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Apr 03
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421: Why Great Leaders Have No Rules with Kevin Kruse

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Kevin Kruse says: "If we think our boss cares about us as individuals as opposed to cogs in a machine, our engagement goes way up."

Author Kevin Kruse offers wise–yet contrarian–pointers  for leaders.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Arguments for closing your Open Door policy
  2. Why to set guardrails instead of rules
  3. How to be likeable without striving for being liked

About Kevin

Kevin Kruse is Founder+CEO of LEADx, the first and only AI-powered executive coach and leadership success platform built with IBM Watson.

A successful entrepreneur, Kevin has won both “Inc 500” awards for fast growth and “Best Place to Work” awards for employee culture. He was previously the founder or co-founder of several companies with successful exits.

Kevin is also a Forbes contributor and a New York Times bestselling author of nine books including Employee Engagement 2.0, Employee Engagement for Everyone and We: How To Increase Performance and Profit Through Full Engagement.

Kevin’s next book, Great Leaders Have No Rules: Contr arian Leadership Principles to Transform Your Team and Business (Crown Publishing) will launch on April 2, 2019.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Kevin Kruse Interview Transcript

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

Kevin Kruse
Well, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to be awesome level, but I’m going to do my best and it’s an honor to meet you and finally here live.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thanks Kevin. Yeah, it’s funny, we were talking before I hit the record button, how we see each other’s logos and faces in all kinds of places and here we are talking live at last.

Kevin Kruse
I like that phrase you said. It could be a song, “logos and faces in all kinds of places.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yeah, it seems like it has to be country with a slow tempo. You do a lot of things at the opposite of a slow tempo in terms of founding companies and having great exits. I want to hear about your company Leadx, and in particular, you have the first and only AI—as in artificial intelligence robot style—powered executive coach. How does that work?

Kevin Kruse
Well, thanks for asking on that. My mission is to spark 100 million leaders in the next ten years. That’s a big number. Certainly I can reach some with a podcast, with a book, with speeches or those kinds of things, writing, but not that many.

When I saw what AI was able to do now, especially in the area of mental health and therapy and coaching, I said well, hey, leadership is about behavior change, changing thoughts and identity to change behaviors, let’s apply it.

For two years we’ve been training IBM Watson in all kinds of topics related to how to be a great boss, how to be a great manager, how to be a great leader. We call our coach Amanda. We released Coach Amanda in November of last year. Basically, you download the app on your Android device or smartphone or you log in and Coach Amanda will teach you about management fundamentals.

But she diagnoses your personality. She knows your personality. She’s teaching you management principles, leadership principles, but tailored to your personality. There’s sort of a new mode we just released. You can ask her questions like, “How do I handle an employee who smells badly?” or “Comes in late?” or “How do I communicate with a Myers Briggs INTJ?” You can ask her all kinds of questions.

Then the new mode, which is really cool, it’s like what a human coach does, is Coach Amanda will help you to pick a developmental goal and a deadline like 12 weeks from now. She’ll help you to create an action plan. Every week she’ll check in with you and she’ll buzz you on your phone or send you an email that says, “Hey Pete, your friendly reminder, your goal is,” I’m just making this up, “become a better public speaker by this date.”

Your next activity is watch some TED talks. Did you do it or not?” If you say you did, then she’s going to ask you to jot some lessons learned from that activity. If you say you didn’t, she’s going to ask you to jot some notes about what got in your way.

Pete Mockaitis
She scolds you.

Kevin Kruse
Yeah. Well, what got in the way of you getting to that.

Pete Mockaitis
Why have you been so naughty?

Kevin Kruse
That’s right. That’s right. Shut the power off on the spaceship if you don’t behave. That goes in a coaching journal. She becomes your accountability partner, who also can give you resources. You’re all about action, things to do at work. She will give you every week a new activity to do at work to get better in your goal area.

Pete Mockaitis
That is so wild. I guess I wonder about these things in terms of just how wide a breadth of questions can I ask because I know like Siri there’s some things she can nail, like “Hey, Siri, wake me up at 6 AM.” She’s all over it. But other questions are a little trickier for Siri. If I were to ask Amanda something like boy, let’s see, “How do I-“ okay, let’s just say, “Amanda, I’m trying to figure out which business initiatives should be my top priority right now.” Could she handle that? What happens?

Kevin Kruse
No, she can’t, is the short question. But you’re raising a really important issue with all these devices and these chat bots. The best chat bots out there, Siri, Alexa, Google Home, they’re at an 85% accuracy level. Out of everything that they get asked in any given day, they can get about 85% of that. That’s where it’s sort of maxed out for now.

Now for Coach Amanda, when we first released her two years ago she could get 11%. Then all the wrong answers, you feed it back in. She gets smarter. She was then at 44%. Right now she’s at about 65%. We think that we’ll get to 85% by the end of the year. You need, in general, about 10,000 unique questions for the bot to then kind of know 85% or better. But the thing is, it’s in a given area.

If we saw that you had asked that question of Coach Amanda, we would say, “Okay, she’s teaching people to be better leaders. Is this a leadership question?” We might say, “Eh, evaluating what business to do isn’t our definition of management leadership and she’s just going to say ‘I don’t know. Would you like to hear what kind of things I know about?’”

We talk about training AI to understand humans, the other half is to train humans how to speak to the AI. I’ve got an Alexa device. I noticed a while ago, a few weeks back, the ring was glowing orange. I didn’t know what that was at the time. I said, “Hey Alexa, why are you glowing orange?” She’s like, “I can’t help you with that.” “What does the orange light mean?” “I can’t help you with that.”

I had to Google it and it said “Oh, that’s when you have a notification from Alexa.” Then I said, “Hey, play me my notifications,” and it told me like, “Oh, UPS is going to deliver a package today.” You think it would know this. If I say, “Alexa, play me my messages. Play me my alerts. Why are you orange? Do I have a package?” She cannot answer any of these very similar things.

Alexa trained me. Now when she’s orange, I say “Play my notifications,” and then I’ll get it. But it took me a couple of days before I got that.

That’s with Coach Amanda, most people just don’t wake up and say, “I’ve got a question about management today,” but if you’re a manager at a company that’s used let’s say the DISC personality survey. It’s kind of a popular personality survey. You know everybody’s done that and you know that your boss is high in D, which is dominance or driver.

You would then know that you could ask Coach Amanda before your next meeting like, “Hey, how do I persuade someone who’s high in D,” and then Coach Amanda would answer it. But you wouldn’t just naturally think of that kind of question on your own. It’s sort of a two-way learning.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay. Thank you. My curiosity is satisfied. Now I’m curious about your book, Great Leaders Have No Rules. What’s the big idea here?

Kevin Kruse
Well, the big idea is that most of the conventional wisdom around management is wrong. I’ve now had 30 years of being a serial entrepreneur. I crashed and burned my first company because I had no concept of leadership. Then my next couple of companies, they did okay, but it’s because I had outdated ideas of leadership. Better than no ideas, but they were outdated.

It was only when I really rejected the conventional wisdom, thought about how to make things work better from a management leadership perspective for the modern world, that’s when the last couple of companies have really taken off and done well.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Well, so could you give us an example of an outdated rule or principle or approach to management that is still a common practice that ought to be rejected?

Kevin Kruse
Yeah. Well, let me do the one – it’s the first chapter, which is close your open door policy. Most people – I made that as chapter number one because most people have heard that idea of having an open door policy. Of course, this day and age, Pete, we don’t all have physical doors.

It might be we’re in that open office environment, someone taps us on the shoulder to ask a question or even working alone, but someone messages us on Slack and kind of – it’s some digital form of “Got a minute.” It’s never just a minute.

Now, of course with all these management things, they come from a good place. The idea of the open door policy is it facilitates communication, it’s fast problem solving, it’s a flat organization, everybody can leapfrog each other’s bosses and go right to the top. All sounds good. But in this modern day world, there’s a lot of problems.

First problem, of course, is as the manager who’s’ getting interrupted all day, it’s almost impossible for us to do deep work, to do focused work, to think strategically. But Marshall Goldsmith writes about, it’s also a problem for the person coming through the door for a couple of reasons.

Because if someone’s coming in with unscheduled meetings all day, you’ve got to ask yourself did you hire the wrong person, did you not train them well, or do you have a culture that is not supportive – it’s not a culture of psychological safety. Are they so scared to make a decision, to solve a problem on their own, that they’ve got to run everything by you? Maybe you’ve got a delegation problem or a perfectionism problem. It’s a sign that maybe things aren’t well from their standpoint.

I put a lot of comments from readers in the book. As one person pointed out, they’re like, “I don’t want to talk to my boss if I’m interrupting her and it’s a bad time and she’s stressed out or whatever. I’d rather it be, ‘Hey, let’s schedule 15 minutes or 30 minutes. Here’s the topic, so you know in advance what it’s about.’”

I don’t say close your door completely. The idea is – I say, “Close your door, open your calendar,” meaning set office hours. To each their own. For some people it might be like, “Hey, in the morning if my door’s closed, that’s my deep focused work time. I invite you to focus on your work as well. But in the afternoon if my door is open or not, just tap and come on in because my office hours will be in the afternoon.”

Or maybe it’s, “Hey, Monday and Friday are open door policy days and in the middle of the week it’s all about making stuff. We’re not going to do the open door.” You can figure it out, but the idea is hm, if it’s getting abused, there’s something wrong going on, so how can you set some ground rules and then support your team members in a way where they don’t have to come through as often?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m digging that a lot. When you talked about making stuff versus managing, I think that came from the lean startup world somewhere, the makers’ versus mangers’ schedule. It’s really resonated with me in terms of there are some days where that’s all I need to do is I need to coordinate with a bunch of different people and a bunch of different little things and make sure everyone is equipped, empowered, informed, guided, raring to go and rock and roll.

There are other days where I need to enter deep isolation and creatively give birth to things.

Kevin Kruse
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
And having one-, two-, three-minute interruptions just disrupts everything in terms of I was having a brilliant idea, or it felt brilliant at least, and I was in the throes of writing it up and now where did it go? I don’t even know anymore because I replied to a message along the way.

Kevin Kruse
Yeah, that’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s intriguing. You say that you are making some boundaries, if you will, associated with “Hey, these times are open office hours. These times are not so much.” That almost sounds like a rule. You say great leaders have no rules, how are you thinking about the term ‘rule’ here?

Kevin Kruse
Let me say, the time where rules make sense is if it’s a law. Your company has to have a rule that follows the law or if it’s a safety issue. You don’t want people working on railroad tracks wearing headphones or something like that. If you’re really horrible at hiring, if you’ve hired a bunch of knuckleheads, rules might contain them a little bit.

But the problem with rules that aren’t the kind of required rules is that every time I bump into a rule, it takes away the chance for me to make a decision, for me to make a choice. When that happens, it becomes more your company than my company. Rules get in the way of conversation, rules get in the way of contemplation, and they disengage workers.

Pete, I’ll tell you, I stumbled on this 20 years ago. It’s a story I tell in the book, where I had sold my company. I was 30 years old and as part of the deal they acquired my company. I was going to become a partner, vice president, report to the CEO. He gave me a big speech about he’s not my boss. We’re just partners. We’re going to build the dream together. Each one vote. All this stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m inspired.

Kevin Kruse
Inspired and feel good. I’m engaged. It feels like my company. Then 30 days in, I had sent my first expense report in. The check comes back. I happen to notice that it’s short like four dollars. It’s not a lot of money, but I thought maybe I filled it out wrong or something.

I emailed our CFO, “Hey Don, it’s not a big deal, but did I fill out the form wrong?” He says, “No, we don’t reimburse for Post-it notes.” I emailed back, “Why?” He emailed back, “Wasteful expense.”

A buddy of mine, who had come into the company the same way, vice president, partner, all this stuff, he told me that he was shorted three dollars because while he was traveling on business he had ordered a beer with dinner and they don’t reimburse for beer. They said, “Look, you could have ordered a six-dollar milkshake and we would have paid for it, but we won’t pay for a three-dollar beer.”

This became what was known as the Post-it note wars. You could imagine I was feeling so good and then 30 days in when I’m told I’m not allowed – the rule is no purchases of Post-it notes. That’s it. It was like, “Wasteful expense.” Black and white. It’s a rule. How engaged did I feel? Did it feel like my company or their company? Did I feel like a VP or did I feel like someone with no power at all?

Then here’s the funny thing about it though, Pete. The second half of the story is I went and fought with the CEO. He said, “Kevin,” he said, “I had no idea that this was bothering people.” He said, “I don’t care about Post-it notes. All right, that rule is overturned. You win. Everybody can go buy Post-it notes. But,” he said, “Let me explain.” He said, “I don’t care about Post-it notes. I care about being frugal.”

He said “One of our values,” and it was an official company value, “was growth and profits.” It wasn’t the mission to be profitable, but it was like the air you breathe. You need it to go chase your mission.

He said that he used to walk through the office and see that everyone was buying Post-it notes and they were doodling on them while they were on the phone or in a meeting. They were writing phone messages on them when they could have used any other kind of paper.

He shows me this stack of ripped up squares of paper. He said instead of Post-it notes, he uses all the scrap paper from the printer and stuff, rips it twice and now he’s got these squares on his desk that he uses. He says, “It’s a symbol.” He said, “The no Post-it notes is a symbol of frugality. It’s a reminder about the culture and the value of being frugal, that profits matter and we care about it.”

The funny thing is even though he overrode that rule, I never again bought Post-it notes. It’s because now we had a conversation. We had a relationship. I understood, okay, the value of the organization is frugality and profits. The acceptable norm is rip up little pieces of paper and use those. Don’t be wasteful with Post-it notes and other kinds of things.

It totally changed my view on it even though I then had permission to do it. I wanted to support our values. I wanted to represent our values. Now that I realized it was a symbol, I wanted to have little pieces of ripped up paper on my desk, so the team members would realize I’m being frugal. But none of that would have happened if it had just been the rule.

This is where I get in a lot of trouble, Pete. If people already think it’s crazy. I’ve had several companies over the last 30 years. We’ve never had a dress code. We’ve never had a vacation policy. The employee handbook is always a page and a half long of the required legal stuff.

You do get people making mistakes, the people that will travel and order eight beers instead of one. But, to me, that’s a time for some feedback. That’s a coachable moment. Sometimes you’ve got to coach people out of the organization.

But all of the sudden, you’re not having people bump into a rule and then feeling disempowered, disengaged. It’s, “Oh, I did something that’s out of line with the agreed upon principals, the agreed upon values of our family. I get it and I’m going to be more likely then to conform.”

I think this goes in all areas of our life. People have rules in their marriages that I hear about all the time. I don’t think we should have rules in marriage. Again, I’m saying a rule is like that black and white thing that’s been imposed on you rather than something you’ve thought about and are deciding to do based on values.

I don’t think we should have rules for our teenagers. Me and my sisters had curfews growing up and it was a disaster. It wrecked the family dynamic. I’ve got three teenagers. I’ve never had a curfew. I might just be lucky. They’re model kids and everything.

But it’s not that I’ve ignored the issue of what time you’re coming home, but instead of saying, “The rule is 11 PM,” and at 11:02 we’re now shouting at each other and they’re grounded, it’s more like, “Hey, when are you going to come home tonight?” They say, “Well, I’ve got this really big party and it’s kind of far away.”

I said, “Well, you know I love you so much. I am not going to be able to sleep until you’re home and I have to get up early to take your brother to his basketball game, so what time are we thinking?” It’s a whole other thing that builds relationships, builds culture, and increases compliance.

People can get around rules really easy, but if they’re bought in, they’re less likely to abuse it. Then whether they get home at 10:55 or 11:05, who cares?

Pete Mockaitis
That is interesting because right now it’s sort of like your teenager’s on your side. It’s like he is helping you and the family by getting home on time as opposed to – and maybe even a little early.

Kevin Kruse
Yes, right.

Pete Mockaitis
He’s helping you out even more because you’re able to get some sleep extra versus when it’s just a rule, it’s like, “Well, I’m going to try and get every last second out of it because I can and I don’t feel engaged or bought in or like I’m on the team.” That’s very intriguing how you say rules disengage workers because it deprives them of an opportunity to make a decision, to have some free agency.

It was so interesting as you were talking about the Post-it note story and I heard that, “Hey, frugality is a value here.” I guess my thought is when it comes to values is like, well, the value I find much more empoweringly resonant is that we have rock star employees and we give them the very best tools they need to do their work with excellence.

So by golly, Kevin, you get the most fantastic Post-it notes that you can conceive of if they make you feel 2% more creative, engaged, empowered, supported. I want you to have the world’s finest Post-it notes. That’s kind of what gets me more fired up in terms of value, but-

Kevin Kruse
You and I think alike. Right. Because a discussion, a really important one around value.

Pete Mockaitis
But at the same time, when you see that what it means, it’s like, “Oh, okay,” and you can support that, especially I suppose at a higher level of VP. You’re like, “Well, yeah, profit is important and yeah, waste is not cool, so I can get excited about that.”

Kevin Kruse
Not to go too deep just on that one chapter of having no rules, but here’s the thing. Instead of rules, think of guardrails because I’m sure if there’s any chief financial officers out there, they’re like, “Oh, everyone’s going to be wasting on their travel budget,” or whatever. Well, fine, but instead of having a rule that people are going to bump into and circumvent or do stupid things to try to comply with the rule, give guardrails.

It’s like, “Hey, when you’re traveling 100 bucks-ish a night on a hotel is going to be normal and fine. If you’re in a major city, that might be 200. If you’re in the Midwest in a rural town, maybe 60. But spend the money like it’s your own and I just gave you some milestones for not staying at the Ritz Carlton kind of a thing.” Guardrails are okay.

It’s like, okay, I’ve still got some of that – I like what you said – like some free agency, some decision making, some choice. Do I stay at this hotel or that hotel?

Because otherwise the other thing is people will do the wrong thing to stay in the rule. They’ll say, “Well, I can’t stay at the hotel that’s right next to the client office because it’s 10 dollars too much over the rule, so I’ll stay farther away to save the 10 dollars, but now I’ll spend 100 dollars on a rental car.”  They just ended up wasting the expense to stay inside your hotel rule.

Pete Mockaitis
And the time. It’s like if I’ve got to truck it out another 20 – 30 minutes each way-

Kevin Kruse
No matter what that rule is, that’s the thing. They can circumvent it on purpose or just do more harm by trying to stay in it. That’s why they’re so imperfect.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Yeah, that’s nice. Replacing the rules with guardrails and a value. It’s so funny, I guess no one ever told me when I was an employee to spend the money like it was my own because I was super frugal. They would have benefited. But I was like, “Well, hey, I would never pay for a 280 dollar a night hotel if it were my money, but apparently none of you mind, so I’m going to do that.”

Kevin Kruse
That’s exactly right. As soon as you tell people they have a whatever it is, 50 dollar a day meal budget when they travel, all the expense reports come back at 49 dollars and 79 cents. Everybody is spending up to the rule because they think “Well, that’s like free money. That’s fine. Let’s get that second beer or let’s get the appetizer.” If you just say, “Hey, here’s kind of the normal spending patterns. Please spend our money as if it were your own,” you’ll save money that way.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Kevin Kruse
Absolutely. And move faster. I had Gary on my team just the other day. We’re doing software development. He’s like, “Hey, listen, I need like a backup Android phone to test the-“ I’m like, “Gary, just go buy it.” He’s like, “But I don’t know which phone to buy.” I’m like, “Spend the money as if it’s your own,” and boom conversation’s done. He’s empowered and we’re all good.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, awesome. Well, hey, while we’re on that note, so instead of issuing rules, you have a guiding principal there, spend the money as if it’s your own. That’s just a great sentence that can offer a lot of clarity and empowerment. You’ve got some more?

Kevin Kruse
I don’t know if I’ve got them as pithy as that. But the thing on the rules is kind of overreaching. That’s a big one, but that’s just one example of the many different kind of accepted management things. Here’s the rulebook. Here’s the employee handbook and all that. We talked about open door. It’s time to close the open door.

Another one that is resonating with a lot of people is this idea of being likeable but not liked. Now people don’t view that as normal management wisdom, but often we have this need as especially the younger managers, this was my big fault early on, is that we have this kind of need to be liked and so we’re the poplar boss, the nice boss, people like us.

It’s okay to like to be liked. It’s nice. It feels good to be liked. But if you have that need, that is going to get in the way of you making tough decisions, making tough decisions quickly, giving people feedback that they need to grow and prosper.

If I need Pete to like me and I’m your boss, it’s going to slow me down from giving you the hard feedback that will make you better. The reality is, Pete, you probably don’t need me as a friend; you need me as a leader. You need me as a coach.

This is one of those things where – and it’s the more current wisdom is like, “Hey, flat organizations and we’re all equal,” and all that kind of stuff. I used to tell people that. I would say, “Oh, I’m not your boss. I just have a different role on the team.” That sounds nice. Well, until I’ve got to either lay people off, give them tough feedback, promote someone out of the three people that are qualified. Well, now they know that I’m not just a friend and all the rest.

That’s just sort of another one that’s been resonating with people is don’t be a jerk. You want to be likeable. But don’t necessarily be liked. You want to not be attached to the outcome of whether you’re actually liked or not.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. I think that’s great. If you need to be liked, I think it’s great to make sure you’ve got some people outside of work who like you.

Kevin Kruse
Yeah, that’s right. That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
You’ve got that need being fulfilled successfully and you can do what you need to do inside there. Then when you say being likeable, you’re just sort of talking about just general friendly and respectful ways of being or do you have any particulars there?

Kevin Kruse
Well, yeah. It definitely starts with that. There’s no need to, again – I think I’ve got another chapter that talks about lead with love. The old school wisdom would be purposefully put up barriers between you and your team members. You don’t eat lunch with them. You don’t socialize with them. You don’t talk about your personal life because you must remain objective and you must remain fair. You don’t want your emotions interfering.

Well, that’s too much in the wrong direction. One of the biggest ways that people will feel engaged at work, so engagement is just how we feel – how committed we are to our organization and its goals. 70% of this engagement, how we feel about work, comes from who our boss is. Now if we think our boss cares about us as individuals as opposed to cogs in a machine, our engagement goes way up.

It’s okay to get close to your people. It’s okay for me to ask about your weekend, to know the names of your children and what they’re up to, to know that you’re training for a marathon or something, even to know when you’re struggling at home or you’ve got a parent who’s ill. You don’t want to put up these artificial barriers.

It can be down to these little things, where you’re walking through the hallway of your organization, are you going to keep your head up, make eye contact with everybody, smile and say good morning or are you going to keep your eyes down and hope nobody stops you because you really don’t care. You just want to get back to your desk and get some work done. It’s like be likeable, be sociable, don’t put up these artificial barriers.

Remember when I say lead with love, you don’t have to like someone to love them. That sounds a little weird and it’s weird to talk about loving your team members in this whole Me Too era. I’m not talking about inappropriate love or anything like that. I’m talking about this greater love and compassion for fellow man and woman. It’s about this higher level. The Greeks had a word for it called agape love. It’s like this universal love that you see in all of the major religions.

If I am going to serve my team members, if I’m going to lead my team members, even if I don’t like somebody, I can still hope for the best. I can still care about them. I can still realize if I had lived their life, maybe I would be just like them. That’s where it gets into it. Don’t be a jerk is a good starting point. Then actually connect and care with your people is how you really activate that.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m right with you there. Loving in terms of willing the good of the other as opposed to liking just like, “I enjoy your presence and want to hang out more because it’s fun.”

Kevin Kruse
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
Nice distinction there. I’d love to get your take when you talked about the manager leader walking around and holding their head up, I want to get your input on and a couple of guests have cited this Harvard Business Review study about how the majority of managers are uncomfortable talking with their colleagues for any reason. I just think that is so striking. What’s your take on what’s behind this?

Kevin Kruse
Well, I’m not familiar with that particular study, but similar ones I have come across. There’s a couple of things that are going on. Pete, just recently, last year or two with this AI coach that we’ve been working on, we’ve been going deep into personality theory. Personality is the number one driver of behavior and we’re talking about leadership behaviors.

The interesting thing is, especially in large organizations, managers are supposed to be focusing on results, business results, but also relationships. How do you attract and retain great talent? But that relationship part generally falls to the side. People are profits. People chase the profits. These managers get promoted for getting things done – things, tasks. The more task focused they are, the more they get promoted.

Once you get up to a certain level, you’re really good at the productivity stuff, at tasks, you’re not so good at the people stuff. I think that it doesn’t help when the traditional wisdom is that that is okay. That it’s like hey, don’t get close to your people. That’s where I think people start to get uncomfortable.

This day and age, we know that, again, trust drives engagement. What drives trust? Authenticity. If Pete comes out and says, “Hey, you know what team? Here’s what I’m really good at. Here’s where I’m not really good at. I’m going to tell you when I’ve got the answer. Ask me anything. If I don’t know, I’ll just tell you I don’t know and I’m going to go find out. By the way, here’s the three things I did wrong last year.”

Well, when we hear that from Pete, all of the sudden it’s like, “Oh wow, Pete’s like a relatable person and he’s not going to lie to us. He’s not lying to us. If I mess up, I can go to him and let him know. If I want to try something, it’s not like, ‘Oh, this experiment goes wrong and I’ve derailed my career.’ It’s ‘Oh, we were innovative. It didn’t work out. Now we’re going to try something else.’”

The old school was not taught – I had mentors tell me when I was in my 20s, “Kevin, leadership is acting. Kevin, wear your leadership mask when you arrive in the office.” People would talk about that. Thankfully I think that’s changing, but when you’ve been drilled into that and you’re task focused anyway, you’re not going to be too comfortable talking to people at work.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s powerful. Thank you. Well, Kevin, tell me, anything else you really want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Kevin Kruse
No, again, you can hear in my voice and I can hear it in yours, Pete, I geek out on leadership. This is a leadership book, but to me, leadership is a superpower because leadership just means influence. When you learn to lead yourself, influence yourself, you can get to health, wealth, happiness. When you learn to lead, influence, your marriage, your children, you have a great family life. When you learn to lead, to influence at work, your career takes off.

That’s why I’m so geeked out about it. Thanks for the opportunity to really have some fun with some of these concepts.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh sure thing. Absolutely. Good times. Now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Kevin Kruse
Well I like “Life is about making an impact, not an income.”

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

Kevin Kruse
I don’t know if it’s a favorite, but one that stood out from one of my earlier books was this study they did at Princeton showing that taking notes by hand is far superior than writing them on a laptop keyboard or a smartphone. It’s called The Pen is Mightier than the Keyboard. That’s the name of that study.

It’s because when we can type, then we tend to just be an automatic recorder of the word of the sounds without processing it. When we have to write them, we have to think about what we’re hearing, quickly analyze it, shorten it, put it down and then it anchors it in our memory.

Pete Mockaitis
That makes a lot of sense. I always prefer to use typing for notes just because I can type so much faster than I can write with a pen, but that’s kind of the idea is because you can write slower, you must do some prioritization.

Kevin Kruse
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
And capture fewer words. That process is powerful. Okay. Thank you. That’s helpful. It’s all connecting for me over here. How about a favorite book?

Kevin Kruse
I’m a huge reader. I probably read more than 50 books a year. A classic favorite is Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. It’s a great one. Well, since you’re reading so much, let’s ask. How about a favorite book or two released in the last five years?

Kevin Kruse
Yeah, Daring Greatly from Brene Brown really gets – again, you don’t think of it as a classic business or leadership book, but that helped me to understand issues related to self-worth, external validation, which gets you then to be more authentic. Very practical book from Kim Scott is Radical Candor on how to give feedback. Zero to One is an entrepreneur book about startups and positioning. Peter Thiel. Those are more recent ones.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Thank you. How about a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Kevin Kruse
Yeah, I don’t have anything novel or unique. I’m a live for my calendar guy. I just use Google Calendar. Again, I like writing notes by hand. Sometimes I will then transfer them into Evernote. I use a Moleskine notebook or some kind of paper notebook. It’s just classic tools.

Pete Mockaitis
Now I’ve got to ask, when you are taking notes by hand and then get them into Evernote, are you just taking a photo or using a scanner? How do you make that happen smoothly?

Kevin Kruse
Yeah. They have, of course, tools now, including notebooks, where you write in the notebook and it automatically goes into Evernote. Then there’s ones where it’s special paper, you write on it, and then it scans and it does the OCR into Evernote. I don’t do anything that fancy.

What I tend to do is I write notes through – I fill up these books fast. A lot of it is not worthy of sending to Evernote. But if something is worthy of sending to Evernote, I’ll just snap it on my phone, upload it as a photo to Evernote and then I’ll just write a couple of words that I know will match if I’m looking to do a search. That’s just sort of a poor man’s version of getting it into Evernote.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh sure. Yeah. How about a favorite habit, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Kevin Kruse
It’s great you ask everybody this question. This starts before I get to work, but every morning I start – I’m a big believer in having an attitude of gratitude. I always just try to think of three things that I’m grateful for. Every morning I try to think of something different. Just changes my mindset in an abundance mindset. It destresses me. Maximizes my world view going into work.

Then at work the first thing I do, highly recommend it, is I just consciously think of what is my most important task for the day at hand and I’ll scrawl it on top of my printed calendar for the day, again, by hand just to kind of anchor it there.

Pete Mockaitis
Is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks?

Kevin Kruse
Well, the one that is the most controversial is – I wrote a book called 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management and one of the things I found – it wasn’t my idea. I interviewed 300 highly successful people, self-made billionaires, millionaires. None of them used a to-do list. They only worked from their calendar.

The phrase is ‘schedule it, don’t list it.’ If you really want to do something, pause and think what day, what time and for how long are you going to do it. If you’re not willing to do that, then maybe you shouldn’t plan to do it. That changed my world. That was a couple years ago. I don’t use a to-do list anymore.

Every day I get ten emails telling me I’m a stupid, crazy jerk for telling people that. I get ten emails from people who say I’ve changed their life because they learned it.

Pete Mockaitis
Fascinating. If folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Kevin Kruse
The book Great Leaders Have No Rules available on Amazon.com, all bookstores, wherever they want to buy that. If they want to get free trial and check out Leadx with Coach Amanda, that’s at Leadx.org, O-R-G.

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

Kevin Kruse
Well, in the theme of the book, I would say challenge the rules. Even if you believe you should have rules, challenge them. Make sure you are asking the team members that you’re working with, the higher-ups, quote/unquote, “What is behind this rule?” Again, once I asked about the Post-it note rule, my view of it changed.

I would invite you to do the same thing outside of work. Even if you say, “Kevin’s crazy. My teenagers need a curfew.” Okay, but ask your kids why do they think that curfew’s in place, why is it the time that it is, how do they feel about it. At the very least, even if you keep the curfew, you will have strengthened that relationship and strengthened their commitment to compliance.

Pete Mockaitis
Kevin, this has been a blast. Thanks so much for sharing the good word. Good luck with your book and all your adventures.

Kevin Kruse
Thanks Pete and thanks for you doing your work and spreading the word out there too. You’re helping a lot of people.

Apr 01
0

420: How to Break Free from Distracting Devices with Brian Solis

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Brian Solis says: "There has to be a much more mindful approach to how we use technology... in a sense, it's taking control of us and we have to take control of it."

Brian Solis interlinks procrastination, distraction, and device-related addiction to show how they rob us of productivity and happiness.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The biochemical forces that rewire your brain when exposed to social media
  2. The key thing you must do  to reclaim your attention
  3. Why devices are often thieves of our own happines

About Brian

Brian Solis is Principal Analyst and futurist at Altimeter, a Prophet Company, a keynote speaker and best-selling author. Brian studies disruptive technology and its impact on business and society. In his reports, articles and books, he humanizes technology and its impact on business and society to help executives gain new perspectives and insights. Brian’s research explores digital transformation, customer experience and culture 2.0 and “the future of” industries, trends and behavior.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Brian Solis Interview Transcript

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

Brian Solis
Pete, it’s honestly my pleasure. I’m really looking forward to this.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yes, well me too. I’m excited to dig into the wisdom of your book, Lifescale, but I understand that this is personal for you. Can you tell us the story of how distractions were impairing your life?

Brian Solis
Oh yeah. Well, it’s my favorite subject, kind of fall on the sword and be vulnerable to everybody, but in all seriousness, it was not the book that I set out to write. In fact, I was trying to write another book on innovation and just couldn’t really get past the proposal stage. For the first time in my life I was stuck and couldn’t figure out why and had wondered if this is what writer’s block had felt like or if I was just stretched too thin.

But long story short, after a whole bunch of research and time of reflection and introspection, I’d gotten down to the bottom of the fact that I wasn’t able to get into the flow like I used to because I completely changed my life. At that point, when I started writing the proposal, it had been two years since the previous book had published. Before that, each subsequent book had been a little harder and harder to write.

This time was the first time I couldn’t get past the proposal stage. I had just basically succumbed to all of the digital distractions that define my life. In the time that I had written the last book, I had grown exponentially on platforms. I was using my phone more and more and more and it had an incredible effect on depth and creativity and flow and productivity in ways that I just didn’t realize until I had to go back and dive deep or try to.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s interesting, so you’re kind of a victim of your own success. You had so many fans, followers, et cetera, that there’s just more to respond to and more potential for beeps and buzzes and claims of your attention.

Brian Solis
Yeah, absolutely. Not only that, but with that pressure of maintaining a presence and also trying to stay relevant and continue to build that audience because there’s always somebody or something new to follow or at least be entertained by.

The other side of it is the dark side of digital, which is what it does to your brains. It rewires it. It makes it operate it much faster. It makes it jump around from task to task to give you sort of the semblance of multitasking, but essentially all you’re really doing is task hopping. It sort of drives you to float at a much more superficial level rather than allowing you the freedom and space to dive deeper and be content there.

I could list out a million different things that it does to you, but it also affects you chemically.

Pete Mockaitis
You mentioned that it rewires your brain, these digital devices and these interactions. Can you share with me perhaps one of the most frightening bits of research or studies that points to this phenomenon?

Brian Solis
Oh my goodness, well, there’s so many. Just going outside of the brain rewiring thing. For example, if you use social media quite a bit, whether it’s Facebook or Instagram, one of the things that tends to happen is that when you post something or based on the designs of those apps, they are designed to create micro doses of anxiety.

For example, if you open the app, there’s going to be a millisecond delay before you see how many new notifications you have. That’s meant to sort of create this sense of anticipation so that when you see that number, you feel like you’ve won. In that moment what it’s doing is unlocking a series of six different chemicals within your body.

Also the same types of chemicals swoosh about you when you do get a new like or when you do get a new follower or when people are connecting with you, so essentially getting these micro doses of the semblances of joy or happiness or validation or connection or desire. Your body learns to crave that, not unlike smoking or not unlike other types of drugs or alcohol that your body just starts to produce these chemicals in the absence of using those apps that sort of feed that addiction for you to come back.

That over time plays out in all kind of things. For example, I studied the effects of Instagram and Snapchat on a woman’s definition of beauty and also the effects on their self-esteem. I wish I could publish the results, but I will say this is that it’s not good. It leads to all kinds of things and not just loneliness, but depression.

Because if you think about it, there’s this sense of them trying to always keep up with what the internet’s standard of beauty is or whomever you follow and what that standard is. Even then it’s not necessarily always a real standard. They might be using FaceTune as a way of sort of making themselves slimmer or more attractive or younger.

This is also creating new types of plastic surgery products that are catering to what’s called dysmorphia or filter dysmorphia or in some cases, Snapchat dysmorphia because people want to look the way that they do in, let’s just say, their selfies self, their aspirational self.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, that’s so fascinating. I guess I didn’t realize that the platforms deliberately put in a little bit of a gap before you saw the notifications. I just thought that that was dumb like, “Didn’t you know that’s what I wanted to see first? How come I have to wait for this?” It’s like, “No, it’s by design, Pete.” Now I know.

Brian Solis
Yeah, Pete, it’s by design. It’s even worse, it’s called persuasive design. It’s actually taught at Stanford University. It goes further than that. Some of the techniques that they use are also for example, called variable intermittent rewards, which are designed to emulate the types of things that go into, for example, digital slot machines or even analog slot machines. It’s really meant to kind of cater that every time you use it, you feel like you are you.

I’ve called this sort of resulting circumstance accidental narcissism because everything that you do in these platforms essentially tells you that you’re the most important person in the world. If you don’t like what you see online, so for example, if you post something that really mattered to you, but you didn’t get enough likes or reactions to it, chances are you’re probably going to delete it because that’s not your best foot forward, at least in the way that you think about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so there we go. There’s some formidable biochemical forces at work when it comes to these devices and social media accounts and generating some addictive stuff. Tell us, what have you found are the most powerful practices to get liberated from this and reclaim your power to focus?

Brian Solis
This is a challenge that I face with this book as well is how do you sell a book to people who don’t necessarily realize that they’re distracted or suffering from any of this. In total honesty, as I mentioned earlier, I didn’t know I had a problem until I failed in a pretty significant life milestone. I would hate for anybody else to kind of have to get to that point. I want everybody to optimistically or proactively come to this conclusion on their own.

I share this with you because, for example, Google and Apple are putting what they’re calling digital wellness tools inside of your smartphones that sort of document how much time you spend on your phone every day or your tablet, where you’re spending all of your time.

I’ve noticed in many cases in my – it’s called digital anthropology – in my work that people don’t necessarily see that as a bad thing. They see it almost as a badge.

Somebody I talked to while I was at South by Southwest recently told me, “My gosh, these digital wellness tools are killing me. It told me yesterday that I spent over five hours, over five hours. Can you believe that?” And not once in the conversation did they say, “I need to change,” or that there’s a problem or-

Pete Mockaitis
Just like, “How about that?”

Brian Solis
Yeah, pretty much. To get to the answer of your question, there has to be a much more mindful approach to how we use technology. I’m not asking anybody to disregard it. I need it in my work and in my world. But we have to take a much more mindful approach to how we use it. In a sense, it’s taking control of us and we have to take control of it.

Even getting there, it’s even in the smallest of things. It’s starting to build the muscle memory and the expertise and the rigor to be able to just focus on one thing, whether it’s mono-tasking or whether it’s some type of exercise or whether you’re practicing meditation.

Whatever it is, just focus on one thing for at least – studies show at least 25 minutes to build that discipline so that you aren’t getting pulled in a million different directions because if you are getting pulled in a million different directions all the time, you’re never building the skillset necessary to be more creative.

Creativity is what the world needs now in a time where everybody’s using filters or augmented reality, where artificial intelligence and machine learning is starting to take and automate everybody’s jobs. This is the time for creativity because creativity is the source of innovation and that’s what we’re trying to get to.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so you’re saying it’s just sort of like building a muscle. You’ve got to go ahead and challenge yourself to focus on one thing, be it mediation on a given task for at least 25 minutes in order to get some gains bro.

Brian Solis
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Then I’m also curious when it comes to taking breaks, like if you want to have more rejuvenation and restoration to have more creativity, I’m guessing you wouldn’t recommend, “Hey, check out what’s on Facebook,” as a refresher. What would you recommend instead?

Brian Solis
I’ll tell you this. One of the stats that blew me away was every time you reach for your phone – and look, the first couple of times I tried using what was called the Pomodoro Technique, which is a little tomato kitchen timer, a little analog thing, but they make digital versions. The first time I tried to focus for 25 minutes, I was reaching for my phone without a notification. That was the muscle memory I was working against.

Stats show that when you allow yourself to break free in a moment like that, it takes about 23 minutes or so to get back to work. Your body has to just sort of shift its gears because what’s happening is when you’re shifting tasks, you’re actually – there are nutrients in your brain that you’re using up and you’re having to sort of refocus it into a certain area where you were before and that takes time. That also depletes those nutrients over time. They say you’re freshest in the day.

But ultimately, one of the things that I learned here and I hope this answers your question, Pete, is you have to want to get your task done and not only get it done, but get it done in the uniqueness of you so that it stands out in a world where everybody is really starting to look the same. As amazing as everybody’s life looks online, it’s pretty much all the same.

You have to express yourself in the truest sense of you. You can’t do that if you don’t know who you are outside of what you’re trying to project and also if you don’t know what you’re capable of.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it. Well, Brian, tell me, anything else you really want to make sure to mention before we hear a couple of your favorite things?

Brian Solis
Yeah. One of things that I found was that we tend to procrastinate more because it’s really so hard to shift and focus. It’s actually easier to give yourself to distractions and notifications and also because we’re chemically drawn to it. In a sense, we’re addicted without understanding that we’re addicted. We were sort of subjected to those designs that got us there. It wasn’t really our choice to get there.

But what happens over time is that procrastination becomes sort of this subconscious attempt to avoid those unpleasant emotions or those unfamiliar disciplines that we sort of lost or gave up in exchange for our devices.

There was this quote that I had stumbled on from Muhammad Ali that said he hated every minute of training, but he told himself not to quit. The suffering that he was going through now, he was going to be able to live the rest of his life as a champion. That got me to think about whether it’s my work or your work or whatever it is that we’re trying to do, individuality really is a competitive advantage.

Also, creativity is, honestly, a scientifically-proven key to happiness. If you can’t visualize what it is that you want to achieve and why, then you can’t appreciate it and you can’t learn and you can’t build upon it to celebrate it. Essentially, that means that the devices and our relationship to them become sort of thieves of our own happiness.

That’s what I want to leave everybody with is that really what we’re talking about is not just taking control of technology, but actually living a happier, more creative life that we get to say what we use technology for and how and why and what we get express that’s uniquely us and then and only then can we live our truly best life.

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

Brian Solis
I think it was that Muhammad Ali quote, but I think I have another one too. It was this quote from one of the designers, who shall be unnamed, who was basically whistleblowing on the whole industry about the techniques they use to define some of our favorite apps and it was that “We were given the power of the gods without their wisdom.”

Pete Mockaitis
That is nice. Thank you. How about a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Brian Solis
I started with this Pomodoro Technique to build that discipline down to 25 minutes, but I also found the equivalent in vinyl, listening to vinyl again. One side of a record is roughly about 25 minutes.

The process of focusing for 25 minutes is fantastic, but also the physical routines that you go through to pull that vinyl out of its sleeve and kind of enjoy the senses of the smell and the feel and putting that needle slowly down on the disk and hearing the crackling a bit. It’s also very cathartic and therapeutic. You build this muscle set, but you also calm your mind into this way of being able to jump into a much deeper way of work much faster.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. I haven’t heard that as a tool before. Vinyl, awesome. How about a favorite habit?

Brian Solis
A new favorite habit that was an old favorite habit has been the arts. I grew up playing guitar and sort of shelved it in favor of chasing a paycheck. What I had slowly lost in my life was that sense of artistry that really unlocks parts of your brain that you can’t really get to without it.

I’ve started playing around with all kinds of different things like I’m not even an illustrator or an artist in any way shape or form, but I try to pretend like I am one. I’ll draw. Sometimes I’ll throw the pen in my left hand and try to write sentences and just kind of activate much more artistic behaviors to keep that brain firing in new and unique ways.

Pete Mockaitis
Brian, this has been such a treat. I wish you much luck with the book, and your speaking, and your work, and all the fun you’re up to.

Brian Solis
Well, Pete, I appreciate it. I’m on a mission. Like you said at the beginning, this is my eighth book, but my first personal book. I’m hoping to just bring anyone who is willing along on the journey with me.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. Thank you.

Mar 29
0

419: Aligning Your Career with Your Definition of Success with Lizette Ojeda

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Dr. Lizette Odeja says: "Money can only take you so far. Once you've reached a certain level, more money isn't going to fill that void."

Dr. Lizette Ojeda shares her “Get It, Pivot It, Quit It” method for making career decisions, as well as a few exercises designed to help you be more aware of your core values and boundaries.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to defend against career  “shoulds”
  2. How to determine your core values when making career decisions
  3. Power questions for making career decisions

About Lizette

Dr. Lizette Ojeda is a career development expert, helping people achieve their career goals, have better work-life balance, and step up with confidence in their zone of brilliance.
She’s a Tenured Associate Professor at Texas A&M University and Licensed Psychologist and Career Strategist who teaches career counseling, conducts research on career development, has been nationally recognized for her work and has been published in Journal of Career Development, The Encyclopedia of Positive Psychology, The Handbook of Career Counseling for Women, and has helped hundreds of people achieve their career and life goals.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Lizette Ojeda Interview Transcript

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

Lizette Ojeda
Thanks for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m super excited to dig into your wisdom. I understand one thing that you’re super excited about is skydiving. What’s the story here?

Lizette Ojeda
Oh gosh, I’m super adventurous and a lot of people don’t know that about me because I’m introverted.  But I’ve done it three times. I told my husband that I would chill on that until the kids got out of the house just in case there are any broken bones or bruises or blood involved. But when you’re up here, the exhilaration, the excitement of seeing the world from a whole different perspective, and the silence, it’s just an awe-inspiring moment for me. I just love it.

Pete Mockaitis
So you’ve done it three times or how many?

Lizette Ojeda
Three times, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Three times. Yeah. I’ve done it once and I thought it was awesome. I’d like to go again. I’ve heard that actually the second time can be scarier than the first. Is that your experience?

Lizette Ojeda
Well, apparently not because I did it a third time.

Pete Mockaitis
Maybe some people like the fear and then the conquering of it. I just thought it was so fun. It’s like, at last I am flying. This is what I wanted to do since I was a kid.

Lizette Ojeda
Yes. What a great way to say that you can do anything if you put your mind to it. You can be whoever you want to be.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, totally. And just there’s that sort of feeling of accomplishment. It’s awesome and it’s a thrill. But my wife also would like for me to not jump out of planes during this phase of family living and I have obliged for now. We’ll see if that needs to be renegotiated.

I also want to repel off of a skyscraper, which I understand there is an organization that does that, often collaborating with nonprofits, which just seems like a good time.

Lizette Ojeda
Wow, that sounds amazing. In Houston, where I’m at, there is a pool up on a skyscraper that has a see through bottom, so you can actually see your way down all the way to the ground. It’s pretty, pretty scary.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s wild, yeah. Cool. That’s something that’s exciting over in that world. I also want to get your take on – you’ve done a lot of different counseling and coaching for people facing career decisions and situations. I’d love it if you could kick us off by sharing what’s been the most fascinating and surprising discovery that you’ve made from all these conversations.

Lizette Ojeda
Yeah. When it comes down to it and I hear about what people want in their career, it comes down to people thinking that it’s just a part of who they are rather than an extension of who they are. The way I see it is that your career is not separate from you. It’s an extension of you. It’s how you show up in the world doing things that are within your zone of brilliance that you’re also passionate about and that is also a demonstration of who you are.

I think that a lot of times people have this idea of what a career should be and then throw into the mix of expectations of what you should be doing, whether that be internal voices in your head based on what you grew up being told or just people making suggestions to you about what path you should take.

I think it’s something that’s really personal and difficult to separate the professional from the personal because they both influence each other. When one is not doing well, the other one ends up suffering sooner or later. You just can’t separate it.

Pete Mockaitis
I agree. When you talk about some of these shoulds, could you get a little bit more specific. What are some common shoulds you hear again and again and again?

Lizette Ojeda
Let’s say if you have kids, you should be a better mom, you should bake homemade brownies. These different expectations of who you are for women based on the current things that you have going on.

You’re expected to be able to do it the time well, and that’s just not a reality and it starts to make women wonder “Is this really the path for me?” Unfortunately, even to the extreme of opting out because they don’t think that it’s possible for them to bring their whole true authentic self at work and be awesome as they are in the current stage that they’re in.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I hear that pressure and the shoulds and the expectations and feeling like you’re failing, you’re screwing up, you’re not enough, you’re not good as a professional or parent or both at the same time. Not so pleasant. I want to dig into your framework when it comes to making career decisions, when it comes to get it, pivot it and quit it, very succinct and interesting to say. Can you unpack, what are these key components?

Lizette Ojeda
Yes. What I’ve discovered is that with every move that we make, with every career decision that we’re about to make, it really comes down to one of three options. That’s either you’re going to get it, go get what you set yourself up to do, whether that be a promotion, whatever that is, whatever you have inside. You are deciding to go get it and just need to figure out what strategy, what support, what path that is.

Sometimes you need to pivot meaning you’re not going in the direction you thought you wanted to go after at all. This one can be really difficult for people because sunk cost comes into play, whether “Gosh, I put in all this effort, time, energy and this is no longer the direction that I want to take. What’s on the other side?”

It can be really scary, but they know that there needs to be a change. They’re just not sure if it should be a lateral move, changing industries or changing just positions or companies, but they know that there’s a change that needs to happen. It could also even be a change in strategy, a change in environment. But that’s mostly what’s going on there.

Then the quit it, that’s when you decide to let go of what you’re doing now. It could be recognizing that after evaluating your core values and the current phase you are in life right now and then getting really clear on what you want your career to look like long term. You decide that this isn’t it anymore.

Sometimes it might be a fancy title, that you decide to let that go, especially if it comes at the cost of your health, your sanity your family, all these other things that are really important to you, but a lot of times it conflicts when you’re not clear on what your core values are in the first place and you try to do everything and not get anything done. That’s where you have to start making some big decisions because it’s just gotten to that point where something has to give unfortunately.

Pete Mockaitis
I see. It sounds like when you’re doing your career coaching, you’re sort of looking at three very different flavors in terms of what it is we’re trying to solve for. Are we trying to solve for how do we get that thing or how do we make the best change or how do we sort of escape. Is that fair to say?

Lizette Ojeda
Yes. A lot of times the people I talk to, they feel stuck. They’re overanalyzing things, just spinning their wheels. They end up maybe making some changes, but they end up right back where they were and they don’t really get to the core underlying issue.

I walk them through this decision-making process of helping them figure out is this something you want to stick to, but maybe just not in this way. Maybe the path that you’re taking isn’t the right one for you, but the destination still is because not every destination is led by the same path, so it will look different for everyone. Instead of just giving up on something that you have your heart set on, you may be approaching it in a way that isn’t a good fit for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Tell me a little bit more about getting to sort of the core or root situation. Can you give us some examples of folks, they think the problem is one thing on the surface level, but that’s really symptomatic of something deeper? Can we see how that looks in practice?

Lizette Ojeda
Yes. For example, let’s just talk about money. A lot of times people will give it their all at work because they want a raise, for example. Let’s just go with that. But then they realize that once they got there, they’re looking down and they’re like, “Okay, now what’s next? I thought this is what I wanted and it really is not.” The money that they make no longer can compensate for the meaning that is lacking.

Tony Robbins says it really well that “success requires for you to feel fulfilled otherwise that’s your greatest failure,” if you’re successful without fulfillment. Being really clear on what success even looks like for you because you can be chasing different things that maybe are not something that you value, but that you think you should value, societal indications of what success looks like, for example.

But you have to define that for yourself and be okay with it and allow yourself to show up in this world standing strong in what you believe in. That could be really difficult especially when you have other people who maybe don’t support you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh totally. The money example or sort of the status situation, folks might say, “Are you crazy? Why would you ever leave that job? This is nuts. I would love to be making the kind of money that you’re making or to have the influence or the control or the prestige or the whatever that you’ve got.”

Lizette Ojeda
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
But that’s not doing it for you.

Lizette Ojeda
No, and you’d be surprised how many people tell me, “Lizette, I feel so bad. Who wouldn’t love to have what I have? Who wouldn’t love to have this position? But I just feel so empty. I’m not really doing what I’m meant to do. I don’t feel like I’m contributing the way I know how.”

It comes down to this combination of just not feeling fulfilled, a lack of getting what they desire most, and then feeling like they haven’t really reached their full potential and there’s a part of them that’s withering away. There are these indicators of status and success, like you said, but it’s just – at the end of the day, research shows that money can only take you so far. Once you’ve reached a certain level, more money isn’t going to fill that void.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yeah, that’s right. I think that Daniel Kahneman did some research on that. I captured that number at one point and adjusted it up for inflation. It was somewhere around 85,000-ish dollars. Is that right?

Lizette Ojeda
Yes, but I would say that it also depends on where you live. It’s going to go a different way if it’s in San Francisco, for example.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh certainly. And if you have six kids or zero kids.

Lizette Ojeda
Yes, definitely.

Pete Mockaitis
I think that’s in the mix as well. But kind of the aggregate overall is in that realm. I think that having been on both sides of that number, I think there’s really some truth to it in terms of what you’re really gaining in terms of your life experience and how it’s shaped by having those dollars handy.

Okay, we talked about not falling for the shoulds when it comes to planning out your career and making those choices. What are some of your pro tips for zeroing in on what really, really, really, really, really matters most to you?

Lizette Ojeda
Yes. This is going to require some self-reflection, so thinking on how you make decisions. What patterns are you noticing? Are you noticing that you make decisions based on more self-care, for example? Are you making decisions that open up more opportunities for you to go to different conferences and present?

Your values guide your decisions, so if you don’t know what your values are, then I encourage you to work backwards. How are you making decisions? What are you deciding on and against? And what does this pattern-

Pete Mockaitis
I guess it doesn’t need to be decisions you feel good about if you’re trying to decode what’s the underlying good value there.

Lizette Ojeda
Yes, but the decisions you don’t feel good about can also be very informative.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, there you go.

Lizette Ojeda
Because that’s telling you you’re not in alignment. You’re making decisions that aren’t based on what you value most.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. If you say, “Hey, what’s a decision you felt great about?” it’s like okay, well then, that is serving a value. And “What’s a decision you felt not great about?” is a value that you have compromised. Can you maybe give us an example of how someone might work through this in terms of “Oh, hey, here’s a decision I made and here’s what that’s telling me about a value?”

Lizette Ojeda
Yes. I would ask you to pay really close attention to your reactions. Thinking, what kind of thoughts are coming to your mind as you’re making this decision. What are you feeling? Do you start to feel kind of fluttery? Do you start to feel at peace? Do you start to feel like your throat may be closing up? Figure out what your body’s signs are.

I would really encourage people to do that because that’s really going to tell you when you’re making decisions based out of maybe fear or maybe wanting to please other people or maybe feeling like an imposter. It could be so many different things. Listening to what your mind and your heart and your body are telling you is going to help you really dial in on how you make decisions and when you make certain decisions in a certain way.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d love it if you could zero in on the body part of that in terms of can you pinpoint a couple particular bodily sensations to a couple of particular messages?

Lizette Ojeda
Yes. This one’s a big one. Right by your collarbone in the middle of your neck, you’ll start to get a little red when you start to feel uneasy. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
So just look in a mirror and behold.

Lizette Ojeda
Yeah or your friend might be able to tell you that. It’s because your body is kind of preparing itself for the fight or flight, but there’s nothing to fight. It’s just all in your head because you feel like you’ve got to make the right decision and it could be life altering.

Pete Mockaitis
What else?

Lizette Ojeda
Yeah. I was talking to a client recently and she was telling me how they were forcing her to make a decision at work between two different job opportunities within the company that she needed transition … pick and she needed more time. She just couldn’t tell them that she needed more time. She felt like she had to make a decision and then she started to get sick.

That’s an indication that your body is repelling against something that you’re forcing it to do. Being able to take that information and not ignore it, because then what’s going to end up happening, you’re going to burn out, your performance is going to go down, it’s going to spill over into your personal life. It’s just going to become a huge ball of mess, so being really in tune with your body and these signs. Then responding accordingly.

There’s this fear involved there. It doesn’t have to be something that is horrific and catastrophic. How can you approach this? Decide to just go ahead and move forward with what is being requested because you understand the pros and cons and are willing to risk the consequences or just go ahead and say, “Okay, this is making me really anxious, but here’s how I can deal with it.” Either way, figure out how to take back control over the situation, how you react to it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Excellent. I’d love it then if you can talk about some of the particular questions you really recommend folks ask themselves when they are exploring these career decisions, wither the decision is to get it or to pivot it or to quit it. What are some of the power questions you found that time and time again when folks engage them, they see good insights on the other side?

Lizette Ojeda
Yes. One of things that I want to mention of where people get stuck is that they think that decision that they make today is going to be their forever decision. That often keeps them stuck from making any decision. Thinking about “What do I want most right now?” will really help you make a decision that is in alignment with what you want most and asking yourself why do I want it.

You have to ask yourself that question until you can’t really ask anymore, kind of like saying, “Well, I want a Lamborghini,” let’s just go with that. Why do you want it? It’s not just because of that. It’s because of what it will allow you to do, who you will become, how you will feel. Asking yourself as deep as you can, “Well why? Well why? Well why do I want this promotion? Well, why do I want to work for this person instead of that person? Why?”

Then when do I want to do it. Is this the right time? Maybe it’s something that I need to table it until I’m in a different position to be able to take this on. And having the support that you need to help you make this decision because a lot of times we can stay in our head and it’s really hard for us to figure these things out unless we have some support to be able to have somebody have a more objective perspective.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good.

Lizette Ojeda
A lot of times, yeah, we make things bigger than they really are or we’re not able to see solutions that are right in front of us because it takes such an emotional toll on us to be able to make these decisions that have huge implications.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Do you have any pro tips there when it comes to finding a place of calm or peace or rationality when you’re in the grip of some of this emotional stuff?

Lizette Ojeda
This is what I do. I ask myself, “Okay, what is the worst that can happen and what do I really want to happen? How likely is the worst to actually happen?” If it’s very minimal, then I’m going to go for what I really want. If I couldn’t live with myself if what I really don’t want actually happened, then that would be something that would carry more weight.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you give us an example of what are some things that would be yeah, just kind of a bummer versus, “I cannot live with myself if this happened?”

Lizette Ojeda
Yes, okay. Okay, I’ll give you an example. My kids are in pre-K and they had a school activity. I really wanted to be there, but I also had something at university, which is where I’m a professor, so I had to pick. I decided that I didn’t have to choose either one; I could have a little bit of both. I just went to the most important part of each of those.

Being able to think it doesn’t even have to be either/or sometimes. Sometimes you can make decision where you get at least 80% of your cup filled with whatever it is that you need.

Pete Mockaitis
Got you, yeah. Can you give us some other examples of – because I’m really intrigued by this worst case scenario thinking because whenever I do it I’m like, “I don’t want that. I don’t want that either. I don’t want that either,” but it seems like you laid out an interesting distinction between there’s some things that you could not live with that occurring. What is sort of the gravity of those things?

Lizette Ojeda
Yes, okay. This just made me think of sometimes, an exercise that I tell my clients to do. It’s making a list of your must haves to haves. What are the things that you must have and what are nice to haves and what are cannot haves. Then, what are your tolerables? Then once you have all those written out then you can make checkmarks as to whatever decision you’re considering, where it falls on that table of all the different nice to haves, must haves, can’t haves.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. Finally, I’d love to get your take on, could you maybe share with us a story of a client who just did this whole shebang in terms of they had some questions, they engaged some of the stuff that you’ve mentioned here and these kinds of ways. They reached some insights and then they went off somewhere and where they are now and how it’s going for them.

Lizette Ojeda
Yes. It’s a woman. She was in the oil and gas industry. She wanted to make a bigger impact, but was being held back because she felt like she was in a good old boys kind of network. There wasn’t a lot of opportunity for her to have more leadership and impact within her company.

What we did is like, “Okay, well, you want it. Let’s go get it. How are we going to get it? Let’s think outside the box. They’re not giving it to you, then you go get it somewhere else.” We found other opportunities outside of her job, so like being on boards on organizations in the community, being able to make an impact in that way.

She recognized that the decision she wanted to make in terms of having this part of her career fulfilled could look in different ways. As she’s working towards finding a different opportunity in terms of the job, meanwhile she can do these other things. It didn’t have to be either or, like suffer in silence and just keep doing this, but as I’m looking for something better, how can I still have this need met?

Pete Mockaitis
Lizette, do you have any final thoughts, things you really want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and talk about some of your favorite things?

Lizette Ojeda
Well, I think that it’s really important for you to think about what your career means to you because it’s not just a career; it’s a calling. It should be something that is in alignment with who you are. Figure out what exactly that looks like and how you can make that happen.

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

Lizette Ojeda
Yes, one of my favorite quotes is that “Not every destination is led by a single path.” I love that because you can have the same destination, the same end result that you’re looking for, but it’s going to look differently when you inject your personality, when you inject your values. If you try to go down that path in a way that isn’t a good fit for you, then it’s not going to be enjoyable. When something is not enjoyable, you’re not good at it and we all want to be awesome, right, at work.

Pete Mockaitis
Right on. Certainly. Well, how about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Lizette Ojeda
Yes, okay. What comes to mind is the Premack Principle. Have you heard of it? Premack Principle, it’s one of my favorite.

Pete Mockaitis
Premack, I’m not sure.

Lizette Ojeda
It’s when work expands to fill the time you allot it. I think that this is a really interesting concept because when you are busy at work doing things you love, it’s so easy for you to just fall into this trap of doing more and more and more because you give more time to it. What I usually do so that I can be able to do all these different things is give myself a little timer. That way I can only do something for a certain amount of time instead of trying to make it perfect.

That’s something that I encounter a lot of women who feel kind of overwhelmed with all these different things that they’re doing and starting to resent their career, I tell them to just follow that principle.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. How about a favorite book?

Lizette Ojeda
Oh my goodness, a favorite book. It would have to be Happiness by Diener and Biswas-Diener.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. Tell us a little bit about that one.

Lizette Ojeda
Yeah, he’s a big guy who does work on life satisfaction, which is also one of my areas of research, looking at what helps us feel happy in our careers and in life in general because they go together. He’s the guy who’s found some research that shows about that money thing that we talked about earlier and just looking at what factors contribute to our satisfaction with our life. It’s really interesting.

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

Lizette Ojeda
I would say Asana, everything is so organized in there.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh Asana, A-S-A-N-A. I thought you literally meant a sauna. …. I could do a sauna.

Lizette Ojeda
Oh that’s nice too.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like, that is a good tool. It helps to unwind a little bit. Okay, I’m with you. Asana, the task and project management application. Okay, I’m following. Thank you. How about a favorite habit?

Lizette Ojeda
Oh gosh. When you say yes to something, you automatically say no too. I have the habit before I say yes to anything, I’m like, “Okay, what do I have to say no to?” And yes, Netflix and naps count.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, noted. Is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with your clients?

Lizette Ojeda
Yes, when you know that you’re not just showing up to work as a part of something that you do, but part of something of who you are, being able to put that together with your personal life as well, so figuring out how to make that happen so that you don’t have to sacrifice either one.

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

Lizette Ojeda
You can find me on DrLizette.com or on LinkedIn, just Google my name.

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

Lizette Ojeda
Yes, I would say that really think about where you want to go and why you want to do that, what’s holding you back and how can you get that out of your way so you can go and be awesome at your job.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Lizette, thanks so much for taking the time and sharing the goods. I wish you lots of luck in professoring and researching and teaching and coaching and all your ….

Lizette Ojeda
Thank you, Pete.

Mar 27
0

418: Separating Your Self-Worth from Your Productivity with Rahaf Harfoush

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Rahaf Harfoush says: "We have this constant narrative that if we're not always hustling... that we're shameful and that we don't deserve our own success."

Rahaf Harfoush masterfully unpacks history, psychology, philosophy, and more to discover how we got obsessed with hustling / productivity…and how that obsession often hurts our  creative output.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How productivity and creativity are incompatible
  2. The reverberating negative impact of the 2008 economic recession on how we work
  3. Best practices for optimizing your limited reserve of energy

About Rahaf

Rahaf is a Digital Anthropologist, Best-Selling Author, and Speaker researching the impacts of emerging technologies on our society. She focuses on understanding the deep (and often hidden) behavioral shifts that are taking place within organizations and individuals as global digital infrastructures enable the unprecedented exchange of ideas, information, and opinions. She teaches Innovation and Disruptive Business Models at SciencePo’s Masters of Finance and Economics Program in Paris.

She’s worked with organizations like Starwood Capital Group, Deutsche Bank, Estée Lauder, UNESCO, The OECD, A1, ING Direct, and  more.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Rahaf Harfoush Interview Transcript

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

Rahaf Harfoush
Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to talk about your stuff, but first I want to hear about something you write that the world doesn’t see. You say that you write fiction secretly. What’s this about?

Rahaf Harfoush
I just love losing myself in a good fiction story, so I’ve just been toying around with thrillers and murder mysteries and just things that I write. Nobody has seen any of this yet, so maybe one day I’ll work up the courage to release that, but it’s a really nice outlet. It’s really complimentary to the nonfiction writing that I do for my regular job. It’s an interesting balance. It stretches my abilities in different ways.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so murder mystery, that’s intriguing. How do you come up with creative ways for people to die?

Rahaf Harfoush
Let’s just say if anything was ever to happen to my husband and they looked at my Google searches, I think I would be in trouble.

Pete Mockaitis
Although that’s the-

Rahaf Harfoush
I’m always Googling the most random things. It’s always like, “How long does it take for a body to do this?” “What happens if you do that?” My husband always laughs because he goes, “Honestly, you better hope nobody ever looks at your search history.” Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s actually perfect if you really were going to do some malfeasance, then having that as a cover would be great. “Well, I am an amateur novelist. This is all part of the research, detective. Look elsewhere.”

Rahaf Harfoush
Yeah, that could be the big plan.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, again, I really appreciate you’re up late in France, taking the time to chat. I’m excited to dig into it. One book you’ve got out, it’s no secret, Hustle and Float. There’s so much good stuff in it. Could you share, for starters, perhaps the most surprising and fascinating discovery that you came about when you were putting the book together?

Rahaf Harfoush
The most fascinating thing that I experienced when writing this book was how there was often a gap in my own behavior and my own knowledge. It was like really frustrating because or I would originally be researching stuff like burnout and the need to meditate and things like that. Then even though I was writing about them rationally, I would be doing behaviors that were the opposite. That was a thing.

The other thing was, this was a book that was written to try to understand why we often act against our own creative performance, against our own creative best interests. I guess what surprised me was that I was surprised by how much these forces were influencing my life and how much they were impacting the way I was approaching my job, my work, my performance, my productivity.

There were moments when I would finish researching something, identify how it was manifesting in my own life and just really be like “Wow, I cannot believe that this narrative that has developed over the last 50 years is the reason why I do X or the reason why I can’t do this, or that.”

That was really interesting. It was almost like peeling back the layers of an OS and kind of looking into the code and realizing there’s all sorts of stuff in there that are determining your decisions that you never knew.

Pete Mockaitis
That is very intriguing. When you talk about the phrase ‘acting against our own creative best interests,’ what exactly do you mean by that and can you give us a rich example?

Rahaf Harfoush
What I found out in my own experience and in talking to hundreds of professional creatives—so strategists, entrepreneurs, leaders, managers, writers, designers, lawyers, accountants—was that people who were high performers or people who identified as high performers had all experienced at least once in their career a time where they were burnt out, where they experienced physical or mental symptoms as a result of overwork.

The thing that really intrigued me about this research was I asked them, “Did you try frameworks? Did you have the knowledge to prevent this?” They all said yes. This was really interesting to me because that meant that the problem wasn’t a lack of knowhow.

It wasn’t like you were going to open the door and be like, “Hey guys, I want to introduce you to this thing called napping, and this thing called vacations. You should really try it one day.” It’s like we all knew what we should be doing and none of us were doing it.

When I started to look to understand why, I realized that our work culture has taken two really big important concepts—productivity and creativity—and we’ve shoved them together to create our modern work culture. The problem is is that these two things are not compatible and when we try to chase our obsession with being productive, we end up hurting our creative performance. We end up getting in our own way.

We end up getting in our own way even when we know better, even when we feel tired, even when we sense burnout coming on, we can’t seem to stop ourselves. This contradiction in behavior from smart, intelligent, ambitious people—I was like, I have to figure out what’s going on. That’s kind of what the general gist of the book is about.

An example would be that you’re working on a client project or you’re writing something or researching something and you keep pushing yourself. Even though you’re tired and even though you know that the best thing you could do for yourself would be to step away, you don’t. You pull an all-nighter. You don’t get sleep. You start skipping meals. Your health starts to suffer.

You do all of these things in pursuit of this productive goal, but in reality every step that you’re taking is actually making it more difficult for you to creatively perform. I’ve seen this across the board. I have seen lawyers, I have seen writers, I experienced this myself firsthand.

I had such a severe round of burnout that I was incapable of doing anything for my job for weeks. My hair fell out. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. It was actually, in all honesty, absolutely terrifying. I’ve never experienced anything like that before. I never want to experience anything like that again.

The fact that it was totally preventable, was the most frustrating thing because even when I was at my worst, even when I was so sick, I was still kind of shaming myself about it. Why weren’t you strong enough? Why can’t you just push through? Why can’t you just hustle harder? Why can’t you just keep getting up in the morning? There was this like never-ending narrative of shame that was pushing me.

That’s when I was like, okay, I need to get to the bottom of this because this way of working is not sustainable and if I want to have a long and fruitful career, I have to find a better way.

Pete Mockaitis
That is powerful. What drama, losing hair, unable to work. Wow. That is primed nicely. Then tell us, when it comes to these narratives or wrong ideas or these behaviors, what’s kind of fundamentally going on inside our brains that causes us to do these things that are working against our own interest?

Rahaf Harfoush
What you realize is that you are this person and you think you’re this rational, intelligent person, but really you are in the middle of this crazy mix of I call them the three forces, which are your systems, your stories and yourself. In other words, the history, how our work culture evolved, how our thinking about idolizing productivity, why work is considered to be morally good, all these things, how those ideas developed.

You have just the history of productivity systems and how businesses evolved. You have the stories that we tell ourselves about success, so all those articles that you see about why you should get up at 4:30 in the morning to get the job done, how we sort of worship productive people, how any magazine cover, business magazine cover, you’ll see the ‘secrets of the highly productive people,’ ‘get more done.’

We have this reinforcing narrative that takes thing like the American dream, if you just work hard enough, you’ll be successful, combined with this obsession of being busy and productive. We have these stories that we tell ourselves about what success looks like in our culture.

Then finally you have ourselves, which is our body, how our brains and bodies are wired. These three forces together mix and they give us a very specific set of beliefs about the role that work plays in our lives, the role that it plays and links to our self-worth, to our identity, to our value in society, to whether or not we’re worthy, whether or not we’re enough, to whether or not we have accomplished our goals and what that means, to our social standing.

You have this really complex emotional relationship that’s been built on years and years and years and years of stories and belief systems and attitudes and reinforced narratives that you see in the media. Then you now have this new era of work, where most of us are being paid to do creative work, knowledge work.

Here we are trying to do a type of work, but we’re forcing ourselves to evaluate our performance based on systems that were designed during the industrial revolution, systems that weren’t designed for the type of work that we’re doing. They weren’t designed for us. Plus, we have this constant narrative that if we’re not always hustling, always pursuing, always chasing, that we’re shameful and that we don’t deserve our own success.

When you look and you see, for example, why is it that most people check email on their vacations or most people don’t even take the full allocation of vacations that they have, it’s not because they don’t want to enjoy their vacation. It’s because we have these deep drivers that are linked to our vulnerabilities and our ego that are convincing us that our work is linked to our worth as a human being.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh my gosh, this is so good, so good. What’s funny, as you were speaking, I was transported to a time I was on a fishing, outdoorsy vacation with my BFF, Connor, and company. We had a fishing guide. We were doing fishing. It was kind of fun to do, hanging out, nice sunny day. Then in the afternoon, I remember Connor, he looked at his phone and his emails and then he said out loud, “Why am I looking at my email?” He was like genuinely bewildered that it just kind of happened to his surprise.

Rahaf Harfoush
Yeah, it’s a powerful motivator.

Pete Mockaitis
It wasn’t necessary. It wasn’t deeply addictedly habitual because some folks – I guess there’s a whole continuum or spectrum of that behavior. But it happened and it surprised him. I was sort of surprised as well. It was like, “Yeah, why do we do that?” It sounds like you’ve actually gotten somewhat to the bottom of the answer, why do we do that?

Rahaf Harfoush
Yeah. It’s really sad in a way because we’ve put so much of ourselves, which is now tied up in our jobs. When I was going through my burnout, the thing that kept rattling around in my brain the whole time was, “If I’m a writer that can’t write, what do you do with a writer that can’t write? Who am I if I’m not a writer?” I didn’t realize how much I had absorbed that part of what I do into who I was.

Then you start to understand, okay, now we’re dealing with all of this economic turbulence, we’re dealing with automation, we’re dealing with new industries, we’re dealing with globalization and all of these things are shaking the foundations of what we use to define as work. The definition of what work is, what a jobs is, what a career is, that’s all changing.  But all of that is so linked to how we see ourselves and how we see each other.

Of course we’re going to get a little bit nervous when people start rattling at that foundation. It makes sense that we’re behaving this way.

I’ll tell you a super really quick anecdote. During the 2008 financial crisis, this really crazy thing happened where a lot of people lost their jobs. A lot of people were out of work. There was a lot of panic. But during this time, job satisfaction went up.

Even though during the financial crisis when companies fired people that meant that the rest of the work had to be divided amongst the people that were left. A lot of people suddenly found themselves doing 1.5 jobs, 1.75 jobs, maybe even 2 jobs, but because everyone was so terrified of getting laid off, happiness at work during that time actually increased. Job satisfaction went up because people were just so grateful to have a job.

At the same time, they were too afraid to ask for time off, they were too afraid to ask for extra help. We sort of solidified this traumatic economic experience, but we fused it with this bizarre thread of happiness, which I think kind of scrambled our brains a little bit.

Then when the economy recovered, many companies didn’t hire all those people back because they thought, “Huh, we’re getting by fine without it.” Many people sort of kept the link between their job satisfaction and the overwork they were performing and that overwork became the norm and it also became a reflection of the security that they had during a time of incredible economic turbulence.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fascinating. You’re saying that – and maybe you have some data to back this up – that if you look at workers in say 2000 to 2007, sort of pre-2008 recession, to now, there’s a whole lot more hustling and idolization of the hustle now as compared to a mere 12 years ago.

Rahaf Harfoush
Yeah. Yeah and it almost acts like – in the book there’s a whole chapter devoted on it in the book, but it’s almost like a form of Stockholm Syndrome. We ended up being exposed to these really unpleasant working conditions. People were working twice as hard for half the pay basically or doing two jobs, getting paid for one job.

I think the Wall Street Journal called them the rise of super jobs, where suddenly everybody was expected to do a lot more than before. But at the same time, because we were so grateful for the opportunity, we were still like yes. It was still seen as a good thing. We almost emotionally imprinted a different norm of work.

I talk a lot about the history of work, but for our generation and for us and all of us now, the 2008 financial crisis was one of the most defining economic moments. Most people in some capacity were touched by it or knew people that were impacted by it. It’s this very important emotional part of our work history.

We sometimes overlook the fact that it kind of changed a bit our approach to how we look at what work norms were and we never really bounced back from that. Even though the economy quote/unquote recovered June of 2009, we still maintained those same behaviors. It’s not like the economy recovered and suddenly companies were like, “You can go back to working one job.” It’s like the economy recovered and they were like, “Yup, this is the new normal,” and we never went back.

Pete Mockaitis
Fascinating. Let’s talk about identity first because that sounds huge with regard to being a master skeleton key that can unlock a bunch of this stuff.

You reflected, “Hey, what do you do with a writer who can’t write?” I’ve got the tune ‘what do you do with a drunken sailor’ in my head now. That notion that our identity, our worth, our value is wrapped up in our work and what we’re producing, can you deconstruct this for us in terms of if that’s not it, what is, and how do we combat this tendency to identify our very worth with our productivity in our jobs?

Rahaf Harfoush
It’s a really fascinating story because – I went back and I sort of traced the history of work, all the way back, especially in America, going back to the Puritan work ethic. I’ve heard this phrase – I don’t know how familiar you are with the Puritan work ethic – I had heard this phrase so many times over the years, but I never really understood the finer details of what that meant.

What did the Puritans actually mean? Where did this work ethic come from? It turns out that they believed that when you were born that your soul was predetermined, meaning before you were born God had already decided if you were going to go to heaven or not. God already knew. This was already all written. But they didn’t know, so they spent their entire lives looking for signs of which way God had decided, so signs that they were chosen or signs that they were not chosen.

Because of this, they kind of hypothesized that the type of person that God would choose would be somebody who was respectful, industrious, hardworking. These norms emerged where if you were hard working and if you were not lazy, which was also synonymous with being immoral, that if you were hardworking, then it’s clear that you were chosen.

From the very early, early point of work culture history, we started linking work with morality, work as being an indicator of the goodness or badness of your inherent self.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so fascinating because I’m thinking right now from Christian theological perspectives, there’s plenty of occasions when Jesus went away to a deserted place or he was talking about Mary and Martha and how the person doing all the work – he was like, hey, the person not doing the work has actually chosen the better half.

It’s interesting that the Puritanical work culture chose to, I guess preferentially, select the verses that kind of promote the industriousness over the others because even in the scriptures themselves, there’s a pretty good case to be made for rest, silence, rejuvenation, and not just work, work, work, work, work.

Rahaf Harfoush
Yeah. But you also have a lot of quotes about idle hands do the devil’s work. I think that’s it or something like that. From the very beginning, we started linking our work to our worth as a person. The work that we did was inherently linked to whether or not we were good or not.

That’s a really kind of fundamental building block right there. That also never really went away. We just built more and more and more on top of it. We just added more narratives. Then with the American dream it was – think about it this way – if how hard you work depends on your goodness or badness, then the American dream also says that if you work hard enough, you’ll be successful.

The problem with the American dream ideology is that the flip side was if you’re not successful, you’re not working hard enough. When you couple that with this Puritan ideology, if you’re not working hard enough, it must mean you’re not good enough.

All of the sudden we’re not just talking about a job. We’re talking about the moral sanctity of your soul. We’re talking about your worth as a person. We’re talking about the value that you bring.

We have created a culture now where, again, combined with the economic things that happened in 2008, combined with the way we worship startup entrepreneurs and tech titans and billionaires. All these little signals come together to form this almost concoction that creates this ideal of what we think work should be, the role it should have in our lives and who we are in reaction to what we do.

All of that together forms a really strong bridge between our vulnerabilities, our ego, our weaknesses, our insecurities, and we link all of that, we anchor all of that to our jobs.

This becomes really problematic because if you’re a writer that can’t write, if you get laid off during the recession, if you get fired, if there’s no work, then we have absorbed – we’ve imbued work with so much value that when we take it away, we are just kind of lost. We really take a psychological blow when somebody takes that piece of us away.

That’s why you see so much attitude. For example, think about how we talk about people that are on welfare. Think about how we talk about people sometimes who are unemployed. There’s all these attitudes that we have that if you start picking apart the pieces that make up those attitudes, you can draw a direct trail right back to this idea that your job is linked to your goodness as a person.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s some powerful stuff. So if we’re enmeshed in this and you want to escape and this is also reminding me of there’s an awesome article recently in The Atlantic about what they called ‘workism’ and how that has completely become sort of the new religion for many people.

Okay, if that’s where we are, point of departure, and we want some liberation from that so we can start making some wiser choices, set some prudent boundaries, get some rejuvenation, how do we, I guess, reprogram our brains here?

Rahaf Harfoush
Yeah, often they say the first step is just recognizing that there’s problem. I think the first step is realizing that these three forces are influencing your life. They influence everybody a little bit differently. It depends on your own history, your background, the values that your parents instilled, the behaviors that you saw your role models.

They can manifest in a lot of different ways in people’s lives, but the first step is to recognize that they are there. The first step is to look at the things that you just assume were to be true about the world, about work, about yourself, and just start to question where those beliefs came from.

[24:00]

In the book, there’s a whole list of questions that you can ask yourselves, things like, “How important is your work ethic and your identity? What does hard work look like for you? Why is it important? Who are your work role models?” And to really just start to understand your own relationship with some of these concepts because the most important thing is getting out of your own head, getting out of your own way.

So many people will try – they’ll be like, “I’m going to wake up at 5:30 AM in the morning. I’m going to do David Allen’s Getting Things Done. I’m going to do inbox zero. I’m going to do-“ They try to do all these frameworks not realizing that the frameworks are just Band-Aids that are trying to address the symptoms.

What we have to do is really address the root cause, which is our fundamental relationship with our beliefs about work. To do that, you have to start by questioning everything you think you know.

Once you start asking yourself these questions, “Where do my beliefs come from? How do they manifest? How much do I like my identity and my job?” at least then you can start to see, the same way that I did, like “Oh, maybe all these articles I read about the top successful tips of entrepreneurs that always push the same type of thing, that’s a certain archetype, that’s a certain mythology that I’ve absorbed, but if I take a step back, that’s not actually linked to what I think a successful life looks like.”

You start trying to break apart, again, going into your OS, going into the programming, the algorithms and starting to say, “Are the assumptions that I used when making these predictions about how I see the world, are they really true or did I just accept them as true because of the media, because of our history, because of our biology?”

Once you do that, then once you see the forces, they can’t influence you that much anymore. Once you see them for what they are, then you can be the one to choose what serves you and you can be the one to choose what you keep and what you leave.

What’s really funny about this is I’ve had a lot of very polarizing reactions about this because so often, people want to pick up this book and they want to see some sort of five-step method, framework, easy acronym, let’s just get the solution right on the way. I’ll have people email me and be like, “You went too much into history. This is too convoluted. You didn’t get to the point. What’s the solution?”

It’s like, I feel like it’s a bit subversive, but it’s like, “Guess what? The only solution is, ironically, we each have to do our own type of emotional labor to figure this out. I can’t do it for you. You’re the only one that can unlock those belief systems, unlock that self talk, unlock all of those. I can’t do that for you and no framework will do that for you.” But there’s an impatience because everyone just wants a quick fix.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, this is so powerful and really potentially super transformative in terms of getting at the root as opposed to – I love GTD and David Allen, episode 15, so—

Rahaf Harfoush
I love him. I love him. I use it. I use OmniFocus. I’m all about that.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yeah. It’s my favorite, OmniFocus.

Rahaf Harfoush
Yeah, but my point is OmniFocus and Getting Things Done will never fix you if you feel productivity shame about the fact that you don’t think you’re good enough unless you’re constantly busy.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, absolutely. Well said in terms of the fundamental psychological belief identity stuff at root, certainly, as opposed to hey, GTD and OmniFocus as a tool in order to organize all the incoming stuff so you can feel good about where it’s going. Those are sort of two different things we’re solving for.

I guess what really gets me going here is as I reflect upon what you’re saying, I recently had a podcast interview with Michael Hyatt, and that will release a little after this one I believe, in which we talked about Elon Musk, who’s Mr. Hustle himself, like sleeping at the Tesla plant and doing all these things. He really does seem to be heroically idolized.

I thought Michael Hyatt did an awesome job. He said, “Well, I guess it depends on your priorities. He’s blown through a couple marriages. He’s had these troubles.” Then you’re right in terms of the hard emotional labor, you’ve got to thing though, it’s like, “Well, would I like to have a life like Elon Musk in terms of those pretty cool entrepreneurial successes, but at those costs, or would I like to have a life that is different and prioritizes things differently?”

Rahaf Harfoush
Okay, but maybe I’ll push back on this a little bit because I don’t think that’s the actual choice. I think forget the personal costs. Put that aside for a second. Let’s just talk about performance. Let’s just talk about being an entrepreneur, you need out make the best possible decisions in order for your company to perform.

I want you to imagine yourself after sleeping on a factory floor. You just spent eight hours. You’re tired. You haven’t slept properly. Think of your state of mind. There’s no way that you’re going to convince me that the you that has had a terrible night’s sleep, that is uncomfortable, maybe has a backache, that crick in the neck, whatever it is that’s going on, you’re not going to tell me that that is the best version of you that’s going to make the best decisions for your business.

The problem is that we have started to talk about overwork as though it’s an admirable trait, when in reality when you look at creative performance from a biological perspective, from a psychological perspective, just all the research says the same thing, that you need to take breaks to let your brain recharge so that you are at peak performance.

You running this marathon, pulling all-nighters, not sleeping, doing all these things, sleeping at the factory, you’re not actually getting closer to peak performance. What you’re doing is getting closer to performative suffering so people can say, “Look how hard he’s working. Look how much he’s suffering,” because if you remember, the harder the work, the more deserving you are.

What he’s doing is he’s just hitting all of these emotional symbols to get us to say, “He’s so hardworking. Look how much he’s suffering for his business,” whereas honestly when I heard that I was like, “Elon, go home, man. Take a shower. Have a meal. Sleep for a couple of hours. Shut your brain off. Let it all settle down and then come back the next day and then you’ll be at the top of your game.”

I know myself when I’ve been overworked, I’m not producing my best work and I’m not making the best decisions. I make more mistakes and the quality of the work that I am producing is subpar.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. All right. It’s like, hey, not only are we talking about outside work; we’re talking about inside work things and performative suffering. What a turn of a phrase. That’s lovely. That’s compelling.

I’m intrigued. You mentioned in the beginning you talked to a lot of high performers who experienced a bout of burnout at some point and they knew the things they should be doing with regard to hey, take a nap, take vacation.

Are there any things that you discovered that we should be doing that are not so obvious? You mentioned some good research and science associated with peak performance and creativity and what it takes. What are some of the key things we should do or not do that can prevent or rejuvenate us from burnout that really pack a wallop?

Rahaf Harfoush
One of the things that I looked at was, again, how historically we’ve devoted a lot of the work systems that we have today, the 40-hour work week, 9 to 5, all that stuff. I think the biggest injury that has been done to us from many of these methodologies is the fact that we are expected as human beings to show up for work in the same way, at the same energy level that is consistent for the entire time that we’re at work, 365 days a year.

That is just not the way human beings are wired. We have ebbs and flows of energy, ebbs and flows of creativity. We have different cycles. We’re productive at different times of the day. We’re more productive at different times of the year sometimes.

One of the things that we have to look at is the way that you’re working, is it designed to maximize your performance? Are you actually creating a way of working that works with your strengths instead of just trying to take yourself and shove yourself in a system that was designed for work that you’re not doing, designed for a way of work and a type of work that no longer really exists for most knowledge workers?

One of the things that I found is really powerful is starting to reframe the way that we even approach performance. Not every task in a job is created equal. A big presentation that you’ve got is going to suck up a lot more energy than just doing some admin and answering emails. Or when you’re travelling, that’s going to take a different type of energy level than when you’re sitting at your desk working.

We have to start to think about how can we conserve and optimize for this type of energy usage. That often depends, like breaking away from this mold of needing to conform to some arbitrary metric like 9 to 5 or that you have to work in the same way from 9 to 5 in the exact same way at the exact same energy level.

If we start to accept that these cycles happen in our creativity, in our performance, in the way that we approach hard tasks, in the emotional response – often creative performance, it requires a lot of emotion. You’re really excited that you have an idea, but then you get kind of frustrated because you hit a block. You get sad because you think you’re not going to solve it. Then you’re elated when you do solve it.

Those emotions also take an energetic toll on you as well. But we don’t really create systems that take all of this into account. We need to design systems that are made specifically for creative performers.

That respect I would honestly challenge you to look at your own natural rhythms. I’m a night owl. I am not productive in the morning. For so many years I killed myself trying to fit into this standard, into this ideal, where I’m raring to go at 8 AM. That was never going to be me. I am honestly at my peak hours between 6 PM and midnight. That is when I do my best work. That is when I do my most writing.

I had to design a business that worked around that. I had to say, okay, there are days when I’m going to manage my energy. I’m going to work on a highly cognitive task in the evening, which means maybe in the morning I’m going to do some lighter stuff.

Once I started paying attention to when I needed to step away, when I needed to replenish, when I needed to downshift to easier tasks, when I needed to really hustle and focus on high cognitive tasks, the craziest thing happened, which is I was better rested, I was happier, and most importantly, my output—which is the thing we’re all obsessed with anyway—my output went through the roof.

That’s when I realized that your output, your creative output, is not linked to how hard you work, how many hours and how many nights you spend and how much you don’t sleep and how many meals that you skip. It’s really based on optimizing to the fullest possible potential this limited reserve of energy that you have, so how you’re going to invest it or you’re going to spend it, how you’re going to replenish it.

Then if you do that in a way that’s designed for you and your body, your performance, your success, your happiness, your relationships, everything will go through the roof.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful. And you’re crushing it right now in your peak zone. I guess it’s just after midnight now in France.

Rahaf Harfoush
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so good. Then I want to hear then, part of it’s just knowing yourself in terms of when you work best, you’re a morning person, you’re a night owl. Are there any kind of universal best practices that are great for allocating and optimizing and being strategically wise with your limited reserve of energy?

Rahaf Harfoush
This is the funny thing, all the solutions that I’m saying, none of them are new. It’s not like somebody’s going to be like, “Oh, I should really take a break,” or “Oh, I should get a good night’s sleep.” None of this advice is new. What’s new is that now we have the ability to start unraveling why we’re not taking this good advice.

You know. Everyone who is listening right now, you know what you have to do, you know what your body needs, you know the conditions that you work best in. you know this. What’s more interesting to me is why you’re not doing it. What is blocking you? What is holding you back from this? Where did these beliefs that you have come from? Is it shame? Is it insecurity? Is it fear? Is it ego? Is it the need for validation?

Because those are the behaviors that are hidden, that work in the background that often sabotage you so that when you’re tired that little voice will say, “Are you kidding? You’re going to take a break? No way. You’ve got to push through. You’ve got to hustle, otherwise you’re weak, otherwise you’ll never succeed.”

For me the best practices are really about having these conversations with your friends, with your teams, with your spouse, with your family about the role that work plays in our lives.

I’ll give you a quick example, which is with my friends. I noticed when I was researching this book that oftentimes when I ask my friends, “Hey, how’s it going?” the response was always some variation of “Oh, I’m so busy. Things at work are crazy right now. Oh man, I’m so overloaded. I haven’t stopped running. I’m on the road nonstop.”

All of these, going back to that term that you love, performative suffering, was basically the same thing. It was just reinforcing verbally to each other in a social context how much we were working, how much we deserved our jobs, and how we were deserving of our success because of how much work we were putting in.

What we said as a group, we actually said we’re going to ban saying “I’m so busy.” Let’s dig deep and try to find something else out use to describe our lives. It really highlighted how much this idea of being hyper busy, hyper productive was a behavior that we were all holding up like it was some sort of positive ideal.

Again, there’s no quick fix here. You already have all the quick fixes. You literally have everything you need at this instant to optimize your creative performance, but what is it that is blocking you from doing that?

Pete Mockaitis
In your research, what have you found to be the most common blockers?

Rahaf Harfoush
Shame and self-worth, thinking that you’re not good enough, thinking that if you rest it means that you’re not strong enough, it means that you’re not worthy enough, feeling the need to be validated, feeling like you don’t know who you are outside of your job. Those are the things that often manifest, especially in high performers because when you’re doing really well at your job, you’re even more tempted to link your job to your identity.

The funny thing is if you just start listening to yourself talk, like there were days where – and I run my own business, so I don’t have a boss telling me when I need to come in or what I need to be doing, and yet there were times when I was like the hardest on myself than any boss I’ve ever had in my life, where I said things to myself about why I couldn’t hack it or why I was feeling tired or how I could have hustled more or how I’m letting good business ideas pass me by or how I was watching an hour of Netflix instead of working on a side hustle.

All of these things that we’re constantly reinforcing these attitudes about my own self-worth, ended up really damaging the work that I wanted to do.

The biggest one is really feeling like you’re not enough, which is why when I work with groups, when I do these workshops and I go into organizations, I work with teams, it’s often saying something as simple as, “You self-worth is not tied to your productivity. Your value as a human being has nothing to do with your output or your job or what you do to pay your rent or what you do to pay your mortgage.”

Every time we have these conversations, the next day or two days later, inevitably, I will get a couple of emails of people saying, “I really needed to hear that. I really needed someone to tell me that this is not the sum of my identity.”

The flipside of that point, which is also interesting, is there are people – if you are not ready to hear this, if you are not ready to tackle some of these forces in your own lives, then much of what I’m saying is going to annoy you. You’re going to feel anger. You’re going to be like, “What is she talking about? She doesn’t know how to hustle!”

Pete Mockaitis
You’ve got to hustle.

Rahaf Harfoush
You’ve got to go get it. I will tell you, that emotive response is also something that I’ve seen. Anger, defensiveness, being very insulted. I’ve had people tell me, “Well, you just don’t have what it takes to succeed. You just don’t know what hard work looks like,” the whole thing.

What fascinated me is not the criticism, so the argument, let’s debate, let’s debate whatever you want, but it always the intensity of the emotion, which gave me the inkling that it had very little to do with me and much more with how they were responding to what they felt was a perceived threat on their identity, their status.

If you feel those emotions, I would encourage you to just sit with them and really try to understand where that resistance came from because when I was working through this stuff through the book, I was really resistant to a lot of it. There were parts of it, took me months to implement, months to wrap my head around, months to really feel it in my gut. I was angry and defensive. I was like, “Well, this can’t be the case. I don’t know about this.”

But once you do that work, once you unravel all of those things, and once you get to the point where you feel like my productivity is not linked out my self-worth, what you might not know is that it’s incredibly freeing. It actually frees you up to take even more risks, to do even more things because you don’t really have anything to lose because you’re already enough. You’re already worth everything.

For me, for example with my fiction, that’s when I started working on fiction stories because why not? If it bombs, it bombs. If it never sees the light of day, that’s okay. I found it incredibly liberating to be so secure in the fact that I was enough and I was worthy. That the work that I was doing, while challenging, while enjoyable, while I really liked it, was not the end all and be all of who I was as a human.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, to the notion of you’re enough and you’re worthy and your value does not come from your work and your productivity, how does one arrive at that place?

Rahaf Harfoush
Well, if that one is me, it’s when you hit rock bottom and you have nothing left. I had an option. It was either, “Okay, well, I guess I’m nothing because I can’t write anymore or I have to rethink the way that I look at myself.” It’s just a matter of really separating it. We have a really hard time doing that. We have to separate who you are, who you are as a human being. Your value and your self-worth as a living, breathing soul is enough in itself.

That could be something as simple as just reminding yourself of that, of recognizing that when you’re at work or when you’re doing really well at work, when you’re doing really poorly at work, that that is just a consequence of the information economy that we live in of jobs and all of that stuff. That is not tied to you. It’s kind of in the same way where – it’s almost the same kind of like Zen approach, where I don’t know if you’ve ever read The Four Agreements? I don’t know if you’ve read that book?

Pete Mockaitis
I have read the Blinkist summary of The Four Agreements.

Rahaf Harfoush
Yeah. Actually, hilariously, me too. But the thing that I really took from that book was nothing has anything to do with you. If somebody’s angry or somebody is sad or somebody is kind of mean to you, that in reality when you really stop and think about it, it has nothing to do with you. That’s just a reflection of their own inner turmoil and their own inner state.

Once you kind of do that similar separation from your job, you kind of realize that it loses the power to kind of knock you around, for everything to feel so scary all the time, especially if you are somebody that self-identifies as a high performer and you have these big goals and big dreams and big risks that you want to take.

I found it incredibly comforting to separate that because that meant I could be a high performer, I could take risks, I could fail. I could have tons of failures and it doesn’t matter because my failure is not a reflection of my lack of hard work, which is not a reflection of my lack of moralness. That was really key for me. I actually found it made me enjoy my job a lot more because it didn’t feel like it was so personal to what I was doing.

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

Rahaf Harfoush
Just again, don’t pick up this book if you want a quick fix. I don’t want to hear your angry Amazon reviews. If you’re not willing to do the work and to have a complicated nuanced look at our history and how we got here, honestly, this book is not for you.

But if you are really interested about the origin story of how knowledge workers and productive creatives, how we can thrive in this new environment, you have to know where we’ve been and how we got here. Then you can figure out where we’re going.

I just really wanted to put that disclaimer out there because I don’t want anybody to be disappointed. But if you are willing to do the work and if I can support you any way in your own journey as you’re answering these questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out. I would love to hear from you.

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

Rahaf Harfoush
Ralph Waldo Emerson has this really wonderful quote about how – I’m going to paraphrase here, so please forgive me. He says something like “The implanting of a desire indicates that its resolution is in the constitution of the creature that feels it.”

Basically he says that if you have a desire to do something, if you have a dream to be a writer, to be an entrepreneur, to be a whatever, then just the fact that you have that dream means that there’s something inside you that can fulfill it.

As a writer, it’s a very lonely job sometimes. You’re kind of on your own. You’re facing your own insecurities every time you look at that damn blank page. There’s something really nice to say, “The fact that I really want to be a writer, the fact that this is what I love to do, must mean that something in me can do this.”

I always remind myself that, especially when I’m in that valley of despair. The implanting of that desire means that my ability to fulfill it is in me. I just find that very motivating.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely, thank you. How about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Rahaf Harfoush
My favorite bit of research was they took a person’s phone away, put them in a room and this room only had a device that if you touched it, you would get electrocuted. It turned out that people would rather electrocute themselves than be bored for 15 minutes. I thought that was quite telling about our addiction to information stimulation.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. How about a favorite book?

Rahaf Harfoush
A favorite book. My favorite read of last year was Bad Blood about the Theranos scandal.

Pete Mockaitis
I listened to the podcast, The Dropout.

Rahaf Harfoush
Absolutely riveting, like jaw dropping. If you had told me it was fiction, I would have said it sounds too crazy. But I just thought that book was such a wild ride, so many interesting things.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite tool?

Rahaf Harfoush
This is a little nerdy, but please bear with me. One of my favorite tools when I really want to get in the zone is I go on YouTube and there is an audio file of the sound of idling engines that the Starship Enterprise makes from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

I know this is super obscure, but I have literally listened to hundreds of white noise machines and they never seem to work and this noise is just – it’s just magical. It just envelops you in this cocoon of creativity. When I have that on with my noise cancelling headsets, I am in the zone. I am a writing ninja. If it’s your thing and you need something to kid of help you focus, check it out. I know it’s a bit weird, but I really swear by it.

Pete Mockaitis
You mentioned this before we hit record and I loved it. It’s not so nuts because crysknife007, thanks for putting this video up, he put up three of them – or she, I don’t know who crysknife is – their total views are just over five million.

Rahaf Harfoush
I’m not alone. It’s really soothing. It’s really soothing. It’s just humming enough that it blocks out the noise, but not so much that it’s a distraction. I just find I can hear myself think better. A friend recommended it to me and it’s almost like been passed on from writer to writer in secret. I’m letting you guys know on this magical secret tool. If you do use it, send me a Tweet and let me know.

Pete Mockaitis
What’s powerful for me as well is because as I think about – so I’ve watched most of the episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, everyone on that crew is a high performer, from Jean-Luc Picard, Geordi La Forge, impressive folks. In a way, it’s kind of nice to have a sound that just reminds you, at least it reminds me, of excellence.

I think the dorkiest book I ever read was entitled Make It So: Leadership Lessons from Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s not bad. I think they were trying to just cash in on a built in audience of people who like Star Trek and leadership. Let’s see what we can do with this. But it was a fun read for young Pete at the time. But it’s true; those are some rock stars in their respective domains on the Starship Enterprise.

Rahaf Harfoush
Yeah, and space is kind of like your imagination, sort of like the final frontier. It’s sort of like you’re exploring, you’re out there, you’re taking risks, you don’t know what you’re going to find. I just kind of find it – it gets me right into the zone.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite habit?

Rahaf Harfoush
A favorite habit is to leave your phone outside of your bedroom and to just not have it anywhere near you when you’re sleeping so that you can just kind of read for 15 – 20 minutes before you go to bed and just have that silence.

I’ve become very intentional about how I use my social media tools and realize how silence is becoming a very rare luxury and how most good creative ideas come from silence and come from periods of silence and to be very protective of that silence in your life. Especially if you’re a strategic thinker or researcher or writer or you need to solve problems or innovate, those moments of silence, cultivating habits where you block off times where you can have that silence, is the best thing you could do.

Pete Mockaitis
Is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with audiences?

Rahaf Harfoush
I think it’s that we just have to get a little bit better at remembering why we’re working so hard. Many of us just fill all the efficiencies that we gain from all of these GTD systems, we were supposed to fill with the good things in life, instead we’re just filling them with more work. I think I always like to remember just what’s important. You touched on it with the Elon Musk example.

I think very few people get to their deathbed and say, “Man, I wish I slept at my factory a few more nights.” At the end of the journey, no one gets out alive, it’s like what is the important thing and to always remember your health is the most important thing, that’s a big one, as well as your relationships and nurturing the people that you’re with and loving them and being happy with them for as long as you have them because nobody knows what tomorrow will bring.

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

Rahaf Harfoush
You can find me RahafHarfoush.com or on Twitter or really anywhere. If you just type Rahaf Harfoush, I’m pretty sure I can connect with you on your platform of choice.

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

Rahaf Harfoush
Yeah, take a look at your work hero, take a look at somebody that you really idolize and admire and challenge yourself to see how much of what you admire about them is their productivity and how much is what you admire about them is their creativity. Then see how you feel about the answers that you get.

Pete Mockaitis
So good. This has been such a treat. Thank you for going deep and staying up past midnight – when you do your best work – in France.

Rahaf Harfoush
Yeah, I’m just getting started.

Pete Mockaitis
This has been a real treat.

Rahaf Harfoush
Same for me. Thank you so much.

Mar 25
0

417: Managing Infinite Expectations with Laura Vanderkam

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Laura Vanderkam says: "The choice to do anything is the choice not to do something else."

Laura Vanderkam reveals time management wisdom as presented in her charming new fable, Juliet’s School of Possibilities.

You’ll Learn:

  1. A handy mantra to keep choices in perspective
  2. How  to better handle your email  inbox
  3. The most useful questions for directing your time

About Laura

Laura is the author of several time management and productivity books, like Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done, I Know How She Does It: How Successful Women Make the Most of Their Time, What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast, and 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think. Laura’s work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, City Journal, Fortune, and Fast Company. She has appeared on numerous television programs, radio segments, and has spoken about time and productivity to audiences of all sizes. Her TED talk, “How to gain control of your free time,” has been viewed more than 5 million times. She is the co-host, with Sarah Hart-Unger, of the podcast Best of Both Worlds.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Laura Vanderkam Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Laura, welcome back to the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Laura Vanderkam
Thanks for having me back.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, well, I’m excited to discuss your fable, but first I want to hear about the story behind the story. Did you really write it in one month for National Novel Writing Month?

Laura Vanderkam
Well, I did.

Pete Mockaitis
One month. That’s quick and impressive.

Laura Vanderkam
Well, it’s not that long a book. You can read it certainly in about two hours, so it isn’t that lengthy in terms of word count. But the trick is it took a lot longer than that to come up with the idea. I had written stuff for National Novel Writing Month, which is when people try to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s November.

Laura Vanderkam
It’s a whole social media thing. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Where others are growing mustaches, you’re writing novels.

Laura Vanderkam
Others are growing mustaches, other people are writing novels. Thousands of people try this every year. It’s great because it’s not going to be a good novel at the end of the November, but it’s going to exist. You can definitely take something that exists and turn it into something better. That’s often much easier to sort of work into your normal life than turning nothing into something. That challenge can really get people going.

It’s somewhat like Whole 30. People can do anything for 30 days. It’s just like, well, I only have to go crazy on the writing for 30 days. I’m a big fan of National Novel Writing Month, but yeah. That’s when I cranked it out, November 2017, then spent about a year editing it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh okay. I was going to say, as I read it, it sure seemed like it took more than a month to create.

Laura Vanderkam
The rough draft existed in a month. Everything else took quite a bit of time.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. You’ve written numerous nonfiction books. We’ve talked about one on a previous occasion, so check that out. It was a fun one. What have you found are some of the key benefits of writing in a fable format?

Laura Vanderkam
What I’ve learned over the years is that people really like stories. When I give speeches people seldom come up to me afterwards and say, “That statistic, that statistic just moved me.” It’s always a story that I’ve been telling about something that people can remember and then recite back to you with a reasonable amount of accuracy, whereas people can never get the statistics right when they come back to you and try to cite them again.

I learned that people like stories. That’s how we remember information. Certainly if you look at some of the most popular business books of all time, they are things like The One Minute Manager or The Go-Giver series, books like that, that tell a story. I thought I’d give it a whirl. My publisher on all my other time management books said that they were looking to commission a few fables, so asked me if I was interested and I was, so Juliet’s School of Possibilities is the result.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, lovely. I’d love to get your take when you were doing some of the researching and writing, did anything in particular strike and your readers/fans as particularly as a fascinating and surprising discovery?

Laura Vanderkam
Juliet’s School of Possibilities is a fiction story, a novella. The funny thing is though, you can probably work a lot of time management themes into a novella. I think that was sort of surprising for me as I realized, oh, these things do suggest themselves to a story line.

The heroine, Riley’s, life is completely falling apart because of being stretched too thin, trying to respond to everything instantly, having no idea what she should prioritize, so she leaps at whatever is most urgent in front of her. A lot of people have told me that they can really sympathize with that idea, that this is something that they go through themselves. Hopefully, in the course of the fable, as fables need to do, she learns how to live life differently from a mentor figure, Juliet.

But yeah, I think a lot of people suffer from that feeling that there’s just not enough time in the day. It’s not that we’re necessarily wasting time. Certainly there is a lot of wasted time in life, but people aren’t watching 8 hours of TV a day. They’re trying to do the stuff they’re supposed to do, but there’s no way they can do all of it. The question is when you can’t do all of it, what do you do.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. We’re going to dig into that, but first I’ve got to address what just made me chuckle the most is so Riley, our heroine, is working for a firm called MB & Company, which is a strategy consulting firm and the top three strategy consulting firms are named McKinsey & Company, Bain & Company and the Boston Consulting Group, and they’re often referred to as MBB as a category.

It’s pretty clear that you were alluding to one of these three and the lifestyle. Tell me a little bit why you chose this as the backdrop here.

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, well, through my own personal life I have a bit more involvement with perhaps one of those consulting firms that people can go look that up if they would like. But it is not any of them in particular, but yes, by being MB it could be any of them.

Certainly these places are known for a certain lifestyle that people travelling a lot, being on call for their clients, certainly a very high-paced, very competitive environment. Very amazing people that these firms hire too. Certainly incredibly smart, driven, who get to solve very interesting problems.

I thought it made sense that Riley would be at a place like this because she’s a smart, ambitious person who wants to solve the world’s problems. This seems to her like a place she can do it while getting paid fairly decently at the same time.

Of course, the issue for her, the challenge is she feels like she’s constantly proving herself. Many of the people who work in the MB-type world, the Ivy Leaguers and such, and, of course, she isn’t. She’s just very, very smart and ambitious, so she feels like she’s constantly proving herself. That’s one reason she feels she has to work harder than everyone else.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that was fun for me because I worked at Bain.

Laura Vanderkam
Okay, so you’re one of the MBs.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. I went to the University of Illinois.

Laura Vanderkam
Yes, all right, so you appreciate this.

Pete Mockaitis
It was that, yeah.

Laura Vanderkam
I have to say, Pete, do you think I got it right? Do you think I got this MB Consulting Company, was I accurate?

Pete Mockaitis
I’d say it was close enough to the mark certainly in terms of hey, like the demanding review process and the interesting performance categorization buckets.

Laura Vanderkam
I was going to say, do you have a euphemism for firing people because there were some funny ones out there?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, no, I thought that was funny. It’s like ‘resignation suggested,’ I think what it was in your book. I remember at Bain it was like the top was ‘consistently outperforms,’ and then there was ‘frequently exceeds expectations.’ Almost everybody was in the middle, which was called ‘strong contribution.’ Then below there was one called ‘inconsistent contribution,’ which you didn’t want to be.

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, you don’t want to be inconsistent.

Pete Mockaitis
Then there was one even lower – one time – I don’t think anyone I know has ever seen it, so yeah.

Laura Vanderkam
One of the firms has the euphemism ‘counseled to leave,’ which I just find hilarious, but, yes, ‘resignation suggested’ is the fictional one. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Anyway, it was a fun read. It was quick and it was inspiring. But you tell me, if you would like for readers to take away one thing, what would it be?

Laura Vanderkam
Well, Riley learned that you do have a lot of choice over how you spend your time. It may not appear that way when there’s all this stuff coming at you, but the choice to do anything is the choice not to do something else. In fact you are always choosing, so the question is which choices are you going to make. She is empowered, perhaps, by the end of the fable to make choices that in line with her long-term goals both professionally and personally.

I hope people will think about this that there’s a phrase in the book that “Expectations are in ; time is finite. You are always choosing; choose well.” That pretty much sums it up. We could never do anything that somebody might hope we would do, that we might internally hope we would do.

Get 500 emails a day, you’re not going to be able to answer them all. This is setting yourself up for failure right there. Given that we are always choosing, how we can learn to choose well? I hope the readers will come away with tools to make good choices in their own lives.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that phrase is what struck me the most, “Expectations are infinite; time is finite,” because, well, it’s just so true – it’s very liberating for me as I reflect on it in that indeed, expectations are infinite, and so there is – it’s basically just a fool’s errand to try to meet them all. You’re asking for trouble if you do that.

I don’t know remember who had the quote, it might have been a comedian or someone. He said, “I don’t know the secret to happiness, but the key to unhappiness is trying to live up to everyone else’s expectations.” Who said that? It was good.

Laura Vanderkam
I don’t know, but it’s a good quote.

Pete Mockaitis
I like it. I should know it because it’s so good. That was just connecting/resonating. We’ve got two kids under two years old right now in the house. Our home is way less tidy than it’s been historically. Go figure. I was chatting with my wife about in terms of like, “I don’t even know how people can do it all.” She’s like, “I don’t think they actually do.” It’s like they’ve got helpers or they just accept, “All right, this is the squalor we’re going to be in for a little while.”

Laura Vanderkam
It is a squall. Two under two will definitely do that for you. A lot of things get de-prioritized during that time. We have to learn to be okay with that. I think where people get into trouble is when they decide that they’re still going to have the pristine house, that for some reason that should be a priority because if it is going to be a priority, then absolutely nothing else will never happen because you will constantly be picking up after the small children who are destroying it.

You might be happier to decide that it just isn’t a priority for now. When the children are 12 or something, maybe you can have a nice house again, but for now, not so much. That’s great. We have to choose what matters to us in any given moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Can you share what are some of the other top productivity and time management implications from the book?

Laura Vanderkam
Well, I certainly hope that I may steer a few people away from attempting to maintain inbox zero because – it’s funny, a lot of people assume that I must always have an empty inbox because I write about time management in people’s minds, therefore, you must always have an empty inbox. That’s not true at all. I have hundreds of unread messages. I don’t archive anything or delete much, so there’s thousands of things in there. I just don’t really care.

In my mind, email is a tool to do your job. It’s not your actual job itself. If I am answering something, great. If I’m not, I’m not and that’s fine. I generally would prefer to focus on the projects I have chosen to do and then let email fit in around the edges of that.

The issue with attempting to achieve inbox zero constantly is that, you can’t last in that state because whatever you send out to get yourself down to zero, people will then respond to, so you’re right back up.

I’ve seen people on time logs because I’ve had thousands of people track their time for me over the years, like writing down what they’re doing, sending in their log so I can analyze them. I’ve seen people attempt to pursue inbox zero in the course of the time they’re logging for me and it’s just funny. Some people have put like notes like “I’m at 200. Okay. Inbox 185. Inbox 135. Oh wait, back up to inbox 165. All right, down to inbox 120. Oh, we’re back up to 180.” It’s just, you’ll never get down there.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. I love your quote from wise Juliet in the book. She said something like, “I have 24,000 unread emails and I know they’re all unimportant because my assistant has told me that they’re not important.”

Laura Vanderkam
Which is a much more efficient way really. Would it have been a wise use of Juliet’s time to read through those 24,000 emails? Well, probably not, especially since she has someone whose job is to support her professionally.

One of the things that Riley, the woman whose life is falling apart before she meets Juliet, hasn’t seemed to get her head around. I think a lot of us see or have this issue too. I don’t have a dedicated assistant, so it’s not something that’s really an issue for me in this case.

But she has an assistant and yet she doesn’t really use her because in her mind she still needs to do everything, like somebody sends you an email, you must be the one reading it and responding within the first ten seconds, but, of course, if you’re doing that, you can’t do anything else.

Pete Mockaitis
Right on. Well, so you say you tackle email around the edges. Does that mean that nowhere in your calendar is there a dedicated processing buffering email time? It just sort of happens when it happens?

Laura Vanderkam
No, I would say there is, but I try to have it be later in the day.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Laura Vanderkam
This is the key thing that I try not to go through and process all my email in the morning because that is when I’m most productive, most able to crank out creative stuff.

These few weeks I’ve been focusing on book launches, there’s been a lot more back and forth with people than there would be normally, so some of this has not entirely been happening in the past two weeks. It’s funny, I feel a little cranky about it, actually.

But I try to have most of my email processing and triaging, as I call it, later in the day. Around 3:30 I’m not doing all that much. It’s really hard for me to be cranking something out at 3:30 in the afternoon. That’s a really good time to sort of go through the email, delete the stuff I’m not going to respond.

If I see something that I want to put some thought into, I’ll make a note and put it on the to-do list for the next day or two to go through and have a thoughtful response to that and everything else I either deal with or I don’t, but I try not to spend too much time on it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so not to make it all about you and your day and your processes, but yeah, let’s go there for a little while. 3:30 is kind of a lower energy time, fine for emails. Then when are you done with the work for the day?

Laura Vanderkam
It depends. I have a couple of children who get off the bus between 4:00 – 4:15. I often am doing car runs to various activities, but I will come back to my work later. Certainly if there’s something I decided to respond to later, I might do that. I might do a project at night while the big kids are reading in their rooms and the little kids are asleep.

Sometimes I do work between 9 and 10 PM, which is a strategy that I found a lot of working parents do. I don’t know if you’ve stumbled upon this one yet with your two under two. The issue a lot of parents face is you’re trying to work sort of normal hours and your kids go to bed relatively early, you then won’t see them very much.

But if you leave the office at a fairly early time, go home, hang out with your kids, and then do those hours that you would have done at the office at night after they go to bed, then you’re trading off work time for TV time as opposed to work time for family time. That’s a choice a lot more people are willing to make.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. Well, talking about 9 to 10 PM work and TV, now I’m thinking about blue light. I’m thinking about sleep quality. I’m thinking about melatonin. Any pro tips there?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah. Well, I definitely think you should end it before too late. Working what I call the split shift, where some of your work is done at night after the kids go to bed, requires being careful about it. You need to make a to-do list for the time that you’re going to work.

People are like, “Oh yeah, I’m going to get through my thousand email backlog after the kids go to bed.” No, you are not. What are the three things that do need to happen before you start work tomorrow? Let’s do those things. Or what would help set you up for a good morning tomorrow and then you can triage again at lunch the next day to figure out what you need to do.

But those things that have to happen are the things that you have identified as being important. Those are the things you should do.

Then you should set an end time. Maybe in past life you would have left the office at 6:30 and now you’re committed to leaving at 5:00, so you should probably only aim to do an hour to an hour and a half in the split shift. Don’t suddenly be the person who’s going to be doing three hours at night because that wasn’t what you were doing before. You don’t need to add hours to it.

But yeah, I try to be off at least 30 – 40 minutes before I’d like to go to bed so I can have some time to relax, to read, to talk with my husband, all that stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. I want to talk a little about some of the nice question prompts you’ve got at the end of the book. Tell me, in your experience working with clients, what have you found to be some of the most useful prompts that really get people thinking and prioritizing and coming to insight, clarity, revelation, like, “Aha, yes, I should do this or stop doing that.”

Laura Vanderkam
Well, one of my favorite things to ask group is what they’d like to spend more time doing. It’s funny, I have people make a list on their own and then afterwards I ask, “Okay, who put exercising down?” It’s like every hand in the room goes up, it’s just, oh, I’ve never seen that before. Imagine that. People want to spend more time exercising.

But if you sort of nudge people to make a longer list of the things they want to spend more time doing both personally and professionally, you get some interesting answers. People have good conversations with each other about it.

We can usually think of lots of things on the personal front between exercising and reading or spending more time with family or doing certain hobbies. Those are all things that people want to spend more time doing. Volunteering.

But there actually are professional things that people want to spend more time doing too, even if we don’t necessarily want to spend more time at work. People want to mentor younger colleagues. They want to spend more time doing strategic thinking, maybe doing things that would establish them as a thought leader, giving speeches or writing papers or otherwise doing that.

Reading for work, all those great studies or papers that do come out. It’s hard to stay on top of that when you feel like you’re constantly responding to emails. Those are things people want to spend more time on too. Or actually developing employees. Really nudging people to think through those things too.

One of the prompts in the Juliet’s School of Possibilities book that somewhat gets at this is the idea if you’re going to spend an extra hour this week on – or if you had an extra hour this week to spend on one professional priority, what would it be?

On some level, I think it’s a very silly question. I kind of had an argument with myself about putting it in because the truth is there is nobody who couldn’t find one extra hour per week right now in their lives to do whatever it is they say they don’t have time to do, professionally or personally.

Yet, it’s a good question to prompt people to think about because it immediately gets people to that, “Oh, what is that one thing I know would be impactful and I know that I’m skimping on?” Same thing with your personal life. If you one more hour this week to do something in your personal life, what would it be? Immediately we get to that thing that people love, enjoy, find meaningful, and don’t feel like they’re doing enough of. It’s a way to quickly get at that concept.

Pete Mockaitis
I found that it’s something about making it small and bite-size and approachable with one hour, somehow made it easier to answer because it was-

Laura Vanderkam
I could ask you what you’d do if you went off in a cabin in the woods for three months, but you don’t know. You have no idea what you’d do. Maybe you do, but most people would, “I have no idea. I’d probably watch TV. Does my cabin have cable? I don’t know,” whereas that one hour is much more manageable.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. It makes it all the more clear in terms of, “Okay, that’s what I want to go do. That’s what I want to not do.” I’d like to hear what then, once you’ve identified the activity you’d like to do some more of or some less of, tends to be the very next step for people to making that come to life?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, well then you need to figure out how you can find space for this in the life that you currently have. I really do believe that anyone can find the space. I know people are busy. They have lots of commitments.

I always talk through this story of the lady who kept a time log for me and in the course of her time log week, her water heater broke, which created this massive flood in her basement. Magically enough, she found the time to deal with it. It’s the same thing. If you treated this priority for you as the equivalent of having water all over your basement, you would probably find the time for it.

For most people, mornings are good. It tends to be time that the emergencies have yet to arise, although, I would also challenge people that you create the sense of emergency by plugging into things like your inbox. Maybe you could show up at work and just do whatever the priority is for an hour and then go into your inbox. It might be a weekend morning if it’s something that’s personally important to you.

People say, “Well, I want to work on creative writing. I just want to find one hour in my week to do it.” I’m sure you can. Get up a little bit early on the weekend.

Or even if you have two young kids as you do, hopefully they nap at some point. Maybe you can use nap time not for chores, but for doing some creative adult fulfilling thing. Or after they go to bed at night or maybe trading off with a spouse that each of you gets two hours on Sunday afternoon to do your thing and you trade off. Then you’re each getting a chance to have that extra hour in your life. It doesn’t have to be too complicated.

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

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, well, I hope listeners might check out this fable. I know it’s a little bit different. I was worried about this of asking my readers, who I know love just productivity tips, straightforward productivity tips, to give it a chance. But as I said, people really do like stories. It’s so much easier to remember lessons when they come in the form of a story. I’ve certainly found that as I read things. Sometimes it’s things we know, but it’s good to be reminded of them.

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

Laura Vanderkam
Well, I wrote this ‘choose well’ quote in my book. I actually got those words ‘choose well’ engraved on a bracelet that I wear. Juliet wears a bracelet that says ‘choose well’ and said well, if it’s good enough for her, maybe it’s good enough for me. I’m walking around with a bracelet saying ‘choose well.’ It’s reminding me in any given moment that I do have a choice of how I spend my time and I should think about it.

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

Laura Vanderkam
Writing nonfiction books, I’ve come across all sorts of fascinating studies. My favorites are always the ones where the researchers clearly have a sense of humor. I read about one not long ago, where how people react when they feel rushed and late.

These researchers actually set up seminary students to go deliver a sermon on the Good Samaritan who is in the Bible because he stopped to help a wounded man. They then told some of these seminary students that they were late to deliver their talks. Those seminary students were actually highly likely to rush right past an injured man lying on the ground because they were late to deliver their talks. That’s pretty funny. It doesn’t say good things about human nature, but it’s humorous.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and I think – call me an optimist, but I’ve reflected on that study at length. My hopeful spin on the matter is that if we are being selfish jerks, it’s not because we are full of malice or spite or selfish or just sheer self-absorption, but rather we just feel kind of busy. If we can solve that problem, well, then we can make the world a better place, Laura. Are you inspired by my vision?

Laura Vanderkam
Well, then we just need to tell ourselves, “I have all the time in the world.”

Pete Mockaitis
There you go.

Laura Vanderkam
“So I can deal with this.” Yeah, that’s the banality of evil. People seldom set out to do horrible things. It just sort of one small choice leads to another.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. Chill out and everyone will be better off. How about a favorite book?

Laura Vanderkam
I probably said this last time I was on, but I’m still a big fan of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. I reread that once a year. It’s just very evocative prose and packs so much into just 200 pages. Anyone who wants to write a lot in a quick book would do well to read that.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Laura Vanderkam
I’ve really been reflecting on the wonders of Uber of late. In years past when I started giving speeches, it was always just a hassle to go anywhere other than your hotel and the airport if you were in a town that wasn’t New York or Chicago. There’s no taxis in most smaller towns. Now you can get everywhere. You can go try a restaurant just because. It’s not this huge horrible thing attempting to get back.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Laura Vanderkam
Favorite habit. Well, I recently started putting some strength training into my life. I kept saying I wanted to do it. It was probably one of those things I would have said I would have done if I had more time, which, again, I know is a ridiculous question because I do have plenty of time. I just wasn’t doing it. But what I realized is that I needed a good cue in my day that now is the time to do this.

The way my mornings are currently structured, some days I bring my middle schooler to school and then I come back and I have about 10 – 15 minutes before I need to get the middle kids out to the bus stop. That’s my time.

I had been just deleting emails and feeling like, “Oh, well, I can’t use this time. It’s too small. Or maybe I could read, but I feel like I should be working.” Now I just go into my office and throw around a kettlebell and do some resistance bands, do some plank poses and I’ve done it by the time it’s time to get the kids out to the bus.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. How about a favorite nugget, something you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, I use that phrase ‘I have all the time in the world’ that we need to be telling ourselves. That’s one that’s in the book that Juliet says several times, “I have all the time in the world.” I’ve been thinking about it. It is such a good mindset to have. It isn’t actually true. Everyone’s time is limited. We have many things that are on our plates that we need to do, various obligations we’ve taken on at various points.

But we’re so much better off believing that we have all the time in the world because whenever you have a thesis, you look for evidence to support it. Somebody who feels like they have all the time in the world isn’t going to race past the injured person. Somebody who has all the time in the world is actually going to have a conversation with an employee who’s come to you to talk about something very important.

Somebody who has all the time in the world is going to sit at the breakfast table for five minutes longer when a kid really wants to talk, whereas somebody who doesn’t have all the time in the world might rush off and they would really miss out. Better to have that phrase in your mind rather than saying, “I’m so busy. I have no time for anything,” because if that’s your story, then you certainly look for evidence to support it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I like that a lot. It sure feels better having that in my brain than the opposite. Could you share some of the most compelling evidence that makes that kind of true?

For example, I could think that “I have all the time in the world because the amount of time required to do a given task is highly compressible.” You could do a task in 20 hours or 1 hour and you can outsource/automate, etcetera that thing. In that sense, time can fold and become – I feel like the Matrix right now.

Laura Vanderkam
Time can fold and stretch and climb in and out of it or whatever it is we do with our Matrix. Time is a funny thing. It is all about our impressions of it.

One thing I encourage people to do is to celebrate the time dividends that they have in their lives. There are certain things we do that are much easier for us now than were in the past. Maybe it’s a skill, like writing an article for me is very quick or recording a podcast can be done relatively quickly. I don’t have to spend a ton of time preparing for it.

Or even giving a speech, I have a basic outline, which I then change for different groups, but I know the stuff that might go in there and I cycle through different things depending on who I’m talking to. Writing the speech originally took quite a bit of time and effort, but now I have it and I have it memorized and so you reap the benefits of doing that.

Sometimes if I’m feeling like, “Oh, I don’t know that I did all that much this week,” I’m like, “Well, I didn’t spend 30 hours writing a speech because I didn’t need to.” I should celebrate that fact. I encourage people to recognize those time dividends in their own lives.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. When you talk about it being quicker now than it used to be, that reminds me, Steven Landsburg is an economist. We had him on the show. He had a talk all about how just the insane amount of time it would take to say do laundry in the 1920s. It’s just massive.

Now we can do it pretty darn quick with washers and driers. I have a washer/dryer combo in one tub, so that’s pretty cool. That kind of really does provide some good evidence for having in the world because it’s like well people survived and lived their lives in a pre-laundry machine world.

Laura Vanderkam
They were scrubbing on those washboards. It was tough work.

Pete Mockaitis
And in a pre-internet world and in a pre-smartphone world, they were getting by just fine. Now we have all these time saving devices. What’s intriguing is instead of us just hanging out in leisure for three times as many hours in our weeks, we manage to still do lots of work.

Laura Vanderkam
Although less than in the past. This is a little known fact, but the average work week has in fact declined over the past two generations. People like to think they’re more overworked than ever, but on the whole, society-wide, it’s not true.

Pete Mockaitis
Now is that worldwide and US?

Laura Vanderkam
I know it’s US. But as people move out of hard manual labor, I don’t know that you realize how many hours it takes to run a farm. It’s a lot.

Also, there’s different kinds of people in the workforce now too as more women have gone into the workforce. Women, in general, tend to go into jobs and fields and also in the way they make their choices, tend to log fewer hours working for pay than men do. They log more hours obviously in childcare and housework. The overall work level market and nonmarket is exactly the same. But because there’s more women in the workforce, that lowers the overall time too.

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

Laura Vanderkam
I would ask them to come visit my website, which is LauraVanderkam.com. I blog most days there. You can read that. You can find out about all my books and hope people will come check it out.

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

Laura Vanderkam
Well, I always challenge people to try tracking their times at least for just a few days to see where the time really goes. Some people do this automatically at work because they’re lawyers or accountants or other people who have to do it. But if you’re not in that camp, just try it because it’s enlightening to see where the time really goes.

Try to do it outside of work as well because sometimes we’ve been telling ourselves, “Oh, I have no time to join that softball team,” or something and you track your time and say, “Well, actually on Thursday nights I’m not doing much of consequence, maybe I could join that softball team and practice with them.” I promise you’ll feel a lot better about life if you do.

Pete Mockaitis
Laura, this has been so much fun. Thank you and good luck with the book and all your adventures.

Laura Vanderkam
Thank you so much.