This Podcast Will Help You Flourish At Work

Pete Mockaitis
Ron, welcome back!

Ron Friedman
Thanks for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about Superteams, and I’d love it if you could maybe kick us off with a particularly fascinating and exciting discovery you’ve made while putting this together.

Ron Friedman
Well, let me tell you how I did this research. So I polled thousands of workers and asked them two simple questions about their teams. Number one, “How effective is your team at achieving its goals?” And, number two, “Compared to other teams in your industry, how would you rate your team’s performance?”

And then we took the teams with a perfect score, a very tiny group, we call them superteams, about 8%, and we looked to see, “What are the superteams doing differently?” And we looked at everything, from the way that they structure their day, to how they run their meetings, to the basic ways in which they recover after work hours.

And what we discovered is that superteams share three key strengths. The first is they get more done by better managing their time, energy, and attention. The second strength is they don’t just collaborate well, they actively make one another better. And the third is even when things are going well, they’re not satisfied. They’re constantly building new skills and improving over time.

Now the great news is every single one of those strengths is learnable, which means, by building the right habit, any team can dramatically improve its performance. So you asked, “What are some surprising insights?” There are a ton.

And, honestly, like this book features so many surprising insights. It would take us a long time to get through them all, but let me just give you one. And this might be very counterintuitive to your listeners in particular.

Productivity tips, the ones we hear about all the time online, you know, maybe even on this show, about things like, “Okay, turn off your notifications if you want to get stuff done,” or, “Only check your email three times a day,” or, you know, “Put your phone in the other room.”

Those types of productivity hacks might be great for the individual, but they slow the team down. And it’s because one person’s deep work becomes another person’s bottleneck. And so when you’re looking at the team level, how do the best teams get stuff done? It’s by coordinating when they’re going to be on and when they’re going to be off.

They set dedicated focus blocks so that people can get work done during the day with nobody has to monitor their emails. And so I think productivity experts are solving the wrong problem. And the problem they’re trying to solve is, “How do we allow people to do real work during regular work hours?”

That’s a very noble pursuit. But when you tell people to unilaterally disconnect from their team, you actually make the workday longer both for the individual and for everyone else in the group.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s intriguing insofar as what I’m not hearing you say is, “Forget deep work. Everyone should be always on and available to be notified and summoned instantly, constantly.” But rather, “Yes, preserve deep work, but, ideally, do that with the whole team’s unanimous consent, coordination, and understanding.”

As opposed to just like, “Oh, where’s Pete?” “We don’t know.” “We’d love that answer.” “Well, I guess he’s somewhere unavailable for a couple hours.”

Ron Friedman
A hundred percent. And I love what you just said, “Where is Pete?” That’s exactly what happens. I call it a focus free-for-all. Everybody comes up with their own rules for themselves, and the team, as a whole, ends up lengthening the workday and making work harder for everyone.

And so let me take a step back and give you some statistics. These are some jarring statistics, I think. The average worker loses 18 hours a week to meetings. They then lose another 11 hours a week, digging themselves out of messages. That’s three quarters of their week gone before they’ve accomplished a single task.

And so, you know, we often wonder, “Why is everyone getting burnt out?” This is the question, like, we’ve been trying to solve for the last five years, “Why is everybody getting burnt out?” A better question is, “How do they manage to get any work done in the first place?”

And so what you find on superteams, the best teams in the world, what they do is they have dedicated focus blocks, they carve out meeting-free days where no one has to attend meetings, except they don’t call them meeting-free days. They call them get-stuff-done days because they want to reinforce the purpose behind the initiative.

And so if I was to sum up how superteams get more done, it’s by minimizing distraction and maximizing focus, but on the team level.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s very sensible and sounds solid. Well, and I guess what I’m thinking is, with these 18 hours of of meetings and 11 hours of messages, like, ideally, you are getting stuff done in the meetings. Like, the decision, the brainstorming, the insights generated, the solutions, the creativity is happening in the meeting to drive forward the team’s objectives. And, likewise, with what you’re messaging about, but often, the reality is not so rosy.

Ron Friedman
Yeah. And, in fact, you ask people, “What is the number one time sink in your week?” It’s not commuting, it’s not social media, it’s meetings. And most people consider meetings to be the number one drain in their entire week.

One of the things I do in my keynotes is I ask people to stand up when they see the percentage of meetings on the board that feels like a good use of their time. And I start off with 80 to 100. No one stands up.

I just did a keynote where the CEO didn’t stand up until I showed zero to 20. And it’s pretty depressing, frankly, when you think about it. Half our week is gone towards an activity that feels like a bad waste of our time.

And what happens when you’re in a meeting that doesn’t feel like a good use of your time? You fight to reclaim that time, and you do so by multitasking. And that makes the meeting worse and reduces the decision-making quality and feels, frankly, counterproductive.

Like, you know what happens in these large meetings, and we’ve all been part of them, where the only person paying attention is the person speaking, and everyone else is either doing their email or waiting for their turn to speak so that they can feel like they’ve contributed.

What we find on superteams is they are 50% better at avoiding unnecessary meetings. They’re 54% less likely to schedule recurring meetings. And recurring meetings are particularly insidious because they’re so difficult to remove from your calendar.

Pete, if you and I have a recurring meeting every Tuesday, in order for me to cancel that recurring meeting, I need to have a very awkward conversation with you. I need to say, “Pete, I don’t feel like our time together anymore is valuable.”

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like a breakup.

Ron Friedman
And it’s almost like breaking up with someone. And so people prefer to avoid having that conversation. They keep the recurring meeting on the calendar, and it’s completely draining. So let’s get into solutions. So what should you do? What should the team do?

In the book, I talk about meeting guidelines. Meeting guidelines are simple rules where you and your team decide, “This is a good use of our meeting time. This is a bad use of our meeting time.” On most teams, just about anybody can call a meeting for any reason.

And the unfortunate truth is lots of workers use meetings as a crutch. It enables them to look productive to their teammates because they’re getting stuff done, they’re putting meetings on the calendar, but it gives them license to procrastinate because they’re waiting on the meeting. And so meeting guidelines prevent that from happening.

So let me give you some examples. On my team, we have a simple rule: “No decision, no meeting.” If you have an update, that’s an email or it’s a video capture. If you have a question, pick up the phone. Unless there’s a decision to be made, we’re not going to pull people away from getting their stuff done.

Another example, I talk about it in Superteams, it’s a company called Percolate. And at Percolate, they have a simple guideline: “No spectators.” If you’re not contributing to the meeting, you don’t need to be there. It’s not a criticism, it’s respect for your time.

What all these rules enable people to do, again, is to get real work done during regular working hours. Because if they don’t have that opportunity, what happens? They look for ways to create more time. They come in early. They stay late. They work weekends.

I can’t imagine how many of your listeners experience this all the time, where they’re constantly fighting to get their actual job done because the regular work hours prevent them from being able to do it. So setting meeting guidelines both on the team level.

But also it’s something for leaders to lead in terms of of a conversation with the teams, not something that’s supposed to come top down where the leader says, “Okay, we’re having a meeting. We’re having meeting guidelines from now on, and this is what it’s going to be.” It’s something for the team to co-create together because when they do, they set themselves up for way more productivity.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, thank you. Well, I’m hungry to dig into many of these subcomponents, but I guess, first, I just want to calm the nagging questions inside me. So these 8%, these superteams, I guess, Ron, how do we know they’re not just delusionally overestimating their greatness if it’s just sort of like, “Yeah, I think we’re pretty great, and I think we rank very highly compared to other teams”? I guess, fundamentally, how do we feel good about that?

Ron Friedman
I love that you’re asking that. I’ve been on a hundred podcasts and nobody has asked me that question, so thank you. We have a lot of great evidence that one of the best predictors of actual team performance is the team’s perception of the team’s performance.

It’s not the same thing as saying, “How good of a driver are you?” because that’s a self-rating. This is a rating about the group. And people tend to be far more accurate in their performance reviews about the team. So there’s a lot of meta-analyses that have been done over decades showing that this is actually a great predictor.

The other thing I would say is we asked a lot of questions about these teams, or rather about of the individuals who took the survey that were not very positive in terms of the results. So I thought, for example, “Well, maybe their nutritional habits are better.” Because, as we know, if you eat right, you’re going to be sharper at work, and maybe they’re eating better.

No. We found no such evidence. We thought maybe their sleep habits are better. Not the case. We even asked them, “How likely are you to look at your phone before brushing your teeth?” The answers were not good, Pete. And so we know from the research that they’re not just saying great things about themselves, they’re actually saying some things that are not so great.

The other thing, the final thing I would say is that a lot of the insights and the recommendations that came out of Superteams are supported by other evidence. So it’s not like they’re coming out of thin air. Like, there’s a lot of reason to believe why a lot of these recommendations make intuitive sense.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, fair enough. And I suppose you had multiple individuals inside a team as well.

Ron Friedman
That’s right. Yeah, so this is six thousand people, over six thousand, rather, with six rounds of research across a wide spectrum of different industries. So we had everything from attorneys, to medical personnel, to salespeople. Like, we just looked at, “What are the findings that are significant across the industry?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so when it comes to these practices, the meeting guidelines, I think, is swell. And it’s kind of intriguing how just the word guideline, it makes me think of budgetary guidelines. And so many times organizations will have very robust and precise and immovable finance processes for which a project gets budgetary approval.

It’s like, “Oh, hey, if it’s more than $2,000, you got to work it through the finance process, and then away you go.” And yet, a meeting very well could cost more than $2,000 of company money when we factor in the cost of all those human hours being expended within that gathering.

Ron Friedman
Yeah, the reason we’re calling them guidelines and not rules is because they’re suggestions and they can be broken. We don’t want to put handcuffs on people in the way they work, they do their work. We’re trusting people to work effectively.

And so even meeting-free days, if you look at the companies that are doing this right, they’re allowing people to break those meeting-free days if they so desire. And so they’re meant as recommendations for, “Here is typically how good work gets done. But it doesn’t work if you limit people’s ability to get their job done.”

I think this is the problem. I think, a lot of times, we look for simple solutions that restrict people’s ability and undermine their autonomy. So a great example of this is return to work. Return to office. Everyone after COVID, “Okay, everybody needs to get back in the office. This is how we could do great work.”

One of the other findings we looked at in our research is, “Where are superteams most likely to occur? Are they more likely to occur in office? Are they more likely to occur remote? Or are they more likely to occur in hybrid teams?”

There’s good reason to imagine that it’s hybrid teams because they get the best of both worlds, right? They get to be around each other, they get more focus time. That one might be best. It turns out it doesn’t matter where the team is located.

High-performing teams are equally likely to occur in office, remote, or hybrid. And it’s because how the team works is way more important than where a team works. You can have wonderful opportunities for gathering together in the office.

But if that also means that your best employees now need to commute for two hours just so that they can get to the office and fire up their Zoom and attend the same meeting they could have attended two hours ago if they were allowed the flexibility to work from home, that doesn’t lead to better performance. It leads to resentment and it leads to overwork and burnout.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, keep laying them on us, Ron. So work from home, work remotely, it doesn’t really matter. What else are some of the other biggest findings?

Ron Friedman
I’ll give you another one that I thought was really surprising. So this actually starts Superteam. So we asked people about the amenities they have at their office. And we presented a very long list of to 20 amenities.

We asked them, “Do you have a ping pong table? Do you have an office gym? Do you have collaborative spaces? Do you have quiet rooms where you can meet and have some privacy?” And there was only one amenity that predicted high-performing teams, and it was this: a quiet space to do focused work.

It was the only amenity that predicted high performance. It was twice as likely to occur in high-performing teams. And that speaks to how most offices are an attentional war zone. This is why so many people want to work from home, is because they can actually focus and get their work done.

Most people don’t underperform because they’re led by a bad manager or because there’s too much work. It’s because they’re not able to actually get their work done. They just want the peace and quiet to actually get their work done. And if your week is just being cannibalized by meetings and messages, there’s just no opportunity for doing that.

And so I think what that speaks to is how, if you’re looking to design the perfect office, don’t start with, you know, an office slide. Don’t start with the office gym. Start with giving people the opportunity to focus.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. Well, I’m curious, with these superteams, there’s some factors that matter, some factors that don’t. I mean, what about just having really smart, great folks on the team in the first place?

Ron Friedman
Yeah, I think that’s important. I think a lot of the books in my space start with, you know, get the right people on the bus. Like, that’s the message, “Get the right people on the bus.” And that’s great if you’re building a team from scratch, but most leaders are not building a team from scratch. They’re dealing with the people they have on the team.

And so this book is about, “What are the practices that can help you turn any team into a high-performing team?” And it starts with a very simple formula that I think most leaders and most teams overlook. And that is, “How do you turn a group of strangers into an actual team?”

Most people think they work on a team, but they don’t really have a team mindset. They’re just a group of people who happen to be working together. So how do you do it? How do you turn strangers into an actual team? Well, you need three things.

The first thing you need is you need a shared goal. You need one outcome that everyone is working to achieve together. Now that sounds obvious, but in most teams, you don’t have that single outcome. So, for example, Pete, if you’re trying to get promoted and I’m trying to go home at 5:00 o’clock so I can take my kids to soccer, we have different goals. And that leads to tension.

If you’re on a sales team and you have two different people, two people both trying to optimize their sales, they’re competitors, they’re not teammates. They don’t have that single goal because they don’t have a metric that unifies them in terms of a single outcome. So that’s the first thing, shared goal.

The second thing is you need role clarity. I need to know what I’m responsible for, I need to know what you’re responsible for, and I need to know how those two things intersect. If we don’t have clear roles, then balls get dropped or we have turf wars. Either of those is problematic.

The third thing you need is you need something called interdependence. Interdependence is just a fancy psychological term. All it means is we need to believe that we need each other in order to succeed. If we’re independent salespeople, not only do we not need each other to succeed, we’re competitors, “I need you to fail in order for me to look good.”

So if you don’t have those three things, you do not have a team, you have a recipe for dysfunction. And I think this is where most teams struggle, is they’re missing one of those three factors.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, fundamentally, there’s these three components, make a group a team. I guess I’d love to hear back on the individual side, is there any sort of foundational thing that individuals must have or must not have in order for the superteam business to come together?

Ron Friedman
Yeah, I think you need to hire people who are great collaborators, who are actually interested, authentically interested, in helping to make the people around them better. And I’ll give you an example of how you can hire for this.

This is an example from the book about an airline that, during the interview process, has people get up in front of a crowd and talk about their background. They do this for all the recruits together. They hire, you know, groups of people together.

And everyone thinks that what they’re really testing for is how effective people are at speaking. Because, you know, if you’re going to be a stewardess or whatever, you’re going to need to speak to the people on the plane. But actually what they’re looking for is how people react when someone else is speaking.

Do they cheer them on? Or do they stay quiet and hope that they screw up so that they look better and they only hire the people who are supportive of others? And that’s actually what we find in superteams is they don’t just collaborate well, they make each other better. And they make each other better by supporting one another, both in and outside the office, but they also make each other better by raising accountability.

In our study, we asked people a simple question, which is, “When things go wrong on your team, who do you feel worse about letting down? Do you feel worse about letting down your boss or do you feel worse about letting down your teammates?”

And on superteams, not even close. Eighty percent of people say, “I feel worse about letting down my teammates.” And that’s exactly what you’re looking for, is you’re looking for a team that’s accountable to one another, not to the manager.

Because when they feel accountable to one another, they work harder, they take ownership and they look for ways to lift the team by doing tasks that, even if they’re not in their job description, they’re still going to do them because they want the team to succeed.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And also in your book, you make a distinction between effort versus energy and attention. Can you explain what is the distinction and why does it matter?

Ron Friedman
I think, a lot of times, people assume that if they just work hard enough then they’ll, you know, get everything done. And the truth is that how you recover is just as important to how you well you do your job. And if you look at the best athletes, they take their recovery just as seriously as they do the actual task at hand.

And what we find on superteams is a lot of people, you know, assume that if they’re not working, that they’re automatically recovering, but that’s not the case. Just because you’re not working doesn’t mean you’re recovering your energy automatically.

So scanning Instagram or bingeing Netflix, that can help you wind down at the end of the day. It doesn’t help you recover your energy. What does? Well, it’s mastery experiences. They’re activities that you do outside of work that stretch your skills and challenge you in new ways.

So depending on your interests, that can mean playing a new song on the piano. It can mean playing pickleball. It can mean trying out a new dish. The key takeaway here, and this by the way, is what you see on superteams, is they’re far more likely to invest their off hours in hobbies. And those hobbies refuel them and recharge them and enable them to show up more effective at work, which then enables them to sustain their attention more effectively.

And so the key takeaway here is, when it comes to your downtime, don’t try a slow down if you really want to recover. Try to accelerate in a completely different direction.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you give some more examples of these winning recovery hobbies or master activities?

Ron Friedman
Yeah, it really depends on your interest. I don’t know, Pete, can I interview you? What do you like to do for fun on vacation?

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. Well, swimming is fun.

Ron Friedman
Okay.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d say eating food and laughing are among the top things. Well, I’ve been having a lot of fun with Slay the Spire 2, the game, since it was released. It feels like some mastery is happening there, just like these decision-making.

Ron Friedman
Is that a video game?

Pete Mockaitis
It is. It’s kind of strategic decision-making kind of stuff.

Ron Friedman
Okay. You gave me three things that I think are key to those recovery experiences that we know from the research are effective. So you mentioned swimming. Swimming is exercise. Exercise restocks your mental injury and makes you smarter at work.

And it’s because when you exercise on a regular basis, you get more blood flowing to the brain, enables you to sustain your attention, makes you less distractable. It also activates the memory regions of the brain. So now you’re soaking up information more quickly. We find on superteams, they exercise 84 more minutes per week. So exercise is one element.

The other element you talked about was laughing and being with others. Social experiences are vital to to recovering our energy. You go out for a nice time with people you love and people who support you and like you, they don’t have to be your family, that will restock your energy.

The third thing you mentioned was video games. They get a bad rap. Truth is, video games can not only help us restock our energy. They also make us smarter because, as you mentioned, they require sustained attention.

And so a lot of people think that that recovery is like exercise, where if I’ve just spent all day exercising my muscles, I’m going to be tired. And so I should just slow down, let my muscles recover. It doesn’t work that way for recovery. You actually will recharge faster by doing something different that energizes you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now, that 84 minutes more per week of exercise is startling. I love these numbers. So 84 minutes, so what does that leave the exercising or the superteam group in exercise minutes versus the non-superteam group in exercise minutes?

Ron Friedman
That’s a great question. I don’t have it in front of me. But what I can tell you is that it’s a social norm on these teams. In other words, they tend to do it. They not only view themselves as exercising more often, they say their teammates exercise more often. And a big part of it is the leader.

The leader talks about how, when they exercise, they kind of socialize. They talk about the benefits and how they do it, and they take more walking meetings. And walking meetings are not just an effective way of getting exercise during the day, they make you more creative because now you’re taking your ideas and putting it in a different environment.

That leads to more stimulation, more idea generation than it would be if you were stuck in a windowless conference room. And this is another thing. I think you’ll appreciate this, Pete, is walking meetings make you more attractive.

And it’s because, when you take a walking meeting in the presence of another colleague, you get elevated heart rate. And elevated heart rate tends to be confused for attraction. And so this is something I say in my keynote. If you take nothing else away from this, at the very least I’ve given you a secret weapon for making yourself irresistible, is take walking meetings. People will find you more attractive.

Pete Mockaitis
Attractive in every sense or just romantically, Ron?

Ron Friedman
Man, you have a researcher’s mind. I love that. The attraction comes from the confusion around the elevated heart rate in the presence of another person. And so if you get elevated heart rate while looking at another person, this is why people look more attractive at the gym, because you have the elevated heart rate.

You look around, and you’re just more likely to interpret that as attraction. And it’s because of the elevated heart rate. It’s not because of how they actually look.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So we also could be attracted to someone in the sense of they are a rock star at a concert and they are attractive as opposed to, “I want to take this person on a date.”

Ron Friedman
That’s right, yes. And it’s more of a positive experience. And so if you tend to have a more positive experience around other people, a particular person, you’re going to interpret that person as more attractive.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Ron, this 84 minutes is startling. Give me some more eye-popping numbers you’ve discovered.

Ron Friedman
Eye-popping numbers. Meeting-free days. Let’s talk about the impact of a meeting-free day. And so this is research out of MIT Sloan. After a meeting-free day, people report 71% higher productivity and half the stress as a regular day. I mean, that’s remarkable.

If you ever come in on a Sunday morning without having people email you and just being able to like, for three hours, just do your work, you know how unbelievable of an experience that is, how restorative that is, how energizing, because you were able to just identify what you need to do and then you’re able to do it.

Now imagine if you had days like that during the week. How often do many of us go into the office or fire up our computer from home, and then eight hours later, stand up and be like, “What the hell just happened? What happened to my time? I don’t even…”

You go home, you have dinner with your kids, they’re like, “What did you do today?” I’m like, “I don’t know. I don’t know what I did today. I had meetings all day. I didn’t do any goddamn thing.” And so this is all about allowing people to just do their job effectively, and it’s got to start at the team level or it’s never going to be solved.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And with regard to this energy and attention stuff, are there some top strategies beyond the energizing hobbies and exercising and collectively discussing and agreeing upon when we are not meeting? Are there any other top strategies that go miles in helping us manage distraction and stress?

Ron Friedman
Yeah, so this book looked at both the habits of the teams but also the habits of the individuals on the team. And so one of the things we looked at is, “How do people on superteams structure their day?” And if I were to summarize a few of the habits that I think are worth noting, there’s three of them.

One of them is looking forward, the second is looking backward, and the third is staying present. Okay, so I’m going to go through each of those buckets. And this, by the way, is how people on superteams are experiencing work as more proactive than reactive.

And we find that on superteams, people say they’re twice as likely to feel more proactive during work. So if you want to stay proactive, these strategies will help, almost regardless of the team you’re on. And so the first strategy…excuse me. Okay, we’ll edit that out. The first strategy is looking forward. What does that mean?

It means, at the end of the week or on Sunday morning, looking ahead to your calendar and identifying blocks of time that you can utilize to get actual work done, and then time blocking. Setting an appointment with yourself, where you will achieve a particular task during a particular time slot. Time boxing by looking ahead.

The second strategy is looking backwards. What does that mean? It means, after a good day, people on superteams are more likely to say to themselves, “Okay, that was a good day. How do I have more days like that?”

And after a bad day, they’re more likely to say, “That wasn’t a great day. How do I avoid having days like that in the future?” So there’s this ongoing reflection and refinement and improvement in terms of how they’re structuring their day.

And the third thing is staying present. And if you think about when we’re most distractable, it’s typically between tasks. When we switch from one task to another, we become more distractable. So after exiting a meeting, what’s the first thing we do? We look at our phones. After finishing a memo, you go on your email.

And so if you can reduce the amount of transitions between tasks, you can make yourself less distractable. And so superteams tend to do that by batching similar tasks and by writing out concrete SOPs, standing operating procedures, that help them stay on task without being distractable.

And so those are the three strategies that will help you improve your performance regardless of what team you’re on – look forward, look backward, stay present.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you also claim there’s a magical question that makes team decisions smarter by up to 30%. Tell us, what is this question? How do we even measure that?

Ron Friedman
The question is, and this is something that the best leaders will ask at their meetings, which is, and this is before making an important decision, “If this decision doesn’t work out, or if this decision backfires, why would that be?”

Simply asking that question empowers the people in the room to tell you you’re making a mistake. And it’s called a pre-mortem. We all know what a post-mortem is. A post-mortem is at the end of a project, we talk about what went well, what didn’t work well, what we’re going to do differently in the future.

This is a pre-mortem, and what the research tells us is that teams that conduct pre-mortems, which is imagining, “In the future that this project does not work out, why would that be?” that opens them up to new ways of thinking that improves the ultimate decision by up to 30%.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, lovely. And any thoughts with regard to navigating disagreement, thinking through consensus, arguing, getting to good outcomes with our collective wisdom?

Ron Friedman
Yeah, there’s a lot of research, great research, about how to disagree more effectively. A lot of it’s in this book. I have a chapter on Scalia and Ginsburg, the two Supreme Court justices, that were incredible friends, even though they disagreed about just about everything.

And one of the strategies was, essentially, understanding that you don’t need to agree on everything in order to be a good teammate. In fact, the best teammates tend to view disagreements as a tool for making better decisions.

The worst teammates tend to view disagreements as a judgment on how people evaluate their competence. This is the problem that people have, is they tend to confuse people’s agreement for liking. And so it becomes, “If you don’t agree with me, then you don’t like me or you don’t respect me.”

And so the disagreement gets off course because now we’re fighting about whether I’m a worthy person as opposed to what the right course of action is. And so the best teammates disentangle this emotional component from the actual logical argument.

I talk about ways of doing that, but one of the critical pieces is recognizing that people, generally, don’t change their mind in the conversation. They change their mind after the conversation is over when they’ve had a chance to reflect.

And I think, in the movies, we’ve been taught to just kind of bash people up with arguments and they’re going to change their mind, and agree with you eventually. But, in fact, you are far more influential and effective if you lay out your ways of thinking, and then giving people the space to change their mind outside of the meeting.

Pete Mockaitis
I think that really rings true in my own experience, in that someone says, I don’t know where I heard this, but that someone said, “The truth will set you free, but, first, it will piss you off.”

And that is my experience in terms of someone says something and I don’t like it in regard to making a change when I was perfectly comfy, cozy, not making that change. And it’s just kind of annoying, like, “Eh, I don’t like it.” It’s just my default reaction, “I don’t like it.”

And then maybe the next morning-ish, it’s like, “But that’s probably the right answer. So we should do it.” Yeah.

Ron Friedman
You know, I often feel the same way, particularly when my editor sends me changes. And I have learned in my advanced age of 49, that often is the best indicator, when it makes you angry, the feedback makes you, it’s often a leading indicator that it’s probably a good idea. And I always wait 24 hours now before responding.

Because once you get past the idea that it doesn’t have to feel good, that you’re optimizing for the best possible outcome, you approach it with a different perspective. And it’s a perspective that is more amenable to making the changes you need to change to achieve your objective.

Pete Mockaitis
This reminds me, I think, Daniel Kahneman was chatting with Adam Grant, and said, “I love being wrong, because it’s the only way I really know that I’ve learned something,” which, I think, is just an amazing reframe.

And it speaks to your experience of the editor. It’s like that commentary, I assume the editor’s good. That commentary that gets onto your skin is all the more powerful and helpful because it’s challenging something fairly deep within you that just ain’t so.

Ron Friedman
Yeah, and, you know, there’s research on feedback. And what the research tells us is that, for people with high self-esteem, they actually prefer negative feedback to positive feedback. And it’s because they know you can’t improve from positive feedback.

Positive feedback just tells you to repeat the thing you didn’t before. Negative feedback offers clues about how you can improve your performance in the future. The challenge is most people aren’t very high on self-esteem, so you can’t give people negative feedback if you want them to improve.

In fact, one of the research articles I cite in Superteams is that 97% of feedback does not improve performance – 97. In fact, 30% of feedback makes people worse at what they were doing. And so the question is, “How do you get it right? How do you model your feedback after the 3% that’s actually effective?”

And one of the most important tips I can offer you is to focus your feedback on what people can do differently in the future. Don’t re-litigate the past. Don’t tell them what they did wrong. Don’t tell them how it made you feel and the impact on you.

Talk about one change that you’d like them to consider the next time they do the task. And that will lead people to be far more receptive to your feedback and is far more likely to improve their performance.

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

Ron Friedman
Well, one of the things I tried to do with this book is I really wanted people to apply the insights. And so I created a free masterclass. You can find it at SuperteamsMasterclass.com, and it gives you the book’s best insights in under 20 minutes, and – this is key – it gives you a discussion guide for sharing some of these ideas with the people on your team. It’s completely free, SuperteamsMasterclass.com.

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

Ron Friedman
So in the book, I talk about this general manager named Sam Presti, he’s the head of the Oklahoma City Thunder. And his office is filled with quotes. And it’s because, apparently, this is what he does, where he reads a book he likes, he highlights the quote, and he prints it out, and he slaps it on the wall so he doesn’t forget it.

So I’ve adapted that same approach. I’ve got quotes all over my office. Okay, I just picked out one that I thought was great. “Eighty percent out the door is better than a hundred percent in the drawer.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Ron Friedman
And the idea is just get stuff out even if it’s not perfect because it’ll allow you to move on to the next thing.

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

Ron Friedman
The study that was the spark for this research on Superteams was a study by Sonja Lyubomirsky where she looked at what happy people do differently. And so the way she did the research was she found people, she had people evaluate their level of happiness.

And then she asked them about their habits. And then she separated out the happy people from the unhappy people, and looked to see, “What are the happy people doing differently that contributes to their happiness?” And it’s a classic study.

And some of the findings were, don’t compare yourself to people who you consider more successful because it’s wasted energy, it’ll make you unhappy. And so that is what led me to the research comparing high-performing teams against average teams.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Ron Friedman
So a recent book that I really enjoyed, it’s called The Award. And it’s about a guy who wins a literary award. And I don’t know how to describe this without ruining the book for people, but it’s not what you expect it to be. And it’s all kinds of shenanigans that is very funny to read about.

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

Ron Friedman
Yeah, waterproof notepads. They enable you to write down your best ideas in the shower, and it’s actually where I write my to-do list for the next day.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Ron Friedman
Eat dinner early. It is a complete life hack. It will allow you to fall asleep faster and get a much deeper sleep. And so you aim for finishing your dinner five hours before bed.

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

Ron Friedman
When I do workshops on superteams, I talk about taking what makes your vacation restorative and applying it to your everyday life. And so the mistake that I think a lot of people make is that they wait until vacations in order to recover.

But if you can identify what makes vacations restorative for you and schedule that onto your calendar, you’ll have way more energy. So an example of this might be, Pete, you like to swim. If you can find a way to swim once a week, maybe on weekends, I’m willing to bet you’re going to show up at work with more energy.

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

Ron Friedman
I would point them to SuperteamsInc. That is the name of my company. We do keynotes, workshops. We love to teach leaders how to apply these insights. And so that’s the best way to find me.

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

Ron Friedman
Yes. I would urge you, the next time you want to, if you happen to pick up an idea from this conversation, or if you read Superteams, and you want to apply some of those ideas to your team at work, but you’re not the leader, I would urge you to talk to your leader about running an experiment.

Don’t suggest a complete wholesale change. Say, “Hey, can we try this for one week and see how it goes?” Like, a meeting guideline or a focus block. Try it because, what often happens is when leaders are offered an experiment, they’re far less likely to reject it out of hand because it’s just something they don’t need to commit to forever. They’re just trying it for one week and seeing how it goes.

But then even, if they don’t agree with your experiment, they’ll appreciate the idea that you’re trying to improve the way the team operates and makes you look great.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Ron, thank you.

Ron Friedman
My pleasure, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Eric, welcome back!

Eric Zimmer
Thanks, Pete. I’m really happy to be here, years later.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, that was wild. A thousand episodes ago we chatted and, in the meantime, you’ve been doing some really cool stuff. So I’m excited to talk about How a Little Becomes A Lot.

Could you kick us off by sharing what do you think is among the most fascinating or surprising or counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made as you’ve been, you know, learning these lessons and researching and packaging them into this book?

Eric Zimmer
Well, I think the first one is the idea that small change is what matters. So I start the book with a story that I think illustrates it well. And if you were filming the movie of my life, you would see a really pivotal scene where I walked into a treatment center in 1994 in Columbus, Ohio, and it’s the dead of winter. I’m a homeless heroin addict. I weigh a hundred pounds. I’m jaundiced and I’m yellow from hepatitis C.

Prosecutor says I might be going to jail for fifty years. I’m just really broken. And I go in, and they say, “We think you need to go to long-term treatment.” To which I say, “Meh, no, thank you.” And I go back to my room and I have what we call in recovery a moment of clarity, which I could say was more like just being scared to death when I looked at what was coming, right?

Because I was just like, “I’m going to jail or to die, and soon.” And so I went back out, and I said, “All right, all right, I’ll go to your treatment.” And that would be the really big pivotal moment. The director would spend a lot of time there. You know, the music would swell in the background triumphant.

Pete Mockaitis
Push shot.

Eric Zimmer
Exactly. And it’s not that that moment wasn’t important. Of course, it was, but that moment has significance because it was followed by thousands upon thousands of little decisions, little actions that I made after that, to move towards recovery and away from addiction. If I didn’t do those things, that would just be yet another failed attempt.

And so I think when we think about changing, we all want to make the big change that will change things quickly, change them for good. You know, we think about the epiphany or the watershed moment or this thing. And those things are useful.

But a lot of big change efforts fail because nobody is really understanding that it has to happen little bit by little bit. And we could go into a thousand different examples of that. But that’s the core principle that underlies a lot of the book.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, well said, in terms of if you had a moment of clarity, you showed up for a moment or a few days of of rehab, and then that was, you know, and then relapsed, then it’s interesting that that moment doesn’t seem as consequential without the future ahead of it.

Eric Zimmer
Yeah. And, I mean, and, frankly, that moment came about because of lots and lots of little small moments before that where I did make attempts to change, right? All of those were important, too. And we tend to think of, when we go to change something, we tend to think of just the action piece of it, and the action piece is part of it.

But if you look at models in behavior science around change, you recognize, and the most famous one is called the stages of change model, right, where you go through pre-contemplation, then you you’re going through contemplation, you’re thinking, “Should I make this change? Is it worth it?”

Then you’re doing planning before you actually even get to the activity. And so this book is really trying to show all of those mechanisms and how we can get better at both making change. That’s the first half of the book. And then the second half of the book is, “How do we get better at working with the sort of changes that life just tends to throw our way that we don’t really like?”

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Yeah. Okay. Well, then, lay it on us, in terms of when we want to make changes, how do we do it better? And can you keep illustrating it with real changes made?

Eric Zimmer
Sure. I mean, let’s just pick something like you want to get an exercise routine. The way most people do it is they, one day, wake up and they go, “All right, I’m going to get in better shape.”

Now, oftentimes, this is just a vague idea for a while, right? Maybe you go to the gym occasionally, you take a walk occasionally, but nothing’s really happening. So I would say, you know, we’re kind of in the contemplation stage there, right? We’re thinking about it.

We might be taking certain things that we’re doing, but we’re not really making progress. And so the first thing is the book walks through it, is to sort of accept and understand the little by little approach. Then what we need to figure out is like, “Why are we changing? Like, what is it that we’re changing? And why does it matter?”

Because we really do need to be motivated to do it and understand why it’s important to us. How does it tie into the things that are most important to us in life? And then from there, I have a method in the book called the SPAR method, where we go through and we plan the change out. We get very, very specific.

And we can go into that in more detail if you would like. And then the next piece is we learn to navigate the moments that are difficult. So if I do the the work right in the planning phase, I kind of get pushed to what I call a choice point.

It’s the moment where you basically say, “Oh, yeah, I am going to get on the bike,” or, “I’m going to continue to lay here on the couch.” And so the next skill we need to learn is we need to learn how to negotiate those choice points.

Because if we go the direction we don’t want to go, we end up on the couch when the best part of us wants to be on the bike, then it’s because we were feeling or thinking something, or saying something to ourselves at that moment, that we didn’t know how to work through. And so then we can look at those moments and find our way and work through them.

And that’s the basic process of setting up a new positive change. And we can go into any more detail on any aspects of that, but that’s the framework broadly.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, let’s hear it. Let’s work through the S-P-A-R there.

Eric Zimmer
Yeah, so the S stands for specificity. When we’re trying to do a new behavior, we need to be really specific about what we’re doing.

“What’s the exercise? When am I doing it? How am I doing it? Where am I doing it?” All that specificity is important because ambiguity is really often our enemy. Because what happens is we’re trying to figure out what to do and do it at the same time.

The best example I can give you is that, like, in my day-to-day work, I get off a call and I have an hour and a half window. And now I’m sitting there, I’m going, “Well, what should I work on? Well, I could work on this, and I could work on that. But you know, I should walk. I haven’t really moved much at all today. And, you know, oh, I could check this score.”

And we end up burning a lot of that time because we don’t know, specifically, what we’re doing. I know I do much better when I’m like, “Oh, that hour and a half between the call with Pete and my next conversation, that hour and a half is going towards interview prep for the two interviews I need to do on Wednesday,” right? So specificity is always our friend in the beginning. Ambiguity is our enemy.

P stands for prompts. It’s basically we get reminded to do the thing. Now that sounds sort of silly, but it’s not. Like, I’ve been doing this thing where I’m trying to take a walk about every 30 minutes for five minutes. It doesn’t always work. You and I are going to talk for 45 minutes. I’m not going to get up in the middle of it.

But if I don’t remind myself to do it, I just don’t do it. If it’s the morning, and I’m on the couch, and at a certain point, I need to go get on the exercise bike, and at that moment, I’m doing what I like to do in the morning oftentimes, which is read Substack. So there I am reading Substack.

If I don’t have an alarm that tells me it’s time to get up and go do it, I’ll often go right by it. And then I’ll suddenly be like, “Oh, I only have 15 minutes to do it now. Why bother?” So prompts are important. Alignment is about setting up our environment to support us in what we’re trying to do.

So the simplest example of that in my life is, if you could see over my shoulder, I’ve got two guitars there, and they are sitting out on stands. I play my guitar probably 75% more often when it’s on the stand versus in the case laying right there, which makes me feel like, “Well, what kind of dumb animal am I? Like it takes five seconds to open a guitar case.”

But friction, you said it before we started, thinking about friction, right? If I want to make something easier, if I want to do more of something, I want to make it easier to do. How can I set up my environment, alignment? And a key part of our environment also is other people.

So what kind of support do I have? Who’s helping me? Who am I sharing this with? Who might help me be accountable to this? And then finally the R is for resilience, which is where we step back and we go, “Okay, what could go wrong with this plan?” So if I’m walking a client through this, we go through all that, and then I’ll say, “All right, now let’s find the flaws in what we’ve planned.”

You can’t plan for everything. But if I’ve got a client who is trying to finish a novel, and the plan is to write for an hour after the kids get on the school bus, the thing we have to talk about is, “What happens when they don’t get on the school bus?” because that’s inevitable. That is going to happen.

Now the answer might be, “If the kids are home sick, that’s just a day I don’t write. Okay.” But it might be like, “Oh, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to go in the room where the kids are, and I’m not going to get any actual real writing done but I’ll use that as research time.” We just have a plan. And so that’s SPAR: specificity, prompts, alignment, resilience.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I’m thinking about the specificity part, and I think you’ve nailed it in terms of, “Oh, hey, I got some ‘free time’ in between my calendared obligations with other humans.” And there’s a question there, like, “What should I do?”

And, in a way, the answer is infinite in terms of there’s billions of things you could do, and maybe dozens of things that would be useful to your general goals and values and priorities. So how do we land at that kind of clarity like, “Ah, of course, I’m preparing for interviews,” or, “Of course, I’m writing this book,” or, “I’m getting on the exercise bike”?

Eric Zimmer
Well, I mean, I have a section in the book where we kind of start by talking about like, “What do we value? Like, what’s most important to us?” And I have a bunch of different exercises for doing that. And then there is a process of translating that value into action, right?

And so I can’t give any advice that says, like, “Here is exactly how you always figure out what the most important thing is.” As professionals say, in a career, that’s part of what we get paid to do. We get paid to look at all the stuff that has to get done, which is always more than can get done. And we’re paid to decide which of those things is going to add the most value.

But the more often we ask that question, the better, right? The more often we ask that question, the better choices we make. Whereas, a lot of times, we just run into the default. So if I’m not planning well, what will happen to me is I’ll get off the call, and I’ll look at my task list.

And what ends up usually happening is whatever is easiest to do, right? And I call this separating decision from action. I want to decide. And then, at a different time, I want to act. And what I want is the the wisest version of myself deciding what’s important to do this week. There’s no shortcut for that, right?

There’s no shortcut for spending the time to go, like you said, “Of all the things I could do, what matters here?” And then deciding that those are the things that are going to happen, and then trying to stick to it. So there’s not a simple answer to that.

But starting, you know, Stephen Covey, in his famous book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, said, “Begin with the end in mind,” right? Like, “Where am I going and why? What matters to me? What’s important to me?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So do you have any thoughts for separating what you “should do” from what is, in fact, truly, deeply, resonantly aligned with your deepest value-ness?

Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I mean, values are hard to figure out. They really are. It’s hard work, because two things happen, right? One is we’re very often just presented a giant list of values to pick from, and you agree with nearly all of them, right?

Like, you look at it, you’re like, “Well, I value, yeah, I value truth, I value honesty. Sure, I value freedom, and I value responsibility, and I value…” right? I mean, okay, great. I don’t know how to figure that out, right? It’s just a giant list.

The other reason values work is really difficult is that, often, as you start to determine what you really do value, you start seeing the gap between what you value and what you do, and that’s uncomfortable, but it’s good medicine, right? It’s the kind of medicine that tastes bad going down, but is really good for you because that’s the only way we end up with a life that feels meaningful to us, is to take the time to figure it out.

So I’ll give you one quick one that’s from the book that people could do. And it’s called pick a guide. And it basically says, “Find somebody that you admire, and write down what is it about them that you admire. Why do you admire them? What are the traits about that person that you value?” And that’ll tell you something about what’s important to you. Because you’ve put this person here as somebody that you admire, “Why? Why do I admire them?”  So that’s a very simple one.

Like I said, there’s a bunch of others, and my recommendation is just to do a variety of different values exercises, like, you know, do one today and do another tomorrow, and then one next week. And, ideally, then we start to triangulate in on what is most important to us.

Now there’s an important thing to know, though, which is that in that chapter I talk about two types of conflicts, right? One is values versus desires. And values are the thing, you know, the way I define a value is it’s the thing that the best part of me has decided is worth wanting.

Desires are the things you just want. So we have values-versus-desire conflict all the time. It’s kind of the way I frame it is, “What do I want most?” a value, versus, “What do I want now?” a desire. And those are very difficult sometimes, but you can work through those.

The harder type of conflict is the values-to-values conflict, when you value two things. If you have a family and a career that you value, you are familiar with this values conflict all the time. We call it work-life balance, right? And we want it to balance so we don’t have to keep having it tug us in different directions.

But the reality is that I don’t think, that ever goes away. It doesn’t ever go away. But for me, when I recognize that and I can say, “Oh, look, this value is conflicting with this value,” and I can name the stakes. It doesn’t necessarily mean I know exactly what to do.

But I can relax a little bit because I go, “Oh, this is just totally normal that I’m going to feel this pull.” And then I can think about, “Well, okay, how can I work with these?” And I think of it less in my life these days as like this tension and pull, and more as sort of a dance.

You know, it’s a little bit more of a dance between these different values. So, yes, that’s my not-short answer.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, well, thank you. That’s good. Well, then in the universe of prompts, alignment, and resilience, do you have any favorite examples or tips and tricks, do’s and don’ts for doing this well?

Because, I mean, I think, in many ways, prompt it’s like, “Okay, I could set a timer on my phone. That’s handy.” I’d love to hear what are some cool, creative, clever approaches to these bits?

Eric Zimmer
Well, prompts can be lots of different things. The obvious one is a time-based prompt. If something goes off on my phone at a certain time and it tells me to do X, Y, or Z. And these are really important. It’s basically how we organize most of our lives, right, “Oh, it’s time to go to that meeting,” “It’s time to eat dinner,” “It’s time to go to bed,” right? So that’s one type of prompt.

But there are also some others. And another is like a preceding-event prompt, right, “I do this, then I do that.” So an example of this is I will spend five minutes meditating after I take the dogs for a walk. You take the dogs for a walk, ideally, every day. It’s something that consistently happens. You just bolt something onto it.

That’s a really good one. I think the term, one of the terms in behavior science that is used for this sometimes is habit stacking. You’re stacking one on top of the other. You need to make sure that what you’re stacking it on is something that actually happens consistently. So we’ve got that kind of prompt.

We can have a location-based prompt. We can be like, “Every time I come to a red light…” Now, again, you’re not going to be like, “Every time I come to a red light, it’s time to get on my bike,” right? But it could be, if you’re trying to change a way of thinking, like you’ve got a thought pattern, “You know, every time I come to the red light, I could just reinforce the thoughts that I want to have.”

“Every time I come to a red light, I will just spend two minutes thinking about, like, what’s actually going well in my life.” So those location-based prompts are also really valuable. So that’s a couple different tips on prompts.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then with regard to alignment, environmental setups, we got the guitar example, which is delightful. Any other good moves you’ve seen there?

Eric Zimmer
Well, I think there’s a basic principle we just want to keep in mind. And it’s if we want to do more of something, make it easier. And you want to do less of it, make it harder. So it’s the classic, you know, if you don’t want to eat junk food, don’t have it in the house.

Now, DoorDash and Uber Eats and Delivery and all that has really made that one harder. But if I have to, if it’s just open the fridge and there the thing is, versus I maybe have to get in the car, or I have to spend the time getting on an app, I mean, you just want to have friction, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Eric Zimmer
And so that’s the basic idea. And you just want to get creative, like, “What can I do to make this easier? Oh, I can, if I have trouble getting out the door in the morning, I could have all my gym clothes set out and right by the door. I could set the coffee to automatically brew 10 minutes before I get up.” I mean, we could just do things to ease us along.

And again, oftentimes, we think of these, and we go, “That’s so obvious, it doesn’t matter.” But there’s the guitar case example, right? And again, like I said, when I think about that, I’m like, “That is stupid. Why can’t I just open a guitar case? That’s dumb.” But it’s unquestionable that I do it more when it’s sitting there.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And, likewise, with junk food in terms of if it’s there, I mean, I will eat it, even though I don’t want to. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer
Yeah, 100%. Yeah. Try not to. Just make it harder. You know, I had a client for a while who was dealing with some issues with pornography, and it just wasn’t what he wanted to do.

And so we started, and we were like, “You know what, let’s have you log out of your computer before you go to bed.” Well, that wasn’t enough friction. “Oh, let’s have you power the computer off.” Not enough friction.

Where we ended up was, “Let’s have you put your computer in your car before you go to bed.” That was enough friction. It gave him enough time to think, “Do I want to do this?” And that is really valuable in that way.

Here’s an example of an environmental setup. So my digital tick, such as I have one, is checking my email too often. There’s just no need to check my email as often as I sometimes will. So, for me, what I have is a little app on my phone, in that when I click my email app, this other app pops up, and it says, it makes me take a deep breath, and then asks me, “Do you want to do it?”

Very often, my answer to that is no. I just was doing it automatically. So by introducing that little bit of environmental change, a little bit of friction, I go, “No, I don’t want to do it,” because it’s given me a moment to contemplate.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s great. And then with regard to people, I mean, they can do that as well. Like, I’ve had a friend say to me, “Hey, if you see me in this shared office space, playing XBOX for more than 20 minutes, say, ‘Hey, looks like you’ve been playing for more than 20 minutes.’”

And he’s like, “Oh, yeah, you’re right.” And then he immediately shut it off. It’s like, “Oh.” Like, that’s all it took was enough of a prompt in terms of, like, “Oh, yeah, you’re right. I kind of totally zoned out. Now I’m zoned back in. So thank you, and we’re done now.”

Eric Zimmer
Yeah, find a friend to meet you at the gym. Find a friend to take a walk with you. Those are all people prompts. And many of us may know a person prompt that’s just no good for us, also. The minute we see so and so, you know, we know we’re going to get in trouble that night.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Understood. Okay. Well, now, let’s talk about these choice points, where the rubber meets the road, the battle. Yeah, there’s a thing and the time comes to do the thing, and, by golly, you just don’t want to. What do you do with that?

Eric Zimmer
Yeah, so again, I want to stress the first part of this, the structural, the planning, the why I’m doing it, like, we need to do that. If we don’t do it, we will lose at choice points far more often than we win.

So we want to stack the deck. That’s one thing almost all behavioral scientists would agree on. It’s, like, don’t rely on self-control more than you have to. And self-control is the kind of thing that we need when it’s that moment.

So the good news about being at a choice point is that we don’t have to analyze our whole life for why we’re not doing something. We analyze that moment. And in the book, I have something I call the six saboteurs of self-control.

But what I really did is I thought about, like, “What are the common things that are going on inside someone at the moment that they make the choice that the best part of them wishes they hadn’t?” You know, I just discussed one, which is like the autopilot, “I’m not even choosing, it just happens automatically. I have my phone in my hand and I don’t even know how it happened.” “Oh, I wasn’t even thinking, and the next thing you know, I’m eating a Twinkie,” right?

Another one is, and I had this a lot with writing the book, it’s around self doubt. Like, I really didn’t think, I really doubted my ability to write a good book. I mean, deep doubt. It brought up self-doubt I haven’t had in a long, long time.

And so what I would find is, it’s time to write, and I don’t want to. There’s resistance. And if I would examine, “Okay, what’s going on in that moment?” what I would realize, it’s some form of there’s just this underlying like, “You’re not any good at this. It’s not going to go well. What’s the point? None of this is going to…You’re not good enough to write a book.”

And so, in that moment, I don’t have to solve self-doubt, because you can’t in a lot of cases. All I have to do is turn it down enough to allow me to do the action. So I might say something to myself, like, “Well, do you know that you can’t write a good book?”

And the answer is, “Well, no, of course, I don’t know that.” Even my most pessimistic self is like, “Well, we don’t know.” And sometimes I just go, “Okay, well, do you believe if you sit down and write that you’ll get better at it and you’ll have a better chance of writing a good book?” And I’ll go, “Yeah, I think so.” And that would be enough, right?

I don’t have to suddenly believe that I am the next John Steinbeck in order to do it. I can’t tell myself, “You’re an amazing writer,” because I don’t believe it. But I find what I can say to myself that gets me to do the action.

So, there’s another one which is like emotional escapism, right? Like, for whatever reason, when I get close to doing this thing, I just feel yucky inside. Okay, well, how can I work with that? You know, how can I say, “Okay, well, what am I actually feeling? Oh, what I’m feeling is, oh, I’m actually tired.”

Okay. Well, how would I talk to myself if I’m tired? I might say, “Well, you know what, it’s always hard getting started. Just get started, see what happens, you know, and let’s check in five minutes down the road.” Enough to get me started.

So a lot of times, in those moments, it’s just we’ve got to find out what to say to ourselves, how we coach ourselves to go in the direction we want. And most people have the experience of, very often, once you start something, it gets easier to do. It’s that initial friction.

I’ve been watching this show about space, and every time I see a rocket launch, I think about this. I’m like, that’s sometimes what it feels like to start something, right? You see, and you’re like, “They use so much energy to get the thing out of the atmosphere. Once it’s free of the gravity of the earth, it tends to go on its own.”

We’re often the same way, “I’ve got to get out of the gravity of the moment that’s pulling me down. If I can start, then I go.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. You know, I’ve coaxed myself successfully a number of times in terms of, “Oh, that just feels too hard.” But sometimes even five minutes feels like too big of a commitment. And so it’s like, “You know what? I’m going to do one minute. I will do one minute, and then we’ll see what happens.” And that’s enough.

Eric Zimmer
I use that trick far more than I think I should. I’m like, “Oh, I’ve hosted a podcast about this stuff for 12 years. I’ve coached hundreds of people around the world. I’ve written a book on this. Surely I don’t need to do that.” Well, yes, I do, right, because it works.

You know, my one is I keep talking about the Peloton bike because it’s just a consistent thing, right? It’s a big part of my workout routine, and I face resistance in the morning. So I’ll just be like, “Just go put on your bike shoes.” By the time I’m in there, off the couch, I’ve escaped the gravitational pull of my couch. And now, I can take the next step, and I can take the next step.

I use that so often. And it’s another example of the little by little principle, right? One idea is that you try and make a small change. The other is that you take a big change and you just try and bite off the littlest part of it to start.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. Okay, so we’ve got six saboteurs. We’ve got three. Let’s hear some more.

Eric Zimmer
Let’s see. We’ve got the insignificance trap. This isn’t where I so much doubt that I can do it. I doubt that it matters. This is where I’m not connecting the dots of little bit by little bit, a little becomes a lot. My favorite story of this is I had someone I was good friends with, and she was an alcoholic addict also.

And she tells this story, and she’s totally serious. She’s like, “My landlord would come to me, and say, ‘You haven’t paid the rent again, and yet here you are on the porch drinking a six-pack. Why can’t you take that money and put it towards the rent?’”

And she would say, “You dummy. Like, I can’t pay rent for the cost of a six-pack.” Like, she could not connect the dots in her mind that if she didn’t do that every day, she would have a whole lot more money. It just didn’t add up.

And so that’s often the way we are also. It’s like, “Well, what does this one time matter? It’s not going to go anywhere.” I think finances, people fall into this. I know I have. Like, I’ve made the mistake that we all caution every young person against, which is start early – saving. Well, I didn’t.

So what happens is, let’s play that forward 15 years, and my brain starts going, “Well, I didn’t really start early enough. And so what I’m able to put away now, like, I’m not going to be able to get where I need to get. So I don’t do it,” right, which just then perpetuates the same problem. So that’s a really big one. We have to kind of convince ourselves that the little things we do, do, indeed, add up to something more.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I like that a lot in the world of finance because I’m thinking about, when I look at a recurring monthly expense, like a subscription or something, it’s like, “Oh, it’s whatever, it’s five bucks a month, you know, whatever.”

And so I just now habitually rephrase that to, “It’s $600 per decade. So a decade from now, would I rather have 600 bucks that has, hopefully, been invested and growing? Or would I rather have that subscription?”

Eric Zimmer
Exactly. And then the other thing that’s really helpful for me, also, is sometimes that works. Other times, I have to say like, “What else could you do with that money?” That’s always a really helpful one. Like, “Oh, I’m spending $200 a month on this business system that does X, Y, or Z. Oh, I could take that $200, and I could put it into ads for the podcast. Oh, well, that might be even more valuable.”

So that’s another one for me is always recognizing, like, “What am I trading it? What’s the actual trade here?”

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. And the other saboteurs?

Eric Zimmer
Another is that we physically just don’t feel good. And this one is, part of it is the response, part of the response goes back to planning, right? Like, the thing, you know, it’s the most obvious thing in the world, but most people don’t obviously think of it.

If you’re going to do something in the morning, you actually have to start that process the night before. Because if you don’t go to bed until 2:00 in the morning, your odds of doing something at 6:00 are very low, right? So we could say that this tiredness is partially planning.

We have a phrase in recovery, “Don’t allow yourself to get too hungry, angry, lonely, or tired,” because that will manifest for you as wanting to drink. And so I think we can look at this same thing. Like, “What is going on here? Am I too hungry? Well, do I need to eat?”

Sometimes we just need to take care of the physical stuff that’s going on. Or, again, back to tired, “How do I learn to talk to myself through tired?” And, for me, that is usually a version of it’s always hardest at the beginning. Once you get going, you’re going to feel better, you’re going to be more into it, you’re going to get energy from doing it. And so I talk myself through that physical state.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then the last one?

Eric Zimmer
Oh, yes, a classic one. I gave it the clever name out of the short-sighted stumble. But, basically, it is the incredibly human tendency that says that, “I value what’s happening right now way over something that’s in the future.” Researchers call this delay discounting.

We’re just not good at it as people. We’re not good at going, “Oh, well, you know, I want this little thing right now, but what I really want is this.” So the short-sighted stumble, there’s two ways to work with that.

The first, for me, is to ask myself that question, “What do I want most versus what do I want now?” It puts it in time. That works for me a lot, because I go, “Well, what I want most actually is to be healthy. What I want now is to eat the ice cream.”

The other tool for this is another thing I learned early in recovery. We called it playing the tape all the way through. And it meant that, for a lot of us, we just think about the first scene. So if I go back to myself and drug addiction, what I’m playing through is how good it would feel to get high, or how bad I feel right now, and how that would help that.

But I got to keep going because what’s going to happen after that? “Oh, well, about five minutes after that, what’s going to happen is that all the shame and the fear are going to come rushing in. And then I’m going to want to get high even more because how do I cope with shame and fear? It’s by getting high.”

“Oh, and how do I have the money to do that? Oh, I got to go steal something. Oh, you know, well, you’re looking at 50 years in prison already.” I play it all the way through. And so we can do this with so many different things.

Imagine you’ve got an issue where you scroll too long on Instagram in the morning, you end up being late for work. It’s one thing to think, “I should get off Instagram.” You know, you may have that thought vaguely. It’s another thing to pause and go, “Okay, what’s going to happen next? Oh, well, I’m going to end up in 15 minutes, frantically rushing out the door, saying to myself, ‘Why do you always do this?’”

“Then I’m going to get in the car and I’m going to hate everybody on the road for going too slow. Then I’m going to get to work and I’m going to have to do that sort of awkward shuffle past my boss’ office, hoping they don’t see me. And then I’m going to sit there and wonder all morning, like, ‘Did I screw up again? Am I jeopardizing my career?’”

When I think through that and I see it and I feel it, that’s a lot more visceral than “I should probably stop doing this.” So that is the short-sighted stumble.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. All right. Well, tell me, Eric, anything else you really want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Eric Zimmer
I think the only thing I’ll say about the book, also, is that the second half of the book is really about dealing with the sort of changes that happen to us, and really about some of the ways that our mental attitudes shape our response to both change we’re trying to make and change that happens to us. So, in some ways, it’s kind of two books in one.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, is there any kind of critical guiding light or mantra about that second piece you’d like to share?

Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I think that it’s that we are – we’ve heard this before, I’m sure you’ve heard people say it – we are meaning-making machines. Meaning, we always are constructing meaning out of the facts of what happens.

We don’t see that. We just think the way we see it is the way it is, but learning to be able to question that is really valuable. And there’s just three quick questions we can ask ourselves, right? The first is, “What am I making this mean?” It just recognizes that we are, indeed, constructing a meaning.

And then, “What else could it mean?” And then the final one is, like, “Which of those two is most useful?” So if I have a day where I’m writing, and it goes really badly, at the end of the day, I could say to myself, “See, I knew you couldn’t write a book. You’re not a good writer. This is never going to work,” etc.

I could also say, “You know what? You just had a bad day. Everybody has bad days. You didn’t sleep well last night.” So that’s the “What else could it mean?” Which meaning is more useful? Well, the one that says, “You had a bad day. Try again tomorrow,” is far more useful.

It’s not necessarily even more true because the future is not written at that moment. It’s not that one of those is true and the other isn’t, but one of them is decidedly more useful than the other.

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

Eric Zimmer
It’s a line from a song, and the song is called “My Mind’s Got a Mind of Its Own.” It’s by Jimmie Dale Gilmore. And I love that phrase, “My mind’s got a mind of its own,” because it points to this fact that we do want multiple different things. We are motivationally complex creatures. And I just think it’s a clever way of making that obvious.

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

Eric Zimmer
My favorite is probably the Rat Park experiments.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Eric Zimmer
It’s basically, you know, there were a bunch of studies done that showed that if you give a rat heroin or cocaine, and it’s a rat in a cage, it will take those drugs till it dies, which tells us the basic idea is how terrible those drugs are. And this is really the way it was used, particularly, in the ‘80s, the war on drugs.

But there was a researcher named Bruce Alexander, who asked a question, he said, “Well, what if the problem isn’t the drugs, but it’s the cage?” And so he, basically, constructed what he called Rat Park, which was like paradise for rats, you know, lots of other rats to hang out with, lots of room to run around, fun things to do.

And what he found was that most of the rats, not all of them, but most of the rats moved away from a constant heroin-cocaine addiction to a normal life. Now some remain addicts, just like there’s addicts in every population. But it really pointed to the important role that our environment plays in what we do.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And a favorite book?

Eric Zimmer
My favorite book is, it’s called The Brothers K, not The Brothers Karamazorov, which is the Russian novel by Dostoevsky. It’s called The Brothers K, and it’s by an American writer called David James Duncan, and it is a fiction book, and it’s a family saga epic. And it’s still my favorite novel, you know, 30 years after I read it, probably.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool?

Eric Zimmer
My favorite tool is that little app I shared on my phone that allows me to sort of cause myself to pause before I do something.

Pete Mockaitis
And what is it called?

Eric Zimmer
ClearSpace.

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

Eric Zimmer
“A little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing.”

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

Eric Zimmer
OneYouFeed.net. That’s O-N-E-Y-O-U-F-E-E-D.net. You can find the book, the podcast, our weekly newsletter, all things related to what we do.

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

Eric Zimmer
Keep thinking about what really matters. Keep thinking about what adds the most value. Can I share a quick story on that?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Eric Zimmer
Okay. So when I started the podcast, I was leading really large software projects, you know, $150, $200 million software projects. And I, all of a sudden, had this side job that I wanted to give all my time to. And so I had this real challenge because, I mean, my professional career was really, really demanding.

And what I found out was something really interesting, is that the more time I spent thinking about, like, “What really matters in this project being successful? What really matters in this software release? What really matters?”

And I was doing that because I wanted to spend more time doing this other thing. I got better at what I did. I was spending less time doing it, and yet I got better at it, you know? And it was because I was so focused on, “What is the most important thing here?”

We do so many things every day that don’t actually really make that much difference. And by being ruthlessly focused on what did, I became better at my job while freeing up time to do something else.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Eric, thank you.

Eric Zimmer
Thank you so much, Pete. It’s wonderful to see you and talk to you again.