348: How to Achieve Anything through Curiosity with Diana Kander

Pete Mockaitis
Diana, thanks so much for joining us here on the How To Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Diana Kander
I’m pretty excited to be here. Any chance to become more awesome is a great thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Agreed, agreed. I understand you’re doing some work in becoming awesome at doing a handstand. What’s the backstory here?

Diana Kander
That’s right. Actually the backstory is writing the book that we’re going to talk about today. But I learned that there’s a simple process to allow yourself to do pretty much anything you can set your mind to. And once I accomplished one task of doing a plank, where you’re on your tippy toes and your elbows, as part of writing the book I did a plank for 11 and a half minutes.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding!

Diana Kander
It was a crazy thing for me. I couldn’t do more than a minute and a half before I started. And so then, once you accomplish one impossible feat, I was like, “What else can I do? What’s the next most difficult thing I can think of?” And for me, that was doing a handstand, so my 2018 goal has been to do… I’m a very uncoordinated person; I’d fall in just from sitting before. I have trouble just walking. So for me, being able to find inner strength and center like that was just a very exciting opportunity. So that’s what I’m doing in 2018.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s fascinating. Why don’t we start right there? What is the process by which you can learn to do anything?

Diana Kander
So, I learned in writing my second book that if you want better results, you just have to ask better questions. And the way that most people approach a task or a goal is, they’re going to try their best and hope for the best. And that is not how you get exceptional results, that’s not how you get to a 10-minute plank. That’s never going to happen if you just decide that you’re going to practice planking every day. Even if you have the habit down, you’re not implementing the right practice. And so, what are the questions that you can ask in order to implement the right questions?

And what’s funny is, I didn’t write a personal development book; I wrote a book on how big corporations can stay in business once they’re successful. But all the lessons that apply to large organizations – trying to become more curious and understand their customers and reach their own large goals – they’re just as applicable for individuals trying to reach crazy goals like doing a 10-minute plank, or a press handstand, which is what I’m trying to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Okay, so if you want better results, ask better questions. And so, the book is called The Curiosity Muscle, just to orient everybody. And so, let’s continue this thread for a bit. So, what would be some examples of lame questions and what are great questions, and how are you upgrading the questions you’re asking in the instance of the plank or the handstand?

Diana Kander
Sure. So, like I said, most people start out, they’re going to do their best and hope for the best. And the very first and most important question you can ask is, “What are my blind spots? What do I not know about what I’m doing that I should be doing?” And for my planks, it was going to people who are professional plankers and have done world-breaking planks, which do you know what the world record for planking is?

Pete Mockaitis
I sure don’t. What is it?

Diana Kander
It’s 8 hours and 10 minutes. Just crazy, right? It makes 10 minutes sound like nothing. So, what are those people doing that I’m not doing? And what I learned from understanding the routine and their practice was that there are certain muscle groups involved in holding a plank that I didn’t know had anything to do with it. So your glutes are very involved in holding a plank. It actually is super important, but that didn’t make any sense to me. Your shoulders are a very important muscle group.

And so, in addition to practicing planks, I started working out these specific muscle groups, and it doubled my time without even really doing anything different. And then understanding other blind spots that I had, like things that I didn’t know about when I was trying to hold a plank, of what these people were doing that I didn’t even know about – that was a very important question. So, that’s question number one.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so, “What do I not know that I should know?”

Diana Kander
Yeah, most people think of their blind spots as their weakness, like, “Oh, I know I should be doing this, but … work. I know I’m not good at this.” But that’s not what a blind spot is. A blind spot is something that you think you’re already doing well, that you’re actually doing terribly. And all of us have blind spots in our professional practice; it’s just that we don’t have the guts to get the feedback to find out those things that we’re doing that are actually sabotaging our professional growth.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And it’s interesting – you mentioned guts, and that’s what it takes to get that. But in another way, it sounds like it’d be more fun to learn some things that you had no idea, than it is to just beat yourself up about not doing the things you know you should be doing.

Diana Kander
Well, the thing about blind spots is finding out about them. It’s super fun when you’re planking and like, “Oh, that’s interesting”, but when it comes to your professional skills and what you’re doing that is frustrating your customers, it is not fun. It actually is quite painful and embarrassing, because you’re going to people and you’re saying, “What is it that I’m doing in my business that is unsatisfactory, that actually I thought I was doing well but isn’t good enough?” Or, “What is it that’s frustrating you about whatever it is that I’m doing?” And hearing those responses can be quite crippling.

In fact, as I was writing the book, one example of trying to understand your blind spots is, I sent out a copy of the book to some close friends who I could trust to be honest with me. And the email I wrote to them was, “There will be a time when this book is published and I need you to give me positive feedback on it. But this is not that time. Your gift of friendship to me right now would be to tell me all the parts that don’t make sense, that are confusing, that you don’t like these characters, you don’t like the storyline, you don’t understand the point I was making. And tell me all of those things.”

And then I went around town just collecting one insult after another. And I had this one really great friend who wrote me this email that while I was reading it, I subconsciously started getting into the fetal position, because it hurt so bad, the feedback that I was getting. But every single one of those feedback sessions made the book a much, much better product in what it is today.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Alright, maybe we should get oriented to the big picture here, and we’ll pursue some more of these practices. They’re just so fascinating, they get me hooked in. So, what’s the main point behind The Curiosity Muscle?

Diana Kander
Sure. The main point is that our success sabotages our future growth. We get very comfortable when things start working, we feel like we’re getting control of something, and we know what we’re doing so now we just need to become more efficient at it. And once we let that success kind of go into our ego and grow our ego, we stop being curious. Success is the main thing that kills curiosity.

And once you lose curiosity, you lose that relationship with your customers and you start losing relevance, because now even though you’re still innovating and you’re growing, you’re not doing it in the right direction, you’re not creating value for your customers. You’re still doing things, you’re creating output in a very efficient way, but it’s not what they want, because you’re no longer curious about what they want. Because you’ve been so successful, you think you know what they want better than they do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, if we’re no longer curious but we’re still doing things, what’s fueling our doing instead of curiosity? So I guess curiosity was getting us there before – you’re fascinated, “What do they need? What do they want? How could I be of great service to them? How could I crush it for them?” And now what’s fueling the next stuff?

Diana Kander
Think about getting to the peak of a mountain top. And what’s fueling you at the top of the mountain top is the fear of falling down, the need to keep achieving and to keep growing. For a lot of organizations they become focused on quarterly results, or just growth for the sake of growth, and those are the kinds of things that sabotage real curiosity and customers.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. It’s sort of like, you’ve got something to lose at that point. When you’re at the top of the mountain you could lose your life, or if you’re a huge business you could get sued for millions of dollars. So let’s put in all kinds and processes and rules and requirements to mitigate risk and what not. Or you could have your stock price plummet because you didn’t hit your quarterly earnings guidance. So, you’ve got all these fears that are fueling you, instead of the curiosity.

Diana Kander
Sure. Every dollar you make is a reason not to changing anything. So, as long as you keep making money, you’re like, “Let’s just keep this gravy train going.” And that’s where the danger is – you’re not constantly looking to disrupt yourself or the next thing that customers want, and their wants and needs are constantly evolving. And they’re going to evolve away from you and you won’t recognize it because you don’t have that kind of relationship that you once did.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, understood. So then, what’s the antidote? How do we keep curiosity alive and flowing, and getting the good questions going?

Diana Kander
Sure. So, think about curiosity – the best definition I’ve ever heard of it is “the space between what you currently know and what you want to know”. So, when you first start running a business, that space is rather large, but then once you become successful, there’s nothing there. You just walk around all day being like, “I know everything I need to know. I’m pretty awesome.” And the secret to becoming curious is to increase that space between those two things – between what you know and what it is that you want to know.

And so, my co-author Andy Fromm and I came up with these four questions that you need to master in order to increase the size of that space. So, the questions are: “What are your blind spots, as they relate to your business and the things that you’re creating?”, “Are you spending your time on the right things?”, “What can you experiment?” I know you’ve been very careful deciding what you’re going to spend your time on, but how do you know if you were wrong in that decision? And number four is, “How can you engage others to help you get to your goals?” Because a lot of people, once they become really successful really concentrate decision-making power at the very, very top and they stop engaging their employees, their customers in helping them solve big problems or come up with new ideas.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. The third one you said you’re experimenting and you’re also assessing whether or not you’re right. Can you expand on that a little bit?

Diana Kander
Sure. So, almost every company has a process to decide whether they’re going to take on a new initiative. They have some kind of a meeting, they have some kind of a business case that they write up. And then what happens once they approve the project is, they never revisit it again. Unless it’s a horrible failure that just explodes, nobody’s ever going to stop it. It could be a mediocre project that’s just siphoning resources away from the company, but there’s never a process to revisit approved projects six months after they’ve started or a year after they’ve started, to figure out if you were right in making that initial decision. We just assume that everything we decide is going to work out.

And as you know, the vast majority of the things we decide to do are not the right things. So what’s the process that you can implement in your business and in your personal life to decide, “This thing I decided to do was actually not the right thing, even though I was acting on the best information that I had at the time.” So, there are two questions that we introduce as part of this, which are, “How will I know if I’m wrong?” and, “When will I know?”

So, just to give you a super silly example – there are all kinds of things you can try to do to improve your plank time. In fact, if you Googled it, there are over 3.5 million results on Google of what you can do. So let’s say you choose very carefully which of the things you’re going to try. You can’t try them all, but you pick the first one you’re going to try. How do you know if that’s the right thing to do, and when will you know if it’s not the right thing to do?

So for me, I like to create as many objective metrics in the things that I try, so for me I said I’m going to give it two weeks every time I implement a new process, and if my time doesn’t go up by 30 seconds over a two-week period, then I’m going to try the next thing. But in most businesses, they never implement those kinds of stop caps. They have success metrics; they say, “These are all the things that we’re going to accomplish”, and it usually takes years to accomplish the success methods, but they never think about failure metrics, which are much shorter in time span. You will know much sooner if something’s not going to work than if it is going to work.

So what are those failure metrics and are you assessing them for the projects that you’re selecting to choose to spend your time and your resources on? And the most successful companies, the ones that never peak – they have really great process to kill things that just aren’t working.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I really dig that. And you reminded me of some lean startup stuff, with regard to the experiments and what you’re seeing there, as well as I’m just fascinated by Nielsen’s consumer product research process, associated with, “We’re just going to benchmark the survey responses about your potential brand of pasta sauce against the hundreds of other brands of pasta sauce that we’ve studied before, to assess if it’s good enough to be unlikely to fail.” It just fascinates me that that exists and it’s done in the world. So, can you share with us some of the best examples or quick ways to get an early failure assessment on something you’re trying?

Diana Kander
Sure. Well, I can give you some examples of my favorite company that is really, really good at this kind of an assessment, is Amazon. And whenever people talk about Amazon, they talk about all of the incredible things that they’ve invented. And now they’re doing one-day delivery, which is just unbelievable. They’re just constantly coming up with ways to wow you, and that’s part of what’s fueling its growth.

But what nobody ever talks about are so many projects that they’ve lost lots and lots of money on, and things that never worked out. Like the Fire Phone, which was the phone that they introduced, which was supposed to be the phone to end all phones. They lost $175 million on it and a few months after it came out, they couldn’t sell them for $0.99 at most. That’s crazy. And one nobody really talks about is Amazon Destinations, which was their travel booking website that they created and shut down six months later. They put a lot of resources into making it the place where you book your travel, and then within six months knew that it wasn’t going to work.

Nobody ever talks about Amazon Local, which was their hub for local deals. It was like a Groupon that they started in 2011, and then shut down three years later. Nobody ever talks about Amazon Wallet, which was a way for you to put all of your credit cards into one place, that they shut down six months after launching it. They had Amazon Local, which was a way for you – not a square or a PayPal triangle, but a rectangle that you could use to accept payments. They had Amazon Music Importer, which was a way for you to house all of your music online, and Amazon Test Drive, which was a way for you to try all of these games before you actually committed to buying them. I can keep going on and on and on.

Pete Mockaitis
And they don’t have the Statistically Improbable Phrases anymore on the books.

Diana Kander
What do you mean?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that used to be one of the ways you could kind of check out what’s unique or fresh, or the content, as a means of searching for and identifying book content called the Statistically Improbable Phrases, or SIPs. And I was a dork for the data; thought that was the coolest thing, as a means of seeing books that are similar to other books, based upon their overlap there. But I guess most people don’t care about that level of stuff, and so they’ve killed it.

Diana Kander
Well, I think I’m probably happy that that doesn’t exist anymore, for my own books. Nobody talks about all of these things that they had and then shut down. And what they think is that Jeff Bezos is some kind of genius who comes up with these big ideas, and that everything that he says works out. But he’s not a genius; he’s a human being just like all of us, and a lot of his ideas and the ideas of the people working at the company don’t work out. What they have that most companies don’t have is a process to kill projects when they’re not working. And most organizations – over 80% of public organizations – have no process to revisit projects on a regular basis, after they approve a business case.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. It seems like for the most part it’s just like a new executive comes it and it’s like, “Alright, we’re evaluating everything. Oh, all these things should no longer be happening”, as opposed to a regular, ongoing basis.

Diana Kander
But they shouldn’t have been happening for years and years. That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
Totally. That’s cool. So, could you give us maybe a window into what such a process might look like, in terms of, “At X months ahead of trying out this thing, we’re going to look at Y metric and it needs to be at least Z value”, or how does that unfold in real life?

Diana Kander
Sure. I’ll give you one of my favorite examples, which was this company that was an online mortgage lender and they had this marketing program where they were going to be a very large, successful mortgage lender. And their process was, people express interest in a loan, then they send them paperwork, then those people send paperwork back, and it opens a file. And so on and so forth, until they get a house and sign all their paperwork.

So, the marketing department was like, “You know what we should do? We’re going to send everybody who expresses interest in a loan a nice gift in order to move them down the funnel. We want them to send paperwork back to us, so let’s do something nice for them.” And so what they sent them was this really nice, delicious, beautiful cupcake. It was a $25 cupcake, all said and done – very delicious, in a glass jar, it had sprinkles with the company logo on it. Genius, right? And the initial results of sending out all of these cupcakes were people taking photos with them, posting them on social media, they were like, “This is the coolest company ever.”

And so the marketing department, all the evidence they were getting back was, “This feels like it’s going really, really well.” And for most organizations what we measure is, how does it feel? We’re going to spend this much money on marketing efforts; do we feel like it’s working? How many impressions did we get? That’s what they’re testing. But that’s not really how you create value in an organization.

And so, it came time around bonus time, and the marketing team went to the data department and was like, “Can you help us quantify just how much money we’re making for the organization? We think that more people are sending in their paperwork but we’re not quite sure.” So the data team says, “Tell me the names of the people who got the cupcake and the people who didn’t get the cupcakes, so we can compare.” And they were like, “That doesn’t make any sense. This is such a genius idea. We sent out 100,000 cupcakes.” So if you’re doing the math, it’s a lot of cupcakes.

And the data team is like, “We’re going to have to send out a couple of thousand more because we can’t tell you whether the experiment was successful or not.” And again, this is something that almost every company does, in that they create programs that is impossible to measure whether it’s working or not, because everybody gets it so it’s just based on how it feels. So, the data team sends out a couple of thousand – some people get them, some people don’t – and they start comparing the results.

And what they learn is, the people who get the cupcakes actually send in their paperwork in much higher numbers, which is fantastic. But the data folks kept watching what happened to those people, and the ones that got the cupcakes sent in their paperwork in much higher numbers, but actually closed their loans in lower numbers. And in total, there was actually no difference in their total closes between whether they got a cupcake or not.

So, people who got a cupcake – they felt bad that they got this really, really nice, expensive, delicious thing, so they were going to do something. And that something was send in the paperwork, even though they weren’t planning on taking out a loan. And it wasn’t just the money that the company spent on the cupcakes, but every time somebody sent in a file, a case was opened, somebody manually entered all that information in. Then this loan officer was assigned, and that loan officer was researching the neighborhood, the school district, all that stuff. So, this company was spending millions of dollars on a project that felt really, really good, but it was actually siphoning resources away from the company.

And so, this is a perfect example of how you should also be measuring failure metrics. So, we’re going to implement this new initiative, it’s going to help our customer. Great. How would we know if It’s not working, and when would we know? So, those are two important questions that you would add to any business case process, and then revisit every time. If you have those meetings on a quarterly basis or a monthly basis, you just revisit projects that you’ve approved before and look at the failure metrics to see how they’re going.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that. So, we talked about the questions, we talked about process, we talked about thinking about it differently and ensuring that you’re ongoingly revisiting stuff and seeing if it needs to get killed. So, I’d love to revisit the point associated with just being able to stomach it, what’s coming back. Do you have an pro tips on how you develop that resilience or thick skin, or whatever you’d call it, so that you can go there?

Diana Kander
So, there’s nothing I can say that’s going to make it hurt any worse. I literally teach on this stuff and write on it, and it still hurts me a lot. I still like getting compliments every time I speak, but I know that I’m not going to get any better if I don’t hear the “do betters” or the blind spots. So, I try to think about that kind of feedback like weightlifting. So, if you go to the gym and you pick up a set of one-pound weights, and you do all of your exercises with those one-pound weights, you’re going to feel really good, like zero strain, zero sweat. Right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Diana Kander
You’re not going to feel anything and you’re not going to get any stronger. If you want to get stronger, what you need to do is pick up weights that hurt your body to pick up, eventually. So, I try to think about that kind of feedback and those kinds of blind spots that I’m learning about as things that actually make me stronger.

So, even though they still hurt, I might … like, “She’s getting stronger”, some kind of a comic book character. In your brain, that’s how you improve. The worst thing that somebody could tell you is, “You’re doing fine”, because that is not a way for you to improve or change anything. The biggest kindness that somebody can offer is to say, “There’s something that you are not aware of that’s sabotaging everything that you’re doing.”

So, I’m a professional speaker; I speak on innovation and curiosity. And I had a good friend who’s a standup comedian, and I wanted to add some jokes to my routine. I thought it would be really funny. So I had her watch my speech and I thought she’d help me come up with some stuff. And she was writing the whole time, and when I get done, she puts her pen down and she was like, “Hey, you’re really bad at breathing.” And I was like, “What?” She was like, “Yeah, you are horrible at it.” And I was like, “I don’t know, I’ve been breathing for a pretty long period of time and I feel like I’m doing it okay.”

And she’s like, “Do you ever lose your voice after giving a speech?” And I said, “Almost every time, but I think that’s a professional speaker thing.” She’s like, “No, it’s not. It’s a thing for people who don’t know how to breathe.” She goes, “Do you ever get lightheaded when you’re on stage?” And I said, “Yeah, when I’m giving a talk for an hour, I think I’m going to pass out up there.” She’s like, “See, you don’t know how to breathe.” I was like, “Wow.” To me that was a huge blind spot, something I never knew about.

And I said, “Okay, let’s keep talking about this, but can you give me some jokes? What else did you write down?” And she’s like, “Is that how you walk on to a stage? Because you walk very apologetic.” I was like, “How do you walk apologetic? That seems really weird.” And she goes, “What’s that weird thing you do with your eyes when you’re talking? I couldn’t even hear what you were saying; your eyes were freaking me out so much.”

So, I walked into the room thinking that I wanted some jokes. Just like all of us in our lives we’re like, “Here’s what I think I need to improve.” And there was this whole other category of very serious faults that I had in my presentation style, in my delivery style that were actually sabotaging my professional speaking career. And it was learning about those blind spots that made me 10 times better than any jokes that I could have introduced into the talk. And that’s the power of getting really curious to elevate your game to a whole new level.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s awesome. And I want to get your take on how you frame and prime the people you’re asking these questions of. You mentioned with your email and how, “Being a friend to me is really telling me what’s wrong with this book and how it’s troubling or it doesn’t make sense in certain places.” So, that was a handy way you did it there. Do you have some other perspectives on when folks are asking for feedback, how could they ask for it in a way so as to actually get it?

Diana Kander
Sure. I think this is a super important question. Actually I wrote a whole article on why people lie to you whenever you ask them questions. And they’re lying because they’re good people are they’re trying to be nice. Most people don’t actually want the answers. Most of us, whenever we give a presentation, we walk out of the presentation and we turn to the person with us and we say, “How was that?” That’s the generic thing that people say.

And then all of us lie when somebody says that to us. And we know that we lie when somebody asks us, but we still ask that question because we want them to lie to us. It’s just a terrible circular thing that happens, but we want to hear that we did amazing, because we need that for our ego, and people know that. So they will lie to you unless you create a safe place for them to be honest.

And you really have to tell people several times that this is what you want. What you want is critical feedback. And even sometimes when you say it, they won’t believe you. So, number one – you need to create a safe place; you need to show them that you’re very serious. So, rather than saying, “How did I do? Really, be honest.” Don’t say that; instead you say, “Hey, I’m really trying to improve and grow how much I’m charging. I would love for you to give me three things I could do better.”

And then they’re like, “You know, it was awesome. I really enjoyed myself.” I’m like, “No, really. I really appreciate you saying that; that means a lot. But I’d love for you to dig deep. I promise it won’t hurt my feelings, I promise I’m just trying to learn how to be better. Any three things that you can think of, of how I could have done better, the things that didn’t really quite add up.” So you’ve really got to go a couple of rounds with them, number one.

Number two – you need to make sure you’re asking the right people. So, I wouldn’t play this game with my mom, because she would be like, “I hate your outfit”, which is zero helpful to me. You need to ask professional speakers; you need to ask people who have created value in the area in which you’re trying to create value. So, either your customers in your business, or other people who have reached the peak of wherever it is that you’re trying to go – those are the people whose advice you want.

And then number three – you want to make them feel like putting themselves at risk and being honest with you is worth it, that you’re actually going to act on their advice. So, when people give me advice, then I come back to them and say, “Hey, you gave me excellent advice and then I changed this as a result”, so that when I come back to them for more advice, they know that I mean it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. That’s great, yes. So think about it not as sort of a “one and done”, but rather, “Oh, cool!” They feel helpful and like they got to make a positive impact, and they appreciate it because it’s like you’ve showed them some honor, or it’s like a compliment. It’s like, “Oh, you seriously listen to me and take what I say seriously. Cool.” It gets them totally primed to do it awesomely even better the next time.

Diana Kander
It’s just like any mentoring relationship in your life. You need to make them understand that you value the advice and you’re going to act on it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. Well, tell me – anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Diana Kander
I think curiosity is the secret to accomplishing anything. What I learned during the process – I kept being like, “What else can I apply this process to? Yeah, it works for planks, and keeping companies in business. What else can I do with it?” And I found that you can do three things with it.

Number one – you can use these four questions to significantly improve your relationship with your customers, or any kind of relationship. Actually it works for spouses as well. Any relationship you want to improve, you can use these four questions. Number two – if there’s a persistent problem in your business that you’re trying to solve, this is a really good way to look at it in a different way. Or number three – if there’s a big, hairy, audacious goal that you’re trying to reach, these four questions are going to help you think about it in a completely different approach. So, those are really … cases that I found so far, of using these questions.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Well, now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something that you find inspiring?

Diana Kander
Yeah. So, one of my favorite quotes actually has to do with curiosity. And it’s by Mark Twain: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” For so many of us, we walk around very comfortable, thinking that we know all these things to be true about our business and our customers, when we’re just walking around – I think about blind spots – like having food in your teeth. You walk around very confidently with food in your teeth until you get to a mirror.

And if you haven’t been surprised and in a little bit of pain from feedback that you’ve gotten from customers or employees or your boss within the last 12 months, then I can guarantee that you have blind spots in whatever it is that you professionally do. So that’s kind of my gut check – if somebody hasn’t told me something painful and surprising, then there are blind spots that are stopping me from growing to the next level.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome, thank you. And how about a favorite study or experiment or a bit of research?

Diana Kander
I like all those studies that show that you’re the average of the five people you hang out with the most, and how that works for your GPA and your income level, and a lot of things in your life, that they can measure in objective ways that it actually isn’t just your personality or your achievement level. All of these things that are true about the people that you choose to surround yourself with.

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

Diana Kander
The book that I have been recommending for so long is Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi. I just saw it at the bookstore, and it’s been reworked and remastered and it’s got an extra 200 pages that I haven’t seen. But the reason I love that book so much is because it’s about creating real relationships with professional contacts. As opposed to thinking business is a networking or a tool, really creating real, meaningful relationships. And that book just always spoke to me and has been a secret to so many of the relationships that I’ve been able to continue for so long.

Pete Mockaitis
Are you a conference commando?

Diana Kander
What does that mean?

Pete Mockaitis
That was one of the chapter titles.

Diana Kander
Oh, like how to do it, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
He was just talking about this hardcore stuff, like, “Volunteer for the conference, then you get a list of all the attendees in advance, then you research all the attendees, then you invite a select segment of them.”

Diana Kander
I don’t even bring business cards, so I’m obviously not a conference commando. But I do look through the list and if there any people that I really want to get to know on a deep level, then I’ll find the people that I want to meet, figure out who we have in common, reach out and say, “Would you like to get a cup of coffee?” So yes, I’m definitely still using stuff from that book, but again, it’s not about how to meet as many people as possible, but how to really create deep relationships with the people that you do meet.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Diana Kander
My favorite tool. My iPhone

Pete Mockaitis
Is there an app that you love and you think is underrated, because it’s crazy useful?

Diana Kander
Headspace. I know it’s not an underrated app, but it’s an incredibly powerful tool for me personally. If I’m having a crazy day, I just take 10 minutes and it works like magic.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite habit?

Diana Kander
Well, besides collecting feedback? My favorite habit is to tell people that I’m doing awesome or fantastic, which I am. That’s how I feel, but people seem really, really surprised by it. It always takes people back, like, “Oh, I haven’t met anybody who is doing awesome or fantastic today.” And it’s just a funny interaction that I get to have a couple of times a day.

Pete Mockaitis
That is fun, as opposed to “Busy” or, “Fine, thanks.”

Diana Kander
I feel fantastic, so that’s what I say. And people frequently are like, “Oh, well, nice to talk to you.”

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. And how about a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect, resonate, gets retweeted, etcetera?

Diana Kander
“If you never settle, then you will never peak”, which is kind of the thesis behind this book and what I’ve been working on. But if you never settle for being good enough at what it is that you’re doing, you’re going to continue growing. If you’re constantly curious of how to get to the next level, there’s never going to be a time in your life when you peak and get on a downward slope.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Diana Kander
I have a website – DianaKander.com, where you can read a lot of my articles, see videos of my talks, and get bite-size nuggets of all kinds of this information.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright. And do you have a final challenge or call to action you’d issue to folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Diana Kander
I would love for them to choose one big, hairy, audacious goal, and it doesn’t have to be at work. What I found in doing the plank challenge and handstand challenge is, if I am curious in my personal life and doing something physical, then I will be more open in my professional life. And if I put myself in a beginner mindset, not like, “I know what I’m doing”, where I’m trying to learn at one of these tasks, then I will be much more open in my professional life, and curious and creative. And so, I try to constantly have a thing in my life where I’m totally out of my element and I’m trying to learn as much as possible, because I find that it affects all of my work in a very positive way.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Well, Diana, this has been so much fun. Thank you for bringing the goods and a multitude of Amazon examples – that was intriguing. And please, keep doing what you’re doing, and I wish you tons of luck with The Curiosity Muscle and your speaking and all you’re up to!

Diana Kander
Thank you so much, Pete. It was awesome to chat with you.