All Posts By

Marco Bartolome

May 14
0

1152: The Five Essential Steps to Getting to Where You Want to Go with Dr. Henry Cloud

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Dr. Henry Cloud reveals the five essential components to achieving your desired future.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why the human body is our best model for achieving results
  2. The biggest power move of high performers
  3. Two questions to go above your natural wiring

About Henry

Dr. Henry Cloud is a clinical psychologist, leadership expert, and New York Times bestselling author whose books have sold over twenty million copies worldwide. Named by Success magazine as one of the top 25 leaders in the field, his work spans executive coaching, organizational transformation, and personal growth. He holds a BS in psychology from Southern Methodist University and a PhD in clinical psychology from Biola University. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Henry Cloud Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Henry, welcome!

Henry Cloud
Good to be here, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to be chatting with you. I loved your book Boundaries, and we’re talking about your latest, Your Desired Future. Could you kick us off by sharing, perhaps, one of your most intriguing, fascinating, counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about this tricky gap between intention and achievement?

Henry Cloud
Well, it’s something that we all experience and something that we notice in others who, whenever we’re at one place, it may be in your career and it may be in your life and it may be even in a relationship, “Well, here’s where we are,” and we want to be in a desired future or a different place, right?

And we got to work on it, and it doesn’t happen. And what was kind of the sort of you call it the awakening, was that I noticed that, when people would put hard work in things and they weren’t getting there, they started asking the question, “Well, what’s missing? And is there a universal path that just has to be included in getting anything from here to there?”

And that’s what started the study on it many, many years ago. And that’s where this model came from. And, basically, it’s because we go about things as we are wired. And we create teams and companies and projects in our own image.

And the problem is we don’t have all of the strengths that it requires, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t make sure all of those elements are there. And that was the big awakening, just to give a map for that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, the major reason we don’t achieve that which we intend is that we’re kind of going about it just you doing you.

Henry Cloud
It’s a great phrase.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And some things, I guess we’re wired to achieve, you know, fairly naturally and other things are kind of a stretch.

Henry Cloud
Yeah, and what’s really important, you can look at people that accomplish stuff in different areas and even very different styles. You take a Bill Gates and a Steve Jobs, they started out the same time, kind of doing the same thing, very, very different styles. But if you break it down, what was it that moved them from here to there? Those elements are the same. They do it differently.

And sometimes, like you’re saying, we do those things naturally in some particular area, but we fail in other areas because they’re not present.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you share with us perhaps a story of someone who was running into some trouble and then made some changes in alignment with these principles you’re unpacking here and what happened for them?

Henry Cloud
This is one you see all the time. It’s very common for an entrepreneur or a founder to be really good at vision and really good at engaging the talent and sometimes even good at strategy. And what happens is, when it gets a little further down the line where you start to have to really get a little bit what feels like to them in the weeds, then that’s where it kind of unravels.

And I think you’ve seen a lot of stories like this where somebody starts something, where you see it a lot is in the public companies. It goes public, and then the board says, “We got to bring in a seasoned operator.” Well, that’s because of these other components in the chain.

If you want a story, I can tell you about my own.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s hear it.

Henry Cloud
Many years ago, I wanted to start a psychiatric hospital that was friendly to people of faith. Because a lot of times people of faith would check into a hospital for treatment and their faith would be seen as part of the problem, not part of the answer. And I just wanted a place where that was friendly.

And so I thought, “Well, the best way to do this is to buy a hospital.” I was in my 20s. I didn’t even know that was hard. So I went out and raised the money to buy a hospital and started down that path, and ended up changing the model a little bit.

Long story short, started the company, right, and was doing one hospital, and it was doing well. But I was doing it in my own image. I wasn’t in the healthcare industry. I was a clinician, and so I set up this whole hospital company almost in a private practice model.

And what happened was, just by happenstance, I met somebody that had come from that industry, and he looked at it and said, “You have no clue what you have here.” And he started asking questions, like, “Where is your call center?” And I go, “What’s a call center? I mean, we just took calls and put people in treatment.”

And then he started asking all of these questions. And just by having somebody that could bring the other elements in of engaging the right talent and having a strategy to scale, and knowing what to measure and what to hold accountable, be held accountable to and all that, we ended up in 45 markets in the western United States.

And I would have been kind of stalled at a very limited vision if that hadn’t happened. But it took somebody else to point out to me what was missing.

Pete Mockaitis
And so these things about having a call center, how would you categorize the domain of stuff that was just sort of you were blind to?

Henry Cloud
Yeah, let me put it in then. The book is about a very simple model. I found a long time ago, if people have little models as almost like a GPS to look at, “Am I doing everything that needs to be done?” That’s where this came from.

And I had a big awakening one day, because there’s all this leadership and performance literature out there. But if you put it all together, what’s it really talking about? And I decided, “Why can’t we factor and analyze all that and get, what are the categories? What are the elements that it falls in?”

And I ended up asking a question. If you look at the human body, the most efficient, most complex, most complicated, greatest achievement machine it’s ever been designed, how does it get from here to there?

And it was incredible because if you break it down and went to neuroscience and neuroanatomy and all this stuff to ask, “How does a human body get from here to there?” Well, it starts with, what you read in the literature, your brain has something no other species has, which is the capacity to imagine a future that doesn’t exist today. We call that a vision.

Now, what was a real awakening was everybody knows about vision. But when you start to look at the brain and what it does with a vision, it has certain components to it that then creates a linear path and does all the stuff. But your head can’t go anywhere by itself.

So what it does is, number two, is it starts to engage the talent it’s going to need to help it get there. Because the brain is not going anywhere by itself. So it says, “Well, I’m going to need a couple legs and a couple eyes,” and it starts recruiting people with the talent and the skills that are gonna help them move from here to there.

Now we got it all together, you got the, “I don’t need my little finger, but I need a leg and I got eyes. And then we got to figure out, well, how are we going to get there? Well, I think I’ll call an Uber. Well, that’s not a good way to get there. How about a scooter?”

“Now if I’m going to get over the other side of the room, what’s my strategy going to be? How am I going to get there? I’m going to walk.” And now we have a strategy that begins to define the specific activities that are going to make that strategy come to fruition.

Now that becomes a big deal. And what your brain does at that point is it creates a plan with specific activities that move the needle on that strategy. And then, number four, it has already designed a measurement and accountability system.

You start walking, you start to wander off, it goes, “Wait a minute,” and it corrects you because it knows what you’ve got to be held accountable to that’s going to get you there. And, number five, if you do veer off, it quickly fixes you before that problem becomes a pattern.

So what do we have? We’ve got a very clear vision that’s got to be compelling enough to awaken a lot of systems in you and desire and other things. Number two, who do you need to help you get there? It might be talent, it might be a team member, it might be a friend, it might be a supporter, whoever. But we’d never go anywhere by ourselves.

And you got to specifically name, like Jim Collins said, “What are the seats on the bus that you need? And who are the people that are going to be in those seats?” And then you got to have a strategy. Otherwise, we start doing all sorts of random stuff, hoping we get there.

That strategy has a plan. And, number four, are you measuring the right things along the way? Because a lot of people just measure against the goal. They’re not measuring against the specific activities that are going to move the needle.

And then when you find something that’s off, you’ve got to fix it fast. Because if you don’t fix it fast, you don’t have a problem anymore. You’ve got a pattern. And patterns change the direction of where we’re headed.

So the human body knows what it’s doing. We should just kind of do what it does. And when you look at great achievements, you’re always going to find those five things. Clearly knowing where they were going, getting the right talent on board, having the right strategy, measuring the right things with accountability, and quickly fixing what you find. That’s the way we get from here to there.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say your body knows what it’s doing, you’ve got chapter 2 entitled, “Your Body Knows Best,” what do you mean specifically by that?

Henry Cloud
Well, what I mean is that it comes with all the systems that do all the right things to get you there. Let’s just take the measurement and accountability system. When you start walking across the room or you start driving a car, your brain has already figured out what it needs to hold you accountable to. You automatically steer. Well, that’s because those systems are wired in there.

What we’ve got to do, if you’re going to increase sales or increase the culture of a team, you got to start with knowing where you want to go and then knowing who’s going to play what role in getting you there, and then knowing what to do.

So our bodies just do this naturally until you start to break it down on what they are doing. The neuroscience of how your body achieves things is exactly applicable to everything we do in life.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I like that you have laid out some core foundational fundamental principles, and it seems like you’ve done a nice job of categorizing, cataloging.

Pete Mockaitis
And so it seems simple and elegant and, but, of course, with the way you lay it out this way. How do we run into trouble?

Henry Cloud
Yes. Here’s how we run into trouble. Two ways. One is everybody knows those topics. There’s nobody in business that hasn’t heard of those five things. We run into trouble because we’re not doing them in the way that they work, A. But, B, we really run into trouble because our own personal issues get in the way.

For example, take holding people accountable or holding the team accountable. Well, what if you’re conflict avoidant? What if it’s hard to have difficult conversations, what if you have fear around that?

Or back to vision. What if you come up with a, “Gosh, we could do this,” and then you got a bunch of negative voices in your head that say, “Well, what makes you think you can pull it off? You don’t have the money for that. No, that’s too hard”?

And just our simple thinking patterns and the limits we have in our own head can stifle a vision. So all of these components, the growth gaps that we need to do in getting better, those really come into play. And that’s what a lot of coaching is about, too.

You know, I work with CEOs in huge, I mean, public, multibillion dollar, they run huge things. And most of the time, it’s not that they don’t have the business acumen. It’s some kind of personal growth step that’s getting in the way. And that’s how a lot of times we get stuck.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you give us an example of a personal growth step and how that gets things back on track?

Henry Cloud
Well, I’ll give you one of a big company everybody knows. If I ask the question, “Where did Google come from?” We all think back, and if you’re old enough, “Ah, well, tech was ramping up, and the internet was ramping up, and somebody put a bunch of money up, or whatever.”

I would answer that this way. Where Google came from was a graduate student named Larry Page who went to a personal development, personal leadership development retreat, a camp, and they taught him a mantra. And the mantra was, “Have a healthy disregard for the impossible.”

And he kept saying that over and over and over. And he was trying to get rid of the natural tendency to think in some sort of limited fashion and question any idea or discount it or have objections. And he just started doing that over and over and over.

Well, one morning, he woke up and he had a thought. And that thought was, “What if we downloaded every URL on the entire internet and saved them?” Now that’s insane, I mean. Most of us would go, “Well, we don’t have enough RAM for that? I mean, where would you, you know?” All of a sudden, all these reasons why it can’t happen.

But he took a personal growth step to get some crap out of his head and then we ended up with a search engine, and then we ended up with all this other stuff. So it’s a lot of looking at oneself, looking at my patterns and how I typically go about stuff.

And are there any of these elements that are difficult for me that I should take a growth step in or I should get help with or bring somebody to the party who knows how to do this? You know, if you go back to my hospital company that I built, I was much more on the vision side of that. I engaged the talent. I brought the investors. I brought all the doctors, so 200 doctors ended up working for us and a bunch of other stuff.

But I didn’t have the strategic operational skills or even thought about that, that would ever get that to the place it went. And I probably never would have gotten there if I hadn’t brought in new talent. And that didn’t have to be somebody you hire. It could be your uncle who’s done what you’re doing.

We always need to find the right wisdom and the right help, whether it’s paid or unpaid, that can help us get to the next step.

Pete Mockaitis
And how do you identify or zero in on which of these components is our shortcoming, our gap, our personal development need?

Henry Cloud
Well, one of the ways, first of all, just look at the results. We have a lot of ways of explaining things away, “Well, the market’s bad, this or that.” Let reality talk to you. And sometimes that’s in the actual results of what you’re getting and whatever you’re trying to work on.

And you’ve got to get honest about this, “Is this thing working? Is it moving forward? Is there anything I can look at that says, yes, we’re going in the right direction?”

If there’s not, then what I would do is I would just go through the categories and start to ask, “What’s missing here? Or what have I really not focused on?” You know, a lot of times, a big one is the engaging the right talent piece. I mentioned that a few times because it’s huge.

We don’t know what we don’t know a lot of times. And what we’ve done is we’ve kind of just listened to people that are right there. And sometimes we got to get out of our own bubble or our own neighborhood or whatever.

And there’s somebody that’s done this before. There’s somebody that can look at it and know what I’m missing. And we need other eyeballs. And the best people, they get out of their closed system. They look at the way other companies, other teams, other individuals, other people are doing this that kind of expand this and can help them.

And the biggest, highest performers I’ve ever worked with, when I first went into coaching, I kind of expecting the ones that were crashing and burning to reach out to me the most because, “I need help. They’re calling me all the time,” this or that. It turned out to be the exact opposite.

The highest performers are the ones that use input from the outside the most. It is the highest performers that I hear from most often.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I have found that is rather transformational when I reach the conclusion, “I really don’t know what I’m doing here. Someone else does. I’m going to talk to them.” And so I just recently, I emailed someone who’s like, “Hey, I saw your LinkedIn. You’re a strategic advisor. I could use some strategic advice. What’s your hourly rate? Let’s do it.”

And she said, “It’s 500 bucks an hour.” I was like, “You got it.” And it was a pretty worthwhile $500 hour in terms of, “Yes, this is what I am missing and what I need. Thank you very much.”

Henry Cloud
Because what’s the value that you got from that? You know, a lot of times people look at the rates they’re going to have to pay and they go, “Well, that’s a lot for an hour,” this and that. Well, if that ended up making you, when you utilize it, multiple seven figures, it’s the cheapest hour you ever got in your life.

It’s just you have to look at the value you’re getting, always. And sometimes that value is free. Again, it might be a relative, it might be a friend. What’s important is, “What value does that talent bring to what I’m trying to do?”

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely.

Henry Cloud
Because advice is cheap.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Henry Cloud
Anybody will tell you what they think you ought to do.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think, in my experience with this, it seems like you can get an answer very quickly by asking a buddy, asking Google, asking the AI models, but it’s not what you really need. Well, I mean, it might be if it’s really quick and easy, straightforward answer, it’s like, “Okay, yep, that’s it. Got it.”

But when it’s nuanced and complicated and specialized, I find that we…what’s the expression? Is it Mark Twain or someone? “It’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

It’s like, “Oh, okay, that’s the answer. Okay, I’m just going to go do that.” It’s like, “Oops, no, no, that actually is not the move,” but, unfortunately, you’ve sort of spent a lot of time and effort, maybe money, on a path that might make some conventional sense or feels good, but it is not actually rooted in reality, best practices, etc.

Henry Cloud
I think you’ve hit a couple things on the head there. One of them is when you said it’s nuanced and everybody’s got an answer or whatever. I’m very leery, I should say, of people that have a template that they just come and apply to every situation. And there’s value to that.

I mean, there are consultants and they have a model and they go in and take that model and put it there. The people that I want to talk to are the people that have the experience base that they don’t come in and say, you know, “Look, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

So they look at every problem, “Here’s the answer,” right, because that’s what they know. It’s like you’re saying, they know that and they’re going to apply it. There’s a proverb that I love that says, “He who gives an answer before he understands is a fool.”

And I want to talk to somebody who’s got great diagnostic abilities to look at my situation and, inductively, pull out from their experience base the nuances, like you’re saying of, “This is the path. This is what I think is wrong. This is what I would suggest.” And they’re doing good diagnostic work.

And sometimes people, they already know the answer before they’ve met you, then I would I’d be a little leery of that. I want somebody that’s got enough experience and knowledge to whatever I’m struggling with. The answer is somewhere within them and they’re gonna pull it out of the box.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love to get your pro tips in terms of are there any super high-leverage moves, like we talked about finding a great person for insight, advice, diagnostic skill to help you out? Within the other domains of a vision, strategy and plan, measurement, accountability, adaptation, problem solving, are there other high-leverage, best practice moves, tips, tricks, tactics that really do a lot of good work for us when we implement them?

Henry Cloud
Yeah, there’s one big one. Look in the mirror.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Henry Cloud
It’s, we gotta look at ourselves first. I mean, it’s so easy to explain things away, “You know, this person is not good,” or, “The market is this,” or, “You know, we got bad customers,” or, “My boss,” or something. And that’s not what great performers do.

The big power move is to first look at ourselves in that context, and ask, “What am I contributing to these results? What am I contributing to this problem? What am I contributing to keeping it from being resolved?” And to own it.

Then we can go to, “What do I need to take control of to change?” But it is a tough shift for a lot of people to make to stop externalizing what’s holding them back. Now there are external factors that we have to work with, but if we don’t look at ourselves and how we’re responding to those external factors, it’s just going to continue to stay stuck.

And it all starts with some pretty good self-awareness. And here’s what a lot of people don’t realize. Self-awareness is a fruit of other awareness. We become aware of ourselves by letting really good eyeballs take a look, and other people on the other side of us talk about their experience with me and what they see, and we got to assimilate and accommodate that data.

And so, here’s a good question. If you’re on a team and y’all suck and you’re leading a team, go to each one of your team members and ask a simple question, “So what’s it like to be on the other side of me as your leader in two areas? Relationally, how am I doing? How do I make you feel? How do I help you? How do I support you? All that.”

“And on the other side, the actual work, the tasks. How am I performing? How am I delivering for what you need from me?” That’s a great conversation to have. And ask it above you, ask it to your peers, and ask it for people that report to you. And you’re going to probably get some pretty good direction from that.

Now, you don’t listen to everybody. There’s nutcases out there, too. They have their own biases. They have their own agendas. But if you choose carefully, you’re going to probably see a few patterns emerge.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, super. So we look in the mirror and we get self-aware by getting other aware, talking to folks, asking those questions. Any other power moves that make a big impact?

Henry Cloud
What’s hardest for you to do next? We tend to move away from change that’s going to activate our fear systems, really. When we got to make a change that’s not, and these are the most valuable changes, by the way, because if they were easy, we’d already be doing them, but they’re necessary and we’re not doing them.

So that’s usually the growth step we need to take is going to feel very uncomfortable to you. And big growth steps happen from stepping into the area of your discomfort, because that’s where new skills and abilities are not only needed, but that’s where they’re going to be built.

We don’t grow without discomfort. Your hippocampus has got to be aroused in order to keep the log and the memory patterns of new whatever you’re doing to turn them into automatic. And arousal comes from getting nervous.

It’s like the Olympic swimmer who’s waiting for the gun to go off. They are aroused because it’s a big challenge, but that pulls them to greater achievement as well. Most of the big records are set in the final event. They’ve had that same swim 100 times before they got there. So step into the areas where you’re not comfortable, and that’s really where you’re going to learn.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Anything else?

Henry Cloud
Well, I open the book with a story about my dog Finley. Finley is a Doberman. I’ve always loved big working breeds. And Finley is awesome. I mean, she does her job, but she does it like she’s wired. Somebody comes to the door, she runs to the front door, she barks, scares the heck out of them until I come up and say it’s okay. And it is intimidating and she does it great and I love her.

But I’ve never heard her run to the front door and bark, and then stop and say, “I wonder if that was helpful?” In fact, a bigger question, “I wonder if barking like that is going to get me closer to where I want to be on Thursday?”

That ability to get above what we’re doing, above how we’re wired, and begin to ask the question, “Am I doing what needs to be done to get me where I want to be on Thursday?” that is something that all of the greats do. They don’t just work, they work on how they’re working and they get above it.

And that capacity for self-observation, with some kind of a path, and that’s what the book is about, you could just get above and say, “How clear have I been about the vision and communicating it to the people that have got to go with me? How much have I really worked on making sure I got the right talent around me?”

“How clear is the strategy for all of us? Have I just assumed that? Do people know every day when they wake up what they got to do that day that really moves the needle? And then are we really keeping tabs on are we doing what we said we were going to do and is it working? And then when problems come up, are we fixing them?” And if we get above that path and start asking those questions, all sorts of light bulbs come on.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, I like that a lot. And I’m thinking about, we had a guest, Richard Medcalf, with a book called Making TIME for Strategy, and he was sort of talking about just this. And often there’s a project that no one’s asking for, but it requires asking these kinds of questions to really get those tremendous improvements.

I’d love your hot take in terms of, is there a ritual, a habit, a practice by which folks you’ve seen incorporate this into a recurring rhythm and see good things on the other side?

Henry Cloud
Well, one of the important words here is rhythm. We tend to observe ourselves, but not frequently enough sometimes. The cadence of it is not enough. If you take, for example, you take a pilot and they’re going from LA to New York, well, they’ve got a strategy, they’re going to fly this plane, but they’ve got a plan and the plan, the strategic anchors are 40,000 feet, 540 knots, certain heading. So they take off.

Well, what they’re also doing is getting back to the cadence of measurement. If they drive down at 38,000 feet for more than just a blip, their accountability system is going to say, “Flight plan shows 40,000. You’re at 38,000,” instantly, they go, “Crap! I’m burning too much fuel. It’s slowing me down. I got to adjust.”

But if they wait too long for that to happen, they’re going to end up three states away or getting there an hour late. And when we’re looking at what we’re doing, some cadences, they’re too short. I mean, people don’t even have time to work before somebody is in their face again, you know, they micromanaging them all over their case.

You got to give enough space to what you’ve observed to begin to implement it. But if you go too long without self observation for you and the people that are involved, you can be 500 miles off track and now you’re down the wrong road.

Pete Mockaitis
So, is it daily, weekly? In some ways, it’s possible, I think, to overdo it. Like, we’re kind of getting into a bit of a navel-gazing or a, what is it, a state-dependent vibe, which is suboptimal, per the research and literature. So, what do you think?

Henry Cloud
Well, again, it depends on, “What are you doing?” Some things that you’re working on, and sometimes in crisis or things have gone south, that cadence can be daily for some things. I mean, it depends on what you’re doing.

Other times, a quarterly checkup. It all depends on what you’re doing and how long it takes for the change to take effect and how long it takes for it to unravel things if it’s not addressed. Those are the two factors I’ve looked at.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now let’s hear about some of your favorite things. Could you share a favorite quote with us?

Henry Cloud
One of the favorite quotes that I put in the book was one time Peter Drucker said, “There’s nothing worse than executing perfectly the wrong things.”

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Henry Cloud
I think it was 2004, we had about 400 fatalities in the commercial airline industry in the US, 400 and some people died. The FAA came together, and what they did was they brought into one group the equipment manufacturers, like Boeing and Airbus and those people who make the planes, the pilots unions, the mechanics unions, the air traffic controllers, and kind of whoever touches this thing called flight.

And they formed a covenant of their group together. And the covenant was this, “When we find a mistake that we did, we’re going to bring it to the group, and we’re going to – lack of a better word – be transparent, confess it.”

And what they said was, “Nobody is going to get fired, nobody is going to jail, unless you try to blow up a plane or something. Nobody is going to get in trouble. We just want to bring the problems to the group.”

Here’s what happened, just take an example. A pilot comes in and says, “We had a near miss and it was really close and it was really bad.” And the group starts going, “Tell us about it. How did it happen?” They said, “Well, I was trying to adjust the switch down here and lost visuals and wasn’t looking at the radar or the screen or whatever, and there it was.”

The manufacturer says, “Oh, well, we can move that switch.” A million things like that where they’re coming together without fear.

Now here’s what happened. That was in ‘04. I think it was 12 years later. You can look up this story. I want to say, like, they went, it’s like, in 12 years, 20 billion departures, something like that, in that time period, zero fatalities for 12 years.

Now, what does that tell us about the kind of teams we need to create, the kind of relationships we need to create with bosses, with direct reports, with our peers, where we can come to the table and talk about what we’re struggling with and where we need help and where something is not working and where I screwed up? That’s one of my favorite studies.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Henry Cloud
One of them is not a business book. It’s a book called No Man is an Island by Thomas Merton. You know, I don’t even know what year this was, but Peter Drucker wrote a classic called Management. It has so many foundational principles in it. You can go through it and just over and over and over again. That’s one of my favorites.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Henry Cloud
OneNote.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Henry Cloud
One of my favorite ones that anchors me is I try to, somewhere pretty early, 9:00 o’clock-wise, but soon in the day, whenever I get up, I need about an hour of quiet time, and try to do that every day if possible. And it’s a spiritual time for me, it’s a reflection time, and that’s a really important one.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget that you share that’s been quoted back to you many times, a Henry Cloud nugget that you’re famous for?

Henry Cloud
Probably the one I hear the most is it’s more a phrase, it’s from my book, Necessary Endings, and they will say, “Knowing about the wise, fool, and the evil changed my life.” That’s what people tell me. And it’s a little, again, a model. You don’t deal with everybody the same way, that we have three kinds of people in our lives at any point.

A wise person is a person that, when they receive feedback, they say, “Oh, you’re right. I’m sorry. I won’t do that again,” and you have a conversation, things get better. And so we can talk about problems with them.

A fool is someone that, when the truth appears to them or when they’re given truth, they don’t adjust themselves. They try to adjust the truth.

So they’re going to minimize, get defensive, blame you, the problem is never in the room. It’s out there somewhere or they’ll attack you and get angry. And it does no good to talk to them about problems. You have to talk to them about a different problem.

And the problem is, “When I talk to you about problems, it doesn’t help. So I’m not going to talk to you about problems anymore. We’re going to move to some consequences if this doesn’t change.” And the third category are people that do evil things. And those are the people that are intentionally out to hurt you. We need to always protect ourselves from that group.

So you talk to the first group. You have some limits and boundaries with the second group, and sometimes that can get to a good outcome. But the third group, it’s lawyer, guns, and money, like Warren Zevon said. You got to go into protection mode.

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

Henry Cloud
Probably just go to DrCloud.com. A lot of what I do is right there.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Henry Cloud
I would do what Finley doesn’t do. Don’t just keep barking. Stop barking and ask yourself, “Is the way I’m barking going to get me to where I want to be on Thursday?” Get above your ways and look at the patterns. And the book will give you a good template to look at that with.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Henry, thank you.

Henry Cloud
It’s good to be with you.

May 11
0

1151: How to Harness the Surprising Power of Ignorance with Alan Gregerman

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Alan Gregerman shares why the right kind of ignorance is the secret to driving innovation.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to challenge assumptions that are keeping you stuck
  2. Why not knowing can often lead to better solutions
  3. Six ways to unlock ignorance as a superpower

About Alan

Alan Gregerman is an internationally renowned authority on business strategy, innovation, and hidden potential who has been called “one of the most original thinkers in business today” and “the Robin Williams of business consulting.”

As the president and chief innovation officer of Washington, D.C.-based consultancy VENTURE WORKS, a bestselling author, and a sought-after keynote speaker, he focuses on helping companies and organizations unlock the genius in all of their people in order to deliver the most compelling value to their customers. He is also the founder of Passion for Learning, an award-winning nonprofit that teaches girls technology skills as a key to life and career success.

His three previous books—The Necessity of Strangers, Surrounded by Geniuses, and Lessons from the Sandbox—challenge conventional thinking about people, the world around us, what it means to be remarkable, and where brilliant ideas actually come from. He’s also the author of the critically acclaimed blog Surrounded by Geniuses.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Alan Gregerman Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Alan, welcome!

Alan Gregerman
Greetings! Delighted to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am a plenty ignorant person, so I’m excited to hear about how that could actually be a force for wisdom. Could you kick us off with a particularly surprising and fascinating discovery you’ve made as you were putting together your book, The Wisdom of Ignorance?

Alan Gregerman
Sure. So I’m really keen on the idea that all of us have the ability to innovate consistently, but we’re going to do it by paying attention and taking a fresh look at the things that matter most. And so the world around me is such a fertile ground for innovation. So let’s start with a simple story I love to tell. And that’s 1941, a guy named George de Mestral walking through the Alps with his dog.

So George is walking with his dog and he notices his dog is covered with burrs. All of us have had that experience and we’ve said, “What a nuisance!”

George thought burrs were cool. So he took some of these burrs off of his dog and he took them back and looked at them under an old microscope. Probably a lot of listeners have an old microscope somewhere.

And he noticed that these burrs were amazing because they had an amazing ability to hook on to things as they brushed against them like his dog. George discovered Velcro. Velcro wasn’t discovered by geniuses with expertise in a lab.

Velcro was discovered by a guy walking his dog. So my guess is all of us can walk around, pay attention, and imagine remarkable things that could be different. And that’s really part of how we keep our careers energized and valuable.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Alan, I love that story so much. And that really reminds me of occasions in my own world and life where I noticed something and then I dig in and then it becomes really potentially impactful. I remember one time, I was at a podcast conference, Podcast Movement. It’s amazing. And someone had a podcast app. They had a booth. Everyone is promoting their stuff, you know, walking around the exhibit hall.

And I remember what I was struck because I saw this podcast app actually listed how many subscribers to a given podcast were on that app. And I said, “Holy smokes, you don’t see that anywhere. Not on Apple podcasts, not on Spotify.”

“So I could conceivably deduce based on your market share, a very rough estimate of the total listenership of a show based upon this number.” And the person behind the booth was like, “Huh, yeah,
I guess you could.” Like, that hadn’t occurred to them, but it was very fascinating.

And, hopefully, you’ll sort of deconstruct this alchemy because, I mean, I just noticed it and then it was like Eureka, and it was exciting. And then that was pretty helpful in terms of figuring out maybe some promotional opportunities, priorities, etc., and sort of market research and all kinds of little things. It’s been a handy tool going forward. And now Listen Notes exists, so people just go there.

But before they did, I had this nifty tool at my disposal because I noticed a thing and was really curious about the potential implications. But I’m imagining, Alan, I’m leaving a lot of noticing on the table. Like, there could be a lot of cool ideas just waiting to burst forth, but I’m oblivious to the implications of stuff, just like that Velcro burr example.

Most of us were like, “Ah, how annoying these burrs,” versus someone goes, “Wow, how fascinating. Let’s dig deeper.”

Alan Gregerman
Well, so think about most of us in most of our jobs don’t take the time, and it’s either because we’re determined to do a good job or our organizations don’t ask us to take the time to actually step back and imagine, “Could we do more with whatever we’re working on?”

And then imagine one other thing, which, for me, and I’ve been in innovation consulting for a long time, people can’t see me, but I have a few gray hairs. And so imagine what I talk about as the 99% rule. And that is 99% of all new ideas are based on something that already exists.

And yet, in most organizations, they ask us to come to a meeting, they give us a blank sheet of paper or a beautiful whiteboard, and they say, “Does anybody have a brilliant idea?” It’s as though we can turn on the part of our brain that has brilliant ideas because we haven’t been using it the rest of the time. The reality is just get out there, pay attention, and suddenly things start to click.

Everyone listening, I’m sure, uses Uber. Was Uber created by folks who knew the taxicab business? No, Uber was created by two friends who couldn’t find a taxi on a trip to Paris and suddenly realized something called GPS technology existed, which had the ability to bring someone with a car to someone who needed a ride. And so that was the origin of Uber.

And so the world is filled with ideas and they’re all based on people actually stepping back, paying attention to things that exist, and imagining how they can adapt it to their world.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now you got my wheels turning. I’m pondering here with regard to the 99% versus the 1%. Just so I have a taste for what does a completely new idea even sound?

Alan Gregerman
Okay, yeah. No, that’s a good question. So, of course, fire, that’s like a completely new idea when it happened two million years ago. And whether it happened because a lightning strike hit something and it’s set on fire, and then people suddenly decided, “We don’t have to wait for lightning. We can do it or not.” So that’s an original idea.

And then in 1895, the folks at Weber created a grill based on the idea that fire existed, okay? So that’s an important thing. The wheel, about a 6,000-year-old idea. Now the wheel is used in everything and we couldn’t get around on a scooter or a car or an Uber without the wheel. So those were original ideas,

Optical lenses. So I wear glasses, I’ve worn them since kindergarten, lucky guy. And when I was in kindergarten, glasses were pretty dorky. I’d like to think I have pretty cool glasses now. But the reality is optical lenses to improve vision didn’t happen until around 1285. And they’ve gone through lots of iterations.

So now we can even get Lasik surgery or whatever we want to do. But that was an original idea, I think, when it happened, and it improved the ability of 60% of people who see badly to be able to see. So there are lots of original ideas, but most ideas actually are based on something else. It doesn’t mean they’re not original, but they didn’t start by somebody taking a blank sheet of paper.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, okay. And then, by contrast, can you share with us some ideas that are just like, “Hey, you know, I combined a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and here we go”?

Alan Gregerman
Well, think about it. I mean, so many things that are all around us. So Airbnb, people like to use Airbnb. It’s an alternative to hotels. Not started by people in the hotel business. Started by some friends who were design students who needed to pay their rent.

And one of them said, “Gee, should we let someone surf on our couch?” And then, suddenly, they realized, “Well, couch surfing, everybody has a couch, an extra couch. Some people have an extra apartment. Some people have an extra house. Maybe those are places we can rent.” But the idea of having somebody stay somewhere and pay you wasn’t a new idea at all.

So ideas kind of abound. You know, the folks at Southwest Airlines, when they actually were really doing a good job – I shouldn’t probably say they’re not doing a good job – but they’ve changed their business model.

They changed not by knowing a lot about the airline industry but by knowing there had to be a better way to travel. And their model actually was Greyhound buses, the idea that people needed to get from point to point and it shouldn’t be particularly expensive.

So look around at almost anything that really matters to you, and the reality is somebody has thought about how to make it better. And when we get into talking about how to make your career more valuable, I believe the folks who pay attention and figure out how to make things better are the ones that are going to be consistently valuable and relevant and really be desirable in the marketplace.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. Okay. Well, so it’s funny, Alan, as you do this, it seems like these ideas seem super easy in hindsight, “Well, of course, we just do this.” But when we’re in the midst of things, sometimes coming up with these combinations, these creative breakthroughs feels real hard.

Alan Gregerman
Well, it feels real hard for a few reasons. One is I don’t want to downplay that it’s not hard, but it’s doable for all of us. And the reason why I think it’s particularly hard for all of us is because we don’t get up and wander around and pay attention.

Think about when we were kids, we were innately curious, partially because we didn’t know a lot of stuff. And so we were trying to figure things out. So we asked questions, looked, wondered what things were all about.

We don’t know a lot as adults. The percentage of what we know compared to what we could know or think about is really, really small. But we don’t get up. And so either we’re working in a business or organization, or we’re working virtually, and we tend not to get up and wander around and pay attention. So the world passes us by.

My view is, if we simply get out there and engage the world, ideas are going to come to us. We see some place using a technology. We see people on scooters. We see whatever is going on. And, suddenly, it dawns on us, “Why can’t I do things differently?”

You gave the example of the podcasting conference. And, suddenly, when you saw an app, you thought of all the possibilities. Well, we should look at the apps on our phone and imagine what are the possibilities. Could we create an app that has that same functionality that does something a bit different?

So I believe we just don’t pay attention and we don’t wake up each day saying, “Maybe I should think differently about the world around me.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. You’ve got a fun turn of a phrase, enlightened ignorance. What is that? And how is that different than just not knowing what’s up, being uninformed?

Alan Gregerman
Okay, good. So we live in a world, let’s be honest, where we’re surrounded by stupidity, okay?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Alan Gregerman
And so I think of the difference between stupidity and enlightened ignorance as stupidity is really, “I really don’t know but I actually don’t care to know.” And for me, enlightened ignorance is, “Great. I don’t know but I’m challenged to figure out how to do something remarkable.”

And so that’s what the book is really about is the idea that we can find a problem that we don’t know anything about and we can figure it out if we have the right mindset. And so I want people to think about in organizations how we have the right mindset so each and every day we can show up and be really kind of engines of innovation.

And so enlightened ignorance is really a formula for how we take something we don’t know, we admit that we don’t know the answer, and we actually figure out how to get smart enough to think about solving it.

And so that, for me, is really the heart of innovation. That’s what almost every innovator has ever kind of lived as, someone who’s enlightened about something that needs to be done, but ignorant about how to do it and determined to figure out a better way.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, it’s funny, I’m thinking about, I remember a moment of my ignorance back when I was consulting, I was, you know, a fresh Bain associate consultant, and we had a giant department store, was our client, a chain of department stores.

And I remember, they had some apparel stuff going on, and I learned about the concept of size packs, which was totally new to me. I thought, “So a department store doesn’t just tell, like, the manufacturer of the clothing, ‘I want 10 larges and 20 extra larges, etc.,’ like per their needs, but rather they are constrained to order a size pack, which has like five larges, four mediums, whatever, and then just hope they can mix and match like the size packs to get what they actually want?”

And I thought, “That seems really silly to me.” You know, not me not knowing about whatever supply chains and logistics and all the things. And I thought, “Well, wouldn’t a manufacturer really like maybe working with us more if we order just…?” or, sorry, “Wouldn’t it be better for us if we could just buy the things that we wanted to hit our inventory needs for the customers at a retail stores instead of being, you know, constrained by these size packs?”

And I was genuinely curious, this is new to me. I’m learning. I’m asking. And when I asked that question, basically, like, “What’s up with size packs?” I remember the partner on the case looked at me, and was like, “Are you serious?” I was like, “Oops! Oops! I guess I wasn’t supposed to ask that question.”

I’ve revealed that I am a total neophyte, ignoramus in the world of, you know, department stores and clothing distribution logistics. But, to this day, and maybe I should just look it up, but I still think there’s something to it, in terms of you could disrupt the way that game is played.

And there would be, I’m sure, you know, pros and cons on playing the game the same versus differently. But I felt like, in that moment, my ignorance could have potentially been an asset.

Alan Gregerman
Well, I think ignorance is often an asset if there’s a better way to do something. So now, based on what you said, let’s use our imagination.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure.

Alan Gregerman
I can imagine now, using AI and having cameras located in department stores, and having those cameras look at all the people who come to shop for clothes, and those cameras, based on some parameters, making some decisions about the general sizes of the people who are coming into my store.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, the customers will love it.

Alan Gregerman
And then I order based on that, okay? But now I just assume that people are evenly distributed and people looking at certain types of clothes are evenly distributed, and that’s why I get extra large and large and medium and small and extra small. And there are better ways to do things.

You know, so I’m always thinking about the fact that, and I’d love your listeners to think about, we’re only limited by our imagination. So anytime you get in a situation where you get a little bit frustrated at work or somewhere else, just pause for a moment and say to yourself, “There must be a better way. What’s my initial thought about how there could be a better way?”

And that’s really kind of part of the reason why I wrote the book, is I’d like to give people a guide to thinking about how there could be a better way to do the things that really matter.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And it’s interesting, and then, I guess, also to keep that humility, and I do want to hear about that’s one of your six keys. So let’s talk about those in a second, but to also have the humility that is like, “Well, no, Pete, actually, a size packs save us a huge amount on transportation and warehousing and whatnot. And to get all customized without size packs, you’re going to dramatically increase that cost. And it’s actually not worth it for anybody.” Like, “Okay, understood.”

Alan Gregerman
Okay, but I’m not certain that’s the case, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it may or may not be the case. There may be certain contexts where, you know, it’s often, I guess, I’m biased towards the middle a lot, Alan. That’s kind of my thing is I imagine there are probably certain contexts and circumstances in which size packs are perfect and others in which an alternative is superior.

Alan Gregerman
Well, so I’m not an expert in retail clothing, but I do know, because I order a bunch of stuff online, that when I order online, I actually vote with my feet, right? So I know roughly the size I wear and so I’m ordering.

So if I run an online clothing business, then the reality is, and Nordstrom Rack or something else comes to mind, that people are giving me guidance so I now know what to order because I can see what people are ordering.

If I run a store, maybe I’m stuck a little bit with size packs, but I think in the future I won’t need to be if, in fact, there actually are retail stores. But what I want people to think about is the idea that there are ways to collect information and that I can be most successful by starting fresh with a new challenge and saying, “Okay, what do I need to know to figure this one out?”

I’m not certain that retail stores are thinking about that and that’s why they offer the array of size packs or whatever they do. But I want people to actually just pause and say, “Okay, I can do anything here. Let me think in a new way.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, let’s talk through your six keys to enlightened ignorance.

Alan Gregerman
Okay, so here’s the thing, and I appreciate the chance to talk about enlightened ignorance and the idea that actually we find something that matters to us and we actually want to be remarkable at it. And I think, you know, as I think about your podcast, if I think about the things that are most important for people in their careers, it’s that that’s the challenge we need to navigate.

And the challenge is that we need to be committed to continuing to learn, grow, think of valuable ways to make a difference wherever we work, and then be open to suggesting those ideas. So where do we start?

The first one, I think, is, if I have a clear purpose, something that matters to me, I’m likely to make a difference. I’m likely to be focused on all the things I need to do because this is something I want to solve for. I want to create a solution to a problem. I want to create a new opportunity. So purpose is really powerful.

And purpose can be, “I want to create a product that enables women to feel good about the clothing they’re wearing.” Sara Blakely creates Spanx, okay? So Sara Blakely, think about this, she was a door-to-door fax salesperson.

Some of your listeners, because I know your demographic are first going to go, “Door-to-door sales? Would anyone open their door for somebody?” And the second they’ll say is, “What in the world is like a fax machine?”

So this woman was selling fax machines door-to-door, and she suddenly realizes that her undergarments probably can be seen through some of her clothes. So she says, “I’m going to solve this problem.” She becomes, for two years, totally purpose-focused on solving this challenge. And she does.

And she creates this company called Spanx. And she’s a billionaire now, all based on having no idea how to solve this problem, but then doing a series of tests and experiments to see if this problem is solvable. So that can be a purpose, certainly, but other purposes abound.

If any of your listeners are ever in Washington, D.C., and they come to the National Portrait Gallery, they’ll see a piece of art called “The Throne.” And “The Throne” is a remarkable piece of 184 objects that are all wrapped in aluminum foil, which was the work of a fellow named James Hampton, who was an untrained artist who worked in the federal government, and, for 14 years, evenings and weekends, built what he thought was a tribute to God.

He was determined to be ready when God came back to Earth and to show that he was among the most faithful. So he built this. This was his purpose, his life’s work, and he was doggedly determined to do this.

And this piece of art is amazing. In fact, you can Google it. Just called “The Throne of the Third Heaven.” And if you look at this piece, you’ll say to yourself, “Wow! What drove somebody to do it?” A clear sense of purpose. So I just like people to think about, “What am I doing and why does it matter? And why do I want to learn and excel at something?” And if we have a clear purpose, that really matters.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m also just thinking very, very tactically, was it the reticular activation system? Like, that notion that if you’ve got a purpose and there’s something you’re trying to solve for, any number of random stimuli can become the impetus for, like, Eureka inspirations, like that dog Velcro situation.

I don’t know his story if he was looking for fastening options or anything, but if you were, you would get really fired up. You would notice that, like, “Holy smokes, I got to know everything about burrs stat.”

Alan Gregerman
Well, right, so I think you’re onto something. So here’s the idea, and that is if I have something that really matters to me, a problem I want to solve, an opportunity I want to create, then almost anything becomes the raw material for thinking about it.

So I wake up each day kind of overwhelmed with the idea that I can create a breakthrough and do something different. I show up at work on Mondays – can you imagine that? – really energized to do something different.

I’m going to improve customer service. I’m going to improve distribution. I have an idea for a new product or service. I am energized. If I don’t have a purpose, I show up and I’m just kind of slogging it through, you know, I’ll do more of the same.

And so I find purpose is the great energizer, in a way. It’s a great starting point for making a difference. I’m kind of super highly motivated to show people that you don’t have to be an expert to create a breakthrough. I wake up every Monday, super excited to get the word out to more people.

But I think whatever we have as our purpose, if it drives us, then it really makes us really powerful in terms of our ability to take a fresh look, because we’ll do whatever it takes to be remarkable at solving that purpose.

So that then leads us to the second, which is curiosity. And that is, if I have a purpose, I ought to be curious about, “Is there a better way to do the things that matter most?” So if you’re thinking about your job, think about, “What should I be curious about? And it might not be folks in my industry who are awesome at what I do, but it might be folks who are in something else, who do something else, another business, another walk of life, who would be a spark, a source of inspiration.”

So let me give you an example. A team of people came to me because they needed to improve customer service in their organization. And they said, “Well, where should we think about it?” And I said, “Well, think about all the leading providers, where have you gotten great customer service?”

And then I said, “How about this? Let’s go to Cirque du Soleil together.” And I have no idea what goes on at a Cirque du Soleil performance. They’ve got a funny language, they’re doing all kinds of things, they’re cool costumes, but I know they’re focused on, from start to finish, a remarkable customer experience.

So we arrived an hour early and we simply paid attention to everything they do to engage customers and get people excited about this kind of different type of entertainment. And then we stayed an hour afterwards to see all the things they were doing afterwards to make it so that people would really be involved, tell other people, be repeat customers.

So wherever you think folks are remarkable, in any walk of life at doing what you do, commit to being curious about what they do, figuring out what they do and seeing if you can apply it to your work.

Pete Mockaitis
And when I’m thinking about the biography of Leonardo da Vinci here, it’s like that dude may be the most curious human who ever lived. I mean, it was astounding in terms of it didn’t need to be remotely relevant, so it seemed, what he was directly working on, but he would just go deep into researching a random animal’s functioning body part, like, “Why it did it the way it did.” And in so doing, I mean, well, I guess the proof is in the pudding. That was remarkably fruitful for him.

Alan Gregerman
Well, yeah, so I mean, he ended up being called a Renaissance person, right? So I guess we have a term for somebody clever, but imagine, here’s one example from his world that ended up having a current implication.

So Igor Sikorsky, in 1939, invents the helicopter, the first vertical lift craft, okay? As an 11-year-old boy in a market, he saw a toy called the Chinese top. For those of you kind of listening, but you can’t see it, I’ll kind of demonstrate here.

It’s a stick with a propeller on it. You rub it in your hands and it goes straight up in the air. As an 11-year-old, that sparked him to think about humans someday going straight up in the air. He goes to a library in Kiev where he’s from, or Kiev, and the librarian says, “Well, you know, there was this guy, Leonardo da Vinci, and he actually drew pictures of a helicopter, like, he never, ever created one, but he drew pictures of them.”

Did he come up with this on his own? No. On his balcony in Florence, he saw dragonflies. And dragonflies are actually the natural embodiment of a helicopter. They’re like miniature helicopters. Sikorsky saw this, looked at dragonflies, and many, many years later created a helicopter that actually, on the maiden voyage, flew for 59 minutes. That’s kind of awesome, actually.

I mean, compare that to the Wright brothers, eight feet above a beach for a hundred yards, and they’re the fathers of flight? Sikorsky goes up for 59 minutes straight up in the air and flies around. But da Vinci was an important part of that because, as you said, he was innately curious about everything around him.

And so he imagined that dragonflies were something humans could do, and it took about 500 years for humans to actually do it. But, no, so I just feel like I would love everyone listening to just get out there and pay attention.

You know, when I wander around, and I’m in DC, but I’m in Chicago a lot and lots of other places, I see people walking around glued to their phones, you know, as though that’s like really important. They got to send a text or they got to take a call or they got to check their email. They’ve got to do all those things.

Just put your phone in your pocket and wander around and pay attention. You’ll be shocked at all the things you see and the connections you start to make just by being curious.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And how about respect?

Alan Gregerman
Well, so let’s, for a moment, because in my mind there’s a little bit of an order about it. So let me insert one more and then we’ll get to respect. And so that’s humility. And it’s a natural thing. So, look, if I honestly realize I don’t know everything, or that the stuff I know isn’t appropriate for solving the problem I’m trying to solve, I ought to be humble.

I ought to admit that I don’t know, and that ought to energize me even more to figure it out. And so I like the idea of humility. So let me give you a great example there. It’s a sad example that turns out to work out really well.

So a fellow named Dixon Chibanda, and you can Google his TED Talk, is one of only 13 — 13, that’s an actual number — of licensed psychiatrists in the country of Zimbabwe. And Zimbabwe is a country of 17 million people. And so if you do the math, and I was not like a rock star math student, but I can tell that’s not enough psychiatrists to take care of an entire nation that might have some mental health challenges.

One day, one of his patients can’t get to him and she takes her own life. And he decides there has to be a better way. And so he decides, in a country that’s under-resourced with psychiatrists, that he has to figure out who would be respected that people would listen to. And he determines that it’s grandmothers, the most respected people in lots of societies.

He trains thousands of grandmothers to be the front line of mental health defense, and creates an organization called Friendship Bench, in which he places benches in communities throughout Zimbabwe, and tells young people they can book a time to hang out and talk with a grandmother. And he teaches the grandmothers the fundamentals of talking with somebody who’s facing depression.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that. I’m reminded of the Vince Vaughn movie, “Nonnas,” with the Italian grandmas who started a restaurant, but this is way cooler.

Alan Gregerman
Well, yeah. And so imagine this, five years later, the suicide rate in Zimbabwe goes down over 90%. And it’s based on the fact that people have someone they can turn to, and it’s a grandmother, and nobody’s going to do something really bad when a grandmother cares about you.

And so kind of a brilliant idea, but that’s the idea of humility. I’m trained as a psychiatrist. That’s not solving my problem. I’ve got to get more people involved in mental health. So, back to what you were asking about — respect.

I can learn something remarkable from any other person on the planet if I’m open to doing that and if I’m willing to connect with them. So imagine, I tell a story in the book about a homeless man, an unhoused person, that I met by actually going to McDonald’s to have my Egg McMuffin and coffee.

And I met a man out there who was sitting on the curb who asked if I could buy him two apple pies. And I said it first, you know, because I was trying to focus on health, I said, “Well, you know, two apple pies is not really a balanced breakfast.”

And he said, “Well, I really like apple pies.” And I said, “You’re an adult. Go for it,” though I did get him an orange juice because I figure we all need vitamin C. I began to see him regularly. You know, I would go to McDonald’s every week and buy him two apple pies and an orange juice. Never got him to eat protein, but I’m not sure there’s a lot of protein at McDonald’s.

And so I befriended him. A person who, on the face of it, most people would say, “What would I learn from him?” I learned a lot from him during our conversations. I would guess I learned at least as much from him as he ever learned from me. But I learned about, you know, he was a jazz musician. I learned about his love of jazz. I listened today to lots of the musicians he recommended to me.

I learned about his life and his family and some of the ideas he had. And, most importantly, I learned about resilience. Almost every company and organization talks about, “We need to be more resilient in a fast changing world.” Here was a person who lived on the street for two years. He had to figure out how to be resilient every single day. And the things that he knew were things that I incorporate in my life and my world.

So whether somebody is in another culture around the world, whether somebody is of a different generation, whether somebody, through a quirk not necessarily of their own, has landed in a difficult place, we can learn something from everybody but we have to wake up each day believing, “Anyone I meet, potentially, could be valuable to me.”

And the idea of respect is that, “I don’t know where the ideas that I’m going to need are going to come from but I ought to cast a wide net and be open to those.” So that’s the idea of respect.

The fifth thing I’d love people to think about is what I call future focus. Many of the people listening probably were either subject to or they loved reading about Jules Verne, Around the World in 80 Days, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

Jules Verne was like the first science fiction writer or one of the first. He wrote all of his books based on wandering up and down the streets of Paris and imagining things, and going to the library and reading other books.

We can imagine what the future is going to be like by just engaging with the world around us and paying attention to the clues it’s giving me, “Why is everybody riding a scooter?” “Why do some restaurants not even have service people? I just scan a QR code and then I order online, and then my food appears.”

Lots of things going on. “Why are driverless cars really popular?” All kinds of, but I need to pay attention. I need to get up and pay attention. I need to think about what the clues are about the future that are actually leading me to the future, and then I need to figure out how to win by getting to the future before anybody else.

If I’m in a job, I should think about that for my company, “What’s going on out there in the world that’s going to impact us? And how do I bring that in and be valuable, suggesting ways we can respond?” So that’s the idea of future focus.

And then the last thing is the simple idea that I talk about all the time, and that is, and it’s not something that we all think is great, but we all should be paranoid. And what do I mean by that? You know, the reality is we all should pay attention to what’s gaining on us.

Right now, we’re all afraid that AI is gaining on us. It’s going to take our job. It’s going to make what we do irrelevant. I think we need to pay attention and then we need to figure out what’s our strategy, “As a human, how can I be valuable in a world of AI? I can imagine. I can make connections. I can care. I can be curious.”

AI is only as good as my ability to be all those things. And I can show how I can connect the dots in ways that no machine ever could. But I have to always believe that somebody is following me because that motivates me to have, you know, as we’re talking about it, this enlightened ignorance.

It motivates me to say, “Each day, I can learn something new that will make a difference that’s going to make me more valuable in the work I do. And I’m determined to do it.”

Pete Mockaitis
You’re right, the word paranoia doesn’t have the greatest connotation in terms of positivity. And yet, if we think of it as the antidote to complacency, I think that’s super useful to just have a bit of, well, we had one guest saying, you know, fun, fear and focus is just a great mix for getting stuff done and having creative ideas and all that.

So, in a way, there’s a bit of sort of an emotional, maybe biochemical component there. But also, you know, I think it’s possible that I’ve probably been guilty of it, it’s like, “Hey, the thing I’ve been doing has been working pretty well. I’m just going to keep doing that on repeat for years.”

And it might be worthwhile to not be so comfortable and to proactively change things up instead of having to have them change, thrust upon me from external forces at a timing and in a context that’s not ideal.

Alan Gregerman
Well, no, so I think you’re right. And just think about it logically. And that is, five years ago the world was very different than it is today. Five years from now, it’s going to be even more different than it is. If we believe we can do exactly the same thing and know exactly the same stuff and be relevant five years from now, I think we’re kidding ourselves.

In fact, if we think that we can go to school and major in computer science, and that the day after we leave school and get a job, we won’t have to learn something new, we’re probably kidding ourselves. So the reality is we need to constantly up our game, but I think that’s part of the fun of life, actually, learning the right new things when I need them.

I like to think about the idea that we should learn how to engage the world. These six things I talk about are the things we should be learning as kind of habits of our lives. And then we should learn how to kind of “just in time” learn.

Say, “What do I need to know in order to do what I need to do to get me or our company or our organization moving forward? And then I’m going to figure that out. I’m going to be all in and I’m going to cram like crazy to figure that out. And then I’m going to make some mistakes but I’m going to refine what I know and I’m just going to get better and better at it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you mentioned AI, I’d love your hot take in terms of how can AI help and hinder our creativity.

Alan Gregerman
Well, so I use AI a lot, but I don’t write anything with AI, and I don’t come up with my final answers for AI, and I don’t even imagine using AI. I often use AI just to think about what’s known about a certain topic, and I use that as a bit of a starting point in helping me to think differently.

I use AI to collect information. If I were to go to the web, I do a lot of speaking around the world, and I often say to myself, “I’d like to do some speaking in Chicago or Japan or wherever. Can you give me the names and contact information of folks who book speakers in these places?”

And AI can do that. I’m sure I’m using up way more energy than I have a right to. But AI can do that really, really quickly. If I had to search a lot of data sources to figure that out, that would be a monumental effort.

So I collect information using AI, but I use my human ability to imagine and to connect dots after I’ve used AI.

And so I think of wherever a job requires creativity and innovation, wherever it requires building strong relationships with other people, wherever it requires kind of connecting dots in different ways, seeing patterns in different ways, I think all of those things are things that humans are going to do really, really well. And so I’d invest in those things and then I just invest in how to learn quickly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Alan, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Alan Gregerman
I just believe, for everybody listening, we’ve been sold — I don’t want to say it’s a bill of goods — but we’ve been convinced, a lot of us, that we’re not particularly innovative, that the world is a place in which there are people who are really creative and then there’s the rest of us, and we need to be resigned to just doing stuff.

I believe we all have the potential to be remarkably creative. It’s just we’ve got to open our eyes and pay attention and start thinking in different ways. You know, I wrote this book to truly challenge people to say, “I can actually take a fresh look at the things that matter most and come up with something different.”

And so I want everybody out there to believe you can do awesome things. You just have to be open to trying to make those happen. And so that’s really what I’m kind of passionate about, is the belief that every single person can do awesome things with kind of this straightforward formula for the six things we need to do really well.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Alan Gregerman
So I love José Andrés, you know, the restaurateur who also created World Central Kitchen, and who’s determined, especially in war zones and danger zones, to feed people.

So he once said, “Life begins at the edge of the unknown.” And so I believe the stuff we already know is fine. The stuff we don’t know but could know is like energizing and awesome. So I love that quote.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Alan Gregerman
I like Don Quixote by Cervantes. I love the idea that we all need to kind of battle windmills and think about what’s possible, and imagine no matter where we start that we can do remarkable things.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job​?

Alan Gregerman
If I were to give a favorite tool that I like in the world of work that’s relevant to your audience, I would say, each day, find somebody in your organization you don’t know very well, but that you, working with them, would be beneficial to the organization.

And set up either a call or a meeting or coffee, depending if you’re co-located in the same place, and have a conversation in which you just talk about things you have in common that have nothing to do with work.

And I can guarantee you, in 10 minutes, you’ll make a connection with that person and you’ll be more eager to think creatively and make a difference with that person.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Alan Gregerman
I wake up each day and we have three dogs, I take them for a walk, and I pay attention to kind of what interests them, probably the smell of another dog being in some place. But because they take their time walking, it’s kind of called a sniff and stroll, it gives me time to ponder and think about things.

And so I’m imagining all the things I see, and kind of the power of the bright color of flowers this time of year, of kind of the different ways people transport themselves around. I just pay attention and my morning walk is a great start.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that seems to really connect with folks, they quote it back to you often?

Alan Gregerman
There are a lot of key things, but I’d love to think about the thing that people kind of resonate with most is just the reality that we can figure out the stuff that matters most if we have the right mindset.

That we don’t have to know everything, that we should just get started. Figure out something that matters to you and, even if you’re bad at it, just get started because you’ll bump into ideas along the way and figure out how to be remarkable.

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

Alan Gregerman
Well, so lots of places. I mean, they can go to AlanGregerman.com. You can connect with me on LinkedIn. Don’t follow me. Connect with me. I’d like to learn what you’re up to. So you can do that.

As Pete said, you can go on, actually, on Listen Notes and put my name in there and kind of listen to me. I mean, I’m honored to be on your show. But if you want to hear more stuff, if you’d like more information, I can send you other stuff about me, articles or books.

Read a few of my books. I mean, read The Wisdom of Ignorance, and if you don’t like it, I will Venmo you the money, you know?

Pete Mockaitis
Guarantee! And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Alan Gregerman
I think, just show up at work each day and say to yourself, “How can we be more valuable to the internal or external customers we serve? So how can we make an even greater difference in their lives?” And I think if you use that as the starting point of your purpose, given whatever job you have now, it’s going to energize you to take a fresh look at the things you do. You won’t get stuck in the things you do. And, over time, you’ll find you’re more and more valuable to wherever you work.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Alan, thank you.

Alan Gregerman
Thank you. I’ve appreciated the chance to be on your show. Thanks.

May 07
0

1150: How to Reclaim Your Schedule and Own Your Time with Laura Vanderkam

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Productivity expert Laura Vanderkam shows you how to take charge of your schedule so that you can make time for what truly matters.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why you feel like you don’t have enough time–and how to change it
  2. How setting aside 15 minutes can change your whole workday
  3. How to become the ringmaster of your schedule circus

About Laura

Laura Vanderkam is the author of several time management and productivity books, including Off the Clock, I Know How She Does It, What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast, and 168 Hours. 

Her 2016 TED talk, “How to Gain Control of Your Free Time,” has been viewed more than 5 million times. She regularly appears in publications including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and Fortune. 

She is the co-host, with Sarah Hart-Unger, of the podcast Best of Both Worlds. She lives outside Philadelphia with her husband and four children, and blogs at LauraVanderkam.com.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Laura Vanderkam Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Laura, welcome back!

Laura Vanderkam
Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be back.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about Big Time. You’ve got a simple path for us for time abundance. And we talked a little bit about this notion of time scarcity versus abundance last time. Tell me, what have you discovered with your new research adventures?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah. Well, Big Time is all about moving beyond a sense of time scarcity, and what happens when we truly believe that we have enough time for the things that we want to do in life. I really do think it is possible to fall in love with our schedules, and I’ve got lots of practical tips, talked to lots of people who are making it happen. I think that time can, ultimately, be our friend.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds enticing. Can you share with us some of the on-the-ground investigative research studying you did to discover these bits?

Laura Vanderkam
Well, one thing I did is looking at how people spend their work hours. And how people feel about work is a very complicated question.

You know, if you ask people, in general, how do they feel about their jobs, most people will say they’re reasonably satisfied. If you look at people’s happiness during the day, like in a 10:00 a.m. staff meeting, they tend to be pretty unhappy. Like, they are watching the clock, hoping that time is moving faster.

So we have this, you know, gap between, like, we’re reasonably happy with our jobs overall, but during the hours we are spending at our jobs, we may not be as happy as we could be. And I really hate to have people wishing time away in their lives because time is so precious.

So one of the things I had people try out is a couple of strategies for making the experience of working hours better. Like, are there things you can do during an average work day to have you watching the clock less? And they’re pretty simple strategies.

I mean, one was spending one more hour per week on your favorite sort of work. We all have things we don’t like about our jobs but, hopefully, there’s something that drew us to the job in the first place. And so spending one more hour a week on that.

Spending just 15 minutes deepening a work friendship. So even if you’re not enamored with your job itself, like you probably have at least one colleague that you could be friendly with, and building a relationship with that person can make the experience of time at work a lot better.

And, finally, taking intentional breaks, taking two short breaks each day that you have decided ahead of time what to do with, turns out can also vastly increase the happy feelings at work. And so taken altogether, when I had a couple hundred people try these out over the course of three weeks, their workday satisfaction rose significantly.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really intriguing because, if folks are in a situation where they’re not enjoying their job, the idea of spending more time working, like your first tip there, might seem very unpleasant, like, “Heck, no. I don’t want to spend one more minute than I have to.”

Laura Vanderkam
No, not that you need to be clocking 41 hours a week instead of 40. No, I mean, re-purposing some of the time that you are already working. And even when people don’t have a ton of control, a ton of discretion over how they spend their working hours, there are often still things you can do to change it on the margin.

Whether that’s asking your supervisor to assign you to something different than what you’ve been or to spend a little bit more time on one project and try to be a little bit more efficient on something else.

There’s always things you can do just on the margins to increase the number of minutes spent on enjoyable activities versus less enjoyable activities.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, so the re-purposing, that’s a great distinction. Although, I might suggest, you tell me, that even if you do spend the 41st hour instead of 40 hours, well, I’m thinking of Mary Poppins got that tune in my head, “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.”

Laura Vanderkam
That’s true. That’s true. It might be worth a 41st hour just to change the experience of work. You know, it’s so true. I mean, there was one ridiculous study I read with psychology that had people put their hands in freezing cold water.

And when they made it slightly less cold at the end, people rated the experience as so much better. And so maybe it’s the same thing if you spend the last, you know, 15 minutes of your work day, but maybe even if you work 15 minutes later on something you really enjoy doing, maybe that could make the whole experience different.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, certainly, and the notion that you’re taking control as opposed to work is happening to you, it’s like, “No, no, no, this is the 41st hour. I am choosing to do this discretionarily.”

And in so doing – and I’m just totally making this up, so give me your hot take – that you can have some transformative impact on your own associations and relationship to the experience of work by going there.

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, and I think having that mindset of, “I have some agency over this situation,” is huge. And, again, I know a lot of people don’t have complete control over their work or their working hours. But even if you don’t have complete control, you have some. And using whatever agency you have to make your time better can just change how you feel about life in general.

I mean, we don’t spend the majority of our waking hours working. There’s that adage that, “Oh, you spend the majority of your waking hours working.” Most people do not. But, that said, we do spend a fair number of hours working.

And so if there is something you can do to move those hours out of the wishing-time away category and into even the neutral category, that can be a major life satisfaction boost. And something like deepening a work friendship.

I mean, you think about a friend as somebody that you would spend time with off the clock. So wouldn’t it be exciting to be able to spend more time with somebody that you enjoy on the clock? And, in general, friendships are built through the accumulation of relaxed, pleasant time spent together. So the more you can throw at that pile, the better.

Pete Mockaitis
And with regard to these categories of the experience of work, can you unpack a little bit of the names of the categories, how you kind of think about which vibe is appropriate for a given activity, the tracking, a little bit of the nuts and bolts for these bits?

Laura Vanderkam
I think one way to think about how you’re spending your time at work and how you’re feeling about your time at work is to give yourself, honestly, a mood score or an energy score as you go through your day.

I’m a big fan of time tracking, in general. I’ve found, through other research I’ve done, that when people track their time for a week, they tend to feel better about their time overall because it turns out that many of the catastrophic stories people tell themselves about their time are not true, right? Life isn’t actually all that bad.

We don’t work around the clock. We do get some sleep. We have some time for ourselves, even if it’s not as much as we want. And so as you’re tracking time, you could also keep track of, “How do I feel about my time? Am I happy?” Is it all clouds and rainbows and unicorns? Or is it, “I’m hating the universe?” and sort of somewhere between zero and 10. And probably most of the things we do in life are around a five or a six. But maybe some stuff is better.

And if you are going through your work day and you find that some categories of work are edging up, like you’re feeling like this is maybe a seven or if it’s in certain circumstances, it might be even an eight, well, obviously, if you can come up with a way to spend an extra hour of the week in that seven or eight category, as opposed to maybe a two, three, four kind of category, you’re going to see a big boost in overall satisfaction.

Same thing with energy. Actually, it’s interesting, because one of the problems that creating intentional breaks helps solve is that people’s energy dips a lot through the day. People have been working for a while, and then you feel like you need a break, but if you don’t take an intentional break, you’ll probably take an unintentional one. For many people that looks like scrolling around online, checking email after you just checked it five minutes ago.

And so if you find yourself with your energy dipping, like that’s trending down, maybe 10 as you’re ready to run a marathon and zero as you’re flat on your back, that’s a good sign that it’s time to build in something that would boost your energy, something like taking a quick walk, talking with somebody you like, getting some fresh air.

And as people try that, they’re going to find that the numbers after that break start trending higher.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you give us just plenty of fun stories in terms of practical, tactical, experiential, individuals who figured out how to make that switch to re-purpose an hour to have more engaging goodness, what they did for their breaks, and how that was transformative?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, sometimes it’s about noticing the work that is already there and savoring it when you’re doing it, because so much of life can just be mindless. Like, you’re going through the day, you’re doing stuff, but your mind is somewhere else, so you’re always thinking about the next thing.

So, for instance, one health care provider who was part of the study would take a minute to look at her schedule coming up and what was going on. And she realized that some of her favorite visits were with babies, right? She loved to have babies come into the office and take care of them and talk to the new parents about how they were doing.

And so when she would see these on her schedule, she would consciously be like, “Oh, yeah, I’m looking forward to this, right? I’m getting to do this favorite work coming up in one of my patients this afternoon, and would savor it while it was happening and take a moment afterwards to pause and be like, ‘Yes, I love doing that. That’s my favorite kind of work.’”

And, you know, the kids were on the schedule anyway, right? The same patients are coming no matter what, you know, if her mind is somewhere else or if she’s fully absorbed and enjoying this. But her experience of work was so much different by anticipating, experiencing, savoring in the moment and reflecting on it afterwards.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s super – the anticipating, savoring, and looking back. Boy, that’s powerful. You can do that with just about every day, there’s something worthwhile.

Laura Vanderkam
It could be even that you had a great conversation with a colleague before a meeting.

Like, you can pause and notice that, be like, “Oh, yeah, I like that person. That was a moment in my job that was a wonderful thing.” And it’s the same with you mentioned the breaks, like, stories of people taking breaks. This was almost people had to teach themselves to take good breaks.

I always say people take breaks anyway. People cannot work straight through. Even if it’s just to go to the restroom, there’s some break happening in any sort of work. The problem with a lot of information work is that they are unintentional breaks.

Like, you are going along, doing your work, you get distracted by something, you’re on your phone for a minute. Next thing you know, you’re cycling through headlines, you’re checking your WhatsApp messages. These are breaks, but it doesn’t feel rejuvenating at all.

So I was having people really learn to take real breaks. And some people were very nervous about it at the beginning. Like, I had people, you know, somebody printed out an e-book so it looked like they were working on a document while they were taking a break.

But I’m happy to report that, over the course of trying this out for a while, people realized like the earth does not crash into the sun when you take a 10-minute break. Most of us are just not that important. So you can do it.

And somebody would go outside and sit and look at the sky for 10 minutes and come back in. And it’s pretty hard to tell yourself, “I am starved for time,” when you’ve had 10 minutes to just kind of watch the clouds. And just little things like that can change your entire experience of time.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really good in that, by physically doing a thing, it’s like your brain gets the memo, “No, actually, you’re not wildly scarce in time because look what just happened.”

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, we could change our story like that all the time. Our time narratives are based all on what we are noticing. So training our brains to notice things that are not just these stressful moments can completely rewrite the story from one of time scarcity to time abundance.

Pete Mockaitis
And when it comes to these breaks, so you say two 10-minute breaks and just build them into the day, is that like one in the afternoon, one in the morning?

Laura Vanderkam
Sure, whatever works. I kind of think of these as in addition to a meal break that people might take in the middle of the day. But, obviously, you could add on a few minutes to take a longer lunch break instead if that works better for your schedule.

Some breaks are formal. Sometimes people are, like, you take it at this specific time. For a lot of people, it’s more you catch it when you can. But looking at your schedule ahead of time and kind of proactively choosing when might work is another very smart way to exert agency over your schedule for the day.

Because that sort of strategy is what can then have you say, like, “Oh, well, look, I actually have a longer break between these two meetings, and I could do something else. I could work on some of my favorite work in addition to taking a break.” And when you start to see those kinds of things, you take more charge of your working day.

Pete Mockaitis
And can you share with us some breaks that folks have just been loving in terms of finding them super rejuvenating? Staring at the sky sounds fun. What else do you recommend?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, well, anything that can get you moving physically is going to be a big win. There’s some pretty solid evidence that people who engage in physical activity will see their energy levels go up quite a bit, even through very short bursts of energy.

So if it is possible to get outside and go for a brisk walk, that is going to be at least two things right there that will boost your mood and energy. If you can take a work friend with you, good. That’s even, like, three. That could be even better.

But so people definitely enjoyed that. Now, obviously, you can’t always get outside. But are you somewhere that you could go up and down the stairs even? That would make people feel much more alert than they had.

You know, I had people take, like, little adventures. If there is, say, a park near your office, you might be able to walk out the door, walk there for 10 minutes and come back and have the boost of seeing something different in the course of your day.

But it could be other things. It could be calling a friend. It could be listening to something inspirational like a soaring movie soundtrack. People might find that a little bit exciting. Meditation works for people. Reading something, especially something upbeat.

Even if you, like, read something fun for 10 minutes twice a day, that’s 20 additional minutes of reading you’ve gotten in your day. And if you do that five days a week, that’s 100 minutes, which is an hour and 40 minutes. Like, this is a lot, you know, it does add up. You could probably read an extra book a month that way if you wanted to.

People looked at art online. Even, you know, watching funny videos, as long as you’re doing it intentionally. I think a lot of people are just sort of, you know, pull up YouTube shorts and see what’s there, which, you know, I get it.

But if you have maybe saved up a clip from a favorite stand-up comedian or a clip from a favorite sitcom that you used to watch back in the day, those can be the kind of things that will make you laugh, and a laugh will boost your energy quite a bit.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that a lot, and I’m a believer in breaks. In this office, it’s wild. I’ve got like a little basin of water I will dip my face into. I’ve got a little rebounder trampoline I’ll just jump on. I’ve got an acupressure mat. I’ll lie on it. I’ll stand on it. I joke that it’s the recording studio and wellness spa with all these amenities.

And it’s so true. When I really stop and engage with these things, it creates a great energy boost as opposed to, if you blast straight through, it’s like the body will demand a pause. And so often, yes, it is a scrolling of some sort. I like your phrase – an unintentional break asserts itself.

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, I refer to that as our electronic hobbies, right, because it fills so much time. And a hobby could be a great thing to do on a break, particularly if you work from home some days. I mean, you know, 10 minutes you could go play a musical instrument.

You could go do some knitting, or needle point, or color in one of those adult coloring books, or even go outside and weed a few things in the garden, if that would be, you know, something you’d find relaxing. But instead, we tend to default to these electronic hobbies of scrolling around, reading social media comments, opening your inbox again, even though you just opened it five minutes prior.

And by naming that as a hobby, I think it gives people pause, because it’s like, “Well, that’s not what I’d choose to do as my hobby.” It’s like, “Okay, well, then we need to re-purpose that time for something that you find more enjoyable.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s super. Let’s talk a little bit about the tracking of time. It seems there are many tools that would love to avail themselves in this domain. What have you found works great for you and for others in doing this?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, so I’ve been tracking my time for about 11 years now. Nobody else needs to do that, but I have been doing that because I find it very useful and it’s also very easy. And I just check in three to four times a day, write down what I’ve done since the last time I checked in.

Each check-in takes me about a minute. You know, three minutes a day, same amount of time I spend brushing my teeth. So it is not something that I find incredibly onerous. But I just use spreadsheets. It is a basic Excel, standard thing.

It’s got the days of the week across the top, Monday through Sunday, half-hour blocks down the left-hand side, 5:00 a.m. to 4:30 a.m. So 336 cells representing the 168-hour week, and I just fill it in as I go.

However, that’s not the only way you could do this. There are lots of time tracking apps on the market.

My podcast co-host on “Best of Both Worlds,” Sarah Hart-Unger, was having trouble tracking her time for years, even though I was constantly preaching the benefits of it. And she came across Toggl, T-O-G-G-L, which has a free version that is a more digital version of this.

Like, you just… it’s on your phone, you say what you’re doing, start and stop. You can go back in and correct the record later if you’ve forgotten to hit stop, and so you’ve been commuting for the last six hours. You can go back in and change it later.

But she found that fairly intuitive and something that fit in with her busy life. So that’s something that people could give a whirl. You could also walk around, like, with a little notebook. You want to look all artsy, like, “I look at my journal as I’m going through the day.” That works too.

Like, the tool itself doesn’t really matter. It’s more like, “Can you do it? Will you do it? Will you stick with it for at least a few days?” and, ideally, a week. And if you do, I think you’ll learn a lot about your life.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, and I’d love to zoom out and get some of your big-picture perspectives. You’ve got a mindset or metaphor of being the ringmaster. Can you expand on this?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, this is probably one of my favorite metaphors for time and how we think of our lives. So when people tell you, “My life is a circus,” they tend to mean it is chaotic. But that is such a slander against circuses because circuses are the most organized performance you will ever see.

Nobody is getting shot out of a cannon at the wrong time, right? If there are supposed to be tigers in one ring, they are not in another ring. They’re not coming on at the wrong time. They are there when they are supposed to be there, right? And so I think we should aspire to have our lives be as organized as a circus. A circus is complex, but it is not chaotic at all.

And so I’ve developed this metaphor of, like, I am the ring master in charge of my life. My life has three rings, right? So this is a three ring circus of career, relationships – so meaning friends and family – and self, the things I need to do for my own physical, mental, spiritual, emotional health.

So all the time, you are monitoring all three rings, you are making sure that what is supposed to be happening in each ring is actually happening, that the logistics are thought through, that this all looks like a good time. And one of the additions of this metaphor is that a lot of circus performers, acrobats and stuff, perform over a net. And the net is there for when things go wrong.

And, to my mind, a net is a net, but I have interviewed circus performers and they have informed me that, “Oh, no, no, no, no, the net has to be very well thought through. The net is exactly where it’s supposed to be. The net is inspected frequently. We train ourselves on how we land in that net so that we don’t injure ourselves if we fall or something goes wrong.”

And so I was like, “Wow, that’s a good metaphor for life, too. We all need nets under ourselves. We need backup plans for when things go wrong. We need to actually think of those backup plans. Like, do they work?”

It’s not just, like, “Oh, I think maybe if my kid is sick on a day I have a big presentation, I could avail myself of this backup plan.” It’s like, “Well, no, no, no. Let’s make sure. Let’s test that net. Let’s make sure it’s there.”

But when you do that, the circus can go off with much less stress, with much less worry that when something goes wrong, it turns into a disaster.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s super and inspiring. Like, we should be so lucky to have it.

Laura Vanderkam
We should all be a circus. We should be a circus. And not just that, you want to manage it for delight, right? Another part of the metaphor is that a circus isn’t cool if it’s all drudgery. Like, if people are just going through with no smiles on their faces as they’re doing their tricks.

You want to make it look like it’s enjoyable. And as we manage the complex but not chaotic three-ring circus of our lives. We want to make it look like a real performance and truly enjoy it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And what’s your philosophy on embracing your golden hours?

Laura Vanderkam
So the golden hours are the hours after work and before bed. If you think about how people talk about the golden years for retirees after they stop working, they have time for leisure and family, it’s the same that we get a miniature version every weekday evening.

After you’re done working, you get time for leisure and family. However, many people find this time incredibly hard to use well. And that is because we are tired, right? We’ve used up a lot of energy in the course of the day. In many cases, it’s this march toward bedtime. And sometimes people are even counting minutes as they are getting through the evening.

And again, time is precious. I hate to have people wish any time away. So I am all about embracing our golden hours. Partly that’s just a mindset. If you think of that time after work and before bed as your golden hours, you’re going to have a different mindset than if you’re thinking of it as a second shift or just the time that’s left over after work.

I think it’s a good idea to set just small, possibly low energy intentions for the evening so it feels like something happened, right? So it’s not just all this time passed between the end of work and bed. It’s like, “Oh, well, I did a puzzle for 30 minutes,” or, “I went for a walk outside with my family for 30 minutes,” “We had ice cream on the patio because it’s nice outside tonight.”

And if you have something you can point to that you enjoyed that actually happened in the evening, you’ll feel more like this time exists and life isn’t all just these have-to-do’s. There’s some want-to-do’s in there as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Golden hours, golden years. Understood. I guess I’m thinking about, in the universe of time tracking, I find that sometimes our hangups are not so much about having the time available to deploy on something, but finding the will, the audacity, the motivation to push past resistance or avoidance to go make amazing things happen with time.

So it’s, like, sometimes time is the bottleneck resource, and other times it’s more of like an emotional will type vibe. How do you think about these two resources in conjunction with each other?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, I think time gets blamed for all sorts of things, that it is not really a time matter. When I have people track their time, often people find that they have a reasonable amount of discretionary time. It’s just that a lot of it happens in chunks that we haven’t thought about, right?

We haven’t thought ahead of time, like, “Oh, yeah, I’m going to have four hours after work and before bed. Only two of those are going to be spent on childcare,” for instance, “I’ve got two hours after that. What would I like to do with it?”

But, you know, by that time, you’re kind of tired and at the end of your rope and feel like you’re out of energy and out of sorts, and that’s the end of it. And so nothing happens except those electronic hobbies, as we talked about earlier.

I think intention goes a long way. So if you know that this evening you are going to go play a board game with your partner or something, like, you’ve got that on your brain, you’re managing your energy toward it so you’re not surprised by it and feeling sort of resistance to it in the moment, even though it’s something you actively chose to want to do.

So knowing it ahead of time is often helpful for sort of getting ourselves in the mindset for doing something. When my kids were little, I would sometimes even think about that, like coming into the evening, “What could I suggest that we do that I wouldn’t hate so I don’t get, like, ambushed by the request to play Candy Land, which I definitely did not want to do?”

So it’s that kind of thing. Like, can you go into it with an intention? Because the intention will shape how you handle your energy going into it. I think, also, you got to be careful about making sure you’re setting intentions for yourself to do things you truly want to do.

And I think a lot of people just have not thought about this. The things they say they want to do are not things they actually want to do. And so it’s like you get to that time in the evening, you’re like, “I need to learn Spanish.” Do you actually want to learn Spanish? Like, is that something you’re telling yourself you should do?

Or, you know, is it just, you know, the thing that feels responsible and productive to do with your leisure time, like, “I should be on Duolingo”? Well, you know, maybe you don’t want to be. Is there something else that you feel less resistance to?

And if that is the case, maybe you should re-shape your goals to be more in the direction of things you truly do want to do, like things that make you feel more energized when you think about them, as opposed to thinking like, “I don’t want to,” in the moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s a really good distinction. And we might have any number of “shoulds” that, like, “I should learn this language,” “I should build big muscles,” “I should learn AI, apparently.” Do we all need to know AI?

Laura Vanderkam
That’s another one. We’re all going to be behind the game on that one.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So any pro tips on distinguishing between a should and a genuine desire of our heart, our values?

Laura Vanderkam
I think paying attention to that energy that you feel with something. If you think about like, “Ooh, that sounds exciting,” or, like, “I feel a little bit more energized as I think about it.” I’m not saying it’s going to be automatically easy, but like if you saw it on your calendar, like somebody had put “Spend two hours doing X,” like, would you be excited about it?

You know, some things I would, like having dinner with a friend. Absolutely. Like, reading one of my favorite books. Yes, I would. Learning Spanish, not so much. That’s not one of my goals. So I think that can help quite a bit.

In general, in life, I’m always encouraging people to spend less time on the things you are trying to talk yourself into. You might want to spend a little more time on the things that you are trying to talk yourself out of, because it sounds logistically difficult, or it’s outside your comfort zone. Like, those are things you can deal with.

Where that comes up and people are like, “Oh, you know, it would be so cool to sing in a choir again. I really enjoyed that in college, but I’m a busy person. I have a job. I have a family. I can’t make time for that.”

But that’s when you’re talking yourself out of something. Whereas, if you’re talking yourself into it, like, “Well, I should learn Spanish,” “I should be doing this,” those are things that maybe are not the direction to go.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is a master key right there. Wow! It’s so funny because that really does cut to the heart of it. When you’re talking yourself out of something, it means that you have a desire. It’s there and you’re fighting against it, by definition, it’s like, “Oh, that’s not practical. That’s too expensive. It’s like, I’ve got all these other responsibilities.” So that’s really intriguing. And I guess, sometimes, I see a two-by-two matrix in my mind’s eye, Laura.

Laura Vanderkam
Oh, boy.

Pete Mockaitis
You can’t take the consultant out of me. There’s the internal desire and then there’s the argumentation. And sometimes you don’t argue with yourself at all. It’s like, “I should really get a burrito. Yeah, let’s do it.”

Laura Vanderkam
“Let’s do it. We’re on it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s that. And then it goes in every combination of the two-by-two. And so, yeah, I think that you’re right. That really is a zone of opportunity there in terms of you have the desire and yet you’ve been talking yourself out of it. Maybe go ahead and give it a try.

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, you know? I mean, logistics can be figured out. You can always try something for a while and see how it goes, too, right? You can go back to life as it was after a trial period or whatever, but you might be surprised at what you can fit in.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. Well, Laura, tell me, any critical insights you want to make sure How to be Awesome at Your Job listeners hear before we hear about your favorite things?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah. Well, I’m always preaching the time tracking. So if anyone’s listening to this and thought, “Well, hmm,” I’m going to say, well, that’s maybe a should that we should try at one point in our life.

Because I do think many of us walk around with stories about our lives that just aren’t true, that, “I work around the clock,” or, “I’m working late every night,” or, “I spent my entire weekend working,” “I never see my family,” “I don’t get enough sleep,” or, “I sleep terribly all the time,” “I never have free time,” all these things, “I spend my life doing housework,” various stories that people tell themselves.

And almost universally, time tracking will show that those stories are incomplete, right? Even if you work long hours, you are probably not working around the clock. There are probably some other hours where you are awake and not working. And so you can see where those happen and maybe start thinking about, “Well, what would be the best thing for me to do during that time?”

You may have a bad night or two. Many people do, but often, over the course of the week, we tend to average out toward what our bodies are needing. And when you see that, you might start thinking, “Huh, well, given that I’m not saving any time by sleeping less on Tuesday and crashing on Saturday, maybe I could try to get the same amount of sleep every night and feel better and more energetic overall.”

You might see that there is some discretionary time, but, you know, what you spend that doing is kind of up to you, and that’s the nature of discretionary time. And sometimes we’re spending more of it than we like on our electronic hobbies, but we can do something about that, right?

We can challenge ourselves to do things that sound a little bit more fun, rejuvenating, relaxing, you know, for just a few minutes before going toward that YouTube binge for the rest of the night. So I really do think that time tracking will make time feel more abundant.

And you can believe me or not, but I did have several hundred people try it and they felt better about their time afterwards. So I take comfort from that.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Now could you share your favorite quotes, something you find inspiring?

Laura Vanderkam
So many years ago, one of the first people I interviewed about how she spent her time told me that “I don’t have time” means it’s not a priority, and that has stuck with me forever.

And there may be consequences to making different choices, but it reminds us that time is a choice. And also it means that I never tell anyone now that I don’t have time to do something.

Pete Mockaitis
You just tell them they’re not a priority?

Laura Vanderkam
It’s not a priority, sorry. I try to be nicer about it, but, you know, that is fundamentally what it comes down to.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. All right. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Laura Vanderkam
I would say that the one I mentioned earlier about people just getting short bursts of activity, like, five, 10 minutes of physical activity, their scores on an energy scale went from, like, a three to an eight or something. It was, really, I’m misquoting it here, but the idea is that it doesn’t take much. And we can’t make more time but we can definitely change our energy levels.

And when you feel more energetic, you can just do more than if you feel less energetic. So even though you can’t make more time, you can sort of have the equivalent of making more time by paying attention to how, you know, where your energy levels are and what you can do to get them back up again.

Pete Mockaitis
And, to be clear, five-ish minutes of activity raises the energy level for hours, or…?

Laura Vanderkam
At least an hour. I remember from that particular study, people took like five minutes to do a burst of activity. And then their levels right afterwards, I think, it was a nine. And then an hour later, it was still north of a six. So if you go from a three to the rest of the hour spent north of a six, like, how could you not be getting more done? That’s the difference between feeling like you’re flat on your back and feeling like, “Hey, I can do stuff with my life.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. And a favorite book?

Laura Vanderkam
This is, honestly, what I read in the course of writing Big Time is I read War and Peace, and I loved it.

Pete Mockaitis
I just got War and Peace.

Laura Vanderkam
Okay, you should read it. Yeah, I mean people look at it, and it’s like, “That’s a really big book,” and it’s true. But it is very accessible. It has 361 very short chapters. So if you read one chapter a day for a year, it only takes a couple minutes each day and you’ll get through it.

Pete Mockaitis
And a key habit?

Laura Vanderkam
So I have started listening to, like, all the works of a particular composer over the course of a year for the past three years. So this year, I am listening to Mozart in the car.

And that’s a lot better than other things I could probably be listening to. And so it has definitely upgraded the running around that tends to happen in my life. So that music choice habit has definitely elevated my listening game.

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

Laura Vanderkam
Please come visit me at LauraVanderkam.com. You can learn more on my website about my books and podcasts. You can get time tracking spreadsheet if you want to do that. You can also reach out to me at Laura@LauraVanderkam.com. I love hearing from people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Laura Vanderkam
Maybe today you could think about what your favorite sort of work is and challenge yourself to spend just a few more minutes on that favorite sort of work, and then reflect afterwards on how it went. And I think you’ll change the experience of your work day completely.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Laura, thank you.

Laura Vanderkam
Thanks so much for having me.