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Each week, I grill thought-leaders and results-getters to discover specific, actionable insights that boost work performance.

1008: The Nine Steps for Making Career Progress with Ethan Bernstein

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Ethan Bernstein reveals the process for finding and seizing career opportunities you won’t regret.

You’ll Learn

  1. The four quests driving every career transition 
  2. The exercise that keeps you relevant 
  3. The problem with job descriptions—and what to focus on instead 

About Ethan 

Ethan Bernstein is the Edward W. Conard Associate Professor of Business Administration in the Organizational Behavior unit at the Harvard Business School, where he teaches the Developing Yourself as a Leader and Managing Human Capital courses. He spent five years at The Boston Consulting Group and two years in executive positions at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, including Chief Strategy Officer and Deputy Assistant Director of Mortgage Markets. Bernstein earned his doctorate in management at Harvard, where he also received a JD/MBA.

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Ethan Bernstein Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Ethan, welcome.

Ethan Bernstein
Thank you, Pete. It’s great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to hear some of your wisdom. And I’d love to know, you are teaching and researching organizational behavior, and that was a field of study that I did and I love it so much. Can you share with us a particularly surprising or fascinating discovery you’ve made about us humans and organizations that has really struck you and stuck with you?

Ethan Bernstein
So, I spend my days and sometimes nights studying workplaces, particularly trends in workplaces, like increased transparency, increased connectivity in workplaces today, the way that affects employee behaviors, and the way those behaviors affect performance. And one of the things that’s captured my attention, I suppose you call it a surprise, is that we’ve been two-plus decades in the field of organizational behavior telling people to chart their own path, find their own way, create their own journey, and people still don’t really know how to do it, and it shouldn’t be a surprise because we really haven’t told them how.

And so, that’s what led to this interesting bit of research that we’ve been doing around how people hire jobs for the job they want to do in their career as opposed to just being hired by organizations.

Pete Mockaitis
How people hire jobs. That’s a fun turn of a phrase right there.

Ethan Bernstein
Well, Clay Christensen, who was one of my dissertation advisors, created a theory called Jobs to be Done Theory, which Clay used to solve one of the key frustrations he had. He saw great organizations, great people, creating new products that didn’t sell, and for him, that was frustrating because it just seemed like a waste. All these great people, all the material and time and everything else that went into it and then ultimately didn’t work.

And the Jobs to Be Done Theory suggested that the reason for that was that people don’t just buy a product, they hire a product for a job to be done in their life. And so, if you sell a product based on attributes, like an apartment has granite countertops and an open kitchen, that’s not actually why people buy it. People buy it because they can imagine themselves cooking in that kitchen, talking to people.

That the experiences, not the features, are what matter, and that if you really understood the experiences people were looking for, the struggling moment that led them to hire that product for a job to be done, then you could create other products to solve that job to be done better. And if you think about why people move jobs, that’s oftentimes why they move jobs. They realize that they’re struggling, they want to make a certain kind of progress, that progress isn’t being delivered by the organization or the role they’re in, and so they seek a different role that could do that.

And that was the surprising moment, I suppose, for me in 2009 when I saw Bob Moesta, who worked with Clay on the protocols behind Jobs to Be Done, do one of his investigative journalistic interviews of a consumer who bought a product to understand the causation behind why that person had bought that product, what job they’d hired that product to do.

And I sat there thinking, “I gave some advice to somebody on their career this morning. I should have done this because then I would have been able to provide better advice.” And 15 years later, that’s what we’ve done over and over again, over a thousand times to collect the data for this book.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s cool. And when you say, with regard to the data in the book, any really striking themes, patterns, insights that just pop off the page for you?

Ethan Bernstein
So, as an academic, I expect there’d be huge variation in the causation. People, it seems, choose different jobs for a whole variety of reasons. When we actually took all these interviews, these 60-plus-minute interviews, coded them, all the rigorous research that keeps me fully employed, we actually found that the things that push people away from a particular role and pull them towards a particular role, that there’s actually a lot of commonalities.

We clustered it all down to 30 pushes and pulls, which is a remarkably small number if you think about it. Now, I will say, to me that’s a small number. To the outside world, 30 was too many. So as publishers said, “Wait, wait, 30, that’s too many for us to remember,” we then went back and looked at patterns across and found even more so that if you look at the patterns across those pushes and pulls, people are largely just on one of four quests.

And what stage of your career you’re in, what stage of your life you’re in, can have impact, but people will filter through each of those four quests over the course of probably their career. But understanding what quest you’re on then provides a person with the ability to make them more awesome at their job because that’s when the advice matters. You can give great advice to a person on a different quest and it can be bad advice because they’re on the wrong quest for that advice.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really resonating, and I’m chewing on this. Could you perhaps bring this to life for us with a particular person and a transformation that they saw as they were thinking through this stuff and coming up with fresh insights by thinking about it this way?

Ethan Bernstein
So, let me explain the four quests a little bit, and then I’ll do what Michael Horn, my co-author, made me do in the book, which is I put myself in the book, and I’ll write myself into the framework as well in a prior role, not in my current one, just in case the dean of Harvard Business School is listening to this podcast.

So, the four quests. One is, get out. These are people who genuinely find their energy drained by the role they’re in and find that the capabilities they want the organization to be drawing on aren’t the capabilities that is actually being asked for. So, they are both not happy with how their work is going and the what of their work. And for them, they’re just looking to reset both those dimensions, they’re trying to get out.

Think of the opposite dimension. If you’re trying to build on both things, you’re actually quite happy with the work environment and you’re happy with the capabilities you’re asked to deliver, you just want to take the next step. So, for some reason you’re ready for that next step and you want to take it, and the organizations of the world and the world in general is pretty much designed for the take-the-next steppers. That’s so-called progression in most organizations.

The off dimensions are more interesting. So, if I love what I’m asked to do, the what, and some of us are out there right now thinking, “I love being what I am, like, what I’m asked to do. I’m respected for the work I do, and so forth, but I hate the how. I don’t want to commute anymore because it wastes my time. I’m working too hard because I have a new family. I’m not working hard enough because I’m an empty nester.”

“The manager that’s now managing me because that person switched doesn’t respect me for the way I’m doing my work, and so they’re asking me to do work differently for their purposes, whatever the case might be. The work drains my energy more than drives it. And so, I want to reset the how, I want to regain control.”

The people who, on the other hand, love the work environment they’re in, everything about it, or most things about it, but they’re being asked to do things, that the reputation they’ve got, the work they’re actually being asked to deliver, is not drawing on the capabilities they either thought that they have or want to have, those people are trying to regain alignment. And so, once upon a time, Pete, I was a consultant.

Pete Mockaitis
Me too.

Ethan Bernstein
I thought we might have that in common. And I had been asked, at a firm I loved, I really actually, I loved the job, and I had been asked to step in for somebody who’d left a project midstream, and it was a restructuring project. And I stepped in, we delivered the product to the client, we delivered the project, all was good, and then another such project came along, and because they needed someone with that expertise in the local office, they asked me if I would do it, and I said, “Okay.” I mean, I was still at the stage of my career where I was like, “Sure, of course, I’m happy to help where I can.”

So, now I had two projects in restructuring under my belt, and we all know that restructuring projects oftentimes involve certain amounts of layoffs, and so that was something I was, apparently, getting good at. So, when the third time around, right, a client came to ask for this and wanted the same team that had done the previous projects, I got called and brought into the conversation with the client even before the project began, and was introduced as the expert on that.

And that was the moment I knew I needed to regain alignment because that had never been my intention. And this happens to a lot of people on project-based work and other work. You just develop a reputation and expertise that wasn’t what you wanted to do, and you love the how, but the what? And that’s how I ended up at the Harvard Business School doing a doctoral program.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, I can’t help but chuckle, here we are, former consultants, and we find ourselves discussing yet another 2×2 matrix. We can’t help ourselves.

Ethan Bernstein
If it weren’t an actual 2×2, it would have to be a 2×2 in the sky that we would be seeing in our own imaginations. But yes, and I will be clear though, this is not categorical as a 2×2 typically is.

So, get out, take the next step, regain control, regain alignment. These are like poles on a map – north, south, east, and west. There’s a lot of space between the North Pole and the South Pole. There’s a lot of space between regain alignment and regain control, and people are in that space. So, these are just likelihoods.

In fact, we offer an assessment based on the pushes and pulls so people can try to figure out where they might be on the quests using an assessment at JobMoves.com. It’s available for free. But the assessment will just give you likelihoods and then you ultimately have to pick based on those likelihoods.

This is not about telling you what you are. This is about helping you be more aware of where the pushes and pulls are so you can understand if those forces are aligning enough that they overcome the habits of the present and the anxieties, the new solution that might keep us in our role feeling stuck, maybe silently quitting, I don’t know quiet quitting, I don’t know, but it’s understanding the alignment that might be drawing us to something new.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s handy. So, we can think about things in terms of “Do we have a fit on the what side and on the how side?” You’ve got a juicy teaser, I can’t resist, there’s a mindset shift that helps us love instead of regret a new job. Is this it or is there another one you want to unpack for us?

Ethan Bernstein
So, that’s the broad one. So, if Clay’s frustration was around new products that didn’t get sold, my frustration is around people who disrupt their lives, sometimes their family, certainly their career trajectories, in order to take a new role only to find, six to twelve months later, they’re unhappy with it, which, if you just asked a room, “What’s the fastest you’ve ever gone from taking a new job to knowing it wasn’t right for you,” over three-quarters typically say between a month and a year.

That’s my frustration. And that’s not leading anybody into a good place. It is causing us a huge amount of disruption and it’s an indication, I think, of a process that’s broken. And so, my goal here is to try and help people do that better.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, I’m curious then, on the outside looking in, it could be a little bit tricky to know, “What’s my experience going to feel like in that month to year in which I go, ‘Uh-oh, oopsies.’” Do you have any pro tips in terms of, like, top research methodologies or questions to ask or steps to take to prevent this regret?

Ethan Bernstein
So, let me offer you a few a few thoughts from the book and from our research and from my course “Developing Yourself as a Leader,”

So first, I think having the pushes and pulls is helpful. That list, you ask somebody, “How do you do it? How are you feeling about this job?” they have no idea how to answer. You give people a list of 30 items and ask which ones are operational for them, it’s much easier. It does prime them, but given the data, suggests that most of those are going to be covering what people are feeling, it’s just an easier place to start with a menu as opposed to start with a blank slate.

Then, once you’ve got a sense of your quest, you know which dimension you’re on and where that likely is, then you start asking yourself the question, “Okay, so what drives my energy and what drains it?” And this is, again, not about attributes. It’s not about the granite countertop and the open kitchen. These are experiences. In the job world, those are titles.

Titles have a huge return to ego, and you’ve got to get a better one. Those return, that return does not last long. What you really want, actually, is to think about what you’re going to do, not what you’re going to be. That has a much longer life cycle in terms of its return to you.

On the capability side, similarly, we talk about strengths and weaknesses. I’m sure, Pete, when I talk about strengths and weaknesses to you, you have a sense actually, those are sort of ingrained in you, what we’d say their trait instead of state. Instead, think of something like a balance sheet that describes you in the current moment in time. Just like a company, you have assets, things that are acquired by you at material cost, that you are hoping will deliver future value in your career, acquired, by the way, and funded by liabilities, usually the expenditure of time, effort, and potentially money.

Those assets depreciate over time. If they depreciate without you replenishing them, thinking about the next role, you’re not staying relevant. So, you can think about a much more deliberate approach to building and keeping, maintaining, your capabilities, given the change of the world around you, than strengths and weaknesses really gives you permission for.

And all of that begins to then shape up what it is you’re hoping to achieve. Once you’ve done that, I have another set of five steps after that. So, we’ve gone through steps one through four, five steps of advice for how you actually get what you’re looking for.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you give us a few examples of assets to help shake off static strengths, weaknesses kind of a framing we might be operating with?

Ethan Bernstein
When I do this with my students, a couple typically show up routinely. There are skills out there, hard skills, technical skills. If you’re a software engineer, then your degree of knowledge about a particular platform of engineering, that’s an asset. These platforms, these languages change. That’s something you need to reinvest in if you want to stay relevant. And there are many other kinds of technical. For market analysts, your knowledge of the market, any one of these pieces of technical knowledge, that’s certainly an asset.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m thinking about marketing too. It’s sort of, like, things are constantly changing in terms of, like, just the rules for Google ads or Facebook ads. And then it’s like, “Oh, yeah. Well, that strategy worked three years ago, but, oh, you’re doing that now? Oh, wow, that’s really out of date.” And it’s funny, these, it seems like some skills have a short shelf life and some almost seem eternal.

Ethan Bernstein
There are some evergreen skills, but there aren’t very many. We want there to be more than there actually are, I think. And so, most technical skills today depreciate much faster than they used to. So Boris Groysberg, who once upon a time, he’s a faculty member here on the Business School’s faculty. Boris explained to me this exercise, and his favorite example is mechanics, an auto mechanic.

An auto mechanic of the 1960s, you learned a car, you leverage that for 20 years. You learn a car in 2020, 2024, how long does that really last? Things are changing much faster, especially the degree to which it’s about coding and not about the actual mechanical skills. It’s different. It’s changing. And part of the reason people are so so desperate for progress, on a daily or weekly or monthly basis, is because they’re just trying to remain relevant. So that’s one, technical skills.

Another one that comes up frequently? Relationships. Networks. Network might seem evergreen. My friends will always be my friends. My contacts will always be my contacts. Weak ties will remain weak ties. That’s, oftentimes, the way we find information. Not by the strong ties, not the people that we’re closest to, but the friends of friends, if you will.

And yet, really think about it. If you don’t invest in those relationships, how long do they actually last? Maybe a couple years? Maybe you can go back to someone five years, ten years down the line and say, “Hey, remember those great times we had? By the way, I’m looking for a job. Do you know any interesting openings?” But a network depreciates, too. Most things depreciate.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s heavy, and you’re right. We wish more stuff lasted longer, because just the way we wish our roof lasted longer. We didn’t have to spend the money to replace it as often. So, I would like your thought then, what does really, really last?

Ethan Bernstein
Well, my own view is actually what lasts is the constant effort we put into refreshing our assets. So, remaining relevant is a deliberate act, and the more deliberate you are, the better off you are on that capabilities dimension. Now, if you’re in a build, not a reset mode, you’re just trying to refresh what’s on there.

The good news for most of us, though, who are oftentimes finding ourselves on the reset capabilities front, where we’re trying to, for example, regain alignment, if all assets do depreciate over some amount of time, there’s actually quite a bit of flexibility as long as you anticipate it. And so, our advice, our core advice, is not to go for the evergreen product, but instead to think about where you want to be in five years’ time.

Worry a little bit less about your income statement, if you will, today, and a little bit more about your balance sheet tomorrow, because that’s what’s likely to be able to influence what you’re going to be considered for on the next job.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a general approach by which we attempt to deduce, “Okay, what assets do I need in the future? And how shall I prioritize the cultivation of them?”

Ethan Bernstein
So, we find that most people enter a move, either because of pushes or because of pulls, either they’re being pushed away from something, or they’re being pulled towards something. It’s an opportunity that looks too good not to consider, or, “I’m frustrated with my current situation.” Whichever one you enter in, the next step is to think about the other side of it. What are you leaving behind? What might draw you in?

We have not written a book about finding your dream job because we don’t believe in dream jobs, we believe in good tradeoffs. So, we encourage people to not answer the question, “What do you want to do next?” We, instead, ask people to answer the question, “What are three to five prototypes of what you might want to do next, given the quest you’re on?” It’s a much easier question for people to answer. And the more contrast you create across those prototypes, the more contrast creates meaning for you and you understand the relative nature of these things.

And that conversation then, combined with your energy drivers and drains of past jobs and the capabilities you have and the balance sheet you might have or might not have and want to build, help you begin to think about how to prioritize certain tradeoffs over others for your next move. So, it is about choosing, not about designing from scratch.

This is not just a two-by-two or pie in the sky, but it is about choosing wisely based on your particular progress, the kind of progress you want to make. Because what we saw in The Great Resignation, when people want to make a certain kind of progress and the world offers them progression that doesn’t match, what do they do? They leave.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, when you say three to five prototypes, could you articulate, like, “Here’s what I mean by a prototype, like how someone might articulate that sketch?”

Ethan Bernstein
It’s three to five versions of a job you might want to have. Just like if you’re a new product developer, it’s three to five versions of the product you think that people might want to buy. I’m not going to ask you, Pete, what you’re looking to do next, but…

Pete Mockaitis
I might do this until I die. We’ll see.

Ethan Bernstein
But maybe there’s a version of this. Maybe there’s another podcast around the corner. What does that look like? How is it that you would change this or change that? Would it be within an organization? Would it be outside an organization? A side gig? Is it a set of side gigs? Is it a part of my portfolio? What dimensions could I change? Could I change geography? Could I change role like a functional role? Could I change any one of a number of aspects of this?

If I took the core central quest that I’m on, let’s say it is regain alignment, and wanted to change some of the capabilities I’m being asked to do, okay, what are the three to five versions of that role I could imagine that would allow me to do that, that would still take into account the fact that I like the way my energy is driven currently by the job?

Those pushes and pulls don’t exist for me. And also took into account the capabilities I might want to keep, I might want to build on, so that I’m just focused on changing the dimensions that would allow me to achieve what I’m trying to achieve in the next round.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I think I hear the conceptual idea of what you mean by a prototype. Could you now say, for yourself or someone, students that you’ve encountered recently, how they would articulate all of that in a conversation?

Ethan Bernstein
So, here’s an example. One story in the book is of somebody who believed the next job she wanted to have involved working with scientists and travel. So, a travel coordinator at a top scientific magazine sounded great, until she discovered that actually a travel coordinator neither works with a scientist nor travels. But the job description sounded fantastic. The party material was great, but what she was going to do wasn’t what she ultimately wanted to do.

But that’s where the prototypes come in, so that would be one potential prototype. And you can go out there and find these roles, if you need to, but most of us have the ability, especially if we have one or two or three jobs in the world, to get a sense for, “Okay, so based on what I’ve done, which are the pieces I keep, which are the pieces I don’t?” But that’s an example of it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I like that. I like that a lot. And I think, so often folks get the wrong idea about a job from the outside. And I’m thinking about sort of early career or picking majors, and our folks will say, “I’m going to go to law school because I like arguing, and in the courtroom, I could do that.” And so, hopefully, they’ll learn pretty early in the research process that, “Well, hey, most of the work of a lawyer is not that most of the time, and you’re mostly researching stuff and writing stuff and talking about why this paragraph or clause needs to go or be adjusted in such a fashion. So, you want to know that earlier rather than later.”

Ethan Bernstein
And once you’ve specified five prototypes, you would do what any new product developer would do. You’d go ask people about them. So, you can actually learn before switching if you have the material to go have those conversations, and we’re not talking about just people talk about informational interviews. That is part of this.

But you’re not actually looking for a person’s job, or a job like theirs. You’re actually looking to truly understand that lawyer, “What does she do on a daily basis? Does it match this prototype or not?” Because if it doesn’t, then you’ve been sold a bill of goods by the world that doesn’t actually exist, and it’s good to know now before you switch than after you switch and discover that you’re one of those people who, one month to 12 months in, took a role that you didn’t want to take.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Thank you. Okay. Well, you say we got nine steps, and you say we’ve covered some steps and there’s more to be covered. Just so we get it on the record, could you enumerate, “Step one is this. Step two is that”?

Ethan Bernstein
So, nine steps, and you’ll notice in the book, it looks like a little bit of a Chutes and Ladders view. But step one, we’ve talked about, understanding the pushes and pulls. Once you’ve understood the pushes and pulls, we’re going to try to start putting those on the dimensions. So, step two is understanding the energy drain and drivers of prior jobs, and then the capabilities, doing a balance sheet exercise, a career balance sheet exercise, step three.

Step four, then, identify your quest. It doesn’t have to be exactly right, but at least getting an initial sense of what your quest might be. You can always go back and revisit these later. Step five, then you develop those prototypes, those three to five prototypes, because it’s a much easier answer than what do you want to do, to say what are the three to five things you might consider doing.

Step six, to pick the prototype. Here’s where we look at those priorities that you’ve made, the decisions you’ve made in the past, what you prioritize in your energy drivers and drains, what capabilities you might want to focus on and see if that can inform us to go towards at least one prototype, maybe two. Then check those prototypes against real jobs out there to ensure that these prototypes are not just dream jobs, they’re trade-offs, they’re ways of deciding on things that actually exist and matching them to those real opportunities.

So, now you’ve been through seven steps. At some point, someone is going to ask you to describe those seven steps so that they can have a compelling reason to hire you, and that’s step eight, to create your story spine. We’re not talking about an elevator pitch. Part of what we’re trying to do is encourage people not to sell themselves into a job that’s trying to sell them something about the organization, but instead go for match, go for fit.

So, instead of an elevator pitch, which is typically a sales pitch, we’re asking people to use the Pixar Story Spine to come up with the progression, the narrative, of how you ended up deciding that this is what you needed to do next and be able to do that quickly in short order. And only then, step nine, is to apply for jobs.

You only actually apply for those jobs once you have all those pieces because, especially in a talent environment like today, if you’re one of a hundred, you might have trouble finding the job. If you’re one of three, and you’re really compelling about the reasons why you’re one of three, and it’s a great fit, you’re much more likely to be successful in making that move.

And if we are, indeed, in a world, which we seem to be in, in which people will move jobs, that could be internal or external, once every four years on average, more frequently for certain generations, people make progress by moving. And if you’re going to do that, you want to make as much progress as you can within a single move.

Pete Mockaitis
And can you   a picture for what a one in a hundred candidate sounds like versus a one in three candidate?

Ethan Bernstein
So, I am the person around here who spends a lot of time thinking about HR. So, here you get to hear my pet peeve first.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Ethan Bernstein
Job descriptions. Job descriptions these days have everything packed into them, and there’s a good reason for that. You mentioned lawyers earlier, Pete. Lawyers want us to be able to hire anyone so they put everything they can into the job description. And what it ends up sounding like, you’ve seen some of these, right, “Entry-level job. Five years of working experience required.” It’s just, no one can fit into a job description these days because it looks like they’re asking for unicorns.

So, what do we do as individuals in the workplace who want that job? We take our resume, we put it all in there, we pack everything we can into it so that we can be the superheroes who will fill that role. So, we’ve got a matching process between superheroes and job descriptions. It’s not doing anyone any good to find fit. It’s just two people trying to sell each other on a fit. Sales is not fit.

So, that’s what the one in a hundred looks like. You’re trying to convince somebody that you’re better than the other 99 on the dimensions you’ve read about in the job description using the lines of your resume. The one in the three? That’s the person who doesn’t just have the resume with all the stuff in the words, but actually can explain the spaces in between the roles, can talk about the trajectory.

It doesn’t have to be a line. It can be a zigzag. Most of us zigzag all the time. That’s how we make progress. If it looked like a straight line, then it’s just progression, which is fine, but most of us don’t look like that, and we haven’t written a book for people who are on a progression because they know where they’re going next. That’s the one in three, though.

The one in three is the person who actually has an explanation, a story spine that makes sense for the zig and the zag, that makes the person who you’re talking to convinced that actually this is the right role for you because you will grow in the role and the role will grow with you, and the organization and the individual will both benefit.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. So, we’ve got the story, the context, the whole picture, it fits together, and there seems to be a real deep congruence or rightness about it. That’s cool. I want to follow up on what you said about the lawyers. The lawyers want the job descriptions to sound like anyone could do them. Could you expand on that? What’s this behind the scenes for us that we should be aware of?

Ethan Bernstein
Oh, so for years, organizations have structured job descriptions to allow the hiring manager as much flexibility as she or he wants to hire the person they ultimately find for the role.

Pete Mockaitis
In order to protect them in the event of a liability situation, lawsuit.

Ethan Bernstein
Right. Exactly. Well, I don’t know if it’s just to protect them, to ensure that they can say “This person fits within the job description that we ultimately found.” I’m not an employment lawyer so I’m not going as far as pretending to be one. My law degree did not take me that far. But there is a degree to which it permits them flexibility as a hiring manager, because there’s just enough in there that anyone could fit the job description.

That’s kind of the problem, isn’t it? Anyone can fit the job description. We actually suggest shadow job descriptions that the manager can share so that people understand what the role actually does require as opposed to what could potentially be the shape and form of the job.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Well, it’s funny, this actually never occurred to me that the job descriptions are formulated with an intention other than clearly describing the job and who might flourish within it. Call me naive, Ethan.

Ethan Bernstein
Well, I’ll tell you, I, oftentimes, when I’m talking with people about this, will ask a poll question about how much jobs descriptions describe the work that people are ultimately doing in their roles. Some people come out in the 80 to 100 percent, but it’s a small number. Most of the time, most of what we’re actually doing, we don’t remember being in our job description, or we don’t think our job description really prepared us for.

And that’s because, if you track the history of job descriptions, where they came from and how they’ve developed, they really weren’t necessarily designed to do that over time. They’re designed to do something else. They’re designed to provide the hiring manager with the flexibility she needs in order to hire the people that she wants to hire.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, inside scoop, behind the scenes. Thank you. Well, let’s say that we’ve gone through a lot of these steps and it’s like, “Okay, wow. This is really clear. I need to make a change, and this is sort of what it looks like, and, boy, we’ve got an opportunity that looks appealing, and maybe we’re going to apply,” but there’s some just emotional stuff in terms of there’s some fears, some anxieties, there’s the devil you know. How do you advise folks when their head says, “Yeah, we got to get out of here and go in a direction like this,” but internally they’re feeling fear, anxiety, and really not sure about taking the steps, making the leap?

Ethan Bernstein
Development is a social process, we know that. So, therefore, is moving. If you’re not actively talking to people about your development goals, ideally people at work, then you’re going to end up in a situation just like you described, “I’ve gotten eight steps in and now I’m feeling very anxious because what I have in my mind and what the world around me thinks of me, we’re on two different wavelengths at this point.”

So, every step, of that nine steps, for us, is social. The pushes and pulls, we actually have a chapter in the book for mentors to be able to train up on how to do that job, that interview. What Bob Moesta, our co-author, developed with Clay in terms of the protocols for conducting an interview on Jobs to be Done, and then they do it together.

Each step, actually, involves other people. That should have a huge impact on reducing the fear and anxiety you’re talking about before it becomes overwhelming, before it becomes such a block that people simply don’t move forward. It is counterintuitive because most of the time, we don’t want to, don’t feel comfortable talking about this at work, but maybe that’s because we haven’t had a common language, we haven’t had a common framework, we haven’t had, Pete, the two-by-two.

But, more importantly, we haven’t had a process that we could bring to the table, that individuals could bring to the table, to make use of the assets, the people around them, because my field has been saying for decades. “Lead your self-development, this is great. It gives you all the flexibility in the world.” We were talking about this, to create your own journey, and we just haven’t given people the advice and the means for doing it. If we do, maybe they’d be more comfortable making this a social process.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Ethan, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention, top do’s and/or don’ts, before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Ethan Bernstein
Don’t talk about what you’re going to be. Talk about what you’re going to do. Don’t focus on strengths and weaknesses. Think about your assets and liabilities instead. Don’t do this alone. Be social in the process. I know it sounds very counterintuitive, doesn’t it, based on how people typically do this.

But I guess I would conclude with don’t keep expecting more from each other. So, this is a conversation, ultimately, in most organizations between the individual, the manager, and HR. Each of those parties has had a bit of a history for pointing the finger somewhere else. HR says, “Managers don’t have time.” Managers say, “I don’t know what the employee wants.” Employee says, “No one wants to listen to me.” This has to be a joint endeavor.

And so, top do? Don’t keep this a secret. People are very open, typically, to understanding what you’re trying to achieve. And the less you say as an individual, the more people think that what you’re needing in terms of progress is big rather than small. Whereas most people, when you really dive down, are just looking for little bits of progress over periods of time.

As a manager, don’t ignore the fact that we’ve given you 30 pushes and pulls. We’ve given you the reasons why employees quit. Many employees quit. So why not use those to have a conversation about which might be operating or not operating with the people that you’re working with, and see if you can’t start a conversation which people leaders are aware of how their individuals are feeling on those dimensions that matter for making them potentially move?

And then HR? Track it all. Because quests do change over time, but they don’t change over days. So, if you have a sense for what people are trying to achieve, you’re much more likely to both make them productive, as opposed to quiet quitters, and you’re much more likely to retain them than using the tools that we’ve been using forever, which include things like, frankly, money. Money’s great. Everybody would like more money. Everybody would like a better work life.

Everyone would like all these things, except when you give it to people, we, it affects us for a little while, and not so much after that, because in the end, we each have our own definition of progress. And if you’re not aware of what that is, either as the individual, the manager, or the HR person, you’re not actually customizing the employee experience to the person who you’re trying to keep.

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

Ethan Bernstein
I’m going to go to a Mark Twain quote, given where I am in the world. “The two most important days in your life are the day you were born and the day you find out why.” And every time I hear that quote, I’d love to ask him a question, “What on earth am I supposed to do in between?” The answer is, make progress. And, hopefully, some of this advice helps everyone out there not just be awesome at their job but make progress in it as well.

Pete Mockaitis
A favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Ethan Bernstein
Chalk. Believe it or not, at the Harvard Business School, we still have chalkboards. You know why?

Pete Mockaitis
Tell me.

Ethan Bernstein
As opposed to whiteboards, this is at least my understanding of it, at least as opposed to whiteboards, when you write with chalk on the board, people hear it. You’re actually working with the students to make progress together in the classroom. And that’s why I love chalk because the sound, and the work together, putting their comments on the board, because I’m not writing my own thoughts, I’m writing theirs, goes from blank slate at minute zero to full board at minute 80, structured in a way that we actually understand how we’ve all contributed actively to the conversation and the progress we’ve made together.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. That’s poetic. Yeah. And a favorite habit?

Ethan Bernstein
I have a six-year-old and a 12-year-old. My favorite habit is reading to them every night.

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

Ethan Bernstein
Maybe I can answer that question and anticipate your question about my favorite book at the same time. I, oftentimes, will end my course with a children’s book that I then rewrite for the lessons of the course. It does turn out, though, you don’t need to rewrite that much. Yes, pull out the red pen, cross out some lines here and there, make it more focus to the course, but you can learn a lot from a book like Pooh’s Instruction Book.

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

Ethan Bernstein
I’m at e@hbs.edu, just the letter E.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s really cool. That’s one of the shortest email addresses I’ve ever encountered. Beautiful.

Ethan Bernstein

Seven characters without the period and the @ sign, yep.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Ethan Bernstein

Think about the next one now.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Ethan, this is fun. I wish you much lovely progress.

Ethan Bernstein

Thank you, Pete. This has been fun. I really appreciate the questions.

1007: The Overachiever’s Guide to Finding More Fulfillment at Work with Megan Hellerer

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Megan Hellerer reveals the simple shifts that make your career and life feel more meaningful.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why many overachievers feel underfulfilled 
  2. The mindset that leads to fit and fulfillment 
  3. The key questions to ask before any decision 

About Megan 

Megan Hellerer is a career coach and the author of DIRECTIONAL LIVING: A Transformational Guide to Fulfillment in Work and Life. She has led hundreds of women, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to transform their lives by transforming their careers. After checking all the traditional boxes of success—graduating at the top of her class from Stanford University and spending eight years as a Google executive—and still deeply unhappy, she quit her great-on-paper job with no plan. Now her mission is to provide others with the support and guidance that she needed when she herself was struggling.

Resources Mentioned

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Megan Hellerer Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Megan, welcome!

Megan Hellerer
Pete, it’s so good to be here today. Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to have you and discuss some of the insights from your book, Directional Living. And I would like to hear a story about a transformed client, but it sounds like, in many ways, your own story is like the picture-perfect textbook case for what we’re talking about here. Could you tell it to us?

Megan Hellerer

Absolutely, yeah. I consider myself my own first guinea pig. All of this grew out of my own need for solutions, for answers. And so, my story is I was what I now have come to call an under-fulfilled overachiever, which is someone who has checked all the boxes, done all the right things, did everything they were supposed to do, and really built this great on-paper life that did not feel so great inside.

And, for me, that looked like, you know, getting straight A’s in high school, captain and president of all the things, going on to Stanford, graduating at the top of my class, starting at Google almost immediately after I graduated, and dutifully climbing the ladder for eight years there, and getting a bunch of different promotions, and getting to work on cool stuff, and be exposed to a lot of interesting ideas.

And, in the meantime, I was having near-daily panic attacks, I was deeply depressed, and was struggling really even to get to work every day. I was just miserable. And I should say this wasn’t always how I was. My mental health started suffering in my time at Google, and yet I couldn’t quite connect it to the fact that I was unhappy at my work, and maybe it wasn’t the best fit for me. I felt so ashamed of the fact that I had this dream job that everybody would want, and what was so wrong with me that I couldn’t be happy or feel like a job was just a job or find fulfillment in this.

And, eventually, I ended up quitting my job with no plan, simply because I really could not do it anymore. And through that process of simply trying to help myself, I sought out many resources and teachers and mentors and programs, and nothing was quite helping me find a new approach or new way of thinking about my work and my career.

And through that process, I ended up taking a coaching training course, simply in an effort to help myself, but also thinking that it might help me when I was back in corporate land, mentoring and managing teams again, and I just loved the way that coaching worked, the frameworks around it. I did not intend for it to be a career. I was extremely skeptical and dubious of coaching as a career. I very much had a lot of ego involved where I was, like, “Who goes to Stanford and becomes a coach? That’s not a thing,” and didn’t really think I could also have an income from that.

But I kept sort of going through the process, and, in order to get certified, which I did just because I figured “Why not? I’m already here,” I had to coach, get a certain number of paid hours of coaching and reached out to some friends of friends. And what happened is that their lives started to change. My life started to change through helping them change their lives. They started referring people to me and before I knew it, before I even had the intention of having a coaching practice, I had a full roster of clients.

And sort of still dragging my feet, I decided it was something that I needed to, I couldn’t not try. And fast forward 10 years later, I’ve now been working with helping under-fulfilled overachievers find fulfillment and developed a methodology and a framework for thinking about this and looking at this, that I realized also applies beyond under-fulfilled overachievers, and now have had the great fortune and joy of getting to write a book about it as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s so cool. Well, I want to dig into so many little tidbits here. First, my own curiosity, which coaching certification body?

Megan Hellerer
Coaching Training Institute, CTI. I think they might have changed to Coactive Training Institute.

Pete Mockaitis
jI was going to say, I don’t know a ton about the coaching landscape but I did do the fundamentals course with the Coactive folks. And it seems like the people in the know often say “This is what’s up.”

Megan Hellerer
Yeah, that was the first course that I took was the fundamentals, and then, for the sake of brevity, I left this out of it. But I took that and then I didn’t go back, you know, there’s many other series. I didn’t go back for, like, three months because I was, like, “This is too much fun. This can’t be serious work because work has to be hard and serious, and, therefore, this is a waste of my time because it’s not going to lead me to where I want to go in my career,” which was a whole other mistake or misguided belief. And, eventually, I couldn’t stop thinking about it and went back and completed it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then let’s back it up a little bit. The panic attacks and the deeply depressed and the miserable situation at Google, were these in your life prior to Google, like, as you were crushing it at Stanford, etc.?

Megan Hellerer
No. So, I think that’s a key part of the story is that I did not struggle with mental health previously. I should say, I had high-functioning anxiety, to some extent, but it wasn’t debilitating. It wasn’t getting in the way of the way I was living my life. I had pretty decent coping mechanisms. And so, it really escalated majorly at Google.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, now you’ve done a lot of work and a lot of reflection, and can you identify, is it your assertion that it was the primary driver of some of these mental health challenges, was the mismatch of you and that role there?

Megan Hellerer
Yes, actually. So, I often refer to it as the fulfillment ache, which is like the distance between who you are actually and how you’re showing up in the world. And when that chasm gets too big for too long, this sort of existential depression, anxiety, struggles develop in that gap. So, again, it really does become physically, viscerally painful to live that way.

And so, I think it was a misalignment of my life, in general, Google being a very big piece of it, given how much time I was spending there and how maybe unbalanced my life was. But I don’t think my relationship was a good match for me at the time. I don’t think the city I was living in was a good match for me. And so, there was, holistically, it was the misalignment of my life but that was a major piece of it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, since we’re talking about being awesome at jobs here, at How to be Awesome at Your Job, I’m curious, can you identify the particular pieces of mismatch within Google? Because I would imagine, and you correct me if I’m wrong, that there may well be some roles inside the vast breadth that is this company, in which you might be delighted. Do you think that’s the case, or, no, no, there were a few fundamental things that just weren’t working for you?

Megan Hellerer
That one might be delighted in, or that I personally might be delighted in?

Pete Mockaitis
Ah, sorry, you, Megan, would be delighted in.

Megan Hellerer
Yes, because I was going to say, this is not an anti-Google thing, right? Like, there are many people for whom working at Google in whatever role they’re in, and I’ve coached people into Google or supported people’s decisions to be, to stay at, or join Google or other tech companies and all of that, so this isn’t anti-Google or anti-corporate. For me, personally, I do not think there is a role at Google. Never say never, but as far as I can tell, I do not think there’s a role at Google that would be aligned for me.

So, there are a few broader things, like environment, like I just don’t think I’m meant to be in, like, an open floor layout plan. Like, I’m very pretty introverted, and I like to do deep focus work separately from people. So, there are things like that, that I think were never a good match for me and really drained my energy.

Well, I love working from home, which I think is another thing, like, I am most creative and most effective from, like, five to nine in the morning, and that’s when I do my best writing, my best deep thought work. And so, it’s hard to do that when you are keeping corporate hours.

I mean, you can still do that, but then you’re spending four extra hours with your butt in the seat to demonstrate that you’re there in the office. You don’t have a lot of control. Like, I only take meetings at certain days and certain times in order because that’s like the best flow and efficiency for me. All of these things, not Google specifically, but are difficult in corporate land.

I also really like working for myself, as in being my own boss, and kind of, I don’t know, directing the flow of things and deciding what the priorities are, and I really like to be able to be nimble and make quick decisions, like hiring, firing, joining, a lot of testing and learning.

And I found that it was very, draining to have to support decisions and strategies that I really didn’t agree with because that’s the nature of the game. You can voice your opinion, leadership makes the decision, and then it’s your job to enact those things. I also was working on, like, sales and partnership side of things. But living and dying by the spreadsheets of revenue, and that are kind of arbitrary things were really difficult for me, and kind of just, like, the death by PowerPoint, I just like couldn’t. There was all the meetings about meetings and meetings, and I really, clearly, I need to go to more therapy for this.

I really had a hard time with things that felt inefficient or ineffective. And that stuff really grated at me. I also think that’s part of why I was good at my job there, is because I have an eye for scale and operations, and I was able to offer ways that we could improve things, but that isn’t always taken into consideration.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, well, Megan, I’m relating to this so much, and I love how you’ve teased out some of the very specifics. Like, based on who you are, how you roll, the means by which you operate and exist in this world, were not fitting there with regard to the bureaucracy, you wanted to do more testing and learning, the open floor plan was tricky, supporting things that you weren’t the boss of, making the decisions on, living and dying by spreadsheet revenue, things that felt inefficient.

And it’s funny, I can really relate to so much of this because I thought I had a dream job at Bain & Company and I learned a lot of stuff, and the people were phenomenal, and there was not a jerk or an idiot anywhere to be found there, in my experience, and some cases were really cool for me, and some really weren’t.

And that was really intriguing how we see, “Oh, well, some magazines say this is the best place to work,” Bain or Google, “And yet it’s not the best place for me to work. Huh.” And that’s natural for you to think, “Oh, well, what’s wrong with me? If the world says these are the best places to work, and I’m not happy there, maybe my happiness functioning is just broke.”

Megan Hellerer
Yep, exactly. And I think that gets to the point of there is no objectively great jobs or objectively perfect. It’s only good or right for you. And I will say that in terms of “Would there be a job at Google that would be a good fit for me?” I made many tweaks and shifts in the eight years there to try to make it work. This wasn’t like I did one thing the whole time and then I was like, “Hm, I’m done.”

Like, I changed teams, I changed roles, I changed locations, I changed organizations, I changed products, I changed, like, every managers, seating arrangements, like pretty much every tweak you could make, I made. And when I finally, in sort of the last role, was the thing that I was like, “This is my last hypothesis of what would make this work.” And my idea was, if I was working on consumer-facing products instead of ad-oriented or enterprise or some sort of products, like maybe then if I was working directly with the end consumer that I would care more about the impact I was having.

And even then, and we were working on Google Wallet at the time, like tap and pay, which was brand new and, like, such a revelation and was, like, novel and interesting, and as a consumer I was excited about it, and I still was not excited about doing the work involved in that and the day to day of what that actually felt like and the experience of it, really made it clear for me. And then I think working, I’d been working my butt off for this promotion. I really was like working so hard for so long and, whatever, doing all the things.

And then I got it, I got the promotion, and I felt nothing. In fact, I felt emptier, I was like, “What am I working for now?” And also, nothing actually changes. It’s the same job, which is like maybe more responsibility, maybe a slight pay increase, higher expectations, and now I just work for another promotion? And there was no one ahead of me that I could see, that I was like, “Oh, I actually really want that.”

And it just dawned on me, like, “Who am I doing this for?” And I think those were some of the moments where I couldn’t see somewhere that I truly wanted to get to, or where anything was going to feel different after having made all of those adjustments that I could think of.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, thank you. And I like the word “hypothesis” there. You were testing each of these things, and it sounds like that’s kind of like a fundamental means by which you cracked the code on this, in terms of “What’s going to do it? Well, let’s see. Maybe it’s this. Let’s try it. Oh, I guess that wasn’t it.” And then, “Oh, this coaching thing is really awesome. Huh, how surprising. Well, maybe let’s do a little more of that, see how that goes.” So, that seems to be one thread there.

Could you share what are kind of the fundamental principles you recommend people keep in mind? If folks are resonating, like, “Oh, this is haunting. Megan is like telling my story,” how would you recommend people start thinking about this thing all the wiser?

Megan Hellerer
I love that you brought up hypothesis because I often talk about it as sort of the scientific method for life, where our job is not to know the answer or to figure out the answer. We’re meant to sit there and be like, “Okay, what am I meant to do with my life? Let me think really hard about this.” We need to live into those things. We need to experiment.

So, have a hypothesis. That’s great. And think, “Okay, I think I want to go into this field,” or, “Coaching seems more interesting, or something to do with counseling and advising and consulting. That seems like a better direction for me.” And then the key thing, is that when you’re doing an experiment in scientific method, the goal is not to prove yourself right. The goal is not to prove the hypothesis right. It’s to find the truth.

And so, what often happens is we pick, in my language, a destination, and say, instead of a hypothesis, “I wonder if this is the right thing for me,” we say, “This is the thing I’m going to achieve. I’m going to become CEO by the time I retire,” and we get so attached to that goal as our failure or success, as opposed to testing and learning, that we don’t even realize somewhere along the way that that actually is not the truth, that’s not the results of the experiment, that’s not actually what we want. And so, when we get there, it doesn’t feel like what we thought it would. And that’s kind of where one of the biggest problems are.

So, to go to these core principles of what I call directional living, which is the first principle, which is focus on the direction, not the destination. And what I’ve found is that most of us who get stuck in our careers, and frankly in our lives, it’s because we focus on the destination. We are being outcome-oriented. We think we need to know exactly where we’re going before we start moving.

So, we think, “Okay, I want to be CEO in, however, many years. I’m going to reverse engineer my path in order to figure out exactly how I’m going to get there. And then I’m going to put on my blinders and I’m going to brute force, just make it happen because that’s what determination is,” and we miss out on so many opportunities and so much information about ourselves as we’re evolving and learning, and also the world as it’s evolving and learning.

And so, what we want to do instead is focus on the direction. And this is sort of the biggest place that we’ve been misled, I think, with traditional career guidance that says, like, have the five-year plan or the 10-year plan, and know exactly where you’re going. So, if you’re focusing on the direction, you’re focusing only on the single next directionally right step. That doesn’t mean, again, we don’t have an idea, a hypothesis of where we’re going.

So, if you imagine it’s a road trip, you might think, “Okay, I’m headed towards the West Coast,” which is different than, “I’m going to L.A. no matter what. No matter how many roadblocks there are, no matter how many detours, I am going to L.A.” to find out, when you get to L.A., that you actually don’t want to be in L.A., or that isn’t the best suited role or job or place for you.

So, instead we’re heading towards the West Coast and we’re allowing ourselves to launch and iterate, to use tech language, as we go. And that, I found, allows for so much more adjustment, flexibility, responsiveness, again, to our own selves and to the world around us, as all of these things are changing at a faster pace than they ever have before, and it allows us to evolve. So, that’s the first principle, focus on the direction, not the destination.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that. Thank you. And it’s intriguing, I loved when you said the word blinders, that resonated as the distinction in terms of directional versus destination. With the destination, we got the blinders, like, “Okay, just buckle down, grind, hustle, get her done.” But blinders, by their very definition, literally, I’m imagining a horse with the blinders on, it says, “You’re not looking around, you’re not observing, you’re not gathering the information.”

And yet, earlier in your story, you said, “I looked around and saw those in the elevated positions, those were also not what I wanted. Nobody was doing the thing that I wanted.” And I think that’s so huge, it’s like, “Are the blinders on or are the blinders off?” Because if they’re off and you’re observing, new stuff comes to light.

I’ve got a buddy who’s just on the cusp of the executive leagues at a major retailer. I want to keep it a little vague. And he’ll say the same thing, he’s like, “You know what? I thought I wanted to be a CEO and yet, when I observe CEOs and other executives, I don’t think that’s what I want. They actually seem to be working more than I’m working, and have more stress and responsibility and less time at home, and I’m already feeling like I’d like to spend more time at home with my two little ones and wife. So, I guess I don’t want to be a CEO?” And it was like quite a revelation for him.

Megan Hellerer
Yeah. So, I would say a couple things about that. So, in terms of your friend specifically, I love that he’s thinking about it that way. I would also caution that or I would question, if I were him, I would wonder if there is space to redesign what CEO looks like.

So, I wouldn’t just throw, like, “I don’t see any CEOs that look like the way I want to be a CEO, so I must not want to be a CEO.” Like, there may be room for him to design it in a way that works for him, especially because he’s going to be in a leadership position, or, again, he may say, “I don’t think I do want to be a CEO. What is directionally right for me? What’s like a one-degree turn? Is it something else in the C-suite?” Is it staying where he is for the next however many years? And then maybe he wants to be a CEO when he feels like it better suits his lifestyle at some later time.

There are many ways to look at this, but I love that he’s asking that question. And that is the opposite of blind ambition, in the sense that you aren’t looking around and you aren’t asking yourself the question. The moment you highlighted that I was recapping when I looked around and saw, “Oh, I actually don’t want this life that I have been working towards,” that was the moment my blinders came off. I wasn’t clear about that until those later moments. I was completely in the blinders, and this is where blind ambition comes from.

And a lot of people who come to me who are miserable, but have all the achievements and none of the fulfillment, all the success on paper, feel terrible, they’re like, “Maybe I’m just too ambitious. Is that the problem? Is ambition the problem?” And I feel like this question is coming up more and more. And the thing to me is that ambition is just the desire for impact, the desire for contribution, almost the desire for more life. There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, I think that’s a beautiful, wonderful thing, and it’s the type of ambition, the way and the how of the ambition.

So, the blind ambition is the destinational thinking, the pick the destination and decide no matter what you’re getting there. It’s sort of like the end justifies the means approach of navigating your career and your life. Aligned ambition is “Is this warmer? Is this colder?” launch and iterate, directionally right approach where you have an idea of where you’re heading, you’re not aimlessly wandering.

And maybe CEO has been a beacon for him, and that’s been incredibly effective as a direction, but it’s different than holding on so tightly in the blind ambition sense that it becomes a destination, and the only way that he can achieve success in his life.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Okay. So, that’s a core principle right there. We are going directionally as opposed to strictly to a precise destination. We are not having blinders. Rather, eyes wide open, observing what are we seeing, what are we thinking, what is this information sharing about our emerging evolving hypothesis. Is there another key principle you reckon to keep in mind?

Megan Hellerer

Yes, and we’ve touched on it a little bit, so perhaps we don’t need to go into as much depth about it, but it’s launch and iterate. So, take an experimental approach to your career and your life, and this is especially important for overachievers, or perfectionists, where it’s like either you failed or you succeeded.

But when you take an experimental approach, it can really help to sort of loosen up your ability to try things because if you learn, if you get any more information from whatever you’re doing, it’s been a success. So, if we’re redefining success as learning, as where the only mistake or the only failure is not taking action, this gives us so much more freedom and so much more permission to figure out what works for us. And that is actually what tends to build the most effective, fulfilling, impactful, meaningful careers and lives, is a willingness to launch and iterate, and test and learn.

Pete Mockaitis
And when we’re launching, iterating, testing, and learning, do you have any favorite approaches by which we could do this that might be lower risk than, “Quit your job, move across the country, and do the thing?”

Megan Hellerer
Well, that’s the whole beauty of it. With a launch and iterate approach, with a directional approach, you never have to take gigantic leaps because every single step is just taking the next directionally right action. And so, I actually discourage people from making any gigantic sweeping decisions. This should be a lot of small tweaks, and then when the big decisions get there, they feel like just the next decision as opposed to some gigantic leap of faith.

So, your job is only to move the plot forward. If you made progress that day, you’re good to go. So, again, it’s not about quitting your job, or getting divorced, or moving across the country, or selling all your things, or switching industries, or any of that. And often that is impulsive and running away from something as opposed to running towards something.

Obviously, I had to do that but not everyone has to blow up their life, and my hope is that, had I had these frameworks and tools, I might not have had to do that. I may have been launching and iterating and testing and learning a lot earlier.

So, yes, small decisions are important. And whenever you’re feeling stuck, I encourage people just to, “Where’s my curiosity leading me? What’s one thing I can do that feels, that makes this feel warmer as opposed to colder, that’s moving me in the right direction as opposed to the wrong direction?” And following just that sort of simple calibration, if you make enough right turns, you’re going to end up in the right place.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you give us some examples of tiny, hotter, colder decisions?

Megan Hellerer
So I recently moved Upstate New York. I guess it’s been about a year or two now, so not that recent. But I grew up in New York City, I, obviously, did a stint in California, but I was like, “I’m New York for life,” and really thought I was never going to leave, but I haven’t really given it much thought. I was never like, “Where am I going to spend my life?” It just was like, “This is where I am.”

And in the process of writing my book, I realized I really needed to give myself a DIY writing retreat. And so, I rented a cabin in Upstate New York and went there just to focus and write this book. And I ended up in this one place and I was blown away by how much I loved it and how different it was than what it was in my head, and also how differently I experienced it at this point in my life versus other points in my life.

So, I went home, went back to our normal life but I kept thinking about it. So, the next summer, we decided to rent a house for the summer up in the similar area and try out for the summer what it was like there. And, again, I was like, “Wow, I really love it here.” And then I started thinking, “What if I don’t leave? What if we actually live here?” And that felt like a complete revelation. But instead of getting rid of our apartment and buying a house Upstate, and just like making it happen immediately, I was like, “I just need to take one more directionally right step.”

So, I asked the person who we were renting the house from, you know, what her plans were, and she was actually like, “Well, I happen to not be coming back, so I would consider renting this to you long term,” which is actually a big deal because we didn’t want to buy because we wanted to test.

So, we ended up staying in this house and renting for a while longer, and just testing and learning, because there were many variables that we needed to figure out. My husband has a job in the city, so he’s a professor, and so he does need to be there a few days a week. What was that going to look like? And so, we did that for six months, see how it feels, and we loved it.

And so, then when it turned out that she was going to sell the house, we ended up finding another place, looking around and deciding, “Okay, what are we going to do?” And we found the most perfect home, and it happened to be right around the same time that we found out we were pregnant and we were going to have room for the baby, and so it all sort of, like, worked out. There was a lot of synchronicities involved.

So, that’s an example of how some people might be like, “I need to figure out where I want my permanent home to be,” versus, “Wow, I’m just noticing I really like being here. What if we tried this out for a few more months?” or whatever it is that you have the possibility of doing. So, that’s not a job example. That’s another life example, but that is kind of the framework you can think about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, no, I actually love that right there. And what’s fun is it’s just starting with that directional, as opposed to destinational, and blinders off approach. When you went on that writing retreat, if you had a different mindset, you might not have noticed at all that you liked being there, it’s like, “Got to get the pages. Got to get the pages. What’s the word count goal for the day? Oh, not there yet. Got to hustle. Got to crank. Got to get more words on my writing retreat.” And it could just blow right past you, that, “Hey, this is actually kind of an awesome spot. I’m enjoying being here.”

Megan Hellerer
That’s exactly the point. And I love that you picked up on that, because one of the things I’ve found with people who are used to this blind ambition approach is that we have been taught, or we believe on some level, that our curiosity, our interests, or our joy are a distraction from the goal at hand. So, it’s sort of like, we actively ignore it.

So, for example, I mean, I could think of picking a major in college. I was like, “Oh, I love this creative writing thing.” Well, that is just a distraction from the very practical major that I need to decide on that I’m going to use, as opposed to seeing that as, “That’s really valuable information about what I care about, what I love doing, what excites me, what makes me, gets my creative juices flowing, all of that kind of thing.”

And so, most people, when you ask them, “What do you actually want?” don’t know because they’ve been ignoring it for so long. So, exactly that, had I had a different mindset, if somebody had said to me, “Do you like living here? Have you liked spending your three months here for the writing retreat?” I think I would have said, “I don’t know, that’s not the point of me being here. That’s completely irrelevant information,” versus allowing that information in.

So, one of the practices I tend to do with people a lot is learning how to allow that information, recognize that information, and just even register it. You don’t even necessarily have to do anything about it. But one of the first steps is what I say screenshotting your mind. So, when you’re having ideas or thoughts cross your mind, to get into the practice of noticing them, and you’re sort of sending a message to your brain, to your psyche, to your creative, whatever you want, of “I’m paying attention. I’m ready to capture these ideas.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and I love that so much in terms of like the joy, we could perceive it as a distraction from the real work, or I think we could be quick to write it off. And what comes to mind is a few times my wife has said while I’m just being silly with the kids, “Dada needs an improv class.” Because I’m being kind of kooky and silly and ridiculous, and I sort of immediately dismissed that in terms of, “Well, you know, hey, there’s a lot of going down with work, and the young kids, and this is not practical.”

But I think a better approach, steeped in these principles, would be to say, “Hmm, there is something to that. Like, there is a part of my silly, kooky nature that is meaningful and joyous, that isn’t getting a chance to be expressed as fully in my current set of roles and duties that’s worth reflecting on” as opposed to immediately dismissing, “Oh, improv class. Ah, I’m not going to drive all the way into the city for that. Ah, forget it.”

Megan Hellerer
Yeah, exactly. And that’s exactly the type of thing, because here’s the other surprising thing or at least surprising to me, curiosity, so an interest like that, like, “Huh, improv,” is the best proxy that we have for purpose. So, we spend so much time, “What is my purpose? What am I meant to do here?” We’re not going to be able to necessarily figure out the answer to that. I don’t think we have to have some broad mission statement.

The best thing we can do is figure out what our curiosity is telling us and know that that is going to lead us somewhere. So, if there’s something, when someone said, “Oh, improv class,” first of all, if it wasn’t interesting to you, if there wasn’t something in there that you were interested in, you wouldn’t even bother rejecting it, right? You would just be like, “Mm, yeah, no, that that’s not interesting to me.”

The fact that you, one, have noticed it, but two, actively are like, “No, I’m not doing that,” tells me that there’s something interesting in that to you. And then doing that, I would love to encourage you to explore, even just looking up improv classes, or maybe it’s a one-day workshop, or maybe it’s just going to more improv shows.

The lowest stakes thing that you can think of as a way to take another step, to explore this curiosity, because we don’t need to know where it’s going, and it doesn’t mean most people will jump to the destination, “Well, I’m not going to be a professional improv person,” or, “How am I going to use that in my life?” But instead, realizing it may not be that you do improv in some way, but maybe it sparks you, like just makes you so much more creative, in general, that suddenly you’re having all of these other ideas for a podcast or for whatever other things that you’re working on.

Or, maybe there is something there that you’re, again, it doesn’t have to be improv specifically, but maybe it moves to some other kind of performance, or you make some sort of connection that ends up being something that becomes really meaningful for you. These are the breadcrumbs; these are the clues that are telling us, “This is where the meaning is. This is where the fulfillment is,” and we’re so used to ignoring it.

Another analogy I like to use here is that it’s like cravings for food. So, the cravings are meant to tell you where the nourishment is, right? If you are lacking vitamin C, you might start craving an orange. For us, the craving, the curiosity craving for improv, for silliness, for goofiness, for whatever that self-expression is for you, is your body’s, your psyche’s, your spirit’s way of telling you that there’s some sort of nourishment fulfillment purpose there for you, and that you need to follow that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. Well, Megan, tell me, any other top do’s and don’ts you want to make sure to put out there for the under-fulfilled overachievers?

Megan Hellerer
The first thing that I want to highlight is that many people say that this, they feel like doing this work, this reflection on like, “Where’s my curiosity leading me? What am I interested in? What do I care about? What is fulfilling for me?” is selfish or self-centered.

And what I want to say is that I really believe and have found that everybody benefits when we are doing the work that is most aligned for us, when we’re living the life that is most aligned for us, because we’re not only happier and more fulfilled, but we are giving other people permission for them to do what’s most aligned for them, and we’re also doing our best and most impactful work.

You’re actually not being helpful to your team for you to be in a job that is not aligned for you. Donate that job to someone else who actually is really aligned for that work, who can actually show up and want to be doing that work. A lot of people feel like, “Oh, but I’d be abandoning my team.” You’re actually abandoning your team by doing work that isn’t really where you want to be doing and where you could be having such a more impact.

The way that you contribute most to the world, the way that you can benefit most to your community, to the people around you, to your family, is by doing the work to figure out what is most aligned for you because that’s where you’ll be the most impactful. And this ties into the second point, which is another pushback I get, which is, “But what if I can’t afford to quit my job?” or, “What if I can’t afford to do this kind of work?”

And this is completely valid, in the sense that coaching is not available to everyone, and most people can’t afford to quit their job, and the good news is you don’t have to. But we are making decisions every single day in the life that we’re already living. And my suggestion would be to start asking yourself in all of those decisions, “Is this directionally right or is this directionally wrong? Is this warmer or is this colder? And how can I make it more directionally right?”

This could be in what you’re eating for dinner, “Am I doing this because it’s something I think I should do or because I actually want to?” in what books you’re reading, what podcasts you’re listening to. If you can start to make all of your decisions, steering them more in the directionally right, most-aligned-for-you way, this is going to have huge ripple effects on the rest of your life and costs nothing.

Exploring your curiosity doesn’t mean spending a couple thousand dollars on a program. It could mean taking a book out from the library. It could mean listening to a free podcast. It could mean doing a Google search. It could mean sending an email to someone to have a conversation about them. Take an action, any action, towards your curiosity and advance the plot and you’re doing your job.

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

Megan Hellerer
One of my favorite quotes that is actually the best analogy I know for directional living came from E.L. Doctorow, which is, “It’s like driving in a car at night. You can only see as far as the headlights in front of you, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

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

Megan Hellerer
I think these are depressing studies, but I think they’re important, which is engagement at work is at an 11-year low, where only 30% of people feel engaged with their work. That’s a Gallup poll. And only 17% find it to be a source of meaning, which is half of the rate from four years ago, and that’s a Pew study. And both of those are post-pandemic. This isn’t like the middle of the pandemic when there are many other issues going on.

We have a huge issue with engagement and meaning and fulfillment at work. The way we are working is not working and it’s only getting worse. This problem isn’t going away. And I found that those numbers to be shocking and really important for that reason.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Megan Hellerer
The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron.

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

Megan Hellerer
I would say this inner navigation system, calibration and barometer of simply asking, “Is this warmer or is this colder?” when I’m making decisions to make sure that they’re aligned for me. And I use it for everything, including coming on this podcast. I get an invitation for a podcast, and I ask, “Is this warmer? Is this colder? Does this feel directionally right or not?”

And I do say no to podcast invitation events that don’t feel aligned for me. So, I think that is sort of the cheat code to keep it really simple if you’re confused, “Is this warmer or is this colder?” I think that’s the easiest, simplest, most basic, and most effective tool for decision making there is.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with your clients; they bring back up to you often?

Megan Hellerer
I think simply the terminology of under-fulfilled overachiever and people having a word that resonates with them to articulate what they’ve been struggling with, and then also the vocabulary of the old way of doing things that we’ve been taught, destinational thinking, and the new way of doing things, directional thinking. I think having words to capture this tends to be one of the most revelatory things for people.

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

Megan Hellerer

My website is my name, so MeganHellerer.com, and I’m also on Instagram, @meganhellerer. And my website also has connections to all my socials and books and more information on my philosophy and all of that good stuff.

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

Megan Hellerer
I would suggest asking yourself “Is this aligned for me?” and trying to be radically honest with yourself, tell yourself the truth about your life. And if the answer is no, or any part of that is yes or no, figure out what are the parts that are aligned and what are the parts that aren’t, and see what you can do to tweak the parts that aren’t. It doesn’t involve blowing up your life. Small tweaks can make a huge difference.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Megan, this has been so much fun. I wish you many happy directions.

Megan Hellerer
Thank you so much, Pete. Have a great day.

1006: A Navy SEAL Shares the Hidden Attributes Enabling Optimal Performance with Rich Diviney

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Rich Diviney reveals the hidden drivers of optimal performance: attributes.

You’ll Learn

  1. The crucial difference between skills and attributes
  2. When your “weaknesses” are “strengths”
  3. A neuroscience hack for focus and overcoming stress 

About Rich

Rich Diviney developed his expertise in human performance during his over twenty-year career in the US Military, during which he completed more than thirteen deployments overseas and held multiple leadership positions.

While serving as the officer in charge of selection, assessment, and training for a specialized Navy SEAL command, Diviney was intimately involved in an extremely elite SEAL selection process, which required pairing down a group of exceptional candidates to a small cadre of the most elite optimal performers.

He also spearheaded the creation of a mental performance directorate that focused a strong emphasis on physical, mental, and emotional discipline to optimize individual and team performance, allowing operators to perform faster, longer, and more effectively in all environments—especially high-stress ones.

Resources Mentioned

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Rich Diviney Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Rich, welcome.

Rich Diviney
Thank you, Pete. It’s good to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to hear about some of your wisdom associated with The Attributes, but I think I’m going to put you on the spot and ask that you kick us off with a thrilling, riveting tale related to your time in the Navy SEALs and/or training that’s also instructive and tees us up. So, no pressure, but I want you to check every box with your opening story.

Rich Diviney
All right. Well, so I went into the Navy SEALs. I joined the teams in 1996. I graduated at Purdue University, was commissioned as an officer, went straight to training, and then got through training, which is always a good thing because it’s about a 90% attrition rate at SEAL training, which is called BUD/S, Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL Training.

And so, I went through, got through in ’96. Beginning of the career was, you know, it was normal, but there was nothing going on. Of course, 9/11 happened and things got very busy and kinetic. But what happened between 2005-2010, is I went to one of our very specialized SEAL commands, and that selection process was unique and intense. And I actually took over that selection process in 2010. And in doing so, really had to figure out what we were kind of looking for performance-wise.

So, in other words, to get to this command, you had to have stellar performance reviews, you had to have recommendations, psychological exams, physical tests, all that stuff. And when you went, you went through a nine-month course, a selection course, and 50% of the guys who went through didn’t make it, right? So, 50% of the top Navy SEALs did not make it through, and that’s okay. Every selection course implies attrition, but I think what was not okay and what they asked me to do was that we weren’t able to effectively describe or understand why guys weren’t making it through.

We’d say something like, “Well, the guy couldn’t shoot very well.” Okay, well, you tell a Navy SEAL that caliber, he can’t shoot very well. That’s like, I mean, this guy’s probably shot more rounds than most people in the military. So, it’s disingenuous to him and disingenuous to us. And so, they asked me, they said, “Rich, we need you to look at performance and figure out what’s going on.” And so, I had to really deconstruct performance.

And the couple stories that I’ll kind of harken back to, that hammered this home for me in terms of what I needed to look at, were these. So, in basic SEAL training, in BUD/S, you spend hundreds of hours running around with big boats on your head, you spend hundreds of hours exercising with 300-pound telephone poles, running around with those things, freezing in the surf zone. I was doing this work in 2010 and I had already been on hundreds of combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I can tell you with certainty, never on one of them did I carry a big heavy boat on my head or a 300-pound telephone pole, right?

So, what I recognized in that moment was that they weren’t training us in those moments to be Navy SEALs. They weren’t training us in the skills of being SEALs. They were actually teasing out these qualities. They were putting us in these environments to tease out these qualities to see if we had what it took to do the job.

So, then I kind of thought back and I remembered a story I’d heard from an older instructor, and he said, “Rich, you know, years ago, a kid showed up to SEAL training, and he walked into the instructor’s offices, and he said, ‘I want to be a Navy SEAL.’ And the instructor said, ‘Okay. Well, you have to do a swim test.’ And the kid said, ‘Fine.’”

So, they took him out to the pool, and it’s an easy test, like 50 meters, so 25 meters to one end, 25 meters back to the other end. He gets all ready to go, and as soon as he jumps in the pool, he sinks right to the bottom of the pool. And at the bottom of the pool, he begins walking across the bottom of the pool to one end, he touches one end, he walks across the bottom of the pool back to the other end.

He comes up, he’s gasping for air, the instructor looks at him and says, “What the heck are you doing?” And the kid is still trying to catch his breath, looks at the instructor, and says, “I’m sorry, instructor, I don’t know how to swim.” And at that point, the instructor looks at him and pauses, and then he says, “That’s okay, we can teach you how to swim.”

And the idea is “Why did the instructors say that?” The instructor said that because he knew, if this kid had the attributes, the qualities to show up to Navy SEAL training, one of the most elite maritime units on the planet, and he didn’t know how to swim, he had everything inside of him to be a Navy SEAL. Teaching him the skill of swimming was going to be easy.

So, that was really the big story, the big “aha” for me in terms of bifurcating the terms between skills and attributes, and the fact that if we look at just skill, we’re missing a huge percent of the performance picture because we have to look at these qualities that people bring to the table if we want to understand performance at very elemental levels.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, yes, let’s dig in to some depth in a moment, the distinction between skills and attributes. I think that’s really thought-provoking and useful. But first, I’m curious, with your specific charge, in terms of, we’ve got to get to the bottom of why. Why are half of these super highly trained, experienced operators not getting through? What was the answer?

Rich Diviney
Well, the answer was, we were looking for some specific attributes, and the guys who weren’t making it through either didn’t…well, they just didn’t have enough of them. So, for example, a couple of the attributes I talk about in the book are the mental acuity attributes, which are situation awareness, compartmentalization, task switching, and learnability.

When you are doing, for example, the level of operations that we’re doing, in this case, close quarter combat, where you’re going in and clearing rooms to rescue hostages, it’s a very rapid, a very fast, very dynamic environment, inside of which you have to do live fire, you have to take instruction, you have to learn, you have to upload it, you have to be very cognizant of your buddies, you have to move quickly, you have to hit your targets.

And I think what was happening, most of the guys would drop out during that phase, and I think what we found was that they were, again, they didn’t have none of these, none of us have no attributes or zero attributes, but, in this case, they didn’t have enough of an ability to run into environment, be situationally aware enough to pick a target, focus in on that target, address that target, and then switch to the next target rapidly.

So, it was, I think that the attributes that we didn’t see that were the most predominant in predicting failure, or at least attrition, were enough of those mental acuity attributes. And then another one would just be resilience. Resilience is defined as this ability to bounce back to baseline. It’s not really getting back up when you get hit, it’s to be able to bounce back to get back to baseline.

So, you think about that rubber band, you stretch, you let it go, it goes back to its original shape. Can you bounce back from hardship or even success? And the guys who would be screwing up and they’d get the spotlight on them and just get hammered, hammered, hammered, some guys would just be able to wash that off and bounce back. Other guys would just go into a spiral.

And so, that was, if we saw that, that was certainly an attribute that we needed to see a predominance of because we can’t have folks who can’t bounce back to baseline rapidly enough. So, those were probably some of the most predominant ones, and then there were others that we kind of identified too, but less predominant.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I’m intrigued, Rich, we talk about attributes versus skill, is this mental acuity stuff and the resilience bounce-backing stuff not a learnable, trainable, developable skill?

Rich Diviney
So, it’s developable. It’s not teachable. Let me just identify the terms here just really quick for the audience. A skill is not inherent to our nature. In other words, none of us are born with the ability to ride a bike or throw a ball. We’re taught to do those things; we’re trained to do those things. Skills direct our behavior in known and specific environments, “Here’s how and when to throw a ball or ride a bike.”

And then skills are very visible. They’re very easy to see, which means they’re very easy to assess, measure, and test. You can put scores around them, statistics, and otherwise. You can put them on resumes, which is why we get seduced by skills often when we’re picking teams or performance evaluating.

But what skills don’t tell us is how we’re going to show up in stress, challenge, and uncertainty. Because in an unknown environment, it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to apply a known skill. So, this is when we lean on our attributes. So, attributes, on the other hand, are inherent to our nature. In other words, all of us are born with levels of patience, situational awareness, adaptability.

Now, you can develop them over time and experience, but you can see levels of this stuff in very small children. So, anybody who has small kids or has, you know, experienced small kids will agree with me when I say there are one and a half year olds who are patient, and there are one-and-a-half-year-olds who are impatient. So, there’s a nature/nurture element to attributes.

Attributes don’t direct our behavior; they inform our behavior. They tell us how we’re going to show up to an environment. So, my son’s levels of perseverance and resilience informed the way he showed up when he was learning the skill of riding a bike and falling off a dozen times doing so. And then finally, because they’re difficult to see, they’re very difficult to assess, measure, and test, but they come up the most viscerally, and viscerally during times of stress, challenge and uncertainty.

So, the idea is we all have all of the attributes. The difference in each one of us are the levels to which we have each. So, if we take adaptability, for example, and seven is high and one is low, I’d be a six on adaptability, which means when the environment changes around me outside of my control, it’s fairly easy for me to go with the flow and roll with it.

Someone else might be a level three. If the same thing happens to them, it’s difficult for them to go with the flow and roll with it, there’s friction there. They’re still adaptable because all human beings are. It’s just harder. So, if we’re trying to line these up like dimmer switches, we’d all have different dimmer switch settings.

So, the idea is, yes, you can take an attribute you’re low on and develop it, but you can’t do it the same way as a skill, because…and just one more thing for your audience, a way to distinguish between an attribute and a skill is to ask yourself a question, “Can I teach it or can it be taught?” If the answer is yes, it’s probably a skill. If the answer is no, it’s probably an attribute.

So, Pete, you could say to me, “Rich, I want to go to a range and learn how to shoot a pistol and hit a bullseye.” I could take you to the range and teach you how to do that in a couple hours. That’s a skill. Or you could say, “Rich, I want to learn how to be more patient.” I can’t teach you that, all right? That has to be self-developed.

So, to develop an attribute you’re low on takes three factors, three things. The first thing is you have to know you’re low on it. The second thing is you have to have a need, desire, or motivation to develop it. What do I mean by that? Well, we have to understand that just because you’re low on an attribute does not mean you need to develop it. In fact, developing that attribute may be detrimental to what you’re trying to do.

I always say the stand-up comic with too much empathy is going to be a lousy stand-up comic, right?

Pete Mockaitis
“Oh, I’m sorry. You didn’t like that joke?”

Rich Diviney
That’s right, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
“Really, boy, I feel terrible. Let’s just call of the set.”

Rich Diviney
Or, I don’t even tell the joke. So, yeah, just because you’re low doesn’t mean, you know, in fact, you’re being low might be exactly why you’re so good at what you do. But assuming both are true, you’re low on and you feel like developing will actually help your niche, the third is the most important. To develop an attribute, you must go find environments and place yourself environments that tease and test that attribute.

So, if you want to develop your patience, you have to go find environments that test and tease and develop your patience, whatever that looks like for you. It could be, “I’m going to drive in traffic. I’m going to deliberately drive in traffic.” Or, “I’m going to pick the longest line in the grocery store to stand in.”

I always say “Have kids. That’ll develop patience.” But whatever that is, you can do that for any attribute. So, those dimmer switches are not, and our attributes aren’t immutable, but they certainly take more efforts and consideration in terms of developing them or increasing them.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you there in terms of, I think the two-hour shooting example is handy because it’s not like, “Hey, there’s just a few guidelines associated with lining up the sights, or your breathing, or whatever. The fundamentals are there, “Okay. Now I know those things and I’m going to do those things. And, oh, wow!”

Because I think maybe one thing that’s coming to mind is you’ll see transformational results from zero to just a few hours later. It has been my experience with learning skills, like, “Oh, I had no idea.” It’s like, “Oh, okay. Well, now I kind of know the fundamental things. I’m just going to do those things, and now we know the results are way better.”

Versus patience. Yeah, you’re right. It’s not like, “Okay, in two hours, I’m going to teach you deep breathing and thinking about where they’re coming from, and now you’re done. Your patience has been tripled in quality.” I hear you. It doesn’t tend to work nearly that quickly in practice.

Rich Diviney
Yeah, does not work, I guess, linearly. And we have to think about attributes. The reason why attributes are so important is because it defines who we are at our most raw, our raw selves when you-know-what is hitting the fan, when the plan doesn’t go, the plan goes out the window, we’re steeped in uncertainty and chaos, these attributes are what rise to the fore. All the rest of it goes away.

I always kind of joke, and you and I talked before you hit record, about personality tests. I think most of them are fun and great. The only thing about personality we have to consider is that when the you-know-what hits the fan, personality goes out the window, and we, at our most raw, are running on these attributes.

And I think the gift I was given in SEAL training, and my teammates were given, is that we, from day one of SEAL training, started to understand who we are at our most raw and started to understand who each other were at our most raw, because then we knew, okay, when everything is dropping in chaos and uncertainty, we know exactly who’s going to show up and we know when to lean on each other and when to support each other and all that stuff. That’s the importance of this stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Okay. Well, so I took the assessment, and it was impressive, 250 items, but it went by super quick. And I got a kick out of how I have taken a number of these as well, such as StrengthsFinder and more, and the results sort of have some confluence, you know. So, I mean, I guess, while we’re distinguishing, we got skills, we got attributes, we got personality, how about strengths? Where do we put that into this?

Rich Diviney
So, I’m glad you asked, because when we talk about attributes, we don’t talk about good or bad. What we talk about is your performance fingerprints, what’s your unique performance picture. And the reason why we don’t talk about strengths and weaknesses is because your top attributes, your top five attributes are just as meaningful and have done just as much for your success as your bottom five. In other words, you being low on your bottom five is also why you’re successful.

Now, when we look at it honestly, what we say is, let’s do some honest introspection and ask ourselves, “Okay, these are my top five, these are my bottom five, or these are my order ranked, whatever. What are ways that this has served me? But what are also ways that this can maybe not serve me?” because that’s when we have to understand some blind spots.

So, the attributes equation is not about strengths and weaknesses. It’s about where you show up performance-wise, and where you might want to either dial down or dial up certain attributes or even develop attributes if you so desire. But there’s no judgment, which is powerful because it takes judgment out of the picture, which makes teams run faster and better.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s interesting, so there’s 41 of them in the report. But as I read through the names, they all seem, like, good. Like, I’d like more discipline, charisma, confidence, courage, empathy, adaptability.

Rich Diviney
That’s exactly right.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, “Oh, yeah, that sounds great. I’d love to have more of that.” But you’re saying like, well, having a whole lot of something is not always beneficial in a certain context, nor is having a very low score on something detrimental in a given context.

Rich Diviney
That’s right, yeah. Any one of the attributes, we could make an argument for pros and cons for that attribute, and we could also make an argument where at extremes, we could certainly have detriment. But the idea is the pros and cons are what you look at, and you start to say, “Okay, this is how and why I perform the way I do.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s funny, I’m thinking right now, so in my attributes, my highest, we’ve got creativity, cunning, innovativeness, open-mindedness, integrity. And it’s funny, because right now I’m going through a process of getting a mortgage, and from my perspective, it’s just kind of like, “Okay, guys, so you can see I got credit, I got assets, I’ve got income. So, like, we’re good to go here, right?”

Rich Diviney
That’s right, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
But the answer is no, like, “We have to comply with all of the things perfectly so that, in the United States the way it works, because we’re going to resell this to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac who need to have their standards complied with to a T, and that’s why there’s a low cost of capital associated with this.”

“So, your creative ideas associated with how you might prove this or that is not what I want. I want you to go to your bank and ask them for this very specific document, and then include that along with 12 other very specific documents, and then we’re good to go.”

Rich Diviney
So, it’s funny you should say that. By the way, your results are great. I’ve never seen creativity, cunning, and innovativeness all in the top five. All three of those are attributes that involve imagination, but they’re different to an extent. And this is where we have to get precise with the language-ing. This is one of the things we find very powerful about the attributes content, because we’re very precise with the etymology of each word.

So, creativity is the ability to create something into existence that otherwise didn’t exist. This is the artist with the blank canvas, the writer with the blank sheet of paper, the sculptor with the lump of clay. You’re able to create new ideas that didn’t otherwise exist. Innovativeness, on the other hand, is the ability to take something currently in existence and use your imagination to iterate on it and make it better. And then cunning is the ability to use imagination to problem-solve in ways that are outside-the-box thinking.

So, you have a very powerful trio there of using imagination on all different fronts and facets. The other thing about this is you’re also high on integrity, which means, you know, cunning, people, a lot of times, view cunning as pejorative, but cunning is not pejorative. Cunning is just outside-the-box thinking.

But I always say the way we use cunning can be pejorative. In other words, you can use cunning malevolently, that’s Bernie Madoff, or you can use cunning benevolently, that’s Oscar Schindler. The fact that you’re high on integrity means you’re going to use all this stuff in a benevolent way, which is pretty cool.

And then, of course, your open-mindedness does not surprise me because, as someone with all three of those imaginative attributes on top, you’re someone who is constantly taking in and open to new ideas because it probably just informs your ability to use more imagination. So, I think it’s a fascinating top five. What are your thoughts when you see the top five?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it does ring true in terms of StrengthsFinder, I think Ideation was my number one, and I do find that when I am in settings, like teamwork settings, that’s what lights me up the most, is that, “Let’s figure out the new, cool, creative way to do the thing.” And what is less exciting to me is, “Okay. Well now we know what that is, so just do that hundreds of times repeatedly for the next decade.” It’s, like, “Ooh, can someone else please execute that? Ugh.”

Rich Diviney
Right. By the way, let’s just talk about now your bottom five. What you just said there is also indicated by your bottom five because you’re low on patience, which means you don’t really like to…you won’t bang your head against the wall, and then persistence. Persistence is an interesting one. It’s defined as a kind of a firm steadfastness in understanding there’s a course of action and sticking to the same course of action over and over again because you know it’ll work.

So, I usually say it’s the stonecutter approach. The stonecutter basically taps that rock in the same place a hundred times and nothing happens because he knows that after the 101st or 107th tap, it’s going to break. That’s persistence.

You’re someone who’s constantly trying to ideate, which means you like new ideas, and you have little patience for sticking to the same course if it doesn’t make sense or if it’s boring. You will shift very rapidly. Where it could be a blind spot for you is you have to say to yourself, “Okay, well, there might be times where staying the course is, in fact, what needs to happen.” And that might be where you have to lean on someone else in your team who’s better at persistence, who can basically say, “Hey, Pete, we need to just stay the course.”

Your high imagination may find you in a position where you’re just constantly inundated with new ideas and it’s tough for you to take one and stick to one because you’re just constantly having new ideas. And again, this is not that these things do happen. These are just blind spots that may happen based on the way these attributes line up.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s really true, and if I am not seeing some level of results when I’m doing a thing in my own world, I feel like I need some pretty robust evidence that this course is ultimately correct. It’s like, “I did the thing three times, I haven’t seen any good results or effects flow from it yet.” So, I’ve coaxed myself, and everyone says, “Well, Pete, take a look at these impressive results on the random control trial, you know, that lasted six weeks, so let’s give it the six weeks first.”

Rich Diviney
Yeah, give it some time. Give it some time. And again, this is stuff you can do. Again, it’s not that you don’t have these attributes. They’re just prioritized in your behavior lower than the other ones, which means you have to do more, you have to have more deliberacy in when you have to dial them up. Like you said, you have to consciously make the effort to say, “You know what, I just need to stay to this.” It’s a conscious thing. Whereas, if you’re just acting without thinking, you’re likely going to shift.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, this is fun for me. I’ve got a big report. So, what if people who don’t have that? What do they do?

Rich Diviney
Well, yeah, they could always take the assessment, but I think one of the things folks can do is they can begin to interrogate their performance. And the way we do that is we look back at our performance, especially during times of stress, challenge, and uncertainty, and only because that’s when these things are most visible and visceral, and start asking ourselves some honest questions about how we showed up.

So, if we went through a situation and we say to ourselves, “Well, as everything was changing around me, I was upset and it didn’t feel good and I couldn’t really flow. It was hard for me to flex and flow.” That might indicate you’re a little low on adaptability, and that’s okay. It just gives you an idea of where you stand on these.

And you can start to think about these attributes in terms of how you’ve performed. You could think about how you perform in every day, all day, but especially during stress, challenge, and uncertainty. Experiential knowledge is the most powerful in this case. And I would even encourage those who do take the assessment to look at their results and then begin to think about times in their lives where these attributes have served them or have not served them, and start to say to themselves, “Okay, I can see now, experientially, how and why these show up the way they do.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then I guess I’m curious, if you find yourself in a context, maybe it’s a job, or role, project, where it kind of seems like the attributes you have are not a great match up, “Maybe I am a super empathetic stand-up comic.”

Rich Diviney
Yeah, no kidding. Yeah. Well, I always say, I mean, I like to think of human beings as cars, just like the movie. Some of us are Jeeps, some of us are SUVs, some of us are Ferraris, and there’s no judgment because the Jeep can do things the Ferrari can’t do, and the Ferrari can do things the Jeep can’t do. But it behooves us to lift our hood and figure out what we’re running with because the friction in our lives, that we’re talking about, might be because we’ve been a Jeep trying to run on a Ferrari track this whole time, or a Ferrari trying to run on a Jeep track.

And so, I think what folks can do, if there is significant kind of friction in one’s life, they may, in fact, be in a position, in a role, in a job, in a niche that is not suited to their normal attribute profile. And what’s happening there is they’re going to the job and they’re having to consciously behave differently, consciously dial up or dial down their attributes so that they can actually conduct the job, which you can do, that’s okay, but it doesn’t feel as good.

So, the idea would be, ask yourself, “Okay, what are my attribute sets? How does that performance picture look? And what might be some niches inside of which I could use this to excel?” And then if you’re a leader of people, you have to start looking at performance differently. In other words, low performance might not be because that person doesn’t know what they’re doing. It might be because their attributes don’t line up properly.

And that happened to me when I was commanding officer of a SEAL command, and I had a supply department. I had eight people; four people in this future look kind of innovative type cell, and then four people in the logistics kind of admin bookkeeping cell. And I had one sailor in the innovative cell that was not performing, bringing down morale.

And I brought her in, I started talking to her, and within 10 minutes I recognized her unique attribute set was a complete misfit for what I had her doing, but it was perfect for this other thing. So, all I did was shift her. I shifted her roles, her performance skyrocketed. So, it is about helping people get in the right seat on the bus as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we have 41 attributes, and if you don’t have a report in front of you, is there a bite-sized, manageable way you can think about these in a few categories so we can kind of map ourselves out a little bit?

Rich Diviney
The attributes themselves, I’ve broken into categories. Certainly, in the book, there’s five categories. The work we do now, we have nine. You can find those on the website, but those categories are like the grit category. So, what attributes make up grit? Mental acuity. What are the attributes that describe how our brain processes the world? Drive. What are the attributes that make up the driven person?

We have vision attributes, which have to do with creativity. We have service attributes, which have to do with our ability to serve other people. Social intelligence attributes, leadership attributes, and team ability attributes. And so, all those are grouped so that the attributes can clump kind of in a nice organized fashion.

It’s not to say that those attributes are strictly in those categories. I mean, even though courage is a great attribute, one could make an argument for courage also being a leadership attribute, but it helps them bin and organize the attributes in a little bit different way. I would say, though, if someone does, in fact, take the assessment and understand their rankings, I would offer and recommend people to look at their top five, bottom five.

This is one of the reasons why the assessment pulls those out because, the top five, bottom five starts to really describe and help one understand some unique aspects of their performance. The middle attributes, basically, are those attributes that you tend to easily shift in the polarities, between the polarities.

So, in other words, I just have to look at yours, but we take something like charisma. Charisma is something that you’re someone who can at times be charismatic and at times you’re not charismatic. You can kind of shift between those polarities, versus when you start seeing where they’ve been top and bottom, those are the ones you’re most often like or most often not like, if that makes sense.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s funny. I mean, there are times when people, they say, “Pete, I want you to be the master of ceremonies for this event.” It’s like, “Well, okay. Let’s put on the tuxedo, and let’s, you know, the big smile, and away we go.”

Rich Diviney
Yeah, that’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
And then there are other times where it’s like, “That’s fine. I don’t need to be the center of attention. I’d be happy to arrange the items at the event as well, if that’s what you need to do.”

Rich Diviney
Yeah, you shift in the polarities, which is what the middle ones indicate which is good. So, they’re all useful in terms of understanding.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say this is how we are under stress when it all hits the fan, maybe we could zoom out a little bit and share, are there general best practices, no matter what your attributes are, that are ideal for when we find ourselves in these intense situations?

Rich Diviney
The answer is yes. In fact, you’re throwing out a nice preview for my second book, which is coming out in a few months called Masters of Uncertainty, where I give some tools and techniques for, in fact, what we can do in stress, challenge, and uncertainty. So, there are ways we can actually use our brain and our physiology to step through stress, challenge, and uncertainty better.

One of those ways is just a way we can actually interrogate an environment and manage our autonomic arousal. One of the biggest things that happens to us in stress, challenge, and uncertainty is we get autonomically aroused, i.e. our amygdala gets tickled and our arousal goes up. This happens to a degree that can, eventually, if unchecked, reach what we call amygdala hijack or autonomic overload, where we’re acting without thinking.

That type of amygdala hijack is very handy when we are getting out of the way of a moving train. We won’t have to think about what we’re doing. We just want to move and act, right? Not as handy in most other everyday stress and anxiety because we want to put conscious thought into our decision-making process.

What happens as our autonomic arousal goes up is our frontal lobe begins to take a back seat to our limbic, and when we reach the point of amygdala hijack, or autonomic overload, the frontal lobe has now gone back and we’re operating on our limbic without thinking. So, the key in challenge, stress, and uncertainty is to keep that frontal lobe engaged, and one of the ways we can do that is to ask conscious questions about our environment constantly.

So, in other words, “What can I focus on right now at this moment?” Even something like, “How am I feeling right now?” This is why “name it to tame it” is a very useful emotional technique, an emotional tool, because it’s pushing your limbic back a little bit, bring your frontal lobe online.

So, I think the idea is, as long as we’re managing our arousal by keeping our frontal lobe engaged, and we can do that with better questions, it’s a way to step through our environments of uncertainty, challenge, and stress.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you walk us through an example of some “naming it, taming it,” great questions?

Rich Diviney
Yes. One of the best questions you can ask in an environment of stress, challenge, and uncertainty is, “What could I control in this moment?” And what’s cool about the brain is the brain is designed to answer questions. It’s constantly doing it. And so, if we deliberately put a question into our frontal lobe, our brain will immediately begin to come up with answers. And so, if you put that question to your frontal lobe, you’re going to start to get answers that allow you to say, “You know what? Okay, I’m going to focus on this.”

Here’s a real-world example. It’s a SEAL training example, but it can be relatable. In SEAL training, like I said, you spend hundreds of hours running around with big, heavy boats on your head. And I remember, it was the middle of the night, we’ve been running with these boats on our head for hours and hours, and it was miserable, and we were on the beach and we were running next to the sand berm.

And I remember being miserable under the boat, and I said to myself, “Okay, you know what? I’m just going to focus until I get to the end of the sand berm. That’s what I’m focused on. I’m just going to get to the end of the sand berm.” What I did in that moment, unbeknownst to me, but I deconstructed later, was I immediately took control of an uncontrollable situation. I gave myself a focus point and I basically said, “Okay, end of sand berm.”

And as soon as I did that, as soon as I gave myself a goal, once I hit that goal, my brain gave me a dopamine reward for that. It’s inevitable. When we set goals and accomplish a goal, we’re going to get dopamine reward, which allows then for us to do it again and ask another question. So, we can actually start setting these horizons in any environment, and asking better questions about our environments so we can step through.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a really cool one. And I find that that’s true with regard to any number of unpleasant tasks, “If I could break this down into, I’ve got one page and I’ve got it into a dozen pieces and I’ve got my green is my pen color of completion. I don’t know, it just is. Green means done, money, victory. Then, yeah, it feels good.” It’s like, “Okay, well, there’s one piece,” as opposed to if you didn’t have the segmentation, you’re just like, “Oh, I just got one big mess that I’m dealing with.”

And I’ve also found that handy for exercise, even in indoor sterile environments, I don’t know, like a StairMaster or a treadmill or a bike or an elliptical, I find myself doing that just with numbers, like, “Hey, it’s a 30-minute workout.” It’s like, “Hey, if we get past 15, that means we got the majorities behind me. That’s awesome.” And so, I’m just making it up, and yet it helps.

Rich Diviney
And even that process, so neuro-scientifically, this is what we call DPO, duration pathway outcome, something that a good friend of mine, Andrew Huberman, who has a popular podcast called the Huberman Lab, he and I put together a few years ago, but the brain is constantly looking for these three factors in our environment to define it.

One is duration, “How long is this is going to take?” Two is pathway, “What’s the route in or out?” And then, three, is outcome, “What happens at the end?” And so, in the absence of one or more of those three things, that’s when we find ourselves in uncertainty, challenge, stress, anxiety. So, what’s happening there is we are literally creating our own DPOs, whether it’s you in the gym, me on the beaches of BUD/S, we are creating a duration pathway outcome, and we’re taking charge of this focus point, and we’re creating something to focus on and then strive toward.

I call this process moving horizons because these horizons are constantly shifting, and the distance or the size of each horizon has to be subjective to the individual and subjective to the intensity of the task. So, in other words, a more intense task, it’s probably going to be a shorter horizon. If I’m In SEAL training, in the surf zone, just freezing my butt off, and they’re keeping us there for hours, which happens, I remember saying to myself, “Okay, I’m just going to count 10 waves.” My horizon was short.

There were other times where I remember saying, “You know what? I’m going to just make it to the next meal,” the horizon shifts. The key, in terms of the dopamine reward system, is that you have to pick a horizon that’s meaningful for you. In other words, not too hard, so you run out of steam on the way, but not too easy, so when you accomplish it, you don’t get a doping reward. That’s highly subjective.

And so, as you do that in the gym, in life, on the beaches of BUD/S, you’re shifting those horizons constantly and asking yourself, “Okay, what’s the next meaningful horizon?” subjective to your own experience.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s handy. And I’m thinking about just daily work in which you have to focus, because it seems unlimited. It’s, like, there’s an unlimited pile of things that you could do, and then the day could be long. So, then what do you do with that? I actually have a timer that I use, it’s set to an hour or whatever, and then I find that very helpful in terms of, “Okay, I’m just going to crank on this for an hour.”

And sometimes it’s like, “No, I’m tired. 45 minutes is all that’s going to happen this time.” And then it feels very satisfying, it’s like, “I did the thing. That hour is complete and now I’m having a break and it’s all good.”

Rich Diviney
Yeah, you’re creating your own horizons and the timer’s helping for that. What you’re doing also is you’re practicing compartmentalization, which is one of your bottom fives, but the fact that you use a timer means you’re actively practicing, which is a good tool to use because that’s handy and it helps you kind of set those DPOs.

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

Rich Diviney
No, I just encourage people to just start exploring their attributes. If they want to visit us on our website, it’s TheAttributes.com, and we’re going to give your audience a discount code for the assessment as well.

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

Rich Diviney
The one that pops to mind is one from Einstein, because he has so many good ones, and it goes something, I don’t want to murder it here, but it goes something like, “Everybody is a genius, but if you try to teach a fish to climb a tree, it’ll look like an idiot.”

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

Rich Diviney
Recently, I heard of some folks in the AI space who have been starting to deconstruct the language of animals. How about that? They started to understand the language of elephants, whales, and different animal species, which I think is utterly phenomenal.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow! And a favorite book?

Rich Diviney
One of my favorite books is probably Sapiens by Harari. I go back to that quite a bit. That’s a great one.

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

Rich Diviney
I honestly try to put together and arrange habits or times, periods where I can just be in my own head, whether it be if I’m jogging in the woods or even on an airplane, I can look out the window. But times I can really just be in my own head and think about and process ideas, I think that’s a gift that we should give ourselves, we should all give ourselves more.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a particular nugget you share that people really resonate with and quote back to you often?

Rich Diviney
When it comes to leadership, the one I hear the most is that being in charge and being a leader are two separate things. Being in charge is a position. Being a leader is a behavior. And the one I hear the most is I tell people you don’t get to self-designate. You don’t get to call yourself a leader. That’s like calling yourself good-looking or funny. Other people decide whether or not you’re someone they want to follow based on the way you behave. So, if you want to be a leader, behave like one.

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

Rich Diviney
TheAttributes.com. So www.theattributes.com has everything there, the book, the assessment, a bunch of stuff we do with companies and things like that. So, yeah, feel free to go check it out.

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

Rich Diviney
Yes. Growth is found outside of our comfort zone, so always make it a project to step outside the comfort zone often because that’s where you’ll grow and that’s where you’ll learn, and it’s a great place to be.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Rich, this is so much fun. Thank you. I wish you all the luck.

Rich Diviney
Cool. Thank you, Pete. Thanks for having me.

1005: How to Feel Energized Every Day with Dr. Michael Breus

By | Podcasts | One Comment

Dr. Michael Breus cuts through the noise and discusses the three most important wellness habits: sleeping, drinking, and breathing.

You’ll Learn

  1. The top habit that leads to better sleep 
  2. Just how much water your body needs 
  3. What many get wrong about breathing 

About Michael

Michael J. Breus, Ph.D.,is a double board-certified Clinical Psychologist and Clinical Sleep Specialist. He is one of only 168 psychologists in the world to have taken and passed the Sleep Medicine Boards without going to Medical School. He is also the founder of sleepdoctor.com.

Dr. Breus is the author of four books with the newest book (2021) Energize! Go from dragging Ass to kicking it in 30 days, adds the concepts of Movement (not exercise), and Intermittent Fasting to his already famous Sleep Chronotypes. And it was recently named one of the top books of 2021 by The Today Show. In his 3rd book (2017) The Power of When, which is a groundbreaking biohacking book proving that there is a perfect time to do everything, based on your biological chronotype (early bird or night owl). Dr. Breus gives the reader the exact time to have sex, run, a mile, eat a cheeseburger, buy, sell, ask your boss for a raise and much more based on over 200 research studies.

He is an expert resource for most major publications doing more than 400 interviews per year (Oprah, Dr. Oz, The Doctors, NY Times, Wall Street Journal, and more). Dr. Breus has been in private practice for 23 years and recently relocated to and was named the Top Sleep Doctor of Los Angeles by Reader’s Digest.

Resources Mentioned

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Dr. Michael Breus Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Michael, welcome back.

Michael Breus
Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here eight years later.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, indeed. It’s been a while. You were one of the first and one of the longest episodes because I had so much I wanted to talk to you about sleep. So, thank you for bringing it.

Michael Breus
Of course.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d love to hear, any really fascinating new discoveries that you’ve made in the world of wellness, energy, sleep, drinking, and breathing that you’re excited about to share right off the top?

Michael Breus
Well, you know, I’ve got a new book coming out and I’m pretty excited about it. I mean, let me tell you why I wrote the book because I think that’s really the most important part, is I just think wellness is too fricking complicated. Like, I was at the gym the other day and this woman, she kind of finished an exercise and then she was just, like, sitting there, like, you could tell she was visibly confused at what was the next thing she was supposed to do. And I feel like all of wellness has sort of started to turn into that.

Everybody’s asking me, “Should I buy a sauna? What green drink should I have?” And they’re not even looking at, “Are they getting enough sleep? Do you have enough water in your body? Do you know how to breathe correctly?” So, I started thinking about it after I read a book my friend Joe Polish wrote called Life Gives to the Giver, and he was talking about these skills that you gain over time, and that one skill, sometimes a particular skill will, once you have it, will kind of topple over and then maybe make some other skills a little bit easier.

They called them dominoes, so I was like, “Well, I wonder what the dominoes of wellness are?” What are the fundamentals? Like, what is the DNA of wellness? What are the two or three things that you just got to get right for everything else to make sense? And sleeping, hydrating, and breathing kind of made sense to me.

If you look at the world’s records, the longest a person has ever gone without sleep is about 11 and a half days. Started hallucinating. It was pretty, pretty messed up. It wasn’t pretty. Pretty much kind of in a corner, sort of shaking to the side. But you look at how somebody can last without water, which, by the way, I do not recommend to anyone, three days is about as far as you’re really going to get. And then when you look at breathing, how long are you going to last without breathing? Without assistance, I think that the record is something like 11 and a half minutes, 12 minutes underwater, something like that.

But I started to think about, like, “What are the fundamental things that our body can only live without for a very short period of time?” Believe it or not, we can go without food for, like, 30 days. We can go without exercise for a lifetime, I think. I think a lot of people have proven that one. You can go a long time without doing a lot of stuff.

And so, then I said to myself, “Okay, these three feel like it. Let’s dive into the literature and see what there is to see.” Obviously, I know the sleep literature pretty well, but this book is not a repeat of that. What I really decided to do more of was look at, “Okay, well, what are the five big mistakes? Like, what are the five things that people are just screwing up with their sleep?” If they just fixed one or two of them, I swear to you, life would be so much easier.

Then I started to really dive into hydration. And, to be fair, I was never a hydration guy until I started to become a runner and live in Arizona at the same time. So, I really had to know and understand that from a runner’s perspective, but also started to really wanted to learn about hydration from an overall perspective.

I’m 56 years old now, and a lot of my contemporaries are finding that hydration is a bit of a challenge, and so really understanding what are my hydration needs, and then breathing, and then you start to think about breathing, like, “All right, come on, Michael, like, how bad could I be breathing? I mean, I’m alive, right? Like, this really shouldn’t be that difficult.”

If you start to look at the Indian and the Ayurvedic culture and history, you start to learn that some of the yogis and some of the people way back in the day, they’ve been doing some pretty interesting breathing techniques for a very long period of time, and they get incredible results. There’s breathing that slows you down, makes you sleep, turns on your parasympathetic nervous system. There’s breathing that hypes you up and turns on your sympathetic nervous system, and we use these techniques today.

If you go from standstill to running across a field, trust me, you’re using some breathing techniques, hopefully, fairly efficiently and fairly quickly. So, I started to say, “All right, can I make it easy? Can I make it straightforward?” So, what I did was I said, “Look, I’m going to set my alarm five times a day,” and I did this for myself just to kind of test it out, and I chose the times based on my chronotype.

And then during each one of those little five-minute periods of time, I have water, I do a breathing test. I’m focusing on something for my sleep, and, honestly, it’s now become ingrained as a habit, and it’s wonderful. Most of my patients tell me this is a great starting line for wellness, and I think that’s really what’s great about it, is you don’t have to worry about, “Do I have an exercise routine? How much protein should I have? Do I need creatine?” You know, it’s more like, “Hey, dude, just breathe and sleep and hydrate, and guess what, you’re like 50% there.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, fascinating stuff. And I’m curious, you mentioned your patients, do you have a tale of transformation in terms of a professional who’s like, “Yeah, okay, okay, okay, sure, sure, sure, sleeping, hydrating, breathing, got it,” and then they did it? And what kinds of results can unfold for people who think they’re doing it fine, but then put some attention on it and to do it masterfully?

Michael Breus
Yeah, you know, it’s interesting. I think the devil is in the details, for sure, when it comes to people and how they follow it and how they adapt it. I found some really cool adaptations for people. As we get older, we start to lose touch with some of our thirst signals, we don’t realize that we’re thirsty. And so, I had one woman who really, you know, she just forgot to drink all the time. And so, what we did was we paired television – she liked to watch her shows at night – with tea, and so not caffeinated tea, obviously, because that would be bad for her sleep, but we used to call it tea and TV.

And so, we would actually just put on her phone a reminder, “Tea and TV.” And it was something that was that simple for her that allowed her to become hydrated. And then, to be honest with you, she started to become more motivated for her weight loss goals. Now I’m not saying that this is some miraculous recovery, and I’m not saying that she lost 50 pounds because she started doing tea and TV. But what I am saying is that something as simple as hydration can kickstart other behaviors that you’re just not motivated to do.

It’s very, very, very hard to be motivated when you’re tired, when you’re dehydrated, and when you’re out of breath, it just doesn’t work well. Now, as far as, like, looking at some pretty drastic people, I belong to a men’s group, and on every Sunday, we go for a hike, which is awesome. We have a great time, and it’s beautiful here in California, there’s a million places to go hiking. And we have a varied age range in our men’s group. We have guys that are probably in their late twenties, all the way on up till their eighties.

And so, for the older guys, we always make sure that we’ve got people in the front of the line, people in the back of the line, a little extra water, things like that, just to be thoughtful. And this one guy comes on the trip and he is a fairly robust guy, and he’s like, “Oh, I’m a camel. I don’t need to drink water.” And we’re like, “Bro, you need water,” and we kept trying to give him water, trying to give him water. Three-quarters of the way up the trail, he totally bonks. We have to call EMS. It’s a mess. So, those are the situations that you obviously want to avoid.

Now, the good news was, for that particular individual, he came back to do hikes a few weeks later, and we had absolutely no problems with him because he was able to stay hydrated. So, I think there are some pretty cool stories out there about people who are definitely finding something new about themselves from this, but I think it’s one of those things that you didn’t think about. So, I have had a couple of patients turn to me and say things like, “I’m not as grouchy all of a sudden,” which is kind of fascinating. Again, not something that you would have expected.

I had one spouse tell me that they were much more interested in being intimate with their partner because the partner just seemed like a different person. Their mood had changed, their ability to communicate was better, all of these different things. Now, I’d like to blame it on the Sleep, Drink, Breathe program that it was going to be fixing all of your marital woes, but I’m not convinced it will. I will tell you though, if you do it with your partner, it’s a fun thing to do together and it’s something that a couple can do to get healthy together.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that sounds very pleasurable. Thank you, good doctor. Well, so let’s talk about these in sequence. When it comes to sleep, I’m curious, how big a deal is it if we get okay sleep, you know, maybe six and a quarter-ish hours a night versus great sleep, seven and a half plus hours a night? Is that fine or is that pretty consequential a difference?

Michael Breus
So, here’s what I’ll tell you, is it only matters when it matters. So, as an example, if you’re getting six and a quarter hours, and then, all of a sudden, you get five, you are screwed. But if you’re getting seven and then you get five, you can snap back from that very easily and be pretty good that day as well as the next. So, it really has to do with compliance and consistency, I think, is the two biggest things with sleep.

Because if you can just build a steady, solid base of good quality sleep, and it doesn’t have to be…I mean, again, we’re talking about minutes here. I’m talking about quality, right? So, I don’t care if you have six hours of sleep, as long as it’s super high quality, if that’s what works for you. But remember, the deal here is it’s not to get the least amount of the good stuff, right? Like, people seem to think it’s this kind of game.

Remember, sleep is recovery. This is what your body needs to do in order for you to get to your next step. So, by ripping it off, by limiting it, whether it’s through time or caffeine, is kind of foolish when you start to think about it because you’re going to need that body to repeat that activity again and again and again.

Pete Mockaitis
Now when you say “screwed,” what exactly does that mean in practice?

Michael Breus
Well, I mean, so for example, it really can depend. I mean, I have some people who, as an example, let’s say you’re normally getting seven hours of sleep and something terrible happens and your flight is delayed and you’re sleeping on the floor of the airport and you get five hours and then you have to go on television the next day, you’re probably going to be just fine, right? Because, yeah, you’re not feeling so great, but you’ve been getting seven hours of sleep.

If you’ve been getting six hours of sleep and that’s really not what your body needs, your body needs seven, your anxiety is going to increase significantly with this new added stress of not having slept well, on top of now being in a stressful situation. My guess is that, usually at that point in time, a lot of people reach for stimulants in order to kind of counteract that level of sleepiness.

And so, once you start to go down that path, you end up overstimulating because your body is, unfortunately, dehydrated because it hasn’t slept, and now you are kind of in this little bit of a death spiral where you’re amping up your anxiety while you’re amping up your caffeine. Usually, the performance is probably a B, B-minus, of what you would want it to have been had you been sleeping probably seven hours, where it could have easily been a B-plus or an A-minus, again, just from a rebound.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And what I found is the consequence can be even greater in so far as when I’m well rested, and tell me if there’s some cool science on this so it’s not just my anecdote, when I’m well rested, I’m ready to take on the important but not urgent and not pleasant task that have tremendous strategic value.

Michael Breus
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
And when I’m kind of sleep-deprived, it’s like, “Nah, I don’t feel like it. I’ll maybe do that later.” And so, in a way, if good sleep makes the difference between doing those things and not, over the course of a career, it could have a multimillion-dollar impact.

Michael Breus
Absolutely. And I think we see that with hydration and with breathing as well. So, I mean, I 100% agree that if you can have your body kind of in a flow state, in a mindset where… it might not be perfect, it might not be all, I’m getting my best ideas every single second, but it might be, “Hey, I’m going to do the blocking and tackling that needs to be done of trimming this email list, or creating better copy, or doing more editing,” or whatever it is, absolutely, I think, sleep, hydration, and breathing, all of which, again, if you can put it on kind of a schedule, it makes it so much easier.

It’s interesting, when you look at entrepreneurs in particular, and you look at people who are like, “Grow, grow, grow. I got to get my business going,” some of them have some of the worst wellness habits you’ve ever seen. They’re all coffee junkies or energy drink, I mean, I shouldn’t say all, there’s a lot. And that ends up playing a big role when, in fact, if you slept well and you were hydrated, you’d be shocked at how much energy you have. So, I think there are some things in there that I think could be super-duper valuable at any stage of business.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s funny, you know, Michael, I don’t know how many podcasters you chat with who have, in fact, read dozens of full-text studies, randomized controlled trials of different sleep interventions, but I have because I’m a fiend for this sort of thing. And what I find interesting or sad, I don’t know, is that often sleep hygiene education is used as the control and sees almost no result as compared to the active intervention. So, how do you, in the position of educating, help make an impact here? Like, what do we need to do if sleep hygiene education is so lame it’s the control?

Michael Breus
So, number one, I love the fact that you brought this up, and it’s important that you’re thinking about it this way as well. So, number one, let’s be super-duper clear for your audience members, sleep hygiene just by itself, in and of itself, it barely does shit, like, let’s be fair. Now, if you do the opposite of sleep hygiene, like if you have a drum set in your bedroom, of course it’s not going to go well, super-hot room, lights all on, I get it, okay? That seems like it’s kind of like the no-duh of sleep is sleep hygiene to me.

But I think there’s something in between, like a sleep disorder, and I guess what you’d call disordered sleep, which is just sort of, like, “I wish I had some guidelines. I wish I had some evidence. I wish I had a few things that would really work that I could follow that were straightforward and simple to be able to allow me to get better sleep.”

So, one of them is, no matter what your chronotype is, if everybody out there just wakes up at the same time, seven days a week, not five days a week, seven days a week, biologically speaking, you set a process in motion so that your melatonin production becomes consistent at a very specific time every single night. It is exactly 14, roughly 14 hours, I shouldn’t say exactly, roughly 14 hours after you wake up.

So, if you wake up at 6:00 a.m., 14 hours later is 8:00 p.m. and that’s when your melatonin is going to go on board and start to work. That’s why people start to feel sleepy around 9:30, 10:00 o’clock. However, if you wake up at 6:00 a.m. during the week and 9:00 o’clock on the weekends three hours later, melatonin production is three hours later, which means your brain doesn’t even going to think about going to bed until 1:00 o’clock in the morning.

So, by keeping just this one habit, like this would be a better habit than listening to almost all of the sleep hygiene, again, don’t sleep with a drum set in your room with lights on in a very hot room, but if all you did was keep your wakeup time consistent, notice I didn’t say bedtime, but wake up time consistent, you could actually make a biological process in your body consistent that helps you fall asleep.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I love it. Number one, that’s your top.

Michael Breus
That’s my top. And it doesn’t matter what your chronotype is. Now, I’ve mentioned the word a couple of times, and I know, Pete, you know what chronotype is, but for your audience members, I created a system called chronotyping, where you can take a quiz, you go to chronoquiz.com, and it’ll teach you what type of sleeper that you are.

So, there are four different types. Early birds are now called lions, night owls are now called wolves, and we figured this out. Now, what’s even better is waking up at the right time based on your chronotype. So, chronotype turns out to be genetic and it’s something that I can show you. It’s a quiz. It’s like 30 questions online. Like, it’s not very long and it’s fairly accurate. We’ve had over 4 million people take the quiz now, and so we’ve really been able to kind of dive deep and get some interesting data out there.

And it’s quite fascinating to learn about these different chronotypes because it tells you a lot about the person’s personality and things like that. So, not only waking up at the same time, but if you wake up based on your chronotypical wakeup time, it’s even better. In truth, you end up needing less sleep.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s beautiful. And what’s interesting is, between the last time we spoke and now, I spent a night in the Vanderbilt Sleep Laboratory hooked up to a lot of things.

Michael Breus
Oh, nice. Tell me. Tell me.

Pete Mockaitis
They informed me, much to my surprise, and being a regular weight, a normal weight, that I had a mild case of obstructive sleep apnea.

Michael Breus
Oh, what were your numbers? Do you remember?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you for asking. My apnea hypopnea index was 9.1.

Michael Breus
That’s not very much.

Pete Mockaitis
So, yeah, it is. So, it’s mild, but I was experiencing sleepiness in the day, and so I’ve been doing some things and that has helped.

Michael Breus
So, what did you do about it?

Pete Mockaitis
But as I’ve learned, this sleep apnea business is apparently pretty widespread.

Michael Breus
Oh, it’s amazing how many people have sleep apnea that is undiagnosed. Now, here’s the thing, is you have to really understand sleep apnea and its consequences to really gain an appreciation for it. So, first of all, mild sleep apnea in somebody who’s fairly lean, like you are, is something that, in most cases, we may or may not decide to treat. But, as an example, for somebody who may have been a bit bigger, then we might’ve said to ourselves, “Hmm, they’re already putting a load on their heart because they’re a little bit bigger, so, cardiovascularly, that could, in the future, be problematic.”

We want to make sure, even with mild sleep apnea, that that isn’t putting an extra load on the heart. So, therefore, even somebody with the exact same numbers as you, let’s say nine, but let’s say had an additional 60 pounds on them, we would probably consider treating it at that point. Also, to be fair, their symptomatology would probably be much worse than yours. You just said anything that you reported was kind of mild, whereas somebody with 60 pounds on them at your height would probably have significant different symptomatology, I would gather, probably more severe. So, it’s interesting when you start to look at it.

For folks out there who want to know a little bit more about what we’re talking about, an apnea hypopnea index means the number of times that you stop breathing or almost stop breathing divided by the amount of time that you spend in bed per hour. So, Pete stopped breathing in his sleep or almost stopped, according to the numbers he reports, as roughly nine times an hour. Now, you might say to yourself, “Holy crap, nine times an hour, that’s once every six minutes. That seems like a lot, Michael.” So, let me give you the scale.

So, it’s 5 to 15 is mild, 15 to 30 is moderate, 30 and above is severe. Also, one thing that we don’t know about Pete as of yet is how low did his oxygen desaturate while having these events. That can also be a severity criteria as well. If I have somebody who stops breathing in their sleep nine times an hour but their oxygen dumps into the 80s, I’m treating that immediately because I’m concerned that they may have other things that could be going on.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, thank you for asking. About 92-ish.

Michael Breus
So, that’s fantastic. So, we never want to see it going below 92, if at all possible. 90 is kind of like that lower rung where it’s like, “Okay, let’s just make sure it’s above 90 and then you’re okay.” But 92 is actually a better number to have. And on room air during the daytime, you’re probably 96-98.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, all that’s to say, so we’re getting into it, but I think it’s important, so if folks have no idea that they might have sleep apnea…

Michael Breus
Most don’t.

Pete Mockaitis
…what would be some telltale signs? And I’m going to say it, Oura Ring let me down on this one. Other people may love their Oura Rings and I think it’s great for other purposes, but it left me at the door.

Michael Breus
Well, it’s not diagnostic. Yeah, it’s not diagnostic for sleep apnea, number one. So, first of all, if we’re thinking trackers, everybody probably knows that Apple Watch just came out and is now actually tracking for sleep apnea. So, they actually will tell you, supposedly, if you’ve got sleep apnea. I don’t have the app as of yet, so I haven’t tried it out.

So, if you’re looking for trackers, that’s one that might be possibly helpful to do so. But to be fair, usually your bed partner will tell you. The person sitting next to you is going to tell you if you’re snoring, they’re going to tell you if you stop breathing in your sleep. You may actually experience it as well. You could wake up and be like, “Ahh,” and gasping or choking from air and trying to do that. So that could be a telltale sign.

If you wake up in the morning with a headache, that is absolutely a sign. It usually is due to oxygen deprivation causing that kind of swelling in the brain, which is not good. Also, depression, anxiety, moodiness, things of that nature, that up-and-down nature of that, of it all, that can certainly be a symptom or a sign of sleep apnea, and then of course daytime sleepiness, so just being tired, falling asleep at work, not performing, things like that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, if folks are thinking, “Hmm, that sounds like me,” I’ll say one of the easiest things I’ve discovered to assess this is just like the SnoreLab app, you get an audio of yourself, like, “Hey, there’s me stopping breathing. Whoa! Okay.” And, two, you could just get, like, sleeplay.com has an overnight test.

Michael Breus
Yeah, we sell them actually from Sleep Doctor as well. We have a full line of tests. It’s literally, you push on a button, and we do a full telecommunication with one of our doctors, so you actually meet with one of our doctors, talk about your symptomatology, they decide if it’s appropriate, send a test to your house. Believe it or not, the tests now are disposable.

Pete Mockaitis
I thought that was weird. I thought that was weird. But I’ll tell you my results from the test were almost identical to my results from the Vanderbilt Sleep Lab, and, oh, so much cheaper.

Michael Breus
Right. And easier, right? And in a better environment, I would argue, an environment more tailored to what your natural sleep would look like, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Very good. Okay. So, there you have it. You might have sleep apnea, you don’t know it, take a look at that and the dividends could be huge. Waking up at the same time. What else would be maybe your number two hottest tip for improved sleep?

Michael Breus
I’ll be honest with you. I think it’s kind of the not tip. It’s the, “Don’t think that it’s just going to go away on its own because it’s not.” Everybody thinks that, “Oh, you know, I’m just stressed out and I’m supposed to sleep like crap right now,” or, like, “I’ve got three kids, I’m supposed to sleep like crap.” That’s actually not the case. So, it’s not going to go away on its own.

If you are not happy with either the quality or the quantity of your sleep, and, by the way, don’t confuse the two. Don’t think that just because you sleep more, it’s going to be better, because it might not. So, understand how things like caffeine, alcohol, affect your sleep. Possibly follow my 3-2-1 rule, which is: three hours before bed, stop alcohol; two hours before bed, stop food; one hour before bed, stop fluids. That will save you some trips to the bathroom and, hopefully, make you have some better sleep.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. Well, now let’s talk hydration.

Michael Breus
You bet.

Pete Mockaitis
Good Doctor, you said that we can lose touch with our thirst signals as we age, but if we’re in the prime of our careers, can’t we just drink when we’re thirsty and call it good?

Michael Breus
I wish it worked. Unfortunately, as I take a sip, it doesn’t. So, what happens in a lot of cases is if we are sleep-deprived, and I think we’ve pretty much established that we are a sleep-deprived society, the signals don’t come as often as they should. So, believe it or not, our thirst meter, if you will, is off if you’re sleep-deprived. So that’s number one.

But let’s say you’re well-slept and your thirst meter should be on the mark, part of the problem is that we don’t have a solid understanding of what that amount should be. I started diving into the literature because, honestly, it was really kind of foreboding. And I’ve seen everywhere from 50 ounces a day to 130 ounces a day recommended. So, like, the problem is that nobody knows what they’re shooting for.

So, I actually developed a formula based on your weight and what’s called your uptick, so your ability to absorb water and then how much you would actually need in order to do that based on your weight, so, it’s quite simple. So, you just take your weight, you multiply it by 0.6, and that’s the number of ounces that you should drink.

Pete Mockaitis
My weight in pounds and not kilograms?

Michael Breus
That is correct. Pounds. And so, if you’re a 100-pound person, you should have 60 ounces of water. If you’re a 200-pound person, you should have 120 ounces of water. Now, you want to add 12 ounces for every half hour of exercise. That’s it. That’s the whole formula. Weight times 0.6 and then take that number and add 12 ounces for every half hour of exercise, and that will get you pretty much right as rain. The key here is to sip not chug it, and you want to get at least 30, I’m sorry, 40 ounces before noon because otherwise it’s tough to get all that water down without having to pee all night long.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that’s very clear and direct. Thank you. All right.

Michael Breus
I like to prescribe water. I think it’s the best supplement out there.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, water, is it always water? Other beverages are just as fine or not as good? Or what’s your take?

Michael Breus
Well, you know what? That’s a great question. So, number one, there’s a lot of types of water, believe it or not. There are water enhancers, by the way. We can talk about that. But I think you can throw a couple of cups of coffee in there. I don’t have a problem with that. I would prefer if you could stay away from the sugary stuff.

So, if you like sparkling water, that’s great. If you like carbonated water, I don’t have a problem with it. I’d stay away from soda, if you possibly can. But I’m also here to tell you that if you’re not going to drink and the only thing that’s going to get you to drink is a Diet Coke, fine. Drink your Diet Coke. I’d rather you get the fluid than not.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then let’s talk about these enhancers, these electrolytes, the powders, etc. Are they handy? And under what context?

Michael Breus
Yep, so that’s exactly how you should think of them, as handy and only under certain contexts. So, I did a little comparison in the book, looking at things like liquid IV and LMNT and a few others, and here’s what I can tell you. First of all, there’s a lot of sodium in these, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but here’s the thing. What they’re trying to do is create a barrier with the water-salt balance in your body. Because when you get too salty, your body wants more water. When you have too much water, your body wants more salt. So, that’s basically kind of how the whole thing works.

These packets of electrolytes are mostly salt, so you want to be careful, especially if you have high blood pressure, about dumping these things into your water bottle every day. Why I said I like the word “handy” is because you should have a packet with you, but you should use them sparingly. So, I would say, as an example, if you’re a runner and you run five miles every day, and you do a long run on the weekends, then I would use it for the long run on the weekends.

So, times where you’re going to be extra exposed or have a significant more energy expenditure, I think it makes a lot of sense because that helps keep that hydration going. But I want to be also clear about something, is using one of these products does not preclude you from drinking more water.

So, what a lot of people will do is they’ll pour this thing in, and they’ll think, “Oh, I don’t need to have my however many ounces because I’ve put my hydration multiplier in.” No, no, no, no, no. You still need the same amount of water. You just need to really think about these times and when to use it, and I would argue you probably already know when those are.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then I’m thinking if I am consuming this much fluid, for some that could be quite the uptick. Am I going to have to go to the bathroom all the time? Or are there some strategies for this? What do I do?

Michael Breus
Yeah, so it turns out that you don’t have to go to the bathroom all the time. So, it’s kind of interesting. There’s a section in my book that looks at bladder control, actually, and here’s what’s fascinating is, as you learn to drink more water, your bladder and your body absorbs it quite nicely and can control it. So, you won’t see a huge uptick in bathroom breaks. You will for the first two weeks, but by the third week it levels itself out quite nicely and it’s not really any more than usually what you’re used to. Here’s an interesting little factoid, is that no living mammal can pee for longer than 21 seconds.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I want to try it. I don’t think I’ve ever timed it before.

Michael Breus
Well, you will never not time it now. Everyone who is listening, I can assure you, is now, the next time you pee, you’re going to think about it. But if you pee for 21 seconds, you have truly emptied your bladder.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Michael Breus
Challenge out there.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, the stopwatches coming out. That seems kind of short, intuitively, but, I mean, I don’t know. We’ll see.

Michael Breus
Wait till the next time you pee, and it’s like, it’s not a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. It’s a 1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, you know, that kind of thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so then is there a certain amount of fluid that I can only…? You said don’t gulp or guzzle. Like, is it 16 fluid ounces an hour? Or is there a guideline for, like, what’s going to be just more than what your body can deal with?

Michael Breus
So, here’s what I tell people, is you want to think of your body like a sponge. So, you know when you walk out in the morning to the sink and there’s this kind of shriveled block and it’s pretty hard you could probably hammer something with it, that’s your sponge, right? That’s your body when you first have water. And if you pull the spout and you put water on it, if you put a lot of water on it, it just rolls off. It doesn’t really get absorbed.

But if you have a slow stream, it slowly gets absorbed, absorbed, absorbed, and then the whole thing grows, and then finally, when it gets too much water, it basically overruns. That’s exactly how you should think about drinking. You’re the sponge. You don’t want to throw 20 ounces down your gullet because it’s not going to get absorbed. But if you sip it, you’ll be surprised.

So, my favorite technique for doing this is, every morning, one of my morning routines is, I call it the three 15s, where I sit on the edge of the bed and I take 15 deep breaths, then I get 15 minutes of sunshine, and I drink 15 ounces of water. So, while I’m getting my 15 minutes of sunshine, every minute I just take a gulp, and I’m outside, I get the sunlight, I get the vitamin D, it turns off my melatonin, and I’m breathing. Like, I don’t know how many that is. It’s past a quadruple.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, all at once. All right. Well, any other do’s and don’ts when it comes to hydration?

Michael Breus
Well, one thing for people to know, and this is kind of weird, but it’s actually a truism, you can actually drink too much water, and this can happen. It’s happened actually at a fraternity hazing and things of that nature. You can actually make somebody toxic by putting too much water into them or into your body. As a matter of fact, was it Brooke Shields, actually had this happen? She was overhydrating and she overhydrated so much that she actually went unconscious and passed out. So, you can go to the other side of water. So, again, balance is sort of key here.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s talk about breathing.

Michael Breus
Yeah, let’s talk about it. It’s amazing how many people don’t know how to breathe, it’s actually quite remarkable.

Pete Mockaitis
So, what are we doing wrong, exactly?

Michael Breus
Well, that’s the right question. It’s like, “Well, Michael, are we doing something wrong? I mean, we’re alive, right? So how wrong could it be?” I would say some of the biggest things that we see people that are doing that are actually just not helping with their breathing, number one is their breathing is too shallow. Number one, that puts much bigger load on the heart. Number two, you actually get about half as much air. Taking a long, deep belly breath, and then kind of letting it go through your diaphragm, actually extends the lungs and allows your heart to slow down, which is much more healthy, generally speaking.

So, one of the things that we do is we breathe in a too shallow of a way so it’s just very light repetitive breaths. The other biggie that we do is we’re too mouthy. Too many people are mouth breathers. That can be due to congestion. That can be due to people just not really thinking about it, but in a majority of cases when people are mouth-breathing, it’s basically like putting leaded gas into the engine because you get every bacteria, virus, particulate, everything is coming right through the mouth, straight into the lungs, and kind of gumming up the works.

And then I think the other big one, and there’s actually six breathing problems, but I think these are the big three. People forget to breathe. Do you ever do this, Pete? I have this happen to me every once in a while. Like, if I’m concentrating, like if I’m playing a video game or I’m watching something, I’m just there and then, all of a sudden, I realize, I’m like, “I forgot to breathe.” I start to breathe again. Do you ever do that?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m sure.

Michael Breus
So, that’s something that people do as well. And, again, getting people more thoughtful about breathing, in general, turns out to be a great idea. And the yogis and the Ayurvedics and that culture has done such an amazing job of teaching us so many different kinds of breathing. I utilize several of these different types of breath work in the book, and it’s fun. It’s fun to actually try some different things out.

I’ve tried the hyperventilation breathing called Kundalini breathing. That was quite an experience for me. I’ve also tried the 4-7-8 breathing. This is a technique that I utilize actually in the middle of the night for many of my patients. So, people who wake up in the middle of the night can’t return back to sleep. My favorite technique then is 4-7-8 breathing.

So, it’s exactly what it sounds like. Slowly breathe in for a count of four, you hold for a count of seven, you breathe out for a count of eight. This was a technique that was developed by Dr. Andrew Weil for the Navy SEALs to help them lower their heart rate so they could shoot in between heart rates for long range snipers. So, this is a great technique you can utilize.

I utilize it before I go on stage. I utilize it in the middle of the night. It’s one of those great things that will just dump your heart rate super-duper quick and allow you to breathe better. So, I think there’s a lot out there. There’s more out there than you might imagine on breathing, in general.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, if we’re breathing through the mouth, we have some negative impact associated with just sucking in the microbes, pathogens, etc.

Michael Breus
You bet.

Pete Mockaitis
I guess I’m curious, like what’s really at stake when we breathe optimally, versus we breathe with just kind of without any thought to it?

Michael Breus
So, oxygen transport, and so it all has to do with energy. So, for folks out there who want more energy, shallow breathing is never going to get you there unless it’s super-duper forceful. So, I would argue that all of your energy, remember, oxygen is the fuel that lights the sugar fire that is your energy. So, when we eat something, it all gets broken down into glucose and then stored as either fat or glucose, and so we need something to light that on fire to create energy. That something is oxygen.

And so, by taking small, shallow breaths and unfiltered breaths, what ends up happening is we get bad quality air, and we don’t get enough air, which means we don’t have enough fuel for the fire and we don’t have enough energy.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. And then, you’ve got a few changes you recommend, so we’ve already covered the using your nose and bring it into the diaphragm. Any other top things we’re getting wrong?

Michael Breus
Well, I think just being thoughtful about breathing and thinking about it is probably one of the biggest things that I want you to do. And let’s be fair, you don’t have to do something crazy, okay? Like, a lot of people turn to me, like, “Oh, Michael, you learned all these crazy breathing techniques. I’m not a meditator. I’m not a yoga person. I don’t know how to do those things.” Wrong. This is just breathing we’re talking about.

One of the techniques is you breathe. You hold one nostril closed, and you breathe in through one nostril, and then you breathe out through another nostril. That’s the technique. This isn’t hard stuff, but what it does is it allows you to be purposeful in your breath work. It allows your heart rate to go up and down in ways, shapes, and forms that causes other things to happen in your body, like melatonin to be produced, or cortisol to be produced, or things like that. So, it’s really quite powerful. Honestly, I was kind of surprised, because when I went into this, I’m like, “What am I going to learn about breathing?” I was shocked.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, one of your suggestions is to strengthen your diaphragm, and I’d love to get your hot take on, I guess they call it respiratory muscular training, RMT, with tools like The Breather, but do you think that’s worth doing?

Michael Breus
So, here’s what I think. I don’t think it’s worth spending a ton of money on a bunch of fancy gadgets and gizmos. There are actually some things that you can buy on Amazon for 20 bucks that can actually help strengthen your breathing quite nicely. But the big thing to do is, again, in the Sleep, Drink, Breathe programmatic book, where we have these five separate times throughout the day where we have you do different things, you’re breathing at all five of those times, you will naturally begin to strengthen just by doing some deep diaphragmatic breathing, even if that’s the only technique that you do.

So, the good news here is, I think if you if all you did was buy the book and follow the program, your diaphragm is going to get stronger.

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

Michael Breus
Well, here’s the deal, is I feel like the book is a little bit like a ticket. So, if you buy the book, you actually send me a copy of the receipt and I then send you all this cool stuff. So, I actually have got several lectures that I’m doing live that you’ll be invited to join. You get the plan immediately for free right there, so even before the book comes out. There’s a couple of different things in there that I think you’ll like.

Also, you are entered into a drawing for a free mattress. So, we’re going to have several mattresses that we’re going to give away for people who are doing that. So, it’s going to be a lot of fun. We’re definitely looking forward to it. So, if you get a chance, go to SleepDoctor.com/book, and check it out.

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

Michael Breus
So, I heard Nelson Mandela once say, “I never lose. I only win or learn.” 

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

Michael Breus
I think, for me, the most interesting research that came out was when they started studying narcolepsy to help insomniacs. So, they started to learn, genetically speaking, what was going on with narcoleptics and make them feel so sleepy to try to understand how we could help people with insomnia. I thought that was a really cool application of the science.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is cool. Now, I have to know, is there a one weird trick from narcoleptics that helps them snap into sleep immediately?

Michael Breus
Well, so it opened up a whole line of genetic work and possible new drug therapy, actually. So, there are actually several companies now that are looking at the on switch for narcolepsy as a potential on switch for people with insomnia, but not at that level, of course. And so, it’ll be interesting to see what happens next.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Michael Breus
Well, my all-time favorite book is Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein. But I just read Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, and that was just powerful.

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

Michael Breus
Probably my pillow because I’m a sleep doctor. I love my pillow. I actually have several pillows that I utilize. One is from a company called InfiniteMoon. I have no affiliate anything with these companies. InfiniteMoon, they make a cool, really good pillow called The Curve and then something called Sleep Crown. Now, this is weird. This is a pillow that I actually put over my head and it actually helps. I don’t know why. It’s just so damn comfortable and I really enjoy it.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; you hear them quote it back to you often?

Michael Breus
Sleep is a lot like love. The less you look for it, the more it shows up.

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

Michael Breus
Head on over to SleepDoctor.com and check out my book. You’re welcome to ping me on Facebook, TikTok, all of those. And I have a YouTube channel where I’m now doing some really fun, interesting videos. So, if you get a chance, check it out there, throw me some comments.

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

Michael Breus
Here’s my final call to action, is do yourself a favor and just consider your sleep, your hydration, and your breathing, in what it could do for your overall performance, whether that’s your work performance, your relationship performance, or your personal performance, and see if it’s something that might be interesting for you. You might be surprised.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Michael, it’s been fun once again. Good luck and good sleep.

Michael Breus
Thank you. I appreciate it. Wishing you some sweet dreams, Pete.

1004: Seth Godin on How to Maximize Your Impact and Deliver Work That Matters

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Seth Godin shares insightful stories and perspectives to help us think strategically and create meaningful change in a complex world.

You’ll Learn

  1. The mindset that makes you indispensable
  2. Why to embrace that you’re an impostor 
  3. Three questions to ask with every project 

About Seth

Seth Godin is the author of 22 books that have been bestsellers around the world and have been translated into more than 35 languages. He’s also the founder of the altMBA and The Akimbo Workshops, online seminars that have transformed the work of thousands of people. 

He writes about the post-industrial revolution, the way ideas spread, marketing, quitting, leadership and most of all, changing everything. You might be familiar with his books Linchpin, Tribes, The Dip and Purple Cow. His book, This Is Marketing, was an instant bestseller around the world. The newest book, The Practice, is out at the end of 2020 and is already a bestseller. His newest project is leading a worldwide group of volunteers creating The Carbon Almanac. 

In addition to his writing and speaking, Seth has founded several companies, including Yoyodyne and Squidoo. His blog (which you can find by typing “seth” into Google) is one of the most popular in the world. His podcast is in the top 1% of all podcasts worldwide. 

In 2018, he was inducted into the Marketing Hall of Fame. More than 20,000 people have taken the powerful Akimbo workshops he founded, including thealtMBA and The Marketing Seminar. 

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Seth Godin Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Seth, welcome back.

Seth Godin
Thank you for having me. It’s good to see you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I am excited to dig into some of your insights and wisdom and stories and fun that you got cooked up in your latest book, This is Strategy: Make Better Plans. Could you kick us off with a particularly fascinating, surprising, counterintuitive nugget that you’ve come across as you’re putting this piece together?

Seth Godin
Potatoes.

Pete Mockaitis
Potatoes. That’s surprising.

Seth Godin
There were no potatoes in Europe until 1500 or so. They evolved and were hybridized in Peru. Well, when potatoes arrived, it’s worth noting that potatoes are twice as efficient at creating calories and food for humans as any other food that you can grow.

But when potatoes took off, Dublin, in the 1800s, was the most densely populated place on earth and has never retained, become that densely populated since. So, potatoes are the key to all of this. Anyway, because the people in Europe were colonialists, they looked down on things that were strange, it wasn’t high status. Potatoes came close to being banned in England, and they were banned in France.

And a guy, an entrepreneur, wanted to get potatoes into the diets of people who were starving and who needed food. He had access to the court, so he got Marie Antoinette to wear potato flowers in her hair, just as a little signal that maybe potatoes would be okay, but that wasn’t enough. So then, he rented some farmland a few miles away from Versailles and planted a whole bunch of potatoes and hired armed guards to stand watch over the plot all day but at night, he sent them home.

So, of course, the peasants, seeing that this high value item wasn’t guarded, stole potatoes, ate them, discovered that they were just great. And that’s how France was saved. The lesson of this is strategy is your philosophy of becoming. What moves will you make? What tasks will you take on to change the system, to see the system, and then change it? And it’s all about status, and affiliation, the freedom from fear. It’s time all woven together so that we can do the work we’re proud of.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful, and there’s a lot there. I want to maybe get a contrasting story. Tell us the tale of your hot take on how organ donation should work.

Seth Godin
Well, a relative needed a kidney and so I got to learn a lot about the system. It turns out, in the United States, kidney donation is opt-in, and it turns out that every year millions of kidneys are buried that could go to somebody who needed them, and this leads to a shortage and a waiting list. The problem with the waiting list, of course, is that people are dying to get on it, and they’re dying when they’re on it.

So, lots of things have been suggested. Most of them are horrible, like paying poor people to donate their kidneys when they’re dead. And I got to thinking about the game theory here, the strategy that you could bring to the system, and Dr. Jonathan Sackner-Bernstein, a well-regarded cardiologist, worked with me. We wrote a paper, published it in Transplantation Journal. We did everything right, and even though my idea is correct, it didn’t get adopted. And in the book, I outlined exactly what we did wrong.

But the short version is this. Right now, opting in to donate a kidney has some fear associated with it because you have to acknowledge you’re going to die, and you have to think about how your family is going to engage with that. If we just added one shift to the rule set, which is your priority on the wait list is based on how long you have signed up to be a donor because now there’s no moral issue, right? If you’re not willing to be a donor, you shouldn’t be willing to be a recipient.

If that is the case, that there’s a priority to people who donated early, everyone’s going to get on the list as soon as they can because you would be afraid of being left out. Tension, and status, and affiliation. As a result, the shortage would go away and we wouldn’t need a list. But – and this is the lesson – the people who are in charge of the list are risk averse. The people who are in charge of the list don’t want to go first. The people who are in charge of the list, the worst thing they can imagine is screwing things up.

So, in order to get them to say, “Yes,” I would have needed to spend four years on the road, going to conferences, writing papers, going to meetings, dealing with committees, doing tests, and I wasn’t willing to do that sacrifice. And that is a key lesson in how we make change happen, which is don’t try to start a log on fire if the kindling you have is too small.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s great. And what it’s hitting home for me here is that your kidney idea and potatoes are both fabulous. I love them both. I’m a good Lithuanian boy. We love our potatoes. And it’s intriguing, I think, and this might be sort of a no-duh for many, but I think a number of professionals who strive to be awesome at their job, kind of get a rude awakening at times that just being great, having a fantastic idea or product or offer or solution or skill set isn’t adequate to make it happen.

Seth Godin
Correct. Well said. And that’s why the first two ideas that I just shared with you are not about your job. They’re about projects. But most of us have a job and we have a choice. Either our analysis is, “My job is to do my job, to wait for instructions, just like I did in school, and to do the tasks that are put in front of me.” The alternative is to view my job as a series of projects where I go to people and I enroll them in working with me to make the change I seek to make.

The problem with the first path is, while it might give you peace of mind in the short run, particularly in a changing world with AI and everything else, you’re going to be a cog in a system that doesn’t care about you. Whereas, if you can adopt an awesome mindset to say, “I want to be a contribution. I do projects. I make change happen,” the doors are wide open.

And the CEOs I talk to from companies big and small, that’s what they want from their employees. Unfortunately, they act in a way that doesn’t signal that. They act in a way that makes it feel like third grade and you’re just trying to get through the day.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, you zeroed in on a few of these key principles, difference makers, status, affiliation, fear. And, yes, I think there, I think I see them front and center in terms of, “You know, if I stick my neck out and do this kind of weird thing that nobody else seems to be talking about, so maybe it’s not important, then I could very well look like a total idiot here, and so my status could be down, my affiliation could be down, people not asking me, inviting me to cool stuff anymore, and I’m just afraid of that. Ultimately, you know, getting fired, losing income, got to sell the house, got to downsize, all the things that could unfold.” So, help us, how do we kind of navigate through those core issues?

Seth Godin
So, you’ve nailed it. And the one thing you left off the list that people are motivated by is the freedom from fear. Not actual risk, but the freedom from feeling like we are taking a risk. And it turns out that work has amplified our fear. That’s how they get us to comply and it’s a trap because, the people who get the joke and are willing to encounter the feeling of fear, actually have the most stable and resilient jobs.

So, my first job, I didn’t know any better, I was 23 years old, I was lucky enough to be working with Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Michael Crichton, I launched a whole line of science fiction adventure games, and it was a job, I wasn’t the boss. And the packaging was absolutely beautiful but I needed a way to seal the package for the stores because Target and Lechmere and other mass merchants didn’t want this fourfold gate thing open.

So, they said, “You have to shrink wrap it,” and I didn’t want to shrink wrap my beautiful packaging. So, I ordered 10,000 little tiny Velcro dots to hold it shut. The problem is that 10,000 little tiny Velcro dots do not adhere and stick to coated cardstock. And as a result, my peers happily made fun of me for months. And the thing about it is the 10,000 tiny little Velcro dots probably cost the company $400. And because I was willing to dance with that, I launched more than a dozen gold or platinum level pieces of software in the time it took my colleagues to launch one or two middling products.

Because my posture was the best surfers find good waves. Here’s a wave and it’s not fatal. I can lean into possibility. I can do projects that could be generous if they work and aren’t about my ego but are about making a change. And I knew that the downside was, yes, maybe I was going to get fired. I came within a day of getting fired.

But if I was going to get fired, it wasn’t going to be because I was timid and it wasn’t going to be because I was selfish. It was going to be because I was bringing possibility to the table that made people uncomfortable. But I knew that that’s the definition of being awesome at your job. We don’t need you to comply more than everyone else. I can go to Upwork for that. I can go to Fiverr for that. What we need from you is to push and to imagine because that’s what’s worth paying for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really powerful. And so, zooming in on, I guess, the fundamental mindset that you had cooking with regard to the dots is whereas, others in that same position say, “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know. I guess shrink-wrapping is the thing that we do. So, hey, that’s a shame, but, okay, shrink-wrapping, here we go.” So, they might just go down that pathway.

But because you’re willing to take the occasional oopsie and embarrassment, you are liberated and emboldened to charge ahead and do a lot of great stuff and get way more big wins than a couple of little scuff losses along the way.

Seth Godin
Yeah. So, here’s one way to think about it, and I learned this accidentally at business school. A business school professor has a challenge where they’re teaching a case. They’ve got 60 people in her class, and she has to call on people to move the conversation forward. And I showed up at business school, I was one of the younger people there, and it became clear to me that the spreadsheets and the two-thirds of the case that was about crunching the numbers, it was going to make my eyes bleed. I was never going to be good at it. I didn’t want to be good at it.

So, I decided that I was going to invest all my effort on reading about the personalities and the situations, and not even open the spreadsheet that came with it. And I made it clear through my actions that if a professor wanted that kind of analysis, that’s the day to call on me. That if they wanted to embarrass me and ask me about the numbers, they were welcome to, but that would ruin the… that gets old. They don’t want to do that. They don’t want to set me up to fail. I want to set them up to succeed.

So, if you earn the reputation at work that you’re the person who does interesting things with energy, that you’re the person who contributes and raises the quality of conversation, if you’re the one who asks hard questions, you can hire a boss that wants you to do that, and now you have job security forever. Whereas if you are, you can pick anyone, and I mean anyone, trying to fit in all the way, the minute they can find someone cheaper than you, I promise they will.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s a hard reality check, a true one. I’m reminded, we have a conversation publishing shortly, with Duncan Wardle who worked at Disney, and he developed a reputation for making impossible things happen, which was so fun because they just kept giving him these super cool out-there jobs, and he just kept getting to do them and getting cool results and building a career reputation, and now consulting practice and books and all those things.

And so, that’s quite beautiful how you get a bit of a, the word personal brand feels a little shallow for this. It’s a reputation, it’s an oomph, it’s an ethos, it’s a vibe, it’s a thing that you carry within you and is recognized by others and that perpetuates more phenomenal opportunities.

Seth Godin
But let’s be very clear, this is not about talent and what you are born with. You begin this by being the person who orders lunch better than anybody else, because ordering lunch is hardly fatal, and the people who order lunch and always order the same thing, boring thing wrapped in the shrink wrap and everything else, those people, you can count on them for boring lunch.

But if they come to expect that you’ve done your homework and you realize that two of the people are vegans and one person is gluten free and you found this place, and dah, dah, dah, and lunch was great, you haven’t pigeon-holed yourself as an admin. You have pigeon-holed yourself as someone who cares. And from that, you will get better at caring and being seen as caring.

And so, it’s not that, you know, “Seth started doing this at the beginning of his career, so I will never be able to do it.” It’s, I just was lucky enough to be present with people who challenged me to be challenging. And once I got a little better at it, I could do it more. And so, that’s what we seek to do. And I don’t think I tell this story in the book, but one of the key bits of development I had in my career, it’s the first day of work at Spinnaker Software. It’s my summer job. I am the 30th employee. The company would grow to have hundreds of people and then get acquired and stuff like that. But I walk in, there’s no voicemail, there’s no email, the fax had just been installed, and on the receptionist desk, is this plastic carousel with 50 slots in it and a Dymo label maker to put each person’s name on one slot.

So, you would walk in after lunch or you would walk in in the morning, you’d spin and spin and spin this thing until you found your name and then there’d be the pink message slips. You had to do this three, four, five times a day. It wasn’t in alphabetical order. It was in the order people had been hired. That makes sense because otherwise you’d have to rebuild the thing every time you hired someone. And I walk in and I look at this thing, and I go, “I’m going to have to look at this thing five times a day spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning, so does everyone else.”

So, I reach over to the receptionist desk, and she has a one of those magnetic things filled with paper clips, and I pull out a paper clip and I put it next to my name. So, now all you got to do is spin to my paper clip and I’ll be able to find my message, and the people who know they’re near me can spin to my paperclip and save time. Well, within 24 hours, it was festooned with different-colored paperclips and pipe cleaners, everyone had a little flag over their thing.

I saved the company many, many, many hours of spinning. It wasn’t fatal. It was awesome, and no one told me to do it. No one said, “You’re the senior vice president of paperclip affixing.” Instead, I saw a problem and I solved it. I didn’t have to take credit for it. I didn’t have to send out a memo. I just took responsibility, and if someone had said that was stupid, I would have taken my paperclip out.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful and very resonant. My mom ended up becoming the CEO of the local credit union because she noticed the former CEO was vacuuming after everyone left, and she’s like, “Well, I know how to vacuum.” And so, to your point, she did not get a reputation for, “Oh, Jan can clean.” It’s like, “Oh, Jan cares. She’s invested in this facility and what we’re about. Well, okay. I’m going to give her some more responsibilities,” and then one thing leads to another.

Seth Godin
Go, Jan, go.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, absolutely. So, let’s talk about this fear business. Freedom from fear, it’s interesting because I’m thinking about Dr. Casey Means makes an interesting point about feeling safe. She’s like, “To be incredibly clear, you and everyone you’ve ever loved will die. So, in one way, none of us are really safe.”

Seth Godin
Correct, not to mention the asteroid. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Uh-oh. Now I’m fearful, Seth. So, in a way, none of us are really safe. However, feeling safe is associated with all kinds of wonderful benefits. There’s creativity and health and freedom from chronic disease and all these things. So, likewise, with regard to freedom from fear, none of us are truly free from all risk. Like, we may very well get fired and someone may very well say, “That’s a very stupid idea and you’re not allowed to come to these meetings anymore.” That can happen. But if we have freedom from fear, boy, we unlock a lot of goodness. So, do you have any pro tips on getting to the other side of that?

Seth Godin
Well, we need to talk about resistance, but first I just want to do a small asterisk about fired, which is, I remember a few decades ago when Ford Motor Company saw that sales of the Ford Explorer were slowing down and they fired 10,000 people in one day. Here’s the thing. If their union had been smart, the UAW, a year earlier, would have said, “You’re making junky cars. We’re going on strike until you design a better car.”

Because the fact is those 10,000 people didn’t deserve to get fired. They got fired because other people designed a lousy car. That’s the risk we face, actually, when we show up at work; the risk of complying, not the risk of leading. So, this freedom from fear. If you talk to people who run the marathon, the first thing you’ll discover is that some people quit at mile 20 and other people finish.

And the difference between quitting at 20 and finishing is not how fit you are. It’s, “What are you going to do with the tired?” because they all get tired, but the people at 20 don’t know what to do with the tired so they have to stop, and the people who make it to mile 26, their coach didn’t teach them how not to be tired. Their coach taught them what to do when they feel tired. And the same thing is true with the fear.

Resistance, the thing that holds us back, writer’s block, Steve Pressfield’s great term for it, makes us feel like an imposter. And imposter syndrome is real, that when you get asked to do something, where you are confronting the future, something that hasn’t been done before, you will feel like an imposter. And so, the question which you just asked is, “How do I make imposter syndrome go away?” And the answer is, “You can’t.” And the reason you can’t is you’re an imposter, and so am I.

If you are making assertions about the future, you can’t be sure. You can’t guarantee that you are right. So, if you’re being honest with yourself, you’re simply pretending that the future will be the way you say. And so, when we feel that show up, we can’t make it go away, but we can dance with it. We can welcome it. We can invite it to sit down for tea. We can use it as a marker and a symbol that we might be onto something. And if I don’t feel afraid when I’m doing my work, then I know I am not trying hard enough.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Can you expand on that a little bit because that shows that you care, that you’re trying something new and challenging on your edge, outside your comfort zone, like these kinds of things?

Seth Godin
Yeah. Well, how long does it take to type a 200-page book? And the answer is a day, maybe four days if you’re Robert Caro, but not that much longer. So why does it take so long to write a book? And the answer is, “You don’t know what the next sentence is supposed to be.” That the work you’re getting paid for is to explore what the next sentence is, not to type.

But a whole bunch of people signed up to do a job where they’re in the typing pool. And the problem is the typing pool is no longer filled with employees. That the miracle of AI plus outsourcing is that if I can write down a job, I can get someone to do it faster and cheaper than you.

Pete Mockaitis
If I can write down a job. Yeah, I could chew on that for a while. What is write-downable and what is not?

Seth Godin
Correct. So, I can say to somebody, or to an AI, “Please read this 100-page document and highlight 20 of the quotes.” And if all I need is the quotes, that’s mechanical. I can write that down. If it’s, “Please highlight the 20 most important quotes,” that’s worth paying a human for. Because the decision of what are the most important ones, the choice to leave the other ones out, that’s risky. There’s no guarantee you’re right. Fear arises.

And so, where I get into trouble with AI, where I get into trouble with Upwork, is if I ask someone to do a job where I can’t write down all the steps, because then, inevitably, I get disappointed. But if I can write down all the steps, I would be a fool to hire an expensive human to do it when I got a computer that’ll do it all night for free.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So, pick the best quotes, or the most engaging quotes, or the most viral quotes, or the most thought-provoking quotes. So, if someone on Upwork were to say, “Okay. Cool. Sure thing, Seth. How do I determine which ones are more thought-provoking than the others?” then that is supremely not write-downable.

Even if you could write down, it’s like, “Well, you know what? It might have, like, an interesting contrast, like ‘Ask not what your country can do, but what you can do for your country.'” You know, so it might. So, any document or guidance you could produce would be incomplete, and, thus, in your parlance, not write-down-able.

Seth Godin
Correct.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. Yeah, that’s juicy. Okay. So, we’re all impostors, so we dance with it and it’s not going to disappear. And, in fact, we could hopefully learn to embrace it as an indicator of something good and positive and exciting.

Seth Godin
Yeah, that’s our job. That is actually what it is to be awesome at your job, is to do things that are not write-downable, and this doesn’t mean you have to be a super fancy executive. So, there’s a fancy hotel chain in the US and the chambermaids are the lowest paid people in the organization. They’re the people who make up your room every day. Every one of them gets a $250 per guest budget to spend any way they want to please a guest.

So, they’re the front line. If they discover a couple really upset about something, they can just interrupt while they’re making the bed, and say, “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that. Why don’t you just go have lunch? It’s on us.” And they just made a decision that is not write-downable in the moment, and this is somebody who’s getting paid minimum wage.

If you don’t trust your frontline people to do that, you’ve decided to make a commodity and to race to the bottom. The alternative is to race to the top, is to stand for something and to trust your people to understand the strategy and help you get there.

Pete Mockaitis
Seth, I love that so much. My very first W2 job-job was at Kmart, and Pantry Pete, they called me. And when I learned in the training video that I had “the power to please” you know, like, “Oh, sorry, we’re out of the Pepsi 24-pack, but I can give you two 12-packs for the same price as the 24-pack,” I thought that was the coolest thing ever. And I even wrote down in my schedule, “not work, but exercise power to please,” or EPP because I was dorky.

But it really was the funnest thing I did in terms of, I guess it was the autonomy and pleasing people feels good and I think that’s just a thing that I wish every team, organization, had more of, that capacity to do that.

Seth Godin
And Kmart closed its last store last week, and the reason is because they took that piece away and raced to the bottom. They tried to out-Walmart Walmart, out-Amazon Amazon, and that’s really hard to do, because if you race to the bottom, you might win.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I love that language, out-Walmart Walmart, out-Amazon Amazon, and they sure didn’t out-Target Target. Sorry, Kmart. I mean, I’m a loyalist, got the apron, but, yeah, Target really wiped the floor there. So, let’s talk about you have a great quote in your book, “We mistakenly spend more time figuring out how to win the game we’re in instead of choosing which game to play in the first place.” I think there is just loads of wisdom in this. Can you unpack that a bit for us?

Seth Godin
Well, so we’re surrounded by games. Social media is a game. How many followers do you have? Whichever project you’re taking on is a game. Your career is a game. How much money do you get paid? These are scoring mechanisms that imply what the game is for, that there are people, billionaires, who think that what the world is for is for them to make as much money as possible.

And the thing is, if you confront a game that you cannot win, that is making you unhappy, trying harder to win that game is probably the wrong path. And so, the smallest viable audience gives us the freedom to pick who we are working with and for, and to ignore everyone else. And that gives us the responsibility to pick a game we want to be responsible for, as opposed to just saying, “Well, I’m playing the same game everybody else is.” Everything goes back to high school.

When you were in high school, you could have played the game of “How do I become Homecoming King or Queen?” or you could have played the game of “How do I get on the football team?” or you could have played the game of “How do I become first chair clarinetist?” Those are totally different games. And if you’re playing one of those games really, really hard, but the only reason is because you need to win it, you haven’t thought about which game is good for you and your world, you’re probably making a mistake.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And so, in the professional context, I’m just thinking about folks who just ran down the path, “Go be a doctor. Go be a lawyer. Go be an engineer. Oh, shoot, I hate this. Uh-oh.”

Seth Godin
Correct.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you give us some more examples of folks who have made this mindset paradigm shift and it’s been transformational for them?

Seth Godin
Well, one of the keys to the shift is to ignore sunk costs. Sunk costs are all the things you’ve invested in – a law degree, building something, buying something – and defending them going forward. You’re 35 years old, you’re a dentist, you hate being a dentist. It’s not going to get any better. You’re still going to hate being a dentist, but you keep doing it because you’ve already invested 10 years of your life and all this money in being a dentist, which means you’re sacrificing the next 40 years of your life to defend a choice that might’ve been a good one in retrospect when you made it, but it isn’t a good one anymore.

And the response is, “All sunk costs are gifts from your former self.” The Pete of yesterday, or 10 years ago, did something for me today, and you are allowed to say, “No, thanks.” You don’t have to accept the gift. Now you can make a new decision with new information. I could take this gift of a dental practice and this dental degree, or I’m going to say, “No, thank you,” and I could go become a tree farmer.

And shifting like that turns out to be good-decision science, but it’s also great for our heads, because every day you go back to your job, every day you go to work, you are re-signing up to accept the gift from yesterday. But if the gift isn’t helping you, don’t do it. So, yes, I know people who graduated from Harvard Law School but are now podcasters and life coaches. I know people who had a really good run doing something in Silicon Valley, but now they’re busy building boats because they didn’t give up, and they’re not retired. They’re creating value. They’re just playing a different game.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Some gifts need to go to Goodwill, and that’s totally fine. That’s acceptable.

Seth Godin
Yeah, it’s critical, actually.

Pete Mockaitis
A lot of this rich thinking we’re doing here seems to only exist, from my perspective, outside the realm of the urgent, the here-and-now next action. How do you think about dealing with urgency and getting the headspace to think wisely and strategically?

Seth Godin
So, you either live in the last minute, the next minute, or the best minute. Those are the three choices. So, what does it mean? The last minute is whatever is the highest on my urgency list is what I’m going to do right now, because there’s always going to be something that’s the highest on your urgency list. That lets you off the hook. You don’t have to be responsible for any of your choices because the urgency list determines it. That’s doing everything at the last minute.

The next minute is offered to everybody, every day. We get the next minute. What will we choose to do with it? And the best minute is yesterday you had one minute that was the best minute of your day. Everyone did. How can you make it so that your best minutes stack up? How can you make it so you have more of those? Because very few people who spend their life working at the last minute have many best minutes to report.

The short order cooks don’t usually have a lot of highlights from their day because all they know is someone ordered some eggs, they made some eggs, and then they went back to the next thing. And the power comes from taking a deep breath, leaving the urgent alone, it will take care of itself, and focusing instead on “How do I make this a best minute?” And you can’t work enough hours to defeat everybody because there’s only 24 hours in a day, but you could work less hours and make a bigger difference if you did the right thing with your time.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Seth, I love that question, “How do I make this the best minute?” Your book, This is Strategy, is filled with useful questions. Could you share a couple of them that you think might be the most frequently useful and transformative?

Seth Godin
Well, the ones I keep coming back to are “Who’s it for?” “What’s it for?” and “What’s the change I seek to make?” Because “Who’s it for?” makes it very clear who my client is, who my boss is, who my customer is. Ignore everyone else. “What’s it for?” is why do they need this from me? What are they dreaming of when I show up? Where’s the empathy of what I did for them?

And the third question is, “What is the change I seek to make?” because if you’re not making a change, then you’ve just signed up to be a cog. You are here to make a change. Our work is actually projects. Our job is getting paid by somebody to consistently do projects, but your projects are here to make a change happen. Can you point to the change you are making?

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Well, Seth, tell me anything else you really want to make sure to mention before we hear about a few of your favorite things?

Seth Godin
I would say the single best thing people can do, if any of this has resonated, is to find someone not related to you, and meet with them once a week by Zoom to tell each other the truth, to answer these questions together because what you will discover is, knowing the meeting is coming, you will change your behavior so that you can report in the meeting that you’re onto something. And just having that sounding board can open the door to make a difference.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Now, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Seth Godin
In the classic self-help book, Dune, the Bene Gesserit say, “Fear is the mind-killer,” three words probably worth tattooing somewhere on your body.

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

Seth Godin
I think that understanding what the marshmallow test really measures is really helpful. The marshmallow test has been seen as saying that if a three-year-old can sit for five minutes with a marshmallow so they’ll get two, that self-restraint leads to 20, 30 years of happiness. So, therefore, people who are “born” with self-restraint are destined for greatness.

And some of that is correct, but it’s worth understanding that a kid who grows up in a household that’s under stress, where there’s trauma, where there isn’t dinner on the table, where parents are doing their best but can’t always keep their promises, those kids understandably eat the marshmallow because who knows if you’re going to come back with two marshmallows. You probably won’t.

So, I think we need to give people a little bit more grace and a lot more support because we don’t all win the birthday lottery. And what we can do as a culture is create the conditions for people to become resilient and to find self-restraint so that we can all maximize the joy we have and that we create for others.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Seth Godin
You know, it’s really fascinating to me that you’re not supposed to talk about your own book, but I listen to my own books all the time, because if I’m headed to a meeting or I’m feeling stuck and I put on The Practice, it gets under my skin again. But if I have to pick another book, I think if you haven’t read The War of Art by my friend Steve Pressfield, you need to do that right now.

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

Seth Godin
You might not have a spokeshave at home, but a well-sharpened spokeshave is your first choice for woodworking. And for my job that involves typing, Claude.ai is so much better than ChatGPT. It’s harder working, it’s kinder, it’s not arrogant, and if you’re not using it every day, you’re being left behind because the future is arriving very fast.

Pete Mockaitis
If I may, I do have a ChatGPT premium subscription, and I’m thinking about switching. Have you looked around to all of them; the Gemini, the Perplexity, the dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, and Claude’s your winner? Or you just found Claude and said, “Yep, I’m sticking with you”?

Seth Godin
I use Perplexity every day. If you’re using Google, you’ve made a mistake. Perplexity completely defeats Google. I’ve tried Gemini a little bit. It’s really fun if you want to tweak Google, to ask Google to compare things. Like, type in “Pop-Tarts versus Doberman Pinschers,” and it will give you a little essay about the difference between a Pop-Tart and a Doberman Pinscher, as opposed to say, “That’s a stupid question.” Claude would say, “Why are you asking me that?” and do it in a kind way.

So, I haven’t tried all of them. What’s magic about Claude is they spent a lot of time trying to create something that will challenge you to do even better with the next time you interact with it. Whereas, ChatGPT, to me, feels like it’s always doing me a favor, it does the minimum amount, and it argues, it really argues with you when it’s wrong, and that just pisses me off.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s like, I say, “Hey, give me this answer,” and it tells me what I would do to get the answer. It’s like, “Yes, I know. Go do that now, please.”

Seth Godin
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Seth Godin
I would say that my favorite habit, if people know me, is that I have habits. That I have intentional habits. That I eat the same thing, I get up at the same time, but most of my habits are about wearing an actual uniform and having a practice when it comes to my job. I do not wait to be inspired. Tomorrow, there’ll be a post on my blog, not because it’s the best post I ever wrote, but because it’s Friday. And knowing that these are things I do, frees up my mind to make a different sort of decision. And we all have habits, but if they’re not intentional habits, I think they’re probably getting in the way.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to especially resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often, they Kindle book highlight, they retweet to the high heavens?

Seth Godin
My most successful blog post is also my shortest. What a surprise. You don’t need more time. You just need to decide.

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

Seth Godin
Seths.blog, there’s 9,000 blog posts, one a day for a very, very long time. And if you go to Seths.blog/TIS, you’ll find out everything you need to know about this new book.

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

Seth Godin
You’ve already done the key thing, which is listening to Pete’s podcast, which is showing up and announcing you want to be awesome at your job. The challenge is, “Can you actually say what it would mean to be awesome at your job?” Because if you don’t know where you’re going, it doesn’t matter how fast you’re going there.

Pete Mockaitis
Seth, thank you. This was so much fun. I wish you much luck with your book, This is Strategy, and I hope you have many excellent plans well-executed.

Seth Godin
Thank you, Pete. Keep making this ruckus. It matters.