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Career Management Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Jun 20
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972: Amy Edmondson on How to Fail Well

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Amy Edmondson shares how to minimize unproductive failures and maximize intelligent ones.

You’ll Learn

  1. What separates good failure from bad failure 
  2. The surprisingly simple tool that prevents many failures 
  3. How to stay motivated in the face of failure 

About Amy

Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School. Her work explores teaming – the dynamic forms of collaboration needed in environments characterized by uncertainty and ambiguity. She has also studied the role of psychological safety in teamwork and innovation. Before her academic career, she was Director of Research at Pecos River Learning Centers, where she worked with founder and CEO Larry Wilson to design change programs in large companies. In the early 1980s, she worked as Chief Engineer for architect/inventor Buckminster Fuller, and innovation in the built environment remains an area of enduring interest and passion.

Resources Mentioned

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Amy Edmondson Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Amy, welcome back.

Amy Edmondson
Great to be back.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am super excited to hear your wisdom and talk about failing well. And I’d like it if you could kick us off with one of your favorite failures, personally or professionally?

Amy Edmondson
My favorite failure has to be the time, as a second year PhD student, I had a hypothesis that better teams would have lower medication error rates. I finally got the data after six months of data collection, put it all together, ran the numbers, and, alas, I had failed. My hypothesis was not only not supported, it was 180 degrees wrong.

In other words, the data suggested that better teams measured by a validated team survey instrument had higher error rates, not lower. So, that was just, you know, my dreams of publishing a paper evaporated in a moment as I looked at the screen, and I felt quite despondent about it. So, that was a failure, right? There was no question about it. But of course, it’s a favorite because, ultimately, it pointed me in the direction of a success.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, tell us about how that unfolded.

Amy Edmondson
Well as I tried to figure out what this might mean, “What does it mean when a valid team survey assessment data suggests that these are really better teams, they’re better led, they’re more engaged, they have higher quality relationships? What does it mean when those kinds of teams appear to have higher error rates than their counterparts?”

And it suddenly occurred to me, and what I later thought of as a blinding flash of the obvious, that maybe the better teams aren’t making more mistakes. Maybe they’re more willing to report them, maybe they’re less likely to cover them up, to keep them secret, to shove them under the rug. And the more I thought about that, the more possible, even likely, that became. And, of course, it’s hard to talk about mistakes at work. It’s hard to admit you’ve done something wrong. It’s hard to ask for help when you don’t know quite what to do.

And because of that, what I increasingly started talking about, interpersonally risky nature of those behaviors, it would, in fact, be, at least, it could explain the unexpected findings. It could be an alternative explanation, that the dependent variable, the error rates, was actually a faulty measure. It was a measure that was subject to reporting bias. And just having that insight, of course, wasn’t enough to prove it or to do anything else with it, but it led me down a path of trying to understand whether teams, in fact, have different interpersonal climates, especially around something fraught like error.

And if so, would that affect their learning behaviors? And if so, would that affect their performance? And so, that led me down a road of doing a very different kind of research, which was to sort of explore those possibilities. Later, I called that interpersonal climate, with the input of a peer reviewer on a paper, psychological safety. And so, that was sort of the birthplace of a, then, thriving research program on team psychological safety, which turns out to be a very powerful predictor of team performance in a variety of industry contexts.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. Psychological safety is huge, and you are the queen of it, and thank you for sharing those insights with us in our last conversation. So, yeah, now let’s dig into some of the goodies you shared in your latest book, Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well. Any particularly striking, surprising, counterintuitive discoveries that you made along the way and put forward in this book?

Amy Edmondson
Yes, you know, the failure I just described was what I do call in the book an intelligent failure, and it’s intelligent because, and in research there’s many intelligent failures if you’re doing it right, which is that you are pursuing a goal of developing new knowledge. It’s in new territory. We don’t yet know what will happen. You’ve got a hypothesis, like you’ve done your homework to find out what we know, what we don’t know, and you have a good idea about what might work, and the failure is no bigger than it has to be.

You don’t spend your whole research budget on one experiment. You sort of do it thoughtfully so that you can learn in a reasonably efficient way. And so, science is full of intelligent failures, of course. But I think the surprising thing that I learned through all of this research is that, as human beings, we respond similarly to intelligent failures as to what I’ll call basic and complex failures, the preventable kind, meaning our emotional reactions are similarly negative and unhelpful.

As I started telling my story of my research failure as a second-year graduate student, the emotions I felt were downright catastrophic. I was starting to envision I’ll have to drop out of graduate school, I’m no good at this, I failed, you know, crazy stuff, which is just factually wrong-headed, but that’s where your brain goes. A failure is always disappointing, and when you have one, you can easily, or at least I can, spiral into unhelpful, unhealthy thinking.

And so, I think an opening surprise or insight is that, even though some failures logically are wonderfully helpful in making progress in new territory, we are vulnerable to having an emotional reaction to them that, then, precludes us from learning what we need to learn from them.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is huge, and I want to dig into that in some real detail. But first, could you maybe make the grand case associated with failure being okay, or the main thesis, or the takeaway from Right Kind of Wrong?

Amy Edmondson
Yeah, so it’s not actually as simple as “Failure is okay.” It is as simple as intelligent failure is not only okay, it’s praiseworthy. If you are willing to take risks, and we all must be in order to make progress in our lives and in our jobs, if you’re willing to take risks in new territory, you will face some failures along the way, otherwise, they weren’t risks. If everything you try just goes perfectly, you’re probably not stretching very much, and that’s not a way to be awesome at your job.

So, those are the kinds, you know, the intelligent failures in new territory are indeed the kinds we’ve got to sort of develop the muscles to welcome them, and be not only not despondent about them but actually genuinely delighted by the opportunity to learn and sometimes pivot. But it is equally a book about pulling together what we know about the best practices for preventing preventable failures. One kind of failure I identify is a basic failure, which has a single cause, usually human error, or deviation from the process or protocol or recipe, and those are theoretically and practically preventable.

And so, for instance, in a new job, if you are looking around and you’re not quite sure what to do, and you don’t feel comfortable asking someone, and then you do it wrong and it leads to a failure, that’s a basic failure, and those we aren’t so excited about. It’s a book about failure but it’s really a book about success because the idea is, “Let’s do everything we can to execute well in known territory and to explore well in new territory.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well said. Well said. Well, let’s continue this typology or categorization here. We’ve got basic failure, a deviation from the recipe. My wife and I, we joke about this all the time. She’s like, whenever I cook something, and she said, “Wow, that was great. What’d you do?” And I said, “I did exactly what the recipe told me to do, because I have learned from many, many basic failures, that whenever I think I know better, or this is no big deal, how about I do this little twist, it almost always ends poorly,” unless sure enough, I’ve done the recipe many times, and I thought “Okay, I know how this works. I’m going to put a little extra of this in there because I know that I like this.” And it usually works out okay in those circumstances, so I like the word recipe in there.

Amy Edmondson
ecome an expert in it, and then you’re in a good position to experiment.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, we’ve got our basic failures. And then what else?

Amy Edmondson
Complex failures. So, complex failures are quite simply the perfect storms that bother us and show up in our lives and our organizations. They are the failures that are caused by a handful of factors coming together in just the wrong way, any one of which on its own would not lead to a failure, but the fact of their coming together. Let’s say you accidentally set your alarm clock for p.m. rather than a.m. I’ve done that.

So, maybe you wake up a little late but you still can get to that important meeting on time, but not if you also hadn’t realized your gas tank was hovering on empty and there was a tractor-trailer accident on the highway, five little things happen, none of which on their own would have led you to be late for this important meeting, but they all came together to lead to this complex failure.

Our lives are complex, our world is complex, so complex failures are kind of on the rise, which is depressing. But I think the silver lining of complex failures is that all you really have to do is catch and correct one of the things. Now, some of them are external. There was nothing you could have done about the tractor-trailer, except if it was a really important meeting, you leave a lot of buffers in there. So, then you would have taken extra care to have set the alarm accurately.

But the beauty of them, I mean, the bad news about them is that they’re sort of everywhere and they can just happen when we’re not really at our very best. The good news is, when we’re vigilant, we can catch and correct, and if you sort of catch and correct any one of the factors, you usually can dodge the failure.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And talking about the emotional piece, those are the situations, when you can feel it progressively melting down, that just drive you bonkers.

Amy Edmondson
Yeah, likewise, you sort of see it in slow motion heading your way, and maybe it’s too late to change it, but maybe there’s still time, or at least you can put in a plan B. You can make that phone call and explain and maybe reschedule.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And we have additional categories?

Amy Edmondson
Nope, just the three: intelligent, basic, and complex. And there’s a bright red line drawn between intelligent and the other two because the intelligent ones are the ones that we need to have more of, we need to welcome, we need to just force ourselves to like them. And the other two, we need to kind of sit up straight, pay attention, and try to prevent as many as possible.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, I was going to ask, sit up straight, pay attention, that doesn’t sound hard.

Amy Edmondson
No. That doesn’t sound…yeah, that’s not complete, is it?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Are there some basic protocols, or checklists, or things you recommend to help us prevent those?

Amy Edmondson
Yeah, absolutely. And as I start talking about these things, the worry I always feel is they sound so basic, they sound so simple, and they are. And, unfortunately, they need to be used with intent. So, a checklist, for example, it’s a brilliant tool. It helps us remember to do some of the right things, when maybe it’s just a little complicated, and it would be easy to miss something, turning the anti-icing on, for example, taking off on a wintry storm day, and so we have these structures and tools to help us do the right thing.

But if you have those tools and structures in your life, or in your organization, but you’re using them, roughly speaking, in your sleep, just not really paying attention, not using them with intent, then they don’t help at all, right? If you’re sort of going through the motions of using a checklist but you’re really not paying attention, and you have just a habit of check, check, check, check, check, without your brain in the game, they won’t work. So, no tool is good enough on its own to overcome kind of the vagaries of human nature and lack of discipline.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you talk about good enough, I’m thinking about some people think that they are too good for the checklist.

Amy Edmondson
But that’s another point, isn’t it?

Pete Mockaitis
A Checklist Manifesto, or something, talk about surgeons or whatever, who were reluctant to lower themselves to simply be in checklists.

Amy Edmondson
Right, and that’s because they had the wrong mental model. So, even the wonderful Atul Gawande, who wrote the book, The Checklist Manifesto, I remember hearing him interviewed on NPR, and it was so brilliant because he was asked by the interviewer, “You’re a Harvard surgeon, and so on, a beautiful writer, do you use a checklist yourself in the operating room?”

And he said, “Well, in writing this book, I knew I’d be asked that question, so, of course I had to force myself to use them, even though,” he claimed honestly, “I didn’t think I needed it, right? That’s sort of for mere mortals, but not for me.” I mean, he didn’t say it that way, but it’s exactly, as your question, put it. And so, he said, “And I discovered something.”

He says, “Never does a week go by that that checklist, that I forced myself to use because people like you would be asking me this question, never does a week go by where that thing doesn’t save my process in some way. So, in other words, it turns out I am mortal. I am vulnerable to making mistakes and this very simple, simple tool, this checklist, has saved me on numerous occasions.”

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m curious, as we think about professionals and basic failures, what are some basic failures you see over and over and over again that might be well-suited to a checklist or some sort of a tool along those lines?

Amy Edmondson
If we all think about our experiences as customers, or as patients, just on ordinary annual checkups or something, trying to get the schedule, or trying to, you know, there’s so many organizations that don’t work as well as they should, that you can look around and say, “This could be better with just a tiny bit of scaffolding to allow the recurring, repeating activities to be a bit more programmatic, a bit more supported.” And I know that’s very abstract, right?

Pete Mockaitis
But no, I think that’s a huge tool right there in terms of, you know, it’s funny when we instituted this, when I’m making courses, I have someone, his name is Ian – shoutout to Ian – and we’ve given him the title of Neutral Ambassador of Learning. And the idea is that Ian had nothing to do with producing any of the materials anywhere around the chain, but his role is to step into what we’ve created, and be that first observer, that first voice, and tell us, “All right Ian, what’s wrong? What chapter title was off, wrong? Which bits of the content seemed incomplete or confusing?”

And it’s fantastic! He surfaces all sorts of things, like, “Oh, we were so close that we didn’t even notice.” But with every customer experience kind of a situation, you’d think it’s like, “You know, if you actually tried to fill out this form yourself once, that you’re making us fill out thousands of times, you’d realize that I need more than an inch and a half to write an address. You’d know it on your form.”

Or, that, “Maybe there might be a means by which you can take my name and birth date from one medical form and auto-populate that into the nine other medical forms I have to go through, to have this doctor’s appointment.”

Amy Edmondson
Because if you can do that, you are reducing the likelihood of error, of just simple human error… You probably won’t screw up your birth date. Although sometimes, on my birthday, I screw up my birthday every year because I just automatically write, once I’ve started with my birthday, the year follows naturally.

And so, there I am writing a year from many, many decades ago in the form, when it’s like, “Oh.” It’s just a simple brain malfunction. Right, you write the actual birth date, but yes. So, now I’m thinking, “What are the failures that could’ve been avoided with a simple checklist or making the thing a bit more programmatic?” For instance, in the world of podcasts, I have been on at least one where there was a failure to press record. It’s not catastrophic, nobody dies, but, boy, it can feel almost catastrophic.

Pete Mockaitis
That happened to me once. I felt so embarrassed.

Amy Edmondson
So bad, where you’ve spent all this wonderful time and energy, and then, “Oops. Oops.” It was great for us but the rest of the world would not hear this one, and doing it a second time is just not…but that is one of those errors, by the way, that you learn from and rarely do it a second time. But it is certainly possible to never do it the first time also.

Pete Mockaitis
And I love it, in the software now, we’re on Riverside, and I believe it does this too, it’ll now tell you. If we’re chit-chatting for too long without record, a notification will come up, “Notice, you’re not actually recording now.” So, that’s cool though.

Amy Edmondson
Which is good! Which is good, right? It’s sort of a little check. It’s a check that’s built into the system.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it. Okay. So, then let’s talk about these intelligent failures. You say there are a few criteria that we need to check in order to say that something is an intelligent failure before we could just give ourselves credit, and say, “Oh, that was an intelligent failure. It’s okay.”

Amy Edmondson
Yes. So, first and foremost, it’s in pursuit of a goal. I’m not against just messing about, playing with resources, but that’s another category of activity. That’s play. But if something is an intelligent failure, it is the case that you are pursuing a goal, whether that is a better recipe, or a life partner, or an innovation in your job at work, but it’s something that you’re hoping to accomplish and improve, and it’s arguably in new territory.

It’s not possible to just get the answer for what will happen off the internet. There’s no way to get the new knowledge you are trying to get to make this progress without trying it, without the experiment, and you have a hypothesis where you’ve done enough thinking and homework to have a good sense that this might work, “I know it’s not a slam dunk, but it might work.”

And then, finally, fourth criterion is the failure, if it happens, is no bigger than necessary. It’s just as big as it has to be to give us the new knowledge that we need. And I always say there’s sort of a bonus fifth criterion, which is you take the time to learn from it. And so, those four criteria – pursuit of a goal, new territory, done your homework, no bigger than necessary – can apply to all sorts of realms. They can apply to a blind date. They can apply to improving that cookie recipe. They can apply to an assignment in your job.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. Well, now, Amy, I’d love it if you could give us some fun examples of taking this mindset and approach, and doing it with gusto. What came to mind for me was I’m thinking about Tony Hsieh’s Zappos story, is that one of the first things he had to test was, “Are folks even willing to buy shoes online?” This was back in the day. He didn’t know yet. So, he partnered with a shoe store and said, “Hey, here’s the deal. I’d put a photograph of the shoes in the store, and every time I sell one online, I’ll come here and buy it from you, and then ship it to them.” And so, that’s wildly inefficient from, like, a profit perspective.

Amy Edmondson
Right, but it’s brilliant. It’s brilliant.

Pete Mockaitis
But from learning, yes. It nails it.

Amy Edmondson
Because imagine, I mean, compare that little experiment, expensive experiment, but compare that to setting up a whole warehouse and filling it with shoes of all sizes, and then sort of waiting and hoping. I mean, since we don’t know if customers will buy them online in the first place, what if they don’t? Well, we have just spent tens of thousands of dollars filling up our little warehouse here with shoes, and it failed. That’s not so good. Whereas with him, if it had failed, then all he would’ve lost was a little bit of his time, and maybe he would’ve disappointed this nice shoe store, but no harm done, really, right? So, it’s a beautiful example.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Well, so please, give us some more. As we’re thinking about professionals who want to have more intelligent failures more often, any cool tales that illustrate how this could be done well in practice?

Amy Edmondson
One of the intelligent failures, and it’s not professional, it’s personal, that I love, intelligent failure stories, is my high school friend, Laura, who in her 40s, decided she wanted to learn how to play ice hockey, which is kind of crazy if you think about it, but, anyway.

Well, she lived in New Hampshire, so she thought it was really one of the things that people around her did all the time, and so it seemed like a good social activity and so on. And I think, it almost goes without saying, that her first forays onto the ice were failures, and it was intelligent because, again, she had a goal to join this league, to have some fun. She had done as much as you can do. She’d skated as a child, but in figure skates, not hockey skates. She knew enough to know that she sort of liked sliding around on the ice, and she didn’t try to join the Bruins or anything. She joins this sort of local women’s league.

And certainly, those first few weeks would not have made her a very valuable team member but she got better and really fell in love with the sport, and it remained an important part of her life now. So, that’s where someone is willing to take the risk of doing something new that might not go well. It’s not new territory for the world, but it was certainly new territory for her in her life.

I suppose in business, you bring up Tony and Zappos, but earlier than that, Amazon, obviously buying books online is not as challenging as selling shoes online, but really, “Would enough people go? Could you make it? Could you make a company work out of that?” And, of course, we later understand that Jeff Bezos had much bigger dreams in mind, but he didn’t start with, “Okay, I’m going to become the retailer of everything,” and assume that’s going to work.

He started with, “Well, let’s see if we can sort of create a little bookstore online, and drum up some enthusiastic customers, and then let’s see if we can extend some of those customers into buying other things. And then let’s see if other customers, who maybe don’t buy books that often, will come and buy other things because our operations are now so good.” So, that would be another story of one risk at a time.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. And then let’s talk about this emotional piece. When we hit a failure, we can think, “I’m no good at this,” and we’d have an emotional reaction that prevents us from doing the learning, doing the persisting, doing the optimal response that keeps us moving forward. Boy, in the heat of battle, Amy, how do we address this stuff?

Amy Edmondson
So, this is why I spend some time in the book talking about becoming more self-aware and really more self-reflective and able to pause our unhelpful, unhealthy thinking and redirect it. So, I described my unhealthy, unhelpful thinking in response to my research failure years ago, and I had to learn, and we all have to learn, to kind of talk ourselves away from the wildly emotional and really inaccurate response to the disappointment of failure and rethink it, and sort of reframe it.

Reframe it from “Oh, this is awful. I’m going to have to drop out of my PhD program,” to, “Oh, this is disappointing. I wonder what it might mean?” Now, that’s a shift, or it’s a major cognitive shift, but it’s not unheard of. It doesn’t seem impossible to our listeners, I imagine, that you can practice and then learn to catch yourself, and correct your exaggerated thinking, and turn it into more scientific thinking that brings cooler, more logical thoughts, that also cool the hot emotions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Could you give us an example of that in practice?

Amy Edmondson
Well, I guess an example in practice is I’m going to go back to this really important meeting, maybe it’s a job interview, and I experienced that little complex failure and I’m really unprofessionally late. I show up late. In fact, I show up so late that they’ve moved on to the next candidate. And my sort of human being’s response might be, “This is awful. I’m not going to get the job. This is the end of my life. No one’s going to hire me, and I’m going to starve to death.” Well, no, right?

So, that’s what the psychiatrist, who I talk about in the book, Maxie Maultsby, would call awfulizing or catastrophizing something that is, indeed, not great, not a great performance, but not the end of the world. And so, once you recognize that, that little emotion taking hold, that kind of your amygdala gets hooked and, says, “This is just terrible,” you pause, and you say, “No.” You force yourself to say, “This is inconvenient.”

That’s my favorite word, right? It’s inconvenient. Because, yep, it’s inconvenient, and it’s not the end of the world. And either it’s, “I’ll make amends, I’ll make an apology, maybe get a second chance,” or, “I will definitely not do this again for my next interview.” You figure out. It’s a shift from a backwards-facing, highly emotional, “This is terrible,” to a forward-facing, “Okay, that wasn’t ideal. What will I do differently next time?”

And this is how we continuously cool our emotions down, but we also force ourselves to keep learning, keep getting more thoughtful, keep getting more disciplined and wiser, and, ultimately, more creative as well, because we’re more willing to take risks because we know that the downside of the risks won’t be catastrophic.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. And if we’re having trouble even beginning to think clearly and rationally and calmly about the matter, any other pro tips? Is it sleep? Is it walking? Is it cold water? Is it any of that?

Amy Edmondson
Oh, yeah, all of the above, depending on what you like. So, I would say you start with the proverbial and the real deep breath. That deep breath will interrupt the automaticity of the thinking. But, for me, certainly one of the things that I habitually have relied upon is go for a run. If I’m really stuck on something, and I just change the scenery, literally by put some running clothes on and go for a run, it completely changes how I’m thinking. It seems to put things more in perspective, and so exercise, that’s one, but anything that interrupts.

You could have a checklist of questions to ask yourself. It could be along the lines of, “Okay, what truly are the consequences of this? And what did I learn? And why is this now something that I’m able to put to use going forward?”

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

Amy Edmondson
So we’ve just been talking about sort of self-awareness, self-reflection, self-discipline. Another key domain is context awareness. Be more mindful and thoughtful when you’re in a dangerous context. I know that’s obvious, but it’s truly violated all the time. People don’t put their safety equipment on when they should have, or they text and drive.

So, develop a habit of thinking quickly and clearly about the context, “What are the stakes here? What are the risks? Financial? Reputational? Safety? And what’s the uncertainty?” And act accordingly. Have lots of fun experimenting when the stakes are low. Be very, very thoughtful and vigilant when the stakes are high.

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

Amy Edmondson
One of my very favorite quotes is Viktor Frankl, which is, “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space lies our opportunity to choose. And in that choice lies our freedom.”

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

Amy Edmondson
I think my favorite bit of research is in the research on the fundamental attribution error by Lee Ross at Stanford, where they show in some sort of laboratory experiments that we are relentlessly willing to attribute others’ shortcomings to their own personality defects or character defects. But our own, we will very quickly and naturally see the situational forces at work. So, once we know that we’re likely to do that, once we truly internalize the idea that we will spontaneously do that, then we can step onto the road of becoming a better person, and giving others the same benefit of the doubt we often give ourselves.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Amy Edmondson
I have many long-standing favorite books, but I’m in the middle of one that right now is becoming a favorite book, which is The Road to Character by David Brooks.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they retweet it, they Kindle book highlight it, an Amy Edmondson bit of wisdom?

Amy Edmondson
Choose learning over knowing, and it’s an active choice. We have to choose it because our habitual cognitive response is to feel like we know, feel like we see reality. We have to get curious. We have to choose learning over knowing.

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

Amy Edmondson
I guess AmyCEdmondson.com.

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

Amy Edmondson
Yes, take more risks.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Amy, thank you. This has been lots of fun once again. And I wish you many delightful failures.

Amy Edmondson
Thank you. And you, too.

May 27
0

965: Why Your Boss Isn’t Advocating for You…and What to Do About it with Dr. Nicholas Pearce

By | Podcasts | One Comment

 

Dr. Nicholas Pearce reveals the hidden reason why many high-performers don’t advance—and provides candid solutions.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The harsh truth behind why many don’t advance
  2. Why even a great mentor is no substitute for a sponsor
  3. How to find support if you aren’t being supported

About Nicholas

Dr. Nicholas Pearce is a Chicago native and vocational multihyphenate who has committed his life to creating social impact at the intersection of the academy, the church, and the marketplace. He is an award-winning organizational behavior professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, Founder & CEO of The Vocati Group, a boutique management consultancy, and a respected faith leader. He is also the author of the bestselling book, THE PURPOSE PATH: A Guide to Pursuing Your Authentic Life’s Work.

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Dr. Nicholas Pearce Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Nicholas, welcome.

Nicholas Pearce
Thanks, Pete. Good to be with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to be chatting with you. You have so much wisdom in so many domains, but my producers originally found you from your phenomenal Harvard Business Review article called What to Do When Your Boss Won’t Advocate for You. And it sounds like you struck a nerve with this one, Nicholas. What’s the scoop here?

Nicholas Pearce
I think this is something that a lot of people struggle with. People long to have great mentors and great managers who are invested in their success and care about them as humans. But if there’s something that we learned during the pandemic is that a lot of leaders don’t care about the humanity in us. They view us as not human beings, but as human doings.

And for those who have managers who don’t really care about them, don’t care about their forward progress, or won’t bring their name up in rooms that they’re not able to occupy, it creates a challenge to figure out how to navigate your career and your life forward when you recognize you’re lacking that sponsorship.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, Nicholas, coming strong right out of the gate. I love it. So, they don’t care about our humanity. That’s a strong sentence and yet it seems accurate. It’s not that they wish us harm actively, but it’s just kind of like, you know, at the end of the day, you are a means to producing a thing, and that’s a fairly prevalent attitude. If you had to hazard a guess, what percent of managers do you think fall in the humanity-affirming versus humanity-eh column?

Nicholas Pearce
That’s a hard number to guess at, but I can tell you that most corporations, based on how they are structured, tend to look at people as products, even the language of human resources or human capital. Human capital was, I guess, designed to be something of a more humane way of saying HR, but when you think about human capital, putting human capital alongside physical capital or financial capital, these are resources that are under the control of the organization for the organization’s purposes, not things that have lives of their own to be valued.

So, putting people in the thing column, I think it’s very, very common. And, unfortunately, most folks who have been in the working world for any amount of time know that while HR may sound like they exist for the people, most HR departments exist to shield an organization from lawsuit. So, HR typically is not really there for you. HR is there for the company.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Telling it like it is. So, just for funsies, is there a language that you prefer to use when it comes to organizations and people, like, the people department or learning and development? Like, what are the terms you like to use?

Nicholas Pearce
I love the concept of people and culture. Having an executive leader who is primarily responsible for the development and wellbeing of the people in the organization and the stewardship of a healthy culture, I think that language works well. I think learning and development, as you mentioned, Pete is great because it focuses on the value added to the people and their development. Anything that does not make it sound like the organization owns or controls assets. That type of language, I think, has its own limitations.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Nicholas, I just love where you’re rolling. And I know, in your background, you are both a business school professor and a pastor. And it’s really beautiful to kind of see how the thinking interplays here in terms of just even the words we use, we can find irksome or even dangerous.

Nicholas Pearce
That’s exactly right. I think words have power and words should be used with intention. And I think the words that our organizations and corporations have used over the years are reflective of the desired intention. And as we begin to deconstruct some of those harmful ways of thinking and being in workplace life, we have the opportunity to refresh not only our perspectives, but our language as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, lovely. All right. And we’re just getting started talking about advocacy. So, we’re going to say this word a lot. Maybe since we’re talking words, could you give us some definition? When we talk about having a boss or someone advocate for you at work or advocacy, generally speaking, within work, what do we mean by that? You said speaking up for someone when they’re not in the room, that’s something, got a ring to it. Are there any other dimensions of that you’d highlight?

Nicholas Pearce
Absolutely. So, I think about advocacy as the act of sponsorship, and I juxtapose sponsorship against mentorship. So let me describe the two and contrast them. Mentorship is having that person who will coach you, who will pull you aside and say, “Hey, I like what you did there. Maybe a little bit more of this next time, a little bit less of that.”

Maybe they’re going out to coffee with you once every couple of weeks or every four weeks or every quarter. They’re there to help you navigate. They’re there to invest in your development. They care about you as a human. They care about your performance. They’re trying to invest in making you a better you.

Sponsorship is altogether separate. Sponsorship is not so much about making the direct investment of time in giving feedback, and having lunch regularly, and having coffee, and giving micro corrective feedback. Sponsors are people who are opportunity creators. They are career accelerators and catalysts of opportunity. These are individuals who are bringing your name up when you’re not in the room. And as is often said, 80% of what is said about you is said when you’re not in the room.

So, for many people, especially women, people of color, and others who tend to be excluded from a lot of opportunities in many work environments, they tend to be over-mentored, “We’ll give you a coach, we’ll give you feedback, we’re going to make you a better you,” under the guise that the reason you have not ascended is because you need to be made better.

But what they really need are sponsors, people who are willing to say, “Hey, did we consider giving Nicholas that opportunity? Did we consider giving Jane that promotion? What are the reasons why we’re holding her back? Are we saying she lacks ‘seasoning’? What exactly do we mean by that? Does she need to add paprika and stir? Like, what are we saying?”

The people who are willing to do the blocking and tackling to make sure that organizational politics or bias don’t derail your career, those are your sponsors. And so, many people are over-mentored, but under-sponsored. And so, the whole concept of advocacy speaks to an individual using their credibility, their capital on you to advance you and your career.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so then can you tell us, it’s like, “Okay, boys, it’s really important that we have people speaking up for us when we’re not in the room,” how would we even know the extent to which this is or is not happening since we’re not in those rooms?

Nicholas Pearce
Absolutely. You can tell, one, what your boss is saying to you offline. Do you and your manager have a relationship where feedback flows naturally and continuously? Or are you in a situation where your feedback comes mostly in the form of a formal annual or semi-annual review process during which you get blindsided with feedback that sounds off-base? If so, that could be a warning sign that your boss is not going to bat for you when you’re not in the room.

Do you and your boss enjoy a collaborative relationship? Or do you feel like your boss is competing with you? If your boss competes with you, because perhaps they view you as a threat to their advancement, or as a threat to their supremacy, they’re probably not advocating for you.

If you’ve been in a role for three or five years, and there’s never been a conversation about what your future looks like, I mean, let’s be for real, Pete, if you’ve been in a role a year or two, and there hasn’t even been a conversation about what your future looks like, that may be an indication that your boss doesn’t care what your future looks like, and that they’re certainly not advocating for you and for it at tables that you may not even know exist in the organization.

Pete Mockaitis
Nicholas, I love what you’re saying in that it’s very candid and blunt, and I think some of us don’t even want to entertain the belief that this harshness, reality is present when we’re hearing a lot of nice things.

Nicholas Pearce
Absolutely. I have been in spaces personally and have coached leaders, and employees, students of mine who had all the raw ingredients, I mean, had all the learning, all the degrees, all the certifications, all the skills, all the receipts in terms of high performance, and yet found themselves stuck. And what happens for many people is that it’s the ultimate gaslighting. You’re left to wonder, “What did I do wrong? What did I not do right? Is it me? What am I lacking? What do I need to change? Am I too much? Am I too little? Do I need to turn up, turn down? What is it that’s wrong with me?”

And a lot of us wind up falling into cycles of anxiety and depression because we have been trained at a certain level to believe that the problem is always us. And what I’ve discovered is that there are a lot of people who are incredibly gifted and incredible contributors and collaborators who just run into managers and bosses who don’t know how to lead, or don’t know how to be humane, or are insecure.

And because this continues to do incredible damage to people in an era and a season where mental health needs are already at their highest, I feel at some level, Pete, that the truth will set the people free. And to release themselves from the fear or the feeling that they are not enough and to, perhaps, sometimes release their boss from the expectation that they will be a good advocate when perhaps they don’t want to be or don’t know how to be.

Now, I do have to rush and add this, that if you’re just a chronic underperformer, these words don’t apply to you. Like, you need to do better, right? But if you find yourself consistently meeting or exceeding expectations, you’re knocking the ball out of the park, so to speak, on a consistent basis, everyone can see your brilliance and your promise but your boss, maybe it’s not you. It might just be them. And they’re not perfect people. They’re people, they’re not perfect, but it is your life.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m wondering, if folks find themselves in this position, they might feel kind of stuck. Could you maybe give us a bit of hope, a bit of inspiration, a story of someone who saw a transformation in this department in terms of advocacy wasn’t happening and then it kicked off and good things unfolded?

Nicholas Pearce
Absolutely. One of my coaching clients had this very scenario happen, where the boss was really great in terms of giving mentorship and guidance and coaching and feedback, very warm relationship, their families got together on weekends. I mean, it seemed like a really healthy relationship on one level, but they recognized that, at a certain level, the boss really appreciated them being in that role. Because, let’s just say they got their TPS reports in on time every time, and the concept of losing that individual to another team or to a higher level, perhaps in a different business unit, would create issues for that boss.

And so, that boss, at a level, was conspiring to suboptimize that individual by being nice, being kind, keeping them happy, but not giving them the growth opportunities that they deserved and needed to continue to fulfill their potential. So, this individual had the conversation with their boss and said, “Hey, I really enjoy being on your team. Help me see what future could look like. Help me see what next can be.” And that opened up a healthy conversation where the boss kind of came clean and said, “I knew this day would come. And I’ve really enjoyed having you on the team.”

And they kind of came clean about how there were opportunities that existed in the organization and they were waiting on that individual to come forward to raise their hand and say, “Hey, I actually do want to grow. I don’t just want more money. I don’t just want autonomy. I don’t just want flex hours. I actually want to grow. I want to be able to be my best and become even better at a higher level in the organization.”

And so, that conversation actually opened the door for the boss to advocate because the foundational relationship was in place, high performance was already acknowledged, and so this was just an invitation to the boss to move from mentor to sponsor.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Understood. And I like what you say there. It’s not necessarily evil. Like, they have warm feelings about, it’s like, “No, this person is so amazing. I feel so blessed,” and delighted to have them on their team, but it’s just a little bit of selfishness, which we all are subject to. It’s like, “This is so amazing. I don’t want this person to ever leave.”

But, again, you know that it’s a finite clock. When there’s someone amazing in a role, it’s, like, it’s only a matter of time before they go to a bigger role. And I think this is the way of all things. I think we had a handyman who was awesome and someone said, “Oh, he probably should increase his rates.” And I said, “Inevitably he will.”

Nicholas Pearce
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
“Because we are aware of his awesomeness.”

Nicholas Pearce
Exactly. We don’t want to be the ones to tell him that, or we’re happy to tell him as long as he keeps our rate unchanged, right? But this is exactly it. This happens a lot, you know, Pete. It happens in the nonprofit sector a ton, where you have long-serving executive directors or CEOs or presidents, they’ll be in the seat for 25, 30, 40 years. And they’ll have a talented person underneath them in the organization, who everybody within a mile can see has CEO or executive director capability. But that CEO recognizes, “I’m 55, and I have no intention to retire anytime soon.”

“So, because there’s only one CEO at a time, and I intend to sit in this seat for another 10 to 15 years, I have a choice to make. Either I invest in you becoming the very best you can be, which means losing you, or I continue to suboptimize you to make you question whether you have what it takes to be in my seat. But because I’m not ready to give up my seat to you at this time, now I’m not advocating for you. I’m not bringing your name up in the marketplace because I could lose you, and you fulfill an important part on this team. I value more what you produce than who you are.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Nicholas, you are just touching on exactly, I think, some eye-opening stuff for a lot of people, like, “What’s wrong with me?” It’s like, “Oh, this is what’s really going on under the surface. Understood.” So, lay it on us, if we find ourselves in such a position, what do we do about it?

Nicholas Pearce
Well, one very practical thing that we can all do is to look for advocacy elsewhere. Your boss may not be the only advocate you can get in your organization. Ideally, you’d have a direct supervisor who could go to bat for you because they know your work most closely, but there are other influencers who can give you the boost you need. There could be someone in the organization that is even more high ranking than your boss.

Maybe an ally who might bring your name up. Maybe it’s someone you met in the context of an employee resource group. Maybe it’s someone who you met at the company holiday party. Maybe it’s someone you ran into at a company-wide task force. Maybe it’s someone who, when the time came for the company’s intramural softball team to form, they were the person you rode to the games with. Who knows? But there are other people who can speak to you and can perhaps be an accomplice, a co-conspirator, if you will, in advancing your cause and advancing your career.

Another really helpful thing, and this is something that’s hard for a lot of us, is to build our networks outside of our organizations. For many of us, we may be socialized to feel that is disloyal or underhanded or somehow strategic in the most nefarious sense, but I believe that, what I call 360 -degree advocacy, is a gift that we should all take advantage of. We’ve got advocates above us. We’ve got advocates beside us who are our peers. And we can also have advocates in our direct reports.

Not underestimating the value of people beyond your boss in your organization can be helpful, but also people outside of your immediate workplace who may be LinkedIn connections, or are part of professional associations, or alumni groups, or other civic and community service outlets. Those individuals can speak to your promise as well and may be able to help create opportunities for you outside the organization.

And sometimes, as the saying goes, folks won’t miss the water until the well runs dry. And sometimes you give people the gift of goodbye, and it doesn’t have to be messy. It can just be an investment in self. Investing in yourself and your future does not have to be self-ish, right? Because at the end of the day, let’s face it, Pete, if someone lets you sit on the bench for 10 years and they never advocate for you, that’s 10 years of your life that are down the drain.

And they’re not going to come to you at the end of those 10 years and say, “You know what, Pete, I’m sorry you wasted your entire 30s.” It’s going to be on you to make up for that lost time. And an apology is not going to do it. You owe it to yourself. I was having a conversation with a group of executives who are whining and complaining about Millennials and Gen Z being disloyal. And I said, “Listen, y’all can complain and moan about that all day long until you recognize that companies aren’t loyal like they used to be. Unless you’re giving Gen Z a pension, which you’re not, the company’s already said, ‘Ah, we’re not really loyal to you.’”

If you say in your HR policies, that in order for a 401k or 403b to be fully vested, an individual has to work there three years, you’re telling them from the outset, “We’re investing in you, sort of. Until you’ve been here a while, we’re going to claw back part of the money we’ve invested in your retirement.” So, all of these are signals to individuals that companies aren’t loyal. And so, if companies aren’t going to be loyal to their people, how can you expect people to be loyal to their companies in the way that they were 75 years ago. The rules of the game have changed. And so, it’s not about being disloyal or selfish. It’s just about being smart.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that absolutely resonates. And that was kind of my philosophy when I started my career, it’s like, “I don’t think I can count on any employer long-term ever.” So, it felt kind of mercenary. It was like, “What can I do to make sure I have skills to do anything?” And I was like, “Strategy consulting seems like a good choice out of undergrad.”

And so, and I think it was serving well with developing some skills and some network and some savings to then go do entrepreneurial things. But, Nicholas, I got to hear, when you dropped these truth bombs on these executives whining about the Millennials, how did they reply?

Nicholas Pearce
Oh, they got it immediately. I said, “Listen, all of the participation trophies and all that stuff is cool when it’s your kid or your grandbaby out there on the soccer field getting the little trophy because they put their cleats on the right feet. But when they become your employee, all the participation trophy stuff, where you’re getting rewarded for effort, that goes out the window. It goes out the window.”

And so, recognize, that it was not the Millennials and Gen Z that made participation trophies. It was the uncles and aunts and moms and dads and coaches who could not handle walking away without a shiny object because they showed up and tried their best, and the participation trophy industry was born, but Millennials didn’t demand it. It was the world into which they came of age. They understood it as an expectation. And if Gen X and Baby Boomers had not put participation trophies in the lexicon, Millennials would not expect them in the workplace.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay. So, we’re getting a lot of good contexts from all over here. So, build the network outside the organization. Any other top tips you’d recommend? If we find ourselves not having that advocacy, what else should we do?

Nicholas Pearce
Absolutely. One of the most common cliches that I have heard that I actually believe has truth underneath it is that sometimes rejection can be protection and redirection.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. It rhymes too.

Nicholas Pearce
And so, if you find your manager not advocating for you, it could very well be an intentionally closed door that is designed to push you in the direction of purpose. This is something that I talk about a fair amount in my book which is entitled The Purpose Path: A Guide to Pursuing Your Authentic Life’s Work. And what I find is that, in many cases, the adversity that we may face, whether personally from a health perspective or otherwise, or even professionally in terms of doors that are slammed shut in our faces, sometimes that adversity is actually the grist of discovering purpose.

Oftentimes, people think that the purpose that we have in life is to just be happy. And I’m not the happiness police. I’m not anti-happiness, Pete. However, I have discovered that, oftentimes, it is those painful circumstances that push us into a place where we discover purpose that we would never have discovered before. And so, while many of us want to organize our lives around the avoidance of pain, if we avoid pain, we actually may be avoiding purpose.

Now, I’m not saying we should be trying to attract pain. Hear me clearly. All I’m saying is that sometimes when a boss doesn’t advocate, when a door closes, it could be a catalyst that is pushing you toward purpose and protecting you from calamity that you had no clue was coming your way. So, really embracing the moment in a different way and reframing it as not so much, “This is a flaw in me,” but perhaps more, “This is giving me an opportunity to reflect, to retool, to perhaps even take a break and rest and really think about how I connect my soul with my role.”

“Maybe I was just doing a job, earning a nine to five paycheck, doing the things, paying down my student loans, making the moves, doing the things. But now I actually want there to be meaning in my work. Yeah, I’ve got skills. Yeah, I work for the big shiny company with the stock options and all of the trinkets. But now I actually want to do something with my life that matters. I want to have purpose in my work. I want to connect my soul with my role.” And maybe that closed door was the catalyst to get you to see that purpose is calling.

Pete Mockaitis
That was well said. Well said. Well, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about a few of your favorite things?

Nicholas Pearce
Sure. I think that as much as we often think about what happens when others don’t advocate for us, I think that it’s important that we recognize our responsibility to advocate for others. Oftentimes, it’s very easy to think about what your boss is or is not doing for you, and you’re absorbed in what’s happening over your head, and you’re thinking that you are the main character in the organization story, and you are not.

Many of us don’t advocate for others because we’ve never been advocated for. And while that may be understandable, I don’t think that’s a valid excuse. We have to be intentional about lifting as we climb, not having the crabs-in-a-barrel mentality where only one of us can be advocated for at a time, “And if it’s not me, that means you win and I lose.” I think this zero-sum game mentality, this fixed-pie thinking is eroding the fabric of society.

And so, I think for as many people who may be attracted to our conversation today, because they find themselves in spaces where they weren’t getting advocated for, perhaps being the leader you wish you had can be a very important part of your life’s work and your own personal scorecard in terms of how you evaluate your leadership.

Pete Mockaitis
Right on. And now, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Nicholas Pearce
“Weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes in the morning.”

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

Nicholas Pearce
A favorite bit of research that I love talking about is this vintage study that was conducted by Kathy Phillips, Katie Liljenquist, and Maggie Neale. They’ve done this study looking at the power of diversity to help teams win. And the science on this from over 20 years ago is quite clear, that diverse teams can outperform homogenous teams when the task calls for creativity, innovation, information-sharing, and tackling complexity. This is a well-stated, well-worn vintage research finding. It is not a part of the recent DEI movement. This is pure science from back in the before times that many organizations know about but haven’t really embraced.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Nicholas Pearce
Necessary Endings by Henry Cloud.

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

Nicholas Pearce
Sabbath.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Nicholas Pearce
Favorite habit is prayer for me. It’s time to really refocus.

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

Nicholas Pearce
Yeah, oftentimes, it’s really in the space of this purpose conversation that we started to explore a little bit toward the end. And it is the fact that you owe it to yourself to live a life on purpose. You were created with a purpose. You have a reason for being. And you owe it to yourself to discover that and to do something about it.

A lot of people say that they are reflecting or meditating or praying for purpose because they need clarity on what their purpose is. And for some people, that is truly the case. But there’s a significant percentage of people who I think are probably with us today, Pete, who don’t need further clarity. They need more courage. And once they acknowledge the fact that they’ve got the clarity they need already, the missing ingredient is courage, now it’s their move.

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

Nicholas Pearce
NicholasPearce.org is a great place. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, social media, Facebook @napphd. I also have a TED Talk that folks have been enjoying entitled, “Don’t Ask Me What I Do.” So, any of those spaces will be great to connect.

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

Nicholas Pearce
Be the change you want to see. If you feel like you’re not getting advocated for, advocate for someone else. If you had a terrible onboarding experience, make someone else’s onboarding a little softer. If you feel like it’s time for you to pivot from a job, don’t be messy on the way out the door. Embrace the gift of the lessons you learned in the previous season and take the high road and walk out with grace, not looking at that past experience as time wasted, but looking at yourself perhaps as an alum of that organization or institution, and always seeking to do your best, no matter where you find yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And, Nicholas, this has been fantastic. I wish you much good advocacy and purpose.

Nicholas Pearce
Thanks, Pete. Likewise.

May 16
0

962: Marshall Goldsmith Giving Away All His Knowledge through AI

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Marshall Goldsmith unveils his latest (free!) innovation in the field of artificial intelligence: MarshallGoldsmith.Ai.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why Marshall put all of his leadership knowledge inside a bot
  2. Where AI excels and where it falls short 
  3. Crucial considerations before using–and making–AI bots 

 About Marshall

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith is the only two time Thinkers50 #1 leadership thinker in the world. He has been recognized as the #1 executive coach in the world for over a decade. He is the #1 New York Times best selling author of books that have sold over 3 million copies including What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, MOJO, Triggers and The Earned Life. He is the only living author that has 2 books recognized by Amazon.com as the Best Leader and Success books of all time. He has over 1.5 million followers on LinkedIn alone.

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Marshall Goldsmith Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Marshall, welcome back.

Marshall Goldsmith

Very good to see you again. Thank you for inviting me.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, it’s good to see you again. I’m seeing a familiar backdrop. I remember you invited me to your home last time, and that was super cool. But I think this joke maybe has already been done before, Marshall, but if you’ll forgive me, I have to ask. Is it actually you, the human being Marshall Goldsmith, I’m speaking to?

Marshall Goldsmith

This is indeed me, the human Marshall version.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Okay. Because I’ve used the Marshall Bot, the AI situation that we’re talking about, and I didn’t think it could do a video of your face yet. Is that accurate?

Marshall Goldsmith

That is coming.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay.

Marshall Goldsmith

Now, the sequence of events is text first, then voice, then video, then video and multi languages, and then, ultimately, the metaverse.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay, yeah. You have a very clear pathway but let’s back way up to the beginning. So, all right, Marshall, we got a MarshallGoldsmith.ai. What’s the story here? What’s that about? Why? Tell us everything.

Marshall Goldsmith

I’ve always wanted to give away all that I know to as many people as I can. And I’ve done a pretty good job of it, yet I’ve tried to figure out some technology to make this work. I have pretty much 20 years of abject failures to my credit. I tried things like interactive videos, you know, $3,000 clunky boxes that weighed a ton and didn’t work. I mean, I have tried so many things with nothing but failure until the last year.

So, just in the last year, in hindsight, by the way, we had a whole group of people trying to figure out how to do this. It was really like having a hundred monkeys in a room waiting to type the Gettysburg Address. It wasn’t going to happen. We tried and failed. It wasn’t going to happen. So, what happened is now, after the advent of this new technology, it is mind-blowing. And not only is what I thought it would be, it’s about a hundred times better than I thought it would be.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay, cool. Well, so the technology to, as I’ve experienced it, I go to MarshallGoldsmith.ai, which all listeners can do right now. I can type in some questions or things and it will give me a response. And I can even play your voice, to hear your voice doing that response. So, that’s kind of fun. And so, tell me, how does this differ from, say, ChatGPT?

Marshall Goldsmith

Well, a couple of ways. First, everything that is a computer bot is biased. Let me give you what I mean by that. Let’s say you ask a question, “What is leadership?” A simple question, but there are 30 different definitions. My old mentor, Dr. Paul Hersey taught me, he said, “Look, always use an operational definition. Never say it’s the right definition. Just say it’s your definition. There are many ways you can find words. Don’t get into semantic contests.”

Well, when you use Marshall Bot, it’s my definition, so at least you know whose opinion you’re getting.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. So, duly noted, fair enough. Every AI bot will be biased in one way or another. With the Marshall Goldsmith.ai, we know it is biased in all the ways Marshall Goldsmith is biased.

Marshall Goldsmith

And my bot has no political opinions. No political opinion, no medical advice, and no financial advice. So, mine is programmed just to give you advice about people issues or things I may know something about. Anything else that’s outside of my bailiwick, boom, it doesn’t talk about.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I actually really appreciated that. I’ve asked it several questions and it says, “I apologize, apologize.” It double apologizes. Maybe that’s a quirk or a bug, “But this question is outside of my expertise. As an executive coach, I am only able to answer questions related to my life teachings and books.”

I was really having fun with it. It was like, “Hey, who calls you every day with those questions? And what are they?” It’s like, “My friend Jim Moore asked me these daily questions.” Okay, cool. It’s like, “Hey, did your daughter win Survivor?” “Well, my daughter, Dr. Kelly Goldsmith, was a contestant. She got far but didn’t quite win.” It was like, “Okay. All right. This is sure enough.”

Marshall Goldsmith

Ask it. Ask it why I wear a green T-shirt every day.

Pete Mockaitis

You know, I remember looking at your closet, there’s like a dozen green shirts.

Marshall Goldsmith

“Why do you wear a green polo shirt every day?” ask it that, “Why do you wear a green polo shirt?”

Pete Mockaitis

Let’s do it. Let’s do it. And, guys, you can have the same fun at home at MarshallGoldsmith.ai. Marshall Bot is thinking, ellipsis, “The New Yorker Magazine wrote a story. Larissa MacFarquhar noted you always wear a green polo shirt. You didn’t do that, but that’s what you remembered. Now they expect it from you.” Okay, that’s fun. Well, so we got a thing. Maybe we got a thing, it’s different in that the training dataset is not the whole internet, it’s just your stuff, like your books, your blogs, your articles. This is what it was built off of. I don’t know, am I in there? Is the interview? Like, I interviewed you, would our source material be there?

Marshall Goldsmith

Answer is I don’t know. Let me tell you, though, what it does do that I had not planned and only started doing like a month or two ago. My daughter wanted to trick it, so she said, “Aha, how is utilitarian philosophy related to your coaching?” I don’t know what utilitarian philosophy is. It gave this brilliant answer.

You can ask it, “How is Islamic philosophy, Buddhist philosophy anything related to my coaching?” it’ll answer it. So, what it does is it actually does peruse the internet, yet it puts everything through the filter of what it knows about me. Then it answers it in my voice in a way that is pretty much 100% what I would say. And, by the way, in about five seconds. This is mind blowing. This is not, by the way, what I expected. It’s way better than what I expected.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Cool. And I see that the tech platform underlying this is from a company Fractal.ai. Do we know, what are they working with? Do they have their own model? Or is it Gemini? Or is it…?

Marshall Goldsmith

I don’t know. Let me tell you, I’ve been a very unusual sequence of characteristics that makes this possible. Not too many people have their own sophisticated AI computer bots. So, this is reasonably unusual, number one. Why? For four reasons. One, I got a lot of followers. So, I’ve got 1.5 million followers on LinkedIn. Well, you give away everything you know, if you don’t have any followers, guess what? No one cares. You give away. Nobody cares.

Number two, I’ve got a lot of content. You really need a lot of content to make this work. If you have a tiny amount of content, it’s not really worth it. Number three, I’m willing to give it away. So, not too many people have a lot of followers, a lot of content and want to give it away. And then, number four, I’ve got some nice people at Fractal that are writing big checks to pay for it.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, okay. Cool. So, you part with zero dollars in order to have this capability.

Marshall Goldsmith

Zero.

Pete Mockaitis

There you go. Cool.

Marshall Goldsmith

On the other hand, I don’t charge anything. And they don’t charge anything. Now, let me tell you another thing I love about this. There isn’t some trick door. See, normally when you get something for free, it’s like, “Well, yes, you can get this for free. Yeah, if you spend just a little bit more, you go through the magic door and you get…” you know, there’s always upsell. What I love about this is there is no upsell. The only trick is there isn’t a trick. It’s actually free. You’ve been using it, right? It’s free.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, so then tell me, in terms of if a person just wants to get some value from this, and it’s just, “Hey, I got a question about leadership, whatever. I’m just going to drop by MarshallGoldsmith.ai, and then just ask it.” And that’s sort of how you envision it being used? That’s that.

Marshall Goldsmith

Anyone in the world that wants to. Ultimately, by the way, ultimately in multiple languages.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah. Okay. Cool. All right.

Marshall Goldsmith

It’s not there yet, but ultimately the goal is video and multiple languages.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, so now as compared to, if someone were to straight up hire you as a client, you are their executive coach, and so you’ve got many famous CEOs from across the years who have been your clients.

Marshall Goldsmith

Either, number one, they’ve got to be running a huge nonprofit that does good or, number two, they’re writing a nasty check.

Pete Mockaitis

Certainly. So, right there, we got some savings and better access, so there’s some advantages. But how would you compare/contrast the experience one would have, having you, the human being, coach extraordinaire, Marshall Goldsmith, versus MarshallGoldsmith.ai?

Marshall Goldsmith

MarshallGoldsmith.ai is an information and knowledge bot. It’s not really a coaching bot as such. It’s information and it’s knowledge through the prism of me. That’s really what it is. Now, when I coach people, yeah, you’ve seen me, I just give people crap all the time, you know, I make fun, I’m a terrible coach. Although I get ranked number one coach in the world, God knows why.

But anyway, I always give people a hard time, joking around with them, having fun. I mean, the bot is a bot. It doesn’t tell jokes too much and it doesn’t have some wacky personality, and so it’s probably not as funny as me, and it also doesn’t ask questions as much as me. What it does is it’s not really designed to be a coaching bot. It’s designed to be an information and knowledge sharing bot.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Understood. So, in a way, it’s going to give me something that’s a little bit more customized and on target above and beyond to, say, a Google search, better than Google searching your archives of stuff. I’m getting better…

Marshall Goldsmith

And better. Number one, better, and, two, it’s a pain in the butt. Let me give you some real examples. And as, you know, I can always mention names of my clients. One of my clients is Dr. Patrick Friis. Now, Dr. Patrick, I am a volunteer for him because he’s running the Rady Children’s Hospital. I don’t charge him lots of money, so little kids get…little kids don’t get health care. That’s kind of tacky. So, his is all free, but he’s merging with another children’s hospital, so they can have one of America’s largest children’s hospitals, right?

He asked me, “What’s it like to be a co-CEO? What’s good about it? What’s challenging about it? What ideas do you have?” But that’s a hard question. There really aren’t many co-CEOs. Now I’ve met a few. Some are very successful, like KKR. Most aren’t, right? Most aren’t. And I asked Marshall Bot. The thing had a brilliant answer. No offense to me, it was a much…I agreed with it all, but it was more detailed and thoughtful than my answer.

Then he said, “Well, that’s really good. How about this issue of setting boundaries? That seems very important with the other co-CEO.” Boom! He goes into great detail about that. It was amazing. Then he asked me anything I’d like to add to it. Well, I kind of threw in a little something. I think he tried to make me feel good, “Oh, Marshall, your comment is good. Your comment is good.” I don’t think I added very much. I mean, I think, really, if you had a contest, it versus me, it wasn’t close. Its answer was way better than my answer.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, when it comes to digging up relevant information, it can do that way quickly and way thoughtfully. When it comes to having a rich two-way back-and-forth question dialogue leading somewhere, it just doesn’t have that capability.

Marshall Goldsmith

That’s not what it does. For example, it’s not going to look at you and say, “Okay, why are you sending that for? You know, why are you trying to show off?” I fine my clients $20 every time they start a sentence with no, but, or however, right? So, I talk to them, and my client said, “But, Marshall…” I said, “That’s free. If I ever talk to you again, you say no, but, or however, I’ll fine you $20.” He said, “But, Marshall, 20.” “No, 40. No, no, no, 60, 80, 100. We lost $420 an hour and a half. At the end of the hour and a half, we said, thank you. I had no idea.

I was talking with another client who’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars, right? Hundreds of millions. He’s 53 years old. He’s good-looking, healthy, got a nice wife and three good kids. He’s not happy. You know what I told him? “Raise your right hand, repeat after me. My name is Joe and I’m an idiot.” I said, “You’re an idiot. What is wrong with you? If 99% of the world were listening, they’d be like, ‘What a fool!’ And they’re exactly right. You’re an idiot.” You know what he said? “Thank you.” Marshall Bot is not going to do that.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Understood. So, we got a clear distinction there. So, then, well, I’m curious, thinking broadly about this AI stuff, do you imagine there will be other bot implementations of knowledge bases kind of on the scene emerging in the future?

Marshall Goldsmith

Oh, yeah. I would imagine pretty much everybody’s going to have to do this. I mean, every corporation is going to have to do this. They’re going to have to have their own AI bot of sorts. And I’ll tell you one thing I know that they don’t know. They don’t know how hard it is. I’ve put hundreds of hours into this thing already. This is a lot of work. And it’s easy to do. It’s hard to do right.

Pete Mockaitis

Now the hundreds of hours, I mean, are we counting the time, like writing all those books that you wrote that go into it? Or are we talking about on top of that?

Marshall Goldsmith

On top of that.

Pete Mockaitis

What does that consist of? Like, what were you doing to make that come to fruition?

Marshall Goldsmith

Give it feedback.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. You’re like, “No.”

Marshall Goldsmith

Marshall Bot, I can change the answers. I ask it a question; it gives an answer. Parts I like, I keep; the parts I don’t like, I get rid of. Now, let’s say, if you ask it a question, but maybe it doesn’t have an answer, like somebody asked me, “How is your coaching related to, oh, I think Nietzsche’s philosophy or something?” Well, it didn’t know.

All I have to do then is go to ChatGPT, and say, “How’s my coaching philosophy related to that?” and then it gives an answer because it knows who I am, “How’s Marshall Goldsmith’s coaching philosophy related to that?” It’ll give an answer. On the other hand, I don’t always like all the answer. So, the part I like, I use that to teach my bot. The part I don’t like, I just get rid of. So, I’m using the other bots to train my bot.

Pete Mockaitis

Alrighty. And so, now that you’ve been through hundreds of hours of this, it sounds like you’re pleased with what it’s outputting. Do you still have to say, “Hmm, not quite right? I got to tweak this some more” from time to time?

Marshall Goldsmith

I would see this as a never-ending project. This is legacy for me. I’m 75. I’m going to be dead anyway. I’m just giving everything away. What am I saving it up for, right? I’m just giving everything away to people. My goal is just do a little good here. So, this, to me is, as long as they’re willing to support this, I plan on doing this as long as I can.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, do you have any pro tips on asking questions effectively? Or, I guess, the kids might call it prompt engineering to get excellent output.

Marshall Goldsmith

That is hugely important, because, for example, you might ask it a question, and you think, “Well, gee, I really wish it elaborated on point B.” You just need to learn to ask it to elaborate on point B.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay, sure.

Marshall Goldsmith

But if you don’t know that, you don’t know it. So, prompt engineering is very important. and sometimes you do need to be patient. Like, I recently did a test, and somebody did it and they didn’t get exactly what they wanted. I just re-did the wording just a little bit, they got exactly what they wanted. So, sometimes you do, it’s like anything else that’s new, you have to tinker around with it a little bit.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And tell me more, any other top best practices, worst practices, do’s and don’ts for asking bots questions well?

Marshall Goldsmith

Here’s the problem. Let’s say, “Why don’t people do what they know they should do?” Well, often the idea is they don’t understand it. That’s seldom the case.

If you look at my research, I did a research study called “Leadership is a Contact Sport” with 86,000 people. Anyone’s interested, send me an email, Marshall@MarshallGoldsmith.com and I’ll send it to you.

Eighty-six thousand people. The problem is the theory. They all went to exactly the same course. And then I measured, “How much follow-up did you do after the course?” The people that did no follow-up might as well have been watching sitcoms. It was a total and complete waste of time. And the people that did lots of follow-up got a lot better, “Well, you know, I learned.” No one got better because they went to the course. You got to do something.

Well, the advantage the coach has is the coach reminds you to actually do something, follows up with you, and make sure you’re doing something as opposed to just knowing a theory. From a theory point of view, I can tell you, in terms of if you’re a coach or advisor, do not compete with Marshall Bot. You’re not going to win. Look, I got to rank number one coach and number one leadership thinker in the world. I can tell you. I cannot even get close to competing with this thing. Well, no offense to the rest of the world, if I can’t get close, you can’t either.

Pete Mockaitis

Got you. You can’t come close to competing with it in terms of offering good content answers.

Marshall Goldsmith

Exactly, knowledge. I mean, you can’t get into a knowledge contest with this thing, you’re not going to win.

Pete Mockaitis

It’s got to like the AIs who can crush it in chess or Jeopardy, the knowledge contests. Well said.

Marshall Goldsmith

You can’t beat it.

Pete Mockaitis

As opposed to the accountability emotion stuff because a lot of times, in my experience, a great coach, part of what they bring to the table is just their observation. It’s like, “Hey, I see that you seem to like your energy just kind of dropped there. What’s going on there?” And then you surface something.

Marshall Goldsmith

I’ll give you another one. One person, the first time I met him, he’s introducing himself, so I’m taking notes. After an hour, I said, “Well, I’m now going to read you six times, in the past hour, when you pointed out to me how smart you were. Six.” I read them all back to him, and he was so embarrassed, he goes, “Oh.” I said, “Oh, you’re really not an ass. You’re a really nice guy. You just spend a lot of time proving how smart you are.” This guy had an MD and a PhD. His whole life was proving how smart he is. So, it’s just hard to stop. Well, the computer bot can’t do that.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, I’m curious, so if listeners are thinking, “Wow, I or my team or my organization needs to make our own bot,” can you offer some pro tips, some do’s and don’ts for the creation of your own bot?

Marshall Goldsmith

First, don’t. Don’t assume that technology people can do this for you. It doesn’t matter how good they are. They cannot do this for you. I’ve learned as human beings ask questions in a thousand different ways, and you got to sit there and give this thing feedback. And if your customers are asking it a question, you got to make sure that it’s a good answer.

Let’s say you go to ChatGPT, you say, “All right, what awards have Marshall Goldsmith won?” A simple question. I’ll say, “Give me 20.” Well, 10 of them, I’ve actually won. Five of them are awards I didn’t win. And then the next five, they’re not even awards. It just makes it up. Then I say, “Okay, give me 20 more.” Then it makes everything up. It just starts making stuff up.

Well, you can’t have a business, say you’re in a hospital, you can’t have something representing you making up stuff. You got to have somebody check to make sure this stuff, is it sane here, so it’s not giving you crazy advice. Well, I mean, it might be mildly humorous if ChatGPT or Gemini does that crazy stuff. It’s not mildly humorous if it’s your hospital.

Pete Mockaitis

Absolutely. And so, it seems like, in certain contexts, you might just have to have a human right there intercepting everything. It’s like, “Ooh, that sounds good. That sounds not good.”

Marshall Goldsmith

Well, you need to train it.

Pete Mockaitis

Right. Well, upfront training, and then maybe even real-time interposition.

Marshall Goldsmith

Oh, yeah. You’ve got to ask it question after question. I would say after X number of months, you probably don’t have to have a human there because after, say, six months, most of the questions that are going to be asked have been asked I’ll give an example, “How is humor related to your coaching?” Okay, I never wrote about that. It gave a great answer. The potential of this is amazing.

On the other hand, it’s hard work to do right because humans do not ask questions as you want them to. They kind of ask whatever question they feel like asking.

And also, you got to watch it because people will try to trick the bot, just like you did. They’ll try to get it to talk about politics, or controversial things, or stuff it shouldn’t talk about. Well, you can’t do that in a hospital setting. You just can’t do that, or in a medical setting, or in a corporate setting. You can’t have this thing making mistakes.

From my experience, you got to have to have real content experts do the training, not technology people. Because if you get technology people only, that’s when it goes off the rails because they don’t understand the customer.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, that’s good. All right. Well, Marshall, let’s have some fun with this. I was going to ask about your favorite things, but I might ask Marshall Bot each of the favorite-things questions, and then have you comment on the extent to whether that was accurate.

Marshall Goldsmith

It may or may not have any idea how to answer these questions.

Pete Mockaitis

We’ll say, “Can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?” I’ll give you the Marshall Bot answer and then you can give me your answer.

Marshall Goldsmith

Okay, I’ll be curious. Yeah, mine would be “What got you here won’t get you there.”

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Marshall Bot says, “Successful people become great leaders when they learn to shift the focus from themselves to others.”

Marshall Goldsmith

By the way, equally good.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And can you tell us about a favorite book?

Marshall Goldsmith

Favorite book, yes. Favorite book, “Old Path, White Clouds” by Thich Nhat Hanh. Second favorite book, “The Wizard of Oz.”

Pete Mockaitis

“Old Path, White Clouds” it is. All right. Okay. Let’s say, can you share with me a favorite study or experiment or piece of research?

Marshall Goldsmith

Well, I don’t know if I’d call it a favorite, but one I quote all the time is the marshmallow research. And I quote that, talking about what you should and shouldn’t do. I’m not sure Marshall Bot would interpret the same question as the way I did, but see what it says.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s right.

Marshall Goldsmith

It might say “Leadership is a Contact Sport,” by the way.

Pete Mockaitis

It said you used a series of six active questions that participants answered every day for 10 working days.

Marshall Goldsmith

Yeah, that one. That’s a good study, too. Yeah, it’s from the magazine Dialogue.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, now I got to know. What were those questions or what happened?

Marshall Goldsmith

Oh, well, here’s what happened. Every day, I have people answer six active questions. My daughter, Kelly, taught me about active questions. They all begin with the phrase, “Did I do my best today?” So, everything, like employee engagement is a passive question, “Do you have clear goals? Do you have meaningful work?” Nothing wrong with it. But then it gets people talking what’s wrong with them. Nobody says, “What’s wrong with me?”

The active questions say, “Did I do my best?” so you can’t blame someone else. So, the six questions are, number one, “Every day, did I do my best to set clear goals?” Number two, “Every day, did I do my best to make progress or achieving the goals I set?” Number three, “Every day, did I do my best to be happy?” Number four, “Every day, did I do my best to find meaning?” Number five, “Did I do my best to build positive relationships? And did I do my best to be fully engaged?”

So, rather than blame everybody else for your lack of engagement and meaning in life, you start blaming yourself. You take some responsibility. People that ask themselves these questions every day, huge, get better at almost everything.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Thank you. And now can you name a favorite tool you use that helps you be awesome at your job?

Marshall Goldsmith

I would guess if you have to say something, it would be customized 360 feedback.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Marshall Bot says, “Feed forward.”

Marshall Goldsmith

There you go. Even better. I told you Marshall Bot is better than me. That was a better answer than my answer.

Pete Mockaitis

And how about a favorite habit, something you do that helps you be awesome at your job?

Marshall Goldsmith

Daily questions.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Marshall Bot said feed forward again. All right, sure. And then I ask about a resonant nugget, a quote of yours that really connects, resonates with folks, and they repeat it back often, Kindle book highlight it, retweet it, etc. What’s a Marshall original gem that you’re known for?

Marshall Goldsmith

“To help others get better, start with yourself,” or, “What got you here won’t get you there,” of course.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Yeah. We’ve got something similar, “One of the most important actions or things that a leader can do is lead by example. If you want everyone else to be passionate, committed, dedicated and motivated, you go first.”

Marshall Goldsmith

Very similar principle.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch with you, where should they find you?

Marshall Goldsmith

Marshall@MarshallGoldsmith.com. And to get to Marshall Bot, it’s all free. Just MarshallGoldsmith.ai.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Cool. And then I would say, do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at the job?

Marshall Goldsmith

If anybody asked Marshall Bot 500 questions within the next five days, send me an email and I’ll personally spend a half hour time coaching you.

Pete Mockaitis
Now there is a challenge.

Marshall Goldsmith

Now the record so far on that challenge, one person did ask a thousand questions. But whatever date you air, five days after that, if somebody sends me a note, say, at Marshall@MarshallGoldsmith.com, and says, “I asked Marshall Bot 500 questions within the five days,” I’ll spend an hour just talking with him.

Pete Mockaitis

All right.

Marshall Goldsmith

That way, it’s also great for me because I learn out their experience. See, that’s another way I’m learning. I challenge people to do this, and the ones that ask a lot of questions, and we talk. And, obviously, they’re very serious, they want put in that much time.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, beautiful. All right. Well, Marshall, this has been fun. Thank you. And I look forward to having more enjoyable conversations with Marshall Bot.

Marshall Goldsmith

Thank you so much. Greatly appreciate you inviting me to talk with you.

May 13
0

961: How to Get Better at Anything Faster with Scott H. Young

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Scott H. Young shows how to get better at getting better.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The promise and pitfalls of copying the pros
  2. The See-Do-Feedback model of learning 
  3. How to build the perfect environment for learning 

About Scott

Scott H. Young is the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Ultralearning, a podcast host, computer programmer, and an avid reader. Since 2006, he has published weekly essays to help people learn and think better. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Pocket, and Business Insider, on the BBC, and at TEDx among other outlets. He doesn’t promise to have all the answers, just a place to start. He lives in Vancouver, Canada.

Resources Mentioned

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Scott H. Young Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Scott, welcome back.

Scott Young

Oh, thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I am excited to hear wisdom from your book, Get Better at Anything. Tell us, any particularly surprising or fascinating discoveries you made as you’re putting this together? You’ve been in the learning game for a while. So, tell us what’s new and fresh and interesting for you in terms of learning about learning?

Scott Young

Well, I mean, it’s funny because I wrote a book and I talked to you about it probably about five years ago, Ultralearning. And after I wrote that book, I’m like, “Well, I’m not going to need to write another book about learning.” And as I started digging deeper and deeper, and more and more into the research, I was like, you know, there’s a whole new book here, there’s a whole new set of ideas. And so, basically, this entire book was me including things where I was like, “Oh, that’s neat, I didn’t know that,” or, “Oh, that’s surprising,” or, “That’s useful and no one had ever explained that to me before.”

So, I think when you write these books, you’re also writing for yourself, in a way. You’re writing kind of like, “What did I wish I knew before I read hundreds of books and hundreds and hundreds of papers and this kind of stuff?” Like, what would have been nice for someone to be like, “Oh, here’s a summary of what you need to know.” And so, I mean, that was the starting point for writing this.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, with that, let us know something particularly surprising, useful, and never before explained to you.

Scott Young

Well, so I think one idea, and this is one that I opened the book with and I think is very important, is the idea that how we learn from other people is an extremely important component, not just in our own individual ability to improve, but the ability for entire groups of people, communities, even fields to improve.

So, the story that kind of captured my interest and got me started writing this book was actually about Tetris. Now, Tetris is a game that came out a little over three decades ago and when it came out it was a sensation. People are obsessed with it. They’re playing it hundreds of hours a week. They’re hallucinating falling blocks. But if you look at the people’s scores by the best people who are playing the game, the people who were playing back then are nowhere near as good as like 12- and 13- year-old kids are today.

And the reason why is because back in the day, if you were learning how to play Tetris and you were trying to figure it out yourself, maybe your brother’s older friend knew a technique and you could learn and copy from them but, otherwise, all the players were essentially disconnected. And now we live in the internet age, and you can see live stream videos of exactly how people are doing it, detailed explanations of the strategies, how you move your fingers, everything like this. And the result has been sort of an explosion in performance.

And I was really sort of drawn to this story, not only because Tetris is kind of a funny out of the box example, but also because of how clearly relevant that is for how we learn things in the workplace, and how we learn things in our professional lives. It’s so much of the knowledge that is needed to perform well is locked inside the heads of a few experts. And if you don’t have access to it, if you don’t have the ability to learn from other people, that can really delay and stall your own progress.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, Scott, yes, I love that part of the book about Tetris, because I have in fact watched the Tetris Classic World Championships a few times and am really fascinated by how, yes, the young folks today in Tetris are heads and shoulders above previous champions in terms of their skill. And your point about how, with YouTube and streaming and such, we can really see what are the best folks in the world doing. And as a result, they are advancing much more quickly.

And by contrast, I would say at the very highest level of, say, chess, that has not been as much of a phenomenon, from what I can gather with Magnus Carlsen arguably being better than Bobby Fisher and others of the world champions historically. But, in a way, chess was well documented for centuries in terms of, “Here are the best games of the best players and they’ve been around for quite a long time.” Whereas Tetris and other domains of knowledge, it’s more of a recent phenomenon that, “Oh, hey, we can all see what the best players are doing in great detail all the time.”

Scott Young

Yeah, I think for chess, part of the thing is that it really lends itself to being documented through text. And I think that’s why you have such a rich history of, like, famous games were played 200 years ago and this kind of stuff. I think the technology needed to document elite-level chess play has existed for a really long time. So, of course, there is performance improvements. And I do think that the arrival of like really good computer chess has changed the game too, because there’s just things.

So that’s, like, not a technological innovation that I’m talking about here, but it is an area that I think explains why some of the better players maybe are better than a generation or two ago is that you can have Stockfish search through the space of possible moves and do research on opening positions and stuff in a way that you had to use the human brain to do until very recently.

So, I do think that there are some innovations there, but obviously a major difference between Tetris and chess is chess is like a discreet game where you move each piece, and you can just write it down and that’s all you need to know about the game. You can do it by correspondence via letters. Whereas Tetris, because it is this human software interaction, you need to know tons of details that are not just about, like, this is where this block went, but the exact timing of certain button presses and these kinds of things.

And that, I think, the ability to witness that, the ability to document those aspects of play, they just weren’t around in the early ‘90s. It was very hard. So, you had people like Thor Aackerlund, who figured out a really good way to press the buttons, but he was the only one who knew it, and so everyone else was doing something else, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s well said. And it’s funny, I have heard murmurs that amongst, say, unrated players at chess tournaments, they say, “Oh, watch out, the unrated players showing up at chess tournaments are now phenomenal because they’ve been using Stockfish to analyze their games and say, ‘Oh no, see that game you just played? These are actually the very best moves you could have played.’” And so, they’re learning faster.

So, by the time they actually show up on a measured event, it’s like, watch out, unrated players of today are just obliterating unrated players of yesteryear. So that’s, in a way, intriguing, maybe not the very highest championship levels, but at the, in many ways, advances in technology are improving the ability of folks to learn because they could readily see what is optimal.

Scott Young

Yeah, and I think it’s easier to sort of document these phenomena in areas like chess and Tetris where performance is quite objective, it’s measurable, and we have details on, like, what the best people are doing. But I think for that reason, it’s very important to think about these in the kind of softer, squishier context that we usually live in, like, writing a book, for instance.

I was just reflecting on the fact that when I got into writing my first book, that, essentially, if you don’t have a bunch of friends who’ve already published books, the world of traditional book publishing is just completely opaque. It’s just something that very few people understand, people don’t understand how it works, and there’s lots of people that’ll waste years of their life going down a path in writing a book or trying to pursue that as a career, that it’s just a total dead end without realizing it.

And so, I think this is the sort of phenomenon of how can you get access to, “Well, this is what the best practices are. This is how you perform this skill. This is sort of the template,” so that it doesn’t necessarily make you the best Tetris chess player author in the world, but it gets you so much faster up to that frontier. And I think that is just a huge factor in whether or not you’re able to get better, whether you have to reinvent the wheel or whether you’re getting the blueprint given to you.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, I love that notion there, “Are we getting the blueprint from the best performers in the world? Or are we wasting years of our life pursuing dead ends to really polarize and extremify the ends of it.” And I remember when I was in the early days of podcasting, I went to the Podcast Movement Conference, which is awesome. And folks were like, “How do I grow my podcast? How do I grow my podcast?” And I too wonder that.

And then it became very clear, the answer, according to all the best podcasters in the world, to grow a podcast is to be a guest on other podcasts. Like, that’s the thing you do. Like, it’s not about Facebook ads or tweeting really clever things. It’s be a guest on a lot of other large podcasts and be amazing, so people say, “Wow, I should check that person out.”

And I remember it was kind of an eye-opener for me. It’s like, “Huh, all these top people just keep saying the same thing. Whereas I thought out here, a variety of answers.” And then I shared that with a couple other people, they said, “Yeah, that is the thing I keep hearing.” And it makes sense in hindsight, and I’ve seen success with it myself, but if you’re just sort of taking your best guess or Googling something, you are very likely to end up with dozens of paths when, apparently, one is the very best.

Scott Young

It’s funny, I just want to like to keep pulling on this game analogy that we’ve been using, which maybe I’m stretching it too far. But the basic idea in a lot of games that are played competitively is that there’s this idea of a meta. And the meta is not really like the game itself, but sort of the higher-level understanding of what’s the best practice.

So, in chess that would be like, “What are the openings that are popular? What are the responses that are popular?” So, if you’re a good chess player, you’re going to know, “Oh, that kind of thing was something people did 40 years ago, but most people do this now.” And pretty much any game you can think of has this kind of meta layer.

But the truth is that the same is true in your career, the same is true in your professional life, that there is a kind of meta, there is a sort of, like, what you were saying is that the meta, at least at that point in time of how do you grow a big podcast was, well, you got to be a guest on other people’s podcasts. And I have been doing this sort of, you know, I started out blogging, I have a newsletter, I’ve been doing this for like almost two decades.

And the amounts of changes to the meta as like, “This is the way you build an audience. This is what you do to build a business, this kind of thing.” They’ve turned over, like, five or six times and you always spot people who are very good at picking up this meta. Now, maybe they’re not like the smartest person in the world.

Maybe they don’t even have like, you know, it’s not like this person just has really high raw intellect or this person is the best possible writer, the best possible content creator, but they have a really good understanding of the meta. They have a really good understanding of what is the best practice, what’s working right now, and they’re able to just leapfrog other people in their field because they have that understanding.

And so, that’s something that I’ve really taken to heart in thinking of a lot of skills, because often we take this kind of academic model where we think about like, “Well, the main thing for succeeding in school or for learning is your raw brain power,” but it may be the case that it’s more your ability to connect with other people and to sort of figure out what this sort of best practices is for a field that maybe the smartest people in the room, if they don’t have those connections, maybe they don’t know.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, that’s super. And so, you’ve laid out three key factors, the See-Do-Feedback. Can you unpack a little bit of this broadly?

Scott Young

Yeah, so the See is kind of what we’ve already been talking about, “How do you learn from other people?” And the book kind of documents both sort of how enabling this is, like a lot of the cognitive science showing why this matters so much, as well as some of the obstacles, like, “What makes it difficult sometimes to learn from other people?”

Do is obviously practice matters to get good at anything. You don’t just get good at something by watching someone. You don’t get good at podcasting by reading how to make a great podcast online or just listening to podcasts. You have to do it a lot, and same with all skills. But importantly, the kind of practice matters.

And so, there’s a lot of research showing what practice does and what it doesn’t do. And the thing is, is that, a lot of times you can spend years, maybe even decades, working on a skill, continuing to do the same things, and you don’t get that much better at it. You don’t actually improve that much. So, I think a firmer understanding of what practice is actually doing, what it helps with, and what it doesn’t help with is very important if you want to make progress and not waste a lot of effort.

And then, finally, Feedback is important because it’s not enough. We don’t just get things perfectly the first time. We need corrective information from the environment, from coaches, from our own performance, our own interactions with the environment that we care about. And so, there’s a lot of information about how you can finetune feedback to accelerate your growth.

Pete Mockaitis

Lovely. Well, so let’s hit this mystery. What does practice do for us? What does it not do for us?

Scott Young

So, the basic idea, and I mean, there’s a lot of things to unpack here, but when we practice something over and over again, one of the things that’s going on is that we are making the skill more automatic. To use an example, let’s say we’re typing on a computer. And if you start typing and you decide you don’t get a proper instruction, you’re doing the hunting and pecking, you’re using the two fingers, you’re looking at the keyboard.

If you keep doing that, it will become more automatic, more effortless, a little bit faster. So, you will be on some kind of practice curve where you’ll be getting slowly, slowly better over time. There’s lots of studies showing exactly the shape of that curve, and you do continue to get better, but it gets slower and slower and slower over time. So, in the beginning you show this sort of steep part of the learning curve and then it flattens out and flattens out and flattens out.

So, if you’ve been doing it for 10 years, you may not even notice getting much better at it, even if you keep doing it, but, and this is really important, the hunting and pecking strategy never just spontaneously evolves into touch typing without deliberate effort. So, what the practice is doing is it’s kind of ingraining a habit. It’s ingraining a way of doing things deeper and deeper.

Now, in reality, we often, when we’re doing things, we don’t do things perfectly consistently all the time, so there is a chance to improve, to try new methods and work things out. But it shows how, what we were talking about with the learning the best practices, that if you don’t kind of get in the right ballpark, someone doesn’t teach you, “Okay, this is the home row, put your fingers on here. This is how you move to hit the keys,” then all the practice in the world may not transform you into using the right proper technique.

And so, I think that a lot of what we’re doing when we’re practicing is this sort of dialogue between like, “Am I using the right method? Am I using the best practices? And am I getting enough repetitions? Am I getting enough, like, realistic feedback in order to actually ingrain this skill and make it automatic for me?”

Pete Mockaitis

That’s cool. And what’s intriguing is that some activities, feedback is really built in. And I think if we’re playing a game, for example, it’s like, “Oh, hey, I won. Oh, hey, I got more lines than I got before. That’s great.” Or, I’m thinking about, one of my favorite podcasts is Darknet Diaries, and so we talk about hackers. And so, it seems like they kind of get obsessed with the thing, like, “Huh, I wonder if there’s an exploit here? Let me try it. No, it didn’t work. Let me try again. Let me try.”

And so, in some activities, there’s automatic feedback built right in, and in others, I think about podcasts, they’re not. Like, you could go hundreds of episodes and not hear much, or that would tell you to, “Ooh, do what you did last time. That’s amazing,” or, “Stop doing what you did. That wasn’t working so well.” So, how do you think about means by which we get that feedback integrated well?

Scott Young

I think I would even add to that point, because even when you are getting feedback in that kind of environment, it’s not always helpful. I had a conversation with someone about standup comedy and they were talking about, “Well, you’re getting all this feedback from the audience.” Like, why do some comics, they’ve been around for, like, 10 years and they’re just not getting funnier?

And it’s because, well, whether someone doesn’t laugh or laughs at your joke, that can kind of tell you, “Okay, say it this way and not this way.” But again, it’s not going to give you the full space of possibility. If you’re just not funny, if none of the things you’re saying are funny, it’s not going to give you, like, “Well, this is the joke you should have said,” right? You’re just going to be like, “Well, I guess they don’t like me.”

And so, I think that’s true of a lot of creative professions. Like, you write the book and it doesn’t sell, I mean, that is feedback, but, like, what does it tell you? Like, it could tell you, there’s like a million things that could be wrong, right? You don’t actually know. And so, I think for these kinds of complicated domains, this is one reason why we want to try to enhance the feedback that we get.

So, one of the chapters in the book, I talk about how in a more narrow context, this is the context of making judgments. This is not a complicated skill, like writing a book or producing a podcast, but something where you are just making a judgment, like, “Do I hire this person or not hire them? Are they going to turn out or they’re not going to turn out?” Or, if I’m a parole officer, “Will this person commit another crime? Or are they going to behave themselves when they’re out on bail?” and these kinds of things, these kinds of decisions.

And they find that people who have extensive experience have lots and lots of confidence, which is consistent with their idea that their decisions become more and more automatic. They don’t hum and haw over them. They get more and more confident, but they don’t actually get that accurate. And you can make like fairly simple models using spreadsheets that reliably outperform them.

So, in these cases, I think some of the ways that you can augment your feedback is, well, if it’s a kind of creative profession, it’s something where you are, there is some sort of practice, it’s good to have a coach. It’s good to have someone who can look at what you’re doing and offer advice. I would much rather have a good editor read my book and offer feedback than, like, a hundred random readers. I would much rather have a good business coach tell me what I should be doing with my company rather than just 15 product complaints.

I also think that having a brain trust or having a group of people where you can do work, share it with each other, and then offer feedback, advice together can often be very helpful, not because any one of those people knows more than you do, but because they’re better able to integrate information. So, if there was some glaring flaw with what you did and you missed it, it would be much less likely that a group of, like, five or six people would miss it. And so, that’s another way that you can enhance that kind of feedback for those sorts of pursuits.

Pete Mockaitis

Lovely. Well, I’d love to dig into a couple of particular examples for putting these principles into action for learning different things. But, first, could we have maybe your four-minute-ish version of a rundown of your 12 maxims of mastery?

Scott Young

So, the 12 maxims is “problem-solving is search.” I cover the basic theory of like how people solve problems. And this is this idea that we solve problems by searching for a solution in a space, like going from a start to the end point in a maze. And we do that using methods and knowledge that we’ve built up from experience.

The second chapter is “creativity begins with copying.” This is the idea that creative progress is not opposed to copying. It’s not like originality and copying are the antitheses of each other, but that creativity builds from acquiring past knowledge, from mastering methods from the past. “Success is the best teacher” is the idea that the way we build motivation and interest in a subject is by building up successes and having the right foundation of skills so we know the building blocks of how it works.

“Experience makes knowledge invisible” is the next one, and this one is about how, as you gain more experience in a subject, your own explicit understanding of how it works often recedes into the background. And so, this means that when we’re learning from other people, often we have that kind of tension of, like, “How do we learn from this person when, for them, it’s just obvious?” And so, we have to try to use techniques to surface what is obvious to them, but is not obvious to us. That’s the See chapters.

Do, “I have difficulty” has a sweet spot. This is about finetuning the right level of difficulty and finding a practice loop where you go between seeing examples, doing your own practice, and getting feedback. “The mind is not a muscle.” This is based on a lot of research showing what exactly improves with practice and sort of contrary to the assumption that a lot of people have that, if you just do practice, it’s going to make your mental muscles broadly stronger. That’s probably the wrong way to think about how the mind works. A better way to think of the mind is that it’s like a collection of tools built out of knowledge. And so, you need a lot of different gadgets, a lot of different tools to get the job done.

The next one is “variability over repetition.” This is an idea about variable practice, about how practicing with variations in terms of what you’re doing. So, mixing up what you’re practicing, practicing different concepts, putting things side by side, tends to make our learning more robust and our skills more proficient. And then I have “quality comes from quantity,” which is covering Dean Simonton’s work on creativity, showing that as creators reach the sort of frontier of their field, they tend to have about an equal ratio of hits to misses for their creative work, which shows that if you want to have more hits, then you need to make more work.

And so, this has, I think, profound implications for once we get to sort of the edge of doing our field where we’re regularly producing work, finding ways that we can kind of consistently focus on creative output can make a bigger difference than trying other kinds of strategies. I talk about “experience doesn’t reliably lead to expertise,” which is what we talked about before about this idea that with judgments, lots of experts of different stripes show kind of poor predictive ability, and it’s because they don’t get reliable feedback.

“Improvement is not a straight line” is about unlearning and about fixing bad habits and the sort of necessary work of correcting mistakes that inevitably arise in our early performance. And then I have “practice must meet reality,” which is about the idea of engaging in the situation that you’re working in, so not just practicing in the classroom, but getting out in the real world and doing it.

And then, finally, “fear fades with exposure,” where I cover a lot of the research on the neuroscience of anxiety and how exposure to situations that give us anxiety that we’re afraid of, that have not strong danger, we’re not very likely to get supremely hurt, actually cause the fear response to subside. And this is a very important factor if we want to tackle skills that maybe are a little daunting for us.

Pete Mockaitis

Lovely. Well, thank you for that rundown, Scott. So, I’d love to get your view when it comes to finding these super experts. It seems that having lots of years of experience isn’t necessarily the top credential or qualifier to say, “Oh, this is the expert, the master I should be seeing, learning from.” How do you recommend we determine who are the true exemplars, the providers of best practices that we ought to emulate?

Scott Young

Well, so I tend to view it a little differently. So, my thinking is not so much that we want to find that one perfect paragon of virtue that we want to follow, but that we want to look at the community that’s at the frontier. So, if I were looking at embarking on a new field, I want to switch into academia and start publishing. I’m not going to just like find, well, who’s the superstar academic and what they’re doing? Rather, I’m going to find people who are sort of broadly successful in this field, and I’m going to want to meet and interview with a lot of them and see what they’re doing.

Because I think the communal understanding of how a field works, this kind of meta, is often surpassing any individual person. And so, I think that’s one of the real lessons of the examples, like Tetris and these other environments, that the sort of the group can be smarter than the individual. And so, if I wanted to become, you know, I use the example of Octavia Butler, science fiction writing, and how attending workshops was really, really pivotal for her becoming successful professionally, it wasn’t so much that, “Oh, there’s just one person who knows what it is.”

But when you’re in an environment where you’re with a bunch of other people finally who are all doing the same kind of thing, you can learn from each other and you can stitch together an understanding of that field that maybe any individual person doesn’t have all the pieces, all the answers.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s good. And I think that’s kind of exciting or fun for your own learning process as well. It’s, like, if you interview five people, it’s like, “Well, holy smokes, they have their own eccentricities, idiosyncrasies, unique little things, like rare talents that I could ever hope to emulate maybe here or there. But these five people are all kind of saying three of the same things. Like, here’s a theme, a pattern that’s popping up again and again and again. Okay. Do we know it?”

Scott Young

Well, kind of a weird analogy, but the thing that I think about is that they did these studies with overlaying transparencies of people’s faces. And if you overlay a bunch of people’s faces, the net result is a more attractive face than any individual person’s face. This is just averaging out all the features. And I kind of think the same way about understanding a field, is that any individual person is going to know some of the things that are important, but they’re also going to have weird pet theories and idiosyncrasies that just don’t matter at all.

And so, if you just interview that one person, you’re going to be like, “Oh, well, the key to being a successful writer is to, like, work in a basement and, like, not have any light, or the light is bad.” Or, I’m trying to remember which author it was, but she like would lock herself in a hotel room naked or something like that. It’s just like, “Okay, that’s how I’m going to write.”

Pete Mockaitis

That’s the top takeaway from this interview.

Scott Young

Yeah. Now, those little details are going to average out over time as you talk to more people. And especially if you’re in this sort of group environment, and what’s going to emerge is like the things you talked about where it’s like, “Oh, yeah, the strategy for building your podcast is going on other people’s podcasts.” And it’s like, “Oh, okay, that’s the thing that I need to be focusing on.” So, I think we’re talking about this in this kind of, like, professional context, this meta of the profession, but, I mean, this is true even of particular skills, particular subjects.

If you’re learning a language, for instance, and you just talk to one speaker, maybe they have little like quirks in the way they talk that are not very generalized. But if you talk to a dozen people, that kind of broader overlapping imitation, you’re going to average out at, like, “This is how people from this area talk.”

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, so let’s put it to practice, let’s say a couple of learning scenarios. Let’s say I want to learn how to generate more great leads for a service business. I’ve got a sales person who’s rocking and rolling, who when we talk to people, boy, the close rate is phenomenal, but we want more people to be booking those meetings with him, and I want to learn, “How do I make leads rain forth? What is the better approach?”

Scott Young

Yeah, the first place for starting with that would be, like, find kind of people who have similar service businesses and what are they doing to get leads because, again, there’s going to be some kind of, among the business community, among the industry, there’s going to be some kind of meta understanding of, like, “What are people doing to generate leads? What are the strategies that are working? What things don’t work?” And chances are there are some things that you’re doing right and some things that you’re missing out on, that other people are doing this and you’re not doing it. And so, getting to that frontier is the sort of first step.

And so, if you’ve already spent a lot of time in a field, you know lots of people, again, maybe that gap is, like, there’s only 10% of the things you’re not doing. But if you’re new to an industry, or if you are shifting into field, or the field’s rapidly changing because of technology or new opportunities, maybe there’s lots of things that you’re missing out on. So, that’s the see part and that’s very important.

The next part is doing the practice. So, you have to make those calls, you have to make those efforts, you have to learn from those attempts that you’re doing to generate leads. So, I think often being able to document what you’re doing and making sure that you’re making enough efforts in that regard. And then getting feedback, obviously, seeing what works, what doesn’t work, and being able to measure that precisely often makes a big difference.

Especially in business domains, that’s one of the big things is that people have gut feelings about what works and what doesn’t work. And then you show them the numbers and then you’re like, “Oh, okay. I actually have a bit of a different picture now because I have data on it and not just feelings.”

Pete Mockaitis

And that’s great. What I find interesting is maybe in all fields, I think overconfidence is a general human bias, which is just fascinating me lately. But let’s just say you may very well talk to some experts in marketing who will tell you, with great confidence, conviction, certainty that, “Oh, this ad is garbage. This is the way to go. Forget that platform. This is the thing.” And what really is the ultimate arbiter of truth in this domain is the results generated as opposed to the guesses of the results that will be generated.

Scott Young

Well, I think when you are in, like a direct marketing kind of business or any place where you’re fairly close to the feedback, like your efforts, the things you’re doing fairly directly lead to some kind of material consequence, I think that kind of keeping that tight practice loop with the feedback is so important. And I think pretty much anyone who’s quite successful in that business is very data driven. They’re very much driven based on like, run a lot of tests, see what works, run a lot of tests, see what works.

I think where you get into trouble is when there’s a much longer lead time between your taking action X and you’re getting some results, and maybe there’s all these complex intervening factors and so you can’t do that. Like, we were talking about publishing a book for instance, you don’t get to iterate as fast, maybe publishing a book. And so, that’s when you’re sort of maybe relying a little bit more on what is best practice, what are some of these things as opposed to just getting that direct feedback and learning directly from your mistakes.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, let’s say we got a professional and they are noticing this frustrating trend. They’ll say something in a meeting and there’s not much of a response. And then someone else will say almost the same darn thing, Scott, and folks are like, “Oh, yeah, that’s a great idea. Let’s move on this.” Like, what’s going on here? And they would like to be the person who, when they say things, it is listened to, it has weight, gravitas, it is acted upon instead of brushed aside or ignored. How might we learn such a thing, Scott?

Scott Young

Well, I think it also depends on what the skill is that you’re trying to learn because why are you being dismissed? Why are you being overlooked in the meeting? I know that some of that can just break down to, like, raw communication skills. Like, if you’re whispering, “Maybe we should do this, this kind of thing.” Or, if you’re saying it confidently, those things can make a difference.

But I would say, from my personal experience, being in meetings and doing some of these things, some of the things that are even more important is not only the stature of the person who’s giving the thing, if someone is widely seen as being like the expert on X and they give advice. Like, if I go to a doctor and they tell me, “Oh, you need to be doing this, taking this medicine,” versus my buddy, Steve, or something like that, who read some websites, I’m going to listen to the doctor and not Steve.

And so, sometimes the thing that you’re trying to improve is not even a skill at all. It’s just trying to, like, “How do I position myself so that I can be seen as credible when I’m offering advice here? What is my track record, what’s this? Or what’s the sort of evidence I’m bringing up? What’s the kind of like things that I’m using to argue my favor?”

So, if maybe I don’t have that, “I’m the Wizard of X, and I have all this great track record so everyone listens to me on this,” do you have the data? Like, if you’re trying to make a proposal for it and you’re like, “You know what, we’ve shown that it’s going to improve efficiency by this amount, and this is how we know this,” it’s like, “Oh, this person did their homework.” That can make a big difference too.

So, I think anytime you’re encountering difficulties, anytime you’re encountering kind of roadblocks, it’s very important that you have the right mental model for what the problem actually is because if you think the problem is you’re not being confident enough, but everyone else thinks the problem is, “Well, you’ve only been at this firm for one year, and I don’t trust what you have to say,” then it’s a different kind of problem, right?

Pete Mockaitis

Absolutely. I think that’s, in many ways, perhaps a step zero. It’s, like, before we go off on a quest to learn a thing, let’s make sure that the thing we’re learning will lead us to the result that we’re after.

Scott Young

Yeah, like the way that I opened the book is talking about problem solving, and like the big thing about solving a problem is that you have to be working in the right problem representation. There’s the famous nine dots puzzle, which is like a grid of nine dots. And the question is, like, “Can you draw four lines without lifting up your pencil to do it?”

Now, I know if you haven’t done it before, you can Google it and see what it is and take a look at it. But the reason that people fail the problem is not because the solution is, like, impossible or it’s really hard. It’s because you and your head eliminate the possibility that would allow you to solve it. So, it seems impossible until someone shows to you, like, “Oh, I didn’t know you could do that.”

And so, a lot of the problems that we face in our work and our lives, we fail because we set up the problem the wrong way, we use the wrong language, we use the wrong mental model to describe the problem, and then we get into an impasse. So, like, as I was saying, you always have to sort of interrogate those assumptions you have. If the assumption you have is that, “Well, people aren’t listening to me at the office because of X,” it could be true, it could be the right answer, but if that assumption is wrong and then you spend a lot of time working on it, you might not see results.

And so, with any kind of business problem, any kind of professional problem you have, that’s the first thing is to just be like, “What are the assumptions that I already have? What are the ways I have of representing the problem that maybe exclude the real solution?”

Pete Mockaitis

Scott, what are your pro tips for when we’re learning a thing and we’re feeling frustrated, irritated, annoyed that it doesn’t seem to be going well? It’s like, “I keep producing junk, failing, messing up, and it’s an unpleasant sensation.” How do you think about that process?

Scott Young

So, I like to think about every emotion that we experience has been something that has been evolved in our brain to send us some kind of message. And so, frustration, this experience that you have when you’re learning things and it’s not working, is really we’re kind of banging our head against the wall. We’re trying something and it’s not working.

And when we’re trying something that’s not working, we’re kind of resorting to this process of, like, assuming we’re continuing to work on it, this kind of like trial and error, figuring things out. And depending on the problem, depending on how many possible combinations of things we could do are, this can lead to just us getting stuck. And this feeling of frustration is like, “Okay, you could waste a lot of time here before you get it, maybe you should give up, maybe you should try something else.”

And so, my feeling of whenever I encounter something which is really frustrating, the first thing I ask myself is, “Do I have the prerequisites? Like, do I have the background knowledge that I should have in order to get to this?” So, if I’m struggling with sort of a programming problem, I would look at like, “Well, do I actually have the fundamental skills to solve this problem? And can I sort of go back a step and learn those and then go back and tackle it?” That kind of stepping back and figuring out what’s missing, I think, is a very important prerequisite for a lot of skills.

The second thing is “How do I finetune the difficulty?” So, if we’re doing practice, if we’re doing efforts where we’re trying to learn from our mistakes and work on things, there are so many little levers, so many little knobs that we can make it a bit easier. And if we’re feeling, “This is extremely frustrating, we’re not making much progress,” dialing those knobs back, kind of hitting that difficulty sweet spot is going to be more productive.

So, again, if we’re like really struggling with writing a novel, maybe we should write a short story. If we’re struggling with writing a short story, maybe we should write like the outline, or maybe we should just write the introduction. And these kinds of little tweaks that you can make can all be ways to change the difficulty of your practice so you’re not feeling like you’re overwhelmed and frustrated.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

So, I like this quote, even though when I was doing the research for it, it’s like possibly apocryphal. So, if we can just take that in mind, and this is possibly apocryphal quote, but it’s from Ernest Hemingway, where he said, “We are all apprentices at a craft which no one will ever master.” And I like that idea. I like that idea of, that we are sort of always working and striving towards getting better at something, but never quite reaching it, never quite feeling like we’ve just got it under our grasp.

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite study, experiment, or bit of research?

Scott Young

I think one of my favorite that I covered in the book was John Sweller working on some research showing that people could solve problems without learning how they solve the problem. And that one I talk about in the chapter on the copy leading to creativity and just how there is a benefit of seeing examples, seeing how other people do it. And in some circumstances, it’s more beneficial than trying to solve the problem yourself.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a favorite book?

Scott Young

The one that I think stood out to me most, that I enjoyed most, while I was doing the research for this book was Stanley Rachman’s Fear and Courage, where he talks a lot about the research on fear and anxiety and things that I think are very important for our own psychological well-being but are often not well understood.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

Honestly, I really like just using Word documents and writing things out. I think writing is an extremely powerful tool that is underused. We try to keep too much in our heads.

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite habit?

Scott Young

I think writing daily is very important. I think if you’re in any kind of creative pursuit, doing some amount daily is helpful for continuing to keep that axe sharp.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

I think maybe the main thing that people take from my work is the idea that anyone can learn anything if they go about it the right way. And I think that’s something that is sort of a central ide a in my work and something that people talk about.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

Yeah, so they can check out my website at ScottHYoung.com, and they can get the book, “Get Better at Anything,” wherever they want to get their books, Amazon, Audible, any of those places.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

Yeah, so I think I would ask people to figure out what’s something that you’re really interested in getting better at, and try to find one thing that you could do to make it better, whether that’s seeing from other people, seeing something that they’re doing that you could try to incorporate into your practice, or some way you could tweak how you’re performing it to get a little bit better.

Pete Mockaitis

Lovely. Well, Scott, this is fun. I wish you many fun learning adventures.

Scott Young

Oh, yeah, thank you for having me back.

Feb 29
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940: How to Find the Best Job for You that Actually Exists with Lauren McGoodwin

By | Podcasts | One Comment

Lauren McGoodwin challenges the notion of the “dream job” and makes the case for pursuing the “good-enough” job.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why the dream job actually doesn’t exist 
  2. The true drivers of happiness at work 
  3. Why to become invaluable–not indispensable 

About Lauren

Lauren founded Career Contessa in 2013 after experiencing a gap in career development resources for women who might be job searching, soul searching, leading and managing, or trying to find new ways to advance within their careers. With women accounting for more than 50% of the workforce and the workforce being less defined than ever before, it seemed crazy (and outdated) that a resource for us didn’t exist.

Fast-forward to today, Career Contessa is now the largest online career site built inclusively for women. Lauren is also author of Power Moves: How Women Can Pivot, Reboot, and Build a Career of Purpose (2020), co-host of The Career Contessa podcast, and an educator/speaker on a variety of career topics. 

Formerly, Lauren was a University Recruiter for Hulu focused on hiring, employer branding, and program management. Lauren has a Bachelors in Education from the University of Oregon and a Masters in Communication Management from the University of Southern California where she wrote her thesis on millennials and career resources. 

When not Contessa-ing, you can find Lauren spending time with her family in Redondo Beach, CA where she lives with her husband and daughter. 

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, sponsors!

Lauren McGoodwin Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Lauren, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Lauren McGoodwin

Hi, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I am super excited to dig into your wisdom. And could you start us off by sharing, so you’ve been in this Career Contessa game for a while, great brand.

Lauren McGoodwin
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis

And it even existed before How to be Awesome at Your Job, so kudos on a long run here. Can you share with us a particularly surprising or counterintuitive piece of career advice that you’ve come to learn and adopt and share during your reign as the Career Contessa?

Lauren McGoodwin

Yeah, absolutely. We’ve been around for 10 years, I’ve talked to a lot of successful, very fulfilled people. I think the biggest thing, the biggest misconception I’m sort of very much on brand for that millennial woman who was striving for perfect, was that the dream job does not exist, it’s a myth. It’s a myth that kind of keeps you perpetually stuck. So, that’s probably the biggest one from talking, and basically having the job that I do, which is finding out “What does make a successful career? People who are fulfilled, how do they do it?”

And that’s a big one, I think, because it starts to sort of managing your expectations and actually not expecting to have this dream job that checks every box in your life. It’s similar to trying to find a perfect partner, right? But with jobs, for some reason, we believe not only do dream jobs exist but that, “I should have one. And if I don’t have one, something about me is missing and wrong, and I’ve messed up,” and turn yourself into this personal DIY project to fix that part of your life.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, that’s good. That’s good. So, the implications of that then is if we’re not in a dream job, that’s okay, nobody is because they don’t exist. That’s your view on the world?

Lauren McGoodwin

Yeah, it is my view on the working world, that there is no such thing as a dream job. And you’ll see it makes a really good saying as a meme on Instagram and TikTok and whatnot of the dream job exists and hustle harder to get that dream job, and a job should check all these multiple boxes but what I find is that, really, what the dream job is made up of is this elusive kind of lifestyle piece of a job, where it doesn’t include hellish commutes or return-to-office mandates that you don’t agree with, it doesn’t include manipulative coworkers or bad bosses who actually don’t know how to manage.

And so, you’re sort of looking for this thing that doesn’t exist, and so your expectations are consistently misaligned with reality. That is equivalent, for me, of someone who has a very fixed mindset versus having a growth mindset, someone who can say, “Hey, my ability to learn and adapt is more important than, okay, my ability to be perfect at this presentation.”

So, I think what happens is dream job isn’t just like your job title and your company. It’s really inclusive more of like a lifestyle, and a mindset, and these realities that, one, don’t exist, as COVID, I think, is such a good reminder of, like, things can change quickly, and being able to be adaptable, and be able to lean into uncertainty, is really kind of the stuff that makes you more invaluable at work versus the person who’s like, “I found the perfect job title, and it looks really good on LinkedIn, and I’m able to share these…” I call it, like, glitter and glue moments, “All these glitter moments in my career but the glue is what holds the career together.”

And so, that’s why I’m actually a big advocate for people who always say, “Well, if I’m not looking for a dream job, what am I looking for?” And I will advocate for a good-enough job. A good-enough is really practical, it’s not perfect, and that’s the problem. But dream jobs is you’re stuck there.

One of the things that people will ask me “If I’m not looking for a dream job, what should I be striving for?” which this is unique for each person, but this is why I’m a huge advocate for the good-enough job. The good-enough job is practical. It’s not perfect. It’s not having you strive for that perfectionist tendency that can keep you stuck. And so, the good-enough job, again, it’s practical. It allows you to still have a life outside of work. It doesn’t ask that work check every box of your life and fulfill every part of you.

And I think COVID was a good reminder of that for people, and I worry that now, in 2024, we’re starting to forget about that and try to go back to those tendencies. So, I would just say, to answer kind of the very first question, the piece of advice I have learned the most that kind of counteracts, actually, building a fulfilling career is trying to go after that dream job.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, so that’s a cool distinction there, a dream job versus a good-enough job, and I like what you had to say with regard to partners in terms of, like, no human being is perfect, and no job is perfect. And so, I would say, I think that my dear bride is a good wife, and she’s not perfect, and I’m not perfect. So, help us orient to things a little bit in terms of good-enough.

Lauren, lay it on us, four levels of job, if I may.

One, unacceptable, you should probably get out of there as soon as you can. Two, good enough, yeah, you should probably hold on to this. All right. Three, about as good as actually exists in real life, so hold on with all your might. And, four, just unrealistic, like, that probably doesn’t exist for anybody, so disabuse yourself from that notion readily. So, I put you on the spot there, Lauren. Give us four levels of job, starting with a rung that’s, “Yeah, I should probably get out of here.”

Lauren McGoodwin
Yeah. So, an example of this is like the person who has their “dream job,” they’re a lawyer, they worked their whole life for this, this is the thing they wanted to do, they’ve got that corner office, but they’re miserable. They’re working nonstop. Maybe they’re paid well but it doesn’t matter because they have no life, they have no friends, they’re not able to have any hobby.

And so, it’s that mix of, like, “But this is what I thought I wanted so I need to continue it.” They’re burnt out, they’re all the negative things. That’s sort of what I would think is the rung of like, “But this was supposed to be my dream job. I worked so hard to get this.” It just never, never goes away.

So, then the good-enough job, again, it’s practical but it’s not perfect. Maybe it’s something that you’re really good, you’re not particularly, like, dying over passion for whatever industry, you work in manufacturing, but you’re really good at your job, and it gives you work-life balance that works for you. Maybe for you that means, “I want a really high salary, and I’m willing to sacrifice having to go into an office and commute every day.” That works for the chapter you’re in right now.

Like, stages of your life are similar to stages of your career. I talked to someone the other day, who she got a new job, and she’s been working at a startup, but she has kids now, and the startup has a lot of it can feel a little unpredictable about what’s going to happen, so she’s like, “I really like that but I kind of made a little bit of a career pivot, and I wanted to go to a bigger company because I was looking for something that was more stable, offered me remote role, was an increase in pay because a lot of times startups will give equity.”

And so, again, that is a good-enough job for her. She’s like, “I like this thing well enough, I don’t have to be a die-hard for it, but also it’s not asking more from me than what I think is reasonable given the exchange of money,” the exchange of the paycheck part for her. That can be a good-enough job. Then you have the person who maybe go even like a step further, where they have this deep passion of being able to reclaim their life from work.

And so, they have a job that allows them to have more PTO, or maybe they do, like I talked to someone the other day, she’s a teacher and she’s doing like a job-share with somebody else. So, for her, that’s a good-enough situation. She doesn’t want to totally leave the workplace but she wants to reimagine how it works for her.

So, there’s all these variations of what the good-enough job can be for you. The teacher is deeply passionate about what she’s working on. She’s just struggling with how to make that work with her life, so a job-share works. Then you have the other person who’s like, “I’m not deeply passionate about it but I’m good at it and I’m paid well for it, and so that works.”

And then the top, or the first rung I said is the person who’s like, “I thought I was passionate about this. This is a dream job, it looks good on paper, I’m working for the right company, I’ve reached all these achievements, and it’s not working for me. And now I have this piece of me where I feel like I failed or, somehow, I have this expectation hangover of this isn’t what I expected to be, on top of the fact that I’m burnt out and all these other things.”

So, I think there’s obviously a lot of variations, careers are super personal, but I think what it comes down to is managing those expectations, understanding that the dream job, this concept of a dream job is more about the lifestyle that goes with it. And so, restudying those expectations and then going out, and kind of I always tell people, like when I was a recruiter, “You don’t get everything.” It’s like, the realtor will ask, “What are the top three most important things to you? Neighborhood? Number of bedrooms?”

I think that’s also important to do in your career, and I think it starts with aligning with your values. So, thinking about, “What do you really value personally? And then, how can you translate your top values into the career that you have?” Those are just all good starting places. There’s obviously a lot of intricacies to this but when you are trying to make the shift from dream job to good-enough job, I think that’s a really good starting place.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. So, I dig it. So, we’ve got a picture of the lowest level of job, bad, and then a picture of good enough. Could you also paint a picture for us for the highest levels, like about as good as it gets in the real world, as well as this is just impossible and unrealistic in the world of reality?

Lauren McGoodwin

Like, this job doesn’t actually exist, but if we could make it exist, this is what it would look like?

Pete Mockaitis

Kind of like a fantasy dream job people have that is harmful because they are comparing it to an unrealistic thing?

Lauren McGoodwin
I think that’s a little bit like lazy girl job, which is this TikTok phenomenon that went off, where it’s like you basically don’t have to do anything, and you don’t have to be involved or engaged in any way, but you’re paid really well. I think of that as almost like this true fantasy. Like, one, it is an exchange for you creating impact and value for the company, the exchanges they’re going to pay you. So, you’re not going to be able to actually gives you or never asks you to take a call that’s inconvenient. The realities of life are sort of that is going to happen.

So, to paint that picture, I almost think the comparison is this lazy-girl job thing that people were talking about. I’m not saying that it doesn’t exist but, for me, I look at a “lazy-girl job” which I hate because you wouldn’t hear a lazy-boy job, but, anyway, that’s a whole other topic. But, for me, it’s like I actually have had a job before. My very first job, I was an admin assistant. My only job was to basically wait for the phone to ring.

Now, I wasn’t well-paid, and I had to show up to an office so I wasn’t able to just do what I want all day long, but, for me, I was, as a human being, part of our wellbeing is we want to be engaged, we want to create something, we want to use our brains. And, for me, that was really mind-numbing work, but if we wanted to paint this picture of this “lazy-girl job” or this ultimate job that really doesn’t ask you to do anything, I think people think that would be fulfilling, but I don’t think it would.

I think us, as human beings, we want to move forward, we want to make an impact, and you wouldn’t get that in that situation, but I could see that being this, like, ultimate dream job for somebody.

Pete Mockaitis

Lauren, I love that so much, that notion of a dream scenario would be that you don’t have to do much but you get tons of money. And what’s interesting is, I think, we can see that in real life in terms of if you’ve been on vacation for a while, it’s like you’re actually kind of bored, “And I want to get to it and start being able, contributing somewhere,” there’s that.

And if you look at folks who, I don’t think you can even call them jobs but they have some sort of a subsidized living situation, like a trust fund or some kinds of funds are just flowing into their life without effort, and often these folks are as susceptible or more so, I think the data show, to depression and other kinds of challenges because there’s something that’s not quite being met there.

So, I think that’s a great thing to call out, that you might imagine this thing exists but it kind of doesn’t from a job perspective. And even if you were subsidized magically, that often has its own perils with regard to mental health and fulfillment. So, give us that level that’s maybe just below that in terms of, “This is about as good as it really gets in terms of, I wouldn’t call it a dream job because it doesn’t exist, but this is as close to optimal as one might hope for in this life.”

Well, now can you paint a picture for, if we’ve got four levels, like terrible job, good-enough job, then as good as is realistically optimally possible in real-life job, and then the fake dream job. I think we covered levels one, two, and four. But paint a picture for number three, the best realistically optimal job we might have in life.

Lauren McGoodwin

I think going back to the example of my friend, she was working in one type of marketing, and she’s transitioning to a different type of marketing. She was working for more of a startup-type company that had a little unpredictability with it, she’s going to go to a manufacturing company. So, on the surface, working for a big brand name, way cooler. The type of marketing she was doing? Flashy, cool, really, again, kind of that glitter and glue metaphor, it’s using that, fits into the glitter side.

But she is moving over to manufacturing, definitely not as flashy and cool, doesn’t look as good as a big brand name on LinkedIn, and she’s going to be doing kind of a more traditional marketing route. Now, for someone who’s looking at this, they’re like, “Wait, she’s going from this really cool job to this really boring job.”

But that, for her, she maybe sees this shift from being like, “I had my dream job and it hasn’t necessarily been a ‘dream.’ I’m really ready to go to a good-enough job, a job that I can close my laptop at 5:00 p.m. because I do have young kids, and I want to be able to spend time with them. I get flexibility. I have remote work status with this one. Instead of getting equity, I’m getting a higher paycheck.”

So, again, thinking about “What are my top priorities? And I’m going to get them at this place. Even though it might not be the ‘dream’ on paper to somebody, for me it’s a good-enough job. It doesn’t ask me to give up my life in exchange for the job.” And that is something that I think is really important. A good-enough job is going to take you out of that tunnel vision you have or that fixed mindset that you have.

It’s maybe going to take the pressure off you that you’re feeling right now. Maybe it’s going to give you clarity because you’re not going to see your workplace as your dream, so maybe you’ll be able to recognize when there’s toxicity happening in a workplace more often, things like that. And so, for me, when I hear someone who saying, “You know, I’m kind of leaving the cool, flashy thing. I’m going to go over here but I’m being paid more. It seems like I’m going to have really good work-life balance. So far, from the people I’ve interviewed with, I really like them.”

It’s like they have this surprise factor, where they’re like, “But I should like this big, cool company, checking the box for me.” And I think that is the dream job versus good-enough job kind of conundrum, is sort of this mindset of, like, “I should want this thing. This thing should kind fulfill me, and why doesn’t it?” And so, I’m really proud of people who can make the shift over to “those good-enough jobs” for them.

And it’s not easy to make those decisions and determine, “What are my values? What are my top priorities? Now I have to find a company that fits.” I’m making this sound like it just landed onto their lap but I think it does take some internal work of getting over these preconceived misconceptions of what you should want.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s really cool. And this conversation about dream jobs is making me think about, I guess, there’s been a recent trend of big personalities on YouTube quitting YouTube, which is funny because I understand that the data reveal that young people now, more than they want to be teachers or firefighters, they want to be YouTubers. So, that’s the job, I guess, everyone wants. They think it’s the coolest. Not an astronaut but a YouTuber.

And so, folks who are YouTubers, who are collecting over half a million dollars of income for creatively making videos, are like, “I can’t take this anymore,” which is fascinating in terms of a picture of the dream job doesn’t exist. And if you dig deeper, you sort of learn that, “Oh, well, behind the surface of just making cool videos, they got to manage a team, and brand deals, and books, and accounting, and everyone wants a piece of them.”

Lauren McGoodwin

And the comments, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis

It’s like, the reality is, “Huh, it’s not just a creative wonderland of nonstop adulation for me being me, but there’s a ton of responsibilities that are sufficient to overwhelm a portion of these people who have what appears to be an ultimate dream job.”

Lauren McGoodwin

Yeah, absolutely. And that’s tough, I’m sure. It’s very hard for them to walk away from that because it’s that feeling of, like, “You’re not just going to get this back if you change your mind,” meaning, like, the person who worked all the way to become the partner of a law firm, and I’m only using that as an example because I feel we hear a lot about lawyers who are, like, “It wasn’t what I thought it’s going to be.”

But anybody who kind of gets in that golden handcuff rut sort of thing in their career, it’s very hard to walk away from that. And that’s why I think it’s important to kind of share the message early on about good-enough job versus dream jobs. Careers are long and windy, and you take U-turns and left turns and right turns, and up and down. It’s not this linear career path.

And the more we can kind of, I think, spread this education about what a career is, or what a career path looks like, I mean, I came from the generation very much of, like, this ladder and the lean in, just lean in to saying yes to things. That just hasn’t been the reality I’ve experienced, and I think many of the women I’ve talked to and interviewed, or experts that I’ve interviewed, that hasn’t been their experience.

And same with our audience at Career Contessa, it’s like your best skillset to building a fulfilling career is a person who is being proactive in the driver’s seat of their career versus the reactive to whatever is coming your way. And then, again, also studying this mindset of, like, “I’m part of that world, too,” just thinking about your values, determining kind of your purpose, thinking about, again, I have this phrase about how to be invaluable at work.

And people are always asking because they’re like, “Oh, I thought you want to be indispensable.” And I always say, “Look, but if you’re indispensable to a role, how can you grow because they can’t afford to lose you?” So, that’s a different mentality when you’re indispensable, the company is saying you’re primed for overwork because they can’t afford to lose you versus the mentality of, “We don’t want to lose you,” so you’re primed for more valuable work, for example.

So, again, these are just like this is the lessons that I think is kind of one can learn early on. It’s actually very helpful throughout your career. A lot of us, to your point about the YouTuber that many of us learn at mid-life or later on, and so that’s why I’m here to spread this information

Pete Mockaitis

That’s lovely. Well, I do want to hear more about your unique vantage point. So, with the Career Contessa podcast and YouTube channel and speaking, you have a fun vantage point. And I know when I dork out and look into all my analytics and things, and emails from listeners and see, “Okay, what’s really the hot stuff in terms of what people really want to know, and what kind of content advice, wisdom, is resonantly transformational for them?”

So, Lauren, if I could put you on the spot to share with us maybe three super nuggets that you’ve collected from your time podcasting and engaging with so many folks, what have been some of your favorite discoveries?

Lauren McGoodwin

I interviewed a woman once on what actually drives happiness at work, and I still love this conversation, and they were relationships, purpose, and autonomy. And I really loved that because I feel like happiness at work sometimes feel like this very elusive thing, and I guess in a way it is, but I thought that was a really fun conversation. Sometimes you have conversations where you learn something, and you’re like, “Wow, that’s certainly a puzzle piece to the career puzzle.”

I think another big piece for me is the difference between, like I said, being invaluable at work versus being indispensable. I really fit this millennial woman stereotype of the, like, work hard until they recognize your work. I very much learned through my own experiences, but also through our audience and talking to people, it’s really important to advocate for yourself.

There are good ways to advocate, bragging, however you want to call it. Some people don’t like it. They’re like, instead of advocating, think of it as self-expression. However you need to see this, it is very important that you are able to talk about your wins, and your accomplishments, and your achievements. So, those have been some big wins for me.

The other thing, I think, that’s been kind of eye-opening in terms of stuff I’d learned is, like, it’s interesting that you can outperform someone and not necessarily be better than them, and I think that’s a hard reality. And part of that comes down to they might be better at telling their story, they’re better at managing that, I guess, “playing the game.” And I think that sometimes, again, like a hard reality to come to terms with, but I also think it’s very true.

And so, again, self-advocating, learning how to tell your story, making sure that you’re aligned with the right stakeholders and getting in front of them, that’s really important. And, also, that confidence is not something you’re born with. It’s built by taking action. So, nothing is going to just come to you. You have to have the confidence and the willingness to try something in order to start getting traction.

So, if I could drop it into three nuggets of wisdom, those are like some three big takeaways I’ve had in the last year of talking. I have the best job because, through the podcast, YouTube channel, what we do at the side, our whole job is basically trying to find out, “How can you build a healthy fulfilling and successful career?” It is not a perfect black and white formula that fits in a box for everybody. But there are certain trends that I hear over and over again, and those are a few of them.

Pete Mockaitis

Cool. Well, could you tell us a cool story of someone that you’ve worked with who saw a real cool transformation in terms of they had one perspective, and then they learned some things, changed some things, and saw a fantastic result on the other side of things?

Lauren McGoodwin

Well, I have a couple. I have a friend who recently was working for a thing company, and their whole career was, like, the Googles, the LinkedIns, the Amazons, the Facebook, very much like you look at her career path, you’d be like, “You’ve got one very linear career path at a certain type of company,” was part of the layoffs that happened, has been searching for a job, and was kind of only searching one way for a job, which was, essentially, using her network, referrals, applying, things like that, introductions to hire, relying on her network.

For a whole year, she’s been looking for a job. She’s incredibly talented. And one of the things that I thought was really interesting is she recently hit the Easy Apply button on LinkedIn to a job that had been reposted a couple of times, had less than 50 people apply for it, it was a very different industry than she had been in before but a similar job, like job function, and ended up going for two interviews, got a job offer, meaning the process was like weeks’ long versus multi-months long.

And I was talking to her, and she was like, “I’m almost afraid to take this because it’s the complete opposite of anything I’ve ever done, and it flips all the logic I’ve thought of on its head.” And so, it was almost like she was uncomfortable with this unknown for herself, of like, “Shouldn’t I just keep sticking with what I’m doing even if it’s not working? Eventually it will work.” And she ultimately decided she’s going to take this new job, couldn’t be happier. It very much fits the description of this “good-enough job.”

She goes into the office once a month. They really value her experience in a certain industry. She was feeling very discouraged from the job search before. And I feel this breathes new life into her, and watching her just have this new motivation. And I thought that was really interesting because so many of us sometimes do have this fear of the unknown, or the fear or doing something different. And there were a couple of takeaways from it.

One, there’s no right way to job search. So, if you’re job searching right now, try a lot of different strategies. Yes, tap your network. Yes, try to get referrals. Also hit Easy Apply to the jobs that you think are really interesting to you, or the companies where you’re like, “I like the company well enough. I need to learn more about them.”

So, I love that story. I love the fact that it reminds you that find a target company, network, absolutely. This job market, absolutely has taught me that there are no rules so you have to try a little bit of everything and test out, and see what strategy works best for you. But ultimately, I think, also, going in with if you can manage your expectations to not be too fixed mindset on it has to go a certain way, if you take some those, I think it’s a really freeing thing as well.

Pete Mockaitis

Cool. Thank you. Well, now I’m curious, anything else you really make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Lauren McGoodwin

Well, my book is called Power Moves so if you’re interested in exploring more of these topics related to the dream job and going after the good-enough job, Power Moves is really a framework on how to build a career that is based in a proactive approach versus a reactive approach. And then, of course, my podcast is called Career Contessa. I’ve really made it easy, and that’s where I get to talk to people who share what drives happiness at work. And I love being able to have those interesting conversations. So, if you’re interested in podcast advice, or career advice, check out Career Contessa as well.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Lauren McGoodwin

My favorite quote that I learned from someone the other day is, “This or something better.” And I think that is an incredible quote especially for 2024 with this economic climate, this tough job market, it’s “This or something better.” So, remind yourself of that when you feel like, “I’m not making any progress. I’ve got a rejection.” And I always try to remind people, if they don’t look at your resume, they’re not rejecting you. My point being they look at your resume for seven seconds, or not at all, having a fresh mindset of, “That’s not necessarily a rejection that way,” but it’s, “This or something better.”

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Lauren McGoodwin

I’m loving people who are doing research on remote work or distributed work. So, there’s a lot of CEOs out there who want to call everyone back to the office because of productivity, collaboration. And what these people who do this research are finding is, like, absolutely not necessary to be in office to collaborate, to be productive. And they’re actually doing a lot of research on what does drive those things.

Pete Mockaitis

Awesome. And a favorite book?

Lauren McGoodwin

A favorite book, Atomic Habits. I love that book. I quote it a lot. That and Essentialism I think they were like books I’ve read at the right time of my life to help me kind of get organized and focus, and gave me that fresh perspective that was really important.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Lauren McGoodwin

Loom video recordings where, basically, you’re able to audio record yourself, or you can be on video, and then a screenshare. So, I’ll use it for trainings. It’s great for asynchronous work where you want to be able to send feedback to someone on something. So, on our team, we’re a fully remote company, so I will use Loom to send feedback on, “Hey, I read this article. Here’s something I would change. I’m going to edit here, edit there.” Sometimes we’ll use it for resume reviews for clients, too. So, I love Loom absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite habit?

Lauren McGoodwin

Favorite habit, probably a to-do list. Definitely a to-do list. And I’m not fancy. I use pen and paper but that’s probably one of my favorite habits. I also am really big on 10,000 steps a day, so I just got a walking pad, and I have a standing desk, so that’s a big part of my personality is I’m a very 10,000 steps a day.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Lauren McGoodwin

Certainly, just the dream job myth, I think, is something that people are starting to know me by, is that they’ll say, “I know you don’t believe in dream jobs, but I’m looking for a dream job,” or something like that. Or, “I know you don’t believe in dream jobs, but then what do I find instead?” So, I would say the dream job myth is definitely something I’m quoted back and used on myself a lot.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Lauren McGoodwin

Everything is on the Career Contessa website, so CareerContessa.com. Podcast is called Career Contessa, and the book is Power Moves. And then you can connect with me on LinkedIn, I’m Lauren McGoodwin on LinkedIn, and I post tips daily on there, and I would love to connect with you.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Lauren McGoodwin

My final action, I think, going back to one of the nuggets of things I’ve learned is “How can you advocate for yourself this week? Or, how can you make your accomplishments or achievements known this week?” Does that mean you can send a quick email to your boss, of, “Here’s a quick recap of what I’ve been working on”? Can you mention yourself in that Slack channel, like, “Here’s my win for the week”? What can you do to make sure that you are advocating and letting your wins be known?

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Lauren, thank you and good luck.

Lauren McGoodwin

Thank you.