least is worth asking?

39:14

Let's ask that question.

39:16

And if you do that enough times, everyone

39:18

becomes more curious, it becomes the habit. That's

39:21

the way you interact with the world.

39:22

So I think it to a large extent can be taught.

39:25

That's kind of the thing I was reflecting

39:28

on is, do you have to even tell someone

39:30

to look at the framework and then find something better? Because

39:32

I'm in search of the person that looks at the framework and goes,

39:34

Steve, I found something better.

39:36

Those people are amazing. They are. They

39:38

do exist. They do exist. And I found

39:40

some of them. And that's that's Dave Burkhoff,

39:43

right? No one said to him, you have to question

39:45

whether the way everyone swims, the backstroke is the best

39:47

way. And I found a few

39:49

people like that, but they are vanishingly rare.

39:52

There aren't that many of them who really make that

39:54

their kind of life's philosophy, experimentalism

39:57

as a philosophy. But

39:58

there are some.

39:59

A lot of them actually end up going into academia and

40:02

into science because they wanna know their

40:04

answers. They just wanna know. They're

40:06

curious to the ends of the earth. But

40:09

for the rest, the other 99% of people who

40:11

aren't like that, I think you can lift

40:14

them all up from a three out of 10, four out

40:16

of 10, to a seven or an eight, maybe

40:18

not a nine or a 10.

40:19

But if your whole workforce is people who are a seven or

40:22

an eight out of 10 on curiosity, it's much better

40:24

than having them mostly at a three. So I think

40:26

you can move the needle a little bit. And

40:29

that small minority tend

40:31

to provide so much value

40:34

for the

40:36

less experimental majority. Cause

40:39

I think about, we have this group in all

40:41

of my companies called Ever Changing Landscape.

40:44

And the whole point of the group is when we see something changing

40:46

in the world, or might

40:48

be a new update to a platform or something within our

40:50

industry has changed, it could be an update or a feature

40:52

or whatever,

40:54

take it from where you've seen it and just share it

40:56

with the rest of the company. And you see in these groups

40:58

that we have, that it's really a

41:00

small cohort educating

41:03

everybody else. So let's say there was a hundred people

41:05

in the Slack channel. I'd say

41:07

there'd be five

41:09

people that were super prolific and there'd

41:11

be 15 that were kind of doing it. And

41:16

then there'd be another 25% that do it sometimes.

41:19

And

41:21

then there's kind of a silent 50% that don't ever

41:23

do it.

41:24

And they don't seem to have that sort of natural

41:26

curiosity. I always think as a CEO, I need

41:28

to like find more of that 5% because

41:31

the disproportionate value they

41:33

can add by finding, as I said to you before, recording

41:35

this podcast, just a tiny tweak

41:37

that changes our trajectory is profound.

41:40

Here's my advice on that. I

41:43

think you're exactly right about the distribution. And we see

41:45

this in a lot of cases. I

41:47

talk in the book about the 80-20 rule, the Pareto

41:49

Principle, that most of the gains come from the small

41:52

minority and so on. And we know that like if you're

41:54

a business,

41:54

often the vast majority

41:56

of your sales come from the tiny minority of customers

41:59

and so on. So we know that. this is true. And

42:01

in the case here where you say 50% of people

42:03

are not doing the work on the Slack channel, you

42:06

could break that 50% down into I think two

42:08

broad groups. There's one group that's just

42:11

the way that

42:13

kind of person approaches life is to just not be

42:15

very motivated and there's nothing, there's not much

42:17

you can do about that part, right? If they come

42:19

to work because they see it entirely as an extrinsic

42:22

reward for their time

42:24

that they come and they get paid and that's just

42:27

what they're doing and it's a day job, you're

42:30

never going to teach them to be curious. But there

42:32

is a group of people in that 50% and I

42:34

think it's probably sizable especially at a company

42:37

like one of your companies.

42:39

Those people want to be better.

42:41

They want to do a better job at this. They maybe

42:44

don't have the skills today but if you show

42:46

them they will latch onto it and they will get better

42:48

at it. And it's the most important

42:50

thing you can do as a leader in organizations

42:53

is to not just find

42:55

the people who are talented versus not talented but

42:57

to find the people who don't yet have whatever you would consider

43:00

to be the talent and to separate

43:02

them into those who really want to be the talented ones

43:05

and those who just actually don't care that much. They're

43:07

just there to do the bare minimum and

43:10

that's where I think you're pouring

43:12

your attention and education

43:14

into that first set of people who are

43:17

motivated is key.

43:18

Do you think you can teach someone to be curious about something?

43:21

Because I wonder, you know, people go home and they choose what they

43:24

watch on YouTube and what they read about and what

43:26

they consume on Netflix. That kind of seems to be the purest

43:28

indication of what they're actually curious about, the stuff they they

43:31

lean into in their free time. So we've got some

43:33

people in our team even here that are, you know, here now

43:35

that when they go home they're learning about

43:38

cameras and how to shoot video

43:40

and all those kinds of things and then

43:42

you might have someone in the same team that goes home and

43:44

just wants to watch Keeping Up With Kardashians.

43:47

You know,

43:48

it's quite obvious and I think everyone

43:50

could agree that the first person who has

43:53

a natural curiosity towards the subject matter outside

43:55

of their professional pursuits is going to achieve more in

43:57

their professional pursuits. So could you...

43:59

And I have to provide

44:02

some nuance here that it doesn't matter if someone goes home and watches

44:04

Keeping Up With Kardashians. They'll be useful in other

44:06

ways because they'll be getting sort of creative

44:08

insights outside of the industry, like you said,

44:11

but I do believe that those that are curious

44:13

about the thing they do professionally will

44:16

go the furthest. Yeah, so I think

44:18

with curiosity in general, if you,

44:21

like if I don't know much about cameras, I

44:24

just have my phone and I use it as a camera. That's about

44:26

all I know. I just push buttons.

44:28

And so I'm not that curious about them, but if

44:30

you give me,

44:32

let's say the most educated camera consumer

44:34

in the world is at 100%. If

44:37

you take me from 0% where I am now to 10 or 15%, I

44:41

then know enough to start to develop

44:43

curiosity. Part of the problem with being a novice

44:46

is you don't even know what's interesting about the thing. Like

44:49

if you don't drink red wine,

44:51

and then at some point you start drinking

44:53

it, you're like, oh, there are different varietals. That's

44:56

interesting.

44:57

Even within that varietal, it turns out there's

44:59

a difference between Napa and Burgundy

45:01

or whatever. And as you get more

45:03

knowledgeable about the subject, the nuances

45:06

become interesting to you because they mean something. Like

45:09

this happens with music all the time. Like if you love

45:11

a kind of music,

45:12

especially if it's a kind of music that most people don't listen

45:15

to, you try to show someone

45:17

else that music and you play your two favorite songs,

45:19

they'll be like, they both sound the same.

45:21

It's the most frustrating thing as someone who

45:23

likes something a lot, who's really passionate. And

45:26

it's true for art and movies

45:28

and whatever else. Everyone's like, yeah, whatever. It's like,

45:30

it's same, same.

45:31

It's all just part of the genre.

45:34

But once you develop a taste for it and you get curious

45:36

and you get into it, that's when you start to see the real

45:38

life of it. And so I think the job

45:40

of someone who wants others to be curious about a topic

45:43

or to develop curiosities is to

45:45

make them not the 0%, to

45:47

make them at the 10 or 15 or 20th percent that

45:50

then prompts them to wanna figure out the rest because

45:53

you don't get there from zero.

45:54

You talk about maximizing and satisfying.

45:58

You believe there are two outlooks. on success.

46:00

This is part two of your book,

46:03

The Heart Section. And there seems

46:05

to be some kind of through line between experimenters

46:08

and non-experimenters and maximizers

46:11

and satisficing. Yeah,

46:14

satisficing. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

46:17

So this idea, it's an old idea,

46:19

it's about 70 years old now, but it's the idea

46:21

that broadly speaking, when you make decisions

46:23

or make choices, you can be

46:25

either a maximizer on one end of the spectrum or

46:28

a satisficer. A maximizer

46:29

is someone who says about everything,

46:32

I need the very best. I need to spend

46:34

a lot of time and energy figuring out the best. I

46:36

need to produce the best. If I'm choosing

46:39

what food to eat or what job to have

46:41

or whatever, everything's got to be the very, very best. I'm going to

46:44

maximize. I'm going to make it as good as it can possibly

46:46

be. And I'm going to bring the resources

46:48

required to make that happen. Satisficers

46:51

are people who say, there's

46:54

a level that's good enough. It's not perfect,

46:56

but it gets over the bar and it's going to be

46:58

a different bar for different things. If it's an important

47:01

thing, the bar gets raised and it's lowered

47:03

for less important things. But as soon as I

47:05

find an option that's good enough, I'm going to take it and then move

47:07

on with my life. And then there are people

47:09

who are kind of in the middle who say about

47:12

some things like my partner that I choose,

47:14

or if I'm going to choose what job to

47:16

have or which country to live in. Those

47:19

are really important, whether to have kids, those

47:21

are important questions. I'm going to maximize on those.

47:23

Everything

47:23

else, not that

47:25

important,

47:27

at least relatively speaking, I'm going to just find a

47:29

good enough option. And what you find is that people

47:31

who satisfy

47:32

tend to be much happier. Oh, fuck.

47:36

No, the key is to, I

47:38

mean, if you maximize on everything, I think it's paralyzing,

47:41

the key is to know when to maximize. And

47:43

so if you satisfy a lot of the time and say, let's

47:46

be honest, I don't need to maximize

47:48

on everything,

47:49

then

47:51

that's the way to do it, is to be able

47:53

to distinguish between the two. So if

47:55

you're a chronic maximizer about absolutely

47:57

everything, there's a lot of evidence that you're likely to get stuck on.

48:00

on small, unimportant things.

48:03

Depression, is that a trait of

48:05

maximizers? Yeah, absolutely. High

48:08

achieving?

48:09

Yeah, I mean, so what ends up happening is it's

48:11

the same as perfectionism. That's basically what it is. It's

48:14

the choice-based version of perfectionism where

48:17

you never live up to your own standards, which

48:19

on the one hand produces very good things because

48:21

you're always looking upward and trying to get better. On

48:24

the other hand, it's paralyzing

48:27

and exhausting and to live your entire

48:30

life that way in every aspect of your life

48:32

is problematic.

48:34

Mo Gouda, who came on this podcast, talked

48:36

about how we're happy when our expectations

48:39

are met and we're unhappy when our expectations

48:41

are unmet. And from what I

48:43

ascertain from what you said there, maximizers have

48:46

such high expectations that they're often unmet,

48:48

which causes unhappiness. Yeah. Is that accurate? 100%, yeah,

48:51

that's exactly right. My thesis, my

48:54

PhD thesis was on expectations and

48:57

on how important it is when expectations deviate

48:59

from, or when reality deviates

49:01

from expectations. It's almost never

49:04

about the objective thing. Two

49:06

people could have exactly the same thing and feel

49:08

totally happy. One could feel totally happy with

49:10

it. The other could be devastated by it. It's

49:12

all about what you're used to, what you expect,

49:15

how high your standards are. So I

49:18

think that's a very powerful human element

49:21

in these calculations. When you're talking

49:23

about experimenters, these are people that go

49:25

in search of nuances and

49:28

ask why. Our experimenters typically maximizes because

49:30

on the other side of the coin, satisficers,

49:34

they kind of accept it. So they might be the people that would accept

49:36

convention,

49:37

conventions answer as being,

49:40

yeah, I'll just do what has always been done. Yeah,

49:43

I think so. I think there's some overlap, but the

49:45

thing about the people that I found

49:48

were

49:49

experimentalists constantly asking

49:51

questions. It was rarely about trivial

49:53

things. It's not like they went and said, I'm gonna

49:55

go to the supermarket today and get a chocolate and

49:58

I wanna experiment. I wanna eat. every chocolate

50:00

in the supermarket over the next year so that I know for

50:02

the future which one's the best. They don't do that.

50:05

They say, hey, I'm a swimmer. I want to be an Olympian. How

50:07

do I get to be an Olympian? I'm going to maximize

50:09

the hell out of that. And so it's

50:11

about finding something that's really important to you where

50:13

it's worth being

50:14

an experimentalist.

50:16

But it would be paralyzing to do that

50:18

with every aspect of your life, I

50:20

think. It certainly wouldn't work for me.

50:22

Life crises. We're

50:25

talking about age a second ago. And I've

50:27

got two friends. I've got one friend

50:30

that's 29 and another

50:32

friend that's 39. And they're going through what

50:34

appears to be on the surface of crisis. And

50:37

when I read your book about how

50:39

you call it the nine ending crisis, it

50:42

all made sense. What is that? Yeah.

50:46

So this is some research with a colleague of mine, Hal

50:48

Hirschfield, who's also a very good friend at UCLA.

50:51

And when we were, he was at NYU

50:53

at the time, we went and we were sitting in his

50:56

office and I said to him, you know,

50:57

I ran a marathon when I was 29.

51:01

I've never run another one, but

51:03

I ran one at 29. And I remember thinking, I

51:06

have to show myself as I approach 30

51:08

that there's meaning to my life

51:10

and purpose. I need a big goal. I need to train

51:13

for something. And I thought that was a really interesting

51:15

human instinct. Like, it was a very productive

51:17

one. I ran a marathon, which was not a bad thing.

51:20

But we were talking about it. And he said to me, it

51:23

seems like maybe

51:25

at these ages where there's a nine at the end

51:27

of your age and you're looking down the

51:30

specter of a new decade, that

51:33

it pushes you to kind of audit your

51:35

life. You ask yourself, is my life meaningful?

51:37

Is it what I want it to be? Are there gaps that

51:39

I need to fill? Is there something I need to do? And

51:41

so we started to find these big data sets that

51:44

had some evidence where we could see what ages

51:46

people were out and looking at their decisions. And

51:49

we found all sorts of really interesting behaviors

51:51

when people were 29, 39, 49, 59. You

51:54

get this big rise in marathon running.

51:57

So I wasn't the only one. There's an overrepresentation

51:59

of marathon. marathon runners, especially first-time marathon

52:01

runners who have a nine at the end of their age. If

52:04

you were already a marathon runner, you run your fastest

52:06

marathons in general when you have a nine at the end of your

52:08

age. There's also

52:11

some stuff that's not so good. So you see a massive

52:13

rise in infidelity. So we found

52:15

evidence that there's an over-representation

52:17

of people at those ages who are seeking

52:20

out extramarital affairs.

52:22

You even see a rise in suicide.

52:24

So that doesn't mean everyone who's got a nine at

52:26

their age is at risk of that, but it

52:31

shows in general that we hunt for meaning. And

52:35

so the midlife crisis idea that maybe when you approach 40,

52:37

there's going to be a big crisis there, that may be

52:40

true, but we also found this cyclical

52:42

decade, every decade you get this

52:45

miniature nine ending crisis.

52:48

I was

52:49

in the best shape I've ever been in my life when I was 29.

52:52

That was the year. That was the year I got closest to

52:54

having all eight abs. 30, has

52:57

it been great? Not as great. So

53:00

I was wondering as you said that, what

53:03

happens when the year after?

53:06

29 is often some of our most productive achievements

53:09

or affairs. Does that mean 30, 40, 50 is

53:11

when we chill a little bit? It varies

53:13

a little. It's funny. So what you

53:16

see is it's sort of like a wave and the peak of the

53:18

wave is at nine, but there are some people who it

53:20

only dawns on them when they actually hit the zero ending age.

53:22

Some people it starts at the eight ending age. It's

53:25

really when you get to like 34, 35, 36,

53:27

44, 45, 46, right in the middle of

53:28

the decade when

53:33

you see the trough for all of these kinds

53:36

of behaviors. We're sort of most in our

53:38

lives and doing our thing and not really questioning

53:40

as much, which we found

53:42

that fascinating that just the accident

53:45

that we happened to count using a base 10 system

53:47

means that every 10 years we

53:50

zoom back and audit our lives in this way.

53:52

It's such an interest because the number

53:55

is such an irrelevant thing

53:57

in the context of your physiological health,

53:59

your metabolic health.

53:59

but symbols,

54:02

symbols matter and you talk about symbols

54:04

in your first book as well. Yeah.

54:06

And we don't appreciate how much symbols

54:09

sway our life in fundamental ways do we?

54:11

Yeah, no that's right that's true and and

54:14

I think

54:15

you know even these numbers are symbolic

54:17

they have symbolic meaning for us. It's

54:20

something when you say I'm in my 30s it's

54:22

different from saying I'm 28 or 29 even if it's just a year

54:25

apart or even a few days apart and

54:27

it's the same with what it means to be in your 40s.

54:30

It's symbolic for a time of life and

54:32

certain expectations about what that time of your life

54:34

is supposed to be and so I think that's

54:36

what happens we talked about expectations

54:39

that you you're suddenly in your 40s

54:41

or your 50s or your 60s and then you say

54:44

what does that mean and

54:45

where here is where my expectations are I should

54:47

have the following things maybe a certain amount

54:49

of money a certain career status maybe

54:51

a partner maybe kids

54:54

and then do you have those things and if you don't

54:57

then you get this kind of acting out behavior some

54:59

of it productive that tries to remedy the

55:01

problem perhaps you try to get fit and run

55:04

a marathon but sometimes for some people it's

55:06

not very productive behavior. I know this more

55:08

than most because I started in business at 18 and

55:10

you can imagine

55:11

when I was on BBC

55:15

Newsnight and they introduce

55:17

you and he's only 18 years

55:19

old my business is making zero money yeah

55:22

they were just blown away because of expectation of

55:24

what an 18 year old should be doing and then I had that throughout

55:26

my career and he's only 25 and

55:28

he's got a thousand and he's only 20 and

55:30

then he's only 29

55:33

and then it's stuff Stephen Bartlett is an entrepreneur

55:38

one day has changed and suddenly no one's introducing

55:41

me by my age yes 29 and 30 the expectations

55:44

of a 29 year old running a business and how big that business

55:46

might be and how many team members and revenue

55:48

versus a 30 year old you get me he better

55:51

be a billionaire or else we're not gonna

55:53

mention his age I'm in my early 40s and

55:55

it's the same thing as an academic you know if you're

55:57

a professor in your 30s that's you're young

55:59

And then you hit suddenly one day you're 40 and they're

56:02

like, eh, you're a professor,

56:04

whatever.

56:05

When you wrote about symbols in your first book, what were some of the most

56:07

sort of surprising things in terms of how powerful

56:10

and inspirational they are with us, to

56:13

us, without us even knowing? Well,

56:15

you know, as a marketing professor, I'm very, very interested

56:17

in how symbols play a role in branding

56:20

and in conveying ideas really

56:22

succinctly. I think that the simplest

56:24

way to convey an idea is with an image. And

56:27

the images that are the most powerful are

56:29

often in symbolic form. A lot of them are very

56:31

negative images that we get from symbols. They're

56:34

associated with ideals that we don't like,

56:35

for example, like

56:38

something like a swastika. It's

56:41

a terrible symbol the way it's used or

56:43

has been used for the last almost 100 years now. But

56:46

the amount of meaning that's conveyed in those symbols is

56:49

tremendous. And so there's

56:52

a sort of terrible power to symbols. They can shape

56:54

behavior in all sorts of ways. One of the studies I

56:57

did looked at people

56:59

who were religious

57:02

versus not religious and then showed them a

57:04

religious symbol and then asked them to do a behavior

57:06

that was either going to be done honestly or

57:09

dishonestly. We were essentially measuring whether they

57:11

were going to behave honestly. And for those religious

57:13

people, seeing that symbol kind of clicked

57:15

something for them and they became much

57:17

more honest.

57:18

So in general,

57:19

they might have had an honesty level of 50 percent,

57:22

but you show them that symbol even subtly in

57:24

the environment around them and suddenly they become

57:26

much more honest. So these things are constantly

57:29

swimming around us and gently nudging our

57:31

behavior in different directions.

57:34

It almost reminded me a little bit of the

57:36

thing you wrote about in that book about how when people

57:39

are shown a picture of eyeballs

57:41

at like a free snack bar

57:43

where they can take what they want, they're much more

57:45

honest about their decisions because eyes, again,

57:47

in a way are a symbol. Yeah. They're

57:50

a symbol of the tribe, maybe. Yeah, of

57:52

being watched, of feeling like you're being watched.

57:56

There's some really interesting evidence from this, looking

57:59

at.

58:00

using eyeballs to get people to behave

58:03

better. So if you have an image of a pair of eyes

58:05

looking at you, just disembodied, just the eyes,

58:07

you don't see any of the rest of the face. You

58:09

find that people behave much more honestly. They're

58:12

much less likely to steal something. You

58:14

see shoplifting rates go down. The

58:16

best use of it though I think is

58:19

if you, say you're a chocoholic,

58:21

you love chocolate but you don't want to be eating it,

58:23

but you also want to have a little bit around every

58:25

now and again. One thing you can do is

58:28

you can have a little cupboard in your kitchen

58:30

where the inside of the cupboard you put a mirror.

58:33

And that's where the chocolate lives. So you

58:35

open it up and every time you reach for the chocolate you

58:37

have to stare into your own soul. And

58:39

so the eyeballs, whether they're yours

58:41

or somebody else's, just having

58:44

to look at yourself not just metaphorically

58:46

but literally as you do something,

58:48

it brings out your better angels. And there's

58:50

a lot of evidence for that in various psychological

58:53

studies.

58:54

One of the things that stands in the way of acceptance

58:56

is this question which a lot of people ask when

58:58

they get stuck which is, or when they have a life

59:00

quake which is why me?

59:02

Why did this happen to me? And

59:04

that

59:06

relinquishes our sense

59:08

of personal responsibility. It makes us a victim

59:11

to the situation, which we might objectively

59:14

be a victim however you want to define it to a situation.

59:17

But it doesn't seem to be conducive with getting

59:19

out of it. No it doesn't. And you know

59:21

the interesting thing is if you go to people who are at the

59:23

end of their lives, they're on their death beds and they know

59:25

that the end is near and you say to them, did you

59:27

ever have a why me situation? Did something

59:30

happen in your life at any point where

59:32

you had cause whether you did or not you had cause

59:34

to say why me? You know this felt unfair. 100%

59:37

of them will say yes.

59:39

That's another case where we feel isolated

59:42

in those moments. We're like why me? The implication

59:44

of that is it's me but not someone

59:46

else. Their turn will come. We will

59:48

all have these moments that are really hard to deal

59:51

with. Some of us have had them already, some of us

59:53

will have more of them in the future, but they are universal.

59:56

And so the the best thing you can do I think in those moments

59:59

is to just kind of recognize that

1:00:01

it's okay to be sad and pissed

1:00:03

off and to struggle with them,

1:00:05

but also there's some comfort in knowing that actually this

1:00:07

is just what it is to be human. Everyone

1:00:09

has these moments. You're not unique

1:00:11

in responding that way and you're not unique in experiencing

1:00:14

that situation in the first place.

1:00:16

It's privileged as well as you write about in your book. It's a privileged

1:00:18

response to have that you don't

1:00:21

see across other cultures as readily.

1:00:23

It's privileged and it also I think reflects

1:00:26

the sense of agency we've got from becoming

1:00:29

essentially masters of our worlds in ways

1:00:31

that were not true for most of human

1:00:33

history.

1:00:35

As science and medicine goes, we're

1:00:37

living longer, we are generally a stronger

1:00:39

species, we can do a lot of incredible

1:00:41

things, we can move spacecraft to

1:00:43

other planets. It's ridiculous the

1:00:45

number of things we can do.

1:00:48

As a result of that, we kind of assume that that's

1:00:50

the kind of control we should have over every aspect

1:00:52

of our lives. If we can do big things that

1:00:54

are amazing, why can't we do small things that are amazing?

1:00:58

That's not the way the world works. We mistake

1:01:00

that general sense of human control over

1:01:02

the world, especially as we move away

1:01:04

from religion and become more secular.

1:01:08

We develop that sense of privilege. I think

1:01:11

cultures that don't have that to the same extent

1:01:13

or that still hew to religion more strongly,

1:01:16

you have much more of a recognition that, hey,

1:01:18

to some extent I'm kind of at the mercy of whether

1:01:21

it's the gods or however you want to describe it. That

1:01:24

makes you more open to the idea that you don't have control.

1:01:27

Is that less westernized culture, so cultures with

1:01:29

less money? Yes, that's why

1:01:31

the privilege aspect comes into it because I think the West,

1:01:34

where we are more... It's

1:01:37

expectations again, isn't it? It comes back

1:01:39

to almost everything. It's a huge, huge

1:01:41

part of the human experience.

1:01:45

We all need to lower expectations. Well,

1:01:48

have realistic ones.

1:01:51

There's going to be so many people that are listening

1:01:54

that realize that, you know, they objectively

1:01:56

realize that life comes in seasons

1:01:59

and...

1:01:59

but the difficulty comes is when one

1:02:02

of those seasons ends and we kind

1:02:04

of resist the ending. And a lot of people I

1:02:06

think will feel stuck when a season or

1:02:08

a chapter of life, one of those lifequakes, you

1:02:10

know, I guess, the start of a lifequake, I guess, is

1:02:12

when one of those seasons ends. Knowing from

1:02:15

a

1:02:16

intellectual, from a strategy

1:02:18

standpoint, how to deal with

1:02:20

it in that moment. Cause when a season of

1:02:22

life ends, there's so much uncertainty and

1:02:24

fear and you can't always

1:02:27

see the season to come.

1:02:29

And that's where a lot of those feelings come from.

1:02:31

He talked about acceptance being

1:02:33

a key path

1:02:36

forward.

1:02:37

But is there anything else? I really want to

1:02:39

make sure that we've completed that. Is there anything

1:02:41

else that we can do to be

1:02:44

better at transitioning from one season of

1:02:46

life to the other? Yeah, so

1:02:48

I love this philosophy from the

1:02:50

rock musician, Jeff Tweedy, the frontman of

1:02:52

the band Wilco, who's also a writer. He

1:02:55

writes, he does music. He's a

1:02:57

Renaissance man.

1:03:00

He talks about that feeling of being stuck

1:03:02

and sometimes it's in transitions, but also it's

1:03:05

when you're chronically being forced to come up

1:03:07

with new ideas if you're a creative. And I think

1:03:09

this applies to transitions to

1:03:11

new periods as well. He talks about

1:03:13

this idea that, you know, for decades

1:03:16

he has had to wake up and his bread and butter

1:03:18

is to come up with creative songs and

1:03:20

to write good passages that will then become part

1:03:22

of a book.

1:03:24

That is asking a lot of people. But what he

1:03:26

does is he recognizes that above all else,

1:03:29

action is gonna move him forward. When you feel stuck,

1:03:31

action, even if it's slightly sideways, it may

1:03:33

not be exactly where you want to go, but the

1:03:35

mere fact that you're acting

1:03:37

gives you feedback that you're not stuck,

1:03:39

that you're moving in the right direction.

1:03:41

And so he talks about, at least temporarily,

1:03:44

lowering your expectations to the ground. And

1:03:46

so he talks about pouring out the bad ideas.

1:03:48

If he's writing a song, he'll say, what's the worst musical

1:03:51

phrase I could write right now? Or what's the worst

1:03:53

line for this book? Let me come up with three

1:03:55

of the worst lines ever.

1:03:57

And that's easy to do, because you have no expectation.

1:03:59

expectations. It's not maximizing or

1:04:02

satisfying, it's just like the bare minimum.

1:04:05

And when you do that,

1:04:07

you get the ball rolling, you show

1:04:09

yourself that you're not stuck, and so then what follows

1:04:12

that, as he describes it, is the good stuff. That's

1:04:15

when you get your good ideas, because the

1:04:18

wheels have been greased and you're moving forward. And

1:04:20

I think that's true in transition periods, that we spend a lot

1:04:22

of time agonizing, there's a lot of dealing

1:04:24

with the emotions, which is fair, there's

1:04:27

a lot of time strategizing,

1:04:29

that just acting is tremendously liberating,

1:04:32

even if the action itself doesn't bring measurable

1:04:35

rewards in the short term. I was thinking as you

1:04:37

were saying that, within the context of

1:04:39

dating. So you've just come out of a horrific

1:04:41

divorce, you're sad at home on your own, you can't

1:04:44

even remember how to date, and you're going

1:04:46

to try and find someone that is as

1:04:48

appealing as the person that's just

1:04:50

dumped you or divorced you, and they're hard

1:04:52

to find, so you just procrastinate, you

1:04:54

kind of sit in the misery, and that's where you feel stuck.

1:04:57

If I apply the philosophy you've just said

1:04:59

to bad ideas first, what I'd actually do

1:05:01

is I'd just go on a date. And

1:05:04

I'd say, listen, this is not going to be the husband, but

1:05:06

we're going to start getting some practice, and we're going to start

1:05:08

getting out there and putting my makeup back on and whatever and getting

1:05:11

out there into the market, and you'd take a bad date just to

1:05:13

get the ball rolling, is that accurate? Yeah, I mean,

1:05:15

and a lot of people do that, that's the philosophy of

1:05:17

the rebound, right? Oh yeah.

1:05:20

But I think that's right, I mean, I think from the perspective

1:05:22

of the person who's been dumped,

1:05:24

we always think about the rebound from the perspective

1:05:26

of the person who suddenly discovers they're the next option.

1:05:30

You know that's not a good sign.

1:05:32

But

1:05:32

if you are the person who's trying

1:05:35

to get back out there, I think that's

1:05:37

a really great thing to do, and it doesn't have to be

1:05:39

a romantic date, it's just like, go do something.

1:05:42

You're going to, you'll wallow for a little bit,

1:05:44

which is fine,

1:05:46

but the best thing you can do is to, as I said,

1:05:48

move sideways. Moving forwards might be going on

1:05:50

more dates to try and find the next person. It's

1:05:52

not time for that yet. It's time to just

1:05:54

go and go to a movie, go and see a

1:05:56

rock band, like do whatever it is you like doing,

1:05:58

just so

1:05:59

you're not afraid.

1:05:59

not doing nothing, just act. And

1:06:02

action, one of the great things it does, especially when you're

1:06:05

ruminating and you're thinking about how bad and tough

1:06:07

things are, is action

1:06:09

is a phenomenal distraction.

1:06:11

Like when you're acting, you're not thinking as much. And

1:06:13

so it's worth doing just to be doing

1:06:16

something. That's why people rebound,

1:06:18

isn't it? But it also gives us a sense of meaning and purpose,

1:06:20

which is often the thing that the rejection

1:06:23

has robbed us of. So me going out

1:06:25

and having a one night stand, I don't

1:06:28

advise it, I'm not against it, but I don't

1:06:30

advise it. No opinion on one night

1:06:32

stands. Going out and having

1:06:34

a one night stand, maybe the reason I

1:06:36

feel rejection is because I'm telling

1:06:39

myself a story that I'm unlovable or unwanted

1:06:41

and

1:06:41

going out and

1:06:42

getting evidence that someone is

1:06:45

interested in me can help with the pain

1:06:47

of the rejection. And it's the same within work, if you've

1:06:49

been fired from a job, maybe

1:06:51

you're telling yourself a story about

1:06:53

your self worth and just going out there and

1:06:55

doing some work,

1:06:57

even if it's volunteering somewhere, could be

1:07:00

help ease the rejection because the rejection often is

1:07:02

just a story, isn't it? Yeah, I mean,

1:07:04

I think that's right. I also think the human experience

1:07:06

is essentially bouncing like a ping pong ball

1:07:09

from one thing to the next, where the next thing you

1:07:11

do is trying to capture whatever feels like

1:07:13

it's missing from the last thing. And actually

1:07:15

a lot of relationships, when people jump from relationship

1:07:18

to relationship, are about exactly that.

1:07:20

It's like

1:07:22

when a relationship ends, you think

1:07:24

about what was the thing that was missing in that one? Like

1:07:26

why didn't it work?

1:07:27

And you fixate on that with the next person. Now,

1:07:30

there may have been some great things about the last person.

1:07:32

You forget to focus on retaining those

1:07:34

in the next person. And so then you're missing something

1:07:37

different in the next person that you go to after

1:07:39

that. And so this is what we do in jobs.

1:07:41

This is what we do in how we spend our time

1:07:44

in pursuits, in

1:07:46

dating. We're constantly trying to create

1:07:48

the thing that feels like it's missing because humans

1:07:51

by nature just focus on deficits,

1:07:53

on the losses, on

1:07:55

the negatives. And so that sort of propels us forward.

1:07:58

What's a better approach?

1:07:59

I mean, you

1:08:01

know, the explicit one is the sort of gratitude approach

1:08:03

in saying what's working.

1:08:05

Like that's the flip side of this is to say, whether

1:08:08

it's about a relationship or a job, what

1:08:10

were the best five things about that relationship

1:08:12

that I would want to retain in future?

1:08:14

If you don't ask yourself that question,

1:08:17

it biases the decisions you make thereafter.

1:08:19

And I think it biases them in a way that's really unproductive.

1:08:22

It's going to be true if you jump to a new job, move

1:08:24

to a new country or city or town, any

1:08:27

change.

1:08:28

It's worth asking, what do I, not only what

1:08:30

didn't work and do I want to fix, but

1:08:32

also what did work and do I want to retain?

1:08:35

The best way to get unstuck is to simplify

1:08:37

the problem as much as possible. That

1:08:40

way you can identify what the

1:08:42

sticking points are. I call this simplifying

1:08:44

of the complex a friction audit.

1:08:47

What did you mean by that? Yeah. So

1:08:49

over the years I've,

1:08:51

I've met people who

1:08:54

need much less time to make sense of

1:08:56

complicated situations, knowing

1:08:58

what's not important.

1:09:00

It's good to know what's important, but I think a lot of us

1:09:02

can do that. What's really hard is

1:09:04

being able to say,

1:09:06

subtract that, subtract that, subtract that.

1:09:08

This is the thing. This is the nugget, the kernel.

1:09:11

This is what I should be focusing on. And so

1:09:13

that's, that's the idea of, of kind

1:09:15

of the importance of subtracting. And

1:09:18

there's a great book called subtract by Lydie Klotz

1:09:20

that's on this exact topic. The friction

1:09:23

audit itself is a sort

1:09:25

of philosophical version

1:09:27

of that idea where

1:09:30

in business in particular, I do a lot of business

1:09:32

consulting that works on, on this, this friction

1:09:34

audit process. And I spent a long

1:09:36

time with companies that asked the question, how

1:09:38

do we,

1:09:39

how do we sweeten the deal? Now, how do we make

1:09:41

the product better, more attractive? How do

1:09:43

we stand above the crowd? And

1:09:46

I started to realize that the return on investment to doing

1:09:48

that is often minimal and it's expensive to

1:09:50

do that. And it's really hard to do that in a competitive

1:09:52

marketplace where everyone's doing the same

1:09:55

thing.

1:09:55

But where you get your massive return is

1:09:58

not by focusing on making the carrot.

1:09:59

more attractive. It's by removing the stick that

1:10:02

stops people from doing what you'd like them to

1:10:04

do. Maybe it's interacting with a customer

1:10:06

service rep, maybe it's buying, maybe it's making

1:10:08

a particular choice, maybe it's understanding

1:10:11

information, whatever it is. If

1:10:13

you weed those out, you sand them down,

1:10:16

so there's no longer friction there,

1:10:17

you see tremendous rises in conversion, often

1:10:20

for almost no cost. It's

1:10:22

just a matter of asking that particular frame

1:10:24

of question and going through that friction audit

1:10:26

process. And that friction audit process,

1:10:28

I guess it starts with that question, which is like what's getting

1:10:31

in the way? You can ask yourself that, you

1:10:33

can ask your team that question. You

1:10:35

probably don't ask our teams

1:10:38

that question enough, just generally in business, which is

1:10:40

because we're always thinking about things

1:10:42

we can add, maybe

1:10:45

something we can buy,

1:10:48

equipment we could buy, someone we could hire.

1:10:51

Yeah, I mean, when I think about this, certainly

1:10:54

for teams that works really well, I also think for individual

1:10:56

lives,

1:10:57

everyone, if you ask them, this is really liberating,

1:11:00

I like to do this sometimes, what are the three things

1:11:02

in your life right now that cause you the most friction?

1:11:05

It could be interactions with a certain person, it

1:11:07

could be commuting if you're traveling

1:11:09

a lot, everyone's got a different answer

1:11:12

to the question. But imagine that those

1:11:14

three things you could just eradicate from your life right

1:11:16

now. How much better would your life be?

1:11:19

And people often say,

1:11:20

like, wait, 100% better. My

1:11:23

life would be double as good as it is now. And

1:11:26

so the next thing is to say, well, that's a massive

1:11:28

return on investment. If you can't eradicate

1:11:30

them, that's fine, but at least sand them

1:11:33

down, minimize them, shrink them to the extent

1:11:35

possible. That's where you should devote your resources.

1:11:37

It's a really, really powerful intervention

1:11:40

for individual lives. But I think also, as you said, in

1:11:42

the workplace as well. Such a good habit

1:11:44

to have asking that question frequently, not just to

1:11:46

yourself, but also just to the people you work with. Yes.

1:11:49

Because you get such surprising answers when you ask

1:11:51

these questions. Also to your

1:11:53

partner or to your friend, your close

1:11:55

friends, there's nothing better than

1:11:56

being asked that question. If someone asks

1:11:58

you that the degree.

1:11:59

of caring, if they actually seem

1:12:02

like they want to be able to help, that

1:12:04

will melt any barriers between

1:12:06

you and another person. If you genuinely say,

1:12:08

what are the three things right now that feel like they're

1:12:10

the hardest, most unpleasant things, and how can

1:12:12

I help you fix them?

1:12:14

Is a tremendously uplifting,

1:12:17

connecting experience.

1:12:19

It made me reflect, as you were saying that, on

1:12:21

that. Is it the 61 rule in aviation?

1:12:23

Have you heard that? Yeah,

1:12:26

I think I know what you mean. Where if you're one

1:12:28

degree off for every X amount

1:12:30

of miles you travel, you'll miss the airport

1:12:33

by 60

1:12:34

miles or something like that. So

1:12:36

just one degree in deviation

1:12:38

from the

1:12:39

path, which could be anything that's causing friction

1:12:41

in your relationship at work, in whatever you're doing,

1:12:44

means that you'll miss the airport

1:12:46

by 60 miles for every 100 miles

1:12:48

you travel or something like that. And

1:12:50

it kind of shows how one small unaddressed friction

1:12:52

point in your life could make you miss the

1:12:55

target in such a significant way. By checking in, by

1:12:57

doing the friction audit frequently, hopefully

1:12:59

we can make sure we stay on course in our lives.

1:13:01

I think about that a lot with my relationship, because quite

1:13:04

honestly, if I'm away on business or I'm just

1:13:06

getting caught up in my life and I don't

1:13:08

do a bit of a friction audit in our relationship,

1:13:11

you get a couple of weeks in and

1:13:13

I look over at her in the kitchen, something's

1:13:16

wrong. I don't know what's wrong, but

1:13:20

something's wrong. And it's always because I haven't

1:13:22

done, we haven't had a conversation in a while

1:13:24

about like something we haven't checked in. Yeah,

1:13:27

I think it's huge. I actually talk

1:13:30

about this in the book, that 61 idea. Oh,

1:13:32

so you know what it is? I like destroyed

1:13:35

it. No, no, no, no, no. So I don't talk

1:13:37

about it as the 61, but I talk about

1:13:39

the Y2K bug that people were

1:13:41

worried about around the turn of the century to 2000. There

1:13:44

was this concern that all these computers would

1:13:46

crash because they all had the two digit number

1:13:49

associated with the year. So in 1999,

1:13:51

it said 99, but when we ticked

1:13:53

over to 2000, it went zero zero and a lot of

1:13:55

computers would think it was 1900 instead of 2000. This

1:13:59

was a concern that

1:13:59

that planes would fall out of the sky and nuclear

1:14:02

power plants would explode and all this.

1:14:05

But they first identified this problem in the 60s. There

1:14:07

was a guy at IBM named Bob Bema,

1:14:10

and I think it's Bema or Bema, who

1:14:13

was like, hey, we should figure this out. Like

1:14:15

it's not a big deal yet, but I think computers are going to

1:14:17

be big. There are going to be a lot of them around by the

1:14:19

year 2000. Let's deal with this in

1:14:22

the 60s where it's easy to reprogram

1:14:24

the few computers we have. Let's make

1:14:26

it a four-digit number or do whatever we need to do.

1:14:29

In the end, governments in the 90s spent

1:14:31

billions of dollars because that one degree off

1:14:34

in 1960 that no one bothered to correct ended

1:14:36

up being the 60 by the time

1:14:38

we got to the year 2000. These

1:14:40

little things that niggle that we don't deal with

1:14:43

end up getting worse and worse and worse,

1:14:45

and it's so true about relationships.

1:14:48

They compound negatively against us. My

1:14:51

favorite book I ever read when I started reading more

1:14:53

was, I think it's called Jeff Olsen, The

1:14:55

Slight Edge. He talks exactly about

1:14:57

that. How about the things that are easy

1:14:59

not to do,

1:15:02

like

1:15:03

saving five pounds or brushing your teeth,

1:15:06

other things that end up compounding

1:15:08

against us or for us in our lives and having

1:15:10

the most significant impact

1:15:12

because we ignore those things. We don't think they're important.

1:15:15

That's why I think of Friction Order. It's

1:15:18

not

1:15:19

a waste of time. It's often sweating the

1:15:21

smallest things that garnish the biggest results.

1:15:24

As you know, they're a sponsor of the podcast and I'm one

1:15:26

of the investors in the company. My relationship

1:15:28

with Huel started

1:15:30

with the ready to drink range, which I have here

1:15:32

in front of me on the table. Why did I choose

1:15:35

to drink this? First and foremost,

1:15:37

convenience. I'm not the type of person that wants to

1:15:39

spend a huge amount of time whisking or mixing

1:15:41

things together. I don't typically have a huge

1:15:43

amount of time during the day. There are some days, not always,

1:15:46

but there are some days where because

1:15:48

of the limited amount of time I have,

1:15:51

the choices that I would ordinarily reach for aren't

1:15:53

necessarily the most healthy choices. They're certainly not

1:15:55

nutritionally complete. As soon as

1:15:57

I discovered Huel existed because of a wonderful

1:15:59

guy who worked on one of my teams in Manchester walked

1:16:02

past me wearing a Hjel t-shirt, I inquired

1:16:04

what it was, he told me what it was and then

1:16:06

I bought the ready to drink bottles into the

1:16:08

office. It was a game changer for me and it meant

1:16:10

that on those days where I'm tempted to reach for

1:16:13

less nutritionally complete options or less

1:16:15

healthy food options, I have something

1:16:18

right underneath my desk in the fridge that I can

1:16:20

reach for that allows me to remain in line

1:16:22

with my health and nutrition goals.

1:16:24

And Tesco have now increased their listings

1:16:27

with Hjel so you can now get the RTD

1:16:29

ready to drink

1:16:29

in Tesco Expresses all across the UK.

1:16:32

Career hot streaks. Yeah,

1:16:35

I love this research. These researchers

1:16:38

were asking this question, is there something if we

1:16:40

look at the course of thousands

1:16:42

of careers in different areas, creatives,

1:16:44

business people and so on, scientists,

1:16:48

can you predict when we're going to have the best periods

1:16:50

in our careers? That's basically what they're asking.

1:16:53

They call this a hot streak.

1:16:55

If you're an academic and you publish your five most high

1:16:57

impact papers or if you're a filmmaker

1:17:00

and you have five films that are seen as your canon,

1:17:02

when is that going to happen? Can we predict that? Is there

1:17:04

a way to manufacture that if I'm a filmmaker or

1:17:07

a scientist? And they identify

1:17:09

these two processes that need to happen in precisely

1:17:11

this order. One of them

1:17:14

is known as exploration and in

1:17:16

exploration you go far and wide. You

1:17:18

basically you have a default of yes, which

1:17:21

means that when someone comes to you with an opportunity, you're

1:17:23

like, yeah, sure, why not? I give a talk

1:17:25

to freshmen at NYU and they should, as

1:17:28

freshmen, that time in your life, you should be an explorer.

1:17:31

You don't know what you're going to end up doing with your life. You

1:17:33

could stumble on something wonderful. You should say yes

1:17:35

to everything. And during

1:17:37

this phase, they talk about Jackson

1:17:40

Pollock, the artist who ended up developing his drip

1:17:42

technique that he became famous for. Before

1:17:44

he did that, he spent a number of years trying

1:17:47

five or six different other techniques. Peter

1:17:49

Jackson, who made The Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films

1:17:51

and became a titan for those films,

1:17:54

he was doing horror and all sorts of other stuff before

1:17:56

that. These were their exploratory periods.

1:17:59

But at some point, that yes

1:18:02

default has to become a no default where you

1:18:04

say, hey, I've been trying these different things. I've

1:18:07

been exploring. It's time to exploit. That's

1:18:09

the second phase. And during that phase

1:18:11

you say, Hey,

1:18:12

of those five or six things I was exploring,

1:18:15

this one looks like it has the most promise.

1:18:17

I'm going to pour my heart and soul into that thing

1:18:20

for a little while and see what comes of it. So for

1:18:22

Jackson Pollock, it was the drip painting for Peter

1:18:24

Jackson. It's these big epic fantasy

1:18:26

films. And what

1:18:29

happens then is you've considered

1:18:31

the options, you pick the best one, and then you

1:18:33

make the absolute most you can make of it. You

1:18:35

squeeze all the juice out of the orange. And

1:18:38

that's when those successful

1:18:40

hot streak periods arise, when you

1:18:42

go broad and then you go really narrow.

1:18:45

And then when you feel stuck again, you go broad again,

1:18:47

and then you go narrow. And you expand

1:18:49

and you contract throughout your life professionally.

1:18:52

And I think personally as well, that's,

1:18:54

that's, I think, a path to a good life.

1:18:58

So people that might have been doing the same thing for

1:19:00

a

1:19:01

couple of decades or a decade are

1:19:03

probably not going to stumble across a career hot streak because

1:19:06

then they're missing that experimentation and that

1:19:08

exploration. Yeah, I think that's right. And

1:19:10

you know, the best evidence for this, for me, at least

1:19:12

personally was, um, when

1:19:14

I give this talk to the freshmen, I show

1:19:16

them the four emails that I've got in the last 20

1:19:19

years that changed my life and my

1:19:21

instinct, I actually show them, I

1:19:24

redact some of the information, but I show them the images

1:19:26

of these emails that arrived in my inbox. And

1:19:29

I remember with each one, when they arrived, I was

1:19:31

like,

1:19:31

I'm so busy. I, there's no way

1:19:34

I can do this. It would be an email from someone saying,

1:19:36

for example, before I wrote my first book,

1:19:38

an agent reached out and said, I just read

1:19:40

a piece about some of your research. I think there might be

1:19:42

a book in this. What do you think? My first,

1:19:45

my first instinct was like, I

1:19:47

don't have time for this. I I'm so busy. I'm

1:19:49

a first year professor, but

1:19:51

I was in this exploratory period. So I ended

1:19:53

up saying yes. Totally changed my

1:19:55

professional life. I have a few others

1:19:58

that are like that.

1:19:59

And. Those four are sitting

1:20:01

in a pool with thousands that went nowhere.

1:20:04

But

1:20:04

if you don't have that yes default for a certain

1:20:07

period of time, you're never going to find those

1:20:09

four gold nuggets in that

1:20:11

otherwise kind of silty mess.

1:20:13

And so I think it's a really important default to have

1:20:15

at certain times in your life. We talked

1:20:17

before we started recording about some of the subject matter you love

1:20:20

talking about and creativity was one of them.

1:20:22

When we think about creativity, a lot of people think

1:20:24

about this, the process of coming up with a new

1:20:26

idea. And

1:20:29

by trial and error, I've tried to figure

1:20:31

out the conditions which allow me to

1:20:33

come up with my best ideas. What I mean,

1:20:35

I've got a couple of hypotheses around when

1:20:38

I'm you know, when I'm at the gym, I seem to come up with all my

1:20:40

best ideas or when

1:20:42

I have

1:20:44

space. Yeah, but the process of

1:20:46

coming up with an idea, if I was

1:20:48

to if you were advising me as a

1:20:50

consultant on how to get my teams to

1:20:53

think of better ideas or to come up with our best

1:20:56

ideas, what would you what would you advise

1:20:58

us to do? Yeah, so here's a long term

1:21:00

strategy that I think is really valuable that I've used

1:21:02

and I've found very helpful. I have

1:21:04

several documents

1:21:06

that are about 20 years old.

1:21:08

One of them is called research ideas.

1:21:11

One is called book ideas. One is called

1:21:13

teaching ideas. And every

1:21:16

time I see anything that's even remotely

1:21:18

interesting to me that's related to one of those, I put

1:21:20

it in one of those documents, depending on what it is. Like

1:21:22

for teaching ideas, it'll be a great ad campaign

1:21:24

that I want to share with my students. If

1:21:26

you do that for 20 years,

1:21:28

that document gets really, really long.

1:21:31

And so my documents now, those are some

1:21:33

of them, I think, like 40 or 50 pages long,

1:21:35

just line after line of links and ideas

1:21:38

and short descriptions of things that I've come across

1:21:40

that are useful. If I go back

1:21:42

to that, it does two things. One

1:21:44

thing is it shows me over time what I'm interested

1:21:47

in, because sometimes it's hard in the moment to say,

1:21:49

I don't know what am I generally interested in? But

1:21:51

I have a 20 year record of what I'm interested in.

1:21:54

The other thing it does is it allows you to do

1:21:56

what I think of as the best, the single best

1:21:58

reproducible process for. coming up with creative

1:22:00

ideas, which is called recombination.

1:22:04

So we have this illusion that the best

1:22:06

ideas are radically original, that they stand

1:22:08

on their own. They're different from anything that came

1:22:10

before. They are paradigm shifts. Everything

1:22:13

changes. But even when

1:22:15

you look at those ideas that seem that way, you interrogate

1:22:18

them and you trace them back far enough, they are almost

1:22:21

always a combination of old ideas, or

1:22:23

a recombination. So the

1:22:25

best example of this that I came across, and I talk about

1:22:27

this in the book, when

1:22:30

you ask musicians who is the most original

1:22:32

musician of the 20th century, one of

1:22:34

the most common responses is Bob Dylan. But

1:22:37

if you look deeply, Dylan

1:22:40

certainly had a lot of elements that seemed like they were

1:22:42

different from what other people were doing. But he

1:22:44

himself has said, oh yeah, I was borrowing from this tradition

1:22:47

and that tradition and the folk tradition and this artist

1:22:49

and that artist.

1:22:50

And then when you look at the DNA of his music, there's

1:22:52

so much evidence for what came before. It's

1:22:55

true in business ideas as well.

1:22:58

One of the things I ask my students to do

1:23:00

is come up with a radically original

1:23:02

idea in business that you've seen. Tell

1:23:05

me about a company that's doing something radically original. And

1:23:07

then I'll say, they'll come up with something and then I'll say, all right,

1:23:10

tell me what is similar to that that came before it.

1:23:12

And they can always come up with something.

1:23:14

So is it radically original or was it

1:23:16

just a new combination of elements that existed

1:23:18

before?

1:23:19

And I think that

1:23:21

if you have this long document,

1:23:23

randomly pick idea three and idea 12 and see

1:23:25

if you can combine them and there you might have a business

1:23:28

or an idea that's useful

1:23:29

and creative. We could also do that collectively, I guess, as

1:23:32

a team and as a company, we could create an

1:23:34

internal

1:23:35

ideas document, which everyone can kind of contribute

1:23:37

to in terms of we're thinking, ways

1:23:40

to make this

1:23:42

podcast or one of my businesses more successful,

1:23:45

just dumping in ideas that we're

1:23:47

kind of on the someday shelf.

1:23:51

We went with them when we revisit

1:23:53

that document in the future, we can go, okay, so we were

1:23:55

trying to find a way to get

1:23:57

listeners to share the podcast more and

1:23:59

oh, someone found.

1:23:59

a tool over here that does something else for this

1:24:02

part of the building. Maybe we could combine these two things and use

1:24:04

that to share the podcast more. Here's a tweak to that.

1:24:06

I think that's a great idea, but if you make it a collective document,

1:24:08

people are going to feel like the ideas have to be a certain level

1:24:11

of goodness to share them. Okay. So

1:24:13

start alone. Everyone has their own document and then you

1:24:15

combine it at some point. Ah, nice. That's much

1:24:17

better for, in general, that idea of brainstorming

1:24:19

as the first step. Great if you do it on your own.

1:24:22

You never want to start by thinking in a group.

1:24:24

Groupthink. You're always going to start alone. Yeah.

1:24:27

People converge. They're scared. What

1:24:29

are the things? Do you do much of that? Do you do much of

1:24:32

corporate consulting? Yeah. Quite

1:24:34

a lot. What typically tends

1:24:36

to be the symptoms or

1:24:38

the challenge that corporations are typically stuck

1:24:41

with? Yeah. So,

1:24:43

I mean, not all the consulting I do is about being

1:24:45

stuck specifically, but that's often

1:24:47

a way of framing why you would get a consultant

1:24:50

in, right? There's something you want to change and you want to fix

1:24:52

it. So very, very often

1:24:54

it's a company that's experienced a change

1:24:57

in situation.

1:24:59

The cost of our raw materials has gone up.

1:25:01

What do we do now? Or there's a

1:25:03

thing that we needed and we can't get that anymore.

1:25:06

Or the legislation has changed and the government

1:25:08

now doesn't let us do this key part of what we used to

1:25:10

do. So, a lot of it ends up being quite operational

1:25:13

when it's about stuckness. It's like, how do we pivot?

1:25:15

How do we figure out a way around this situation?

1:25:20

But the consulting briefs are incredibly

1:25:22

broad and varied, which is, again, why I love it so much

1:25:24

because no two gigs is the same. Pivoting

1:25:27

then? So, a lot of pivoting and a lot of figuring

1:25:30

out how to change and also what doesn't

1:25:32

need to change. I think often the instinct is, yeah,

1:25:35

I did some work with a company that makes denim

1:25:37

jeans and they were like, well, cotton's just gone up dramatically

1:25:40

in price. And so as a result, it's more expensive

1:25:42

to make our jeans. What do we do? And

1:25:46

they're like, we need to just overhaul the whole process. I was

1:25:48

like, I don't know. I don't think you do. I think what

1:25:50

you need to do is frame the rise in price

1:25:52

in a way that people don't bulk and run away. A

1:25:55

long, strong relationship with

1:25:57

a lot of customers over time. You have a strong brand

1:25:59

identity. on. So no,

1:26:01

don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Let's just figure

1:26:03

out how we can sell the idea that maybe things are just

1:26:05

a bit more expensive now. And against

1:26:08

a backdrop where everything's more expensive now.

1:26:10

So often it's about minimizing

1:26:12

change. As it relates to these hundred ways

1:26:15

to get unstuck, do you have any that are

1:26:18

your favorite, all

1:26:20

that people seem to be most receptive to, that

1:26:22

are maybe more on the original side of things?

1:26:25

Some of them are very narrow and specific, like case studies

1:26:27

that I talk about, but a lot of them are sort of concepts

1:26:30

like the idea that when things get hard, that's

1:26:32

when creativity begins. Like you've got to let

1:26:34

things get hard. And we're not creative

1:26:36

until we struggle is really

1:26:38

important. It's very liberating because

1:26:40

what it does is it takes the naive

1:26:42

theory of what it is to struggle to be creative,

1:26:45

turns it on its head and says, hey, you're going in

1:26:47

exactly the right direction.

1:26:48

It's the hardship that heralds the good stuff.

1:26:51

So if it's not hard yet, that's the problem. You've

1:26:54

got to keep going till it gets there.

1:26:56

A lot of people find that quite

1:26:58

liberating. I've been playing around in the notes of my

1:27:00

phone with this idea. I was trying to find a way

1:27:02

to put up my stories over the last two days. And

1:27:04

like I'd got to this point about how the

1:27:07

rarity of the amount of people that overcome the challenge

1:27:10

directly correlates to the rarity of the rewards

1:27:13

behind the door. So when something is

1:27:15

sort of the level of difficulty is a signal

1:27:17

of how many people gave up at that exact moment. And

1:27:20

then logically, if you

1:27:21

pursue and overcome the difficulty or get

1:27:24

through that door, fewer people got the

1:27:26

rewards behind that door. And you're saying a very,

1:27:28

very similar thing. You're right. It helps you reframe

1:27:31

what difficulty is. Difficulty isn't

1:27:34

a signal to turn back. It's

1:27:36

a signal that if you keep going, the rewards

1:27:38

just got greater.

1:27:39

Yeah. And I also think it's a question of how

1:27:41

difficult is this for other people? Right. So

1:27:44

being creative is hard. It's hard

1:27:46

for everyone, even really good, good creatives.

1:27:49

They get to a point where it's kind of gets difficult

1:27:51

because you're trying to come up with something out of whole cloth

1:27:54

that's new. Yeah. And so that's not easy

1:27:56

for anyone. Yeah.

1:27:57

If there's something that most people can do really.

1:27:59

easily and you're struggling with it, that's very different

1:28:02

from doing something that's hard and persevering through

1:28:04

that hardship. So I think it's always important

1:28:06

to ask in the background,

1:28:08

am I,

1:28:10

by finding this hard, is that just like part

1:28:12

of the course of doing this thing or am I

1:28:15

finding it hard because I should be putting my mind and attention

1:28:17

elsewhere, maybe I'm just not very good at this thing and

1:28:20

I would be better spending my time doing something

1:28:22

else.

1:28:23

Is there anything else in your work? Because you're

1:28:25

such a multifaceted guy, I mean you've written about

1:28:28

a variety of different subject matters from how

1:28:31

screens are

1:28:32

harming us and our addiction to these

1:28:34

mobile devices to your first

1:28:37

book which sent a lot

1:28:39

on cognitive biases and psychology and

1:28:41

then this book about getting unstuck and all

1:28:43

the psychology around that. Is there anything else that

1:28:46

we should have talked about that you think is valuable

1:28:48

to my audience? My audience are a group of people that

1:28:50

are trying to get better in their lives. They're trying to get unstuck, trying

1:28:53

to get closer to their potential. Yeah.

1:28:55

I'll say one thing. I've been doing a lot

1:28:57

of research lately on nostalgia, on

1:28:59

the concept of nostalgia. I

1:29:02

think in many ways it's the most powerful

1:29:04

backward facing emotion we have. As

1:29:07

you get older,

1:29:08

you start to miss things that are

1:29:10

no longer existing in your life that you loved

1:29:13

at the time and that you think back on really fondly

1:29:15

and sometimes you even misremember them and you think

1:29:17

of them as better than they actually were at the time.

1:29:20

But it's an incredibly powerful emotion.

1:29:24

One of the things we've been finding in this research is

1:29:26

that

1:29:26

the things that make you nostalgic

1:29:29

are often at the time what you think

1:29:31

of as mundane routines. I

1:29:34

really miss grad school. I went to Princeton

1:29:36

and loved it and had a great five years there,

1:29:39

but I don't miss the momentous events. I

1:29:41

don't miss graduation. I don't miss ceremonies.

1:29:44

I don't miss these big culmination. I

1:29:47

miss the really mundane stuff. I miss

1:29:49

walking this one path that I used

1:29:51

to take in the summer between my dorm room

1:29:53

and the office. I did it hundreds of times.

1:29:56

If I could just do that walk one more time.

1:29:58

I think there's a kind of of message there that

1:30:01

we often mistake

1:30:03

these momentous things that we go through

1:30:05

for being like what life is really

1:30:07

about. But actually a lot of it is the

1:30:09

kind of mundane routine stuff

1:30:12

that's every day. And the reason I like

1:30:14

that idea so much is because it suggests that you

1:30:17

can ring tremendous value

1:30:20

out of things that might seem

1:30:22

trivial or not that important if

1:30:25

you recognize that. Like it's changed the way I live

1:30:27

my life. I cultivate so many little routines

1:30:29

out of every day because I know when I look back

1:30:31

that's the stuff that's going to really feel

1:30:34

full of reward and meaning. I

1:30:36

think we try too hard sometimes to make everything

1:30:39

bigger and better and more kind of emotionally

1:30:41

explosive. And so

1:30:43

that's I've always found that at

1:30:45

least since discovering that it's been a really powerful idea

1:30:48

for me.

1:30:49

I think about that. You were just saying about nostalgia,

1:30:51

relationships I've had,

1:30:53

companies we've been in and worked

1:30:55

in for many, many years. And you look back

1:30:58

at the early days and you go, oh,

1:31:00

I wish we could have that again. But you can't I

1:31:02

can't quite easily put my finger on

1:31:04

exactly what it was other than a

1:31:07

bit of excitement. Yeah. You know, a couple of

1:31:09

moments where I have flashbacks of

1:31:12

good moments we had. But there's nothing to say we can't create

1:31:14

those little good moments of celebrating

1:31:16

together in a bar now. And

1:31:20

I mean, there are three components to well-being. There's

1:31:22

anticipation before something happens. There's

1:31:24

momentary when it's happening. And then there's retrospection

1:31:26

after it's happened. Think about a trip you take. If

1:31:29

you're really excited for a trip, I'm going to Europe this

1:31:31

summer and I'm very excited about it. A

1:31:33

particular trip that I'm going to be taking. And

1:31:35

I think our job as humans

1:31:37

in sort of respect of all the time

1:31:40

and energy we put into living our lives is try

1:31:42

to maximize across those three kinds of

1:31:44

well-being the sum of those three.

1:31:48

So the fun stuff, book it in as early as possible.

1:31:50

So you start enjoying it today before it's happened. And

1:31:53

then in the moment, which tends to be very brief,

1:31:55

right, the moments themselves are brief, most

1:31:57

of the value comes in thinking back for the

1:31:59

hopefully decades that come afterwards. So

1:32:02

you're saying get your phones out? Yeah exactly.

1:32:04

Just spend every minute on your phone. Take

1:32:07

a photo of everything. Yeah. Spend the whole time

1:32:09

at Coachella just videoing. Just videoing it. You

1:32:12

don't actually want to experience it. You just want

1:32:14

to look back on it. That's fantastic advice. Thank

1:32:16

you Adam so much for your time. We have a closing tradition on this

1:32:18

podcast where the last guest leaves a question for

1:32:21

the next guest not knowing who they're going to be

1:32:23

leaving it for. I don't get to see

1:32:25

it until I open the book.

1:32:29

The

1:32:31

question that's been left for you is what

1:32:35

is one belief or behavior that

1:32:38

has positively impacted

1:32:40

your life in the past 12 months?

1:32:48

So I've spent a lot of time over

1:32:50

the last few years critiquing tech

1:32:52

and that's what a lot of my work has been about

1:32:54

because I think it's

1:32:57

technology generally and screen-based tech, we

1:32:59

spend a lot of our time on it and I don't think

1:33:01

it always brings us the rewards we'd hope.

1:33:05

My instinct when I first discovered

1:33:08

generative AI, chat GPT

1:33:11

and the other models that are proliferating

1:33:13

was similar. It was sort of this

1:33:15

negativity. It's going to steal jobs. It's going to be

1:33:17

problematic but

1:33:21

I sort of adopted a more experimental mindset

1:33:23

and I've started using it and I've

1:33:26

started using it more than anything as a kind of brainstorming

1:33:28

partner. It's like instead of having a brain trust

1:33:30

of 10 very smart friends who all think a bit differently

1:33:33

about something,

1:33:34

chat GPT is like billions of people all thinking

1:33:36

differently about things and you can keep asking it, hey

1:33:39

give me another idea, give me another idea, imagine that one's

1:33:41

wrong, let's tweak that. So I think

1:33:43

what's changed for me is I

1:33:45

am trying to embrace these

1:33:48

external things that are changing

1:33:50

around us a little bit more because my natural

1:33:52

instinct is to say let's preserve what's so special

1:33:54

about being humans and try to stave

1:33:57

off all of that infringing effect

1:33:59

that comes from from these changes.

1:34:02

But I'm finding that very

1:34:04

rewarding, because I'm finding the good. I

1:34:06

can still say no to the bad, but I'm finding a lot of

1:34:08

good.

1:34:09

I think there's a bit of a hangover

1:34:13

from the social media era and

1:34:15

how that played out, where there was this new technology.

1:34:17

We all rushed into it thinking it was all positive.

1:34:22

And as the experiment played out, we realized

1:34:24

that there are unintended consequences. So

1:34:26

I think we've come into this real next technological

1:34:29

shift with the

1:34:30

unintended consequences mindset.

1:34:33

I think that's right. I think that's exactly right. And

1:34:35

I think the pendulum shifts.

1:34:37

I remember when I was talking to people

1:34:39

about the last book, Irresistible, about screens.

1:34:42

And a lot of them were like, this is 2013, 2014. They

1:34:45

were saying things like, but everyone loves

1:34:47

tech. Why would we even consider

1:34:50

the problems? Why would you write a book about that? It's a

1:34:52

storm in a teacup. The idea that people

1:34:54

were not criticizing tech 10 years ago in the

1:34:56

way they are now, especially screen tech, surprises

1:35:00

a lot of people. But I had way more pushback

1:35:02

early on. And then in the,

1:35:04

say three or four years that followed, the pendulum

1:35:07

swung the other way to critiquing. And

1:35:09

I think now hopefully we're kind of

1:35:12

leveling out a little bit. But I think you're right. There

1:35:14

is a hangover from the social media era.

1:35:18

I think I'm quite scared about it. I mean, we use it in our

1:35:20

businesses, but I think the social

1:35:22

media era has maybe rightly

1:35:25

made us think before we go

1:35:27

all in about consequences. And

1:35:29

it's funny seeing the debates

1:35:32

in Congress and with the CEOs taking

1:35:34

place before a lot of this stuff has been built and

1:35:36

deployed now. Whereas with social media,

1:35:38

we got 10 years in or 15 years in and we were like, oh

1:35:40

my God. So let's do the run the studies now and see the

1:35:42

impact it's having. It's interesting. We're gonna

1:35:44

see how that plays out. You writing another book,

1:35:47

you thinking about a subject? Yeah, I'm always thinking about

1:35:49

stuff. As I said, I've got this document with

1:35:51

like 100 book ideas. I need to live 100 lives

1:35:54

to write them all. But I'm

1:35:56

pretty focused on this one now and some other things, but I

1:35:58

will stay.

1:35:59

start thinking about the next book proposal soon.

1:36:02

Adam, thank you. Thank you for writing such an incredible book. And

1:36:05

if you do end up writing another book, I'll be the first

1:36:07

to buy it because this book is phenomenal. All

1:36:09

your books are phenomenal because they're so accessible,

1:36:11

but they're confronting subject matter that

1:36:13

is so, as you say, has such broad appeal,

1:36:17

where there doesn't appear to be solid

1:36:19

clear answers yet. And I also

1:36:21

love authors like yourself that don't

1:36:23

take a binary approach to things because

1:36:25

life isn't binary in any regard.

1:36:28

And so being nuanced and

1:36:30

personalized, I think, is what you do so

1:36:32

well. But it's also

1:36:34

what people love so much. And you're a fantastic

1:36:37

talker.

1:36:38

You're fantastic at conveying ideas. So if

1:36:40

you ever want to start a podcast, I would certainly

1:36:43

download it. Thank you so much, Adam. It's an honor to meet

1:36:45

you. Thanks, Stephen. It's been great. Thank you.