This Podcast Will Help You Flourish At Work

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

Jun 08
0

1159: Precise Word-for-Word Scripts For Flourishing at Work with Erin McGoff

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Erin McGoff shares the simple word shifts that will supercharge your confidence and improve your image at work.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to get a raise with just a few words
  2. How to set boundaries like a pro
  3. The one phrase to stop using at work

About Erin

Erin McGoff is an award-winning filmmaker and content creator—known as the “internet’s big sister” through her AdviceWithErin branding. McGoff has built a significant online presence with millions of followers, delivering candid career and life advice for Gen Z and Millennials. She received a Pulitzer Fellowship in 2017 and was named a Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient in 2025. Her impact has been recognized by publications like The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, and others, and she is currently a contributor to CNBC. Her New York Times bestselling book, THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF WORK, is on sale now.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Erin McGoff Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Erin, welcome!

Erin McGoff
Hi! I’m so happy to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am happy to have you here talking about the secret language of work and more. So, wow, you have quite the impressive audience, six million plus followers across everything. Could you maybe kick us off by sharing what’s a piece of advice you’ve offered that’s been counterintuitive, such that folks are like, “No way!” but you just staunchly believe, “No, this is, in fact, the way”?

Erin McGoff
I don’t know. Small talk comes to mind. People tend to kind of hate and downplay small talk, thinking that it’s just something that’s not for introverts. But I always urge people to know the difference between being shy and being introverted, and to understand that small talk is as old as humans are themselves, and that it’s a really, really important thing to master in order to develop rapport with people.

So sometimes people are a little surprised, as an introvert myself, that I’m so pro small talk, but it really is a very, very important thing to master.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, tell us, make the case, why is small talk important, if it’s just small?

Erin McGoff
Yeah, right? I talk about this in my book, about how, you know, small talk is not really about the conversation. It’s about signaling to the other person that you’re not a threat to them. And this goes back to our caveman days.

Like, if a person from another tribe, like, tries to come in, you know, to your village, small talk is the way of you both communicating that you’re not a threat to each other. And I think it’s still that way today when we go into work.

Being able to maximize those first few minutes of a Zoom call with a client when you’re still waiting for your boss to get on, that’s like a really golden time for you to showcase your professionalism and your maturity and how capable and competent you are.

And a lot of people think, “Well, small talk is just so cringe-y and I’m just so much deeper than that.” But you need to just get out of that mindset because it really doesn’t do you any favors. So that’s kind of, like, generally my advice is just to get out of mindsets that aren’t doing you any favors and get into mindsets that are.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. I don’t know who said it, probably one of our guests – we’ll dig into the archives – that small talk leads to big talk, and I think it’s so true. Because if you went right for big talk, because I mean, I don’t know, I’m in that ballpark, too.

It’s, like, “I don’t care about the weather. I mean, what are we doing?” And it feels like almost silly and performative. And yet, if the opening question was like, “So, Pete, what’s the deepest fear you’re wrestling with right now?”

Like, “What? I don’t…Who are you? Why would I tell you that out of the gate?” And so it’s sort of, like, there needs to be some kind of a bridge or stairway between just meeting or silence and the really deep stuff that turns into a strong relationship.

Erin McGoff
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I love that small talk turns into big talk. I think that’s very, very true.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and you’ve got some hyper-helpful scripts for us in that situation, and dare your subtitle promise, “Every Situation.” So could you share with us,  what’s the big idea with your book, The Secret Language of Work?

Erin McGoff
Yeah, so “The Secret Language of Work” was really birthed out of what my content is. I started posting career advice online in 2021 and it was mainly script-based. I was helping people actually figure out the exact words to say in situations or, at least, giving them examples for inspiration.

I always was kind of frustrated with a lot of career advice that felt very vague to me, you know, “Speak to your strengths,” “Walk in your truth.” And I’m, like, “What does that sound like, though? I need examples.”

So I really wanted to write a book that democratized access to really high-quality soft career advice, and not only did that but also gave people hyper-helpful, like very, very helpful scripts and examples of what to say in certain scenarios, how exactly to network without being cringe-y, or how to negotiate without accidentally being rude.

Because a lot of us, we want to do things, we want to ask for a raise. The only thing that’s actually holding us back is the fear of coming off offensive or the fear of failure, lots of fears. So I wanted to write a book that was designed to supercharge people’s confidence by giving them the tools and the scripts to actually speak what they want into existence.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool. Well, we love supercharging confidence over here, so we are in the right place. This is good news. Well, could you share with us perhaps a story of someone who was kind of bumbling and unaware of the secret language of work, but then picked it up and what kind of results that unlocked for them?

Erin McGoff
Just yesterday, I got a DM from a man, Eduardo, and he got a dream offer, and he really didn’t want to rock the boat. He had never negotiated his salary before, but he did think that he was worth a little more.

He grew up in a household where his parents had never negotiated, and that financial literacy aspect wasn’t something that he was inherently taught. And he said, “I read your book. I read the chapter. I’m going to go in and I’m going to try it.”

And he updated me this morning that he was able to negotiate a 10% increase. And that was just probably three minutes of using mouth sounds, and it made cash appear instantly. And so that’s the power I want people to understand, is if you can just use your mouth sounds right, you can make cash appear out of thin air. So I have tons of stories, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Mouth sounds. Well, yeah, you know, in a way, that’s kind of silly and flippant, but in another way, it’s very accurate. Because I think we can overthink it, right, in terms of like, “Oh, my god, I have to say  just the right things, but then if I say this, he might say that. But then if I say this and then…”

But it’s like, “You know what, they’re mouth sounds, they’re words, and no need to get all worked up about them,” but almost, like, sort of this, well, the magic words for a genie or something. Well, since we’re on this example, what are the mouth sounds or the magic words for, “Yeah, I’d like you to pay me 10% more”?

Erin McGoff
Well, every negotiation is unique. It’s all going to be a case-by-case basis and all that. And that was something that always annoyed me when I would get career advice, is people would say, “Oh, well, it depends.” And it’s like, “Just give me an example. Just give me some inspiration.”

And so that’s really what I try to do in the book. And it’s so important to stay aligned on your shared goal. You know, the recruiter, or whoever is negotiating the deal with you, they want to hire you. They have an incentive because their job is to get somebody in the role. The company needs somebody to do a job, you can do the job, they offered it to you. So don’t be scared.

In the United States culture, negotiating your salary is a given. It’s what they expect. They rarely give you the best offer or the highest offer they can. And if they do, they oftentimes will say, “This is the highest offer, by the way. Like, we can’t go any higher.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, or, “This is standardized across all of North America. It’s kind of what it is, you know.”

Erin McGoff
Yeah, exactly. So it’s always important to come in with a case, three things. AI can also be helpful, too, if you’re struggling to think about like, “Ugh, I don’t know, the three extra reasons, you know.” It’s helpful to try and figure out what you bring to the table that maybe somebody else doesn’t.

I always say it’s kind of, like, you’re looking at two pairs of jeans, and everybody says, “Oh, they’re just going to go with the cheaper candidate,” and it’s like, “Do you just always go with the cheaper jeans? No, you go with the jeans that look the best on you and they’re the highest quality and they’re the best value for what you’re getting.”

So it’s kind of important to productize yourself, which sounds odd, but to go to them and say, “Hey, I really want to make this work. I want to sign this paperwork today. In order to do that, here’s a salary that I’m looking for, and here are the three reasons why I bring this additional value to the role.”

So it’s really important to remember that, I always say, it’s not personal, it’s just professional. This is just a business transaction. You’re going to provide a service to them, and they’re going to pay you. And a mindset shift that people find really helpful is I like to think about myself as like a vendor or a freelancer.

And I’m not necessarily, like, begging for this job, but rather I bring a certain specialty and skillset to the company, and I’m going to alleviate problems, and I’m going to use my professional skill to improve the company and to provide value, and they’re going to pay you.

And so you’re just negotiating what this proper rate is. Everything is made up. The salaries are changing all the time. Do your research, but also make sure that you are getting paid what you think that you’re worth. And you’d be surprised how well a negotiation can work. It’s just a few minutes of awkwardness for, like I said, cold hard cash.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, that was a hyper-helpful script in terms of, “I want to sign this paperwork today, and here is really what would do the trick for me.” And as I’m hearing it, it doesn’t feel rude. It’s funny, as I’m putting myself in the role of the recruiter there, it’s like I’m excited, “Oh, she wants to sign today. Good news.”

And I’m already predisposed to want to be able to say yes. You know, and then I’ll probably either give it to you if I can, or, you know, you just be really clear about why I can’t. But I think that’s a good feeling to know that you explored that rock. You know, “Okay, well, I tried and this is, I believe them when they said that’s the highest they can go.” That’s cool. Okay.

Erin McGoff
Yeah, and there are other things you can always negotiate besides salary, too. If they can’t go higher in salary, maybe they can do a higher 401k match, or more PTO days, or remote flexible Fridays. So it’s just always important to just see what you can get.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s very nice. Well, so we’re going to maybe dig into all kinds of little hyper-helpful scripts in particular situations. But I’d love to know, are there a few of your favorite go-to’s, like, “Oh, this is a handy script that is useful in many situations.

Erin McGoff
Something that I help people with a lot is setting boundaries, which is tough, you know, when you’re working and, especially in an economy like this, where it’s really an employer’s market, you don’t want to rock the boat.

At the same time, it’s really important to set boundaries for yourself. It’s not other people’s responsibilities to set your boundaries. People will, generally, take what they can get from you. So it’s important to show people what they can expect from you and what they can’t expect from you.

So it’s important to learn how to say no in professional ways. And something I love is, “Oh, I’m currently at capacity.” So let me give you an example. So say your boss is just throwing things on your plate. Instead of getting bitter and frustrated at your boss, “Oh, why don’t they understand that they’re overloading me, they’re stressing me out? I’m drowning as it is.”

First of all, give everybody the benefit of the doubt. Your boss’ job isn’t to micromanage everything you do, they’re not inside your brain. Their job is to do their job, and your job is to do your job. So you have to communicate with them.

And so let’s say they put yet another thing on your plate, and you’re like, “I just…I can’t do this.” Instead of going to your boss, and saying, “I’m overwhelmed. I’m stressed out. I can’t do this all,” that’s just giving them another problem, and every manager hates that.

Instead, you always want to come to your boss with solutions. So you want to say, “Hey, I noticed that you gave me another task today. I’m currently focused on this task. Which would you like me to prioritize?” And then you’re giving them, “Oh, huh, which client is more important? Which one can we shift? Which one can be moved to Monday?” You’re giving them something to work with.

So saying, “I’m currently at capacity with client A’s presentation. I know that you want me to focus on client B. Which one would you like me to prioritize today? And which one would you like me to postpone to Monday?”

In that way, that is like music to a manager’s ears because then they have something to work with. And they’re not just dealing with your stress and your problems, but you’re providing them a potential solution.

Pete Mockaitis
And it sounds very nice when you say it. Good job. I guess my nightmare, when you talked about fear at the beginning, is I always fear a response that’s very curt or mean, you know, along the lines of like, “Well, Erin, we expect you to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time here.”

It’s like, “Well, you know, hey, Erin, actually, both of those are critical. So make them both happen and don’t whine to me about this.” So, anyway, I feel like that’s a bit more edgy than the vast majority of managers will communicate, but they may well convey something along those lines in a more diplomatic, professional way.

So what do you think about that in terms of, one, can you deflate my fears, like that happens almost never? Or, two, do you have the follow-up for when they’re pushing back on your pushback?

Erin McGoff
Yes, absolutely. This is something that people actually like about my videos, is that I always offer a pushback. I actually just posted this, or filmed a video about this today. Because, yeah, on the internet, in a video, a perfect script is going to get the job done.

But, in reality, when you’re working with a difficult boss who does tell you, “Hey, I need you to prioritize both,” that does happen. And, you know, obviously, I recommend that you don’t work with a boss like that, but we can’t always control who we work for. We can’t just quit our jobs if we don’t like our boss. We’re going to have to work with people that we don’t like constantly.

So if your boss does push back, again, don’t make it personal, keep it professional. So I always recommend, when people are coming to their boss, with like a complaint or an issue that they reframe a personal problem as a professional concern.

So instead of saying, “I’m personally so overwhelmed,” all they’re hearing is you’re not competent. You can’t get it done. A bad boss. A good boss will work with you, but a bad boss is just hearing, “They’re not competent.”

Instead, you want to turn it into a professional concern, “Hey, I know client A is a really, really important client, and I really want to make sure that we get this report done right and on time. I have this much capacity today, and I want to make sure that we have time for both. So can you work with me to figure out a solution here to make sure that we can get both reports out the door?”

Again, align your goals. Always be aligning your goals. The boss wants the reports out the door. You also want the reports out the door. But it’s impossible right now to get that done as is. So you want to come to them and say, “Our goals are aligned here, but the strategies, the car is broken down. It’s not going to work.”

And then present them with a solution, “You know, James has a lighter workload today. Would you mind if I gave him the remainder of project A so I could just focus on project B?” And maybe give them, like, a worse second option or something like that? Just give them options.

Pete Mockaitis
“Or I could just have AI generate it entirely.” “No, don’t. Don’t do that.”

Erin McGoff
Don’t do that. And you can relieve that mental load from your boss and actually get what you want. So that’s the secret language of work. Like, the first page of my book, I talk about the desired outcome. So is your desired outcome from this conversation your boss understanding that you’re stressed? No, your desired outcome is working on one thing at a time. So always always keep the first thing the first thing. And, yeah, keep those goals aligned.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, if I may, we’ll keep the pushback going in terms of it’s, like, “Well, Erin, I think that both of these are possible so long as you just crank at it till midnight. What’s the problem?”

Erin McGoff
“I could certainly crank it out until midnight. but that doesn’t solve the problem of these reports being done on time and with quality. You know, unfortunately I’m only one person and we do need two people on this, or we need to rework the deadline. It’s not possible.”

People are oftentimes tempted to say, “Well, why stop work at five?” It sounds great in an internet video, it sounds awesome. You stick it to the man, you know, those videos always go viral, but it doesn’t work in real life.

So I try to give like very realistic advice. And, again, it always goes back to that desired outcome. Aligning your goals and talking about workflows and solutions. And, yes, when it does come to time-based activities, like that can be really tricky.

Like, if your boss is just like, “You need to stay late,” remember that that’s not a sustainable solution. So, like, sometimes, yeah, you might need to stay late at work. You might need to get something done. I’m like very pro working hard. I’m not anti working hard. I think people should prove themselves at work, but I also believe in working smart.

And working a long time doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re working hard or working smart. It just means that you’re working a long time. So it’s always important to collaborate with your boss. I like to have things in writing, too.

Like, send them an email, and be like, “These are all the things that need to get done in the next 12 hours. Even if I stay working until midnight, that’s not going to happen.” So again, just working with them, keeping it positive, keeping it solution-oriented.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, and I like that frame associated with, and you didn’t say it explicitly, but what I’m hearing, and maybe you could highlight it explicitly, is the notion that quality is likely to suffer if you are cranking at it at 9:00, 10:00, 11:00 p.m. And I think that we could all just appreciate that that is true of the human biological entity, straight up. That just is.

Erin McGoff
Yeah, it’s important to remember your boss wants to look good to their boss. And you messing up a client report because you ran out of time, that doesn’t make them look good to their boss. So always think about what they’re looking for and how you can align your goals.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think, even to that notion, in highlighting the burnout or sustainability piece, I think it really does give rise to all kinds of other creative solutions. It’s like, “Okay, maybe you can work until midnight and then you’re going to go ahead and take tomorrow off.”

And, like, that’s reasonable and that there are times when that is 100% cool with the manager, like, “Yeah, please go for it.” And you have the chat and you got a win-win there.

Erin McGoff
Yeah. I mean, you can’t fix a bad manager. Like, the only solution is to get away. People don’t change. You just have to get away from them.

But you’re totally right. That’s another solution that you could offer, “Hey, yeah, I could stay until 2:00 a.m. tonight, get it out the door. I’m willing to put in that extra work because I have this goal of becoming a director in 12 months.”

Like, always remind them of, like, what your goal is, like speak it into existence is something I talk about, “I’m willing to put in this extra effort because I want this goal or promotion. However, I’d really appreciate being able to come in at noon tomorrow, as a way of catching up on sleep,” or something like that. Always offer different solutions.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, framing it in terms of the the goal, the objective, what they want is fabulous. One of my favorite quotes, I don’t know where it came from, was, “Diplomacy is the art of letting other people have it your way.”

And I think that that’s kind of what we’re doing here, is you’re always speaking about it in the terms that they care about.

Erin McGoff
Exactly. Yep.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so we talked about some favorite words. How about some least favorite words? Anything you think just needs to go?

Erin McGoff
Yeah, as far as phrases, like, to remove from your vocabulary, well, first of all, there’s always the the fillers, which I intentionally use, by the way – “you know, just, like, um.”

In the book, I talk about them as language softeners because, as a woman, if I tend to speak the way I feel most comfortable, which is like more blunt and plain, people tend to not like me very much.

So I use fillers intentionally, which people are always really interested to hear about because I’m probably one of the only communication experts out there that is not telling you to tone it down. Now some people certainly need to tone it down. But I’m not a hater of fillers, in general, especially in conversations like this. You don’t want to sound too robotic.

But a phrase that I think is really helpful to get rid of, in a professional and personal setting, is the phrase “I don’t have time.” “Boss, I didn’t have time to do this,” “I don’t have time for that.” People just really don’t like hearing that you don’t have time.

And it’s also not helpful to you because there’s no such thing as not having time for something. There’s not making it a priority. And you can’t make everything a priority. And that’s just that. And this is really, really helpful for people on an individual level because when you say “I don’t have time,” you’re taking your power away from yourself.

You’re saying, “I’m not in the driver’s seat of my own life. I don’t have time for anything. I’m flustered. I’m flailing, I’m all over the place.” But when you say, “I don’t have the ability to make this a priority right now,” you’re putting yourself back in a place of power. And you’re saying, “I have control over my life. I have control over my days. I’m not in a position to make this a priority right now.”

And maybe that’s updating your portfolio or cooking homemade meals. It’s totally fine if sometimes you don’t have the ability to make everything a priority. So I’m really a fan of using language that empowers yourself even when it’s way more fun sometimes to use language that disempowers yourself and lets you be a victim. I’m typically a fan of putting yourself back in the driver’s seat even when it’s hard.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you. “I don’t have time” is false, fundamentally. I guess it’s almost like the phrase “I have to” or “you have to.” It’s incomplete and on its own false, but it means “I don’t have time” relative to “I don’t have time to do this, in addition to the things that I’m super duper committed to and unwilling to give up,” which is the same thing as saying, “It’s not a priority.”

And, likewise, “I have to” or “you have to” is false on its own, but is only true in some context, “You have to do this in order to achieve a particular result, subject to some particular constraints and commitments.” But that’s a lot of words.

Erin McGoff
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. Well, tell us, any other super favorite transformational language shifts that we got to highlight here?

Erin McGoff
One of the things that I talk about in the book, kind of like these basic fundamental idea, is strategic communication is all about playing chess and not checkers.

So there are things that you’ll want to say in the moment, things that your gut is telling you to say, you feel compelled to say. It’s impulsive. And a lot of the times it’s really true and really right, and you’re, like, totally fine for saying that. Like, “Boss, you suck.” Your boss might suck. I totally agree.

However, it’s always important to remember what your goals are. So a great example is when you’re quitting your job. A lot of people, especially if you’ve been working for a bad boss, which is unfortunate, want to tell off their boss.

And it totally makes sense that you want to tell off your boss. That’s what you do in your personal life. You know, if somebody’s being rude to you or disrespecting you, it makes sense. There is a way to do this, though, that stings so much more and protects you from the negative repercussions. And that’s playing chess and not checkers.

So playing checkers would be, “I’m quitting. You’re the worst boss ever. I hate working here. You suck. I hope I never see you again.” Hey, that’s all true, fine, and dandy. All the power to you. You’re expressing your emotions. It doesn’t benefit you.

Because, five minutes after you walk out of their office, that stink will follow you. And you’d be surprised how small the world is. And I’m not saying that you need to get your boss to love you, but I’m saying that there is a professional way to leave your job.

You can say, “Hey, I’m putting in my two weeks today. Thank you so much for my time here. I would love to provide feedback, if possible. If not, that’s fine. But April 6th would be my last day.”

Just keep it short and sweet, and then you can provide professional feedback, whether that’s to HR or in an exit interview. And that is so much more painful and effective because you’re doing it in a professional way. So you’re not getting distracted by your personal emotions, but rather it’s professional feedback.

And you can go to Glassdoor, and you can scream in a pillow, and go to kickboxing classes, and get it out in a healthy way. I always recommend getting out your emotions in a healthy way and expressing them. But do it in a way that benefits you and doesn’t accidentally back backfire and hurt you down the line.

And so the book is very, very much about, “How can you strategically use your words to get what you want, maybe in a way that seems counterintuitive at first, but, over the course of time, will pay off?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think that’s a nice distinction there. It’s, like, you’re a human being who has emotions, and those emotions have validity, and it is often helpful and beneficial to have those emotions expressed somehow.

And yet, often in the workplace, about the thing that you’re mad about is not quite what’s going to give you the optimal result.

Erin McGoff
Exactly. Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Very nice. Okay. Well, do you have any final pro tips on sounding more confident?

Erin McGoff
Yes. You know, something I talk about a lot is this idea of the person that you talk to the most is actually yourself. So a lot of people focus on external communication, “How can I communicate better with my coworkers and my boss and recruiters and all this stuff?” And that’s great.

But none of it really sticks the landing unless you already have a good relationship with yourself. So the person that we talk to most is ourselves. The way that you talk to yourself really matters. And we all tend to have this internal dialogue that’s hypercritical, not very positive. and it takes work to kind of train yourself out of that.

And so something I always say is to be your own best friend. Next time you mess up at work and you say, “Oh, my gosh, I’m such an idiot. I’m always messing things up. I don’t deserve to be here. Everybody’s going to figure out I’m such a fraud and a failure,” pretend your friend is saying that. And how would you respond to them?

You’d say, “You’re not a failure. You’re not an imposter. You just messed up a spreadsheet. It’s really not a big deal. Just go in and fix it. Let your boss know, and move on with your day.” Like, kind of get used to, like talking to yourself inside your head.

It sounds neurotic and nuts, but once you get in the habit of doing it, you become very, very kind to yourself, but you also become stronger because you’re able to deal with obstacles and issues and challenges much better. You’re able to overcome things much, much quicker.

So before talking to anybody else, so this is how I open up a book, is you need to first figure out how you’re talking to yourself and make that into a healthier conversation and dialogue. And it takes a little bit of work at first but, over the course of time, it becomes much, much easier. And then you treat others how we tend to treat ourselves.

So you tend to treat others with more kindness and empathy and dignity, and that gets you so far. I always say, like, manners go so far. You’d be shocked at how many people come into an interview and don’t even say thank you at the end.

I don’t know if it’s because they were never trained to, or because they’re entitled, or maybe they just forgot, that happens, too. But just saying “thank you,” “please,” “I really appreciate that,” like, just these little tiny things can go so, so, so far.

So the devil is really in the details but, yeah, my overarching advice is that if you’re looking to improve your communication with other people, first, improve your communication with yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
And I like that a lot. Well, you talked about the Golden Rule, fundamentally, treat others the way you’d like to be treated, in terms of, like, “How are you treating yourself?” And so it’s often the case that we are much more vicious to ourselves than we would ever be to a third party.

And I’m right with you. I felt that recently, actually. I’ve had some conversations with myself in terms of, like, you know, maybe I’m disappointed that I wasn’t able to take care of business in a couple of days. But to be able to say, like, “Hey, you know what, Pete? It’s been a pretty hard couple of weeks here.”

You know, they cut down my beautiful forest view to make a new house, which is not, yeah, not fun. I’m listening to the beep, beep, beep of the construction machines. I’m sick. So a number of things. And so it’s, like, “So it kind of makes sense that it’s not your most uber productive day in the record books given the context you find yourself in.”

And so, in a way, it feels silly to speak to yourself in that way. And yet it’s very soothing. It’s almost like a a sweet, motherly word of encouragement to your four-year-old self. And I was like, “You know what, that’s right. Okay.”

Erin McGoff
Yeah, you’re right. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
“You know, tomorrow’s another day. It’s all good.” So any pro tips on, if we’re feeling some awkwardness there, or we’re not accustomed to engaging ourselves in this sort of a kind conversation, how do we kind of get more in that groove?

Erin McGoff
That’s a really great question because it’s actually a lot harder than people realize. It’s hard to catch yourself in the moment when you’re in this 24/7 habit of being so self-critical and so hard on yourself. So I recommend this proactive approach.

Every morning, when you’re brushing your teeth, just look in the mirror and be, like, just think, “I’m going to have a great day. Like, I’m really good at my job. People like me. People like working with me.” Those affirmations sound really silly, and a lot of people would roll their eyes with that and scoff.

However, they’re really effective on a neurological basis. And I think if you can just look in the mirror and say three things, “I’m going to have a good day. People love working with me. I’m going to crush this project,” like, if you can get specific about it, too, it will turn into a habit, just slowly over time.

And at first, it’ll feel really weird. Sometimes when I encourage people to do that, they say, “I’m not doing that.” And it makes me really sad because, in that moment, I’m like, “Oh, my gosh, you are so mean to yourself that you can’t even be nice to yourself for five seconds.”

And it’s very, very sad to me, and I just say, “You know, what happened to you where you feel like you can’t be kind to yourself?” It’s tough. People grow up in really rough households and really rough childhoods, and they learned that the only way to survive is to hate themselves. And so, things can get pretty deep pretty quick sometimes with career advice.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, you’re right. Well, “What happened to you?” I’m thinking about the book that that Oprah co-wrote there, which was a good one. And it’s intriguing, it’s sort of not that, speaking from my own experience, it’s not that we’re incapable of that, like, “Yeah, I can say the words in the mirror, sure. It’s just that I feel kind of weird and silly and awkward doing so.”

And what’s interesting about that is, well, one, I think that’s the case for all conversation, it’s like, “Well, if you’ve never done it before, everything feels weird and silly and awkward the first time you do it, just straight up, as a fact of learning and how that works.”

But, secondly, and I find it encouraging that the affirmations you spoke – we had Hal Elrod on the show, talking about, you know, make your affirmations truthful in terms of like, “Money flows to me effortlessly.”

He’s like, “Well, no, it really doesn’t, actually. You have to hustle.” So I think with one of my latest affirmations, which I find it’s like it’s really true, and I actually assembled the evidence for it, I wrote it down, because sometimes I can get in, like, a negative loop, and this is just objectively true, “Sometimes things work out better than you expect.”

Erin McGoff
Yep, what’s the best that could happen?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, because, you know, sometimes it’s like, “Ugh, it’s going to be a lot of effort. It’s not even going to turn into anything, anyway. I don’t feel like it. I don’t want to bother. Blech!” It was like, “Okay, yeah, maybe.”

But also what is true is sometimes things work out better than you expect. And, hey, what do you know? I’ve written down a dozen examples and I found that quite encouraging lately. So I think that’s kind of the sweet spot for affirmations. It’s not the – was it Gordon Smiley – or, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough and, doggone it, people like me.”

But rather, “Hey, here is something that is true, and when I bring that back to the forefront of my awareness, it provides encouragement.”

Erin McGoff
Yeah, I love that realistic approach so much, “I have a big day today. I have a big calendar. I’m feeling really overwhelmed, and I think that I’m really capable of getting this done.” You know, it kind of reminds me a little bit of Tim Ferris’, you know, we’ve all heard of goal-setting when you set goals for your life.

And he has this whole idea where you practice fear-setting. So you actually, like, write out all of your biggest fears. So if you try to start your own company, what’s the worst that can happen? And then you work your way backwards from there to be like, “Okay, well, I go on a debt.” And then you talk about how you would rectify, like, the situation.

And I think that that’s really effective. And I think that if you can just work through it and be really realistic with yourself, like, “I had this big presentation today. I think it’s going to go great because I’m super capable. And if it doesn’t, here’s what I’m going to do.”

I think that’s really, really effective. I like to give as realistic of advice as possible. So I I really enjoyed what you said.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. Well, now let’s hear rapid fire about some of your favorite things. Can we hear about a favorite quote?

Erin McGoff
Yeah, I was just thinking, “Don’t get mad. Get curious.” I don’t always say that. I usually say my favorite piece of career advice, but from our conversation today, I think that’s something that these listeners might need to hear.

It’s just, you know, when you’re feeling angry at work, don’t get mad, get curious, you know, “How did we end up here? What happened to my boss’ childhood that’s making them act this way?” It’s kind of a good general rule of thumb.

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

Erin McGoff
So I think it was in the 1990s, there was a study that found a phenomenon called the liking gap. And it talks about how they found that, when people exit a conversation, the people who you left, the group you left, tend to rate you way more favorably than you think it went.

Like, consistently across the board, people actually tend to like you more than you think that they liked you. And I encourage anybody listening, go read the study, go watch a YouTube video about it. I think it’s absolutely fascinating because there are a lot of interesting studies out there, but I don’t hear people talk about the liking gap very often. And it can be very, very validating if you’re somebody who’s socially anxious.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And a favorite book?

Erin McGoff
I used to say The Alchemist. I feel like a lot of people say The Alchemist though, so I am going to also say Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. I feel like everybody kind of loves that book now, but it is truly the Bible on negotiating. And I think Chris is a great reader on the audiobook. He gives great stories. I think it’s just a well-structured and well-written book.

Pete Mockaitis
He is a great reader on the audiobook. He was on the show, and just the way he says, “Salsa red pearl,” it’s like, “I got to have that truck.” Whenever I see a red truck, I think of Chris Voss. I mean, he makes an impression.

Erin McGoff
Yes, he does.

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

Erin McGoff
Ooh, I’m using a lot tools now. I’m, of course, using Claude Cowork. I absolutely love Claude Cowork. I think when you learn how to prompt things correctly, it’s very helpful. Where people run into issues with AI is that they don’t put in the effort to learn how to prompt correctly.

So if anybody’s listening to this, watch some YouTube videos, learn how to improve your prompts, and you would be shocked at what a great sidekick something like Claude Cowork can be.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favor habit?

Erin McGoff
I drink a ton of water every morning. I’m not even kidding. I think drinking water is like a really great piece of career advice. People in the afternoon, you know, they think they need that second cup of coffee, that 2:00 p.m. coffee. You don’t. You’re dehydrated. You need water. Go drink a ton of water.

And if you still feel like you need the coffee, then drink the coffee, okay?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that folks really dig, they quote it back to you often?

Erin McGoff
I always say no one knows what they’re doing, and people love it. Some people get really upset. They’re like, “Don’t say that doctors know what they’re doing.” And I’m like, “Of course, they know what they’re doing. Of course, professionals know how to do their craft.”

But when you really zoom out, everybody is winging it. Everybody is making it up as they go along. Nobody predicted COVID. Like, nobody knows what tomorrow brings. Economists are wrong all the time.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, the tech bros hype their things, and most of them don’t do the vision they portray. All these TV shows get canceled, “Well, shouldn’t the execs know what shows are going to be a hit?” No, they can’t do it. Yeah.

Erin McGoff
They do not know. I know from experience.

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

Erin McGoff
Yes, follow me on Instagram, @advicewitherin. You can sign up for my newsletter, HyperHelpful.com, which is a fun weekly newsletter that I write to supercharge your career. Of course, I have my book, The Secret Language of Work.

And I have a new app out called StupidFish, which is extremely helpful. We have about 30 to 40, maybe even 50,000 users actually today, in our first week. So, yeah, definitely go down on StupidFish.

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

Erin McGoff
Find the job that you enjoy doing. It’s much, much easier to work hard at something when you’re having fun. I think people who are having fun always tend to win in the end. So find the job that you’re the best fit for naturally. It’s out there. I know it is. There are new jobs being invented every single day. Sixty percent of the jobs people have today didn’t exist eighty years ago. So go, go find your best fit.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Erin, thank you.

Erin McGoff
Thank you so much for having me.

Jun 04
0

1158: The Science Behind Why People Quit with Dr. Anthony Klotz

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Dr. Anthony Klotz discusses how to manage the big and small moments that make us question our next career moves.

You’ll Learn

  1. How the pandemic fundamentally altered our relationship with work
  2. Why doing nothing is often your best solution
  3. How to find more satisfaction in a job you’re stuck in

About Anthony

Dr. Anthony Klotz is a professor of organizational behavior at the UCL School of Management in London. Known for predicting a global labor shift and dubbing it the Great Resignation, Klotz writes for Harvard Business Review and The Wall Street Journal, and his research is regularly published in leading management journals. He has discussed the current and future state of work with media outlets, including The New York Times, BBC, and CNN, and with executive teams at Fortune 100 firms.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Anthony Klotz Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Anthony, welcome!

Anthony Klotz
Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to chat with you. You are undercover famous. Is that maybe the term we can use?

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, it’s definitely undercover, low key, yeah, whatever synonym you want to use.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you are the man who coined the term, “The Great Resignation,” which is kind of wild.

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, I mean, it still strikes me as wild and we’re coming up on almost exactly five years since that initial article came out and went viral, and it still strikes me as strange and surreal.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I understand there’s really some misconceptions as to what the heck that phrase even means. So let’s hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. What do we mean by that term and what is its relevance for career folk?

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, so the Great Resignation was a prediction back in May of 2021 that there would be a spike in resignations in the US workforce, really the global workforce, but mainly centered on the US. And in the months following May, pretty quickly starting in June, we saw this wave of resignations, fairly historically high.

But it’s important, there’s a caveat there, that, really, we only started tracking resignation numbers closely in the US in 2000, so we don’t have the whole history there. But, yeah, turnover, quitting, resignations, whatever you want to call it, spiked and stayed elevated at historically high levels for almost two years into 2023.

And then it tailed back down, and it continued to tail down to where we are today, which is a rate of quitting in the economy that’s lower than it was before the pandemic, but not by too much. And so even though it feels like we’re in a pretty sluggish job market right now, it’s more active than a lot of people think.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Okay, so we’ve got 25-ish years of data here, and so we’ve seen some ups and downs. And so does that mean, now we’re kind of in a normal-ish band of resignation levels?

Anthony Klotz
We’re on the low side of normal, but we’re in that range of normal, for sure, on the lower end of it. I was going to mention, you asked about some of the misconceptions around the Great Resignation, and I think the biggest one that maybe continues to this day is that the prediction was that people would leave the workforce entirely.

And my prediction was largely that people would quit. And when people quit, the vast majority of the time it’s to find another job in the same industry or something related. We did see higher levels of people taking career breaks, of people starting entrepreneurial ventures, of people doing early retirement.

Yeah, but, in general, it’s when people leave jobs, they’re, of course, switching to another role somewhere else.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you’ve done some real deep research into this phenomenon. Your book’s called Jolted: Why We Quit, When to Stay, and Why It Matters. So tell us, what’s a particularly surprising and fascinating discovery you’ve made as you dug into this stuff?

Anthony Klotz
It’s just how close all of us are to quitting our job. And that doesn’t mean we’re always thinking about it or we’re always wanting to quit or anything negative like that. But we tend to, both as academics, as leaders, as workers, tend to think that quitting is a fairly rational process that slowly accumulates over time and slowly.

Maybe your discontentment with your current role increases or the appeal of these alternatives that you have to your current job increase over time, and you make this rational decision to move on. And that’s true about half the time.

But what we found is about the other half of the time, the decision to quit can be traced back to a single event. And these events, these jolts, can be big or small, they can come from our personal lives, they can happen in our professional lives, but they move the quitting process along sometimes fairly quickly.

Sometimes they move us along to where we’d like to quit, but we can’t. And sometimes they should be nudging us to leave and we completely miss them. But going back to your question, it’s that, and I think this is part of why I predicted the Great Resignation was this understanding of how these events work.

And, of course, the pandemic was several of these jolts wrapped up into one. And that’s somewhat surprising to me when I first learned it and to a lot of individuals, just this one event, how it can change our relationship with work and shape the arc of our career.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you expand on that? How is this event that…? It’s funny, I think many of us would like to forget entirely, so apologies to resurface this. But how has the pandemic shifted our overall perspective on work?

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, so, like I mentioned, the pandemic had several different types of jolts wrapped up all into one, and I’ll mention a few of them. One of them was, of course, that for many people, work became different and more difficult in a short period of time.

So if you were a frontline worker or a healthcare worker, all of a sudden, your job maybe became more dangerous or completely changed. And when our job tasks change, for some of us, that comes at a point where we’re already not sure about our job and then, all of a sudden, it changes and that pushes us over into wanting to change what our job is.

For others, like healthcare workers, it also increased the level of burnout, so, “All of a sudden, this event changed my work in a way that it’s more difficult, led to higher levels of burnout.” Many of us experienced switching from working in person to working remotely, and we all reacted to it a little bit differently.

Some people, really enjoying it, some people not so much. And then, finally, there’s the pandemic being a health threat. And so for many individuals, or probably most individuals, at some point, it caused us to take a step back and think, “Is this the end of the world? Am I going to make it out of this?”

And when we think those big existential thoughts, we think about the way that we’re spending our time. And how we spend a lot of our time is at our jobs. And so these changes to how we work, these increases in burnout, this switch in the place that we were working, and then finally these big existential thoughts are different types of jolts that lead us to stop and rethink our relationship with work.

Now, hopefully, the pandemic, this is a once in a very long time event that we don’t have to go through again. But getting back to your question, there is some evidence that it has permanently changed many people’s relationship with work.

And this goes back to a question that’s asked in the United States on this general social survey every two years. And it’s been asked every two years since 1972. And the question is, “If you came into all of the money that you needed to live as comfortably as you want for the rest of your life, would you keep working?”

And this is called the lottery question. And it’s been asked every two years, and pretty consistently, about 70% of Americans say, “Yes, I would keep working,” which is somewhat impressive, and it shows that most of us see the value that work could have in our lives.

But what’s interesting is when you look at that 70% has been sort of flat as a board with a little bit of fluctuation from 1972 to 2018 before the pandemic. And so a little bit of a side note to this is this thought that nobody wants to work anymore or that less and less people want to work. The data don’t really support that, with one exception.

Coming out of the pandemic, it dropped from just over 70% to 62%. And so that equates to 10 to 20 million Americans who are, if you extrapolate that out to the country, who are answering that question differently.

And, keep in mind, they were answering this question during the Great Resignation, which was one of the best labor markets for employees, for workers that we’ll ever see. And yet, more people than ever were indicating that, “If I struck it rich, I’d be done with work.” And that number has stayed in this sort of 65% range, five points lower, you know, millions of Americans lower than the 70%.

And so what that suggests is the pandemic years and the tumultuousness that it caused in the world of work, and the thinking, and the jolts that it caused, there’s some percentage of the population now who have permanently changed the way they view work. And I think that’s going to be part of the lasting legacy of that period of time.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m intrigued about that question. They would continue working if they won the lottery, but do we have the clarity on would they continue working with their current employer or role or doing…? Because, I guess, this is what researchers do. We get definitional in terms of, I imagine, I wouldn’t sit on the beach continuously, but I would probably make some changes in what I was doing. I’d keep this podcast going because it’s fun and awesome, talking to peeps like you. So do you have some detail on that?

Anthony Klotz
So that’s a fantastic follow-up question. And it’s a question that I didn’t think of at first, and then somebody suggested it to me, and it really changed the way I thought about this question. So after I had learned about this lottery question, I would ask my student audiences, executive audiences, professional audiences this question and see how many hands go in the air. And it’s always around 70%.

You’re asking Gen Z, Baby Boomers, it’s always around that 70% mark. And that’s usually an eye-opener for people. And then I was asking that question during a masterclass that I was giving once up in Idaho, at Idaho State University a few years back after the Great Resignation.

And one person gave the follow-up question that you gave, they said, “Okay, okay, that’s great. Ask it again, but ask how many people would keep working at their current job if they struck it rich, if they won the lottery.”

So I’d asked the first question and seen the 70% response rate. So I asked again, “How many of you, if you won the lottery, would keep working at your current job?” It dropped below 10%. So I haven’t collected big data on this, but every time I present this now, I ask the two questions.

And it’s a little less consistent on that second question depending on the audience, but it always drops from this like 70%-ish down to 10 to 20% of people who would keep working. And, to me, there’s this really powerful lesson there that the majority of people see the positive side of what work can do for their lives.

Like, in general, want to work and see a positive version of work out there that they would really enjoy doing. That is not the version that most people are getting in their current job. So there’s this gap there between what we think work could be for us and our wellbeing and our happiness and our sense of meaning in life, and then what we’re actually getting.

And you mentioned you would keep doing this awesome podcast. So I asked people who say they would keep working even if they won the lottery at their current job, “What are you doing? What’s your profession?”

And it’s almost always something in the entrepreneurial realm or something that they’ve clearly chosen that really is their passion. And so, you know, “I always knew I wanted to be a chef and that’s what I pursued,” or “I always wanted to be a chef, but then I went and I was an accountant for 30 years, but then I circled back and went back to being a chef.”

So it’s these really deliberate choices people have made that align with their interests or that give them a great deal of autonomy, which is like entrepreneurship, having a fantastic podcast, being able to have the kind of impact that you want on the world.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you know, that’s heavy. It’s almost kind of sad that it’s so low. I mean, we all got bills to pay, sure, but… So, this is funny, my wife, she gave me a hat, a hat out of nowhere, and it said, “Ever since I was little, I’ve always wanted to turn unstructured data into actionable business insights.”

Anthony Klotz
Perfect hat for you.

Pete Mockaitis 
It’s a lot of words on a hat. and it’s sort of funny, like, “Ha, ha, ha, that’s the joke. No one wants that when they’re little. They want to be an astronaut or a firefighter or something.” And yet, sure enough, when I was in high school, I did want to be a strategy consultant. And then I did that, and it was fun, you know? I wanted to make some adjustments to that career path, which I did, entrepreneurially.

And it really hits home for me that I’m a bit of an anomaly here, like, to actually go after it with this kind of purpose, and then for it to work out.

Because you might think you want to be a lawyer, and be like, “Oh, shoot, this isn’t what I wanted. Oopsies!”

Anthony Klotz
That happened to me.

Pete Mockaitis 
So I guess it’s not only that you’re autonomously pursuing the thing, but the thing ends up being the match that you hoped it would be.

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, that’s exactly right. When I started out of university, I had grown up in a family business in logistics. I got my degree in logistics. I thought, “I’m made to do this. I’m good at it,” got good grades, and then went to work for General Mills in their manufacturing plants in logistics, and was terrible at it and didn’t enjoy it.

So it was like, in theory, this is what I was put on this earth to do. In practice, not so much. So I switched over into management, into operations, and that was a somewhat better fit. But, yeah, I mean, I think there is this experimentation that goes on.

And, yeah, probably for a number of people who are saying, “If I won the lottery, this is what I would do.” Some percentage of them would find, if they made that switch, it’s actually not what they want to do.

I mean, this is part of the rough thing about being humans. We’re terrible at forecasting, you know, what’s going to make us happy. And it’s not until we actually experience it, that we see if our affective forecast lines up with how we’re actually feeling when we do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay. Well, so you’ve painted a stark picture for us. So I would love for you to unpack a little bit of the big idea associated with Jolted. You say we don’t so much super rationally and gradually come to the conclusion that, “Ah, yes, it would, in fact, be optimal for me to exit now.” What is going on?

Anthony Klotz
Most of us in our day-to-day work lives are on a bit of autopilot where we’re trying to be successful in our jobs, have a nice life outside of work, pay the bills, enjoy time with friends and family, and so forth. And these jolts come along and disturb that.

And so jolts are these moments where we question what’s going on with our relationship with work, “Am I on the right path or am I not?” And these can be really confusing. And you’re not really sure what to make of it.

In the book, I talk about, you know, that jolts are sort of everywhere in the modern work world, and there’s six different types of jolts that we’ll experience over our career. And so the problem is these can be really useful signposts to tell us maybe we do need to make some changes to the arc of our career.

But often, when they appear and sort of snap us out of this autopilot, we’re not sure how to respond to them. We get stuck in a bit of a rumination loop. Maybe we give them too much credence and we end up moving towards the exit door too soon. We just don’t really have a system to process them when they happen.

And so what I advocate for in the book is being more deliberate about realizing that, “Hey, look, these events, we don’t know what they are, we don’t know when they’re going to strike, but they’re coming, and they’re going to make us question our relationship with work. And that can sort of lead us down a path to make a suboptimal decision about our career and our happiness.”

Or, if we’re a little bit more prepared for them and we have a bit of a system, not a super strict system, but a system for dealing with them, we can treat them sort of appropriately when they arrive and make a much clearer and better decision about what we should do with them.

You know, part of the punchline here is that a lot of these events that cause us to rethink work should really be dismissed. And if you just walk away from them for a little while, they’ll go away naturally. And I think part of the challenge of the modern work world is we are able to take action pretty quickly when we have a moment where we think, “I don’t know if I want to work here anymore.”

Well, you know what? Almost right away, you could mass apply for hundreds of jobs in that moment right then. You can go on social media and burn bridges really, really easily. This wasn’t the case, I’ll just say, 50 years ago.

When something really terrible happened on a Tuesday, you’d think, “You know what? I don’t know if I want to work here anymore. Maybe this weekend I’ll get out. I’ll get out my resume and freshen it up, or I’ll go look for a new job. But by the time the weekend gets there, you realize, “Oh, that was just a bad Tuesday. No big deal.”

Here, you know, nowadays, we’re in a position to take action right away and make career changes that we may end up regretting. And, let’s face it, the research is clear that almost the majority of career moves end in some form of regret, not complete regret, but some form of regret.

And so understanding these jolts and how to respond to them at an appropriate level, I think, is critical for staying level-headed in our day-to-day work lives and to also be really intentional about crafting a career that brings us what we want.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think that’s one tremendous takeaway that could really alter a life trajectory right there, Anthony, in terms of, like, “When some bull crap goes down and you’re thinking, ‘I’m out of here,’ hold on for a moment.” Duly noted.

Anthony Klotz
Well, in terms of being really powerful advice, doing nothing, it’s kind of a hard piece of advice to sell. But, again, these these jolts, these moments are fairly common, and I think the more that we have the news coming to us while we’re at work, the more that we have social media in our lives, the more we have these moments where we think, somebody else is getting a better deal, there’s better options out there, and so all the more reason why doing nothing as a first option is a good option.

Now a lot of these problems that you experience or that a jolt signifies some sort of real problem with your relationship with work, some of them don’t go away with time. And if you get to the weekend or you’ve decided, you know, for me, like about every six months at the start of the year, and then midway through the year, I sort of sit down and think through the past six months and what have I experienced at work and how am I feeling.

In that way, over the course of time, as I experience problems with work, instead of having to deal with them right away in the course of my working week, working day, I can sort of tell myself, “Come June, I’ll sit down and I’ll think through these.” And I might even write on Post-It notes and set them aside to think about then.

In that way, when it comes to that time when I’ve batched those jolts together and I can think through them, I can realize a lot of these don’t matter anymore. This was just something that mattered in the moment, but didn’t really matter.

But there’s probably a few of them that maybe I’ve written down a few times that signal, “Something is off here and I need to address it.” Now that doesn’t mean quitting. That means addressing it. And there’s a number of ways that you can address problems at work without quitting.

And so that’s sort of the next step. You experience a jolt, it reveals a problem with your relationship with work that time isn’t healing, then you have to take some more action. Doing nothing won’t cut it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you mentioned six types of jolts. Could you maybe give us the two-sentence-ish definition of your six types of jolts with maybe an example so we can get our arms around, precisely, “What is Anthony thinking when he says the word jolt?”

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, so six types of jolts, and I’ll give you a warning. The first five are negative, and that’s because of this positive-negative asymmetry effect we have, where, as human beings, we’re hardwired to pay much more attention to negative events than positive events.

And that’s for good reason. Negative events signal something is wrong, and we need to attend to it. Whereas, positive events are more like, “Keep going. Things are going well.”

So the first type of jolts is direct jolts, and these are negative events that happen directly to us at work. So the most common ones are, of course, failure, or experiencing mistreatment, or interpersonal strife. But these jolts can also be really subtle as well.

So we’re increasingly seeing that small acts of incivility, like being treated rudely or being ostracized, like, you find out that your office has a group chat that you’re not on. That has a pretty strong effect, a pretty strong signal that you’re not part of this group. So direct jolts, negative events that happen directly to us at work.

The next type are collateral jolts. These are events, often negative, that happen to those around us at work and reverberate and have effects on us. A simple one would be witnessing mistreatment. Even though you’re not the victim, it can have an effect on you that makes you think, “I don’t know if I want to be in a workplace like this.”

But the most common type is turnover contagion. So when we have a friend who quits, it’s sort of a triple whammy for us. Our workday becomes less bright because our friend is gone. We probably have to pick up some of their work in the interim, and we wonder where they’re going. Like, “Are they getting a better deal?” So those are collateral jolts.

Maybe my favorite kind of jolts, and they were the ones when I learned about them, I was the most surprised, are honeymoon jolts. So there’s this statistic that surprised me that the most common year for quitting across all years of your employment is year one.

And we tend to think, “Year one? That’s when people are the most committed and the most excited about their jobs.” But honeymoon jolts, you know, during the recruitment and selection process, we form this idea of what that job is going to be like.

And honeymoon jolts happen when we’re in the first year and we realize, “Wait a second, the way I thought this job was going to be in terms of the schedule or the pay or whatever it may be, is not lining up with reality. And I took this job under maybe false pretenses,” or we perceive that we do. So those are honeymoon jolts.

You know, moving outside the workplace, there’s crossover jolts, which are negative events that happen in our personal life that make us rethink, “What am I doing at work?” And anybody who’s had a health scare or a family member or friend who’s had a health scare has experienced those.

And then, finally, for negative jolts, there’s remote jolts. And we’re increasingly seeing that negative events that happen on the other side of the world that you hear about can have this sort of effect on you because they often call to mind the preciousness and the scarcity of life and make us think, again, these big existential thoughts, like the pandemic did of, “How am I spending my time?”

There’s a little bit of research that shows that this is especially likely to happen if the event on the other side of the world happened to a group of individuals who you identify with in whatever way that could be.

And then last, but not least, are happy positive jolts. So, sort of counterintuitively, the good things that happen in life can also lead to us quitting. Not as often, but this is because when positive events happen to us, they open our minds.

We tend to start to think, “I can achieve more than I thought I could. I’m on a roll here. This is great. I could take on more things.” And you have this open-minded positivity at the same time that your resume has just gotten more impressive than ever, perhaps, because you just had a promotion or some accomplishment at work. Of course, they can come from wonderful events in our personal lives as well.

So, like I said, jolts are everywhere. They’re common. We’re going to experience many of them in our careers. And the key is to be ready for them, and then manage them appropriately when they happen.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So what is the ideal or optimal or appropriate way to deal with a jolt beyond doing nothing?

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, well, we already talked about the first one, right? Do nothing and wait and see if it goes away on its own. Now, obviously, and it goes without saying, for egregious jolts, that might not suffice. In my dissertation research, I talked to one worker who said they had a toxic boss, but the worker themselves, they had thick skin.

And so the boss could insult them, you know, whatever, it didn’t bother the worker. They were happy to do their job. But the boss noticed this, “I’m not getting under that person’s skin.” And so one day they went one step deeper. They didn’t insult the person. They insulted the person’s daughter to really get…

Pete Mockaitis
My goodness.

Anthony Klotz
And it worked. The worker said, “I took my keys off my belt, set them on the desk, and walked out the door,” which we call impulsively quitting. So that’s an example of where this do-nothing strategy is not a good one. There are times where, if you can, perhaps impulsive quitting is the right thing to do if you’re in a really bad situation.

But most of the time, the next step is to say something, to speak up. And this sounds again pretty simple, but it’s amazing how many exit interviews that I’ve been in or that I’ve talked to leaders and they say in exit interviews, one of the most common things that happens is the person says they’re leaving because of this reason, that they really can’t stand their work schedule, or they need a little bit of pay bump.

And so they’ve gone out and got another job because they’re not getting it here, and they didn’t ask for it first, or the leader didn’t hear it when they did ask. And so it’s pretty critical… Often as workers, we don’t have the power in the work relationship. The leader has the power, or the organization has the power.

So it’s easy for us to think, “Why would they give me a raise? Why would they change my schedule in this way?” And so we don’t speak up. But if you’re going to move down the path of, “I want to solve problems, or else this may make me leave the organization,” it’s really important that you, at least, give the organization a chance to fix it.

Not only because they may surprise you, but what’s also useful is, if you do continue to move down the path and you do end up quitting, you’ll do so in the knowledge that you tried to fix this problem. You gave them a chance to do it. And that will actually lower the odds of regret down the road, “Maybe I shouldn’t have quit. Maybe they would have fixed that.” No, no, no, you know, because you asked.

I talked to one worker who was in a really bad situation, and I guess this is similar to the prior story, but they were working closely with a coworker interdependently, and the coworker was really abusive. And one day, the abuse got to a point where the worker said, “I can’t take this anymore.” And this person worked in a hospital, and they said, “This is harming my wellbeing. I’m going to quit even though I like this job because I can’t work with this person anymore.”

And they walked around the hospital, and on their walk, they found a random empty office. And they had this thought and they went to their boss and said, “I just walked by this empty office. Can I just move out of where I am near this person and move into this random empty office?”

And I think there’s a lot of bosses who would say, “No, you can’t have some special office in the corner.” But this person’s boss said, “Yeah, you know what? Sure, that’s fine.” And this person was completely surprised, moved their stuff over into this new office, and is now like, that was like three years ago, and they’re now happier than ever in their job.

And so it’s just an example of, like, even if you think it’s wild, ask, especially for medium performers and high performers, the companies do not want to lose you.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Well, I am vibing with that and I’m thinking back to, boy, I think of him often, it’s my buddy, Muhammed Mekki, back in Episode 346 in 2018, he said, “All the time, you don’t get what you don’t ask for.”

And that was his observation, is that in almost any context, you do not suffer reprisal, like it rarely hurts to ask. I’m sure there’s counter examples out there and maybe some of these toxic bosses that you’re mentioning here.

But, yes, it rarely hurts to ask. And at worst, I think you’ll get just a little bit of a, “Oh, man, this guy, huh? Can you believe it?” And then you move on and that’s over. So you may well be surprised. You get a cool office space. Any number of things can be opened up to you if you just ask.

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, and the research does show that, yeah, a lot of the time these positive outcomes can happen just by asking. There’s also some research that shows, in organizational settings, when you ask for something, you’re much more likely to get it if you frame it in a way that it doesn’t just benefit you, but it, of course, benefits other people or benefits the organization.

So, like, “I need Saturdays off,” “I need a $10,000 raise,” “I need,” “I need.” You’re better to take 10 minutes and say, “How do I frame this such that it doesn’t just benefit me, but here’s why it benefits the company, here’s why it benefits my colleagues, here’s why it benefits, it makes my boss’s life easier?” Something like that, like a little bit of sweetener that really increases the odds of the medicine going down successfully.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I like that a lot. And I’m thinking about, I think there was a famous book about fundraising called Asking. Well, you’re going to know the answer now, it was like, “You know, the number one reason prospective donors do not give to a nonprofit organization…?” Can you guess, Anthony?

Anthony Klotz
Because they’re asking what’s in it for them?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, they weren’t asked at all. No one asked them, it’s like, “Hey, could you support this cool work we’re doing?” It’s like, “Oh, that was not on my radar. But now that you asked, that does sound pretty cool.” So you got a real crack at it.

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, that’s spot on.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Okay. So ask. So maybe do nothing, maybe ask. What are some other top tips?

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, so after you ask and you find out what is, and let’s say it doesn’t go well. Let’s say that you’ve identified this problem with your relationship with work. It’s draining your well-being. It’s draining your positive energy, and you ask and try to make some changes proactively or reactively. It doesn’t work.

Then it’s time to think about, “Okay, is this a sustainable situation?” And maybe it’s sustainable and you think this is just a bad part of my job, but it’s okay because the good parts outweigh it. And so part of, I think, as you start into this process, it’s important to weigh up the positive sides of your job.

And there’s the obvious positives like, “Hey, I’ve got a nice office. I’ve got this amount of pay. I work with friendly people.” But also thinking about the goodwill that you’ve built up over the years, because that won’t carry with you if you move into a new organization.

So as we work in an organization for a while, things tend to get easier for us because we’ve built this sort of goodwill with the people around us when we can get things done. So really being honest about the positives and the negatives of your situation.

Now if you find that you’re in a situation where, “I can’t leave this job,” for whatever reason it may be, then I think that takes you down a different path than, “I can leave this job.” So for much of our working careers, most of us are in a situation where we can’t just up and leave right away.

And it could be this term is called embeddedness, like how embedded are you in your job and your community. And it could be like, “Look, this is the only engineering firm in this town that I’m in, and my family is never going to leave this town. So this is it for me, so I can’t leave,” versus, “Yeah, I’m in this metropolis with all sorts of engineering jobs and I can go remote and whatever it may be,” then you have a much lower level of embeddedness and you’ve got options.

But if you’re in this situation where you’re in huge problem with your relationship with work that can’t be fixed and you can’t quit, which I think many people are in this situation right now, then it makes sense to think about, “How do I reduce the size of work in my life in a way that doesn’t cause negative repercussions back on me?”

And so this is why the term quiet quitting, I think, went viral, right, three years ago, is thinking about, “How do I lean back a little bit from work such that I can dedicate my time and energy to pursuits outside of work?” and that could be anything from just well-being to a side gig or whatever it may be, or dedicate more time to try and find an alternative.

And I talk about, when you want to shrink the size of work in your life, when you want to lean back a little bit, it doesn’t make sense to do that in the core of your job, your core job tasks, because that’s going to lead down a negative path.

But I think most of us, if we’ve been in a job for a little while, we find this phenomenon called job creep happens, where we slowly take on more tasks, we slowly do a little bit of extra here and there. And not through anybody’s fault, our job becomes sort of bigger than we meant it to be.

And so then it’s time to do a little bit of landscaping and say, “What are the parts of my job that I’ve taken on, that I’m doing, that really don’t add much to me, to the organization, that nobody would notice if I quit doing, that I could delegate these tasks to someone else?”

And so it’s really about job crafting, about rightsizing your job to say, “How can I make this sustainable because I’m stuck in this situation for now?” So I think that’s the next move after speaking up, is maybe saying, “I need to lean back and see if maybe this job is actually fine if it’s just a nine-to-five job and not with all of this extra attached to it.”

Pete Mockaitis
And I guess I’m curious about the other side of all this in terms of we’re not jolted and we are on autopilot, and yet, we would totally stop working if we won the lottery. Do you have any prompts or questions or approaches where perhaps we need a jolt to cause us to evaluate what’s up and see if we’re, in fact, where we ought to be?

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, that’s interesting. There’s some old research where some researchers studied, “How do people and why do people become entrepreneurs?” And there’s this narrative of entrepreneurship as sort of a very proactive, positive career move that people make, that breaking free from the corporate overlords and becoming an entrepreneur.

But when they looked into it, they found that most people end up as entrepreneurs as a result of some negative event, some failure or something like that. And when they talked to the entrepreneurs, they were like, the entrepreneurs were like, “Look, I was stuck in inertia. I was stuck on autopilot, and I needed these layoffs to shake me out of it.”

And they’re, essentially, saying, “I needed these jolts in order to live the life I wanted to live.” So I think you can self-jolt perhaps in a couple of ways. And one I already mentioned, which is saying, “Every year or twice a year, I’m really going to sit down and take a hard look at my relationship with work, the trajectory of my life. Is it moving toward my version of the good life as much as I want it to?”

The other thing I would say is having some sort of partner who really challenges you, to have that meeting with them every six months. And the two of you, and who knows, it could be your romantic partner, it could be a friend, it could be a therapist, you know, sit down and say, “Let’s really question, take a critical look at my relationship with work. And do I need to make a change or not?”

And so I think you asked a great question, there are certainly times that entrepreneurship research would suggest that there are life pivots out there that we should take. And if we can self-jolt into them, for some of us that would make sense.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Anthony, tell me, any final things you want to mention before we hear about your favorite things?

Anthony Klotz
The only final thing I would say is after this sort of leaning back or shrinking the size of work in your life, I mean, if that doesn’t work, or if you have the option to quit, then I think it is time to quit. This is why jolts do lead to a lot of quitting.

And I would just say, you know, especially for people early in your career, which was me at one point, like, nobody really teaches you how to quit or gives you advice on how to quit. More and more today, we’re seeing employees boomerang back to their former employers. And that only works if you resign in a way that’s largely positive.

And so there’s a lot of, I would say, online content showing the upsides of burning bridges as you leave organizations, and I think that’s probably quite overstated.

Pete Mockaitis
Upside?

Anthony Klotz
I think a lot of people are saying that it’s somewhat… there’s a lot of videos that make it seem like it’s really cathartic to have a marching band play as you quit your job, bake your boss a cake that says, “This is the worst job I’ve ever had.”

And these are hugely entertaining, as your laughter is suggesting, but as you might imagine, I’ve done a lot of research on how people quit their jobs, and there’s several different ways that people do quit their jobs.

And you can imagine that from a career standpoint, the positive styles of resigning make the most sense. And there are a few rare instances in which I would say it’s okay to burn bridges, but those would be very, very rare.

My research shows that about 10% of people engage in some form of dysfunctional behavior on the way out, some form of bridge-burning. That sort of behavior is probably only warranted in like 0.1% of quitting.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess, if anyone needed to hear that now, you’ve heard it from the expert on the matter. Don’t get a marching band and a dramatic exit. Maybe, like, if your career move is into a viral video creator and you’re getting a kickstart with the marching band, but almost never.

I think, yeah, I mean, that was my impression is that, yes, this video is entertaining, but it is not a optimal life approach. That’s what I think the imagination is for. Enjoy imagining doing that, but don’t actually do it.

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, go ahead and type up that email and then delete it, what you really want to say when you quit, yeah, but don’t actually say it.

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

Anthony Klotz
There’s a quote by George Mallory when he was trying to hike up Everest, and people wanted to know why he was doing it. And I won’t get this quote exactly right, but he essentially said, “There is no reason. We just do it for the sheer joy.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And can you share a favorite study, or experiment, or bit of research?

Anthony Klotz
Yeah, there’s a study, Greenberg 1990, where somehow this researcher talked a manufacturing company that was doing pay cuts into letting him manipulate the way that they deliver those pay cuts, which we wouldn’t even be allowed to do anymore for ethical purposes.

But it showed that just in very small ways, the way that leaders deliver negative messages have huge implications for whether employees steal and quit after a negative announcement, like a pay cut or a layoff.

Just doing it with compassion and care versus doing it in a very perfunctory style makes a huge difference for how negative news is received and reacted to by workers. It’s just a really powerful design.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Anthony Klotz
I like dreaming and reading about travel. So probably The Log from the Sea of Cortez by Steinbeck, where he’s tooling around Baja Mexico, the Sea of Cortez, and making all kinds of fun discoveries with his buddies. That sounds pretty good.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Anthony Klotz
In the evenings, usually about an hour before I go to sleep, I put away the screens and go for a walk, usually with my partner. But being away from screens, going for a walk, definitely contributes to a good night’s sleep, which then kind of has a more positive effect, a nice little cyclical positive effect.

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

Anthony Klotz
I would point them to email, for one. Anybody can reach out to me at my UCL email, which is easy to find, or I’m at AnthonyKlotz.com or LinkedIn, of course.

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

Anthony Klotz
If you’re looking to be awesome at your job, I would recommend challenging yourself to say, “When these jolts come, I’m going to set them to the side for the moment. I’m not going to ruminate on them, give them more energy than they need. And I’ll revisit them every three months or every six months.” So that would be the challenge.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Anthony, thank you.

Anthony Klotz
Oh, it’s been a pleasure, Pete.

Jun 01
0

1157: How to Improve Processes, Remove Friction, and Accelerate Innovation with Jon McNeill

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Tesla’s former President Jon McNeill reveals the five-step framework behind one of the world’s fastest-growing companies.

You’ll Learn

  1. What most miss when designing processes
  2. How to identify outdated requirements that slow things down
  3. Why automation should be your LAST step

About Jon

Jon McNeill is the CEO and Co-Founder of DVx Ventures. With a track record of founding and scaling companies, Jon has led teams that generated tens of thousands of jobs and delivered multi-billion dollar returns for investors.

Previously, Jon served as President at Tesla, where revenue grew from $2B to $20B in under 30 months, and later as COO at Lyft, helping double revenue and take the company public. He currently sits on the boards of General Motors, Lululemon, Asurion, CrossFit, and Stash.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Jon McNeill Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Jon, welcome!

Jon McNeill
Thanks. Nice to be here, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to discuss The Algorithm and I’d love it if you could kick us off with a story you shared, which I found riveting, in which when you were just getting started at Tesla, even actually before you had the job, you took it on yourself to tackle a project. Could you tell us the story?

Jon McNeill
Yeah, I was talking with Elon about joining Tesla and I kept saying to him, “I think you need a big company guy to come in.” And he said, “No, that’s exactly what I don’t need. I need a fellow entrepreneur.” And I said, “Well, I want to make sure I can be helpful to you. So, like, what’s your biggest problem right now?”

And he said, “We have a demand problem.” And I said, “Okay, like frame that for me. They’re public companies. So what’s your commitment to the street this quarter?” He said, “Roughly 12,000 cars.” And I said, “How are you doing so far?”

It was about a month into the quarter. He says, “It’s a month into the quarter. We’ve sold like 2,500 cars, short of 3,000 cars.” I’m like, “Oh, now I understand your demand problem. You’re going to miss your quarter. Let me go to work on that and see if I can help.”

So I went to, just in the travels with my own business at the time, I went to eight different cities over the course of about 10 days. And I went into eight different Tesla stores and did what I was told was the pinnacle of the sales process and sales funnel, which was taking a test drive.

And the whole idea was that people would come in, they would get in an electric car for the first time, hit the accelerator. And the accelerator in an electric car is way different than a gas car. It’s instant torque to the wheels, and so you take off like a rocket. And so a lot of people experience that. And then they can’t stop thinking about it until they’ve got a car.

So I went in eight stores, I did a test drive. And then, oddly, like a few days later, I hadn’t heard from any of them. So Elon had put me in touch with his head of sales ops. And I called him and said, “Like, am I blacklisted in the system or something? I used eight different email addresses so people wouldn’t know who I was. And people don’t know who I am anyway. And I’m not getting any callbacks. Why?”

And he looked in the system, he’s like, “No, you’re not flagged or anything.” I said, “Can you do me a favor? Can you tell me how many test drives you’ve given in the last 30 days that haven’t been followed up?” And he’s like, “Sure, give me, like, an hour. I can go run that.”

So he calls me back in an hour, and he said, “Nine thousand, 9,000 test drives, no callbacks.” I said, “Well, congratulations. You’re going to miss your quarter because you haven’t called anybody back. And no wonder you’re so far short of orders.”

So then I said, “Can you shut off a store rep’s ability to take any new leads until they’ve called all of their previous test drives back?” He said, “Yeah, I could do that.” I said, “How fast?” He said, “Globally? I could do that in a few hours.” I said, “Awesome. Do it, because we got to force-change, like, super fast or, otherwise, you’re missing your quarter.”

So he does it. Calls me back the next day, he’s like, “You won’t believe the orders are flowing in like crazy.” And I said, “Yeah, because you’re just calling people back. It’s the easiest thing ever. You’re asking for the order.” And then it dawned on me that I didn’t work for Tesla yet. And so I kind of gulped, and I said, “Hey, I got to call you back, because I got to call Elon and beg for forgiveness.”

So I called Elon and said, “Hey, look. Here’s the situation. You’re demand-challenged. Here’s what I found out. You’ve done 9,000 test drives with no callback. And so here’s what I did about it. I was on the phone with your head of sales ops and we shut down any new leads into the system until everybody called their previous test drives back.”

And I said, “But I got to ask your forgiveness. I was acting like this was my company because I’m a CEO in my day job. But this is not the company I’m the CEO of. You are. This is your company. And I did something and I didn’t even ask your permission. And I’m really sorry. I got to apologize.”

And I didn’t know it because we were just getting to know each other. But I had this long period of silence on the other end of the phone line, and I thought, “Oh, my God, what have I done?” And it seemed like forever. It was probably 60 or 90 seconds of just dead silence.

What I’ve learned since is that’s how Elon processes. He, like, shuts off all other sensory input and just thinks. And so I was about to ask him if he was still there, and he hopped on and he said, “You know what? That’s exactly a rational decision, and I’m so glad you made it. I think you’re going to fit in here just fine.”

And that was the last hurdle. I said, “Well, I think I’ve proven myself I can be useful. So I think I’m ready to sign on, too.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a lovely story on many dimensions. But when I reflect on it, what I’m stuck with is, “All right, Tesla, great, great brand, tremendous company, tremendous leaders, lot of smarts there.” How is it that we find ourselves in a situation where one of the most fundamental things one can do in a sales operation – call people back – isn’t happening?

Jon McNeill
I think I see this over and over again. People look at a lot of data and miss the obvious. And when you just go and see a process with your eyes – this is going to sound completely old-fashioned – but it’s actually the case.

Like, I believe that the strongest analytical instrument you have as a leader are your eyes and ears. And if you go to the front line and eat your own dog food and experience the product or the process for yourself, you’ll often see exactly what’s wrong. But unless you know the exact piece of data to look for that would give you the clue, you don’t know that.

And so this is a complete hack I’ve found in leadership is just go to the front line, go experience the process yourself. You’ll understand really rapidly exactly what’s wrong. And it doesn’t always work, but it works a lot of the time. And this was an example of that.

So a bunch of really smart people looking at data missed it because they didn’t leave their offices. And my encouragement to people, and those people, as I then became their leader was, “You’re going to leave your office at least one day a week, and you’re going to go to the front lines because you’re going to see stuff way faster than the data will show you. And, hopefully, we’ll miss a lot of these potential big divots in our plan if you do.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s tremendous. We had Marina Nitze on the show, who was the CTO for the United States VA, and that was one of her core recommendations, is follow the thing all the way through the process and then you’ll say, “Oh, that’s why it’s taking forever because so-and-so is waiting for something to be faxed. Well, let’s stop that. All right, now we know. Understood.”

All right. Well, so then zooming out a bit, your book, The Algorithm, any particularly surprising or fascinating discoveries you’ve made in your career or while putting together the book that you’re putting forward here?

Jon McNeill
I think this is, like, I had gone into Tesla having been a student of the Toyota Production System and Lean, and what I found was those frameworks were awesome for incremental improvement and optimization, but not awesome for quantum growth.

And so what we tried to distill in The Algorithm, this was the whole team at Tesla and, really, the leadership team that came up with this framework, was to distill a framework for quantum growth into some digestible steps that we could push to the edge of the organization.

And the edge could start to innovate super fast, because that’s what doubling a business every eight months at scale requires. And that’s exactly what the team was pulling off. They were doubling a business every eight months.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So the classic Toyota manufacturing, Lean, Kaizen, Kanbans, etc., is great for your small incremental growth and you’ve got a whole another thing for hyper growth. And can you unpack sort of basically what is the algorithm?

Jon McNeill
It’s a five-step process that we used on a weekly basis to drive innovation. And this is used at Tesla. It’s used at SpaceX. And I think, as leadership experts or academics go to study Elon 20 or 30 years from now, and ask the question, like, “What made this guy such a successful entrepreneur and industrialist? Like, what was it?” I think they’ll come down to this, like, weekly cadence of deploying this framework, because that’s exactly what he does.

He determines the one or two issues that are existential to the business. In other words, the two things that could kill you if they don’t come true. And then he just devotes his time to that. He delegates everything else to the team. And so you have great agencies as a leader because you’re running the business and he’s really working on two existential issues, but he’s doing it on a weekly basis.

And what that does is that keeps the organization innovating on a weekly basis. So if you’re doing that every week, you’ve got 52 opportunities to build advantage versus your competition. And that’s exactly what that delivers.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so could you maybe walk us through a couple examples of, all right, grab existential issue and then work through the steps?

Jon McNeill
So I’ll take you through one to make this super simple. So the first step is question every requirement. Second step is you delete every step and you simplify. The third is you optimize. The fourth is you speed it up because no process can get faster and have high quality with speed unless it is like optimized, so that’s a test. And then you automate last, which sounds kind of nuts especially coming from a technical company or Silicon Valley company to say automate last, but I’ll kind of illustrate that.

So let me start with the first, the negative example. So we started to prepare for Model 3 production. And the idea of the teams was, “We’re going to have a fully automated line, the most automated manufacturing line ever in the history of automobiles.”

And so you might remember this phrase, “We’re going to build the alien dreadnought,” or, “the machine that makes the machine.” That was this whole era. And so teams went to design the Model 3 production line in digital simulation. Today they would call it a digital twin. And they designed all the machines, the flow, the conveyors, the people, everything. They didn’t lay it out manually and do it manually first.

And so when we were down to the wire in terms of, “We got to produce Model 3s because we’re going to be out of cash if we don’t,” they went to start that line, and the line wouldn’t work for a thousand reasons. There were major, major mistakes that were made in that digital SIM.

And digital SIMs usually don’t work because they can’t think of everything. And cars were falling off the conveyors, falling off the line. And that then led to a radical step, which was one of the leaders, Jerome Guillen, said, “I’m actually going to scrap this whole process and build a tent outside. And we’re going to do what we should have done from the start. We’re going to build cars by hand.”

And so we started, over the weekend, building Model 3s by hand. And we simplified the entire process because we didn’t have conveyors, we didn’t have a lot of the machines that were necessary, and we did the bare essentials to produce that Model 3.

So we simplified the process, we deleted all the unnecessary steps, we didn’t have the luxury, really, of having many steps. And then we started to optimize the process, and we started, we produced 50 cars a week, and then we produced 100, and then we produced 500. And the goal was to get to 5,000. And we kept creeping up, creeping up, creeping up by optimizing the process and applying speed to it.

Once we finally had the process nailed, then we automated at the very last step and moved from the tent back into the factory. We had rebuilt the factory production line by this time so that it could actually produce cars.

And when we went to do the postmortem, we said, “How would we have avoided this? Number one, we automated first, not last, and it almost killed us. We did not run the process manually first. We did not delete a bunch of steps. We did not optimize the process. We automated before we had done any of that work, and we almost killed the company.”

So it was, really, at the end of Model 3 production, that the algorithm came together, and we said, “Here are the steps we’re going to follow from here on out. When we go to launch a new product, when you go to invent a new product, we’re going to follow these steps.”

And so that’s an end-to-end example of how not to do it, but then it led us to a framework of how to do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So maybe digging into each of these in some detail, with “question every requirement.” I have a feeling many of us, it doesn’t even occur to us to question the requirements because the requirements, they’re just like the air we breathe or the water we swim in. It’s like, “Well, this is just how it is.”

So could you maybe surface for us some prompts, or some examples, or some perturbations so that we can identify some requirements that maybe need to get questioned?

Jon McNeill
So when we started to sell cars online, we figured out it took 64 clicks to sell a car, but 44 of those clicks were in the financing process. And that’s because a loan doc or a lease doc for a car has 12 pages of paragraph after paragraph after paragraph. You’ve got an initial sign, all this stuff.

And so a question on requirement step that we did was I took that loan doc to our general counsel at the time, his name’s Todd Maron. I said, “Todd, out of these 12 pages, I need to get rid of some clicks. Can you tell me how many of these paragraphs are a requirement of law or regulation?” He came back about 24 hours later and he said, “None.”

I said, “Well, how does a 12-page document exist then?” He said, “It’s the result of a bunch of well-meaning corporate lawyers at banks trying to protect their client. And so they insert paragraphs for all these uncertainties or these edge cases that could come up to protect the bank.”

But he said, “None of these are required by law or regulation. And, actually, the bank has case law on its side. Like, they don’t need all this stuff because if somebody cheats in a certain way, that’s already been decided by case law. So it’s not like you need to make somebody acknowledge something that the courts have already acknowledged as being out of bounds.”

So I said, “Todd, you’re telling me we could have a one-paragraph loan or lease that says, ‘Here’s the price of the car, here’s the interest rate, here’s the term, and here’s the monthly payment?’” He’s like, “I’m telling you, you can do that.”

Nobody in the industry had questioned whether or not the loan doc or the lease doc should exist. We were just crazy, silly enough to make that, to raise that question. We discovered something that none of our competitors had discovered, which is you didn’t need to put customers through a 44-click process. And as you know, if you had to buy anything on Amazon, and it took 44 clicks, you’d probably opt out a lot. And that’s true in e-comm, and it’s certainly true when people are buying a $100,000-car online.

So we went to talk to banks to see if we could get anybody to go along with us on this one-click loan release, and we got the door slammed in our face by everybody, even though they would intellectually acknowledge that they didn’t need all these paragraphs.

They said, “I would never take the risk of doing this. I would never take the career risk of going to my CEO and suggesting we do this.” Finally, we found a very enterprising CEO at US Bank, and he said, “We’ll do it. In fact, we’ll talk to a CrossTown digital bank called Ally. They’ll probably do it too. We’ll take your loans, they’ll probably take your leases, and we’re off to the races.”

All that started because we questioned why a 12-page loan doc had to exist. And that’s probably the clearest example or the best prompt I can give you on questioning requirements. There’s a lot of stuff that nobody ever questions and takes as a given. If you question that stuff and it turns out it’s not a given, now you’ve got an advantage.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that a lot. And I’m thinking about, well, the phrase that comes to mind is checkbox marketing, or really checkbox anything. If your mindset is, “Well, that’s just what’s done. It’s just what needs to happen.” And I’m thinking about, well, I have a one-page guest release form.

And I think lawyers tend to want to put a lot of intense, you know, things in there. It’s like, “I own all of these forever, no matter what.” And I think, “Well, actually that’s not the vibe I’m trying to put out there when I’m just meeting somebody. I’m just sort of like, ‘Hey, you and I are both cool to do what we want to do with this thing, okay? So no pressure, it’s all good.’” And that’s kind of what I’m trying to convey.

So it was not the default. We had to shift and adjust and then it is, well, it’s much smoother because then I don’t have a lot of people say, “Whoa, whoa, hold on, buddy. What, what is this? I don’t know. Wait. Time out. I got to talk to my lawyer. I got to talk to my agent. I don’t know if we can do this, you know?”

No, that just about never happens because it’s very quick and it’s simple and it’s handy. And I liked that example because the law, in particular, feels like something that’s immovable, like, “Oh, ‘legal’ said, we just have to have that. And end of discussion. It was like, “Oh, well, maybe legal would be willing to have a follow-up conversation and see what can be done here.”

Jon McNeill
Totally. And it takes a certain mindset. So, like, Todd, as a leader of the legal teams was willing to come along on that journey with me and question requirements, and that’s pretty rare in that kind of a leader in that function, but he was super commercial and business-oriented.

And so he would start that journey without having a bunch of hesitation. Like, he’d say, “Yeah, let’s go, like, look into this and see if this is really true and if we really need this.” I don’t experience many general counsels like Todd because they largely go into that career to mitigate risk. And so that’s where their position starts.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and as a point of curiosity, I mean, I understand frictions and clicks are, you know, undesirable. They slow down the behavior you want, and this is cool and convenient and nice and pleasant to have fewer clicks.

But, you know, Jon, really, lay it on me, is a few dozen clicks for signing an initialing a hundred thousand dollar vehicle enough to move the needle so that folks are like, “You know what? I wanted that Tesla, but this is too much effort. I’m done with this document. I’m abandoning my cart”?

Jon McNeill
It happened a lot, and when we eliminated it, the opposite happened. People started to buy like crazy online, and our digital sales went through the roof, which is because it’s just science. In e-comm, clicks equal anti-conversion. So you get rid of clicks and your conversion rate goes up. It’s just math.

So this is why when you get to the cart in Amazon, the search bar disappears. They want to take away any potential click that you’re going to do other than hit order, because they know how hard it was to get to that point and how hard it is to get you to actually click the order button.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and I believe they’ve litigated the one-click ordering.

Jon McNeill
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like, “No, this is ours, we own it, no one touch it.” And it’s like, “Very touchy,” and because the stakes are huge.

Jon McNeill
Because of that, because it’s powerful. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, can you chat with us about deleting the steps in the process?

Jon McNeill
Yeah, so here’s another example, and Elon actually cut a little video in this early on, but he had taken on this challenge in manufacturing where there was this separator between the battery and the car. And so it’s basically along the floor of the car.

And we could not produce this separator, big piece of plastic. We couldn’t produce it to save our lives. It was warping and it wouldn’t fit right, etc. And so this is one of the chapters where he’s literally sleeping in the factory trying to solve this problem.

And, eventually, he asked the team, “I got to talk to the engineer who spec’d this part. Who spec’d the part?” And the closest people around are the battery people, and they said, “Oh, it’s the auto dynamics team. They wanted a noise dampener in between the battery and the passenger compartment.”

So he grabs the guy that’s the head of the auto dynamics team, and said, “Why did you spec this part?” He said, “I didn’t spec the part. It was the battery team. The battery team told us they needed a heat shield between the battery and the passenger compartment.”

He’s like, “I was just with the battery team and they said it was you, not them.” He said, “Give me the name of the person who spec’d this part.” So they go look for the name. And it turns out the name of the person that spec’d the part was a summer intern that didn’t even work at Tesla anymore.

Elon had spent weeks in the factory trying to solve this problem, all for a part that didn’t need to exist. And so, at that point in time, “We said, nobody claims ownership of this ‘requirement.’ So we’re going to delete it out of the car. And, therefore, we’re solving a whole production problem that was holding us up.”

And you will find, over and over again, that there are steps you can delete from your sales process, from your delivery process. And the hack to finding those is, essentially, map your process on a wall with a bunch of sticky notes. Then have your team go circle those steps that the customer pays you for. It turns out there’s very few of those.

They don’t pay you for the order sheet. They don’t pay you for the PO. They don’t pay you for, in our case, the bill of lading. They don’t pay you for all this stuff. And the things they don’t pay you for are immediate candidates for deletion, because you’re doing those for internal reasons, and you’re creating cost for internal reasons.

Now some of the stuff is necessary to track dollars and cents. I totally get it. They don’t pay you for accounting. They don’t pay you for tax. I get that. But there are a bunch of steps you can cut out when you start to say, “Hey, the customer really doesn’t pay us for this. And we don’t really get anything out of it. So why are we doing this?” And those are good candidates to delete.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, I was curious, did Elon get on the phone with the intern? Like, “Hey.”

Jon McNeill
The intern didn’t even work there anymore. Like, didn’t even work there.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, mean, hunt him down wherever he is.

Jon McNeill
He was like, “I don’t need to waste time talking to the intern, like, it’s gone.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So then simplify and optimize.

Jon McNeill
Yeah, so once you delete steps, now you’ve got way fewer steps. So you’ve got a simplified process and now you can start to optimize that process and make it go faster and faster and faster and faster. It’s a little bit like starting any skill, whether that is playing a musical instrument or a sport, where you start and you’re like, “Man, I can’t go very fast.”

And then you practice and practice and practice, and it turns out you get faster and faster and faster because you get more and more efficient and optimized. And that’s the idea here is you keep speeding the process up and speeding it up.

Now you’re still in manual mode. So you’re learning a bunch about what’s causing, what’s getting in the way of speed, and the stuff getting in the way of speed is usually a quality issue. And so you eliminate these quality issues. And then once you’ve got the target speed achieved, now you know you’re optimized and you can then start on automation.

Pete Mockaitis
A quality issue in terms of something needs rework or is outside of the spec we’re looking for?

Jon McNeill
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And then with the acceleration, so there’s practice. What are the other drivers of accelerating?

Jon McNeill
Mainly, it’s putting speed goals that are double the current speed. So you say, “I want to either double the output at current speed or I want to double the speed at current output,” either one of those works in my book, just try to double.

And it starts to reveal, “Oh, here’s all the things that are in the way of doubling. So maybe we can delete more steps. Maybe there are more requirements that we should question. Or, maybe there’s a better method.”

And as you do those, then you start to identify, “Ah, there are a bunch of things that we didn’t see at first that we now see now, that we can either delete or simplify to help us speed this process up.”

Pete Mockaitis
So the doubling of the speed is not so much a, “Hey, it turns out we can just double the speed, it’s all good.” But rather, it’s sort of like a magnifying glass to identify, “Oh, that’s what’s holding down the speed doubling.”

Jon McNeill
Totally. There’s this great series of scenes in the Hulu series, “The Bear,” which is about this super high-end restaurant in Chicago. And it’s turned from a roast beef cafe with the same team in the back that is now trying to earn its Michelin star.

And there’s a woman that’s at the pasta station, and she has two minutes once an order comes in to cook pasta. And she starts at five minutes. And then she does things like she portions each serving of pasta in a little plastic container. So she’s pre-portioned.

And she starts to do multiple boiling water pots to drop the pasta into so she can do more than one at a time. And then she’s got a saucier step that she realizes, if she preheats the sauce, it meets the pasta at the right time, she can speed it up. And she gets the process down from five to two and a half minutes by just eliminating all these steps, but she’s still not at her two minute target.

And then the sous chef, who really runs the kitchen, comes over and is just helping her. They have a busy night. And so the sous chef comes over and does a few things that experienced chefs know to do. Bam! Bam! Bam! Order comes out in a minute and a half.

And the woman who is at the pasta station says, “I’ve been working this problem for like 90 days and I got it from five minutes to two and a half. And you walk over and you do it in a minute and a half.” And she’s like, “Yeah, I’ve done this before. So just watch me and you can see the extra steps you can take out of your process to make yourself faster.”

That’s what we’re talking about is just optimize, optimize, optimize until you get to a really different output than you’ve had before.

Pete Mockaitis
And then the final step is automation.

Jon McNeill
Yeah, and then you can automate it. Because automation is like wet cement. When you put it around a process, it sets up really hard and you got to get jackhammers to get rid of it. So you don’t want to automate until you’ve really got the process nailed. Otherwise, you’ll be suffering with the cement that’s already solidified the current process where it is.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So now, as we were talking about this with the restaurant example and manufacturing examples, I’d love to change gears a little bit and hear about, let’s say there’s someone who’s in the middle of an organization and their output is not physical, but, nonetheless, there is a process that’s cranking out something on the other end. Could you give us an example in that domain of working through those steps?

Jon McNeill
Yeah, so, like, whether you’re producing software or whether you’re producing marketing or you’re producing financials, I think the same steps apply. If you step back and say like, “Hey, look, I produce financial statements for the business,” or, “I produce a budget for the business.”

If you step back and say, “Okay, let me just map the process that we use today to do that. And maybe I should question some base assumptions here. And do we have to do all these steps? Like, are all these things really required?”

And so an example of that is Tesla, when I joined, was doing standard annual budgets. And the senior management team and the CEO would set the target for sales, and the target for gross margin, the target for cash flow. And so these annual budgets were being done in the way they’re done at almost every company.

The challenge was we were doubling the business every eight months. And so, like, if you’re trying to project out a budget for a year, it was horribly inaccurate by, like, month three, because things were changing so fast. So all that was essentially wasted effort, all that planning and budgeting.

So we asked ourselves a question, like, “Time is super, super valuable in this company. How could we improve this process? And rather than going through a big planning cycle every year, what actually needs to get done?”

And where we ended up was, we questioned the requirement of having a year budget. It turned out what we did was we had quarterly budgets because the business was moving on a quarter basis, not a year basis, and we would have these rolling four quarter budgets.

We would spend less than two days setting targets in the budget because it was only going be good for a quarter. So you didn’t want to spend a week of the quarter, a huge chunk of the quarter doing it. And that finance team evolved a whole different way to do financial planning and budgeting.

And they did it, not on an annual basis, but a quarterly basis. They did it on a rolling basis, and they just used the key inputs that everybody was looking at in the business anyway, “What’s the sales rate? What’s the production rate? What’s the margin?”

And we can build a budget off of that, and rather than taking the whole company’s time planning, we’re just going to keep rolling this and rolling this, and we’re absorbing everything that we’re learning from the market as we double.

And so you can apply this whether you’re sitting in a finance department or a marketing department or a sales department. You can apply these principles to your advantage, too.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Jon, tell me, any final top tips, do’s or don’ts, for folks looking to implement this stuff?

Jon McNeill
As we talked about, like one of the principles that is a complete hack is eat your own dog food. I learned this from Sam Walton in his book, Made in America, where he would tour stores on a weekly basis to find out what the customer wanted that they didn’t have, what they had too much of that the customer didn’t want, and what were the things that store managers were doing that were super good that he could spread across the company.

And I learned from that and started to see that, “Oh, he’s onto a complete hack.” Like, if you use your own product, if you experience the customer experience, you’re going to see all kinds of areas of improvement. And if you teach your people to see it before you, they’re going to move even faster than you can.

And so I would say, like, the secret hack is go experience your own product and use it. We even went so far at Tesla to have a rule that you couldn’t present product in a PowerPoint. We didn’t want to see, like, some rendering or rendition. We wanted to see the real thing. So if you’re presenting product, you had to do a live screencast onto the screen so we could see the product, we could play with the product, and we could see how it actually worked.

I was with a group of bank executives a few months ago. I asked them to raise their hand if they actually use their own bank’s consumer app. No hands went up. And I said, “I could have guessed that because I’m a consumer of two of your banks, and your app sucks.”

“It’s so bad that if you used it, you wouldn’t live with yourself for another day without fixing it. You would call up the head of engineering and you say, ‘We got to fix this, this, and this.’ But you don’t use it.” So the organization gets the sense that nobody cares. And if you can live with it, they can live with it.

And eating your own dog food changes all that. It creates an immediate feedback loop to the top and it allows you to set the bar of acceptability with your organization.

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

Jon McNeill
I think this whole approach is about simplicity, and so I love the Mark Twain quote, “I would have written you a shorter letter if I would have taken the time.” It speaks to how hard it is to simplify. Humans, I think, we are naturally complicators. We’re not natural simplifiers, and it actually takes work to simplify.

And I love that quote, because it reminds me, each time I read it, of the fact that simplification is work. It’s super valuable and rewarding work, but it’s work.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And can you point to a favorite study or experimental or bit of research?

Jon McNeill
I think, if you want to understand AI and the current version of AI that we have with LLMs, the best piece to read is the original DeepMind paper.

Pete Mockaitis
“Attention Is All You Need”?

Jon McNeill
Yup.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Jon McNeill
Favorite book would be, I’ve got two right now, one is The Goal, which taught me a completely different way of looking at business, by Eliyahu Goldratt. And the second is Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara. I think it applies to every business. It’s so good.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool?

Jon McNeill
Reading. Like, if I could answer the question that way, I’d start every day reading for an hour and a half, and I read variety of things. I read books, I read, obviously, the news. I read Twitter, I read Reddit, Hacker News sometimes. Reading for me is a tool.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share with teammates, audiences, that they quote back to you often, a Jon original?

Jon McNeill
We had the standard for service at Tesla that gets quoted back to me, it got quoted back to me today actually, and that is, “Make them talk about you at dinner tonight.” Do something that is so awesome that they’re going to talk about you at dinner tonight.

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

Jon McNeill
I’d point them, you can find me at DVX.ventures.

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

Jon McNeill
Become a simplifier and you’ll stand out.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Okay, Jon, thank you.

Jon McNeill
You bet. Thanks, Pete.

May 28
0

1156: How to Make Great Meetings that Stop Wasting Time with Rebecca Hinds

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Rebecca Hinds discusses the simple shifts that turn meetings from time-wasters into value-generators.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why most meetings don’t feel like “real work”
  2. Why every organization needs a “meeting doomsday”
  3. The easy agenda fixes that save so much time

About Rebecca

Rebecca Hinds is a leading expert on organizational behavior and the future of work. She holds a BS, MS, and PhD from Stanford University. Rebecca founded the Work Innovation Lab at Asana and the Work AI Institute at Glean, first-of-their-kind corporate think tanks dedicated to conducting cutting-edge research on the future of work.

She is a trusted advisor to companies navigating the challenges of modern work—from meeting overload and hybrid dysfunction to the messy realities of AI adoption and organizational change.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Rebecca Hinds Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Rebecca, welcome!

Rebecca Hinds
Thank you so much for having me, Pete. I’m looking forward to chatting.

Pete Mockaitis
Me, too. Me, too. And I am excited about making meetings fantastic. Could you share with us perhaps one of your most surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made while you’re putting together Your Best Meeting Ever?

Rebecca Hinds
I’ve long been fascinated by this phenomenon that’s called the Babble Hypothesis. Research shows that, when people talk more, talk more in a meeting, outside of a meeting as well, we perceive them to be a leader more than they are regardless of what they’re saying.

And I think, you know, so much of our meetings are performative, they’re skewed by status dynamics and power dynamics within the organization, and I think this Babble Hypothesis really speaks to the fact that we need to be much more intentional about how we show up to meetings because talking, hogging the airtime isn’t just annoying. It isn’t just frustrating. It actually skews our perception of the people in the room.

Pete Mockaitis
That is so fascinating and, boy, you’re bringing back memories of high school. I remember Robbie Klaver – shoutout to Robbie, wherever he is – told me, I was starting up a Model United Nations chapter at my high school.

And he said, “If you want to win awards, all you have to do is talk a lot.” It was like, “That’s it. It doesn’t have to be good, it doesn’t have to be insightful, it doesn’t have to be helpful. Just get in front of that microphone a lot, and that’s how you get awards.”

And it’s like, “Robbie, surely not.” But, no, it really was exactly what I witnessed. And, whatever that had implications for, I guess, people’s college applications and all that. But this high school Model UN principle rings true decades later in workplaces all over the world.

Rebecca Hinds
As does so many other things, so many aspects of high school, you know, the homogeneous people coming together and sticking together, birds of a feather and, you know, jargon, too. We’re often told to use fancy words.

I talk in the book about how that’s often counterproductive because using jargon, using big words, using technical words, as I often see in meetings, it alienates other people, and we actually trust them less because they’re not speaking our language and they’re less relatable.

And I think that the science behind all of this is incredibly fascinating, in part, because it’s incredibly human. And probably what happened in high school is still showing up in some way, shape, or form in our meetings as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thinking about high school jargon, if I may attempt, as I’m 41 years old, jargon-maxing is not good, but talk-maxing is good from your perception as being a leader, and wise, and all those things, but it’s not great from the meeting experience or the outcomes.

Rebecca Hinds
And I think maxing is such an interesting word. We’re seeing it everywhere now, certainly with token-maxing and more is better. My colleague and mentor at Stanford, Bob Sutton, will call this addition sickness, right?

We are hardwired as humans to solve problems through addition. We have a problem, we throw more money at it, we throw more people at it, we throw more meetings at it, we throw more people in the meetings, more meeting minutes, and it’s very dangerous because, often, we don’t take time to subtract.

And there’s also a great research from my colleague, Leidy Klotz at University of Virginia that shows, “If you do prime people to subtract, it dislodges that addition sickness and they start to adopt a subtraction mindset.”

It’s often not that we dislike subtraction. It’s often, it doesn’t even occur to us as an option. It doesn’t even occur to us that, as we add another person to the meeting, what we should probably think about, “Is there someone we can remove where the meeting is no longer relevant to them or as relevant as it once was?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love to get your take for this notion of the person who speaks more is perceived as the leader more. Are there any compelling studies or experiments or data points to highlight just how substantial an effect this is?

Rebecca Hinds
Interesting. So I think that the study that I anchor, and in the book, I believe it was for every 34 seconds of talk time on that order, people gained an extra point as a leader.

Now this was done in a context where there was no natural leader in the meeting in terms of having a bigger title than anyone else. But it skewed the perception in the room. And what’s also fascinating is, in this particular study, and there have been other studies where they didn’t find this effect, but in this study in particular, men automatically earned an extra point for being a leader, just for being male.

And I think that’s also a key part of the power dynamics is, you know, the gender, the diversity in the room, how quickly you speak as well. If you speak more quickly, in general, you’re perceived to be more competent.

And a lot of these cues, and we’re seeing it with AI as well right now, you know, depending on the way an AI tool is framing the output, how sycophantic it is, we also know that if people agree with us, we tend to view them as more intelligent and more capable. And all of these biases, you know, they are front and center in meetings and something that we need to pay very close attention to.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, these are tantalizing tidbits. But maybe we should zoom out and say, what’s your big idea, main message, key thesis of Your Best Meeting Ever?

Rebecca Hinds
So the big idea is meetings are a product. Meetings are the most important product in our entire organization. They’re where decisions get made, culture gets built, alignment gets set, and yet they’re also the least optimized. They’re the least optimized product in our entire organization.

And when we think about great products, great everyday products, well, they have certain product design principles. We should be applying those same product design principles to meetings. So the seven chapters of the book each walk through a product design principle applied to our meetings.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so when you say product, I can read that word in multiple ways. Like, a product might be a physical item that I can purchase at a store. Or, in the tech world, products are not so much physical. They’re software things with features and experiences and a user interface. So how are you using the word product here?

Rebecca Hinds
In a few different ways and with a few different dimensions. Meetings are a communication tool. They’re a communication and coordination and collaboration mechanism within our organization. So they’re intangible in that way.

But what I’m getting at with the idea of product is intentionality. Just as we would think very carefully about how we build products and services for our customers, well, we need to approach meetings with the same discipline.

We would never launch a product to our customers without design, feedback, refinement, iteration. We do that with meetings every single day. We throw them on the calendar and they’re often our default reaction to any sort of uncertainty or ambiguity within the organization.

We don’t treat them like a product we would sell or give to our customers, which, in the context of meetings, those are the attendees in the room. They are not ourselves as organizers of the meeting.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So the product is something that needs to be thoughtfully, carefully considered and not just knee-jerk default, “Here’s meeting,” and to put some upfront effort into crafting how that’s going to be effective. Can you share with us some additional implications of the product mindset toward meetings?

Rebecca Hinds
Countless. You know, countless implications in terms of employee engagement. We know that meeting effectiveness is a strong predictor of employee engagement within the organization, even controlling for the factors that you would think to be important, your manager, your role within the organization.

Real business results, right? I think I often work with organizations where you’ll go in and you’ll start to hear people talk about meetings as if they’re not the real work, you know, “Oh, I have to get through all these meetings and then I can finally get to my work,” right?

If we design meetings correctly, they should be the real work, right? They should move work forward. So often, it’s not the case because they’re used performatively. They’re used as a box-checking exercise and not a mechanism, not a product that moves our work forward.

And so key business results, you know, moving work forward, better engagement, better cooperation, better relationships between the manager and the direct report, you know, meetings are the most common form of collaboration within our organizations.

As knowledge workers, as desk workers, we spend 90% of our time collaborating. There is nothing that we can do as leaders within organizations that is more impactful in boosting collaboration, improving that 90% of time than meetings because they’re so ubiquitous, they’re so common, and they’re so dysfunctional.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, well said. So I like that notion of box-checking versus moving the work forward. And, boy, that’s a really good, bright line of distinction associated with, “Is the meeting real work or is it not?” You’re thinking about effectiveness on these dimensions over the relationship, as well as moving work forward.

Can you give us some more clarity on how I can assess, “Is this meeting amazing, terrible, okay, pretty good?” How do I get a gauge on how effective or ineffective a meeting is?

Rebecca Hinds
It’s such a great question, it’s a hard question. And the reason why it’s a hard question is we have what I call a meeting-suck reflex. Meaning we are conditioned to dislike meetings, and we are conditioned to believe that that’s how we should behave, right?

There are a few things that bond coworkers more than lamenting over that meeting that could have been a two-line email. And because of that, you can’t just go into an organization, your own organization, and ask people, “Are your meetings effective?” because you’re going to trigger that reflex and not the reality. And that’s why we need to be very careful about meeting measurement.

One of my top recommendations is, if you want to gut check into how effective your meetings are, the ones you run, after about 10% of those meetings, ask attendees, “On a scale of zero to five, was this meeting worth the time you invested?”

My colleague Elise Keith calls this ROTI, return on time investment, and it does a couple things. One, it’s usually, in almost all cases, anonymous, so it avoids that temptation to either inflate or deflate the ratings.

Two, unlike meetings, which are socially loaded, everyone has some intuitive sense of the value of their time, and they know more or less whether this has been a good investment of the time. So you avoid that sort of meeting-suck reflex and it’s simple, you know, it’s not after every meeting. Survey overload is real with an organization.

Finally, it’s coming from the attendees and not you as the organizer. My colleague, Steven Rogelberg has done fantastic research to show there are two people that tend to leave the meeting most satisfied, two types of people. One is the organizer and, two, as we’ve talked about, is the person who has spoken the most in the meeting.

And so we can’t ask those two people whether the meeting has been effective. Their ratings will be inflated. We need to ask the users, the attendees of the meeting, whether this meeting has been worth the time.

Often you see split ratings. Often you see a cohort rating the meetings five and four versus zero and one. And that can also be very helpful information to understand, “Okay, this meeting was worthwhile for some cohort of folks, but not for the entire attendee population. Well, now we can redesign the meeting and design it to be much more effective.”

Pete Mockaitis
Worthwhile. And I hear what you’re saying that it’s tricky because meetings have different objectives and that’s a handy gauge. I imagine every potential measure of meaning effectiveness could have some limitations.

This one is like, “Well, hey, you didn’t think it was effective, but, by golly, you needed to know that. And now you do. And it was essential that that occurred,” and emails get ignored. So I suppose there’s a big gray zone, too.

Rebecca Hinds
There is, and that’s why the agenda is also very important. I recommend framing every agenda item as a combination of a verb and a noun. So it’s not just budget discussion, it’s “align” or “decide” on the Q2 budget.

You’re being very clear about, “What is the verb we need to accomplish?” because then you can assess or you can now use AI to assess, “Have we done the thing?” because that is now a measure of effectiveness within the meeting. If you’re unclear on what you’re trying to achieve, well, it’s impossible to determine what it even means to be effective in terms of the meeting.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m curious, if your verb is “inform,” what do we think? Some schools of thought would say, “Well, if all you’re doing is informing and it’s not a collaborative back and forth, then you should just do an email or some alternative medium.” What’s your take on that?

Rebecca Hinds
Exactly that. Information exchange is not a good purpose for a meeting. In the book, I talk about the 4D CEO rule, a two-part test to determine whether that meeting deserves to exist. First test, a meeting should only happen if the purpose is to debate, discuss, decide, or develop yourself or your team.

Information exchange, status updates, boss briefings, often these meetings are designed for the organizer, often for the powerful person in the room who either needs to consume information or disseminate information. In those settings, it is far more effective to communicate asynchronously through email, through Slack, and let attendees self-serve the information.

Pete Mockaitis
I think that’s very handy and sensible and that feels true. I’m wondering about this tricky challenge of, when folks have overwhelming inboxes and too much just flood of information coming at them, but it is essential that something gets to them, I think that’s one of the top reasons folks are tempted to do meetings, like these town hall meetings.

It’s like, “No, everyone really needs to know this. So we’re going to, by golly, put it on the calendar to make sure it gets there.” I’m curious, what’s your thought on making sure, in a world where that is not communicated via meeting, how do we make sure that the memo is sent and received?

Rebecca Hinds
It’s a great point and, you know, there’s the ideal case in organizations, there’s always the ideal case, and then there’s the reality. And the reality in many organizations is workers are overwhelmed. They’re overwhelmed with information and, often, the meeting feels like the most reliable way to get people’s attention to share the information.

There are certainly cases where that makes sense and that’s the unfortunate reality of our organizations, but in the best cases, we’re designing a communication system so that employees get the information they need and are able to distinguish between what’s important and what’s urgent.

And that requires being very clear in terms of, “What is the purpose of a meeting? What is the purpose of an email?” Ideally, you’re designing the asynchronous channels to be consumable and digestible, right? It’s not a memo that’s 20 pages that employees are needing to sift through.

You make it engaging. You make the asynchronous update a video. You make it a video where the CEO or executive team is in a location that has some personal relevance and it’s engaging to people.

Pete Mockaitis
There’s TikTok dancing.

Rebecca Hinds
There’s TikTok dancing, there’s family. One of my favorite all-time sales leaders would record videos after a run, dripping in sweat.

And that’s so important right now, that connection to leaders, not feeling like they’re on a different pedestal than the rest of the organization, which is often what happens in town halls or all hands or all staff meetings is you get this very rosy picture of reality in a way that does very little to strengthen the relationships between individual contributors and the people at the top of the organizational totem pole.

And even in the context of town halls, it’s usually significantly more effective to do those in smaller group settings. We know that as soon as a meeting or any team size gets above seven, eight, nine, 10 people, people start to check out.

Social loafing kicks in, people feel less supported. And so even if you’re doing far fewer town halls, but you’re doing them very intentionally in a way that can encourage back-and-forth dialogue between the individual contributors and the managers, well, that’s going to do so much more to boost the relationship.

Pete Mockaitis
When you say designing a communication system, that sounds very sophisticated, could you give us some examples that maybe we’re not thinking of, like, “Sure, I could say an email, maybe a loom video”? Are there other elements of a communication system that are super effective but underutilized in your view?

Rebecca Hinds
So there’s a really important delineation between synchronous ways of communication and asynchronous ways of communication. And a common misconception is inherently technologies are either asynchronous or synchronous.

We often think of Slack as an asynchronous communication channel, right, because it doesn’t require real-time communication – similar, email. But the reality is any technology can either be used asynchronously or synchronously, right?

We can, and we often do, operate in a world where Slack is treated like a synchronous communication. We get the ping and we’re immediately either drawn to it or respond to it. There is an implicit expectation that you are always available and responding. It’s far more important for organizations to think not so much about the technologies but around the cultures and practices and norms associated with asynchronous communication.

In order for asynchronous communication to work, in order for you to be able to transmit, convey information through asynchronous channels, there needs to be strong, strong documentation culture, right? There needs to be single sources of truth for this information, for the meeting transcripts, for the memos. There needs to be very strong written communication cultures.

And this is something that remote-first organizations tend to do really well. They even train their employees on, “How do you communicate in an effective way asynchronous?” That often requires significantly more context than in face-to-face interactions when you can ask the follow-up question.

I worked with an organization a couple years ago where they had a norm, a company-wide norm, that employees were evaluated on around “No lazy asks.” If you’re going to ask someone for something, it can’t be a lazy ask. You can’t remove context, fail to include context, include the deadline, include the why, include the what, right?

All of these things ensure that we can communicate more efficiently asynchronous, because if there’s ambiguity, if there’s uncertainty, well, people are going to schedule that meeting to get the information they need to move the work forward.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I can’t help but think of the episode of “The Office” where the new boss asked Jim Halpert for a rundown, and he’s like, “Okay,” and so he spends the whole day worrying, “What does that even mean? What is a rundown?”

Rebecca Hinds
Yeah. And that’s the jargon, those are the acronyms, right? And we’re alienating people, in addition to adding ambiguity within the organization. And we see this all the time, you know, with the office jargon, the synergies, the circle backs.

Now with AI, people are, you know, it’s AI everything, “What are you talking about? And do you even need to include AI in what you’re saying?” It’s very important. I think written communication has never been more important, as well as verbal communication, right now.

Pete Mockaitis
And are there certain key things you’re looking at to ensure you have clarity and comprehensiveness or completion when you’re making an ask or trying to communicate a thing?

Rebecca Hinds
Deadlines are very important and, especially, I work with lot of global organizations being clear on what time zone. It sounds simple, but end of day Friday means something completely different in Japan versus San Francisco, as well as depending on your culture.

The why is very important, and we continue to see the why is significantly impactful in helping employees feel bought in to the ask. I see this especially, too, with policy, any sort of policy within an organization. We saw it with remote work, with remote and hybrid policies. We’re seeing it with AI right now.

One of the biggest predictors of whether people get on board with a policy is whether they understand the rationale behind it, even more so than whether they agree with it. And that helps them understand, “Is this worth my time? Is it worth my time to invest in this ask?”

If they can understand the why, the rationale behind it, and it’s something bigger than themselves, that’s going to motivate them to complete it, complete it well, and complete it on time.

Pete Mockaitis
And you’ve got a couple interesting concepts in your book I’d love to hear about. What is your meeting doomsday?

Rebecca Hinds
Meeting doomsday is my favorite meeting strategy to improve our meeting culture. It’s a 48-hour calendar cleanse. Employees delete their recurring meetings for 48 hours and then they re-add meetings back to their calendar in a way they think is going to be most effective.

So many meetings never make it back on the calendar. They’ve outlived their purpose. Perhaps they never had a purpose. For the meetings that have some value, they are redesigned. So thinking about the length, the cadence, the attendees, the agenda items, every meeting on our calendar can be redesigned to be most effective.

And we see significant benefit of this doomsday activity as opposed to a traditional meeting audit. We talked about addition sickness at the beginning and strategic subtraction. Well, what the doomsday does is it jolts you out of the status quo and makes subtraction the default.

When people are doing a meeting audit, they tend to justify the meetings because the meetings are still on their calendar. Whereas, the doomsday, it forces you out of the status quo and it gives employees social permission to delete the meetings in a way that removes that social guilt we all feel when we think about canceling meetings or think about not showing up to meetings.

Meetings are so personal that we often think people will take it personally, and they often do, if we cancel or don’t show up to the meeting. And so I recommend every organization do a meeting doomsday at least once a year. And, again, not just to save time, and we do see big time savings, but to reset our assumptions about what actually deserves to be a meeting.

Pete Mockaitis
So, okay, can you walk us through step-by-step in practice, if we’re saying, “Ooh, we like meeting doomsday. We’re going to do it”? How do I execute that step-by-step?

Rebecca Hinds
Lots of planning. It’s a radical effort. It requires lots of planning. It requires understanding, “Are you going to do it at an organizational level?” That’s ideal. Or, “Are you going to do it on a team level, department level?” I’ve done both. I’ve done as small as a nine-person team.

And then it’s about preparation, making sure there’s leadership buy in. The leadership is communicating the why behind this. There are clear instructions in terms of, “When are we going to do this? We’re not going to do this at the busiest time of the year. We’re going to do it in a lull period.”

How are people going to assess whether the meetings should be brought back? What dimensions are they going to use? Increasingly, I’m working with organizations to use AI to identify, flag those dysfunctional meetings. That becomes very exciting.

And then how are we going to celebrate? How are we going to celebrate along the way the success stories? This needs to be something that is fun. There’s a reason I call it meeting doomsday, right? There needs to be a rallying movement around it.

Meetings need to be the enemy. It’s not the person who scheduled the bad meeting. And we need to create a sense of energy around it. Get people bought in. And you start to see this becomes a big culture-building movement when done right.

And people become very excited about not only doing the doomsday, but also sticking to it. And meetings never are set in stone in terms of being effective. This is something we need ongoing maintenance to do. And, again, doing it at a consistent cadence every year is a way we continue to instill this practice of meeting hygiene.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So then, when they are executing this, “It’s on this day,” I guess that’s the doomsday, “On this day, all recurring meetings, organization wide are deleted.” And then the hope, and with your prep and your communication and your pre-work, is that the new meetings that are established will be good and better ones, as opposed to just, “Oh, hey, I need that meeting. Let’s put it back on the calendar.”

Rebecca Hinds
Exactly. And there’s a big difference. I’ve studied two types of organizations. One, they’ll do this doomsday top-down. They’ll write a script, the IT team will come in and do a massive wipe of the calendar. I’ve seen that. You know, Dropbox did that. Shopify did that. Slack did that.

The meeting doomsday is explicitly designed to put that determination in the hands of employees because we know that, when employees do something themselves, they feel significantly more valuable. It feels significantly more valuable to them, and they’re more likely to stick to it.

Sometimes this is called the IKEA effect, right? When we build something ourselves, whether it’s an IKEA desk, a newly built idea, a newly built calendar, we’re much more likely to stick to it and value it even if it’s a little bit wobbly.

Pete Mockaitis
And what is your rule of halves?

Rebecca Hinds
The rule of halves, inspired by two folks I’ve talked about, Bob Sutton and Leidy Klotz, it’s essentially look at the four dimensions of your meeting – the length, the cadence, the attendees, and the agenda items – and decide one, two, three, or four dimensions you can cut in half.

And often this is a valuable practice as you’re doing the doomsday, but you can take any dysfunctional meeting or any meeting that you know isn’t fully optimized, and pick one dimension, cut it in half, take that 30 minute meeting, try to run it for just 15 minutes, take that six person meeting, “What if it’s three people?”

And what you often find is you didn’t need all that time, you didn’t need those attendees. You might cut too deep, but it’s also often in those moments where you go one step too far, do you realize what was actually essential and what was dead weight.

And so I think that’s, you know, whether you’re doing it one, two, three or four dimensions, the rule of halves can be another effective way to jolt us out of the status quo. I think we often, in organizations, suffer from what’s called Parkinson’s Law, too, meaning work expands to fill the time allotted.

If we give a meeting 30 minutes, if we give a meeting 60 minutes, which is what our calendar tells us should be a meeting, well, it’s probably going to take that 30 minutes, 60 minutes because of this Parkinson’s Law. Whereas, if we cut it to 15 minutes or 30 minutes, it’s more diligent in terms of encouraging us to stick to that time. We’re more diligent because we only have that time available.

Pete Mockaitis
And what are those four dimensions again?

Rebecca Hinds
The length, so the duration of the meeting; the cadence, so thinking about weekly versus monthly, quarterly meetings; the attendees, only inviting stakeholders, not spectators or meeting tourists; and the agenda items. So thinking about, very carefully, “What are the agenda items we want to include on the agenda?”

We also know that agendas suffer from what’s called the law of triviality, meaning, we will disproportionately spend more time on the agenda items that are the least important, the most trivial. And so it’s very dangerous to add agenda items that are trivial, much less important than the higher stakes one, in part because they feel safer.

They feel safer for people to weigh in on. In general, most people want to hear their voice in the meeting, as we’ve talked about, and everyone feels more safe to weigh in on the trivial topics as opposed to the higher stakes one.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I’m thinking about this a lot when it comes to, like, color choices or names of something. And it’s kind of, like, “You know, if people like it, they’re going to buy it no matter what colors on the website or what we call it within reason.” And so, yeah, that is a great observation.

Rebecca Hinds
Naming, font sizes, what do we do over the weekend, what are we eating at the offsite, you know, all of these things. And we see it all the time in meetings, and it’s a reflection of the law of triviality. The other bias is the primacy effect, meaning we will also spend disproportionately more time on the first agenda item. And so agenda design is very, very important as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you also talk about injecting delight into meetings. What are your favorite approaches for this?

Rebecca Hinds
Yes, delight. Now, delight is interesting because delight is a combination of two things. It’s a combination of joy and it’s a combination of surprise. So, delight needs to have an element of surprise. Employees, attendees can’t be expecting it for it to work.

And so, this is something that I recommend it be 10 seconds, a minute in the meeting, an unexpected shoutout for an employee that has done something well. You’re bringing some, you know, food item. Food is a great engagement booster in the meeting that has some personal connection.

Something that is going to leave employees remembering the meeting and wanting to show up the next time. It sounds trivial, but so much of our meeting dysfunction is driven by the fact that employees dread meetings and they’re largely rinse and repeat.

Delight ensures that there’s that moment of surprise that’s positive and joyful that employees will keep coming back to and keep wanting more of.

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

Rebecca Hinds
No, I think that the common thread through all of this is intentionality and intentional design and how do we ensure that we are treating meetings as that important product.

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

Rebecca Hinds
I’ve always loved the quote, “The harder you work, the luckier you get.” And I really believe that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And could you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Rebecca Hinds
So we’ve done some research over the past few years looking at the mental models through which employees approach AI.

And what we’re starting to see, we’ve seen it for years, we’re still seeing, is depending on whether people are approaching AI from the mental model of a tool versus teammate, they interact with the technology differently and they’re significantly more likely to be productive when they approach AI with the mental model of the teammate because they’re not just asking, “What can the technology do for me in a really transactional way?”

They’re asking, “What can I do with the technology?” They’re also recognizing that AI is not perfect. They’re not giving up after the first prompt. They’re pushing the technology to think and act deeper. And I think that’s at the core of a lot of the failures of AI transformation right now, is not recognizing how important the psychology is and how important that relationship between humans and AI is.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Rebecca Hinds
So I’m a massive fan of both Bob Sutton and Adam Grant’s books, so Give and Take is a key one that has influenced so much of my life, as well as Bob Sutton’s book, Scaling Up Excellence, The Friction Project.

I think “The Friction Project,” in particular, is so relevant right now in terms of, “How do we ensure that we are injecting good friction into our organization through the use of AI,” for example, “and removing the bad friction from our organization’s dysfunctional meaning?” are one great example of negative friction.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Rebecca Hinds
So I work at Glean. Glean is my new favorite tool. I use it for all things AI. It’s my first pane of glass into my work in the morning, and it’s a highly intelligent teammate that helps me do my work.

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

Rebecca Hinds
You know, I think I work with a lot of organizations on change management, and I think my mantra is always “Change doesn’t fail because of the technology, it fails because of the humans.” And as we think about AI, in particular, but also meetings and everything in between, making sure that we’re designing for the humans involved is super important.

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

Rebecca Hinds
I’m on LinkedIn. My book, Your Best Meeting Ever is at all your favorite bookstores. And my website is RebeccaHinds.com.

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

Rebecca Hinds
Do that meeting doomsday. I think it’s the single most effective way to jolt you out of the status quo and get a small team and do it together.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Rebecca, thank you.

Rebecca Hinds
Thanks so much, Pete.

May 25
0

1155: How to Escape the Procrastination Trap and Achieve Your Goals with Jon Acuff

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Jon Acuff talks about the hidden fears, assumptions, and overwhelm that are keeping you stuck in the procrastination trap.

You’ll Learn

  1. 
What it really means to have “more executive presence”
  2. How to “make tomorrow easy today” with simple preparation
  3. How to go from stuck to unstuck in 4 steps

About Jon

Jon Acuff is a New York Times bestselling author of 11 books. His titles, including Soundtracks, Finish and All It Takes Is A Goal, have sold more than one million copies. Named one of Inc.’s Top 100 Leadership Speakers, he’s delivered keynotes to companies such as Microsoft, Walmart, and Comedy Central. Host of the popular podcast All It Takes Is a Goal, Jon has inspired hundreds of thousands of people to overcome overthinking and finish what matters most. Jon lives outside of Nashville with his wife and two daughters.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Jon Acuff Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Jon, welcome back!

Jon Acuff
It’s good to see you again, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about procrastination. You got a whole book about this. Tell us, what do you know or have discovered about procrastination that’s new and fresh and surprising and interesting that we should know?

Jon Acuff
Well, I think the really interesting thing to me is that it’s not necessarily a problem. People use it as a solution. It’s just not a good solution. Meaning, if they don’t want to tell their mom they’re not coming home for Thanksgiving, procrastination goes, “No problem. We don’t have to do that for, like, seven months. We can wait until the last second.”

Or, I’m afraid of getting negative reviews of my book. Procrastination says, “No problem. I’ll solve that. You’ll never get a negative review. I mean, you won’t get to write a book, but you’ll never get that.” So it’s not a laziness problem, which is why so many of the willpower discipline things we do don’t ultimately work.

It’s really more of a figuring out how to give yourself permission to do those things that you really want to do or really need to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Permission to do the things you really want to do or need to do. I’m also curious about the things we don’t want to do. I guess we need to do them, but we don’t want to do them. I think that’s where it gets me. It’s not so much…

Jon Acuff
Like what? What do you procrastinate on?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, boy. Well, I think there’s tax things. It’s a joke, every year, my accountant is like, “Yeah, we’re deferring, right? Yeah. Didn’t need to ask.”

Jon Acuff
Yeah, that’s funny.

Pete Mockaitis
So, yeah.  there’s plenty of things in terms of, “Oh, it would be good to have…” I think that’s for me, like, “It’d be nice to have the result of that thing, but, ugh, doing the work seems exhausting and overwhelming, and I just don’t want to right now.”

Jon Acuff
Yeah, I think that’s 100% fair. I love that you admitted having the result would be great. I think a lot of people won’t admit, “You know, I’d really just like to have done the thing, but I don’t want to do all this.” For me, entitlement is when I go, “I wish my LinkedIn profile, and I had a better LinkedIn presence.” And you’re like, “Yeah, you haven’t used LinkedIn for, like, five years.” Like, “Yeah, it’s really suffering somehow with my complete lack of effort.”

Pete Mockaitis
“Yeah, go figure.”

Jon Acuff
And to me, that’s entitlement is when I go, “I want blank, but I haven’t done any of the work.” I just think, as far as doing stuff you need to do, but don’t want to do, it’s about selling yourself into doing it. Like, in the book, one of the ideas is, like, you’re the greatest, Pete, salesman in the world because, before every decision you’ve ever made, whether it was good or bad, first, you sold yourself into it.

So I think a lot of goals comes down to your ability to sell yourself into doing something you want to do or need to do, but you don’t feel like doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, we’re going to need to talk about that at length, but I want to zoom out a smidge and get the big picture. What’s your overall message about procrastination and the latest insights from your in-depth research here?

Jon Acuff
Yeah, so the overall is there’s four permissions you need, and if you do these permissions in this order, it’s almost impossible to not be successful. And I want to say very clearly, I couldn’t have written this book as book two.

If, at 36, Jon Acuff wrote a book called Procrastination Proof: Never Gets Stuck, I’m an arrogant guesser. I’m going, “Maybe, I don’t know. I’ve written one book before. Clearly, I’m great at not procrastinating.”

But by book 11 at 50, I’m like, “Yeah, for someone as distracted as I am, for somebody who has such a hard time focusing to have written 11 books, I figured out how to kind of do some difficult things that maybe you shouldn’t put off.”

So the ultimate idea behind the book is permission, and the four types of permission are permission to dream, permission to plan, do, and review. So those four actions – dream, plan, do, review. And if you do those in that order consistently, everything gets really easy and often really fun.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, yeah, I want to hear about these permissions. And can you tell us a bit about the research process by which you landed there? So you did some substantial surveying, right? And talking to folks and identifying some real themes and patterns that appeared at high frequency.

Jon Acuff
Well, the benefit to my job, Pete, is that the way I write a book is I find a problem in my own life and I figure out if there’s a solution for it, and I spent a few years doing that. And then I ask, “Do other people have it?”

And if a lot of other people have it, then I go research to figure out, “Okay, how does it apply to other people, not just me?” It’s not a helpful book if it’s, essentially, how Jon Acuff beat Jon Acuff’s procrastination. That’s not a good book. That’s a manual for me.

So what happened with this book, I worked with this PhD named Mike Peasley, he’s a professor at MTSU. And so it started with, we did a study on, “How many people think they’re living up to their full potential?” meaning there’s something they really want, but they’re not doing it.

And we asked 3000 people and 96% of them said they were not living up to their full potential. So then I go, “Okay, there’s this huge audience.” And then the research kind of goes from there into testing it in a community online, testing it with real live audiences. Like, it’s one idea.

It’s one thing to have an idea in this office, it’s another thing to take it to a Fortune 500 company and go, “Hey, here’s how this permission works.” And you can tell instantly, “Oh, no, that’s not their world at all,” or, “Oh, no, the permission to dream is not helping the cattle ranchers,” or, “Permission to plan is not helping the engineers.”

So a lot of what I do is then go test it on the road and then, eventually, it ends up in a book. So it’s a longer process than my other books used to be, but I think it turns out a better product.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So then could you speak to us about these permissions?

Jon Acuff
They’re really, really simple. I mean, the first one, permission to dream, you have to have a reason to change. No one ever changes just because. I’ve helped a million people with their goals. I still haven’t met somebody that said, “I woke up today and decided to have grit. I just woke up today and decided to sacrifice.”

No one willingly leaves their comfort zone, and they shouldn’t. It’s comfortable. The only reason people leave their comfort zones is there’s something outside it worth being uncomfortable for. And it’s usually one of two things – desire or disappointment.

Desire, meaning they bumped into something they really want. Disappointment, they woke up at 42 and their career wasn’t where they wanted it to be. They lost their job to AI and they don’t have much of a choice. The disappointment finally got loud enough to go, “I got to change some stuff or this isn’t going to work.”

So that’s the dream. You got to have a sense of why you want to do something and what you want to do before you even move it into planning. And planning is you answer the question, “How will I do it?” Doing is, “Are you doing it?” And review is, “Did it work? Are we headed in the direction we want to go?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now let’s talk about the word permission in terms of it’s just me. I don’t have to appeal to some authority as the principal or a government official for the permission, the access to do any of these things. So can you unpack this word here?

Jon Acuff
Yeah, so I’ll give you an example. Somebody the other day told me they had a weight loss goal, but if they lost weight, they’d be breaking family norms. Because in their family, they grew up in their family of origin, food was comfort. Food was security. Food was family. Food was tradition.

Big Southern family, like you had big Southern plates of food, and to be health conscious felt like divorcing the family you were from. And so he needed permission to go, “No, I have permission to love my parents where they are, but I don’t have to repeat my childhood. I don’t have to. I get to lose weight. I have permission to have a healthy lifestyle. I have permission to care about what I eat and how I look and how I exercise.”

So a lot of times, even if you’re an individual, that doesn’t mean you’re free of kind of hangups that are getting in the way. So a lot of times it is that sense of like, “What are some of the broken soundtracks I believe?”

Take money for instance. Money is the last taboo we have in our country. Like, I know men that’ll tell me the worst things they’re dealing with. But if you go, “Hey, what’s the financial number you’re thinking about retiring with?” “Whoa, whoa, whoa, no, we don’t talk about that. That’s super sensitive.”

And some of them have hangups about money because they grew up in a family where money was considered evil or must be nice or, “They’re rich, we’re not.” And if you get to a certain level of success, you therefore, become greedy.

So they need a permission to go, “No, I have permission to do. I have permission to go as hard as I want at this business on this job.” So there’s so many different areas where the lack of permission holds you back.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear that. And talking about money, I guess, I’m thinking in terms of you hear so much, at least I do, in terms of scams, and scandals, and swindles, and crypto rug pulls, and extractive private equity yuckiness that feels gross to me, such that I think I’m vibing with what you’re saying is I do feel a little bit of resistance internally in terms of really going after some money-making opportunities, because it’s like, “You know what? I’m doing fine. And I don’t want to be like those mean private equity dudes. Hmm.”

Jon Acuff
Yeah, “I don’t want to step on next. The only way to get ahead is you have to take advantage of people.” Or, the one that I saw somebody asked the other day, it was like, “Why is it binary where I can either have a really great business or I can be a great dad? Why does our culture present it as like…?”

Because I’ve had friends, and I’ll go, “I think you should really start that business.” They go, “Ooh, I don’t want to, like, forget my kids names. I’ll never see them.” As if there’s only two options – not pursue your dream or get a divorce and not attend your daughter’s first communion.

And it’s like, “Whoa, there’s a lot of options. It’s just you’ve made it very binary.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So how do we grant ourselves or acquire this permission if we’re feeling some of this conflictedness?

Jon Acuff
Well, part of it is identifying it. Some of it’s just labeling it. Like, there’s a really great exercise that we talk about a lot where it’s like you write down a goal and then you write down your reaction to the goal. So you write down, “Okay, I want to retire with $5 million.”

And you write down like, “Oh, that would be impossible,” or, “Oh, I don’t have enough time for that,” or, “Oh, I’ve already made too many bad decisions,” or, “Oh, somebody who has that amount of money is always like this.”

And you start to identify, “Oh, these things are going to hold me back.” Most of the things we wrestle with in life are mindset issues. They’re not physical problems. Where we live, like at least in the Western world, I never have to fear a tiger.

I never leave my house and I’m like, “Just, hey, be careful. There’s a lot of physical predators out there.” It’s only things like procrastination, imposter syndrome, inner critic, overthinking, you know, perfectionism.

And so a lot of times, it’s identifying those things so that you can actually start to work with them. That’s a great first step to go, “Oh, this is holding me back. I’m overreacting in this situation because I have something that’s holding me back. Let me identify that so I can actually deal with it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s talk about that weight and big Southern cooking plates situation. Let’s say someone has identified that, “Okay, I would like to be slimmer, but, ooh, that feels hard, that feels risky because of these beliefs, these associations, this history,” what do I do with that?

Jon Acuff
Well, I mean, I guess it would depend on, like, if it’s an event you’re talking about, meaning, “I’m trying to be in shape, and I’m going home for Thanksgiving,” or, “I’m going home for Christmas, and I know that there’s going to be a lot of food, and a lot of food discussion.” Like, having a game plan and going, “Okay, what do I want to do with that?”

My favorite definition of discipline, which I put in the book, is “Make tomorrow easy today.” Make tomorrow easy today. What can I do today that makes tomorrow easy? That’s constantly how I’m thinking, “What can night me do to hook up morning me?” “What can Monday me do to hook up Friday me?”

So in a situation like that, if somebody said to me, “Okay, I’m trying to break these family norms,” I’d go, “Okay. Well, is it, like, related to a specific thing? And if it was, then we’d come up with a plan for that thing.”

If it was related to the decisions you were making of like, “Oh, man, every time I feel stressed, I do this and I know it’s a short-term solution.” Well, let’s change that. You know, like, let’s change the rhythm of that. Let’s find a different way to deal with stress than that. Like, if you know that’s where you tend to go, you have permission to make different choices.

And then maybe it’d be, let’s get some community. So now you have a communal sense of it. Like, for me, I worked out alone a long time, and I joined a community called F3 where it’s a free men’s workout in the morning.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, that’s fun.

Jon Acuff
And I love it. And that changed my approach to working out. Like, that gave me new norms. Now I’m with a bunch of other dudes at 5:30 in the morning. That’s a new norm for me. What’s fun is if you do this long enough, not doing it becomes weird.

Meaning, when you first work out, when you first write, when you first build a business, whatever, it’s hard and it’s uncomfortable. But then you get into such a rhythm that, if you miss a week or two, you’re like, “Oh, this isn’t right.” There’s this really sweet spot where the good habits, when you miss them become weird and it flip flops.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I totally feel that, experientially. And I think about it almost, like, a dirt road when you got the groove established. It’s easier to be in the groove than out of the groove. Like, today, I had an odd early meeting. And I knew, and actually set multiple alarms because it deviated from my regular schedule so often.

And so I dropped the kids off, and I knew I got to get right to the office for my early meeting. And, mindlessly, I’m driving to the church for, because that’s usually what I do is I hang out in the chapel for some prayer, post-kid drop off.

And I was like, “Wait, no, no, not today. That’s not…We do that almost every day, but today, I have an early meeting. So I got to get to the office right away.” And so it’s so funny how the autopilot move is just, “Oh, I turn here toward the church.”

And I think that is the case with, well, almost everything in terms of, “Oh, I’m working out in the morning, so that’s what I do.” And then it’s like, “Oh, no, no, today is a different day. We don’t do that.” And so it really tracks that, like, the first one or two or three times it’s like a force of will, effortful, intense. And then it’s easier and easier.

And I guess different people put different numbers on it. But, Jon, if I may, when do you think the groove has more momentum than the new groove?

Jon Acuff
Yeah, like, I love if you Google “How long does it take to start a new habit?” there were nine million answers, and it’s like 30 days, 90 days. I mean, for me, I think, at least, it takes a season, meaning like it takes a fall, it takes a summer.

Like, it takes a, you know, for me, three to four months chunk of time of like now F3 for me, like getting up at 4:55 is crazy. For, like, the first eight weeks, I was like, “This is the dumbest thing ever.” Now, I’m like, “Oh, yeah, I’m looking forward to it. Now I’m into it.” So, for me, it usually takes at least a season.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Got you.

Jon Acuff
How does it take you? I mean, what’s your number?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you know, well, it’s not binary, you know? It’s hard for me to, like, establish the cutoff because I’d say the second day is easier than the first, and third’s easier than the second, and the fourth, and so on and so forth. So I don’t know where I would draw the line. But, I don’t know, maybe 40-ish.

Jon Acuff
Yeah, that feels good. I’ll hold you to that, 40-ish.

Pete Mockaitis
At this point, it feels harder to not do the thing that I started doing 40 days ago.

Jon Acuff
Yeah, yeah, I can see that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so permission to dream. And let’s talk about planning.

Jon Acuff
Yeah, so where people get stuck there is dreaming runs on optimism, planning runs on realism. So dreaming, “Anything is possible. This is going to be amazing. It’s going to be huge.” And then you have to transition kind of into the real world, into reality.

And one of the simplest tools you can do is really just be honest about your calendar. I meet people all the time that’ll go, “I have these 30 different goals. I have 10 different dreams.” And I’d go, “Well, let’s put a number associated with them.”

And then they put an hour or timeframe with them, and I’ll go, “Well, how many hours of free time do you have in your week?” And they go, “Free time? What are talking about? I’m very busy. I’m slammed right now.”

And you go, “Well, you have a 12-hour goal chunk and a week that has zero hours, like that’s why you’re going to keep procrastinating. It’s not because you’re just delaying. It’s because you don’t have the time to pay that bill. Let’s figure that out.”

So that’s a big part of it for people with planning is, “Okay, how do you actually pay the price of the thing you want?” And maybe you don’t want the thing. Like, I would argue, if you won’t spend half an hour with Claude or ChatGPT having it interview you about the thing, you probably don’t really want the thing.

And maybe you’ve just carried that goal along for a long time of, “I think I need to write a book,” “Someday I want to start a business,” “I’ve always wanted to run a marathon,” but if you won’t even spend, like, half an hour kind of just investigating what would that take, maybe it’s not a goal you care about. And that’s fine. Like, I love getting rid of fake goals.

Pete Mockaitis
Tell us about this half-hour AI interview protocol. How does this go down?

Jon Acuff
Yeah, so, for me, if I have something I want to do that’s new, that I don’t know how to do, I often will say, “Okay, one, I love the whole, like, tell me how to write the best prompt to get the thing I want.” So then I’m not even really writing the prompt.

But if I might say, okay, like, an example for me is I’m doing something called Stage & Page, where it’s a one-day intensive for speakers and a one-day intensive for writers. So I might say, “Hey, you know, I’ve been doing this for 18 years. I want to be able to help people that have just started. Interview me about my first year of public speaking because I know these things, but it’s been a while.”

“You’re the best journalist in the world. You write for a magazine called Stage & Page, and I want you to ask me 10 really insightful questions about my early experience as a speaker.” And then it interviews me, and then it’ll summarize that, it’ll create content out of that. But it’s a really easy way versus just a blank piece of paper.

So if I was going to run a marathon, start a business, you know, figure out how to lose 10 pounds, I would say, “Interview me,” so that I really have a sense of why I want to do it, what I want to do, what are my limitations, “Oh, you’ve got a couple injuries. Let’s figure that out.” Like, the interview format is so much easier than just trying to willpower your way into a blank piece of paper.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. So you are engaging in that conversation to get the beginnings of some kind of plan going. Is it fair to say, you don’t expect the AI to spit out the perfect plan, but rather it gets you going so that the planning has begun and the ideas are multiplying?

Jon Acuff
Well, and, no, the problem with AI, the fatal flaws, I still have to do it. Like, I keep working with people and they’ll like give me like, there’s like this AI document arms race that happens in small businesses where I go, “Hey, I think we should try blank.”

And then somebody comes back with a 30-page document that they haven’t even read. Like, AI just created it and now we’re going back and forth on documents. So, yeah, I don’t expect AI to come up with the plan because it’s never really been a lack of information.

Like, if you don’t do the thing, you have a great library in your town. Every town has a great library. So I still have to do it, but it gets me from stuck. The book is designed deliberately to move people through it quickly, meaning it’s 71 short chapters.

And I did that deliberately, and they’re short and they’re punchy and they’re all connected. I did it deliberately because nobody wants to read a thousand-page book about procrastination. Like, if your procrastination book has 90 pages of notes, you’re not a procrastinator. You’re a monster.

Like, that’s Jane Goodall writing about monkeys. I’m a monkey writing for other monkeys. So I just want the person to get started. And if they go, “I have to figure out the perfect plan for this goal,” they’re never going to do it.

But if they say, “Can I be interviewed for a half an hour?” even a podcast, they could take you and go, “I really like Pete’s show, and here’s an episode. I like his style of asking questions. Interview me about a book that I want to write as if you’re Pete.”

And then, like, that’s the easiest, most casual way to go, “Oh, okay. Now I’m feeling a little bit.” It’s not that intimidation of like, “I got to figure this out.”

Pete Mockaitis
And then, so that gets you started. How far do you go with the plan before you do?

Jon Acuff
Yeah, so, for me, I like to do what I call audition a goal. I think a lot of goals fail because people try to commit to something for a year they’ve never done for a day. That’s like marrying somebody you just met at speed dating.

So if you told me, “Hey, I have this thing I’ve been putting off that I want to do,” and it was sizable. Like, we’re not talking about, like, you got to clean out one closet. Like, we don’t need to roadmap that. It’s like one closet. Like, I don’t want you to interview yourself. Like, “You run California closets and are asking me about how I store my socks.”

But if you had a goal that was at least a month’s worth of time, I would say, “Hey, let’s do a one-month audition. Like, what if we just tried this thing for 15 minutes a day for 25 for the next 30 days?” Because I don’t want to trigger perfectionism.

But if we tried that and it was like, “Let’s just see.” And then at the end of the 30 days, you can double down and do half an hour. And at the end of that next 30 days, you can add more time, more time, more time.

I would try to ease you into it. I wouldn’t try to get you to plan an annual thing, like, right out of the gate. Or, “From start to finish, here’s how I’m going to write and publish and market my book.” Like, no way. No way. I’d try to get you to write for 15 minutes a day for 30 days in a row, and see if you even like writing, and see if you even like this exercise at all. So, yeah, that’s the next thing I would do.

Pete Mockaitis
Audition a goal. So, like, the goal is auditioning before you, the director, who will determine if it gets the role.

Jon Acuff
“You’ve made it through. You now get to be part of my summer. Like, I gave you May and, congratulations, I just picked you up for the summer. You’ve now made it for the next summer. And not only have you made it, resources will be dedicated to you. I’m going to give you time and maybe even money. Like, oh, that’s exciting.” You’ve won the audition.”

Pete Mockaitis
Do I need to have a director’s chair and beret when I’m auditioning a goal?

Jon Acuff
I don’t think a beret ever makes a situation worse. Like, maybe a funeral. Like, if you don’t own a beret and then, all of sudden, at your mom’s funeral, you show up in a beret, lot of questions, lot of questions.

Pete Mockaitis
These are the key insights, Jon, that we count on you for. Thank you.

Jon Acuff
Yeah, I hope people are taking notes right now. I hope they pulled over. Probably pulled over on that one, like, “Wait a second. We’re going into berets now, Pete.” And you probably didn’t even put that in the description, if I know you. It’s just a surprise.

Pete Mockaitis
No, not yet. And let’s hit the permission to do now.

Jon Acuff
Yeah, so the first two are great, but if you don’t actually do it, it ultimately doesn’t matter. So the thing that I like about doing that I think people have a hard time with is maintaining motivation. We tend to think motivation will grow as we work on a goal. That’s just not how it works. Motivation is often the first thing to leave.

So I spend a lot of time helping people make it through the middle, or what I call the montage. Like, we love a montage in a movie. We don’t like being in one in our own life. Meaning, we love to watch Rocky IV, and there’s an eight-and-a-half-minute scene where he trains against Drago.

A prize fight training camp takes eight to 12 weeks. So we saw 1% of the experience, but when we try to write a book, start a business, you know, parent teenagers, whatever this big goal is, there’s a lot of middle.

And so a lot of what I do is teach people how to build a motivation portfolio. Meaning, collect enough motivation so that when you’re discouraged, which you’re going to be, you have a long robust list, not just one thing.

If you only have one why, like that why won’t show up most of the days, and you’ll go, “Ugh, I’m not even going to do the thing.” But I’d much rather you have a whole list where you can go, “Oh, it took me till number nine.”

And here’s a silly example, because you said, it seemed like you were familiar with F3. Like, one of my motivations for doing it is, the night before I text three friends and say, “I’ll give you a ride tomorrow,” because I’ve just put myself into a corner.

And I know in the morning I’m not going to text three guys and go, “Hey, it turns out I’m a wimp. Never mind.” Like, I now have some accountability there. I now have that motivation to fulfill what I promised to those three guys.

So that’s what I try to help people when it comes to doing. I’m never, like, anybody who listens to this show or reads the kind of books I write, it’s not a question of whether they’ll do it. It’s a question of whether they’ll keep doing it. And that’s where you really have to lean in.

Pete Mockaitis
So I like that. A motivational portfolio, we’ve got multiple sources of support pulling upon you. One was some of that accountability. People are expecting you to show up and give them a ride there. You said nine. Give us a quick rundown of maybe a bundle of things that might go in a portfolio.

Jon Acuff
A couple others? Yeah. I mean, for me, like, I wrote this book, Soundtracks, and we ended up turning it into a Soundtracks card deck, so it’s 52 cards. So sometimes I’ll have these in my pocket, and one will say “Hills pay the bills.”

And it’s a reminder to me of, like, when I have to do the hard things, if I do them and if I climb the hills, other people don’t, I get to see vistas other people won’t. And that could be something like a canceled flight in Chicago in January, where I had to spend the night, like, at the worst airport next to O’Hare. Like, nobody wants that. Nobody.

But, it’s like, “Oh, yeah, hills pay the bills.” So sometimes it’s a soundtrack. Sometimes it’s a literal song where I know when I hear this type of music, I always feel this type of way. Sometimes it’s a movie clip. Sometimes it is a friend that I go, “This is my most uplifting friend. And anytime I’m stuck, if I call so-and-so, 30 seconds of conversation, I feel like I can conquer the world.”

Sometimes it’s 10 minutes of walking around the neighborhood because I need some endorphins and some sunshine. Sometimes it’s caffeine. Sometimes it’s like, yeah, an espresso would really help at two o’clock when I’m struggling.

So I think everyone should be a great note taker about themselves. I think you should be the best documentary filmmaker about your life because, then, you figure out how you work best, and then you can repeat that. And so that’s what I mean by a motivation portfolio.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I like this a lot. We had Dr. Ethan Kross on the show, who wrote a book, Shift, about your mood, and so this is kind of reminding me of that because he mentions music specifically as a tool. So when you say portfolio, you just have a big old list of options in terms of, “This is the thing I could remember or do to take the action.”

Jon Acuff
Well, because I know I’m not going to want to. Like, why pretend I’m always going to feel motivated to write a book? I’m not going to. Someday, the financial motivation will motivate me, I’ll go, “Oh, it’s how I pay the bills. It’s how I put my kids through college. Great.”

Some days, I won’t care about that. Some days, showing my kids an example of hard work will motivate me. Someday, it won’t. Like, sometimes I’ll be like, “They’re not even really watching. Like, I can take it easy on this,” you know?

So, yeah, collecting those and that’s, to me, part of that is just self-awareness. Like, if you have self-awareness, it’s a lot easier to accomplish your goals, because then again, you figure out, “This works. This doesn’t work. I should repeat this thing that does work. I should stop doing this thing that doesn’t work.”

Like, a simple example. Pete, if my phone is in my bedroom, I stay up later. I don’t need another test of that. I’ve checked that box. I know that. So a simple hack for me is I leave my phone downstairs when I go to bed.

Like, imagine me going, “Man, I found a sleep hack. It’s unbelievable. Here’s how to like…” It’s the simplest thing. I just realized over and over and over again, if I have my phone near me, I’m going to look at my phone, and I’m going to stay up later than I really want to.

So I found a workaround, which was leave the phone downstairs. Like, it’s not complicated. That motivates me to go to bed earlier. Like, “Eureka!”

Pete Mockaitis
You know, Jon, I love that specific example. I was once, true story, in Vanderbilt’s Sleep laboratory, having all sorts of things attached to my body. And I said, “So what are the top sleep tips?” And she’s like, “Oh, yeah, it’s don’t bring your phone in your bedroom, but no one wants to hear that,” as she continues strapping electrodes to me.

Jon Acuff
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Simple as that, “Okay, that was that.”

Jon Acuff
Yeah, jeez, that’s so funny. Were you doing it for money or to fix your own sleep? Like was this a…?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, we were curious if I had sleep apnea. It turns out I had mild sleep apnea. I’ve since overcome that. That was fun.

Jon Acuff
Survivor. Survivor.

Pete Mockaitis
I am. So that’s really cool. The motivational portfolio, it’s like layers upon layers upon layers of backup systems.

Jon Acuff
Yeah, I want it to be easy. I want, like, again, make tomorrow easy today. So I know, like, because nobody’s job is easy. Like, writing a book has a lot of, like, identity and emotion around it.

I’m right now in the marathon part of the book release, meaning I’ve already released the book. I sprinted to the finish line and now I’m in the marathon part, and I need to talk about it constantly and I need to promote it.

And every author loves writing a book. Most hate selling a book. But guess what? If you don’t sell it, you don’t get to write other books. And so now I’m like, “Okay, for me, in the next six months, how do I motivate myself to do 500 different types of promotion around Procrastination Proof versus I hide from it. I hope Oprah discovers it in her dentist office, whatever.”

And I was like, “No. For me to do that thing will be difficult, how do I make it easy? How do I motivate myself to stay on top of this book?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think this is so good, if I may. Could you give me three more things that can go in a portfolio to get motivation cooking?

Jon Acuff
Oh, yeah, 100%. I mean, an item you want to buy can go in a portfolio. There’s a woman I know that grew up in Indiana, kind of small town, and she always wanted to buy a Louis Vuitton purse. That was her thing, like, “When I make it, when I become an executive…”

Like, that was her symbol to the point that when she went to Paris, France with her husband, he tried to buy her one, and she said, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.” She was like, “I don’t want you to buy this for me. I need to do this. This is something I’ve thought about.”

So sometimes it’s okay, “I want to buy this thing,” or, “I want to be able to give this person this thing.” That’s a great one. Another one can be, “By this date, I want to accomplish blank.” Everybody has had the vacation moment where you get a lot of work done right before vacation.

Because you’re going, “How do I make tomorrow easy today? I want to have a really peaceful vacation. So if I clear these things off my plate, I will.” So you get a boost of energy. You could just say, “Where are some deadlines like that that I want to say before I go to this, I’ve done these three things before I go to this. I’ve done these three things?” To me, that’s another one.

And then the third one, I’d say, is like this principle of do difficult things in beautiful places. Meaning, if there’s something you’re putting off, go do it somewhere beautiful. Like, don’t try to crank on something in your office. If you’re stuck, go to a coffee shop.

Don’t run somewhere ugly. Like, make that part of the reward, like, “Oh, I’m going to go to, you know,” I don’t know, “Pinkerton Park, because I love that park,” versus, “I’m just going to run around this treadmill.” You’re already doing a difficult thing. Why add more difficulty?

And so, again, you just get creative and curious about yourself, and you’ll start to notice. Like, last one I’ll give you, I bought a Timex watch. I don’t mean to brag, but, obviously I’ve achieved some success. I bought a Timex watch that has Snoopy on it jumping into a pile of leaves.

So on the days when I feel tempted to write a boring, serious book devoid of humor, I can wear that watch and be like, “Oh, that’s charming. That’s delightful. Like, look at Snoopy having so much fun. He’s with Linus. They’re jumping in the leaves.” Very silly trigger for me. Wouldn’t work for most people. No problem.

One year, I wanted to write a book faster, so I bought carbon fiber Nike running shoes. Bright green. Obnoxious. The most expensive shoes I’d ever owned from a running perspective. Wore them every time I wrote that book. Ridiculous? Totally. Totally ridiculous. But it was another one of those things.

And the more you study high performers like you do, the more you find they’re playing games like this all the time. They’re playing little games behind the scenes to do the things that most people don’t do.

Pete Mockaitis
So if I perceive that I have many lucrative opportunities and I just need to go to work, I should put a large pickaxe in my office because there’s a gold mine that just needs me to go to work on it.

Jon Acuff
Gold, you could do that. Yeah, or get rid of your chair and do a little cart, like one of those carts they carry the gold in. Maybe you just sit in that. Maybe you, overalls, like Yosemite Sam or something. I don’t know, we’re just spitballing, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. Well, I want to hear the one-minute version of permission to review and then how procrastination is the most well-funded fear in human history.

Jon Acuff
Yeah, so the one minute is, I’ll give you the soundtrack for it, “Data kills denial, which prevents disaster.” Data kills denial, which prevents disaster. All the review is telling you is what’s really going on. And we hate a review, dude. We hate it.

The first time I saw this, I was at a restaurant in New York, everybody was going to get a crazy meal. They opened the menu and they had put the calories next to the menu. And everybody’s order changed. Everybody changed their order to sad grilled chicken salads with dressing on the side, not the side of the plate, the side of the restaurant.

So all that to say, if you want to go the direction you really want to go, become friends with data, become friends with a review.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. Now this well-funded fear, what’s the scoop?

Jon Acuff
Well, yeah, so Netflix doesn’t fund perfectionism, Hulu doesn’t fund inner critic, but every single one of those modern-day services funds procrastination. In 2017, the CEO of Netflix said, “Our number one competitor is sleep.”

They are actively funding procrastination, meaning they don’t want you to go to sleep. They don’t want you to get in shape. They don’t want you to write your book. They don’t want you to publish your podcast. They want to turn your time and attention into ad revenue.

And I like those services. That’s not a criticism of them. Just know the score. Like, it’s easier now to procrastinate than it ever has before because you have a pocket casino. Like, that’s a real thing. And in the same way that Dr. Vanderbilt told you, “Yeah, the trick to sleeping is to leave your phone in another room.”

If you said to me, “What’s the trick to writing a book?” I’d go, “Well, why don’t you open your screen time and take an hour back from your greediest, hungriest app, and apply that to writing.” Like, that’s not, even the busiest people, if you ask them to open their screen time will go, “Oh, my gosh, I had no idea I spent six hours on Facebook last week. I would have said, I would have guessed an hour.” Like, that’s what I mean by it’s the most well-funded.

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

Jon Acuff
Yeah, so we have a quiz. If you go to JonAcuff.com/quiz, that’ll show you where you might be tempted to get stuck and what to do about that. So it’ll put you into one of the four categories. You’re a dreamer, you’re a perfectionist, you’re a hustler, you’re an analyst. So JonAcuff.com/quiz will be a whole lot of fun.

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

Jon Acuff
I love Jim Rohn’s quote, “Don’t wish it was easier. Wish you were better. Don’t wish you had less problems. Wish you had more skills.” Like, that’s one of those, that’s in my motivation portfolio. Like, when I go like, “It’s so hard.” Like, “No, I wish I had more skills to deal with this challenge. Am I being invited into a skill?” That’s one of my favorite quotes.

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

Jon Acuff
Daniel Kahneman wrote about it in Thinking, Fast and Slow, where they had college kids make sentences out of words. And one group of college kids had words related to being old in their collection: slow, retired, bald, Florida, etc.

And when they tested how fast they walked later, the students who had read the words about being old physically acted old. They, unknowingly, acted like old people just from reading the words. My favorite study because it speaks to the power of your mindset.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Jon Acuff
I always say War of Art, Stephen Pressfield. That book, for me, really kicked off my own writing journey.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite nugget, something that Jon Acuff shares that gets quoted and tweeted a lot?

Jon Acuff
I often say, “Starting is fun but the future belongs to finishers.” So starting is fun but the future belongs to finishers is one of the things. And then the other one that gets tweeted a lot is, “Be brave enough to be bad at something new.”

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

Jon Acuff
JonAcuff.com is my site. I have a podcast called All It Takes Is A Goal. And I’m big on LinkedIn now. If you listened to the whole episode and just didn’t skip to this, I’m big on LinkedIn. Hit me up.

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

Jon Acuff
Yeah, so I would find somebody 10 years ahead of you and 10 years behind. The 10 years ahead, we know. It’s a mentor. It’s a time machine. Somebody who’s been to the future you want to get to, and will tell you how to do it.

Person 10 years to 20 years behind, they grew up in the new way and can teach you the new way very quickly. I grew up in the old way. I’m 50. For me to do the new way, I have to unlearn the old way first. When I connect with a 27-year-old and they show me something about AI, like, it speeds me up.

So I would just encourage you, know somebody 10 years ahead of you, somebody 10 years behind you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Jon, thank you.

Jon Acuff
Yeah, thanks for having me.