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Marco Bartolome

Nov 12

1196: The Hidden Habits That Makes Teams More Effective with Karina Mangu-Ward

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Karina Mangu-Ward shares how to create the conditions for people to work better, learn faster, and succeed together.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to make it “safe to try” new ideas
  2. How to help your team navigate trade-offs and priorities
  3. How to free up valuable meeting time

About Karina

Karina Mangu-Ward has a decade of experience partnering with leading non profits, foundations, city agencies, and community stakeholders. At August, Karina is an organizational design consultant who helps nurture more creative, self-managing and productive teams.  She’s partnered with New York City’s Department of Education, Sundance Institute, Planned Parenthood, PepsiCo and Chanel. 

Prior to joining August, she worked for 10 years for nonprofits, foundations, government agencies, and community networks tackling complex organizational and social challenges. Her passion is helping groups navigate ambiguity, gain insight and unlock highly complex challenges.

Resources Mentioned

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Pete Mockaitis
Karina, welcome!

Karina Mangu-Ward
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about Teams That Meet the Moment. Could you start us off by sharing one of your most surprising or counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about teams with all your work in this domain?

Karina Mangu-Ward
One of the things that people get wrong about teams is they think it’s all about superstar talent. People are obsessed with hiring the best talent, having the best hiring process, paying premium for great talent.

But I have seen amazing talent sit in the seat and just have their talent absolutely squandered if the team can’t figure out how to make decisions together, learn together, and get shit done.

So, over-anchoring on talent, it’s like a necessary but insufficient condition for great teamwork. And I know that’s spicy. I don’t know, do you think that’s spicy?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I know it is certainly counterintuitive in the universe that we live in this current time, for sure. Could you share with us an exciting story that really illustrates how the ways of working makes all the impact in terms of a transformation for the better or for the worse when things were shifting?

Karina Mangu-Ward
Sure. There’s a great example in the book, so there was a leadership team, HR leadership team at a big organization, and they got together to do what they call a take the workout session. So that’s when a leadership team recognizes, like, they have too many things on their plate, too many demands pulling them in too many directions.

And they got together for an offsite. And I think a traditional version of that is leaders kind of debate with each other and sort of, like, everyone goes, but everything is a priority that happens all the time, right? It’s like, ‘Well, let’s make a list of our 12 priorities, and all 12 of those things are our priorities.”

And this team did the opposite. They sat down, they said, “All right, we’ve got too much.” And someone said, “I want to make a proposal. My proposal is that the way we do strategic planning now, which involves a thousand hours of work spread across 20 people, we should stop doing that. We should replace all of this elaborate deck-building with one six-page memo that clearly outlines our talent strategy.”

Now that’s the kind of thing that, in many teams, would be met with, “That’s not going to work,” “It couldn’t possibly,” “We’ll lose too much of the fidelity of the plan.” And instead, because this team had been taught this mindset that we practice at August called Safe to Try, they said, “Is this safe to try?” which means, “Maybe we don’t all agree, maybe we don’t all think this is the best way forward, but it’s worth trying and learning from.”

And there were some concerns raised, but none of them were really reasons not to do it. And within a couple of hours, they agreed to a change that was fairly monumental, that reduced, like, thousands of hours of work from people, and made a huge impact.

And just the mindset shift of, “Is this exactly right?” to, “Is this safe to try?” is one of the most powerful things that any team can do to change how they work. This is of all the stuff that I teach across all of the teams, I would say one of the stickiest shifts that I help teams make.

I’m curious, does that resonate? Have you kind of come across that idea before?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s a nice, short description of that. Like, I’ve heard like, “Oh, you’re juggling with rubber balls versus glass balls, you know? There are some doors that are one way and two way.” And so this is shorter and zippier, I think, in that it’s, “Is it safe to try?”

And you could kind of very quickly chew on that, and say, “Well, I guess so,” because, on the one hand, you might say, “Well, no, it’s not safe to have your strategic plan be under thought,” you know, in terms of like, so thousands of hours of work, it’s like, “Well, if those thousands of hours of work are producing truly optimal, pristine…” I don’t know.

Karina Mangu-Ward
Are they ever? Are they ever, Pete? Very rare the thousands of hours of deck-making. It’s really about the quality of the ideas. Usually, it’s make work around how we’re communicating things and making sure that Jim doesn’t have a beef with the word that goes on the slide, and Mary isn’t mad that her work isn’t represented in exactly the right way.

Like, there’s so much, like, just nitpicking in corporate life right now. And I think that this notion gets us a little bit out of the spirit of perfectionism and into the spirit of progress. Let’s just go.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s handy. And I guess every organization is different in the sense of, if a strategic planning process that was thousands of hours genuinely had folks doing ample research, interviews, all the things to have a phenomenal base of insight and wisdom and knowledge and data, from which to make optimal decisions – I’m a former strategy consultant – then, yeah.

Karina Mangu-Ward
I’m picking up a vibe here, Pete, from you on this.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, not to be defensive.

Karina Mangu-Ward
I’m, like, you sense a real allegiance to the thousands of hours.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so I guess, though I love killing meetings and I did not care for the seventh, eighth, ninth revision of a PowerPoint deck, you know, with the Bain partners. I wasn’t a fan of that.

So I think that notion of “Is it safe to try?” as I’m imagining being in that room, wondering, pondering that question, it’s like, “Well, I guess we’ll know if it was safe if that six-page, you know, output on the other side seems robustly researched, fact-based, rich and on point, or not. “And if it’s not, it’s like, I guess that didn’t work out, but it was safe to try.”

Karina Mangu-Ward
“That we’ll try something else.” But what you said, the thing I want to hone in on what you said is, “I guess we’ll know once we…” dot dot dot. This is everything. It’s the idea that, in many things, embracing a change, trying something new, we have to admit to ourselves that we won’t know until we try.

And many things are easy to iterate and adapt and throw out if they’re not working quite right. Like, we have to trust our ability and we have to build our adaptive capacity to steer if we’re not getting it right.

I was kind of joking. So it’s going to be the New York City Marathon here on Sunday, and we were joking in the office, like, “What if you prepared for the New York City Marathon by spending three hours every weekend researching the route, planning the turns, timing exactly what your miles would need to be in order to get a qualifying time?”

Like, we often get stuck in this mindset of, like, planning, planning, planning, planning, planning. But the way that you find out your capacity to run the marathon is by hitting the streets, by practicing, by building your own muscles.

And I think, in organizational life, the safe to try is like, “Well, let me go out and try to run a block. Let me see how that feels, how much capacity I have, and then I’ll do some reflecting and then I’ll try again.”

Our other joke was that AI is like the Uber. So it’s, like, if you’re like, “I could do the New York City Marathon, but I’m going to take an Uber from here to there.” I mean, I like a lot about AI, but I think it raises interesting questions about, “When do you need to, like, pound the pavement yourself? And when does it make sense to get in the Uber to get from here to there?”

I’m curious if any of that, if you’re like, “Shut up, Karina. These are ridiculous metaphors,” or if any of that feels resonant, even as, like, especially as a strategy consultant.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, no, I remember I’ve had conversations with AI about, like, “So are these humanoid robots strong enough to do my bench pressing workout for me?” And that was just sort of a bit of a test, because like, “Ha, ha, a bench pressing workout is not for the purpose of moving weight in a particular pattern. It’s for the purpose of building strength and muscles.”

And it’s funny, but it’s up back in the day, the AI sometimes got it, like, “Actually, the weight capacity is this.” It’s like, “Okay, you’ve missed sort of the underlying piece of the question,” but sometimes they got it just right in terms of, “But that won’t accomplish what you seek to by doing the workout.”

So, yeah, I think that’s a wise perspective. And I know mathematicians are arguing or thinking through this right now. It’s, like, “Okay, if we can get to our answers and proofs, but we didn’t do the journey, we have lost something. Is that an okay trade or is it not?” And they’re just wrestling with it.

Karina Mangu-Ward
Yeah, I think that this is, in my life with teams, a lot of this comes up around decision-making. Like, so much of the rich practice of decision-making is getting in reps, deliberating with others, fact-finding, sense-making, discernment, getting comfortable making a call, even if the information isn’t perfect.

Those are what I think of as durable skills. Those are things that AI can never replace. But the way AI gets into the decision-making process, one of the practices in the book is called make a proposal. It sounds ridiculously simple, but I observe lots of groups just swirling and swirling and swirling when they need to make a call about something.

Like, the more consequential it is, often the more swirling it is. And it’s really powerful when someone in a group says, “Instead of should we, how about….?” they say, “I propose we….” because that puts something on the table for the group to respond to, to build on. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it’s just the beginning.

And it is true that AI does an exceptional job of putting something on the table for us to begin with, but the work is seeing it as a proposal and not a product, and retaining all of our deeply human ways of interacting with it and owning every word of whatever we decide to do in the long run. So it’s definitely changing the shape of teaming in these days.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that these subtle shifts here in terms of “Is it safe to try?” and, “I propose…” when you put out a proposal, even in some ways it’s almost the same thing. We’re talking about an idea versus someone says, “I propose this.”

Karina Mangu-Ward
It’s not, though.

Pete Mockaitis
When that person, yeah, exactly, like the whole vibe, emotional, psychological feels get shifted because it’s like, “Oh, oh, this is for real.”

Karina Mangu-Ward
“Oh, oh, now we have something to speak about, yeah.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, “This is a real thing? It’s, like, we got to really put it out there or else, you know, this train can leave the station, and we don’t have the input integrated into it.” Or it’s like, “Oh, there is a leading move that default in existence, whereas before there was nothing. Now there’s a default option, and that needs to be refined or vetoed or dethroned, but we’ve we’ve shifted from inaction to action.”

Karina Mangu-Ward
Yeah, and this is the hill I’m going to die on. Like, you can send people to management trainings all you like. The thing that actually changes the way people work is sticky micro phrases and micro behaviors that have at the heart of them radically helpful intentions.

I’m going to give you another one. Another one of the practices in the book is called the even over practice. Are you familiar with this one?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m not sure yet.

Karina Mangu-Ward
Is that like…? Okay, all right. I’m like, “Who knows about this? I don’t know. We’ll find out.” It’s probably familiar to you in some format. It comes out of the kind of practice of agile, agile ways of working.

But the formulation is good thing A even over good thing B. So that could be expressed as progress even over perfection or growth, even over profit, breadth, even over depth. The ideas in organizational and teaming life are often faced with two things we desperately want at the same time.

And most leaders I know hate having to choose, but they are implicitly often making choices, not owning up to them, and not necessarily communicating them, and rarely communicating them in advance so that they don’t have to micromanage their team, so their team can feel empowered to run in a way that’s aligned without being controlled.

So, instead of saying something to your team like, “We’ve got a new project running and we need to make sure we’re being really rigorous, and also we’ve got to move relentlessly fast.” Like, that’s trying to have your cake and eating it, too.

You might say, “We’re about to go into an experiment. I want to keep this high quality, but I also want to move fast. I think it’s really important that we get something out there that we start trying, that we launch a product or we do a small pilot.”

“So if you’re getting stuck, I want you to prioritize speed even over quality. Just in this case, this is not always going to be the way we prioritize things, but for this pilot on this product, it’s going to be speed even over quality because I think the feedback that we’re going to get is going to be richer than if we wait much longer to try to perfect it.”

And that expression is so powerful to govern people’s actions. And then you never have to go to someone later and be like, “What’s the timeline? And did you speed it up? And why are you…?” you know?

But also, this requires the way people learn this is having a leader model it for them, and going, “Oh, that’s useful. I’m going to try that.” It’s not a three-hour management training. So, yeah, I’m curious. Is that, like, adjacent to something you use in your own practice? Or what resonates with you about that?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that it’s fun to be explicit about that because there are often these assumptions that are just there, in terms of it’s like, “Well, we’re going to do this, but, of course, we’re not going to, like, spend any money.” It’s like, “Oh, no, no. Do this even over being as dirt cheap as possible, you know? Do this, even over upsetting that person over there.”

Karina Mangu-Ward
Yep, I’m going to catch you on that because that’s good thing A even over bad thing B, which is like upsetting somebody is bad thing B. The reason that the way this is most useful is when it’s two things you really, really, really want.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, if I may, it’s like even over their approval, good feelings, happy vibes, you know?

Karina Mangu-Ward
Their approval. Exactly. Because you’re like, “I do also want that, but I’m willing to prioritize this other thing, knowing that I’m going to have to compromise.” This is so vastly different than the way priorities are often released inside organizations, which is like a list of six to 12 things with no communication about like, “Well, if you only have capacity for three of them, what about four through nine?”

But if you have these kinds of governing guardrails about how to choose when you feel stuck, and if you can have both things, have them. It’s not, like, saying you can’t have two nice things. It’s only when you find yourself in that stuck place. But you’re right, making the implicit explicit, that’s the heart of this practice.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, while we’re there, what are some things that are often well worth proactively making explicit about even over X, even over Y, even over Z?

Karina Mangu-Ward
Yeah, I mean, I think there’s two categories. One is the kind of, like, human side soft side. So when I’m working with a group and we’re setting group norms, I’ll often say something like, “Let’s, today, prioritize candor even over comfort. Being comfortable in a group is amazing.”

“But if we’re going to have to fight between saying what we really think and feel and that feeling of comfort, let’s all choose today to be candid. Let’s have the real conversation.” Progress even over perfection. This is one of the most important ones.

And I know it sounds so simple, so straightforward, but in most organizations and teams that I work with, the push for perfectionist culture is so intense, so powerful, that being able to say, “Choose to make a little progress, even if it means you have to give up a bit of the perfection that you think is expected of you, or that you need in order to advance.”

So that’s, like, bucket one. I think the other bucket is more on the business side. So the ones that come up often are like, in a project or like in a business year, the growth even over profitability, or profitability even over growth.

There’s a story I like to tell when Disney+ was launching, they made a very clear decision to prioritize subscriber growth, even at the expense of profitability. They were giving it away and keeping the price really low.

And at some point, they flipped the switch and they said, “No, now it’s about profitability, even at the expense of subscriber growth,” and they, like, increased their prices. A good even over can always be flipped.

And this is like a really important part of the idea that our world is very unpredictable, conditions are always changing. And to be truly adaptable as a team, you have to be ready to dynamically switch up your strategy. So those are kind of like the two buckets that they tend to fall in.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that when you hear that, it feels very liberating and freeing. Like, if I were to, in that meeting of candor over comfort, you know, if I were to then say, “You know, Karina, I think that’s exactly the wrong direction.” It’s sort of, like, you’re like, “Whoa, Pete, come on, man. Where is that coming from?” It’s like, “I thought that’s what we were doing here.”

Karina Mangu-Ward
“That’s what we said. That’s what we agreed. We wrote it down.”

Pete Mockaitis
“Candor over comfort. That’s what we’re doing here.” And, likewise, like, “Oh, I’m just really worried about the margins.” It’s like, “Oh, well, we’re not so worried about those for the moment.” It’s like, “Oh, well, cool. Well, then, game on. Here’s all the things we can do.”

Like, all the, I don’t know how I would describe this emotional experience of it, it’s like, “Oh, you want to do a thing, but you got this worry, constraint, and you’re not quite sure.” And then you just sort of get to wipe that away entirely, it’s like, “Oh, cool. Well, then away we go.”

Karina Mangu-Ward
“Yeah, let’s do it.” I think of that as, like, decision fatigue. Like, in organizations, the swirl is, like, “Is this the right color? Is that the right color? What should I do? Or what are people going to think about what I’m doing?” And I think a good even over wipes away so much of that.

And I agree with you. It feels like a relief. It feels like spaciousness. And it’s, like, it makes your internal battle go away because it’s been externalized, you know? You don’t have to sit in the meeting, biting your nails, waiting for just the right moment to tell me that my idea is shit. Like, you know as soon as it occurs to you that it’s welcome to put it out.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s super. Okay, safe to try, I propose, even over. Tell us about meetings. A lot of time and energy gets wasted there.

Karina Mangu-Ward
Meetings are terrible. Meetings are terrible. Meetings are so important. Meetings are terrible. Both of those things are true. In the book, we talk about the bold stake in the ground is that there’s only actually four kinds of meetings, and everything else, everybody else is lying to you.

So the four types of meetings, this is for a working team, a group of people that are working together towards some common purpose. The four types of meetings are prioritizing work and tasks, like, “Are we doing this this week, next week? No? Who’s doing it? Who’s the owner?”

Collaborating, which is rolling up your sleeves and doing the work. I spend a lot of time in meetings with people who like to talk about the work and don’t do a lot of work. A lot of talking about, “Are you going to do this? And what’s our plan, and the plan, and the plan?”

Doing the work means, like, “We’re building a prototype together. We’ve got a doc open. By the time we’re done with the collab meeting, we’ve made something that we’re going to ship to somebody.” So collab mode is really important.

Demo mode is when you’re sharing work for feedback with people who are going to be impacted by it or need to have kind of domain to direct it or shape it. And then the last meeting is the retrospective, so a meeting where you reflect and learn together and make pivots and then follow through on them.

Most meetings in modern life are some mix of updates and reporting and some weird blend of some of those other things. And, sometimes, meetings are just like revisiting the four things we talked about at the last meeting again, and reopening decisions.

Meeting dysfunction, I think we’ve just normalized. We’ve gotten very numb to how terrible meetings are. But what I’ve seen is that when people kind of, like, get into this mode where they’re cycling through these meetings on a regular cadence, it’s so, I know this is going to sound cheesy, joyful.

People are so lit up by actually working effectively together. And let’s say on a Monday, you spend half an hour prioritizing, on a Wednesday, you spend an hour, 90 minutes, two hours making stuff.

And on Friday, you meet with stakeholders and you’re like, “Here’s what we made this week. What do you think?” And then every month, you’re getting together and going, “What happened? How are we doing? Everything is wrong. Let’s change it up for next month.” It’s engaging for people at work, the work product is better.

So that’s my spiel. And if you’re nodding along to this, like, the first thing to do is just open up your calendar, look at your meetings, and ask of the stuff that’s already there, “Can you kind of discern what type of meeting you’re trying to have? And if not, can you do a bit of re-jiggering to carve out your meeting time in this way?”

Pete Mockaitis
Now, you say most meetings or meeting time is a lot of mishmash of updating and reporting. That doesn’t quite sound like the, I guess, it could be sharing a demonstration.

Karina Mangu-Ward
It’s none of them. We should not be using meetings for updating and reporting. This is not a good use. We should be using asynchronous communication. We should be using AI. We should have real-time dashboards. We should be using Slack. We should have ambient awareness. We should have shared files, “You don’t have to update me. I should have access to your stuff, in your files, and I can go look at it if I need to.”

Like, of course, some information sharing is relevant at points, but for a working team that’s charging against something together, I would say the updates should be so radically minimal. Because these other things, and also the way you set up your asynchronous and ambient communication, should make that much less necessary.

Pete Mockaitis
Tell us about how asynchronous and ambient awareness communications would be set up such that updates have no place in meetings.

Karina Mangu-Ward
So let’s say, I mean, it’s fairly simple. We have to get out of our email inboxes and we have to get into Slack. We have to get into Teams. What that looks like is, let’s say one of the things we’re working on as a team is putting together a project plan.

So I’m going to start the doc for that. I drop the link for that doc before I’ve even built out the plan. I put the link for that blank doc in Slack and I say, “Hey, I’m going to be building out the project plan today and tomorrow in here. Follow along if you like.”

Anyone can see that if they want to. I’m communicating work in progress, I’m working in public, I don’t need to hide anything from anybody. And then by the time we get to our team meeting on Monday, I don’t need to take five minutes to be like, “Hey, everybody, letting you know I’ve been working on a project.”

I don’t have to perform my work for you because you can see all week that I’m doing it. And when we’re working in a shared, a lot of stuff happens on teams, traditional teams, that are not working in this way, where it’s like a sidebar and a one-on-one, or I’m working just like on my desktop.

And when we get into shared channels where I can watch what you’re doing, the expectation is not that I’m interacting with it, but I’m ambiently aware of it, it means that we don’t have to consolidate that updating to a meeting moment.

And also, like, AI is changing this radically. Like, the practice we have in our firm and that we support teams doing is like, let’s say I have a meeting that you’re not a part of, I drop the Granola notes.

Granola is an excellent AI note-taking app. I drop the Granola notes and anyone can go click on that at any time. And I drop a few comments about it. And then I don’t have to spend five minutes in our live meeting taking you through what we covered in that meeting.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really eye-opening in terms of, with the ubiquity of these meeting note takers, AI summarizers, it’s possible, I’m imagining information is, like, there’s just a giant…

Karina Mangu-Ward
I love it. Where are you taking us?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, this ambient information, it’s as though we don’t so much need to show up in the breadlines to get a ration of bottled water. Rather, there’s just a big fresh water lake that’s nice and pure, and anytime anyone is thirsty, they can just mosey and scoop it up.

So we don’t have to wait in line to get our water rations. The information is on free distribution as necessary. So come drink when you’re thirsty and don’t bother lining up because that’s not necessary.

Karina Mangu-Ward
Yeah, because there’s not a single spigot. It’s a river that we can all, like, swim in, literally swim in. I mean, I know, like, I love your humor and I’m, like, a bit of more of a dry academic person.

And Meg Wheatley, one of the great thinkers on system thinking, talks about exactly this metaphor. Information, when a system is operating in a healthy and whole way, goes from being currency to being the water that we’re all swimming in.

And I think we have all the tools and technology that we need to do that. It’s just a matter of getting people fluent enough to use them. And also, like, it can be quite vulnerable to share all your stuff.

It’s vulnerable. Working in that way is vulnerable. It’s hard for people. I came from a traditional firm before I joined my firm now. And I loved, we use these practices ourselves. I started using them myself. I found this one the most taxing.

Like, I didn’t trust it, that I could just share information. I didn’t trust it that I could share drafts that weren’t fully done. It didn’t feel safe. But over time, I could see, I don’t know, just what a better way of working it is to be swimming in the water of information rather than waiting in the line for the bottle.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, it’s kind of, it’s funny, what comes to mind right now is I’m thinking about, you know, Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power. And so what I find interesting about that is, like, well, I love the historical stories. That’s really kind of fun and interesting.

And yet, when I read it, it feels just kind of gross, in terms of it’s like the Game of Thrones, like powers, like a strategy chess game, and you’re like outmaneuvering. And I understand that, in many ways and many circles, that is a reality that needs to be contended with.

And yet, I much prefer a world in which, you know, our egos are minimal and we’re actually trying to make something happen here, and we just generally kind of respect and trust each other. So let’s rock and roll. But, in many ways, that’s not an emotional, psychological reality in many organizations right now, unfortunately.

Karina Mangu-Ward
No, it’s not. I think it’s uncommon. And the organizations that come to us are the ones that know that that’s an important thing. Like, I think, and they want, they come knowing that it’s important and they are asking the question, like, “How? How do we change this? How do we break down hierarchy? How do we break down bureaucracy?”

You have to start, though, from, I think, both an ideological and a practical point of view. You have to believe that that way of hoarding and managing power from the top is actually bad for organizational outcomes.

And that belief usually comes from experience, you know, because it’s not the way people are trained up. People in business school are trained up in much more traditional ways of leading and pushing decisions up to the top instead of down to the bottom.

And in the world that we’re living in where everything is moving so fast, like it is an utter fantasy that you can consolidate power and still be effective. And I think the folks that realize that then have to ask the question, “How? How do we get people to have a bias for action? How do we get people to do things that are safe to try? How do we align people even when people are spread across the world and we’re a global organization?”

Like, there are very thorny questions about how, but I think the, yeah, the philosophical belief that you cannot survive, and certainly not thrive, in our world unless you redistribute power closer to the edges of an organization.

And a big part of redistributing power closer to the edge of an organization is about redistributing information closer to the edge of an organization. I think that makes people squeamy, though. Makes, like, old-fashioned boomer leaders very squeamy.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and I guess the squeamy, if you will, sensations, I’m thinking about any number of occasions in which I’ve delegated something, it’s like, “Ooh, I don’t know. It’s kind of mine. I kind of know it. I don’t know if they’re going to screw it up.”

And then I was like, “But, by golly, it’s just not getting done. So I’m, ‘Hey, here you go.’” And it’s like, “Oh, wow, you’re actually better than I was at this in several key respects. I should have done this a long time ago.”

So I think it is largely about experience. It’s like, “Oh, wow. Like, you don’t know…” I think there are some things you don’t know it until you live it and try it. I’m thinking about, like, hiring movers to help you move.

It’s like, “Yeah, I got this. I’ve moved many times. It’s going to be fine.” And then the first time you pay for movers, you’re like, “Oh, it’s a little pricey.” It like, “Oh, my gosh, life is so much better this way.” Like, “What was I thinking? I could have been doing this whole time.”

And so, likewise, it’s like it feels uncomfortable to hand over the reins of information, of delegating a thing, of having someone box up your stuff. And yet, when you do it, I think you’re glad you did.

Karina Mangu-Ward
Yeah, I mean, I think that’s like a rite of passage. The, like, “You can pack my things” rite of passage. I think I did that for the first time when I was, like, 34 and it was too late. I should have done it much sooner.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, you were like, “This is amazing. Why didn’t I do it earlier?”

Karina Mangu-Ward
I’m like, “This is the best thousand dollars I’ve literally ever spent.” And I think, like, I know this sounds almost ridiculous, but the people that I’ve had the privilege of working with over the years, like, I’ve been at this particular practice, like all the stuff that’s in this book for a decade now.

The people that I started working with a decade ago, we joke a little bit that it’s kind of a cult the way we talk about teaming and these practices that we teach, but which I, like, love and makes me nervous.

But the reality is, like, once you work this way, once you stop asking, “Do we all agree?” and you start saying “Safe to try,” and once you stop fussing around in meetings and start being like, “All right, let’s collab. Okay, let’s demo,” you kind of can’t go back. It’s really the same as the movers.

Like, to go back to those shitty two-hour update meetings, you’re, like, “I will quit this place if you make me do that,” because it becomes intolerable, because you know that there is actually a better way to work that is both better for you as a human, and better for outcomes.

And I think we often think that you can only have one of those things. Either it feels good and you like it, or you’re doing hard work and getting things done. And my argument, and what I’ve seen in practice year over year, is that when you get teaming right, you can have two nice things at once.

And that when people want that, it’s really hard to give it up again. I feel that way. Like, I don’t think I can ever work in a different way. And I’ve, like, dabbled here and there in the last 10 years, and I feel almost allergic to it because of how wrong it feels. And I think that’s a good thing. I want people to feel converted, to some degree.

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

Karina Mangu-Ward
Nah, we covered it. That was fun.

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

Karina Mangu-Ward
There’s one that comes to mind, which is like, “The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready. The show goes on because it’s 11:30,” which is a good old Lorne Michaels quote about SNL.

And whenever I’m talking about teaming and cadence, I think a lot about that. Like, you just have to keep showing up to the moments and making the decisions and having the meetings, even if you’re not totally ready. So there’s that.

And then the idea that, I actually forget the attribution for this quote, but you have to act your way into a new way of thinking. I’m really allergic to the idea that we can sit around and think about how we work as a team.

You have to pound the pavement. You have to try a thing. You have to say the words and see how they feel. And so, like, when I think about my book, my greatest hope is that somebody reads it, but then also, like, just tries something because that’s the way to, like, realize what’s possible and think differently.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Karina Mangu-Ward
I think the study that I think about all the time, it is the Amy Edmondson study, that the number one driver of team success is psychological safety.
I actually think about that a lot in my, like, life, in my family, as well as in my business. It feels very, like, comforting to know that something as simple as inviting a perspective, inviting honesty, creating a space for candor, can do so much to drive great performance and to drive, like, great relationships and great even family systems. So I think about that study all the time.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Karina Mangu-Ward
My favorite book is Frances Frei and Anne Morriss’ Unleashed. In that book, they introduced the trust triangle, which says that the cornerstones of trust are authenticity, empathy, and logic. I read that book. I was sat in Prospect Park, I read that full book in a day, and I see every relationship that I’m in through the filter of those three cornerstones.

And anytime I have that little nagging feeling you get with someone where you’re like, “I don’t really trust you,” being able to say to myself, “Which one of these cornerstones is compromised? Which one are you wobbling on?”

And then I, like, know what to do with that. Like, I understand why I’m feeling that way and I can either repair the relationship or I can not engage in it, if that’s what I want to do. I highly recommend it. Super readable, super accessible, and, like, life, again, in both life and work, really foundational.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s great. I must ask, what’s the logic piece, exactly?

Karina Mangu-Ward
Logic piece, the definition of logic is that someone has to believe about you that your reasoning is sound. Just as simple as that. It’s, like, “I can’t trust you if I don’t believe that I’m getting the real you, that you care about me and my success, and that your logic and reasoning and judgment are sound.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and what’s fascinating is that, with that one in particular, I think what happens to me is it’s, like, “You’re saying things that seem to not make sense and be wrong.”

Karina Mangu-Ward
“Yeah, I can’t trust you.”

Pete Mockaitis
“So I don’t think I trust you unless you can show me you are so advanced in your field, you know things that I have wildly incorrect preconceptions about.” And so it’s kind of high risk, you know?

It’s, like, “Either y’all got some ‘splaining to do, and if you ‘splain well, I will be eternally impressed.” Or, I’ll be like, “Yeah, I thought you were kind of full of malarkey, so we’re moving on.”

Karina Mangu-Ward
Yeah, and I would argue that most of these things are like a sniff test. It’s, like, you know it when it’s happening. Someone can be talking to, and you’re like, “I know you’re not telling me what you really think. I know these are not your genuine thoughts,” or like, “I can tell your argument does not square up.”

And it’s like, “I don’t need to be an expert in your field to know that it is not making sense to me. And even if you are the world’s best expert in the field, I’m not going to extend my trust to you if we can’t get to a place where, at least, I have a sense that your reasoning is sound, even if I can’t, like, parse every piece of it.”

And I think because of, like, and there’s, like, all these other trust formulas and this and that. There’s something about the, like, precision and simplicity of this one that, yeah, I just, I’ve hung on to it for years now. Very helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Karina Mangu-Ward
I’m going to get meta on this. The Atomic Habits thing where you’re supposed to attach a habit to another habit?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Karina Mangu-Ward
Like, I’m an absolute garbage habit developer. I’m so, so bad. But the only thing I’ve ever had success with is, like, tacking a little habit onto another habit. So, like, for years my wife was like, “Stop leaving the towel, the wet towel on the bed.”

And I finally got into a new habit of, like, leaving it on the floor so that when I stepped over it, when I left the room, I would remember to pick it up. So I don’t know if that answers the question, but that’s what I would say.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget that you’re known for, people quote back to you often?

Karina Mangu-Ward
You know what? I just started a new project, and one of my key phrases is “Make the implicit explicit.” And the people on the project were saying that so much, we decided we needed to start a shots game, like ginger shots, something very wholesome.

For anytime someone said, “We have to make the implicit explicit,” “Make the implicit explicit,” I would say that plus “Safe to try.” Someone once came up to me on the street and was like, “You’re that ‘safe to try’ lady. I was in a workshop you did eight years ago. I’ve never forgotten that.” And, to be honest, I absolutely love that. That’s my dream.

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

Karina Mangu-Ward
You can go to Aug.co, A-U-G dot C-O/book. We’ve got a great assessment on there that you can take to find out if you are, in fact, a team that meets the moment. We’ve got resources.

And I’m very active on LinkedIn. One of my favorite things to do is to take, like, pop culture happenings, like the Elizabeth Holmes documentary, or the Knicks win, and think about how teaming is operating in the context of those, and doing little breakdowns. So find me on LinkedIn.

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

Karina Mangu-Ward
The next time your group is stewing, just say, “I propose we…” Start really simple, really small, “I propose we…”

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. All right. Karina, thank you.

Karina Mangu-Ward
Thank you so much.

Nov 09

1195: How to Beat AI Applications and Win Your Job Hunt with Steve Dalton

By Podcasts No Comments

Steve Dalton reveals the most efficient way to secure advocates and open the path to your dream career.

You’ll Learn

  1. The critical job hunting skill most don’t learn
  2. How AI is making the job search worse—and how it can still help you
  3. The 7-point email that turns strangers into advocates

About Steve

Steve Dalton is the author of The 2-Hour Job Search and The Job Closer, which have sold more than 100,000 copies worldwide, been taught at over 150 universities, and adapted for use by Fortune 500 companies. His work is known for turning networking and relationship building into clear, repeatable systems for people who don’t consider themselves natural networkers. 

Dalton developed his approach during the 2008 financial crisis after seeing talented job seekers overwhelmed by advice that worked only for a lucky few. He has since delivered hundreds of workshops and keynotes for universities, employers, and professional organizations. Earlier in his career, he worked as a chemical engineer, strategy consultant, and marketer. Dalton holds an MBA from Duke University.

Resources Mentioned

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Pete Mockaitis
Steve, welcome back!

Steve Dalton
Great to be back.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am so excited to chat with you again to talk about the third edition of The 2-Hour Job Search and more. You know, Steve, I have mentioned to you, and I think I’m going to share this with the listeners as well, that I think of you every time I clean my toilet. No joke. Have you heard that before?

Steve Dalton
I have heard that before, actually.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, it’s kind of special, and I hope you don’t mind.

Steve Dalton
I consider it a position of honor, frankly. My favorite chore, or, at least, unfavorite chore.

Pete Mockaitis
Indeed. And so that was in our previous conversation, which I 100% recommend every person hear, especially if you’re looking for a job or you know someone dear who’s looking for a job.

You are my go-to that I send people to, and I’ve had other listeners say the same. But just for those wondering, toilets, explain, Steve. Toilets?

Steve Dalton
There’s a special thing about the word favorite because it allows you to talk about unsavory experiences in a positive way. The way I describe this is I’m going to give you three statements, only one of which is true. “I really enjoy cleaning the toilet” is the first. The second, “I’m very passionate about cleaning the toilet.” And the third, “My favorite chore is cleaning the toilet.”

For the logicians out there, you might be able to figure out which one is the true statement of the three, because it’s the third one. Now, cleaning my toilet is my favorite chore but it is not something I enjoy. It just happens to be the chore I dislike the least.

So by nature of it being the least negative number, it is my favorite chore. But it gives me a positive way to talk about a negative experience. And a lot of job seekers have negative past experiences.

By framing it in terms of what your favorite part of that unfavored experience was, it gives you a very elegant and professional way to discuss and address negative experiences in your past in a positive and forward-looking way.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, indeed. And so you can’t say you’re passionate about a thing you’re not passionate about, because then you’re kind of lying, and they probably know you’re kind of lying. But you could say, “Hey, my favorite part of this was that,” and it’s good and honest.

And you love, well, your favorite chore is to clean the toilet because it’s a small amount of effort for a lot of impact. A quick swish and it’s like, “Wow, that was kind of gross.” And, like, five seconds later, it’s not gross.

Steve Dalton
Smells great. Yeah, but a lot of people are uncomfortable disclosing and being authentic and saying something that’s genuinely their favorite. So they will often pivot to, “I really enjoy cleaning the toilet,” or, “I’m passionate about cleaning the toilet,” because that feels like the thing you’re supposed to say in an interview that you’re passionate about things.

But so much of interviewing is building and maintaining trust with your interviewer. And if you deliver it, “I’m passionate about cleaning the toilet” with flat affect, they’re not going to believe you. But you can say, “My favorite chore is cleaning the toilet” with flat affect as I just did, and it’s completely credible and authentic.

Pete Mockaitis
Yep, absolutely. Well, we’re going to talk a lot about what’s new, but if you could you give us maybe the one minute version of what’s the big idea, the main thesis of The 2-Hour Job Search for those who have not yet been blessed with hearing you previously.

Steve Dalton
The 2-Hour Job Search is hinged to that great concept that we prefer instructions for difficult or unfamiliar tasks rather than tips. If we are trying to bake a cake for a loved one, we look up a recipe and not a list of tips on baking a cake.

However, that was never extrapolated to the job search. That one universal source of anxiety that we all face, that ability to provide for ourselves and our loved ones. I thought back in 2008 that that was unconscionable.

How can so many career coaches be so smart and think about this for so many hours in a day, but nobody thought to put a set of instructions to do the most difficult parts that anyone can follow, regardless of who their career coach was?

So my whole career has been about bringing structure to chaos, bringing instructions to critical life tasks. I started with The 2-Hour Job Search which was specifically for the key bottleneck of job searching, which was getting that first interview with a human being.

And then my second book, The Job Closer, was similar style of frameworks and fill-in-the-blank models for doing all the other necessary tasks in the job search to make time for reaching out to strangers, asking them how they got so good at their job, and engaging with their answers as is explained in The 2-Hour Job Search. So those two are really companion pieces to one another.

Pete Mockaitis
So you have the instructions, and a key part of the instructions, which I think is sort of a light-bulb moment for many is that the name of the game is having conversations that lead you to having conversations with the right people, which lead you to interviews, as opposed to click, apply, click apply, click apply.

Steve Dalton
Absolutely. I think there is a lot of resistance to this, that concept of networking. I think the biggest one is that you’ve never been trained to network with strangers for the purpose of a job search. People just tell you to go network like it’s self-apparent and it’s totally not.

The chemical engineer in me is bred for awkwardness. And “Sell yourself and put yourself out there, and the job search is a full-time job and be confident,“ all of those things, when I try to put it into practice without really having that aptitude, were counterproductive.

And I realized there are a lot of people like me out there. They’re awkward. They’re neurodivergent. What about all of us for whom sell yourself doesn’t work? And I realized instructions are both clear and kind, to use a Brene Brown-ism.

If we can follow recipes, we should be able to bake a cake. I wanted to bring that to anyone with a library card, not just my students who happen to be able to afford MBAs and then happen to choose Duke University where I worked for 17 years in their career center.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So we got the instructions and they’re gold, and I’ve shared these instructions with many people and I am chatting with a listener shortly. Shout out to Kai. and I’ll be discussing your instructions yet again.

But, before we get into the juicy bits of what’s new in the third edition of The 2-Hour Job Search, I want to get your hot take. As someone who provides the instructions that are great, what’s the sense of the job market in late 2026, early 2027?

Sometimes, you see terrifying things like, “I’ve clicked hundreds of jobs and I can’t get anything at all.” But other people I know have gotten them fast. It feels like an oversimplification for me to say, “Well, if you just do what Steve says, you’ll get a job fairly soon-ish.”

Is that harsh and inaccurate? Or is it kind of what you’ve been seeing with people that, “Hey, if you do the networking things, you still tend to find jobs, even in this difficult environment”?

Steve Dalton
Overview, the job search, as most people know it is terrible. It’s just as awful as everybody thinks it is. Ashby did a study last year, over several years and 34 million applications, and they found the offer rate on a single online application is 0.2%. Not 2%, 0.2%, one out of 500.

Pete Mockaitis
Five hundred, okay.

Steve Dalton
So I asked my LinkedIn followers, “How long does it take you – when all tasks are combined, searching for postings, customizing resumes, and hitting apply – how long does it take you to get an application out the door?” They said 90 minutes.

Now, quick math here. If you spend three hours a night with no holidays or weekends off, every night, it will take you 13 months at those odds just to have an 80% chance of getting an offer through an online job posting.

And this is 2025, before AI was really, really helpful at making you crank out online applications faster. That’s only going to get worse. Bots are only going to get better. I predict within six months, online applications are something that will require no active effort on the part of job seekers. And I can’t wait for that to be the case. It gives us so much time back.

But what does the job search look like when applications happen while you sleep with no active involvement of your own? So online applications are a cesspool, they are basically zero odds, but you will hear the urban legends. I equate it to playing the lottery to try to pay off your rent.

It, occasionally, works out, but it’s not a great way to do it. And it causes a lot of downstream suffering if you’re unsuccessful, which most people will be. Now, the job market for applying is terrible. The job market for networking is an arbitrage opportunity. Very few people are doing it. We’re all obsessed with online applications. In six months, I think online applications go away. There are only really three options for job searching.

There is applying online, which we’re all familiar with; there’s networking, which you’ve already heard me talk about; and there’s attracting, which is that school of thought of “Be a thought leader,” “Become an influencer in your space,” “Comment on other smart people’s insights on LinkedIn or on TikTok.”

I think that one is better than applying because, at least, you’re learning, your network is broadening. But it’s not for everybody to live such a public job search. The thing is, the most popular method is going to go away in about six months. What’s going to happen when it does?

I like to think people will, begrudgingly, embrace networking and realize, “Wait, it’s not my fault. I’ve never been taught to do this. I’ve just been told to network with no instruction beyond that.” But my real concern is despair happens. And people just throw their hands up and, “Well, if the bots don’t match me, I guess I’m just not fit to be employed.”

So my goal is really to let people know that networking, it is a skill like riding a bike or learning to swim or speaking a new language that can be learned. Get ahead of the curve. If you’re one of the few doing it right now, you are going to trounce the competition. But it is scary.

And it’s scarier the further you get in your career, because the more insight, because it took me two editions of the book to finally figure out who the target market for The 2-Hour Job Search which is embarrassing as a marketer.

I used to be a marketer for General Mills, and they said, “If you target everybody, you target nobody.” And I thought The 2-Hour Job Search was for everybody. It was only for the third edition that I realized The 2-Hour Job Search is for anyone who is or can become vulnerable and humble because that is the way you get strangers to help you with your job search, to risk their own social capital to advocate for you.

But that is not everybody in the world. Not everybody has that ability. And the more knowledge you have, the longer you’re used to teaching, the harder it is to put the learner hat back on.

So it does require vulnerability and humility to get people to bring their guards down enough to, almost irrationally, risk their own social capital to help you with your job search, but it is a skill that can be learned, and it will make you. It is a more human and humane way to go about this daunting, daunting task. You just need to be trained for it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I hear you loud and clear. Networking is key in order to be competitive. Do it. And watch out for despair. So then, those who are networking are seeing fine results? Even now, things are not catastrophically, horrifically far worse than they were one to six years ago? Is that true?

Steve Dalton
Networking is harder, there are fewer jobs, more positions are being dissolved and not replaced. Furthermore, we need to talk a little bit about networking, because networking is itself a problematic term, because some people will say, “I reached out to my network and asked them if they had any positions, and they didn’t have anything for me, so networking doesn’t work.”

You could argue that, “Is that networking or not?” What I teach is something I specifically call proactive networking. It’s reaching out to people who are not expecting to have a relationship with you back. So usually strangers.

Now, it’s okay to involve people from your past, but I find it’s harder to change the urgency of existing contacts than to establish an advocacy relationship with someone who’s never known you in any other capacity as a job seeker.

I differentiate that from reactive networking. Reactive networking is my term for getting along with people you share space with. If you’re put on the same team as somebody, they’re going to expect to have a relationship with you and you back with them. That’s just cooperation. We’ve learned that. We learned that by aging, just by going through grade school, being placed on teams and our academics.

But proactive networking is a novel skill that if you aren’t taught to do it and you don’t build that muscle mass, you will just continue not knowing it for the rest of your career, and that’s terrifying.

The nice thing is you only need to learn it once and it’s there for you for the rest of your life. So networking, networking done poorly is counterproductive. Networking done properly, what I call proactive networking, is very, very predictably positive, but it requires learning a new skill, learning a new language.

It is not the “Sell yourself” networking that you may have learned in the past. It’s not the, “Open with two minutes about yourself and your accomplishments before doing an informational meeting.”

It’s, “Wait until you’re asked questions about yourself before talking about yourself because the person you’re speaking to is the star of the show.” They are the one who’s doing you the favor. So let’s feature them and ask them how they got so good at their job.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, certainly. Okay. So you gave us the instructions previously. I guess I’d love to know what’s new, what’s fresh, what’s updated in terms of the recipe? We know who the recipe is for. Got to be vulnerable and humble, and it’s nice to flag that clearly in terms of like, “This is what it’s going to take, and that doesn’t feel so good. But the quicker you can kind of get over yourself in that hurdle, the better.”

So duly noted. Then, assuming we are humbly over ourselves and we have the old recipe, the old instructions, what do we need to know now, Steve?

Steve Dalton
Excellent question. So AI has been a blessing and a curse in our job searches. We’ve been talking incessantly about AI for several years. Quick question to those of you out there listening, do you feel your job search is better because of it?

Most people I talked to would answer no. It’s worse, if anything. It’s harder now, now that everybody else is using AI. And that, to me, is a sign that maybe this is insanity that we’re engaging in, by doing the same things over and over and expecting a different result.

AI is not the silver bullet we hoped it would be. We gave it every shot. We went to how many workshops on it to learn how to apply AI to our job search. We are going back to the future as AI basically commoditizes the cost down to zero of your resumes and applications because they’ll be submitted overnight, and bots will do it for us.

We need to figure out where we’re going next. Are we going to attract people to us by being influencers? Or are we going to go to them by being networkers? So, obviously, I encourage people to be networkers.

Now, where AI is helpful, people, the job seekers tend to use AI for the wrong things and not use it for the right things. The wrong things to use it for are, incessantly, like updating your resume. Nobody is looking at the resume that closely. There is no data-based way to beat an ATF system or an online resume drop.

As much advice as you see on the internet, it is companies with vested interests who are making you very, very paranoid about what you’re doing to your resume before hitting submit, but there’s no data that it leads to offers, and that’s the ultimate goal of this exercise.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s have a timeout on that. So, I mean, I love a good resume. Call me old fashioned. Am I hearing you say that there’s no gaming or finessing the applicant tracking systems, ATSs, with key words or including this paragraph versus that paragraph in your resume, like there’s studies or evidence suggesting that none of those efforts do anything for you?

Steve Dalton
Let me put it another way. There is data that shows that being one of the first 10 or 20 applicants to apply has a much stronger impact on your likelihood of being selected than optimizing your keywords. Because if you’re the hundredth one who applies, the recruiter who is looking through that batch, like ATS systems are surprisingly low tech, you’ve got a human being, a recruiter.

Now the recruiter is measured on how quickly they close these open positions. So their incentive is to be fast, to satisfy, to be good enough quickly.

So they will look at the first batch of 20 and decide if there’s a good enough batch of people to move on to the next round. And if they don’t, they’ll look at the next 10 and hope to find enough to round out a full roster, and they’ll look at 10 more, but once they find a good enough batch, they’ll ship it off so they can focus on their other 14 jobs.

So they aren’t able to be really, really well trained in what elements of a resume make someone a sure thing candidate. And complicating matters, these recruiters are getting overwhelmed by bot-driven applicants, “Well, people who are clearly not interested in the job, they’re just firing out resumes ad nauseam.”

But the fairest way to go through those resumes is in the order that they were received. So my take is optimizing your resume for each online posting that you apply to is of limited value.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it sounds like it’s counterproductive because that will take time, making you not one the top first 10 to 20.

Steve Dalton
Exactly right. And what’s funny is recruiters will complain, “Oh, there’s so much AI in these applications.” And how do they respond to that? “Well, we get overwhelmed with applications. We got to take this posting down, suddenly and without warning.”

And when postings come down suddenly and without warning, job seekers think, “I need to use AI so I can submit before the posting goes away.” So recruiters get more and more AI-based applications. So it’s a death spiral.

Now, where investing in your resume matters is when you have an advocate at a company and they say, “Send me your resume and I’ll pass it along to the hiring manager.” Now it matters. Now put some thought and time into it to make sure that your advocate doesn’t get burned by you having a typo or by you using a resume that’s clearly for a different job function or a different company.

My best practice is have one resume for each job function that you are targeting. Do your best on it, but take all of that extra time and stress and anxiety, and every time you edit your resume, you introduce the risk of typos and grammatical errors, that can get you kicked out of certain processes.

Take that time and port in networking and just do your networking first. It’s only going to be 15 minutes a day if you use The 2-Hour Job Search recipe that I provide in the books. Just do that 15 minutes first, and you can spend however much time with the remainder of your day applying online if you’d like, or building your brand on LinkedIn, or going to a movie and spending time with loved ones.

I think all of those are better uses of time. Just make sure that the bottleneck of the process, waiting for strangers to get back to you to see if they’re going to advocate for you, do that first. That’s Operations Theory 101. If you have a bottleneck, move it to the front of your process because that limits the rate at which you make progress.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, then, so AI, where can it be useful for us?

Steve Dalton
So AI can be incredibly useful on the very, very front end of this process, making something called the LAMP list. The LAMP list is the fundamental centerpiece of the first third of the two-hour job search. It is prioritization.

You only have a finite number of hours and pain tolerance to devote to networking with strangers, this scary thing that you probably never had to do before with any sort of rigor or training behind you. So I want to be very mindful. We need to maximize every minute that you put into this.

But to maximize our benefits, before we spend dozens of hours networking with strangers. Let’s spend 40 minutes thinking who we should even be reaching out to.

And so we brainstorm a large list of potential candidates. We find three pieces of data which are easy to find and predictive of success. We rank them in order, and then we fiddle with those numbers until we get the six that we feel best about, being our first batch of outreach.

This is inspired by the TV show “The Bachelor.” It’s better to be the bachelor on “The Bachelor” than one of 25 contestants on “The Bachelor.” But AI is incredibly good at helping you brainstorm companies, better even than classic tools like Pitchbook or Crunch Base. Tell it, “Here are two or three companies I’m super excited about,” and tell it why. “Give me 10 more like those,” and it will give you 10 more like those.

And then you just give it feedback, “I like these three that you suggested, but I don’t like these other seven. I like these three because of their geography, and because they’re more in the growth phase. And those seven, I don’t want to live there, and they’re more established and bigger companies. I’d rather work for smaller companies.”

And it’s really good at reactive brainstorming. It can keep pitching you ideas so you can swipe left on the ones you like, or on the ones you hate, and right on the ones that you like, and you can get to 40 employers, which is the bare minimum for a LAMP list in about 10 minutes, just reactively reacting to whatever AI spits out at you.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig that a lot. So the AI is, and that’s perfect, I think, in terms of, that is my best experience with AI, is I give it a boatload of context and say, especially for book recommendations, like, “I’m looking for a book that’s going to help me this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And I was going in all this detail, it’s like, “Give me my top five options and your rationale.”

And I was like, “Number one sounds close, but I want it more like this. Do it again.” And then, sure enough, it’s great because, like, the key words only take you so far. So that’s awesome. I dig that.

And so I’m imagining, you know, you could just use multiple models. I mean, sometimes, I geek out on what do I see on Arena.ai or Artificial Analysis to see who’s on top at the moment. But this is so quick, you could probably just do it in five different models and just rock and roll.

Steve Dalton
The shorter time you spend making this list, the easier it is to walk away from. And this is meant to be like a balance sheet, for my accounting friends out there. It’s a snapshot in time. Best used when you focus on no more than three sectors that you just inherently or organically enjoy learning about.

And let’s say you talk to a couple people who are product managers at video game companies, and you decide, “Actually, that’s not me anymore.” You just dissolve the list and remake it from scratch with another sector that you think would be more interesting based on what you’ve now learned.

So it’s not meant to be something that you update. It’s not meant to be open on your laptop at all times. It’s something you do once, you see your top six and you close it, and you only look it up when it’s time to move down to company number seven or when you realize your goals have changed.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. Well, also tell us, if we operate with the two-hour job search instructions that we’ve heard before, or I recommend you go listen to again, what else is new or different or can be enhanced in 2026, 2027?

Steve Dalton
I think it’s important to note the outreach email is now the seven-point email. But with the proliferation of AI spam messages, especially on LinkedIn. LinkedIn has gotten harder to operate in, in a pleasant way. With the proliferation of spam emails, it is more important to be precise in your outreach to strangers, to not resemble the AI spam that’s out there.

So the seven-point email is a very specific and simple fill-in-the-blank template with no fluff. It is, you know, all killer, no filler. But it is a fill-in-the-blank exercise that basically is so short and so targeted, every word, every sentence counts, but that differentiates it from the spam email that you’re used to seeing and deleting immediately without reading.

So there’s no, “Hope you’re well.” There’s no niceties. It’s rooted in the concept that most people don’t want to help you in your job search. You will encounter three different types of contacts.

There are curmudgeons who will never respond under any circumstance. They’re not the worst ones because they’re clear about not being helpful. There are obligates. They are the worst ones you’ll encounter because they want to appear to be helpful, to not lose face, but they don’t actually want to risk their social capital on your behalf, which is devastating because they give you negative return on investment. They take your hope and crush it.

The majority of the help you get in your job search comes from boosters. They’re about 20% of the population. But they are beautiful people and the great thing about them is they’re very easy to reach efficiently.

They don’t need to be sold on why you’re a good person for them to talk to. They just need to know you need help. So there’s a great study in Predictably Irrational that finds you’re just as likely to get a stranger’s help to move a couch if you offer them $0 as if you offer them $50.

But if you offer them $5, you’re far less likely to get a person’s help moving a couch. They call that in the study switching from social norms to market norms. The reason you move a person’s couch for $0 is it’s a good deed. The reason you move someone’s couch for $50 is that’s a good day’s wage.

But once you introduce $5, it’s not a good deed plus $5. The good deed goes out the window, it’s purely an hourly wage calculation. So there were a couple of aberrations that were starting to happen. I think job seekers today are so terrified of making mistakes that they tended to take exact job titles from LinkedIn, put it into their outreach messages, especially in the title.

Your SENIOR PRODUCT MANAGER experience at Waymo, with senior product manager, in all caps, or is capitalized, where it looks like it’s a merge letter that you just copied and pasted their job title and put it in the title. We want these things to look more casual than super formal because super formal is what AI tends to opt for.

So writing a message that is targeting boosters exclusively, or primarily, using language that brings down the temperature on your ask, this is just one person asking a professional how they got so smart at their job.

And then living through with their promise. This is about the readers’ insights and knowledge that they’d be willing to share with a stranger out of the goodness of their heart. It’s a very specific email, but it has a very, very strong impact with our target audience, and it works just as well now as it did five or ten years ago.

There will always be boosters out there. We just aren’t trained to find them.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Well, Steve, could you give us a rundown? So we got seven points, you say, in this message. Could you first – I’ll put you on the spot – give us a rundown demo of what straight-up a full text of such a message could sound like? And then highlight the seven points from that.

Steve Dalton
Yes. Subject would be your product management experience at Waymo. The body would be, “Hi, Mark, I’m Becca, a fellow MBA,” and in parentheses, (Duke, Class of 2028). “Do you have some time to chat about your product management experience at Waymo? Your insights would be greatly appreciated because I’m trying to learn more about product management in the autonomous vehicle space. Best regards. Becca.” So that is the email.

Pete Mockaitis
There’s seven points in there? There are so few words. Seven full points.

Steve Dalton
Yes, exactly. And that’s one of the points. Keep it short. Short emails. Allow short responses. They’re easier to scan. It’s easier for people to figure out what the point is.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s easy to say yes to. Like, if I see paragraphs, I just go, “Ugh.” It’s, like, “Maybe later.”

Steve Dalton
It’s funny because I’ll get a lot of pushback from job seekers who say, “I can’t send these messages. I don’t want to impose on people.” Emails this short are not imposing. It’s those long emails, especially ones where you tout your own background, the cover letter style emails, where you’re telling someone why you’re so great when they did not ask for that email.

That’s where you get into problems. This is a very reader-focused email. There’s almost nothing about you, the sender, and that’s by design. Because this conversation is not going to be about you, the sender. It’s going to be about the reader.

And we are going to honor that promise. We will talk about ourselves when asked and not before. We can put a shortcut to our LinkedIn profile at the signature line of our email. But before that, like, we are a cipher. We are whatever they want us to be. That is fine.

So the other points. Make sure you make your ask in the form of a question, ending in a question mark, not a statement ending in a period. Keep these short, under 75 words. The body of the one I just went through is about 50.

Categorize your interest. So tell them without telling them what other companies you’re likely speaking to, so they know this is probably not your first conversation in this space. So you’re going to know what you’re talking about. That is the most important one of all, is just have that category, that product management in the autonomous vehicle space.

They can probably assume you’re also looking at Lucid Motors, Argo AI, Polestar. Great! And you didn’t have to put them on the spot by saying, “Here are the companies I’m also talking to.” You gave them the category. They can infer from there.

State your commonality to them first. So you might not have gone to their school, but you share a degree with them, potentially. And if you don’t share any commonality with them, you skip that one. But the more senior they are, the more I’d want you to Google them to see if you can find a media reference that was made about them, an interview they appeared in.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I mean, if I may, AI could help you there, too.

Steve Dalton
Absolutely, it can. So it’s great at research and great for prepping for these meetings as well. Put their experience into your own words. This is the newest and seventh point. So if they are a senior product manager, don’t ask about their SENIOR PRODUCT MANAGER experience where senior product manager is capitalized.

It’s still product management experience, “Can you tell me about your product management experience?” I know they’re a senior product manager, but to call that out very specifically makes it look like this is a job search. A little bit too on the nose, a little bit too obviously. But show the confidence that you can put their experience into your own words.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m curious, are you better off with email or LinkedIn nowadays?

Steve Dalton
You are better off with LinkedIn Group messages, specifically. Best kept secret in the job search, and LinkedIn is aggressive about trying to take away that option from you. So they recently offered everybody a free year of career premium. The problem with career premium is it only gives you five in-mails per month, per calendar month. And it will charge you an in-email to send a message to a fellow group member.

Now to send a message to a fellow group member, you’ve got to look them up in the group directory itself and then send them a message. If you are a proud basic member, like I am, I’m proudly basic in a lot of ways, but if you’re a proud basic LinkedIn member, you can do that free 15 times per calendar month.

And that happens to be the best way to get in touch with boosters, people who are predisposed to be boosters, because you share this affinity group. They didn’t have any obligation to respond to you so they’re probably doing it because they want to engage with you and want to help where they can.

When you reach out to someone at their work address or even their alumni address, there’s a higher than average instance that they’re obligates. They’re responding because work might be checking their email or because they don’t want to lose face because they’re supposed to be a good alum but they really don’t want to do this.

So LinkedIn Group messages are your best bet. A direct email, ideally, a lifetime email from an alumni database, but second to that, their direct work email, which you might get from a Prospeo.io or a hunter.io. There are tons of services that will help you guess professional emails. That’s your second best bet.

LinkedIn Connection requests are great follow-up attempts, but they are terrible first attempts because there’s no graceful way to follow up on them, and people tend to accept them and never reply, or they tend to ignore them because they don’t know you. And you only get to customize three of those per calendar month now. So group messages are your best bet.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So to be clear, this is a LinkedIn in-mail message to an individual who happens to be in a LinkedIn Group with you, is what you mean by group messages? One to one, but they are another person in the group with you?

Steve Dalton
Yes, it is not an in-mail unless you have premium, and then you will be charged an in mail for it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it is not an in-mail.

Steve Dalton
If you are a proud basic member, it is something totally separate. You get 15 of them instead of five.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it doesn’t even call it an in-mail when you are in the group with them.

Steve Dalton
Yes, it is a quirk of LinkedIn, but it has been something they’ve offered for a long time and it is just so incredibly useful and free, which I love.

So join all the big LinkedIn Groups – the Harvard Business Review Group, the TEDx Talk discussion group. I’m members of plenty of groups that I don’t really engage in. I just know that there are a lot of people who tend to be job seeking in these groups. And so it gives me free access to message people that I want to get in touch with.

Pete Mockaitis
And I don’t want to get too hung up on the technicalities, but it sounds like this is a nuance that matters tremendously in terms of, like, your response rate could be decimated if you’re, you know, trying it a bit differently.

So I am finding a person who I share a group with, and then just sending the message in LinkedIn, and then that just shows up to them as not an in-mail, but a message from someone who is in the group.

Steve Dalton
Yep, you don’t even need to provide a subject line. So there’s less work for you. Even better. And they know you’re not spamming them because they can click on your LinkedIn profile. They know you share this affinity group together. It really is a beautiful thing.

But, again, you’re never trained to do this. So it’s a loophole that consistently delights. It might be the single favorite thing that I get to share with all of my audiences when I go do talks at schools or even companies.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think, if I may, the reason we love it so much is because, one, we never knew it; two, it’s so quick and easy; and, three, it makes a big impact. I mean, that’s like the sweet, sweet nectar of podcasts right there, Steve.

Steve Dalton
Just want to provide value.

Pete Mockaitis
You nailed it. Cool. All right. Well, wow, so much good stuff. So, Steve, tell me, what is something else that is new that we got to know?

Steve Dalton
You know, we talked about earlier, there are basically three ways of job searching. I think it’s also important to dispel the myths around the term referral.

So the word referral is problematic. A lot of you are thinking, “I’ve gotten referrals before, and it hasn’t led to any interviews. Like, this thing, this whole system doesn’t work.” And it’s because the word referral itself is problematic.

Now, these three phenomena I’m about to describe are all called referrals. The first one, “I don’t have time to talk, but here’s a link. Apply through that link, and you should be good.” This is especially a popular one with Mag 7 companies like Meta and Amazon. That is a referral.

I call that an online referral. Everybody has one. They are points of parity. They’re easy to get, therefore, they don’t return that much of an investment on it.

Pete Mockaitis
But it’s more than zero, like applying blind to the posting. Okay.

Steve Dalton
Yeah, so even with that referral, everyone else has one, too. They’re awash. We want human referrals. Now some of you are thinking, “Well, Steve, I wasn’t born into the right family where my dad is buddies with the CEO at the country club.” Nor was I. I call these birthright referrals.

If you have them, you’d be a fool not to use them, but most of us don’t have them. And it’s easy to think, “Everybody else has them but me,” and really nobody does. We are all looking. And those people are probably not in the job search very often because they just go from kind of nepotistic position to position.

So I call them birthright referrals. We can’t go back in time and change who we were born to and what income bracket. So use them if you have them, but I think a lot of people overvalue them. Just because you knew someone in your past doesn’t mean they’re going to be helpful or advocate for you.

The best thing you can do as a job seeker is go for earned referrals. That’s my term for someone who’s a first-gen college student who convinces someone who is doing product management at one of their dream companies to use their own social capital to introduce this first-gen college student to another product manager who may have a job opening.

That is an earned referral. You demonstrated actual skills that will be useful in any job. So why wouldn’t you put that person to the front of the line for an interview, that you can teach them what they need to know because they already demonstrate the ability to learn a critical skill for any position? But it’s important to note we are targeting earned referrals.

So when we get into these informational meetings, the final third of the book, there’s no single question you can ask a stranger to turn them into an advocate. So the important thing to note is that this is a professional intimacy-building algorithm that I call TIARA.

The best you can do from a stranger is turn them into an acquaintance. But you can’t take an acquaintance and ask them a single question that will turn them into a mentor either. The best you can do for an acquaintance is turn them into a subject matter expert.

So that’s where I recommend the Trend followed by Insight questions of the TIARA framework, T-I-A-R-A. Trend and Insight are the first two questions. Trends are macro questions. Insights are more personal.

That would be inappropriate to open with. Like, “What’s been your best professional decision so far and why?” A bit too intimate to start with, but it’s great after a big macro question, like, “What trend is most impacting your space right now, in your opinion?”

So Trend and Insight questions make people think creatively. They ask them for superlatives, they search their brain and genuinely engage with you. Now they’re feeling like a subject matter expert. And from subject matter expert, you can definitely convert someone to potential mentor by asking them Advice, Resources, and Assignment questions to wrap up the experience.

And that’s laid out in the third edition of The 2-Hour Job Search but really laying it out, it’s a customer journey that we’re trying to fit into one 30-minute meeting. So I disagree with, “Oh, I only need 15 minutes of your time.” It takes time to build this intimacy.

I also deeply, deeply disagree with the feedback that, “At the end of your informational ask, who you should speak to next?” There are lots of pieces of advice I wish would die in a fire, but that one more so than pretty much all of the other ones, because it’s a quick way to cheapen the discussion you just had.

Asking this person how they got so smart at their job and then ending it by implying that they weren’t helpful enough, or maybe this was a plan all along and you didn’t really care about their insights. You were just looking to get introduced to someone more important.

And, furthermore, you didn’t get a chance to get consent from your coworker to share their name with a stranger. So there’s so much bad about this advice. You will be going back and asking for those referrals later, but at the end of the informational is the worst time to do it.

It is the rudest and cruelest time to do it, and you will make the person who just gave you the gift of their time and knowledge lose face, which makes them not want to work with you anymore.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, Steve, there’s some passion there on this one. I can totally hear you there in that those are the vibes that I think I would feel if upon, and I felt it before. You know, it’s almost like, and I think I’m a fairly humble guy.

But if I’m really cooking with someone, right, and I’m feeling like, “You know, I really like this dude. This person’s got it going on. We’re vibing here. I really want them to succeed and win. I’m sharing the goods, the secrets, the gold.”

And then I hear, “Is there anyone else I could talk to?” That is my immediate reaction, it’s like, “Oh, sorry, I wasn’t good enough for you? With all that, that wasn’t good enough?” And so now, on the flip side, if they give you nothing good, like maybe you should ask.

Steve Dalton
I recommend, there’s a middle ground here and TIARA builds it right into the framework. That resources question is always the same. I call it the pivot question. It is always this, “What resources do you recommend I look into next?”

Pete Mockaitis
Resources.

Steve Dalton
The word resources is vague on purpose. Ideally, we’re hoping for a referral to another human being. That’s an earned referral. Some people are open with their networks. Some people may have gotten permission recently to share that person’s name.

Some people may just be excited to help you, and they will volunteer that information, “Oh, do you want to work for us? Oh, you got to go talk to Wendy. She’s looking for somebody right now. I’ll make the intro for you.”

But the key is you didn’t ask them, put them on the spot, make them lose face by saying, “Who should I speak to next?” If they weren’t ready to volunteer Wendy’s name, that would be very awkward.

So I put that at about 20% of cases when you ask the pivot question, “What resources should I look into next?” About 20% of the time, you’ll get someone who just volunteers a name to you.

The other 80% will say, “What sort of resources are you looking for?” And that’s when I recommend pivoting in the other direction, “What’s the best 10 minutes of research you do in a given day or week to stay current on your space? Is there a monthly, daily, weekly newsletter that you find most helpful, and why? Is there a conference that you prioritize attending each year and why do you find it so helpful?”

But it’s really about keeping this person’s trust and advocacy because, ultimately, you’re going to need them to risk their own social capital to make an introduction for you on your behalf.

Pete Mockaitis
So good. Thank you, Steve. Well, now can we hear about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Steve Dalton
I’ve been reading a lot of Dungeon Crawler Carl lately, as many of my listeners out there might be. I’ve found it very inspirational, “You will not break me,” whenever you’re going through that tough period. And I think a lot of us are going through that tough period right now.

We don’t know how we can possibly tackle the beast of job searching. It will not break you. You just have not been trained for this yet.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Steve Dalton
Man, we already mentioned Dungeon Crawler Carl, so I’ll just recommend the entire set. And I also really enjoyed Recursion recently. So I like a good time travel mystery. So those would be the ones I’d keep an eye out for.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Steve Dalton
Claude used well. Use it well. Use it for what it’s good at, which is helping you figure out what you want to do, helping you understand, “What are 10 projects I would be expected to do if I were hired as a product manager for Waymo?” And see if that work appeals to you. That may help you learn you don’t even want to be a product manager.

Like, use Claude, challenge your creativity. It can help you prep for these informational meetings, “What are 10 trends that I need to be aware of? What are 10 pieces of jargon I should be aware of before talking to some product manager who works at Waymo?”

Use it for those less obvious things. Use it for things that are stressing you out and have you stuck, that email that’s tough to word, that concept you’re having trouble putting a finger on, that analogy that you’re just really struggling to come up with. But don’t use it for cover letters. Don’t use it for resumes. It’s not good at that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that seems to connect and resonate with folks, they quote back to you often?

Steve Dalton
A big discussion on the green button paradox. The green button paradox is my term for a thought experiment. I asked career coaches and job seekers alike, “Let’s say that there is a green button you can push.” And, please, join this conversation. I’d love to know your inputs and takes.

Let’s say there’s a green button you can push that will instantly download into your brain all of the whys of networking, all of the benefits from a statistical perspective in terms of your job search, all of the what’s of networking, like how to do a good informational, how to do the TIARA framework, how to write a good seven-point email, how to follow up on those meetings optimally to maximize the conversion to an interview, so it takes away all the risk of embarrassment of doing these wrong.

Pete, the only catch of it is, if you push the button, a batch of outreach initially goes out to your top six, and people expect you to show up at those networking meetings. Data shows that this is going to help you get jobs.

But what percent of job seekers do you think push the button?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, for me, I 100% would push it. So that’s me. But what do I think about most? I think they would say 70-ish percent.

Steve Dalton
The career coaches that I sampled in a recent webinar were between 20 and 30 percent thought would push the button. And that, to me, is very sobering.

Pete Mockaitis
So they thought that 20-30% would choose to push the button. What are you seeing in your survey so far of the percent who would push the button?

Steve Dalton
Job seekers had something pretty similar. It seemed like even the job seekers in this particular session were between 20 and 50 percent. So implying that under half would push the button.

I get it. Like, we are a generation now that is entering the workforce that grew up on screens with less in-real life play. A lot of our socialization is networking. We’ve worked from home for many years, even though it wasn’t our choice.

So I get all of that exhaustion, but the stakes are so high right now. So, to me, the reason this paradox has got me so obsessed is, like, I’m all about programming the button to be better at making the mechanics of outreach and networking easier and more effective.

But I think we all need to ask ourselves, “What is holding us back from pushing the button and how do we get over that?” How do we break down and formalize and institutionalize, maybe at the high school level, even, this fear? Because it’s a lot easier to learn to swim when you’re a toddler than when you’re 40 years old. You just haven’t built up the fear of it.

And I think higher education really needs to take a look at the green button paradox and figure out, “What are we doing to solve the people’s unwillingness to push the button, even though we can prove to them, this is only good for you? This is solving that pain point that you say you want solved, but it seems like the barriers.”

And it’s important to note that our brains have been, for hundreds of thousands of years, wired to protect us. It is doing the same thing to job seekers right now. Every time it comes up with a reason why now is not the right time to network, that is your brain trying to keep you safe from psychological harm.

But we need to have the wherewithal, the agency to tell our brain, to Marie Kondo our brains and say, “Thank you for your service. I know you were trying to do me a solid. The stakes here are just too high. I need to take you off autopilot right now.”

To me, the green button paradox is the next big challenge in the job search. What are we doing about getting people increasing people’s job seekers’ willingness to actually push the button if they had it presented to them? That’s, to me, the bigger challenge and that’s going to take a village.

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

Steve Dalton
Follow me on LinkedIn. I have a LinkedIn Group of about 25,000 people. I answer questions from readers about once a day. There’s usually no more than a week long queue before your questions will get greenlit.

I do corporate workshops, so if you would think, “This would be helpful for our company,” please mention me to your colleagues. Steve@contact2colleague.com is my email address for workshops and talks. If you have a job search question, I’m happy to answer it. I may direct you to my LinkedIn Group for it, though, out of fairness to those already waiting in the queue.

But please engage with this material, get curious, ask me questions, challenge the material. If something I said doesn’t make sense today, I’d love to hear your perspective because that’s how this recipe gets better over time.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge, or, kind of sounds like we covered them, but do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome their jobs?

Steve Dalton
Stay curious. This is a life skill you only need to learn once, like riding a bike. It will be with you for the rest of your life. It will help you get promoted. Keep your job when there are layoffs, find more community at work. The benefits will never stop paying off. Bite the bullet now, learn it now, especially before everybody else has no choice but to learn it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Steve, thank you.

Steve Dalton
Absolutely, my pleasure. Thanks for having me back.

Nov 09

Gold Nugget #1195: How to Beat AI Applications and Win Your Job Hunt with Steve Dalton

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In episode 1195, Steve Dalton reveals the most efficient way to secure advocates and open the path to your dream career.

Look beyond online applications to improve your chances. A study from Ashby found that the offer rate from a single application was 0.2%. If you spent three hours a day on online applications, it would take you 13 months to reach an 80% chance! Moreover, AI has accelerated the pace of these applications, so openings fill up faster. Steve even warns that we could see online applications go away as AI gets even more efficient.

Steve offers two alternatives to online applications:

  1.  Attraction. I.e., becoming a thought leader by sharing content or commenting on others’ posts. However, not everyone may want their job search to be public.
  2. Proactive networking. Contrary to popular advice, this particular style doesn’t involve selling yourself to someone. Instead, you make the other person the star of the show. By asking about their expertise, you hope they go the extra step to offer to advocate for you. In that way, networking requires both vulnerability and humility since they might not always advocate for you. But it’s also the most effective way to get ahead since it creates a shortcut to the organization when it does work.

Use AI to brainstorm and practice, but not for your outreach or resumes. For example, you can ask AI to help you build your list of 40 prospective companies. It can also be your practice partner for informational interviews (e.g., “What are 10 pieces of jargon I should know when talking to a senior product manager?”)

Spend less time on your resume when applying online. Recruiters don’t have time to review your resume in detail. Also, the more you edit your resume, the more you increase the chances for errors. That said, you should give your resume extra attention if a potential advocate asks for it.

Follow seven points when reaching out to your potential advocates:

  1. Keep it short, under 75 words.
  2. State your commonality first.
  3. Phrase your email as a question.
  4. Categorize your interest without mentioning companies (e.g., “product management in the autonomous vehicle space”)
  5. Make half the email about them. 
  6. Ask for advice and insight, not job leads. 
  7. Put their experience in your own words.

Beyond that, Steve recommends reaching out first via LinkedIn Groups. That way, you don’t need to come up with a reason for how you’re connected.

Ask, “What resources should I look into?” instead of “Who should I talk to next?” The latter can make the person feel like what they shared wasn’t enough. At the same time, they may not have permission to share names. Meanwhile, “resources” is vague enough that they won’t lose face if they can’t give a name.

Read/listen to the full conversation HERE.

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Nov 05

1194: How to Finish What Matters with David Kadavy

By Podcasts No Comments

David Kadavy discusses expert strategies for following through on your creative ideas and projects.

You’ll Learn

  1. The missing “fifth quadrant” of the Eisenhower important/urgent matrix
  2. The trick to make big projects less intimidating
  3. The Raphael versus Leonardo modes of creativity

About David

David Kadavy has been a full-time independent creator for nearly two decades. His books have sold well over 100,000 copies and been translated into a dozen languages. He was design advisor to Timeful, a productivity app whose features were integrated into Google Calendar. He lives in a cabin in the mountains outside of Medellín, Colombia.

Resources Mentioned

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David Kadavy
Pete, it is so good to be here. I’m so comfortable.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, I’m delighted that we are chatting again. You’ve been working away on a book for six years, so congrats on, you finished it. I guess it mattered.

David Kadavy
Yes. Well, the book is called Finish What Matters. I think the last time we talked, we ended the conversation saying, “Oh, well, maybe we’ll talk in five years.” Well, it’s been six but, sometimes, finishing stuff just takes a long time if it matters to you.

Pete Mockaitis
Completely agreed. So, tell us, during this six-year journey, or Odyssey, did you have any particularly surprising or fascinating discoveries about finishing what matters while you’re writing this thing?

David Kadavy
When I was going into it, this is the third book in a trilogy for me about creativity and creative productivity, and I went into it thinking, “Oh, this is going to be easy. I know how to finish things. I’ve written, this is my fifth book. I’ve had a podcast for hundreds of episodes,” things like that. And it’s like, “I already know everything about finishing.”

And that didn’t turn out to be the case at all. I actually learned a lot about this because that word matters really stuck with me, and it really made me think about, “Am I just finishing projects? Do I get too stubborn about finishing the things that I start?” that it’s important to finish the things that do matter to you and also that kind of fit your risk profile. They’re like, “What kind of bets do I want to make?”

And so that is where I ended up learning a lot, because I had a lot of self-searching to do, and I came to realize that I can sometimes be too stubborn about finishing the things that I start, I will definitely be more discerning in how far I take ideas from now on and which ideas I decide to follow.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, that sounds like an important lesson for all of us, our finite time on this earth. Can you share with us what’s, perhaps, the big idea or some key criteria or principles you use to make these calls?

David Kadavy
If I connect it to being awesome at your job, like when you’re being awesome at your job, you’re probably delivering results. And you’re probably, to do that, doing things that you expect to lead to results. And these are going to, generally, be things that are expected of you.

But there’s this kind of other category of things where you have ideas about how you might, say, improve a process, or start a task force, or do something that if you don’t do it, nobody’s going to complain to you about it, nobody’s going to notice.

And maybe you get a little bit of energy to explore one of these things, tinker with one of these things on a Friday afternoon for an hour or two. But then come Monday morning, the priorities take over and you end up forgetting about the thing.

And so I think that we are all aware of the second quadrant on the Eisenhower Matrix, the things that are not urgent but important. I’m kind of advocating for a fifth quadrant, if you will.

Pete Mockaitis
Is it still a quadrant? Or is it a quintet?

David Kadavy
I guess it’s not.

Pete Mockaitis
Quintrent?

David Kadavy
The fifth quintent. It doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as well. But the things that are not urgent, but unknown, unknown outcome. So how do you find the time and energy to build that task force for incorporating AI tools in the company when you need to prepare that deck for Thursday’s meeting, or to tinker with that process when you need to fill out that self-assessment for your performance review, or submit that proposal to talk at that conference when you need to study for that certification exam, these things that something might come of it?

But we’re having this conversation because you and I, 10 years ago, decided to go to a conference. And what’s going to come from the conference?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Podcast Movement in Chicago. What? What?

David Kadavy
Yeah, and you think at a conference, okay, you’re going to meet some folks, maybe you’ve got some objectives, but one of them is not, “Oh, so I can have a conversation about my book on somebody’s podcast 10 years from now.”

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

David Kadavy
Right? But these are the things that kind of steer your career in a satisfying and gratifying and innovative direction, are these things that you have an idea, and maybe you have some kind of vision for how you’d like for the thing to turn out, but you don’t really know what the next step is.

And also if you were to follow the thing, it probably wouldn’t lead you to that destination that you have in mind. It might lead you to some other place completely surprising.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, that’s really fun, because when you say unknown, I’m enjoying that. I get excited by that. The thrill of exploration and discovery is a real good time. And I’m thinking about, like, video game designers, they know it, you know? It’s like, “Ooh, I found a thing. Yay!” It’s really intriguing.

And I imagine there are probably some dangerous temptations on either side of this. One is that you don’t do anything at all unknown because there’s a ton of things, and four quadrants is enough quadrants with all the bullet points on all the quadrants.

David Kadavy
We don’t need a fifth quadrant.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like there’s no capacity for anything else or it’s so much fun to explore and play around with all the nifty new little AI tools and the things and the models and what can they do, that it’s all not really what you “should” be doing with your time in order to make results happen.

David Kadavy
Yeah. Well, you definitely don’t want to be spending all of your time exploring, unless somehow that is your job. But I think that it’s helpful to set aside, like, a certain amount of time and energy for one. And then, two, like, be deliberate about scoping these things, not necessarily viewing them as big giant projects.

Like, I think of it as this thing I call the fortress fallacy. And that is that, I don’t know what it’s like for you, but whenever I have an idea, it’s always the fortress. It’s always this big giant thing that I don’t actually have the skills or resources to carry out. Resources including time and energy, right, because there’s other priorities.

And when I think about taking that first step, it’s really intimidating. What I like to do is what I call the cottage test, is that when I think of that fortress, when I have a big idea, I actually keep a spreadsheet of ideas where one column is called Fortress and another is called Cottage.

And I’ll write down that fortress idea, it’s like, “Oh, I’m going to write this 700-page book.” And then I will come up with the cottage version of that, which is it’s not breaking the thing down because that kind of requires more foresight than is often possible when doing creative things or when innovating. I think of it more as like, “What’s the smallest version of something resembling this idea that I can do?”

So, like, for example, let’s say that you did want to start a task force in your company for working with AI tools, and you’re thinking about like, “Oh, well, what’s the impression going to be amongst my colleagues about me automating them out of their jobs?” or, “Who’s going to be on the force? And how are these supervisors going to react to it?”

And it becomes overwhelming and you realize, “Oh, I’ve got more important things to do.” But if, instead, you’re thinking of it as like, “Well, let’s look out for a colleague that I could ask to have lunch with, and we can do some brainstorming and share notes and that’s the end of that.”

Well, and then maybe that becomes more of a regular thing. And then maybe slowly, over time, things start to happen. You see what I mean? It’s like starting off with a well-defined little experiment that you can carry out, and that you might have some kind of expectations for, but they’re far different from the initial, like, pie-in-the-sky or castle-in-the-sky, if you will, vision that you have. And you can budget your time and energy that way.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s cool to think about and well said with regard to the fortress feeling intimidating and so much so that, perhaps, we’ll just look elsewhere.

David Kadavy
I mean, I can actually feel it in my body when I’m looking at those two columns and I write that fortress idea. I can feel myself start to tense up, like, “Ah, I just don’t have time for that. I don’t have the resources.”

And then as soon as I write down that cottage idea, it’s like, “Okay, instead of writing that book, maybe I’ll just record that 30-second reel or something like that.” I can start to feel myself relax and start to get excited about, “Oh, well, what’s going to happen? That unknown, what’s going to happen?”

And that’s something that can make work a lot more fun and enjoyable is not really knowing what’s going to happen with some portion of what you’re doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, if I could piggyback off of that, I’d love to get your hot take on, if we’re doing something kind of repeatedly, like, I’m doing my, I don’t know, 1,198-ish episode of How to be Awesome at Your Job, I mean, I think it’s fun because, you know, new person, new ideas, new stuff, we get into it.

But then there are certain portions of it in terms of like, “Okay, now I got to package it up and publish it, you know?” That feels less fun because it can seem a bit more repetitive.

Do you have any thoughts on how can we bring some of that enthusiasm, excitement, exploration, unknown into our repetitive corners of work life?

David Kadavy
I think when you’re doing something repetitive, one, there’s something exciting about it because it is an opportunity to continuously improve on something. And that’s something that I’ve always gotten excited about.

When I’m doing something repetitive is that I can create a process and formalize it and see, “Well, what if I tweak this part or that part?” And then the next time around I get to do it differently.

Or, as I develop that process, then I can start to offload or automate things. And then I can start to ask myself, “Okay, what is my value-add here?” So in the case of a podcast, because you have automated so many things and offloaded them, delegated, you can now bring more of your own creativity to the process, and you can start to experiment with things there.

So I think it’s important to, if you’re doing something repetitive and you’re not able to decide to not do that thing anymore, it helps to find something that you’re learning from the process.

You and I are both podcasters. I know when I started my podcast, it was because, by forcing myself to do an episode a week, I figured, “I’m going to grow in these ways. I’m going to get to talk to mentors of mine. I’m going to get to practice talking about my own ideas. I’m going to force myself to read more books than I might have otherwise.”

And so there becomes, like, these kind of aspirations that you’re able to push yourself along with better by setting up obligations for yourself. But during that, you’re also asking yourself, “What do I want to get out of this?”

Because, eventually, you reach this point where maybe you’re not learning at the same pace that you were. And then it becomes a choice of like, “Can I offload parts of this to somebody else?” or, “All good things must come to an end, and so I’m not doing this particular thing anymore.”

And for myself, I did over 300 episodes of a podcast. And I reached a point where I said, like, “This is great.” I mean, I do miss it, but I just was reaching the point of diminishing returns on growing the way that I wanted to.

And that was, you know, one of the things that I faced as I wrote this book and learned was like that, “Oh, it actually…” especially with these things that can go on forever, you’ve got to define a finish line at some point.

And that can also be part of the reason why we maybe put off trying some of these ideas that we have is because it’s a little bit of a fear of success thing. It’s like, “If I set up this task force, and now I’m in charge of that, and like now that’s my responsibility, is that something that I’m going to enjoy?”

And so it can help to, early on, define some kind of finish lines for yourself. So, like, again, talking about a podcaster. A friend of mine, Drew Ackerman, when he started his podcast, he had a history of not finishing things.

And so he looked at the statistics and saw that, “Oh, you know, after the first two episodes, 50% of podcasts or 80% of podcasts don’t do anymore after.” So he said, “Okay, I’ll do two episodes.” And then after that it was five, and then after that it was twenty.

And he’s on over 1300 episodes of his podcast, which is called Sleep With Me. It’s like bedtime stories for adults, helping people get to sleep.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I’ve listened to it.

David Kadavy
Yeah. And so when you are facing this project that, if it turns out well, you’re going to have this ongoing obligation, you can end up learning a lot from just sort of defining how much of it that you are going to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. Tell us a little bit about your Leonardo and Raphael analogy.

David Kadavy
Yeah, one of the things that I came across while writing this book that really captured my imagination was about Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael. So Leonardo da Vinci, I feel like, is more famous now than Raphael. Raphael was, like, the quintessential Renaissance painter.

I mean, he was awesome and he had a ton of output. He’s got the Raphael rooms in the Vatican, those are giants. I mean, if it wasn’t for the ceiling down the hallway, Michelangelo’s ceiling, then that would be the greatest accomplishment in Renaissance painting. There’s entire walls of palaces that are lined with his finished paintings.

By contrast, Leonardo da Vinci, we have, like, a dozen finished paintings to his name, attributed to him. And there’s a lot of unfinished paintings as well. And you think, “Well, Leonardo must have really lacked discipline or just not been able to follow through on things.”

Except, when we realize that, for Raphael to paint the way that he did, he learned from Leonardo da Vinci. There’s actually a period of time they call the Florence period when Raphael’s career, where he spent a lot of time in Florence, and he spent a lot of time with Leonardo da Vinci, they might as well call it the Leonardo period.

And you can see that his paintings changed dramatically. And he was more influenced by Leonardo than any other painter. But Leonardo has this reputation as being a little ADHD, as being distracted, as we’ve got these thousands of pages of his notes on everything from metallurgy to geology to paleontology, which didn’t even exist at the time.

And there’s this reputation that, “Oh, he was just… he painted on the side, but he was distracted by science.” No, painting was the most important thing to Leonardo da Vinci, more important than anything. And his pursuit of science, his interest in all these different topics, were all to just feed his skills in painting.

For example, Leonardo made some pretty prescient observations about the moon. And this is an experiment that everybody listening can conduct, and he described it in his notebooks.

It was that if you look at a crescent moon up in the sky and you put your hand or some other more distant object as he describes it, over the illuminated part of the moon and look at the dark part of the moon, the shaded part, you’ll notice it’s not totally dark. There’s kind of a lighter area within it.

Now there were all these theories at the time about why that might be. Like, people thought maybe the moon was made of some sort of translucent substance. But Leonardo da Vinci correctly theorized that, “Oh, that is, at night the sun, the sun at night, reflecting off of the oceans of the earth into the shaded part of the moon and illuminating that.”

And so he had that understanding of light as, like, bouncing off of things. And you can see that under the chin of the Mona Lisa. And then there’s another painting by Raphael from that Florence period where he was learning from Leonardo that looks it’s the exact same composition as the Mona Lisa.

I mean, he copied the Mona Lisa. It’s a different subject. It’s a young woman with a unicorn in her lap, which is pretty cool. And he’s got that illuminated thing under the chin. You can look at his earlier work, it’s not there.

And so, oftentimes, we see this where somebody has to tinker and experiment before their innovations can really be implemented. Sometimes, it’s the same person, but a lot of times, it is somebody taking an innovation that was arrived at through experimentation and then executing on it, and that is what Raphael did.

And so I know for myself, some people think more like Leonardo and some people think more like Raphael. Where Leonardo had what I would call an inductive process in that he’s tinkering with stuff and making observations.

And it all kind of, like, piles into his knowledge about the world, and through that he paints something like the Mona Lisa, which took 15 years and he never really finished it and the client never got the painting. It was kind of never finished.

Some people have like a deductive approach, which is more like Raphael’s approach, where they take an idea or a concept and they just execute on that. And I think that we need to be careful with how we compare ourselves to colleagues or heroes that we are trying to emulate because we can very quickly make ourselves feel like we’re not accomplishing much when, really, it’s just that we have a different approach or we’re attracted to different problems.

I know that I’ve found that for myself that I had an a friend who was a writer who was writing on one subject all the time and I was just like, “It’s tough to keep up with this guy.”

And so when he pointed out, well, he’s deductive, you’re inductive. I’ve written about a whole bunch of different subjects. He’s written about one thing for 20 or 30 years and that suits him. He can do that.

And once I started to embrace that, “No, I’m just interested in a lot of things, but I need to be a little bit more deliberate about sizing my experiments and maybe trying to formulate for some some plan of what direction I’m going in,” that’s when things have gotten a lot more comfortable for me.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s lovely. Well, I’d also love your take on when we’re in the midst of things and pursuing a project and it’s not as fun, interesting, rewarding as it was when it was fresh and shiny and new at the start. Do you have any pro tips on, indeed, finishing what matters here?

David Kadavy
Yeah, because they’re actually, especially when it comes to something that is creative and fun in the beginning, you can sort of naturally be coming up with ideas while you you’re taking a shower or having lunch with a colleague and you get these new ideas, you can integrate them into it.

But actually finishing something, you have to step away from that sort of inductive process. And that can be difficult if you’re somebody who is attracted to thinking in that way, somebody who, I guess the personality traits would be somebody who is low on need for closure or high on openness to experience, like, they want to be constantly taking in new things. And finishing is the exact opposite of that.

So I think of it like finishing displacement theory, that your life and your work is filled to the brim, and you can work on your project and it will fit into your life and your work. But then we reach this point where we say, “Well, we got to finish this thing. How are we going to finish this thing?” and it becomes very difficult.

The thing is it just takes extra energy and time to be able to make that mental shift from just taking in information to actively saying, like, “Nope, we can save that for V2,” things like that.

And so you kind of need to make some space, see what sort of obligations you can put off to the side for some period of time until you finish this thing. For me, like working on this book, there was all this talk about all these AI tools, and I was interested in that but I had a not-to-do list.

“Can you make for yourself a not-to-do list? Here is an idea that has come to me. I’m very excited about this, but this is on my not-to-do list until this project is complete.” And that way you can start to give yourself some of that extra mental energy to do that sort of gritting of your teeth that needs to happen to actually get a project done.

Pete Mockaitis
So extra energy in the sense that, because you really want to do these things and your not-to-do list is growing and is interesting, it becomes a source of energy like, “Ooh, let’s get this thing done because, then, I’ve got this whole pile of interesting stuff just waiting for me.”

David Kadavy
Well, that’s part of it. That’s part of what can motivate you. That can also help because, oftentimes, when you get into a long-term project that is kind of all consuming, part of why that can be scary to finish is what you have waiting for yourself when you’re done, which is you don’t necessarily know.

Or you’re comfortable working on this project, you’re excited working on this pro project, you’ve reached a point where it feels very natural and fluid. I think of it, like, the stand-up comedians that they work on an hour and then they release it on Netflix and now they never tell those jokes again. And you hear them talk about that and they all feel very lost.

So there’s this void that you’re kind of scared to find yourself in when you’re finished with this project. And so, yeah, that not-to-do list can make you excited, can give you something to look forward to when you do finally finish this project.

But, at the same time, I think it is balancing that Leonardo and that Raphael in that I know, I personally find it much easier to stay in a certain mode, whether that is the exploration mode where I am taking in new ideas, where I am tinkering with things, or that execution mode where I call it, while I was finishing this book, I call it devastating focus.

I’m like, “I’m not going to watch movies, putting all my screens on black and white, doing everything I can to reduce the amount of distraction or extra stimulation that I’m attracted to that is not related to this project.”

And I find that when I’m finishing a big project, you’ll find that you’re finishing a lot of other stuff at the same time because you’re in that mode. So you have this sort of season where you’re going to get this thing done. And then after that, you can have that season where you get to the stuff on the not-to-do list and then you’re taking in information again, taking in new ideas.

Pete Mockaitis
Devastating focus. That sounds cool.

David Kadavy
Well, you think about it, like, when you are about to finish a project, what’s difficult about that, when it’s like a career-defining project, is that you have to kind of accept a new version of reality before it exists. You kind of need to puncture into this new version of reality.

And if you imagine, like, a piece of fabric between you and that new version of reality, and if you were to, like, press it with your finger, like, it would move. But if you were to concentrate that same pressure into a needle, it would puncture through that cloth, into that new version of reality.

And so I think of devastating focus as, like, it’s kind of the same amount of effort. It’s just that you’re focusing that effort on a very small point that you are using to step into this new reality.

Pete Mockaitis
The word devastating is so intense, it feels like it has implications all over the place. Do you mean you’re devastating the project ahead of you, or you’re going to feel devastated by how much you’re sacrificing in order to knock her out or both?

David Kadavy
A little bit of both. Like, when you get into a really big project, like you’re going to need support from the people around you. You got to talk to your spouse and say, like, “Look, can we work out this, that, and the other thing? Like, can we just not watch movies for the next couple months while I finish this? Or, can you help me with this part of the chores or something?”

I interviewed one reader who, she was writing a book, and her in-laws helped her out by renting a house that she could write in for a couple months. You need to rally your resources.

And there’s also an element to it that is meant to be self-motivational and self-inspirational, too. If that’s the posture that you like, I think that it works for me. It sounds a little what the kids call thirsty, you know?

It’s like maybe a little too ambitious, but it’s only so often in your life that you’re, like, really driving forward on a huge project that takes you years, and it takes that level of motivation sometimes where you got to psych yourself up a bit.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, tell us, any other top tips before we hear about some of your favorite things?

David Kadavy
Well, I would like to tell a story about this academic named Niklas Luhmann, who showed up on the first day of his professorship and said, “I have a project in mind. I’m going to write a theory of society, a theory of everything. It will take me 30 years.”

And he went on to write this two-volume, 1200-page theory of society, how everything in society works from romantic relationships to business, to politics, to finance. And it took him 30 years.

Now it sounds really amazing that somebody could show up on their first day of work and put forth a 30-year plan, and then actually carry it out. But the way that he did it actually looked kind of fun and was incredibly interesting.

And I think it’s something that we can learn from when we have that castle-in-the sky or that fortress in our minds, is that along the way, Luhmann published not just this 1200-page theory of society, he published 500 times. He published over 400 articles and over 70 books.

And the way that he went about that was by just taking little notes as he read. He created this database of notes of 90,000 notes. It’s the subject of a research project at the University in Germany that he was doing his research at.

And from the special way that he has organized these notes, we can see the way that he went about these projects, was that he started with these notes. And he used this thing that I call BESS, which stands for, we know the acronyms, right? BESS – breaking, expanding, stacking, and surrounding.

And so breaking is, when you are working on something larger, finding some insight that you can break off and create your own little project with. So you might be putting together the quarterly report, and there’s one slide in there that, “This is pretty interesting. I’m going to take this to the team meeting.”

And so for Luhmann, that would have been there was a presentation that he put together. And they can see from the way that he arranged his notes, that as he was writing that presentation, he added notes to his database, that he had new insights as he was working on this presentation, and they went into the database.

Next is expanding. And that is when you’re working on, you create something smaller and then you expand it into a larger thing. So, maybe you have that slide from the quarterly report and you bring it up in the meeting, and then that actually becomes a lunch and learn, and you end up giving a presentation, you expand it into a lunch and learn.

For Luhmann, his use of expanding was taking that presentation, which he later turned into a book on the exact same subject. So he expanded it into a book.

So next up is stacking. Stacking is just taking smaller projects and then stacking them together to create something larger. So let’s say you do that lunch and learn, and then you do another lunch and learn, and then you do another lunch and learn. And now you have this new onboarding process or course that you can put together for training people in the company.

For Luhmann, that was, his notes was one thing, and then also as he did these presentations, he would stack the notes together. He’d take them out and arrange them on a table, and that would be an article. And that’s how he published hundreds of times was by stacking things together.

And then surrounding is basically conquering larger, more ambitious projects by taking on smaller projects that don’t seem related at all to that larger, more ambitious project. It’s sort of dissolves the defenses, so to speak, to use some more tough language along with devastating.

So it really devastates the defenses, is by doing a little project here and a little project here that builds some skills that will help you conquer this larger project. So let’s say you are in charge of organizing the company offsite and, because of that, you have to negotiate with vendors.

Well, that’s an opportunity to work on your negotiation skills. And now when it comes time to negotiate your salary, you’ve gotten some practice with that. This can often come from outside of your work life. Like, if you take improv classes, you do a little bit of stand-up. Well, now you’ve gotten some practice thinking on your feet, and you can use that in talking with clients.

For Luhmann, that first day when he said, “I have this 30-year project idea in mind,” he was able to set forth such an ambitious plan because he had already spent a couple decades doing that thing where he’s taking notes as he reads and organizing them.

And maybe publishing an article here and there, such that when he began doing that, he wasn’t even thinking about sociology. He was thinking about something completely different. He was working on organizational structure, just for an example.

And so that is something that, I think, is useful, a story that could be inspiring for our listeners as they think about the ambitious things that they would like to take on, is, “How can you use BESS – breaking, expanding, stacking, and surrounding – to find little opportunities to break off projects, to expand those little experiments into larger things, to stack them together to create larger things, or to take on projects that aren’t necessarily related to that target project to surround them?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. Thank you. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

David Kadavy
Yeah, I love this one by Ford. I think is really underrated, which is that, “Many inventors fail because they do not distinguish between planning and experimenting.”

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

David Kadavy
Yes, there’s this economist, David Galenson. And like a good economist, he wanted to study the prices of paintings. And he thought he would find this neat pattern that say the younger painters have more valuable paintings, or the older painters have more valuable paintings.

But instead, he’s found two separate patterns. There were the young geniuses who peaked early, and later on, their paintings were not as influential, not as valuable. And then there were the old masters, those who, as they went on, they got better and better.

The two archetypical examples would be Picasso and Cezanne. Picasso peaked at 26. Cezanne peaked at 67. And, like we were talking about earlier, Cezanne was Picasso’s hero.

So if people remember from art history class, Cubism, and it’s basically representing a four-dimensional world on a two-dimensional canvas where you see the nose twice from different angles and there’s all these rectilinear forms and stuff. Picasso really picked that up from Cezanne. And Cezanne spent decades experimenting with kind of breaking down the natural world into different planes of color.

And Galenson has found this pattern over and over again, where there are these people who are more executors like Picasso, who become successful very quickly, and there are those who are more experimental where it takes a lot longer to build that foundation.

And that is a really fascinating study to me. And that’s also where you see Leonardo as an experimenter and Raphael as an executor.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

David Kadavy
I really enjoy Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff. I think that we could all benefit from conducting more tiny experiments in our lives.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

David Kadavy
I like iOS shortcuts, specifically using iOS shortcuts for idea capture. Just making a little widget, to just, whenever you have an idea, tap on that widget, write it down, and it will put it in that sheet, and then you can later go through and and evaluate that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

David Kadavy
I really enjoy this thing called TRE. This is going to get a little weird. TRE stands for tension and trauma releasing exercise. And you can look it up on YouTube, and it’s this sort of thing where you lay on the floor, and you do a certain series of exercises, and it sort of causes you to tremble a little bit, and it releases all this tension like in your back and your hips and stuff.

Check it out on YouTube. I will warn you, be careful with it. It is way more powerful than it looks. You might want to talk to a TRE practitioner if you’re going to try it out or do it at your own risk. But it is very cool, and I’m very glad that I discovered it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, my mind is blown a bit because I have zero frame of reference for this. And so that’s exciting and it’s unknown, and I like exploring unknown.

David Kadavy
Dr. David Berceli, it’s his idea and it’s really cool, and there’s starting to be a budding population of people online interested in it, and it’s really cool.

Pete Mockaitis
So maybe just one more minute here. If I were to do cardiovascular exercise, I know what kind of adaptation I might get. My heart and lungs are able to deliver oxygen and blood circulation more effectively. Cool.

If I do strength training, I’m pumping some iron, it’s like, “Oh, now I am stronger. I’m able to lift more weights or more reps or longer sessions. Cool.” What kind of adaptation or benefit do I get from doing TRE?

David Kadavy
Releasing of tension. And I don’t want to sound New Age-y here. There’s also, like as you do it, these memories pop up and they can be traumatic memories if you’re somebody with a history of trauma. But they can be just, like, that time that somebody cut me off, or that time that somebody interrupted me in a meeting, and I wanted to say something but I didn’t.

And so the best explanation I could give is that it’s almost like, in those moments where you’re resisting some kind of a reaction, an emotional reaction, that you tense your muscles, and then that muscle ends up kind of being tense all the time.

And so TRE releases that tension, and it’s something you have to do kind of like repeatedly over and over to get the benefits of it. And then you sort of reintegrate into your new tension patterns, and then you sort of find maybe things that might have upset you before don’t, or tension that you had in your body, like back pain, neck pain, things like that. You might see those dissipate.

Pete Mockaitis
Nifty. Okay.

David Kadavy
I decided to go with something really different.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, they quote it back to you often?

David Kadavy
I find that that fortress fallacy people find very resonant when they’re trying to take on a big project and they realize that they’re dreaming of the fortress and they should consider the cottage.

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

David Kadavy
I would point them to Kadavy.net. Or, if you’re on a mobile and you want to type it quick, you’d just be kdv.co. Go there, sign up for my newsletter, “Love Mondays.” That is a weekly newsletter, and I’m not going to tell you which day it comes out on.

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

David Kadavy
Yeah, I think when you have an idea, capture it, and then later, triage it. And, in fact, I have put together a special tool that I personally use to triage my ideas. And you can find that at Kadavy.net/awesome.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. All right. David, thank you.

David Kadavy
Thank you so much. It’s been so great to reconnect.