​​KF #37. Drives Vision and Purpose Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Ian, welcome!

Ian Bogost
Thank you so much.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to talk about having a more gratifying life and work and career experience. And you know, Ian, I don’t know if you would think of it this way, but when I think of gratification, I think of Cow Clicker. Can you tell us what this is about?

Ian Bogost
Yeah, this is one of my legacies. This is from, gosh, 15 or more years ago now I made this Facebook game called Cow Clicker. And this was in the day when Farmville was really popular and people were like, you know, sending you updates from their farm on your Facebook feed.

And I thought the whole thing was ridiculous. And I kind of thought Facebook was a little ridiculous, too. It was this, like, weird way of using your friendships and your connections when they were useful to you and not really engaging with those people as kind of full people.

So I made Cow Clicker, and the way that Cow Clicker worked is that you clicked on a cow, picture of a cow that I drew, and it would move. And then you could click it again six hours later, and you could invite your friends into your pasture. And it kind of ran away from me at that point. It got very complicated.

But you’re absolutely right, because I mistook my critique of Facebook for something different than it really was for the people who played and enjoyed Cow Clicker. And what they liked about it was that they got to click on a cow, and the cow mooed, and that was delightful. And then they got on with their day and they came back and did it again.

It took me many years to come to terms with what I had really made and why it was meaningful and valuable to people and how I’d sort of mistaken what I had in mind and my head for what really happened, which was a little bit of delight, delivered a little bit of delight to people.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s beautiful. And I’m thinking about, I’ve heard a legend that Daniel Kahneman once said, “I love being wrong. It’s the way I know I’ve really learned something,” which is a lovely frame.

Ian Bogost
Yeah, I mean, I think I’ve been wrong a lot in my career and I’ve tried to learn from it. Or maybe wrong isn’t exactly how I’d put it, that my thinking has evolved and I’ve tried really hard to shift my thinking as the world has shown me new things.

And so this new work on gratification is it comes from me being wrong many times, like layered wrong-nesses over the course of the last 30 years. And one of them is definitely how wrong I was about games. One of my jobs is being a game designer. And I used to think that games were important because they could show you how, like, complexity works.

And then I thought games were important because they were kind of like toys, like you could play with them. And now I realize they’re more just things that you have no reason to interact with and that don’t apologize for that fact.

And there’s tons of stuff like that in the world. All the time we’re surrounded by it, that it’s just there for us to encounter. All we have to do is accept it. So I love being wrong so I can learn in that way. And certainly the book and the work that I’ve been doing is born of many different layers of wrong headedness.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that a lot. And so let’s hear a little bit of the story. So you kind of created it as a critique and then you’re like, “Isn’t this kind of weird and silly and exploitative?” And what was your arc of discovery there?

Ian Bogost
Well, I mean, it took me so long to discover that it was more interesting than I thought. The fact that people got the critique right away. They understood that Farmville was ridiculous and that Facebook was exploitative.

And I was there making those arguments, like, in 2010. It was long before the whole kind of like tech lash came about and people started doubting whether big tech was doing them any favors. But back then, everybody loved Facebook. It let you connect with your friends, right? It was amazing. Like, what’s there not to like? Maybe they didn’t love Farmville so much. So some people got it.

But then others were enjoying themselves. And I guess at that time in my life, I couldn’t quite grasp that they were enjoying themselves with this ridiculous, unenjoyable object that I’d made, or that I thought was unenjoyable.

And I had game designer friends, and I think the chief among them was Raph Koster, who’s a well known game designer in the multiplayer online game space, and he was like, “Ian, you know, I think you’ve got this wrong. Like, you made something amazing and delightful and people are playing it, and you need to learn from it in that way.” And I was like, “Yeah, whatever F.”

And then the years went by. And, by the way, I blew up Cow Clicker in a Cowpocalypse in 2011. And there was like a cow rapture, all the cows went away. It had really become an obsession of mine, and I couldn’t handle it anymore.

And so I just kind of got rid of it by making the cows go away. Although you could still click the spot where the cow used to be, until Facebook changed their software and then it stopped working without my intervention, maybe five years later.

But I realized, I think it was maybe two or three years ago, I did a story for The Atlantic where I went to this cow therapy farm where you can hug a cow as, like, a therapeutic act. And I was like, “This is my opportunity to come to terms with my cow problem, you know?”

And the cows had been rescued from this, like, traumatic escape where they’d escaped a slaughterhouse in St. Louis where I lived, and there was a huge outpouring of sentiment in favor of the cows, and the cows were, you know, save the cows.

One of them they named Chico and everybody was in the streets with the cows running around. And they saved them and sent them to this, like, cow ashram where they help people feel better about their lives.

So I used that as a way of trying to understand the experience and, you know, like just the idea that these simple tiny things, like clicking on a cow, that that might be it. That might be enough, you know? That might be enough. And that took me, I mean, it took me 10 years. It took me 10 years.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it might be enough for what exactly?

Ian Bogost
It might be enough to make your life meaningful. It might add a little bit more contentment, that you need to feel guilty about or weird about. And it’s not the same as, like, pursuing a career in order that you can achieve the next promotion or help your clients or, you know, finding your life partner and building an environment in which you want to live together. It’s not big stuff like that.

But those small encounters, like clicking a cow, that they can still deliver, not just meaningless meaning, but deep, rich meaning. And I would say that some of the other interests that I had at the same time as I was working on Cow Clicker, but I couldn’t quite recognize, like I was writing about toasters and slippers and other kind of seemingly unimportant elements of the build environment.

And they seem like oddities or curiosities, like how weird it is that someone will pay attention to, you know, the design of a toaster? But don’t you experience delight when you make bread in the morning, when you hear it pop up, and you see it and you smell it, and you feel the warmth and you see the brownness?

Those kinds of encounters started to get, they just really started to interest me. And I was like, “Hmm, I’ll put that in the back of my head.” And over the years since then, I’ve been trying to build a kind of theory, a way of understanding what little tiny experiences like clicking on a cow or making toast have to teach us about feeling larger scale contentment in our lives at work, at home and elsewhere.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s intriguing, and I know you love your cow puns, so I, too, am struck by the notion that clicking cow could really “moo-ve” the needle on mental health.

Ian Bogost
There you go. That’s it. You’re doing it.

Pete Mockaitis
So deep, rich moments. If anyone is scratching their head saying, “Huh? Click cow? Looking at a toaster? What do you mean, Ian?”

Ian Bogost
So here’s a different example, right? I recently re-watched “Mad Men,” the television show. And you know, it takes place in an office in the 1960s. And an office of the 1960s is totally different from an office in the contemporary world.

And one of the things that I noticed was the telephones, you know, the function of telephones in that era. A large part of their lives at work was making calls, taking calls, answering phones, pressing the buttons on those phones, dialing the phones.

That’s not, like, why you do the work. You don’t go to work at the start of the day in order to use telephones. You do it in order to get work done, to call your clients, to close deals, to, in their case, assemble the advertising campaigns that they’re selling.

But along the way, you spend a lot of time using the telephone. And that makes the telephone like a big part of your life in the 1960s, and it was designed in a way that made that experience delightful, tangible. It had heft.

You picked it up. There was an intimacy to the voice on the other end of the line. You held it very close to your mouth, in a way that also felt intimate, right? If you had multiple lines, you press the chunky buttons.

So I became, like, as I was watching this, you know, after having having written the book, I thought, “Wow, that’s a perfect example of the kind of phenomenon that gives you meaning, but that doesn’t feel like it should be meaningful.”

Because what you’re really after is like accomplishing goals normally, but along the way, you have the experience of doing, in the case of a workplace, you have the experience of doing the work, the moment-to-moment encounters that make up your daily life.

And those are much more meaningful than we give them credit for. Or maybe a different way to put it is that you better make them meaningful because so much of your life is comprised of them.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So they are meaningful. And I guess we got to go right for the core of that. It’s, like, what do we mean by meaningful? What makes something meaningful versus not meaningful?

Ian Bogost
So this concept which I call gratification, which is all about being connected to the physical world, this gives you a sense of grounding, it makes you feel purpose. And, also, we live in these physical human bodies that we carry with us everywhere we go, whether we like it or not.

We may think that a lot of our lives have been mediated or digitized, or we don’t really need our bodies anymore, or that they’re secondary to our computers and our smartphones, but they’re not. We still live in the world inside these bodies.

And so the sense of, like, sensory connection with the world, with your home life, with your work life, that adds this kind of base layer of contentment. It’s not the same as happiness or as satisfaction, which is more about like goals and the future and accomplishing things and having purpose. All that stuff is great. I’m not against any of that.

But along the way, you can derive much smaller but still equally meaningful encounters from being connected to the physical world around you. And so my advocacy here, whether it’s for cows on your screen or telephones in your office, or whatever else you might find, and we can talk about more examples that haven’t been outmoded by technology, like handsets have, is that by embracing that, by realizing it’s a huge part of your daily life, you can become more content than you would be if you didn’t.

It’s not trying to replace that purpose and that ambition that you might feel in your job, but rather to amend it. And also to give you a sense of maybe where some of that unhappiness or discontentment might come from, maybe you just feel disconnected from the moment-to-moment actions of your work rather than the purpose or goals of the job.

Pete Mockaitis
Disconnected. Well, I’m thinking about the mindfulness literature in terms of being present and in the moment, and many monks or everyday meditators find this kind of a concept. Like, their breath is meaningful and they’re unaware that it’s meaningful until they stop and attend to that and that alone.

Ian Bogost
Right. So I think, in the contemporary world in the West, we’ve leaned on mindfulness as a way of trying to give ourselves a break, you know? Like, that’s sort of been the interpretation, the Western interpretation of Buddhist-style mindful meditation, that, “I’m harried. I have all these goals and all these ambitions. I have all this stuff I have to do. I need a way of overcoming that sense of anxiety and being one with myself.”

But we don’t do it in order to really be one with ourselves or with our breath or with our telephony or with our cows or whatever. We do it in order to give ourselves pause. It’s, like, we have all these ambitions and all this stuff we’ve got to do, “Let me just take a break so I can get right back to doing all those ambitions that I have.”

And I think the difference between gratification, what I call gratification and mindfulness, is that it’s not in your head. Like, that idea that we can think our way through and out of any problem, I think that’s mistaken.

Some of the way that we live is through our bodies alone, and so you can’t think your way out of your bodily encounters. One reason you can’t do that, Pete, is that they happen to you in the moment in which they take place, right?

Like, when the phone rings and you hear it ring, you can’t sort of go, “Well, I’ll, like, process the sensation of the phone ringing later. I’ll save that up. I’ve got other things to do right now.” And so the sensory engagement, well, you could turn off your phone, of course, right?

When you go out on a walk and you feel the texture of the gravel under your feet, or you feel the heat in the air closing in on you, that happens right then, in the moment. And you can’t sort of put it away in order that you can make sense of it later.

When we’re at work, in particular, our time is kind of not our own. It’s structured by others. We’re often told what to do and where to do it. And so maybe you can take a break and kind of catch your breath, go to the break room. Some people work at home where they can, literally, go do a little bit of yoga or something like that. That can help.

But it shouldn’t and it cannot be a replacement for the moment-to-moment experience of doing your job. So either you figure out how to make that experience meaningful or more meaningful as you do it, not for the ends that it provides, but for the experience that it delivers in the moment, or you’re just going to be like less happy than you could with your lot.

Pete Mockaitis
Less happy than you could be. Well, that’s certainly valuable in and of itself. And it’s funny, sort of like the motivational purpose frame of the mindfulness as well, it’s like you have more meaning and gratification in the moment as is.

And I would also suggest that the show is called How to Be Awesome at Your Job, in so doing, all kinds of good additional result-oriented benefits could accrue to us if you’re more present in a conversation, for example. People just like that. That’s part of what makes a person charismatic or likable. you know, improves leadership, etc.

Or, you just not being stressed, harried, disconnected elsewhere is just going to aid your capacity to think and be creative and make decisions and all kinds of other things on top of just having a gratified, meaningful sensory experience in those moments as well.

Ian Bogost
Yeah, I hear what you’re saying. And here’s the way I’ve been thinking about this. Most of our lives, most of the things that we pursue because we think they’re valuable are kind of goal-oriented, outcome-oriented.

We’re very goal-oriented people and we live in a very goal-oriented and outcome-oriented culture. There’s probably pros and cons to that, but that’s the way it is. I think, all in all, it’s a good thing. Like, we want to accomplish stuff, right? And that’s one of those things that we want to accomplish is purpose, meaning, and, you know, like material success, maybe.

You want to be better at your job so you can get promoted, you get a better job. Maybe you could start your company, whatever it might be. All of that is fine. I think that we need to take a break from it from time to time.

And we need to, in order to experience those kind of moment-to-moment pleasures, you need them first not to have any purpose other than to deliver the experience because, otherwise, you’re just instrumentalizing them, turning them into kind of, like, efficiency gain, hacks, or whatever, before you’ve even made sense of what they’re for, right?

So the first exercise is, “What does it even mean just to experience the sensory world as I encounter it? And then, why is it that that’s so hard to do?” And one of the reasons is that we’ve been kind of trained not to do it, right, or we’ve been, what I call it, dematerialized. We’ve been disconnected from all sorts of aspects of the physical world at work, at home, in every aspect of our lives.

But that said, I also think that you’re right, that if you imagine your overall contentment your whole life, everything in your life that’s going on, how happy you are with your job, with your family, with the car you own, with all of it, then one component of that is your sort of day-to-day sense of, “How good do I feel just moving through the world?”

And if you can build like a foundation like a bedrock, a bedrock part of your overall contentment that comes in part from a sense of gratification, like, you know, you take your coffee in the morning at work, and you pour it out into the mug in the kitchen, and you feel the warmth of the mug in your hand, and you smell the coffee having been brewed, and then you taste it, and it energizes you.

And also you have a moment of time that you can share with your coworkers. That little thing does fuel you up, right? Like, it gives you some sense of, “Okay, this is a thing that I do. It’s a ritual. And I’m also just having and I’m aware that I’m having that sensory experience.”

Now, what if I told you that you have that, like, all the time, constantly? And so you can build a sort of sense of overall pleasure that comes from the things you’re already doing that you don’t need to change, that then will give you a little bit of a of like a boost, you know?

But I don’t think that we ought to start by thinking of the purpose of gratification as sort of fueling us up to be more effective or more productive, because then we almost can’t experience it. You have to, like, learn how to experience it before allowing it to serve some of those higher order purposes that you’re thinking of.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you there in terms of your frame of reference, your intention, your mindset, perspective, attitude, beliefs, all that stuff with regard to how you approach it can alter the experience itself.

Ian Bogost
Yeah, totally. You know how, like, people feel, like sometimes people feel like their work is meaningless, like, they just don’t know why they’re doing it. And that’s one of the things that would make you uncomfortable, dissatisfied at work.

You brought up these games. Many years ago at my game studio, we made this game for a popular ice cream chain. It’s one of those where they, like, bash up the ice cream on a cold surface. You know what I mean? And it was this training game to help people figure out portioning because that’s where a lot of the profit was made or lost in the game.

And I learned a lot about this. This is just like a menial job, in a way, like a first job for 16-year-olds or like a minimum wage job. But it was really important to this company that the job be good. And one of the things we discovered was that the workers, the line workers, like one of their senses of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the job had to do with, like, why were they more or less successful? Why was their manager praising them or yelling at them?

And a lot of it had to do with the kind of mechanics of pulling ice cream, and the fact that they have different viscosities and, like, the mint was super thin, and the cake batter was super thick. So paying attention to those, like, small-scale physical differences.

In this case it’s ice cream, so it’s easier than if you do, like, knowledge work, but bear with me here. Knowing and, like, attending to the specifics of their physical acts, that had a lot to do with their overall sense of contentment or even just of clarity with the job, right?

Now, in the book, when I was researching the book, I talked to a lot of people in different professions, and one of the people I talked to does tile setting. So he works doing mostly residential construction, setting tile, and he was telling me all about, like, all the moment-to-moment attention and care and detail of the work of putting one tile next to the other, which, if you don’t know anything about it, you might think it’s easy, but it’s not.

And he told me how gratifying this was, and how much clarity he was able to achieve during the course of a day. He was able to think clearly, he was able to solve problems, not just over the course of the day or the project, but like moment to moment. He was really engaged with it.

And his name is Dan. And I said, “Dan, you know, a lot of people who work in knowledge work, work in office jobs, would love to have that kind of moment-to-moment clarity and contentment in what they do. But sometimes they just feel like they’re sending emails. You know what I mean?”

So the moment-to-moment experience really does matter not just because it might make you, like, more successful, but because it also gives that moment meaning. It allows you to understand what it’s for, why you’re doing it, especially why you’re doing it like many, many times a day or a week or a year, which is what our lives are. There’s a lot of repetition.

And so if we can find a way to make that repetition compelling, then it will feel less like boredom or like a slog, and more like something we want to do, not just to get through it, and not in order to achieve some greater further outcome from it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and I think that something feeling like less of a slog is, and I don’t want to go into this loop because like this is, like, “Yeah, it’s awesome to be meaningful in the moment and that’s also super helpful.” So I guess I’m thinking, like, if an activity feels aversive, unpleasant, we will just naturally choose to do less of it, and often to our detriment.

Ian Bogost
Yeah, for sure. Or you’ll try to, yeah. And sometimes you can’t do less of it because that’s where the job is, you know? And then you’re really faced with a huge puzzle. And people, they get into their heads about this, they’re like, “I hate my job, I think. Maybe I need a new job.” And they might, right?

But what if what they really hate, or at least in that moment dislike, is not the job itself, not the outcomes, not the colleagues, not the purpose, not the career, not even the sector, but something about the moment-to-moment experience that they’re engaged with.

I have a colleague at the magazine, at The Atlantic, who got this, like, mechanical keyboard. All we do as writers is type, right? Like, that’s what the job is, is typing and talking on the phone. And, you know, it’s not just typing, but it’s a lot of typing.

He got one of those mechanical keyboards, it’s clicky clicky keyboards. You know, some people might find that irritating when it’s in the next cubicle, but he knew that the moment-to-moment experience of pressing buttons on the computer is what his job was composed of at a sort of atomic level.

And that having an apparatus at his desk that would make that experience more gratifying, it wouldn’t make his relationship with his coworkers easier or better. It wouldn’t make the stories he was editing or writing easier or better. It wouldn’t make his overall sense of career progress easier or better, but it would add something to that moment-to-moment experience of doing it, right?

So, I mean, you know, maybe there’s not a simple solution like that for everything, but I think that we’ve massively underestimated the degree to which the physical connection and contact, the sensory experience of work is a massive part of our sense of contentment at work, not just what we’re doing the work for, not just the money we’re getting paid, not just the purpose or the career advancement, but literally, what’s happening to you one moment to the next.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that example a lot. And when you talk about we’ve become dematerialized and we’re sort of trained to be in that fashion, it’s kind of funny. I’ve noticed, in the world of emails, for example, I pay for the software Superhuman, which I absolutely love.

And in some ways it has some extra features which are nice, but for the most part, I’m just using it as a more beautiful, faster, more responsive skin atop of Gmail. And it’s like Gmail can, for some, be zero dollar cost. You pay out in other ways.

And so I guess my dematerialized trained brain has a number of times thought to myself, “It’s so silly to pay money for this thing that doesn’t do anything, really.” And I try to convince myself, like, “Well, Pete, I mean, because it’s faster, you’re actually able to get the job done.”

Ian Bogost
Yeah, you’re trying to optimize.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like I have to resort to an economic productivity rationale to myself to feel okay with, “Yeah, I’m spending money because it makes email, which I don’t like doing, a more pleasant experience sensorially. And that is just fine and dandy.” I’m hearing loud and clear from you.

Ian Bogost
Yeah, no, I love the email example because it’s a huge part of all of our lives, right? I also paid for a Gmail client called Mimestream, and it’s not as fancy as yours. It’s really just an email client. But for some reason, my brain just rejects the Gmail client.

I load it up and I just cannot make sense of it. And Mimestream just looks a lot more like the email clients that I’m accustomed to. And it took me a minute to accept that all I was really buying was this sort of sense of visual similarity with, like, Apple Mail, which I use most of the time.

But once I accepted that, it was fine because that was real. Like, it’s real. Like, my sense of moment-to-moment visual contentment with email, which I also spend a lot of time with, that’s a huge part of my workday and my work life. And I will tell you, I literally feel better using my Gmail work account, like so noticeably so. I know that it’s improved my life because of this silly software program that I bought.

Here’s another gratification-oriented email work example that I’ll share with you. I’ve got one of these Logitech mouses, mice, whatever you call them.

And it’s got a button right where my thumb is. And I programmed this button in my mail client to delete emails so, like, a delete email button. Oh, I love pressing the delete email button. And I’ll just sit there and I’ll just delete, delete, delete, delete.

And that feeling of, like, email triage that all of us do, which it’s just a chore, “And don’t you have a delete button on your keyboard? Bogus!” I do. I do, indeed, have a delete button on my keyboard. But something about having, like, this dedicated email deletion button that I press many times a day, that gives me, like, enormous gratification.

It doesn’t really, like, solve the communication problems that generate the emails in the first place. Maybe I’m deleting some that I shouldn’t, but that’s a different problem, right? That’s a different problem than the one that I’m identifying. So you’re exactly onto it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, I’m thinking about a Guy Ross, How I Built This interview with Paul English who made Kayak. And they sort of established you’re basically just a skin on top of some fancy technology that someone else made. He’s like, “Well, yeah, but that’s what we needed,” and which became a huge company.

Well, now I’m thinking that’s intriguing in terms of how we might choose to integrate delight, sensorial delight into things because I’m thinking about I’ve got this app called Do Habits. And what’s so funny is I like that when I tap it, there’s a little bit of a haptic sensation. And the user experienced designers, you know, they obsess over this all the time.

There’s a little haptic sensation and also makes a little string note. Like, mmm, you know? And so as I tap it, like I did how many minutes of exercise, like, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. And it just feels great. And I find myself wanting to exercise more so I can tap it.

Ian Bogost
So you can tap more. Right.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Ian Bogost
Yeah, no, that’s totally real, though. I mean, think about, you know, and there are, like, kind of dark patterns to those sorts of designs. Like, you know, when you go into like a casino and you hear and see all of the sensations and sounds, it’s drawing you in and trying to capture your attention.

But the reason we like interacting with our smartphones or our smart watches or our devices is because they’re delightful to interact with. They have these smooth surfaces. They’re responsive. You can, like, have the little springy thing when you refresh a feed or something, and it bounces as though it’s a real physical object. Those things are designed to be delightful.

I mean, they’re not as delightful as they once were, I think. But they’re purposely designed in order they can give us some of that. You know, that’s simulated tactile feedback. I recently wrote a little software program for my smartwatch that is just a timer. It’s literally just a timer.

But I found that, like, most of what I do when I time things is I want, like, kind of multiple 30-second long time. Like, it’s 30 seconds, it’s five minutes to brew tea, or, you know, I’m going to do a minute of hard planks at when I’m exercising, or something. Like, I just don’t need an hour-long timer that much, which is the one that comes with the watch. And I made it work exactly like you’re describing. Tap, tap, tap to add 30 seconds.

Like, it’s silly, but the delight that I feel when I do that is real. Like, it’s not invented. You haven’t made it up. Have you ever gone, like, out of your way to go to, like, the coffee shop or the eatery that has, like, the nice cups or the takeaway plates that are, like, really thick, or those bamboo-like disposable or recyclable cutlery?

Like those sorts of experiences, you will even seek them out because they give you a richer sensory engagement than some alternative would. We’re kind of doing this all the time. We just sort of go, “Well, that’s obviously unimportant. Like, I don’t know why I’m doing that. There’s something wrong with me or something weird about it. I just need to keep that to myself and not share it.”

When, in fact, we all do share in all of that delight. It’s the same reason that, like, a noisy office or a quiet office, or one that’s too bright or not bright enough, or has the wrong color temperature bulbs, or where the carpet is, like, it used to be nice and plush and now it’s been worn down.

Those things have an impact on your day-to-day life. You may not want them to, or you may not take it as seriously as you should, but they absolutely do.

Pete Mockaitis
And then I’m also thinking about how when organizations or people give us sensorial delight or sensorial disgust, I have associations with that organization or that person. Like, if, for example, at one point, I rented an office, and in the bathroom they had the cheapest, thinnest commercial, industrial toilet paper that exists.

Ian Bogost
Totally. No, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
And I know they did that just because it was cheaper, low cost. And yet, I felt a level of not being cared for?

Ian Bogost
Right. No, but, literally, I mean, you paused because it feels, I mean, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I think you paused because it feels weird to admit that, to admit that, you know, like you take a business meeting and you go to the restroom, and the toilet paper is like surprisingly thin.

And you’re thinking in your head, you’re like, “What is this company’s values, right? What are they all about?” And you’re not wrong to think that it’s sort of like, you know, like there’s an old joke that if you’re like boarding a plane, and you’re in the jet wing and you see, like, a bolt on the ground.

And you suddenly feel like, “Well, am I safe here?” Even though there’s no evidence that there’s any relationship between, like, the loose bolt and anything that’s been done, but it’s just like that. There is a sense of care that goes into the design and operation of these environments that we live in all the time, including our offices.

And that sense of care, it doesn’t just send messages, it actually delivers experiences that matter to us. I mean, I talk to a lot of people about work, okay? And the bathroom comes up all the time. All the time. Like, if folks feel like the bathroom is, like, too public, like it’s kind of in the wrong place, or they have to pass by too many people to go there, or there aren’t enough stalls, or the stalls aren’t big enough.

In America, we have these, you know, bathroom stalls that you can sort of see under and see around. And in Europe, they tend to have these enclosures with full doors that make you feel. The ones that have, like, the locking door that has the red and the green, you know, vacant-occupied, that gives you the sense that, “Okay, now I’m having privacy because I’m signaling it to someone else, and they’re not going to, like, rattle the door to see if someone’s inside.”

I know it sounds ridiculous to say that your contentment in your job might have something substantially to do with the design of the locks on the restroom stalls, but, honestly and truly, it does. It really does.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And then I’m thinking about the feedback that we choose to share with folks. And so I’m thinking about, I hired someone to paint my new office space, which I own and I’ve got co-working situation going on, which is pretty cool.

And so I got some bids for painters, and there was one who just seemed like he cared a lot. He’s very thoughtful and asking follow up questions and just kind of going through all the things in some detail and just sort of thinking, like, “Hmm, you know, I’d probably go with this sheen for this purpose, unless you were looking…”

Ian Bogost
That’s the stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
And so I just got the vibe, he really cares about the painting he’s doing. And so I hired him, and I didn’t hire someone else who cost a little bit less, and so they asked for some feedback on the form, and it’s, well, one, there’s some social pieces. It’s sort of, like, “I don’t really have a relationship with you. I’m not going to say, ‘Oh, I got the vibe you didn’t really care that much about my paint job because what I feel…’”

Ian Bogost
Yeah, I know exactly what you’re saying.

Pete Mockaitis
There was less sensorial delight and, yeah, I think that’s the case with a lot of things with regard to the feedback that we choose to give tends to be the one that feels most defensible, “Well, there’s a better price over here. Oh, they can better match my timeline.”

What they didn’t say is, “It felt like he didn’t really care about me and my job and my office the way the other guy did.” And so we won’t say that generally, and, thus, we won’t hear that. And we are devoid, we’re missing out on a huge important piece of feedback. And I think that that’s another reason why we feel silly about these sensorial little things we’re discussing is because other people won’t vocalize them to us unless they have to be our close friends or partners.

Ian Bogost
That’s exactly right. And, you know, one of the pieces of advice I give in the book is that if you can verbalize, just talking about these kinds of encounters, like we’re doing right now, it makes them feel less weird, less embarrassing, less, like, foolish.

And I have found, when I start talking to people about these kinds of experiences, you know, like, “Look, I really cared about the sheen of the paint,” or, “You know, have you noticed the wobbly knob? Like, the wobbly knobs really bothering me,” or whatever it might be, that people, they light up right away. They’re right there with you. They just have a hard time starting that kind of conversation.

And so verbalizing it, vocalizing it is one way of making it matter, of making it normal, of acknowledging that it’s a big part of life. And I think that the optimization, goal-oriented mentality that we have, not just as workers, but also as managers, sometimes makes us think that it’s, like, more noble not to care about these things.

That like, “Well, you should just be able to look past that and, like, get on with the important big stuff part of your job.” But that’s wrong, isn’t it? Because these little things eat at you, and they eat at you because they matter, because they’re happening multiple.

Like, you are seeing the walls of your office every moment of every day. And if the light reflects on them improperly because the wrong sheen was put on them, that colors every moment of every day of your work life. You better get it right, not just because it’s nice to get that kind of thing right, but because it actually really does impact your sensory experience of being at work and doing your job.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Ian, so we’ve had a lot of fun philosophically here. And if folks are thinking, “All right. Okay, I’m sold. All right, de-materialization has happened to our detriment. These sensorial things really do matter. And I don’t need to feel silly about it. I can talk about it. I can invest in making it swell,” do you have any top do’s or don’ts for us as we start living life with this new lens?

Ian Bogost
Yeah, I mean, I think the first one we’ve already talked about a little bit, which is just, if you accept these gifts as things that matter, I don’t want to say take it seriously because that puts too much of a burden on your brain.

But if you can be open to the idea that some of these small stuff encounters with the physical world are capable of delivering meaning, then the meaning will just kind of arrive. It’s happening to you all the time.

One way you can do that is just by, like, lingering a little bit longer in the experiences that you’re having wherever you are. And this will help you identify them to kind of feel the sensation of encountering them.

Like, sometimes, I just let my fingers sort of rub up against the keyboard. It just, like, grounds me, like, “Here I am with the keyboard.” And then I also sense the little nubs on the F and the J key that orient me for touch typing, which is like a tiny moment of gratification that I have.

So that’s one thing. Just, like, linger in these moments like a little bit longer. Talk about them, give them surface. But I think the big thing is that, if you are willing to accept that your life isn’t just made of big moments of accomplishment, and then nothing in between matters, but that your life is made of moments, then you can take those moments as they are given.

Even if they don’t do anything for you, even if it’s just, like, “Ah, you know, at this time of day, the way that the light shimmers off the sheen of the paint, huh, that’s beautiful.” That’s enough, right? So dividing your day up into moments every now and then, and just taking in the moment. Not being mindful about it, not trying to, like, bend your brain to accept them or what have you. Just allow yourself to have a moment. That’s another thing you can do.

And then, you know, I think this is a little bit harder, but in the workplace, I think that accepting and even communicating up the chain that some of the trappings of physical life, you know, whether you work from home or whether you work remotely, whether you are in a co-work situation, whether you work a normal job at a workplace, that the physical environment in which you work has an outsized impact on what you’re able to get done at that work, right?

Which means that maybe, like, little tiny changes would make your life a lot, “Oh, actually, if we just had this different kind of coffee cup, I think it would be a lot better.” Like, being willing to make those kinds of small asks where you find the opportunity for improvement is maybe also something that people can do right away, you know?

And then one last thing I’ll throw out there that’s more about your home life than your work life. Find things to do outside of work that are sensorily different from the ones that you do at work. I don’t mean, like, that have different goals. I mean that whatever your sensory life is in your job, find ways of exercising a diversity of sensory encounters outside of it.

So, you know, if you’re a knowledge worker and you’re spending all your time at your keyboard with your computer sitting down, then something that you do while you’re standing up and outside, that’s an interesting experience, not because you need to garden or because it’s better to knit than to move symbols around between SaaS systems, but just because it gives you a different sensory encounter.

It, like, rejuvenates you in order that you can come back and appreciate the world of work, of the moment-to-moment experience of work with kind of renewed attention. So there’s a few ideas.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. I like that a lot. And I think just pausing in order to do that. And I’m thinking about, I remember when I first got an iPhone that had the face ID unlock feature, I thought it was so cool. And I guess I’ve grown accustomed to it, as maybe we do sensory habituation stuff.

And I remember my wife asked me, because whenever I did it, I would flash a real big smile, and she’s like, “Do you have to smile for it to work?” I was like, “No, I just really like doing it.”

Ian Bogost
I mean, I think what you’re expressing is the sentiment of wonder. And if you believe, I really believe this, that there’s nothing whatsoever that isn’t worthy of wonder. And we do forget that. We forget it as we grow older, in general, but then we forget it as the things that were once wondrous become more familiar.

And they’re still wondrous, right? Every day, we’re surrounded by all these miracles. And then there are new ones, too. So being open to feeling that sense of wonder, and really thinking about sensation, about your presence in the world as a human body, as a series of gifts, I think that that’ll change your whole life.

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

Ian Bogost
This is one from the Tibetan Buddhist master Chogyam Trungpa, he says, “When you ask how you should do things, it’s like trying to buy a pair of gloves so you don’t have to touch. One doesn’t have to think about how, one just does it.”

I love that. I love that idea that we’re stuck in our heads and we’re mistaking effort for something that requires none.

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

Ian Bogost
One of the things I’ve become really interested in over the past few years are a series of research experiments carried out by an Oxford University psychologist named Charles Spence and a group of colleagues that he works with.

And one of the things that he works on is what’s called multimodal perception, which is the idea that, like, seemingly unrelated things can change your experience of sensation. So one of my favorite versions of this study is, like, changing the color or shape of a spoon with which you eat yogurt actually changes people’s understanding of the taste of it, or how much they think they enjoy it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And a favorite book?

Ian Bogost
One of my favorite books ever is a novella by Nicholson Baker called the Mezzanine. It’s been around for many, many years. And it’s about a man who is riding an escalator from the ground floor of his office building to the mezzanine level of his office building, and that’s the whole book.

And it sounds ridiculous, I know, but over the course of the ride, he reflects on all of these ordinary experiences that he’s had, you know, having lunch, buying shoelaces, and it just is this vivid celebration of the depth and magic of ordinary life. It’s a really short little easy read that I love to come back to.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Ian Bogost
One that I love that isn’t technological, or at least not in that way, is the Pigma Micron archival ink pens. You know what I mean? I use them in 0.1 millimeter thickness.

And I just find that the smallness and the precision of writing with them, they invite a kind of precision of thought or action. Even if what I’m doing doesn’t have it, it sort of inspires me to think better and more deliberately about what I’m writing down and why I’m writing it down.

Pete Mockaitis
Any favorite habit?

Ian Bogost
Lingering a little longer than needed in anything that I’m doing. And, especially, to the point of, like, if something feels like a little boring, if you’re like, “This is a little strange. Like, what am I doing?” a little awkward, a little weird, that’s something I try to notice.

It’s just a good sign that I’m about to find something new inside of something familiar. So seeking out that kind of sense of weirdness or embarrassment or boredom by letting something resonate a little longer, that’s something I try to do just when it occurs to me without pressure.

Pete Mockaitis
And speaking of resonating, is there any key thing you share with folks that really seems to resonate, they quote back to you often?

Ian Bogost
I think the idea that your life is made of moments, that you can divide it up a lot of ways, but one of them is in these tiny chunks of time that don’t feel like they mean very much individually, but that add up to a lot over time.

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

Ian Bogost
My website is Bogost.com, that’s B-O-G-O-S-T.com. And the book is SmallStuffBook.com.

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

Ian Bogost
I think it would be to realize that your work life is more than just your goals and your ambitions and the outcomes that those produce. It is those things, but it’s more than that. It’s also, and maybe when you think about it, it’s even kind of mostly the experience of doing the work, of being in the workplace and getting the work done with the people that you’re doing it with.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Ian, thank you.

Ian Bogost
Thank you so much for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Chris, welcome back for round four.

Chris Bailey
Round four, Pete. Are you serious?

Pete Mockaitis
It is. It is round four. The last round was, oh, about five years ago, so it’s been a while. But we are using the same pen and the same microphone so I feel like, since I respect you and think you’re a genius, that maybe I, too, am worthy of some sort of props, but maybe that’s reading too much into things.

Chris Bailey
Has the pen helped?

Pete Mockaitis
It’s been pleasant. This is the Pilot Precise, by the way, RT, for those listening.

Chris Bailey
It’s the best pen.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, you raved about it in a previous episode, and I was like, “Oh, let’s check it out.” It was like, “Yep, I’m just going to buy dozens of these things.”

Chris Bailey
Yeah, I have friends who are into fountain pens and they have all these fancy pen rituals, pencil rituals, all these different weights. They send me these pens. They’re all garbage. I’m sorry if you’re a pen person. They’re all garbage, except for the Pilot Precise V5 RT. Come at me, pen people.

Pete Mockaitis
Noted. We’ll put that in the pulled highlight quotes there. So, well, I want to hear, we’re talking about your book, Intentional. It’s been about five years since we chatted. Tell me, what’s the most powerful thing you’ve learned in your life of productivity over these last five years?

Chris Bailey
About values. Now, before your eyes glaze over, whenever I’ve heard the term values, my eyes have glazed over. I am not exaggerating. When I hear the word values, I think of the corny corporate exercises I’ve done in the past where somebody like brings in a sheet of paper and there’s a hundred values and they say, “Circle the values,” and I like them all, you know, grace, humor, whatever. And there’s very little research behind those.

But it turns out, there is a fascinating body of research behind what we value on a fundamental human level, and that there are 12 main values that drive pretty much everything we do. And that when we don’t want to do something, we’re usually going against the grain of our values. And so, I’ve been into this idea. You know, we’ve chatted about this three, going on four times, this idea of becoming intentional.

I’ve always wanted to write a book on becoming more intentional, but I’ve never found enough stuff around values to share, stuff around intention to share, until I encountered values, which are the research shows, that’s been validated across 60 different countries, hundreds of thousands of participants, full credit where credit is due to Shalom Schwartz for discovering this methodology of motivation, essentially.

It was kind of the missing piece that pieced together all of the things that I’ve been incubating on intentionality over the last decade. And it was an unlock for me. It was as if everything was aligned. And I don’t want to oversell. I don’t think I’m overselling.

Once you see what the values are and stuff and how the different levels of intentionality in our life fit together, there’s beautiful, fascinating science behind it. Of course, we don’t always accomplish our intentions, which is a whole other thing, but it’s fascinating, it’s beautiful, and it’s powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s intriguing. And part of me is tempted to say, “Give me the 12 now. List them.”

But first, you say it’s a big unlock and there’s hard science and research. Can you tell me what are some of the main discoveries of this research and what impact does it make when you apply it?

Chris Bailey
So, there’s different fundamental motivations we have in our life. There are two kinds of axes of motivation that we have that motivates us in our work, in our life, any context that we’re in.

There’s whether we’re motivated to enrich other people or ourselves. And there’s whether we wish to conserve things as they are or improve things as they are. And so, these are the fundamental motivations in our life that our values fit inside of.

And the key to keep in mind is that, with all 12 of these values, we’re all different. Your values are different from mine. Although good pens aren’t a value, but there are associated values actually with a good pen and good microphones. We have the same microphone.

The key to keep in mind is we all have all 12 at a different level. So, there’s self-direction, which is going our own way. There’s stimulation, which is enjoying novelty in the moment. There’s pleasure, which is, you know, sense pleasure, it’s a good meal or a good bath or something. There’s achievement, so accomplishing good things.

There’s power, right, a power over resources and other people. There’s face is another one of the values, which is how we come across to other people. There’s security, so personal security and societal security.

Tradition is another value, so the customs that surround us. Conformity is very, interestingly, to me, a fundamental human value, you know, kind of this fundamental conservation of living within the expectations of other people. Humility is a fundamental value.

Universalism, I find to be a beautiful value, which is protecting and advancing the welfare of people and of nature. And benevolence is the final 12th value, which is kindness and serving others. And so, across, and all these values fit into those kinds of four motivations, ourselves or others, or improve and change.

And so, we all have all 12 in different extents. And anything that we could be doing in the moment, anything we could possibly be doing in the moment, fits inside of these values. A good pen is pleasure. That’s the pleasure value.

Pete Mockaitis
Pleasure. Stimulation. Power.

Chris Bailey
That’s stimulation maybe a little bit because it feels so good. Self-direction, if you chose it yourself. If you heard it from a friend, if everybody you know is using this same pen, that fits with conformity. Humility, using a simple $3 pen, or, however much this costs, instead of a fountain. Everything we do is motivated by these values.

And so, our values are the broadest intentions in our life. They’re what we ultimately hope to accomplish. And so, the more that the goals we have fit with these values, the more we actually care about them. And the more they feel like a natural extension of who we are. And then it goes down to the various levels of intentionality in our life, but this is at the very top.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, Chris, you know, as you were speaking, my natural consultant brain, thinking, “Is this a mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive categorization set? Can I think of anything that does not fall into them?” And, well, I’ve only been thinking for about 40 seconds and I was having a hard time digging one up. So, we’ll say it’s pretty good.

Chris Bailey
Well, I can name one or two. I can name one or two.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s hear it, yeah.

Chris Bailey
Yeah, health is one that doesn’t fit. But these values, they’re a motivational continuum. So, they are what could be possibly motivating us in the moment. And health is interesting. That was a big question I had when I looked at this theory, it’s like, “Okay, where is health in this?”

Pete Mockaitis
I think that’s power. I’ve got the power to get out of bed, the power to have the energy for the day, the power to walk up a flight of stairs.

Chris Bailey
Well, that’s the interesting thing. It depends on the person. So, women are more likely to see health as a pleasure value because they feel good in their body.

Pete Mockaitis
Being in pain sucks. Fix that shoulder with a physical therapist. Ugh.

Chris Bailey
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it’s self-direction, right? You can go your own way. Some people see it as that achievement. Other people see their body as an achievement that they can, yeah, bro.

Pete Mockaitis
“Muscle ups, bro.”

Chris Bailey
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, they’re a true motivational continuum. It’s beautiful that these are what drive everything we do. So, uncovering the ones that actually motivate us is paramount for achieving the goals that we set.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it is interesting because I’ve noticed that I really like feeling like a winner – achievement – and I really don’t like feeling like a loser. And some of this can even be neurotically nonsensical, you know, in terms of, like, if I’m taking out my trash and I can’t fit the week’s trash into my trash bin, I feel like I am being a poor steward of the earth’s resources because it’s like, “Oh, you know, this huge garbage bin wasn’t enough for you, huh? So now the whole world has to see, ‘Oh, that family can’t handle consuming a moderate amount.’”

And so, it’s like, “But, like, who cares? Like, nobody actually cares.” And yet this is, this is inside of me. And it’s kind of, and I guess there’s maybe conformity, right, “Hey, all of us fit our stuff inside the trash bin.”

Chris Bailey
Yeah, there’s universalism in there, wanting to protect the nature. There’s face, right, looking at how you come across other people. There’s achievement, wanting to crush the garbage down to a certain extent. It’s all in there. And so, this is the fascinating thing about values, is because they’re essentially our ultimate intentions in our life. They’re what we care about most.

But every single intention that we set, whether deliberately or not, because that’s another curious thing, intentions don’t have to be deliberate, they can be automatic. A habit is our brain forming an intention that will do something automatically for us. Maybe that’s too much to get into on the podcast, but in every moment, especially when we make these deliberate intentions, we’re automatically evaluating a series of options before us using our top values as a trade-off.

And so, the values that tend to win out in the moment tend to be our strongest values. It’s interesting. They’re behind the scenes of our life pulling, because, of course, we don’t always follow through with our intentions. Intentionality, it’s incredible, it’s beautiful, but the road to hell is also paved with good intentions. But these values are behind the scenes because they’re our true motivational nature, pulling on the strings of what we will do and what we won’t do.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, what’s so intriguing is, as I’m thinking about, yeah, with any goal you could feel them at war. And I’m thinking about, I’ve been on both sides of the overweight threshold, according to the body mass index. And food, I mean, boy, it is stimulation, it is pleasure, it’s so good.

And yet, when I am having, on a hot streak of weight loss, what’s doing it for me is achievement in terms of, I’m tracking those calories, like, “Look at that, another day a deficit. Winning!” It feels good. And so then, they’re at war. It’s like, “Well, do I want the pleasure of this cheesecake or do I want the pleasure of winning a caloric deficit for the day?”

Chris Bailey
Yeah, and that’s the thing with these, like, weight loss goals, is an interesting one because 40% of the world’s population at any given time are trying to lose weight, so about half of us are. But we tend to go about goals like that the wrong way. So, we set a goal, ‘Yeah, I’m to lose 10 pounds this year so I look good, have six-pack abs by beach season.” We have this idea of ourselves.

But a goal like that is built around face, right, the value of face. It’s how we come across to other people.

But if your top value is pleasure, and maybe self-direction or something, a different goal would be better, right? Like, instead of that lose the weight to have six-pack abs by beach season built around face, maybe it’s, like, experiment with three different ways of eating – self-direction – to find the one that’s most enjoyable.

And so, you can have the same set of actions that lead you to different goals, but they are actually motivated. And this is something that is also interesting about intentionality, is there are many, and I love this idea. I love this idea.

So, there are many different layers of intentionality in our life. So, we set intentions across all kinds of different timelines, right? We have our values, which are our ultimate intentions. They last the length of our lifetime. Then we have the intentions that are a bit shorter than that, which are called our priorities. Like, “Be healthy” would be a priority.

Then we have intentions that are shorter than that, still, which we call goals, things we want to accomplish in our life, stories of change that we’re creating. Then we have, you know, we kind of go down in timeline. Then we have the plans that we have. Goals should ultimately lead to the plans that we set.

And then we have the smallest of intentions at the very bottom of this. I call it the intention stack in the book. It’s just, essentially, all the layers of intentionality in our life. And at the bottom, the very bottom, we have the present intentions we have in the moment.

So, somebody listening to this podcast, the present moment intention might be, “Listen to the podcast and enjoy it.” Then the plan might be, it might fit inside of a broader plan, like a chore to wash the dishes or something. Then it might fit inside of a goal, like in, you know, “Learn more about self-development and how to be awesome at my job.”

Then it fits inside of a priority, which is “Make a bigger contribution,” which fits inside of a value of, let’s say, benevolence, helping other people, plus achievement. And so, there’s always this stack on top of what we’re doing in the moment. But sometimes it’s aligned to what we care about. Other times we don’t care at all.

And so, it’s fascinating when you begin to deconstruct intentionality and look at the science of it, what it’s shaped like, and how it works, and how we can kind of, I got to say harness, it’s kind of a corny word, but like harness it to do the change that we want.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah. And I think this is, it opens up, and you called it an unlock. It does open up a lot of possibilities in terms of, “Oh, I wasn’t even thinking about approaching this thing with that value as a lens, but because I’m really into that value, it may well behoove me to explore how can I do such a thing to provide for more humility or universalism or benevolence or whatever the thing is.”

Chris Bailey
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, Chris, I want to maybe take a little time out here because it almost feels as though some of these values are good-er, more morally virtuous, right, true, noble than others in terms of, like, let’s say universalism, benevolence, humility. We think, “Oh, what a swell fella, or a gal, who exhibits a lot of those things,” versus, “You know what I’m really about is pleasure and power and looking awesome. That’s kind of what’s important to me.” That almost feels hollow or like a less good life.

Chris Bailey
Yeah, I talk about this in the book, too. My top value is self-direction. It’s not even close. But my number two is pleasure. I love nothing more than to…well, I like self-direction more, but I love nothing second more than to just lie on the couch after a busy day and put on a good show or a podcast, and order some Uber eats, like a big sushi platter and just indulge for the night.

And this was a very reflective process that I went through in piecing together this book is, “Are there good values? Are there bad values?” And I’ve, ultimately, come to the conclusion that, “No, there aren’t good values or bad values. There are certain values that are more conducive to certain goals.” But if you’re able to accommodate the values of others, in addition to the values of yourself, I think you’ll be fine.

Power is one that comes to mind, too, because out of all the values, out of all the listed values, it’s the very least common. It’s at the very bottom across the population level, and, sure enough, it is for me, too. I never want to have power over any other person ever in my life.

But, power, if you look at the world around us, it has a place in what we do. Any organization that has a hierarchy, for example, you have different layers of the hierarchy, and you need power within that organizational structure. Every charity has a CEO. Every nonprofit has a CEO. Every congregation has a priest.

So even the most virtuous of places, these values have a place. Conformity, right, maybe also a frowned upon value. But there’s a great benefit to going along with the expectations of others in certain scenarios, right, for accommodating other people. I’m the most self-directed person you might ever meet. And I don’t want to listen, you know, if somebody else tells me to do something, it makes me not want to do it.

But I remember my grandma telling me, like, “Wash the dishes now,” and I’d do it because I had such a respect for her. And that conformity and tradition, all these values live relative to one another, too, which is interesting. They live right next to each other in these values pie, this pie hierarchy – pie-archy.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think that is a really intriguing perspective there that these values, they’re motivational forces and they don’t necessarily lead to great or catastrophic outcomes for civilization or humanity when they all kind of come together. And what’s interesting about power is you said, you define it as, it is power over others or yourself or circumstances.

Chris Bailey
Or resources, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Or resources, yeah. I’ve got a, my buddy Ronnie, he had a funny saying, he said, “Laundry is power.” I was like, “What?”

Chris Bailey
What does that mean?

Pete Mockaitis
And then I think, one day, I had done all, I mean all of my laundry, and I’m beholding this dresser full of organized socks matched and shirts folded, underwear. And then, as I beheld this arsenal of complete laundry, it’s like, I really did, I was like, I’m ready for anything. I’m ready for anything. I felt powerful in that moment. I understood what he meant.

But I, like you, have no interest in controlling the legions of people. In fact, that sounds like a huge headache, like, “Oh, my gosh, that administrative load would be such a stressor.”

Chris Bailey
And that’s the interesting thing. I don’t want to, like, overload people with this value stuff right now, but I break it down more into, like, you can break down the 12 into 19, actually, of them, where you can break down power, for example, into power over resources and other people. Self-direction, you can break into self-directed thought and self-directed action.

And so, it’s very interesting that there’s this. It’s just a fundamental organization to human motivation that we don’t understand. But when you do understand it and you can fit through these different layers of intentionality, the goals that you have with your values, and then see how those goals connect with the daily actions that you need to take, what you get is your goals become a vessel between who you are on that fundamental level, so what motivates you, and what you do on a daily basis.

And so, we are sharing the fat loss example. Same set of actions, but with a different frame around them, with a different motivational frame around them. Imagine if your goals were all like that. This is actually the thing that bothers me about a lot of goals and goal books and stuff like that, is when you look at the actual research on goals, we have to achieve them by becoming more intentional across the different layers of intentionality in our life.

But we so often see them as static, something that shouldn’t change. But goals should evolve. We should be editing them. We should be dropping them. We should see them as fluid things. And goals, in my view, they’re basically just a story of change that we’re in the middle of creating in our life. And we need to see them as more fluid and ready to change, because so often a goal is really no different from a prediction of what we believe will happen.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, this is really juicy, and so, conceptually, we can hang here for a long time, but I’d love to perhaps shift gears into, “Okay. All right, Chris, my mind is blown with regard to these values, they’re important, and I should be considering them thoughtfully as I’m trying to go about making stuff happen.” Could you share with us a little bit of the step-by-step in terms of, “Okay, I got a list of values. That’s kind of cool. I got some things I want to be achieving, what am I doing with that?”

Chris Bailey
Yes, okay. So, let’s get tactical with this stuff, because, yeah, we have to be. So, you have your values, maybe you do a values test. I partnered with a company to build a test for the book. You don’t have to take that though, because there are certain ones that’ll kind of attract you more, and others that’ll naturally repel you.

And so, what you’ll find is that, when you look at those 12 values and the pie that they’re a part of, you’ll naturally gravitate to some and be repelled by others. Look to the ones that you naturally gravitate to and pick the top two, let’s say, two, three. Stop there. These are what you build your goals around. And then you have a list of goals, right?

How often do we actually sit down and capture the goals that we have that we’re in the middle of creating? And so, I highly recommend a weekly review where you sit down, you capture, and then you review, on a weekly basis, all the goals that you’re in the middle of creating.

And so, every goal, so in the book, I call it the intention stack. So, at the top, it is values, then priorities, then goals, then plans, then intentions, daily, weekly intentions. And, ideally, during this weekly review, or whatever cadence it makes sense for you to review these goals on, you want to look at both your values, which is the motivational force, and the actions, which is how you actually make progress towards these goals in the first place.

So, I think step zero is realizing that goal attainment, the process of goal attainment, is it’s not 99% action. It’s like 80% action, 20% planning. We need to plan more and act a little bit less, because by planning more, we actually act more over the longer arc of time, especially once the initial burst of motivation wanes.

So, during that weekly review, edit your goals, edit your goals, edit your goals. How can you edit them, like with that weight loss example, how can you edit your goals so that they fit more with what you value, so you actually care about them, right? Because the easiest way to tell if something’s a priority to you is you’ve achieved it already, right?

So, the fact that something is yet to be achieved, probably means, on some level, that it isn’t a natural fit for who you are, because it doesn’t fit with that motivational force, right? We do what it makes intuitive sense to do in the absence of intentional action.

So, during that weekly review, how can you edit your goals so they’re more in line with what you value? And how can you bite off a little bit of the goal until your next review, whatever cadence you’re doing this over?

So, if you’re doing it over a week, what do you want to bite off in the next week? Make sure it’s enough that you can chew, or not too much that you can chew, whatever the analogy is there, and schedule time blocks for it.

Practice intentionality on a more granular level. Set a few weekly intentions. Every day, set a few daily intentions so these intentions can actually flow down into one another. So, edit your goals. And, as well, if you find that a goal isn’t motivating that you can’t edit it to the point that it fits into your life, consider dropping it.

Because then we get a chance to try more goals on for size that are actually a fit with what we want to get out of our life and our motivational nature. So that’s one way is that goal review where we bridge, essentially, who we are with what we do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, very cool.

Chris Bailey
There you go.

Pete Mockaitis
And then I’d love to dig into some of your perspectives for, if we’ve got a goal that is not so appealing, well, one, you might learn via the editing process that it needs to be dropped. But before that, do you have any cool examples of folks who were able to just turbocharge motivation and progress by thoughtfully tweaking their goals so they are better fits for their values?

Chris Bailey
This is interesting, right? Because is gray intentionality such a beautiful idea? And then the rubber meets the road, right? The road to hell is also paved with good intention. So, intentionality is both vital because any time we act towards our goals, there was an intention behind it.

But sometimes, it’s also useless because there’s a lot of times when we set an intention only to not follow through, or procrastinate on an intention, or lack the desire to accomplish it. And so, there’s essentially two factors in a goal, in an intention, in something we want to do, that attract us or repel us away from that thing.

So, there’s aversion, which, you know, it’s like, “Get this out of my face, this goal out of my face.” And then there’s desire, which attracts us to a goal. And both of these are forces that work with every single goal that we have. And they’re different over the timeline of a goal, right?

So, if you’re at the very beginning, the very inception of a goal, your desire is going to be through the roof. Your motivation level is going to be so, so high. But then reality sinks in, “Oh, there goes gravity,” and then our motivation level plummets, and our desire can turn into aversion.

So, a lot of it’s like realizing where you are on that timeline of goal attainment. But aversion is a very interesting feeling that we experience along the way, because aversion is what leads us to procrastinate on something.

So, the more aversive something happens to be, which is a combination of “How boring is it? How frustrating is it? How unpleasant is it? How far away is something in the future? How unstructured is it? How meaningless is it?” so lack of connected with our values, the more of these triggers that a task has, the more likely we are to procrastinate on it.

And so, that’s another key is realizing that and understanding what triggers a task sets off. So, if something’s unstructured, like meditation is a great example of this. We were chatting a bit about meditation before we hopped on the horn here and hit the record button.

It’s one of the most aversive things that you can do, right? It’s helpful because it’s so aversive, right? If you can focus on your breath, you can focus on anything. If you can become engaged with your breath, you could become engaged with anything because it’s so boring, because it’s so aversive.

But when you accommodate the fact that it’s so unstructured and unpleasant, by working within the aversion, so a simple example of this, shrink your resistance to it. So, this works for meditation, it works for anything you don’t want to do that takes a little bit of time.

You might have a conversation with yourself like, “Okay, do I want to meditate for half an hour today? No. No, I don’t. What about 25 minutes? No. What about 20? No way in hell. What about 15? Yeah, I could do 15.”

And so, you essentially shrink the task until you no longer feel that resistance level so that you’re at a point where you can get started on the thing. And that increases your desire to actually moving between different levels of this intention stack. You move from that goal layer to that action layer that’s at the bottom.

And so, when something’s unstructured, that’s a sign you need to add structure. When something’s meaningless, it’s a sign you need to connect a goal with your values. Edit it so it’s aligned with your values. When something’s boring, frustrating, it might be a sign you need to step back and plan out on a logical level how you want to become more intentional about that thing.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m thinking about, well, these procrastination triggers, I think I learned them from you as well as what are the top researchers on procrastination. What was the book? I think we both read it.

Chris Bailey
Was it Tim Pytchyl?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s the one. Thank you.

Chris Bailey
Oh, Tim is fantastic, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and he lists those out, and that’s helpful to think about it on those dimensions. And I guess that’s what, to your point about doing more planning, that’s what you can, you can get kind of meta with this. It’s like, “Huh, I have not done these three weeks in a row. It seems something is amiss here.” And so, rather than say, “Well, I just got to knuckle down and buckle up, you know, to get after it.” It’s like, well, maybe there’s some redesign that needs to be working here, or maybe the goal needs to be abandoned.

Chris Bailey
It’s interesting, in writing this book, I chatted with lot of monks, as well as scientists, because monks study intentionality on a different layer than scientists do. They’re not observational, they’re experiential. They observe the causes and effects and conditions in our mind, and we can learn a lot from them.

And one interesting thing that I asked one of the monks, I was deep into the research on where intention comes from, because we set all these intentions, right? And some of them we set automatically, which I call our default intentions.

‘Cause some come from automatic sources. We are on a road trip, we need to go to the bathroom, and so we set an intention at the next pit stop, “I’m going to go to the bathroom.” We don’t even think about this. We do it automatically. So, biological sources, sources to avoid pain and experience greater pleasure also lead to a whole other wealth of intentions.

The lessons we have learned in the past. So, the things we have learned changes, they change our relationship with what we know to be true, which leads us to set an intention differently the next time, whether we do it out of habit or energy, or whether we do it deliberately.

But one source that a monk mentioned that wasn’t in the research that kind of allowed me to piece together other areas of the research was – and he phrased it so beautifully – is our self-reflective capacity.

Our self-reflective capacity, by looking inward, asking questions of our inner world, we are able to set different intentions from the ones that we would do out of biology, or out of basic pleasure and pain, or out of lessons we have learned, to truly go our own way and set the best intentions that lead us to the outcomes that we want, whether we want to be more accomplished at work or lead a more enriching, meaningful life by connecting with our values at work, at home.

We need to tap into that capacity more often. And so, it doesn’t just have to look like meditation or journaling or something. It can look like just going for a walk and then letting your mind go to where “What problems are you in the middle of? How can you solve them with setting intentions that are more conducive to what you want?”

They could look like brainstorming with somebody, so somebody that really gets you thinking. It can look like asking questions of your inner world and looking at what arises out of them. Like, we all have these moments where we go from autopilot mode to being deliberate about what we do.

So, if your whole family was gone for one morning or something, and you woke up and your phone wasn’t there, and so you couldn’t rely on habit in bed and you just laid there. Eventually, a moment would come where your mind would set an intention to do something, where you would set an intention to do something, whether it was a habit or whether you waited for a little bit longer to look at what you truly wanted to do in that moment.

It’s the same like if you’re listening to music and a song ends, pause, and then eventually your mind will set an intention to listen to the next one, which will end up being more enjoyable than the one that you were just listening to on autopilot.

Life is the same way, right? It’s by charting this deliberate course that we experience more meaning because it’s in connecting with that self-reflective capacity that we can be with what we value. And so, our values that compete with one another in each moment, the ones that are truest to us can win out, and then we can truly, truly go our own way.

Tthe truest intentions that we can set, like you were getting at, they come from not just acting, but reflecting, whether that’s on a logical level or on a more intuitive level where we look and connect with that self-reflective capacity that we all have.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you. Autopilot is, in some ways, the opposite of intentionality. I mean, even if we establish those habits intentionally and we’re executing, living them out in an autopilot mode – I’m getting philosophical – on some dimension, the autopilot is intentional, but from like a presentness way of looking at it, it’s not so much.

Chris Bailey
Well, this is why, in the book, I delineate between our default intentions and our deliberate intentions, because we have these default intentions that we have. Habits are great. Habits are amazing. But when you look at an intention as just a plan that we will do something, this habit energy, as I refer to it in the book, and as monks refer to it actually, there’s quite a bit of power in that.

We don’t have to worry about making ourselves a cup of coffee in the morning. Our brain, our body goes through the motions automatically until we’re sitting there like with a cup of coffee. We don’t even have to be fully awake enough to notice it.

But you’re right that, eventually, that moment comes. It’s kind of like the movie montage where, like, somebody’s living their dull humdrum life and the scene is gray and it’s raining outside, they’re going through the same motions. But then, like, boom, somebody dies, or something pivotal happens, where that character has a fit of awakening and decides to do things differently, and decides to go in a different direction from the one that they were going in.

And then like cut to the badass working out montage, or like somebody writing for hours through the night, or piecing together some math problem, you know, something like that. But we all have these similar fits of awakening.

And all that is, is going from the habit energy of relying on our default intentions to the deliberate intentions that we can all set in the moment. Well, here’s something mind blowing about default intentions.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes, please.

Chris Bailey
Our values are constructed out of our default intentions. Like, seeing that in the research, it sent shivers down my spine, I’m not going to lie. It all came together. Our values are who we are on a fundamental human level. They’re what motivate us on a fundamental human level. And what motivates us more than who we are by default? Our default intentions.

And our deliberate intentions, the life we want to live, the contributions we want to make, the work we want to do, that’s the layer of deliberate intentions we layer on top of who we are by default. So, it’s, really, when you look at the science of intentionality, it explains everything that we do, everything that we think, and everything that we are. And molding that is the ultimate skill, I think.

Pete Mockaitis
Whew, that’s good stuff and worthy of chewing on and reflecting upon in depth. I know we’re at our last few minutes, but I want to hear two quick things from you. One, tracking goal progress, something that you’re into, you write about. Do you have any favorite principles or tactics or systems in that zone?

Chris Bailey
Oh, yeah, tracking your goal pace is one of my favorites. So, I use this whenever I write a book, where I make a spreadsheet. Two lines. One is my pace line and the other is my progress line. And it works for any cumulative goal, miles ran, for example. And all you do is you print it off and so you track between today and your target day.

You have a pace, say you want your book to be 70,000 words, so you have the pace line that goes up at this beautiful linear pace. And then you have your actual word count relative to that. Simple tactic, but incredibly helpful for goal tracking.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve made the spreadsheet myself in many contexts.

Chris Bailey
Oh, man, we’re living the same life, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, absolutely.

Chris Bailey
Same pen, same mic, same sheet.

Pete Mockaitis
And you have said it a few times, and I love it, that any productivity intervention must earn back the time that you spend on it, or else it is counterproductive. Since I like to talk about favorite things at the end of each episode, can you share with us a couple favorite tools, tactics, productivity interventions that just crush it on this metric of yours?

Chris Bailey
Okay, I feel I’ve mentioned this on a previous one, but it’s five years ago, so maybe your listenership has cycled out or something. No, they’re probably still out here.

Pete Mockaitis
Never. They’re still there. They’re still there.

Chris Bailey
Yeah, okay. Hey, everybody, again, I hope you remember me five years ago. Rule of three. At the start of each day, fast forward to the end of the day, what three things will you want to have accomplished? It’s my favorite intention setting ritual. I do it every day, every week, every year, so that when I do my daily intentions, they can feed into the weekly and the yearly ones. They all work together like beautiful magic.

Tools. Tools. Man, you know what? I’m going analog these days. I love having a physical book, because I feel my eyes are glazing over from looking at screens all day long, and just practicing a bit of interstitial journaling between tasks. It allows me to really just reflect for one short little paragraph, “What do I really want to get out of what I’m going to do next?” So, an analog pen, of course, the Pilot Precise V5 or V7 RT.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. All right. Well, any final thoughts, Chris?

Chris Bailey
After looking at the research on intentionality, I used to think intention is beautiful, and you see how complicated it is. And it’s in that complicatedness that I think we see our humanness, right? And so, I really think that it’s intentionality that makes us human.

And by connecting with that, you know, talked a lot about deliberate intent, we got to love our defaults, too. They’re who we are. They make up our values. Love your defaults and then you can layer on even better goals, better intentions on top of those.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Chris, thank you.