564: Tapping the Motivational Forces of the World’s Most Successful People with Marco Greenberg

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

Marco Greenberg
Hey, terrific to be on your podcast, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, before we hit record, I learned that we shared a pretty cool connection, and that’s Mr. Hugh O’Brian with his HOBY, Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership Organization, and a client of yours. I know he’s generous and loving and also cantankerous and, well, he will be missed in this world. So, could you tell us a noteworthy Hugh story to kick us off?

Marco Greenberg
I’d be happy to. I was introduced to Hugh O’Brian by, literally, the most legendary figure in the history of public relations, Harold Burson, who, sadly, passed away a couple of months ago just shy of his 99th birthday. And Harold called me into his office, and he said, “Look, I have a really important client to introduce you to who I love, but I want to give you a little bit of warning about Hugh O’Brian. He can be incredibly intense, so much so that we’ve had other people running in the account who ran for the hills or started crying because they couldn’t deal with him. He is absolutely messianic about what he wants to accomplish. He will act as if you have no other clients. But he’s someone that makes a difference. He’s someone that makes an impact. I think you’ll be great to run the account.”

And, sure enough, I was the young 20-something account executive on the Hugh O’Brian Foundation account running the gala, the awards, etc., and I learned a tremendous amount from him. And the fact of the matter is, and I hadn’t thought of this, Pete, until you made the connection between Hugh O’Brian in my own career. But, in my lexicon, Hugh is a classic primitive, meaning he marches to his own drum. He’s an iconoclast. He was non-conventional. He threw out the civilized rulebook. And, for some people, that didn’t jive well with their attitude of what you’re supposed to do in the workplace. But for other people it was actually key to his success. It was key to his ability to move the ball forward like nobody else.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that is good. And, boy, I’ve got a lot of these Hugh memories coming back. I’ve learned a ton from him. And I remember he once shared with us that…so, he was an actor, for those who don’t know. Hugh O’Brian played Wyatt Earp back in the day on a TV series was his big role, and he started this great organization that kind of got me started in this leadership development world. But I remember he said that Gregory Peck left him a voicemail, another famous actor from back in the day who my mom loves, and he didn’t get around to returning the call before Gregory passed away. And I’ve thought about that many, many times in terms of like, don’t be too busy to reach out to your people, and it’s a good reminder. But, anywho.

the human touch doesn’t go out of style. And I think in this world of AI, and big data, and globalization, and outsourcing, and all the trends that we see, I would argue that human factor is more important than anything.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you and I’m with you. So, let’s dig into the topic du jour there. We had a little Hugh time. Let’s see, we’re talking about, so you got this book here, “Primitive: Tapping the Primal Drive that Powers the World’s Most Successful People,” so it sounds helpful. Tell us, what is that primal drive? First of all, what is that thing?

Marco Greenberg
Right. Well, there are a lot of people today that are described as disruptors, mavericks, rebels, non-traditional hires. There are all kinds of different adjectives that are thrown out there. But I think when you get down to it, when you do a reality check, when you do a gut check, it’s really about, “What is that primal drive in our core? What are the instinctive, inborn, natural traits that oftentimes society says, ‘You shouldn’t do that. You must not do that’?” But if we honor what’s primal, and obviously what’s primal can often be childlike, right? And that can be a loaded attribute.

But I found in the people that I’ve worked with who have risen to the top, whether they are the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, whether they are the founders of tech unicorns, whether they are the executive directors of NGOs, whether they are actually secretaries of state, and I’d be happy to share a few stories of anecdotes that I had with two secretaries of state that were very instructive for me in my career. I think a lot of the time, you find that they are honoring their primal instincts, that which comes naturally, that which is organic, rather than trying to bury it like most people are taught to do. Most people think, “Well, that’s not appropriate. I’ve got to cross my Ts and dot my I’s. I should follow the more conventional path.” But what I’ve discovered is the most successful people out there are those that, in the words of a famous book, take the road less traveled.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, that’s an interesting theory. So, then what is the primal drive? I mean, so they do things differently, they march to the beat of their own drum, and they aren’t afraid to kind of shuck or disregard certain civilized norms as necessary. And so then, kind of what’s kind of getting them fired up and in motion?

Marco Greenberg
There are a lot of dynamics going on with these primitive characters. Let’s take an uber primitive in my book, someone like Elon Musk. And when you look at Elon Musk, he’s not someone that plays by the conventional rules, right?
And, originally, my book was supposed to be on marketing and how do you get it out there. And, thankfully, I have a more primitive agent, and I’ll explain why, meaning a literary agent, who said, “You know, marketing books are a dime a dozen. Why do you want to do that? Why don’t you do something more unique?” And he asked me, “What separates the most successful people that you worked with, and currently work with, and in the past worked with, and want to work with?” And the first answer that I had is, “They’re friggin’ nuts. They’re crazy.” They are out there. They are eccentric. They throw out the rulebook as we said. Sometimes they’re inappropriate, not in an offensive or illegal way, but just doing things in a bizarre, off-beat, free spirit kind of way.

So, if we go back to Elon Musk, he’s certainly nuts, right? And when I say nuts, I mean crazy in a good way, in a positive way. And that same nut spirit allowed him to launch PayPal, allowed him to get into the space business when people said, “You have no business doing that. What do you know?” And he got into that. And look at Tesla, flying high as of the beginning of the year in a way that no one would’ve thought. So, I would argue that it’s not necessarily the conventional way of following, with all due respect, the Harvard Business School case study of how a CEO should act, but rather someone who writes his own script.

And I think with Elon Musk, he does that. And I’d be happy to explain how, and how listeners can also, in my words, make a couple primitive moves. In other words, even if you’re quite civilized, quite conventional, more in the lane, more in your own world, your own box, sometimes it’s important to get out of that comfort zone and make a primitive move, be a little more nuts, and I can go through different prescriptions on how to do that when it makes sense with you, Pete. But I wanted to throw that out as just a paradigm.

But whether it’s Elon Musk or Steve Jobs or Oprah Winfrey, there are many, many leaders that exhibit these kinds of extraordinary traits that we talk about in the book.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, they’re nuts and they’re unconventional. And so then, what is their primal drive? Like, what is their fuel source that gets them moving? It’s unique.

Marco Greenberg
I think it comes down to how they measure success. And, obviously, you can define success in a myriad of ways. But from the research that we’ve done in the book, from the over 60 interviews, from talking to neuropsychologists and others who, frankly, have expertise that I don’t, most of my expertise, as I’ve mentioned, is in the trenches, is in the weeds, I think the primal drive comes in four areas.

One is certainly they want to be well-compensated, right? That’s not a trivial thing. They want to be appreciated. And, for good or for bad, in our society, often that comes down to the almighty dollars they say, but I think it’s a lot more than that. I think it’s also about making an oversized impact in their own world and on the world at large. I think it’s retaining their sense of independence. These are not women and men who follow orders.

My dad was a classic primitive. He was a modern architect who died way before his time. But he was in the US Air Force Reserve between Korea and Vietnam. And he entered as a third-class private, and six years later, he left as a third-class private. And he said, “Make me a general or leave me a private, but I refuse to pass on silly orders.” So, we actually have that quote in the book and for good reason, because in my view, that kind of captures the spirit of why independence is everything. And you hear the term, and I hope I can use this on your podcast, Pete, “F you, money.” And that is another way of talking about a way to get independence.

But I think, on a primal level, it’s, A, that impact, B, that independence, and it’s also something that I’ve heard you talk about in past podcasts, and it’s something that other people in business, in my view, don’t discuss enough, and that’s the ability to have fun. I have a former client in Boston, his name is Mike Iacobucci, he has a great startup that’s now very mature, called Interactions. They do amazing, amazing work on the voice recognition side. Apple is one of their big clients. And he says to me, “You know, it’s now my, what, third, fourth startup, and I ask myself every day, ‘Am I having fun? Am I still having fun? If I’m having fun, I’m going to do it. If I’m not having fun, I’m not going to do it.’”

So, the primal drive certainly comes from being recognized, and often that’s from my point of view, but it also comes from, “Am I making an impact? Can I retain my sense of independence? And am I having fun?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then, so we get there, well-compensated, making an oversized impact, have fun. What’s the other one?

Marco Greenberg
Maintain that sense of independence. It’s certainly about the independence but a lot more. And the good news is that you don’t necessarily have to be an uber primitive like Elon Musk to capture that kind of spirit in your work. You can tap into that. Hence, the subtitle of the book “Tapping the Primal Drive That Powers the World’s Most Successful People.”

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, I would love it if you could share a story or two, particularly professionals would be ideal, of those who, indeed, they were untapped into their primal drive, and then they did something that tapped it, and then the cool result they saw as a result.

Marco Greenberg
I’d love to. And speaking of love, I’m going to start with a former coworker and friend who actually goes by the name of Love. Love is his first name, and his full name is Love Whelchel, III. And I met Love when he was running talent development at Young and Rubicon, one of the big advertising agencies out there.

And what I realized about Love and his career, both before I met him and after we had stopped working together, was that he was a classic agnostic primitive. What I mean agnostic, not someone who specializes, not someone who is all about focus, but rather someone who jumps from field to field, job to job, a true renaissance man, renaissance figure, who makes that the essence of his DNA. So, Love started out working as a roadie for NWA. Remember the rap group?

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Marco Greenberg
He went on to selling books for Deepak Chopra. He then got onto Madison Avenue where I met him. And we feature him in the book at a crucial crossroads in his own career when he got a conversation going with Sean Combs, none other than P. Diddy. And he met with P. Diddy on a Friday afternoon about taking over his head of HR and operations at Bad Boy Entertainment. And he’s going home, and he’s thinking about his conversation with Sean, and whether he should leave Y and R. And Sean calls him on the phone as he’s driving, and he says, “Love, I got to know if you’re taking the job.” And Love says, “Mr. Combs, we just met. I need time to think about it. I need time to process it.” He said, “Love, I’m not going to have a good weekend unless you tell me you’re taking the job.”

And in a heartbeat, his whole life went before him, and rather than being…

Pete Mockaitis
You can’t ruin P. Diddy’s weekend. You can’t have that.

Marco Greenberg
You can’t ruin P. Diddy’s weekend.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s just not acceptable.

Marco Greenberg
Exactly. And, Pete, what do you think Love said?

Pete Mockaitis
“Yes, I’ll do it.”

Marco Greenberg
He said, “Yes, I’ll do it.” And he did it for several years and helped take that company to a new level. And, FYI, he’s now at Vera Wang, working for another total primitive in the fashion world. So, here he goes from entertainment, to advertising, to fashion. And we have a great quote from Love in the book, he goes, when he gets a new assignment, he feels like he’s been dropped in the jungle with nothing but his loincloth, a pen knife, and has to fight his way out.

So, for me, that kind of captures the spirit of it. And, no, you do not have to be a guy. I’ve gotten great feedback from a lot of people who say that this book is actually more appropriate for women than men, and I can explain why in a moment if that’s of interest. But that’s an example of a pure primitive. I do think there are people that are really hypercivilized. Again, that’s the kind of other side of the coin in terms of these archetypes.

There’s a woman named Bonnie who I’ve worked with over the years, probably more to the book, a conservative, risk-averse, works her way up the hierarchy, has been in the same industry for years. She worked with me at BBDO, she was there for a quarter of a century, she said that she made a primitive move by going to her boss and saying, “No, I do not want that promotion.” And the reason she said no, which took a lot of courage, it was the kind of offer that you couldn’t refuse, that 99% of her colleagues would’ve said, “Yes, I’m taking that job,” and unlike Love, she said, “No, I’m not taking the job.” And part of it, she traced back to kind of making a primitive move and being oppositional, which is one of the key traits to being a primitive that I think is worth talking about, in having the courage to say no, having the courage to say, “I don’t see it that way,” especially in a world in corporate America that, a lot of times, there’s a lot of group-think going on out there, and we all shake our head, “Yes, yes, yes,” even though in our hearts and our minds we’re thinking something else.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, then I’m curious, for those who are conservative and then they are…we want to tap into the primal drive, how is that done?

Marco Greenberg
I put a prescription together. And one of the books on PR that I suggested all my students read was “Made to Stick” by the Heath brothers. Have you ever read that book?

Pete Mockaitis
I have it on my shelf, and we interviewed Dan Heath recently.

Marco Greenberg
Oh, he’s just amazing. And, for me, that teaches us the value of the unexpected, but it also teaches us the importance of picking the right acronym, something that sticks, no pun intended, that’s memorable. And I was inspired by them, and after I came up with the premise for the book, I sat on my couch one morning, and I wrote “primitives are roaming,” kind of like our ancient ancestors, right? And I’m not talking about roaming on our cellphone. I’m talking about getting out there and exploring unconquered territory.

And I started with that theme, and then I worked backwards, and said, “What does roaming stand for? And how can it help people out there that feel stuck in their career, that feel burnt out, that feel underappreciated?” And you know how many people that describes, right? We’re talking in the millions. So, for me, and I’ll go through it very quickly, and then I’d be happy to dissect it. For me, people who are roaming are, A, relentless, that’s the R, and it doesn’t just mean working hard. It means sometimes stopping and then restarting or jumping lanes, but it means not forgetting what our big goals are, what those big targets are.

O, as we mentioned earlier, is for oppositional, the courage to say, “You’re wrong, and here’s why,” rather than just shaking our head, “Yes, yes, yes,” and engaging in more destructive group-think. The A is for agnostic, being able to roam from field to field rather than just being one occupation your whole life. A lot of people were typewriter repairmen in the day. That job has gone by the wayside along with a lot of other occupations. M is one of my favorites, Pete, and M stands for messianic, not necessarily being religious, but it does come from the word messiah, and it’s seeing that you have a divine calling, that’s it’s more than a job, it’s even more than a career. And I’d love to tell you about some people that represent that messianic fervor. I think Elon Musk certainly is one, but there are tons of others that do.

I is a bit of a counterintuitive one, it’s insecure. Yes, insecure. We’re told to be confident and have that swagger. I would argue some of the most successful people I’ve worked with are actually insecure. I have some anecdotes that Richard Branson as an example of that, and it’s not ignoring your insecurity like some do. It’s embracing it. It’s weaponizing it. N is for nuts. Yes, you’ve got to be a little crazy in the good sense of the word. And G is gallant, being noble, not just thinking of yourself but looking out for the other.

So, together it spells roaming. And I think you can give a prescription for people who want to tap into this primitive drive but, understandably, don’t want to get fired, don’t want to be so out there that they’re an outcast. They want to be team players but, at the same time, they want to maintain their independence and be that contrarian out there that actually can take an organization to new heights.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so, yeah, I’d love to hear, I guess, each of these, R-O-A-M-I-N-G, has some things you can do to tap into it. So, why don’t we start with insecure and Richard Branson while we’re there? And then maybe you can share any of the other kind of most accessible and powerful means to tap into that power. So, how do we weaponize insecurity in a helpful way?

Marco Greenberg
Right. Well, it makes me think of my own career when I was working for BBDO, the big advertising giant in their Israeli office, and I met with a wonderful guy who was the former chief rabbi of Ireland, and he was in Israel at the time, Rabbi Rosen. And he looked at me and he said, “Marco, just because we’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not trying to kill us.” So, it was the first time I’ve heard that, and you guys, and viewers out there, probably heard of Andy Grove from Intel, and only the paranoid survives, so it kind of derives from that. But the idea is here we are in a world where I can’t tell you how many millennials have worked for me. And what’s one of their favorite expressions? “It’s all good.”

And sometimes it’s not all good. Sometimes it’s really messed up, so I think the all good kind of mindset comes from a position of chill, let’s just be relaxed, go with the flow, it is what it is. But, oftentimes, in business, we have to be more primal and think like cavemen and cavewomen that, “Yeah, we’re being attacked right now, and this is a time where we might want to tap into that primitive mind as oppose the cerebral mind, and be more instinctive, and be more quick, and be more fast.”

There was a time where neuroscientists thought, “Oh, the primitive mind has no meaning. We should be cerebral. We should be rational. We should be logical.” But recently, including MIT scientists discovered that actually there’s a lot to do with the primitive brain. So, on that insecure front, I think it relates very directly to that, back to Richard Branson, weaponizing your own insecurity.

There is a wonderful podcast on Freakonomics where Stephen Dubner interviews Richard Branson. And Branson admits, in front of his executives, when they’re talking about financials at Virgin, he stopped them and he wasn’t clear, and his top lieutenants didn’t want to embarrassed him, but they realized that, here, a billionaire, Sir Richard Branson, a legend, didn’t know the difference between net and gross. And he admitted it.

And he admitted that he had learning disabilities as a kid and was never very good at math, so they literally drew a figure of a net, like a fisherman, and they said, “Richard, the fish that you keep, that’s the net. The fish that go in the net and then jump back in the water, that’s your gross.” And he said, “Thank you. I got it.” So, in other words, here’s a great executive who doesn’t try to put the wool over people’s eyes and act, “Whoa, I got this,” right? He says, “No, I don’t got this. I’m insecure.” And there are plenty of other examples.

There’s one in the book that I’m very fond of, a former colleague who’s now running all of marketing for YouTube in EMEA, Europe, Middle East, Africa, etc. Her name is Riki Drori. And we have an anecdote with her that she proudly says, “I’m the most insecure person I know.” And she says it with glee. And part of that is it keeps her on her toes, it keeps her always moving forward. It’s not taking things for granted. Instead, it’s always trying to, yes, take it up a notch.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I hear you there. So, then with the insecurity, it can be quite powerful for, hey, Brene Brown and others, talking about the power of vulnerability, for letting other people be honest and psychologically safe and contribute great ideas, as well as you have some paranoid hustle that can emerge when you’re thinking, “Okay, this is about to be taken from me.” Okay, that’s helpful. Then let’s talk about oppositional. I can see the others kind of maybe more intuitively. But if you’re feeling uncomfortable about being oppositional, but even though you think there could be quite helpful and powerful, what do you do?

Marco Greenberg
It comes down, I think, and I’m saying this as a PR guy, you don’t necessarily need media training for this but it doesn’t hurt. I think it’s how you say it. If you say it in a disrespectful way…

Pete Mockaitis
“Marco, you’re dumb and that’s never going to work.”

Marco Greenberg
Exactly. If you say it in a demeaning way, you’re not going to get what you want, right? But if you’re able to say, “Look, I hear what you’re saying. In fact, I used to think that way myself, but I got to tell you I disagree. Respectfully, lovingly, I disagree. And here’s why.” So, it’s what you say but it’s also, even more important, how you say it.

I got to say, one of the most influential people, not just in my business life but in my life, who I dedicate this book to, is the late Danny Lewin. Danny was the cofounder and chief technology officer of Akamai Technologies. Without going into all the details, tragically, Danny was the first person killed on 9/11. He was a former commando in the Israel Defense Forces. He stood up against the hijackers, and he was killed before the plane went into the first tower.

Danny was a classic oppositional primitive, and not just because he fought back on 9/11, it’s how he did business.
Pete, I might be the first person that ever says a phrase in Hebrew on Awesome at Your Job, but I’m going to do it with your permission, [Hebrew 31:52], “You’re not correct and I’m going to explain why.” That’s what Danny did in a charming, loving way that people thought was irresistible. And, guess what, it took him to new heights. And we have an anecdote in the book on when he went head to head with Jefferey Skilling. Do you remember that name?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, with Enron.

Marco Greenberg
Totally. So, Danny was brought down by Enron to meet in Houston with the Enron team. This was at the time when Enron, these were the smartest guys in the world. They could do no wrong. No one have heard of Akamai Technologies. And Skilling had a certain idea for him getting involved in the content-delivery business over the World Wide Web, and Danny said, “Jeff, that’s a horrible idea and I’m going to explain to you why.” Needless to say, the meeting didn’t last long. But the point there is that when people at Enron were just saying, “Yes, yes, yes,” to Jeffrey Skilling, who was later indicted and sent to jail, as you well know, that’s not a good thing.

So, I think, like anything, it’s the happy balance between, “Yes, we want to be team players,” but part of our responsibility as a team player is to also indicate when we think things are headed south in the wrong direction.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. I think there’s a lot of fear associated with being oppositional, and there are some ways that you can be diplomatic and helpful as you do so. But I think what’s fascinating is there are times when, boy, when you’re oppositional, it goes fabulously well. Like, I think there was…I remember I had a friend who was a relationship therapist, and she had some hotshot executive who was unaccustomed to having people disagree with him and kind of show him what was inconsistent or blind spots in his thinking and logic and approach. And so, he was just like amazed by this relationship therapist, like, “You need to come work for me.”

And I had an encounter in college, one of my good friends, Anne, she was dating a guy who I thought was kind of funny but also kind of mean. And so, I remember I think I was a little more wildly out there in my youth, and I said, “Oh, yeah, he’s really funny and smart. Although, sometimes has he ever kind of strike you as maybe just a little bit of a-hole.” I said the real word.

Marco Greenberg
Right, right.

Pete Mockaitis
And she laughed and said, “Yes, he very much does.” Later they broke up, and we’re still great friends and she really appreciated that candor. I think it’s largely why we hit it off and kick off such a great friendship is that there can be tremendous gains associated with being oppositional when I think a lot of times we only maybe fixate on the downsides.

Marco Greenberg
You’re so right. By the way, the research bears that out. A lot of people think that nodding your head yes is going to get you ahead in your career track when, many times, it’s the exact opposite. And a lot of research has been done with C-level executives that they actually respect people who argue a position persuasively and can convince them to question their own POV. For example, take Eric Schmidt when he was at Google. He said, “We run this company on questions not answers.”

And I think part of being oppositional is being able to ask questions. And the sad truth of it, and this gets back to the advantage of sometimes being more like a kid. Kids ask a lot of questions. But what happens with society? We beat it out of them, right? Like we say, we’re breaking a horse. We’re teaching a horse to be civilized. A lot of the spirit within kids is broken down. And in the book, we talk about research that the average five- or six-year old asks hundreds of questions a day. Do you know what happens, Pete, when they become teenagers?

Pete Mockaitis
Tell us.

Marco Greenberg
It comes down to asking maybe two or three questions a day. So, they don’t want to rock the boat anymore. They’ve been taught to stay in line, to do as they’re told, to be a good little boy and good little girl, to be excellent sheep. By the way, that’s a great book written by a Yale professor talking about how we’re doing a disservice to our young people today of saying, “Hey, we want you to be physicists, we want you to be poets, we all want you to start the next great NGO,” but sometimes we’re giving them the kind of message that, “We’d rather have you be Big Three consultants and just get in line to do what others do.”

Pete Mockaitis
I was a Big Three consultant but I left. I got out of line in a big way. So, I remember people who say, “So, Pete, what are you thinking about doing?” I was like, “Yeah, I want to go write books and speak and coach.” And they’re, “Oh,” and they all said the same thing, “Well, now is the time to do it. When you’re 25 and don’t have kids or a wife,” which was not an endorsement of, “You’re going to be great.”

Marco Greenberg
Totally. Totally.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s just, “Let me encourage you without rendering a judgment on your success.” But it worked out.

Marco Greenberg
So, I think giving ourselves permission to be a little more out there, in however we define that phrase, can often be the key to our success. The good news is you don’t have to jump outside your organization. I was on the phone with a client from one of our largest academic institutions that we represent that I’m wearing their T-shirt, they’re based in Columbus, Ohio, and she loves the fact that she has the reputation of being someone who, in a respectful way, asks the right questions rather than just following the pack. And for her, that’s been key to her success within a large organization. So, you don’t just have to be an entrepreneur, you can make some primitive moves within a huge bureaucracy and benefit from it.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Okay. So, now, I want to get a quick take from you in terms of we’re talking about conventions and how we can break them. Do you have any just real quick do’s and don’ts in terms of, hey, convention you probably want to break, and convention you probably don’t want to break?

Marco Greenberg
Let me give you some ideas on conventions that you can break, and we talk about this in the book.
Another anecdote and rule that I think you can think about is sometimes you got to be the craziest dog in the fight. I learned that from an esteemed venture capitalist Todd Degres who ran Spark Capital. He’s invested in everything from Twitter, to Tumblr, to Square, to 1stdibs, etc. And the idea there is you do, sometimes, have to be nuts. You have to be more out there, more daring, more willing to ride the tiger and live on the edge. And that’s something that oftentimes we’re taught not to do. We’re taught to do the analysis-paralysis thing, but we know where that gets us. Not very far.

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

Marco Greenberg
I think we want to remind listeners that some of the brightest people out there are people that see their professional life as an adventure rather than just a job, rather than just showing up. So, I’ll give one of my favorite examples of an author that I’ve learned a ton from, and the reason I mentioned, he’s more than just an author. He’s also an MIT professor. He’s also a social entrepreneur, and I’m talking about Alan Lightman.

If you look at his Wikipedia, it’s like mind-blowing. The guy writes textbooks on astrophysics, then he became the first professor at MIT to institute a writing requirement that you have to actually learn and understand the English language and literature. He then became a writer himself, and he’s written many bestsellers. And then he went to Southeast Asia and started a nonprofit to take a new generation of women leaders to new heights.

So, the reason I mentioned it is, forget about focus, forget about domain expertise. Alan is an example of someone who lives on the edge and has that childlike curiosity, and it’s been his jet fuel. So, for me, a lot of us are playing it too damn safe, and we need to start roaming and jump from field to field. And we have some great examples, including some rocket scientists out there like Alan Lightman from MIT.

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

Marco Greenberg
one of it comes from Troy Anderson who wrote a book about the Chinese game Go. Did you ever play Go?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Marco Greenberg
With the little pebbles, right? So, one of the things he says about the book, applying it to business, and with Stanford Business School, is “Don’t get too attached to your first moves.” And I think a lot of people, whether they’re starting a business, whether they have a new job, and they look at the job description, and they say, “Well, I’m going to be doing A, B, and C,” and then they might realize they have to shift gears very quickly, and they’re doing W, Y, Z. So, I think being nimble is something that a more primitive mind feels comfortable with as opposed to someone who is more circumscribed, who is following the exact recipe according to the cookbook. The primitives improvise. They’re more spontaneous. They throw a little bit of basil in, a little bit of pepper in, and out comes something great.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. And, now, could you share a favorite study or experiment or a bit of research?

Marco Greenberg
Yeah, we talked about some of the research that connotes the importance of being childlike and being oppositional. And I want to touch on that oppositional point and really bring it home. When I was in college way back when, the best airline in the world, Swissair. Well, back around 2001, Swissair, like a lot of airlines, had a challenge. They brought in consultants, no offense to your former colleagues at the Big Three, and they said, “Swissair has got to do what we say. Read the best practices. We did the benchmarking. You got to do this,” and all the nice, very polite, diplomatic people in Geneva and in Zurich said, “Yes, yes, yes, we got to do this.”

Well, what happened? They went out of business. Part of why they went out of business, the research said, is there was no one really presenting that alternative point of view. What’s another way that we can do this? So, there was group-think, and that group-think brought down one of the most successful airlines of all time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And how about a favorite book?

Marco Greenberg
It’s about the 1940 Cincinnati Reds.

Marco Greenberg
And it’s written by Brian Mulligan, and it’s about the various challenges that the team that had the first ever suicide of a player during a major league season, and how people reacted to that suicide. And part of the reaction was these hardened players, many of which emerged from the Depression, many of which went on to fight World War II, after the suicide of one of their colleagues, a kid named Hershberger from southern California, what they learned is, “Don’t make fun of people. Don’t boo people because that has consequences, and bullying is not cool.” And they learned that back from a 1940 episode. We see plenty of examples of that with cyberbullying.

If I can just get a little plug to one of the books that made a big impact on me over the last year. It’s called “In Praise of Wasting Time.” And guess who wrote it? Professor Alan Lightman of MIT. “In Praise of Wasting Time” came from an amazing TED Talk that Alan gave about two years ago. And here we are in an age where everyone is trying to maximize every minute, be billable, I’m sure a lot of your listeners can relate to that billability phrase.

And what Alan says is, “Let’s do the opposite. Let’s just sometimes zone out, have a great idea in the shower.” Speaking of research, it shows why sometimes great ideas happen in the shower, or on a long walk, or when we’re not forcing ourselves to think of something and come up with a solution. We just let our mind wander. We let our mind roam and great things happen.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Good deal. Thank you. And how about a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Marco Greenberg
Let me connect it to another favorite book. “Deep Work” by Cal Newport from Georgetown. Have you had him on?

Pete Mockaitis
Soon.

Marco Greenberg
Yeah. You know, being productive in a distracted age, and I quote him in the book. Everyone is, I like to say, in 911 mode, like the 911 operator. We’re always reacting. We’re always going on someone else’s agenda rather than our own. How fast can we respond to that email? How fast can we spend to that text message? Am I looking at my Slack 24/7? Etcetera, etcetera. Wrong, wrong, wrong. We need to, instead, give us time, as Alan Lightman says, “Step back and actually think.”

So, here’s my tool. I start with the simplest app on my iPhone which is the Memos app. And that’s the first thing I do in the morning after meditating, and a hot bath because I wake up without a need for coffee. I just start with a blank slate and I create. It might be a memo to a client. It might be an idea for an opinion piece. It might be the chapter of a book. It might be an email that I want to write a colleague. But I think if you set the agenda at the start of the day, then that’s your agenda as opposed to following other people’s agenda. So, be more of a goat that climbs the top of the mountain rather than a sheep following the flock. And part of that starts with you write what you want to start the day with rather than consuming what other people want to start the day with.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Now, could you share with us a key nugget, something that you share that you’re known for, that resonates with folks?

Marco Greenberg
Getting back to insecurity, I’m a shrink-going Upper West Side, middle-aged Jewish guy, and I like to tell a lot of people who work for me, not just “only the paranoid survives” as Andy Grove said, but that a little bit of anxiety is underrated, right? I want people that show a little fear in their eye. I want people that are given an assignment and say, “Wow, how am I going to pull this off?” I want people who don’t think they know it all, right? They don’t think that just because they aced the SAT and went to an Ivy League school that they figured it all out. Quite the contrary. I want people who are hungry.

And, especially, amongst the venture capitalists that I’ve worked with. A lot of them like Todd Degres, they don’t care what school you went to. He went to Trinity, which is a great school in Connecticut, but he didn’t go to Harvard, he didn’t go to Yale, he didn’t go to MIT, he would’ve gotten in in a million years.
He also has a chip on his shoulder, which is another thing that I talk about in the book. Yes, have a chip on your shoulder. We’re told that that’s a bad thing. I think that’s a good thing. So, whether it’s having a chip on your shoulder, or whether it’s realizing that anxiety is underrated, I think it’s time that we interject into the business nomenclature some stuff that’s often counterintuitive but can help people leapfrog in their career rather than stand in line and wait for someone to tap them on the shoulder and promote them, or tap them on the shoulder and tell them they got to move on.

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

Marco Greenberg
It’s easy to remember, PrimitiveBook.com. You’ll find information on the book. You’ll find some information on me. I’m also really active on LinkedIn.

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

Marco Greenberg
one of my favorite psychologists is a guy named Albert Ellis who really started the behavioral school of psychology.

Marco Greenberg
So, one of his great books is how to stop making yourself miserable about anything. Yes, anything. And I want to share his wisdom, which is what I said at the beginning of our show, you got to stop should-ing on yourself. Stop should-ing on yourself. A lot of people put themselves in a corner and say, “Well, I should go to business school,” or, “I should be more left-brain and quantitative,” or, “I should do what my parents have been telling me to do, and take the MCAT.” F all of that, and you listen to what that little boy and little girl in you always wanted to do.

And, for me, I always wanted to write, and I always wanted to speak, and I wasn’t courageous enough, like you, to do it in my mid-20s. I’m not leaving my day job anytime soon but I’m finally doing it at 55 so it shows that it’s never too late, and you can honor that inner spirit, that primitive spirit, that can often tell you a lot more than your more cerebral mind.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Marco, thanks so much for spending this time. I wish you lots of luck in all of your primitive adventures.

Marco Greenberg
Really appreciate the opportunity, Pete. And continue the great work that you’re doing at Awesome at Your Job, and I will continue to be a loyal listener.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you.