Career Management Archives - Page 3 of 31 - How to be Awesome at Your Job

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.

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.