119: Build Your Grit, Achieve Your Goal with Linda Kaplan-Thaler

Pete Mockaitis
Linda, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Linda Thaler
Thank you so much for inviting me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you have a fun history and you’ve written a lot of catchy jingles that folks are familiar with, whether it’s the Toys R Us kid or the Herbal Essences’ “Yes, yes, yes!” or others. So I just would love to hear from you. What’s a little bit of the behind the scenes and how these things come about? Because my imagination is just like Jim Gaffigan’s little Hot Pockets bit, which is like “What have you got for us? Hot Pocket.” That’s perfect. Is that how it goes? How does this work?

Linda Thaler
Yeah. Well, I will tell you that writing the Toys R Us song was a lot of fun. Actually, those kids in the commercial are now probably grandparents. I think it’s America’s longest-running jingle. But I had my masters in music, and I always loved writing children songs and never dreamed that so many kids across the country would be singing a song that I wrote. But I hated it so much when I wrote it that I wouldn’t play it for anybody. And I played it for my art director and I said, “It’s terrible, but what do you think?” And I put it away and then he said to me about a week later, he said, “You know, I keep singing that song. Maybe we should show it to the boss.”
And the boss at the time hated it, but we couldn’t find any other songs. So we played it for the client. The client tested it with five-year-olds and they gave it a thumbs-up, the ones whose thumbs were not on their mouths at the time. And what can I say? It went on the air, and the next week… This was the highest moment of my career, right? This little boy is singing the song. He’s like four or five years old, and the mother is running after him going, “If you don’t stop singing that damn song, you’re going to miss the bus for school.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, there you go.

Linda Thaler
I thought, “It’s never going to get better than that.” So I’m really excited and proud to have written that little piece of American history. It’s nice.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, that is fascinating to discover that you just didn’t know whether or not this was any good. You thought it wasn’t, and you had to go through several lines of sort of thumbs-up before you really knew. And I guess that’s just sometimes how it goes with creative stuff.

Linda Thaler
Yeah. I very often didn’t like anything that I did. I was terribly insecure. I guess I’m probably still insecure. And I think insecurity is a big part of it because it makes you reach further. And if I would write a script (I was a copywriter at J. Walter Thompson; that’s where I started in advertising), I would write it over and over again and stay up all night. I was really obsessive about stuff, but I did it because I was insecure and I wasn’t sure.
My boss was James Patterson, now the number one writer in the world, right? But at the time, he was Jim Patterson, my creative director. And he would give me an assignment to write something, and he would give me the idea, and then I would write up his idea and I’d write three others because I couldn’t stand the fact that my boss would have the best idea. I insisted on trying to outdo it, and he loved that. He loved that competitive spirit in me. And I just urged that, and I tried to, whenever I could be a mentor to people, say, “I don’t want you to try to be like me or say, ‘Oh, I can write like her.’ I want you to be better.”
And my whole career, the one thing I wasn’t insecure about was surrounding myself with people who were smarter and more talented than me. It made my job so much easier. And when I first opened my agency, that was it. I was like, “Who can I find that’s smarter than me and more creative than me and writes better than me?” And I managed to convince these people to come on board. One of them was Robin Koval who was my business partner and also the co-author of all our books. And I knew right away.
I tried to meet with business partners and I walked into this restaurant, and she had come early and she had a huge bran muffin that was surgically sliced, and I had one-half and she had the other, and she said, “Hi. I’m Robin Koval. These muffins were very expensive and very big, so I took the liberty of splitting one. If you don’t like it, I can order you something else or I can just save it for later.” And right away, I said, “That’s it.” It was love at first… business partner love at first bite. And people say with starting a company, a piece of cake. I’m like, “No, it was more like half a muffin.”
But you know that quote, “How you do anything is how you do everything”? And it was like I knew within those first 40 seconds of meeting her that she was going to be proactive, she was going to be considerate, she was going to be thinking of alternatives, and she was frugal. All the great qualities of somebody – and she was early – you want to start a company with.
And we turned our little fledgling agency with that advertisement for Herbal Essences, the woman who was having way too good a time in the shower, having an orgasmic experience with that shampoo. We started with that, and we were soon the fastest-growing agency in the United States and went from zero to $2 billion in billings and 800 people, and just went on from there. But really a lot of it was just insecurity of like “We just have to work harder than everybody else; otherwise we’re going to fail.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is quite a story. Thank you. I feel like you really took me there with the muffin and everything, so that’s so good. Well, tell us a little bit about that paranoia and that drive to work and how that fits into your latest book, “Grit to Great.”

Linda Thaler
Yeah. So here we were, and I have to say we practiced another one of our books, which we like to have counterintuitive wisdom in our books, and that was called the “Power of Nice.” That was several years ago when we wrote that, because what we found was that the secret sauce that no CEO wanted to tell you, because they thought it was a sign of weakness, is that when you’re nice to people, they work harder and you retain them. And we practice the power of nice with our little group, and we were one of the top 10 agencies in the country to work for because we believed in the idea of collaboration and not leading with spears and pitchforks, but really with flowers and chocolates.
We ascribe to Harry Truman who has this great quote. He says, “You can accomplish anything in your lifetime as long as you’re willing to take credit for none of it.” And so we took pride in that, taking credit for things and giving our ideas away to our staff because then, of course, they would work so much harder because they felt it was their idea, while we give ideas to clients so that they would work with us to sell our work upstream in their company.
And so what we found is that we started winning like everything. Aside from Toys R Us and the Red Cross and Herbal, we were winning big things like Wendy’s, which we had no right to win. We were such a tiny little agency. And we realized that Robin and I were smart. We weren’t that smart. We were talented. We certainly were not more talented than any of the other agencies out there that are filled to the rafters with incredibly talented people. What we did realize is that we just worked our tails off more than any other people in the other agencies. And when we asked clients why we won businesses, they would go on and on about the work, and they say, “But at the end of the day, we couldn’t imagine anybody that could work harder on our business.”
So then we started looking at people who were hugely successful famous people, and what made them so extraordinary was how completely ordinary they were growing up. Colin Powell, C minus student all through college, until he discovered his passion for the military, for ROTC. Steven Spielberg, three times he tried to get into film school. They didn’t think he had enough of a gift. Michael Jordan (and this was surprising to me) couldn’t even make his high school varsity basketball team because they didn’t think he had enough physical prowess. Jack Ma of Alibaba, when he graduated from college, he was considered such a low potential that he couldn’t even get a job as a server at KFC.
None of these people had what you would call the it factor, right? They didn’t have Mensa IQs. We spent three years researching this whole idea of grit. They didn’t have Mensa IQs. They didn’t have good GPAs. They didn’t have good SAT scores. They didn’t have a lot of talent when they were growing up. Walt Disney, as the story goes, he was fired from his first job because his boss said he lacked imagination. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. So they didn’t have the it factor, but what they did have was what we call the grit factor. And being ad guys, ad women, we came up with our acronym for what really encompasses grit. G: Guts.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m poised to write. Let’s hear it.

Linda Thaler
Yeah. Everybody out there, put it in your notes there. Guts, Resilience, Initiative, and Tenacity. And as we interviewed people, and as we researched and did studies, we found that 98% of the people who were successful had this grit factor. Now, conversely, and it was a study that Angela Duckworth did at the… who did a lot of work on grit at the University of Pennsylvania. Believe it or not, people who were born with genius IQs, guess what percentage of them become successful?

Pete Mockaitis
First of all, I must ask, how are we defining success?

Linda Thaler
In any way, shape, or form. In other words, achieving whatever goal that they really wanted to achieve.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, they achieve what they wanted to. All right, I want to say 60%.

Linda Thaler
Yeah, 2%.

Pete Mockaitis
Two percent.

Linda Thaler
There is a negative… believe it or not. And this is great for all of us out there. And I always start my speaking events (I do a lot of speaking events) by saying, “Any of you out there have an IQ of 170? Any of you play the violin at Carnegie Hall?” and when they go, “No,” I go, “Oh, I feel right at home.” And then I talk about these uber famous successful people. There’s an inverse relationship between incredibly high intelligence as success.
And one of the things that came out of this study in the University of Pennsylvania was that people who are born geniuses, they sail through childhood, sail through high school. Often, they’ll sail through college. There’s no things to overcome anywhere along the way. Then, when they do hit a speed bump later in life, it is incredibly overwhelming and actually stops them from achieving anything because they haven’t had any expertise in actually getting through a challenge.
So when you look at people who, let’s say, are dyslexic, a disproportionate amount of those people become very successful because they had to learn very early on. There’s one very, very famous lawyer who is dyslexic and he’s considered one of the best trial attorneys of the country. And the reason he’s so amazing is (people go, “He’s incredible”) he spouts all of these studies and all of these cases by memory. He doesn’t consult a book. What they don’t know is he memorized all these journals. He memorized the law books. He took years and years and years to memorize everything because he couldn’t read because reading was so difficult.
So when you see him speak… Actually, I forgot his name, but I was talking to an attorney the other day who actually knew him and said, “Yeah, he’s amazing. People don’t realize that everything is from memory because he is such a slow reader.” So I always say it’s like turning the telescope around. It’s like, look for something that you think is a weakness, and how do you define it as a strength?
We interviewed Haskell Wexler who just passed away last year. He was considered one of the best cinematographers of the 20^th-21^st century. And we interviewed him because he’s an Oscar winner, so famous, so many incredible movies. But we interviewed him because we thought he had this amazing weakness, struggle, and that was the fact that he was born colorblind. Can you imagine, Pete, somebody wanting to become a cinematographer if they are colorblind?

Pete Mockaitis
Wow. Yeah.

Linda Thaler
And we asked him. I said, “Why did you do this, knowing you’re starting off with a weakness?” and he was almost insulted. He said, “No, no, no. It’s my biggest strength. When you can’t see color, you can see gradations of black and white and grays that other people can’t.” So anytime he was on a film, like I think it was “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” where you would have multiracial actors, he was the first call because he had the sensitivity in the way to light them because he could see these gradations that the rest of us couldn’t.
So there’s always a way to sort of turn it upside-down and kind of look at the chair from a different angle and look at the glass half-full. And that was part of why we wrote the book because we were so inspired by the amazingly difficult challenges so many of these famous people went through, simply because they harnessed their grit.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is powerful and exciting, and yes, I love the stories and the inspiration. And so I’d also love to… You teed up an acronym so perfectly I just can’t resist. Could you share a little bit about each of those components: the guts, the resilience, the initiative, the tenacity?

Linda Thaler
Sure.

Pete Mockaitis
And in terms of how that shows up and what your typical professional can do to tap into some more of that.

Linda Thaler
Yeah, sure. I mean, talking about guts, I think Winston Churchill says, “Guts is holding on to fear a minute longer.” Longer than you think you can. We’re talking about try anything new, different, audacious. The stuff that really moves you ahead in life is scary. And we said it’s kind of like walking a tightrope without a safety net. So I went a little further and said, “Let’s interview somebody who actually walks a tightrope for a living.”
So we interviewed Nik Wallenda. He’s from the Wallenda Aerialist Family. And if you might remember, Nik Wallenda walked across the Grand Canyon a few years ago without a safety net. And we interviewed him, not while he was walking across the Grand Canyon, but we interviewed him afterwards. And I said, “You must be nuts. You have a wife. You have two little kids. Why would you take your life in your hands?” and he said, “Nah, that was pretty much a cakewalk for me.”
What? We couldn’t believe it. He said, “No, no, no. You don’t understand. In my line of work, where it’s literally between life and death,” he said, “I didn’t just prepare for this event. I overprepared. You see me walking across this tightrope. What you didn’t see is that I rehearsed and practiced this for five years, eight hours a day in my backyard in Florida. I had my team pushing out wind currents, sandstorms, rainstorms. Anything that could possibly happen on the day that I walked across the Grand Canyon, I had done 10 times harder in my backyard.”
And you could see in his video, if you go online and watch him do this, there’s a point where he crouches in the middle, and he said, “I was unsure of something because a big wind draft came.” He said, “And then I remembered I had been preparing this for years.” And he did it and he said, “We have to remember in life that it is not about the preparation. It’s about absolute overpreparation.” We call it in the book the 30-minute rule.
We did a lot of research on this and found that anytime you do something (you have a PowerPoint presentation, you have an idea, you have a script, whatever it is), when you think it’s absolutely perfect, take 30 minutes more. And research has shown that that extra 30 minutes, you will actually add something and bring some spark of creativity that you hadn’t noticed before. So it’s this idea of overpreparation.
It’s also this idea of you have to create your own high wire. You have to constantly put yourself in this situation to go, “Okay, if I knew I was going to get fired tomorrow, what would I do differently today? If I knew that the last email I sent to a disgruntled customer or a client said something like ‘Well, maybe check out our 1-800 number if you’re unhappy,’ if I knew that person or that client had 10 million friends on Facebook, would I have done that?”
So this notion of mentally firing yourself, putting yourself on the high wire, is something that we all need to do. We’re far too complacent. I tell clients all the time, “If you’re standing still, you’re going under.” The world is just moving too fast. You have to be like that shark. I mean a nice shark, of course. You cannot stop moving because that is akin to getting swallowed up.
And thirdly, get comfortable with being uncomfortable. You’re supposed to feel uncomfortable. Nik Wallenda’s great-grandfather, Kurt Wallenda, had one of the most wonderful quotes I’ve ever heard, which is “Always remember that real life is on the high wire. Everything else is just watching.” So you don’t want to go through life being a spectator.
And Jeff Bezos at Amazon, he left his cushy job in Wall Street. Nobody thought… Don’t ask friends or loved ones, “Should you take that leap into that new career?” because they want you to be safe. Jeff Bezos finally talked to the one person who gave him the best piece of advice, and that was his 90-year-old self. And he turned to his imaginary 90-year-old self, and the 90-year-old person looked back at him and said, “Do you really want to be this age, having never tried something that you were passionate about?”
And we all need to have that conversation, in the privacy of your own house, of course. But you need to have that conversation with that 90-year-old or 100-year-old version of yourself, and then you will be scared not to do it. Then you will be afraid. “Oh my goodness. Am I going to end up having regrets?” And don’t be afraid to fail. I call it failing forward. James Dyson, I call the serial failure. He’s the guy who invented the bagless vacuum cleaner. Now you look at a guy that’s got a lovely British accent who has made billions of dollars with this revolutionary product. But what you don’t know is that it took him 15 years and he had 5126 prototypes that totally sucked, or maybe I should say, that didn’t suck.

Pete Mockaitis
Zing!

Linda Thaler
Zing! Badum-pum! I should have my cymbal here. And he said, “I’m so glad I had all those failures because I was looking to do something that was evolutionary, a little bit better.” He said, “I created a completely new device. Never imagined it would get this far.” So failure is like a really good thing. And we have to let our kids fail, right? I kept holding on to my daughter when she was five, when she was trying to ride her bike. And every time it looked like she would fall, I would hold on to her seat. It took me two years. This girl, I realized, one day she might run for president, but she was never going to run the Tour de France.
And this guy came up to me. He was in his 70’s, he was cycling, and he said, “You know how to teach your daughter how to ride a bike?” I put her on, balanced her, gave her a push.” I said, “What do I do?” He said, “Oh, take your hands and put them in your pocket.” And within five minutes, my daughter learned how to ride because she fell, and she fell about three or four times. She didn’t want to fall anymore. So she learned how to get her balance. Now she’s 21 and she’s a cyclist, a figure skater, and a well-rounded young lady. I’d like to say I’ve had a hand in her success, but mostly because I’ve had the good sense to keep them in my pockets.
So we have to let our kids fail more. I don’t think the self-esteem movement did a great job of telling our kids that they were not that special. We had many people coming into the workforce, through no fault of their own, but parents like me, who ascribed to the self-esteem movement that you have to tell your children that they’re special and unique and everybody is born a genius. And you know what? It’s not good preparation.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you.

Linda Thaler
You know?

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Well, this is so much good stuff. So I guess I’d love to hear that notion of that 30-minute rule when you think it’s perfect to go an extra 30 minutes. Sounds super handy and actionable. What are some other tidbits that, as you imagine, a professional who wants to be grittier, what are some sort of key practices that they should adopt right away?

Linda Thaler
Well, first of all, I always say fall in love with Plan B. Most of us are just steadfast that “This is what I’ve got to do. I have a five-year plan,” whatever. And my advice is, certainly when I started the agency was, to not have any kind of far-reaching plan. Much more about sticking in the now. The research has found that people who were dreamers, when you follow them several years later, that they’re still kind of living in dreamland, and that the prodders, the people climbing up Everest with a toothpick, are actually the ones that are slowly but surely getting to the top.
So it’s important, I think, for people to realize that it’s not going to be a straight path. And whatever your Plan A is, what we found in our research is that you’re probably not going to end up executing or achieving Plan A. I always wanted to be a performer. That’s what I did in my 20’s. I was in a standup comedy troupe. And when I wasn’t making enough money and I turned towards advertising, I realized, “Wow, I can be creative and actually get paid for this. This is a good career move for me.” And I think that we have to stop sticking so much to this idea that “It has to be this.” Steven Spielberg in the Actors Studio said that the best thing he learned as a director was that his Plan B’s were always… the best parts about it was movies. He said, “I was doing…” What was the movie with the shark?

Pete Mockaitis
Jaws?

Linda Thaler
When he was doing Jaws (you probably know this), the mechanical shark, they took one take and then it broke. It couldn’t close its mouth. And they had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on this shark, and that was the movie. The movie was cutting back to the shark. And what were they going to do? I mean, he wasn’t that famous then. And then suddenly his Plan B was he went to John Williams, he was doing the music, and he said, “Well, maybe if we can just hear the sound of the shark and not see it, maybe people won’t notice so much that they’re not seeing it.” So, of course, John Williams came up with that famous multi-trombone “Pum-pum-pum.” And that was only done because they didn’t have the mechanical shark. And of course, it’s what made the movie amazing because you never saw the shark and you were 10 times more afraid just hearing it rather than seeing it.
And so I always urge people just to be open to that Plan B because it’s something in the ethernet out there that’s telling you that maybe you should go in a different direction. And I also tell people it’s not about my way or the highway, that you shouldn’t try to be like the mighty oak tree, which is how we think of people who are gritty. “It’s just this direction. That’s it.” It’s rather to bend like bamboo. The bamboo plant is actually much stronger than the oak tree.
There’s been tons written about why it’s such an incredible metaphor for the way we need to live our lives is the idea of, with its hollow base and strong roots, its ability to move in every direction, and no matter how adverse the environment, the bamboo plant just doesn’t die. And that’s the world that we’re living in right now, where you come into your job, or if you have a freelance business or your own company, and suddenly you wake up and the world has changed. Certainly in the ad business, it’s that way.
And this ability to be open to adapting are the people who are really making it today. And by the way, this notion that the people who are making it, you have this craziness about “I have to make it by the time I’m 30” is ridiculous. It’s overblown hype. It doesn’t pan out in research. In fact, the people who spend many years developing an invention or an app or whatever are the ones who are probably over 40, and most of them are over 50. And if you look at people who win Nobel prizes, very often, they’re in their 60’s and 70’s. So there’s a misnomer that you have to do it by a certain age, or “I might as well give up.”
Pablo Casals, one of the greatest cellists of the 20^th century, was still practicing four hours a day when he was 93. And when somebody asked him why, he said that he was bemused that he was asked the question. He said, “Because I’m beginning to see some improvement.” So there is no end point. And the fastest growing demographic in the world are centenarians, are people in their 100’s.
So I say to people in their 20’s, “What’s your rush? You’re not only going to have one career. You’ll probably have four different careers.” So take the time, rather than bounce from thing to thing, which a lot of people do. A lot of people under 30 and under 40, “If it doesn’t work out, I’m just going to quit this job and start something else.” You’ve got to give it more time than that. Eventually, if it doesn’t pan out, well, maybe you go to a Plan B.
But I think a lot of people are giving up on their dreams because they keep thinking it’s got to happen like immediately. This is the world we live in, where we’re in a media culture where it seems like everybody is an overnight YouTube sensation. We look at “The Biggest Loser” and we see somebody lost 40 pounds between commercial breaks. We don’t want to read the fine print that said it took them a year and a half of sweat equity and diet and exercise to get there. We don’t want to see that stuff. Grit is not fun to watch. It’s not fun to talk about. It’s hard. But when you start celebrating those small victories (“Wow, I got that résumé done,” “Wow, I was able to make those five cold calls today,”) and celebrate the small steps that you take, it’s much bigger than constantly focusing on that end of the rainbow pot of gold.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s very handy. And I’d love to hear if you have any other sort of quick pro tips on the emotional management side of things because a lot of this just seems like there’s just moments and you’ve got either some fear or resistance or some “Ugh, I don’t feel like it” somewhere inside you, and it’s about sort of making the choice again and again to take a further step. So are there strategies or tactics that show up kind of right there in the moment?

Linda Thaler
Yeah. And some of them are really silly things. They seem to be really silly things. In the book, “Grit to Great,” we talk a lot about these grit tips. I mean, one of the craziest things in the world, which came from a Navy SEAL, which is considered one of the absolute best advice for achievement, is to make your bed in the morning. Isn’t that crazy?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Linda Thaler
Right? And what he said was the most important thing I learned in training for a Navy SEAL was that you need to start off the day with an accomplishment. It releases endorphins. He said you need to leave the house knowing that you’ve done something, so if nothing else happens, you come back to this beautiful made bed. It teaches you to do small things perfectly because you cannot do big things perfectly unless you accomplish small ones.
We wrote another book years ago called “The Power of Small,” and John Wooden, a famous coach, said, “The most important things, of all the most important things I teach my players, is the first thing I teach them is how to put their socks on,” because wrinkled socks will irritate your foot and then you can’t play. And so it comes down to these sort of small little tidbits.
One of the things we learned, and we spoke to so many people who gave us great tips, is creating a visual totem that reminds you of your goal. For example, we often have to change the password on our computer. We change it every week, or we have to change it every two weeks. Well, he wanted to give up smoking and he wasn’t able to do it, so he made his password his pledge, “Give up cigarettes.” And he said, “Within a month, I was able to give up cigarettes. I did it for a girl that had broken up with me, and I wrote the letter ‘Forget the girl.’”
And he said, “I really am encouraging people to write out whatever it is that they want to do, have it visually there. I don’t care whether it’s on a wall or you put it in a computer, but something that you actually see every day as a constant reminder of where it is that you want to go and what you want to do. And we call it in the book, we have a chapter called Wait Training. The biggest thing that stops people is they just can’t wait for it. It’s just too long between “I want to do this, but it may take me five years to get there.”
And little tips along that, one of the things is embrace boredom. We are at our most creative when we’re not at our phones. We’re way too addicted, of course, to the data coming in. It’s an addiction that goes to the dopamine centers in our brain, so we want more and more of it. And it stifles creativity because… I mean, we interviewed the editor of the cartoons for The New Yorker, Bobby Mankoff, who is also a friend of my husband’s, and he said boredom is great. That’s when you get a lot of your ideas for cartoons, because what happens mentally is when there’s nothing going on, the brain has to fill up this space, so you make all these weird synaptic connections. It’s the reason that you have ideas in the shower, you have ideas when you’re walking down the street.
Einstein said he worked at the patent office, one of the few jobs available for Jews in Germany at the time, and he said, “It was so boring. I had a lot of time to think.” He said, “I did a lot of thinking.” And one time, he was leaning his chair back and he almost fell and he started thinking about if there was no gravity, how would it have felt? And he said, “And therein lies the beginning of the theory of relativity, all because I was so bored I spent a lot of time just sort of imagining things.”
So we don’t let ourselves be bored enough. And we need to do more of that because it is going to be when we come up with our best ideas. J.S. Bach has a famous quote. When asked how he comes up with all his ideas. “Are you afraid of not coming up with ideas?” and he said, “I had never been afraid of not coming up with ideas. What I’m afraid of is that I will step on them when I wake up in the morning.” So in that dreamlike sense, he would keep a pad of manuscript paper next to him to jot down those thoughts.
And initiative, which is part of that acronym, is sort of finding the way, finding a creative way to get at what you want to do. How do I bend and how do I focus and look at something from a completely different way? It also means embracing other people. Some of the best things that happen… Obviously, nobody in the world could do everything by themselves anymore. But there’s so many examples of people who are willing to listen to people who maybe were much further down the ladder, in order to improve their business.
Years ago, there was a hotel in San Diego and they had to do repairs on the elevator, so they were going to shut down the hotel and lose a lot of revenue. But they had this open policy that anybody could suggest something, and one of the bellboys said, “This may sound weird, but while you’re doing that, why don’t we put an elevator on the outside of the hotel and make it out of glass, and when it goes up, people can look so they can see the sights of some of the beautiful scenery of San Diego?” So they did it. And it not only catapulted the hotel, but the looking glass elevator is now virtually in every big hotel around the world, all because they were willing to listen to somebody at 19 years of age who had no position, but was able to go up to the CEO. So I really believe in this notion of listening to everybody.
And by the way, while I’m on the subject, one of the best ways to accomplish anything is through small talk, not just people that you know, but people that you don’t know. Organizational psychologists have proven that the best way to make contacts is with total strangers that you just pick up and have small talk with. We had so many interviews in so many of our books with people who just spoke to somebody on a train and it led to a job opportunity. They spoke to somebody when they were in an airplane or an elevator, and “Oh, you know this one? You know that one?” and suddenly there were connections made. I urge people out there, stop holing yourself in a little bubble and get out there. Every person you don’t talk to is a closed door that potentially could open up to opportunities you can’t imagine.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Well, thank you, Linda. There’s so much good stuff here. You tell me, is there anything else you want to make sure that you get a chance to put out there before we shift gears and hear about your favorite things?

Linda Thaler
Yeah. I just want to say that we’ve just come from… I’ve worked on several presidential campaigns: one for Hillary, one for Bill, and one for Bill Bradley. And we know how cutthroat it gets and mean it can get. Never has it been as contentious as it has been in this last election, the ultimate reality show, of course. And what worries me is that when you actually look at businesses that are successful, those are the ones that have the leaders that actually are the nicest and most engaging.
A.G. Lafley, the former head of P&G, which is one of our biggest clients, never said the word “I” or “me” in a speech. Always very inclusive. I wrote an article called “The Power of Nice and the Age of Mean” because I feel that people are forgetting this that in the real world, I mean not running for president, but running your own business and trying to attract clients and trying to keep employees, we are forgetting the tenets of what really makes people successful. It is hard work, but the way that you get there is by using the power of nice. And I just feel it’s something that’s being forgotten right now.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Thank you. So now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Linda Thaler
Yeah. I mean, I’ve said a lot of them already, but I do believe the one that I said about Kurt Wallenda, “Real life is on the high wire. Everything else is just watching.” The other one from Beverly Sills, the opera singer, “There are no shortcuts to any place in life worth going.” So I do agree that anything you do is going to take a lot of time, and go with it. Go with the flow.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. And how about a favorite study or experiment or piece of research?

Linda Thaler
I think one of the studies I like the most is Angela Duckworth studying the West Point cadets and finding that the ones that were most able to get through the grueling West Point process, and she’s sort of the founder of this whole grit movement, are the ones that were motivated by intrinsic rather than extrinsic goals. The people who made it through were the ones who were less worried about recognition and status, but whose main impetus was to serve their country. And so I think you all have to look in the mirror and go, “What is my purpose?” If it’s just profit-driven, it’s going to be hard to accomplish it. But if there’s a purpose attached to it, it’s going to be far easier.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. And how about a favorite book?

Linda Thaler
Yeah. “When Breath Becomes Air.” A doctor who knew he had six months to live. It’s been on the bestseller list for months and months. I urge everybody to read it. You will appreciate your life in ways you cannot imagine with that book.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. And how about a favorite tool, whether it’s a piece of software or app or product or service? Something that helps you be awesome at your job.

Linda Thaler
Evernote. I used to print out studies, and every time I read something in the paper, it goes right into my phone on Evernote. And I’m telling you, it’s the best tool ever. I’ve heard other people talk about it, too. You never have to have any worries about collecting things. It just goes right into Evernote, so, perfect.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. And how about a favorite habit, a personal practice of yours that’s handy?

Linda Thaler
Okay, this is the one that I live by. I work out at least an hour or an hour and a half every morning before I do anything. Oh, I brush my teeth. Before breakfast, before anything, an hour of strenuous workout. It can be treadmill. It can be weights. It can be taking on Pilates. But I have to do at least an hour. And if I only do 50 minutes, then I have to make up for it later in the day by doing weights. One hour every day makes you so high and happy and energized. And by the way, a new study came out. You exercise in the morning; you sleep better at night.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that only applies to the morning?

Linda Thaler
Yeah, only the morning time.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. And how about is there a particular sort of original Linda quote that seems to really connect and resonate when you’re sharing it with audiences?

Linda Thaler
I have a lot of fun ones. They say that women are not as empowered as men in the workforce, and I say, “You know what? When I started my agency, we had so many women in our agency we had enough estrogen to make Arnold Schwarzenegger ovulate.” Women power.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun. And what would you say is the best place for folks to learn more about you or get in touch?

Linda Thaler
Yeah. Well, they can Google me. I’m on YouTube. If you look up Linda Kaplan Thaler, you’ll see a lot of my work. By the way, we did a commercial with Melania Trump several years ago for Aflac. That was one of our little creations, too. And you’ll see her in that commercial. She was terrific. She was a lot of fun to work with. But you’ll also see my examples of a lot of speaking events I’ve done.
My website is www.kaplanthalerproductions.com. And Thaler is spelled… it’s a weird name. T-H-A-L-E-R. And you can get a look at all of our books and just stuff I’ve done over the years. And a way to contact me, and I’m not shy, I’ll give you out my email address. It’s linda@thalerproductions.com. Again, I don’t work in advertising anymore because I love speaking about topics like this and I speak all over the world now. I’m happy to speak to a company, to a non-profit, and many colleges. I love speaking at colleges.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, fun. Thank you. Well, Linda, do you have a final parting call to action or a challenge for those seeking to be more awesome at their jobs?

Linda Thaler
Yes. It’s not about no. It’s about “Yes, and…” and “Yes, but…”

Pete Mockaitis
Could you elaborate just a little bit on that one? “Yes, and… Yes, but…”

Linda Thaler
Yeah. I studied improv when I was in theatre. And in improv, you’re not allowed to deny when somebody says something. You can’t say no onstage. You have to always go with them and add to it or twist it to another place. That’s called the “Yes, and… Yes, but…” So anything that you want to do, instead of saying, “Oh, I can’t do this,” which of course is what they would call a fixed mindset rather than a growth mindset, as opposed to “Okay, this didn’t work out. Okay, now, and I should try this,” or “But maybe I should look at it in a different way.” And it really changes your perspective on things because then when you shut it off and you have this very fixed mindset, you don’t go anyplace. But with this sort of “Yes, and… Yes, but…” it just keeps going.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Thank you. Well, Linda, this has been so much fun. Thank you, and I wish you lots of luck and more fun speaking engagements and books along the way. It’s been a real treat.

Linda Thaler
Thank you so much. And hello to everybody out there, and best of luck with whatever you decide to apply your grit to.