Tag

Creativity Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

900: Six Mindsets For Thriving in Uncertain Times with Charles Conn

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Charles Conn shares how to be strategic and make breakthroughs when things are uncertain.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How talented people unknowingly self-sabotage
  2. The simple question that leads to clever breakthroughs
  3. How to communicate your ideas so people will care

About Charles

Charles Conn is an investor, environmentalist, and entrepreneur. He is co-founder of Monograph, a venture firm, and was previously CEO of the Rhodes Trust in Oxford. He is Board Chair of Patagonia and sits on The Nature Conservancy European Council. He was founding CEO of Ticketmaster-Citysearch, and was a partner at McKinsey & Company.  He is a graduate of Harvard, Oxford and Boston Universities.

He is co-author with Robert McLean of Bulletproof Problem Solving: The One Skill That Changes Everything, published with Wiley in 2019, a best-seller now in six languages, and The Imperfectionists: Strategic Mindsets for Uncertain Times, 2023.

Resources Mentioned

Charles Conn Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Charles, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Charles Conn
It’s great to be here, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom and the book, The Imperfectionists: Strategic Mindsets for Uncertain Times and general problem-solving wisdom you have to share with us but, first, I’m curious, so you’re the board chair of Patagonia. I’m imagining that you’re an outdoorsy person then. Is this fair to say?

Charles Conn
Yeah, my big passion is to spend time outside.

Pete Mockaitis
Are there any particularly memorable tales of outdoor adventures that leap to mind?

Charles Conn
Yeah, I have explored on several occasions the very upper regions of the Skeena River in British Columbia which runs almost the entire length of the province, and goes from these incredibly beautiful mountains, all the way down to the sea. That one is deep in my heart.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. And have you ever had any brushes, close encounters with death in your adventures?

Charles Conn
Yes, on several occasions, once involving a landslide and also, in northern Canada, this time on a lake called Mistassini in northern Quebec, and a couple times in boats.

Pete Mockaitis
Hotdog. And what does that do for you, like, internally and how you view the world and your priorities?

Charles Conn
That’s a good question. I think it sharpens you up on what’s important and makes you focus on not all the little things that are the day-to-day but on the bigger things that actually matter.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think we’re talking about something that matters a whole heck of a lot in terms of strategic mindsets and problem-solving. Could you kick us off by sharing a particularly surprising or counterintuitive discovery you’ve made about mindsets and problem-solving and such while putting together The Imperfectionists?

Charles Conn
I think perhaps the one that’s hardest for people to get their own heads around is to be comfortable with the idea of collective intelligence or outsourcing wisdom, whether that’s outsourcing it to ancient wisdom, or outsourcing it to artificial intelligence swarms. It’s very hard for people to think that they don’t have everything inside themselves. But, of course, we don’t and we can’t.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now, what I find counterintuitive is that people find that counterintuitive, that’s so meta. Maybe I’m humble or just a dummy but I’m thinking, “Of course, I don’t have the answers.” And, in a way, that’s kind of a relief. I’m not on the hook, on the spot, expected to. Can you dig into this mindset a little bit?

Charles Conn
Yeah, I think what happens in big organizations, and you’ve worked for fancy consulting organizations, people, over time, sort of overcome that natural humility that you just described and begin to think that their organizations can do remarkable things. And it’s that idea that… you remember Enron, they thought they were the smartest guys in the room.

And that kind of idea, like the arrogance of thinking, “We’re the smartest guys in the room, and, therefore, all of the pieces of the solutions to the problems that we’re trying to solve can be found here,” is a fundamental delusion that especially talented people tell themselves.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, good to know that that is widespread. And I guess that kind of hits me interestingly because I’m thinking about, boy, there was a quote. I got to get this guy on the show. I think he was in the Bush cabinet, he said, “Some people are more certain of everything than I am of anything.” That is exactly how I feel all the time because people will say things with such definitive language and tone of voice and use the word obviously, it’s like, “Oh, it’s obvious.”

And I was like, “I don’t know. I’m not so sure that that’s the case.” And, occasionally, they’re just dead wrong. And so, I’ve sort of had to, in my mind, mentally attach a disclaimer to all things being shared in general casual conversation.

Charles Conn
And don’t you find, as we get older, that instinct to humility should get stronger and often it doesn’t?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think so.

Charles Conn
And that’s what makes someone boring, right, that they’re confident that they know everything there is to know and they’re not open to new mindsets and new ways of seeing things, new lenses.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And I think about just how many times I’ve been dead wrong about things, so it’s, like, I have evidence to suggest that it’s quite probable that I may be mistaken about something, especially with my first impressions pre-research.

Charles Conn
When we’re young, we often have that kind of confidence, never in doubt, occasionally correct. Hopefully, the world gives us the evidence that you just described. Usually, it does.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Okay, so there’s something surprising that popped up. Could we maybe zoom out and hear kind of the big picture or the thesis behind the book The Imperfectionists: Strategic Mindsets for Uncertain Times?

Charles Conn
Yes. So, here’s 30,000 feet on it. There’s always this sense that the world’s getting faster and faster, and now it really is. There’s objective evidence with the amount of new data that’s being produced every day, the impact of artificial intelligence, computational biology, robotics. It’s a blur. And no young people today can look at their parents or their grandparents’ careers and think, “I will have something like that.”

This idea that you could gather a body of knowledge, in high school or university, and then put that to work over 40 years, if it ever really did hold, certainly doesn’t hold now. And that creates a feeling of anxiety and anomie, and you see this a lot in young people. There’s an epidemic of anxiety and also depression because of that sense that we’re unmoored.

And my sense is that, instead of looking for perfection so that we know all of the moving parts and we can confidently solve the problems in our lives, that we should actually let go of that idea, and we should lean into the risk and uncertainty that the world is delivering up to us by using some mindsets that actually tame that or make sense of it for us. So, that’s the 30,000 feet of what the book is about.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, there’s so much great stuff to dig into here. So, let’s hear about the anxiety and depression coming from a sense of being unmoored. Can you expand on that?

Charles Conn
Yeah, I think the way we’re all taught to think about our lives, and companies are taught to think about strategies, to think that there’s a structure out there that you can understand, markets have structures, lives have structures, and that there are agents that operate within this structure. And if you do some thinking about what their incentives are, you can actually deduce what the right strategy for you is. That’s a very standard model of strategy sometimes called structure conduct.

And I think the world that we operate in now, that structure is changing so quickly that understanding the rules or dynamics of how agents will behave in those fluid structures has diminished or gone out the window. And that leaves many people who are looking for structure conduct rules feeling anomie. And in the businesses that we all operate in today, compared to the past, you don’t even know who the disruptive entrant is going to be to your nonprofit or to your business. Maybe one of these super competitors like an Apple or an Amazon who you don’t even think of as operating in your sphere.

And I think that creates a kind of a feeling of uncertainty in a world that’s changing quickly that makes many people freeze, paralyzed, or makes other people leap before they look, both of which are pathological responses to uncertainty.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And just a definition check for anomie. What does this word mean?

Charles Conn
So, anomie is this sister to entropy, the idea that we’re lost in a world where there’s no meaning and no touchpoints or milestones.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I can see how depression or anxiety, might be in the sense of, ‘Oh, this is solvable but I just can’t so I guess I’m no good” is one direction versus anxiety, like, “Ahh, there’s nothing to hold on to.”

Charles Conn
“I don’t know what to do.”

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s freaky. Okay.

Charles Conn
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, you say if we let go of this notion and that there are structures, this is solvable, etc., that we can feel liberated from that.

Charles Conn
That’s right. It doesn’t mean we just sort of lean into anomie. It means we actually have some tools that are well within our capabilities to make sense of this faster-moving world. The fact that we don’t have simple structure in conduct doesn’t mean there isn’t structure in content. We can actually learn the game that’s being played. It’s just the rules are changing and it’s unfolding quickly so we need an orientation toward uncertainty and change, which helps us gather information to make good decisions and to be successful even when things are changing quickly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so this sounds super beneficial, we can let go of some of that anxiety and depression. And what are some of the other benefits associated with mastering these skills and mindsets?

Charles Conn
So, I think you said mastery, and I think a feeling of mastery, even in a world when things are changing, a feeling, a quiet confidence that even when things are changing, you can actually chart a course that makes sense, not a course without mistakes because mistakes and learning from mistakes are a critical part of this framework for getting comfortable operating in this world of change.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you share a cool maybe case study of someone who felt some of these challenges and adopted some new approaches and saw cool results?

Charles Conn
So, I think the very most important mindset will sound incredibly obvious but I think it’s actually really profound, which is curiosity. Humans are pattern recognizers when we’re young. We look for patterns that help us make sense of the world. And then, as we get older, we become pattern imposers so that we can make sense of confusing things.

The problem with pattern imposition is we often get it wrong. This is what Daniel Kahneman wrote about when he wrote about all the cognitive errors that humans do in Thinking, Fast and Slow. If we can stay curious even as we get older, we can actually be open to learning in this world that’s going faster and faster. And I’ll give you two little case studies.

One is Nespresso. So, everybody knows what Nespresso is. It was created by Nestle, which is one of the world’s biggest food companies, the biggest producers of coffee. Nestle had a young engineer, his name was Eric Favre, and he happened to be with his wife visiting Rome. And he was standing there thinking he wanted a coffee, and he noticed that there were a whole bunch of coffee shops in Rome, and only one of them had a queue out the door.

And instead of thinking, “Well, I don’t want to stand in that queue. I got to go with this one,” he said, “I wonder what’s going on here? Why are people queueing outside the door?” And the name of the coffee shop was Sant’Eustachio, so he waited in the queue, and he went inside. And there was this whole barista in there called Eugenio. And he thought the machine was broken so he was pumping the espresso machine and putting extra bars of pressure into everybody’s coffee.

And the result was this incredible thick crema on the top of everybody’s coffee, and that’s why people were waiting. And Favre’s curiosity didn’t stop there. He obviously enjoyed the coffee, but he went away and he thought, “I wonder how we can make that, give people that experience, that actual experience of being in a Roman coffee shop in their home?”

And he tinkered and experimented, he was actually a rocket scientist, and he figured out how to create pressure via the machine, what we now think of as a Nespresso machine and a Nespresso capsule, so that you can produce that wonderful thick crema in your coffee at home. It took eight years to do it. Nestle gave him the time and the space to do it, and he created a business that does about 10 billion a year in revenue, all from curiosity.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And I think that line, that really is where the rubber meets the road when it comes to curiosity. It’s like, “Are you impatient, in a rush, need to do what’s latest and loudest and now, now, now? Or are you like, ‘Hmm, what’s that about? It’s going to take more time and maybe be kind of annoying but let’s go with it, see what happens here’?”

Charles Conn
Right. And in this world, this feeling of anxiety that we’ve got to just to keep our nose at the coal phase, we often let those experiences pass by, and those are the experiences that give us insights that actually give us that feeling of mastery and confidence when things are changing quickly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so then, when it comes to the mindset of curiosity, what do we do with that sort of actionably, “Just be more curious”?

Charles Conn
Well, yeah, so that doesn’t sound right but the truth is we can put it into practice by stopping to notice. And that thing, as kids, we always ask the question “Why?” In fact, there’s all this research, kids ask something like a hundred questions an hour. It’s incredible. And what they’re doing is trying to find patterns that make sense.

And when they eventually learn how to tie a shoelace with a double bow, that problem is solved and they become a pattern imposer after that, “This is how we tie a shoe,” they learned an experiment of how to tie their shoe. How can you leave open that childlike way of asking why. Eric Favre stood there on the cobblestones of Rome, and asked, “Why?” And I do think curiosity can be as encouraging, or spurring curiosity can start with putting questions when we see phenomenon that we don’t immediately impose a pattern on.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, we just ask why about anything and everything that pops on up.

Charles Conn
Everything, especially stuff that’s anomalous. So, we tend to look at things that are anomalous, and we put them into the bucket of not an important datapoint because it doesn’t confirm something that we wanted to confirm or that’s natural to confirm. Or, we bucket it very quickly into, “I guess they’re short a barista there, and that’s why there’s a queue.” We use the wrong framing because, and you said it, we’re impatient creatures.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, once we ask why, I guess then the next step is to try to see what’s going on.

Charles Conn
Yeah. Another great case study, which I wouldn’t go into in detail, is how instant photography was invented. Edwin Land, now a famous chemist, was walking around Sante Fe, New Mexico, with his daughter, and he was taking pictures with his conventional film camera. And his little daughter, Jennifer, pulled on his sleeve, and said, “Let me see the picture, daddy.” And he knelt down and he said, “Oh, well, that doesn’t work because we’re exposing a film emulsion to light, then we send that to the drugstore.”

And he stopped himself, and he realized, like, “No, why can’t we see the picture?” And it was his curiosity, instead of just brushing his daughter off, that led him to spend the rest of the day walking around Santa Fe, thinking, “I wonder if I could make the pictures appear instantly.” And he was working with a patent attorney that night, that very night, to develop what we think of as the Polaroid instamatic camera.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Okay. So, we got curiosity. What’s next?

Charles Conn
So, the next one, I think, is really important. It’s kind of a sister idea is one we call occurrent behavior. Occurrent behavior means what actually happens in the world as opposed to what you wish would happen or think will happen, and for us it means an experimentalist approach. You can see why that’s a cousin to curiosity.

It means instead of accepting existing datasets, you actually create your own data. When you were a Bain consultant, and I was a BCG consultant, one of the first things that they tell you when you started a new piece of work or study or a case, it’s called different things in different places, is you’d look out for the existing datasets that you could purchase or rent so that you can begin to immediately draw insights, but everybody has access to those purchasable datasets, and they don’t represent whatever current reality is because they were collected before.

And an experimentalist or a current behavior mindset says, “I wonder if we can test or taste the market ourselves,” and you can do this in any part of your life, rather than accepting what exists to see if you can generate your own perspective. So, occurrent behavior is trying it. And I think we think of that a lot when we think of internet companies.

So, in internet companies, we think, “Oh, you can just try interface B or interface A, and you can see which one generates more traffic or more revenue.” But you can do this kind of thinking in any business. One of my favorite crazy examples is SpaceX. Whether you’re a fan of Elon Musk or not, what he’s done in only 15 or 20 years with SpaceX is incredible. You had NASA for 60 years sending parcels into space, including people, and during that entire time, they didn’t drive down the cost curve.

In a period of only 15 years, because he was willing to relentlessly experiment, going from sending three or four missions into space a year, which is what NASA was doing, to sending 15 or 20 missions into space a year, which is what SpaceX has been doing, and each time trying something new, including using technologies from the automotive industry, like heat shielding, using innovations like using a basket or a net to catch the nose cone, which is an expensive part that you might otherwise lose, they’ve been able to drive down the cost curve by about 95%, so cutting the cost of sending a kilogram into space from 50,000 to just over 2,000.

It’s remarkable. And it shows that even in the ultimate of heavy industries, experimentation can lead remarkable results.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And when you say experimentation, I’m thinking SpaceX, they’ve had a number of things explode, and I guess that’s part of it.

Charles Conn
Right. And I think this is part of imperfection. Obviously, unplanned disassembly, which I think was the term that they used in a hundred-million-dollar mission is an extreme example of what sometimes comes at a cost. Experiments come with a cost. But there were 20 different things, according to the commentary by SpaceX at the time, that they were trying to experiment with in that launch, and that they learned from, and that they’ll improve from.

In any of human enterprise with relative low cost, in this case, it was relatively high cost, we can generate new data that gives us a better sense for how the world is actually unfolding.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, this is sparking some cool connections. We had Suneel Gupta on the show talking about being backable, and he said one thing that makes you phenomenally persuasive is you have an earned secret. It’s, like, you know something that other folks don’t know, and one of the best ways to do it is just do those experiments.

And then it speaks to fundamental problem-solving process, whether we’re in uncertain times or not so uncertain environments, just that hypothesis-driven thinking approach that we’re into in consulting, is so huge. It’s like, “What must be true for this to be a good move or workout? And then how do we test that?”

And so, just for funsies, could you share with us a couple really cool examples of means of experimenting and testing that are accessible to the typical professional in the midst of problems they bump into?

Charles Conn
So, one is an old story from some friends of mine in McKinsey, which is another firm that I worked at, who were trying to solve a really difficult problem when they were working with the Federal Reserve, which is, “How do you count money?” And this is in the days before counting machines, so in the late ‘70s, they were actually counting money by hand, and they would double and triple count the big bundles of hundred-dollar bills and twenty-dollar bills, if you can believe it, and they thought that that was a far more accurate approach than any other approach.

And one of these clever consultants said, “Hmm, seems like a slow and error-prone approach,” because they would often do tests and find that the counts were off, “Why don’t we weigh the money?” which was a crazy idea. But with a very accurate scale and money at a particular humidity, so specific gravity, weighing is much more accurate than counting, and they were able to demonstrate that.

And I think that’s just one of those really cool little examples, which is exploring your curiosity by doing a mini experiment, in this case, weighing the money, led to kind of a breakthrough how the Federal Reserve thought about counting money. Later on, that was bypassed by great counting machines, but I just think that’s one beautiful example.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun and it reminds me of my favorite TV show ever, Breaking Bad, in which they all have to weigh the money, the stacks of it in the storage facility.

Charles Conn
Oh, dear, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
That is a good one. I’d also love your take on experiments about if we have to predict the future. And so, for example, one of my favorite encounters of one of my failures in using good hypothesis-driven thinking was I was exploring making an investment – this was back in the day – in a magazine that went to producers of TV and radio shows, because I wanted to sell a book and associated speaking services, but the price tag for that ad was sort of substantial for me at the time, and I was like, “Oh, is this going to work out?”

“At the end of the day, am I going to recoup more money than I invested in this thing?” And that’s all based on the responsiveness, both of the producers and the consumers listening or watching? I was like, “How can I even know?” And so, I went in the wrong direction, as a consultant, I was like, “Well, let’s just assume this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and make a spreadsheet.” I’m just making up numbers, and I was like, “Well, those numbers seem reasonable. Let’s go for it.”

And it was a total bust, I very much regret that investment. And then months later, I got a phone call from someone, who said, “Hey, Pete, I noticed your ad in this publication. Can you tell me how that worked out for you?” I was like, “Oh, not well, but what I should’ve done is what you’re doing. I had a whole content info of all these people who bought the ad and I could’ve just given them a ring, and say, ‘Hey, how did this work out for you?’ and then I would’ve known and saved some money.”

Charles Conn
And that’s one of those great problem-solving techniques, which is called Occam’s razor, which is a 15th century idea, which is the best solution to the problem is usually one that requires the least assumptions. And you could’ve started with that approach, which is the simplest one right in front of our nose.

And we often, especially clever people, and I think that’s what’s amazing here, is that these techniques are not to help ordinary people behave like clever people. These are techniques that help clever people even more because we’re the worst pattern imposers, the people who are very confident about their abilities.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, Occam’s razor or with this book, I think it was called Obvious Adams, the idea was, “Hey, just do the obvious thing in business and it will take you really far,” which, in some ways, is I think is best about AI. And there was a Wall Street Journal article about AI coming up with creative business ideas more so than ten MBAs.

I’m a little skeptical but, either way, I’ve heard elsewhere, it said that AI tends to give you the most obvious answer because it’s like picking the words that are next to other words around this thing, large language models. But that in of itself is super helpful, it’s like, “Oh, yeah, let’s do that obvious thing. That’s pretty handy. Let’s go ahead and do that.”

Charles Conn
I think that’s right. Basic large language models that are trained on the internet, which is the junkyard of HTML that is the internet, are likely to give pretty obvious and not creative solutions. I do think AI trained on better databases, and particularly the kind of underlying databases, can actually generate surprising and sometimes creative outcomes because it isn’t looking to impose a particular pattern. It isn’t working with a set of assumptions the way you and I often do.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Okay. Charles, well, we talked about curiosity, occurrent behavior, experiments. Is there another key mindset or piece we should dig into?

Charles Conn
So, the other mindset that we think is really powerful, we call dragonfly eye. And the analogy of the dragonfly eye is because they have these incredible compound eyes that have all these different lenses, more than 30,000 lenses, and a couple of different types of receptors that allow them to see almost 360, and also allow them to see spectra of light that no human can see.

We don’t really know how that insect experiences the world but we like this idea, when you’re problem-solving, of making sure to test different perspectives than your own. And sometimes people will call that perspective-taking, so maybe that would be a simpler way of putting it. When you’re solving a problem, remember to step out of your shoes because your shoes are the shoes of the organization that you’re working in, and your particular set of beliefs about how your organization competes in the world.

So, what we’d encourage people to do is see the problem through the eyes of others. So, that might be your suppliers, it might be your employees, it might be from one of your existing competitors, or it might be a perspective like an incipient or potential competitor, and we think that’s a particularly useful lens. So, trying your problem on through the perspective of others, which is a relatively straightforward thing to do, you can workshop this, gives you insights that other people just don’t have. And I’ll give you an example, this one that I love, and done by a friend of mine, is Invisalign.

So, you’re familiar with Invisalign, which are these clear braces that have just taken the orthodontic world by storm over the last 20 years or so. Were those invented by an orthodontist?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m guessing not, but I don’t actually know. Lay it on us, Charles.

Charles Conn
You got it. So, why not? There had been various forms of braces around since actually the time of the pharaohs but the kind of metal tracks that we have today have been around for something like 70 or 80 years. Why is it that orthodontists who get paid so much money to put those tracks on didn’t think of these clear progressive teeth corrections that Invisalign thought of?

It was thought of by two students at Stanford Business School. One of them was a kid who didn’t have the money to get braces until he was in his mid-20s, actually at business school. He was noticing how awkward it felt to have braces as a mid-20s person. He also noticed that, when he got his braces off, that if he forgot to put his retainer in for a couple of days, when he put it in, it hurt, and then it stopped hurting.

And what he noticed, therefore, was that his retainers were also moving his teeth, and he and his colleague, who’s called Kelsey Wirth, thought, “Huh, I wonder if you could do 3D printing, using a hard clear plastic like this retainer, that would move people’s teeth just like the ugly braces do.” They were taking the perspective of a brace patient, or braces user, not the perspective of an orthodontist who was just looking for the technical teeth correction.

With a different lens, they ended up creating a business, a very difficult to do because no one wanted to support them in dentistry, but eventually they got a school of dentistry to help them do the engineering. They got some engineers at Stanford to help them do the 3D printing, and they created a business that’s worth $20 billion market capitalization today, and have totally democratized orthodontics. It used to be just a small group of people who made that money. Now, any dentist can fit it.

So, I think it’s an incredible insight. It came from seeing things through a different perspective that other people didn’t think, and it’s one of the most powerful ways that you can improve your own life, which is to stop and see things through a different perspective.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I get with the Invisalign story that it was an atypical perspective that we wouldn’t expect it to come from. And so, in practice, if we’re trying to take other’s perspectives, how do you recommend we do it? We just ask, “Hey, any ideas for how to correct teeth?” Or what’s the process?

Charles Conn
I love workshops and maybe you do, too. I love getting people in a room. One of the most powerful things you can ever do is get your customers in a room. Never understand why people don’t do that, and whether you work in a nonprofit or for-profit organization, you can bring the people into the room who you’re trying to provide services to, and ask them, “How do you see my product?” and listen to what they’re saying.

Now, sometimes that doesn’t work when the products super breakthrough. In this case, they wouldn’t have told you that they wanted Invisalign. What they would’ve told you is how awkward they felt getting braces, how painful it was getting braces, how they couldn’t wait to get their braces off. So, imagine the original Sony Walkman. A focused group wouldn’t have created the Sony Walkman, they didn’t have it in their minds to do so.

But asking people how they wanted to consume their music, which was increasingly mobile, actually could’ve created the Sony Walkman. And I think that’s the kind of insight that comes from stepping outside your own pattern imposition framework, and thinking about whatever the problem is from the eyes of others.

Pete Mockaitis
I think that’s well said there. What is the Henry Ford quote – “If we ask the customers what they wanted, they’d say they wanted faster carriages,” or something like that. And so, some would say, “Oh, well, customers don’t know. You’ve got to figure it out for them.” But I think that what you’re saying is, within that, it’s like, “Well, you’re getting at something. If the customers say that, then, well, that can spark some things to go forth and innovate.”

Charles Conn
Customers know their pain points and customers know their druthers even if they couldn’t conceptualize the Walkman or Invisalign. So, I’ll give you one more example. The biggest player in cloud computing isn’t IBM, and it’s not Microsoft. Why? Because they didn’t get the idea first. Someone else got it first. And the people who got it first was Andy Jassy at Amazon, and he got it first because he saw something they were doing internally for their own computing power.

And he realized, “What if we could offer this by the minute or by the byte instead of having people have to create their own server farms? What if we rent this capacity?” And, of course, that’s where the idea of cloud computing came from. He saw things through a different perspective. They developed something internally, and then he thought, “Huh, I wonder if there’s a business here?”

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s exactly what happened with me, as well with podcast production. So, that’s cool. All right. Well, then can you give us some views on when it comes to the notion of being an imperfectionist, or embracing imperfectionism? Can you talk to us maybe a bit about the emotional hang ups? Or how do we make that journey, so it’s like, “Oh, yeah, now I’m just totally cool making lots of mistakes, and being totally imperfect”? That could be quite a leap for some.

Charles Conn
Yes. So, I think the overarching mindset is imperfection or imperfectionism, and that really brings together all of the mindsets, two we haven’t talked about, or we talked about briefly, collective intelligence and show and tell, together with the ones that we have talked about. The overarching idea is to go ahead and lean into risks, and I think this is the emotional thing that causes people either to freeze, “I better wait till things are more stable,” or to just like, “Ahh, jump,” and you could look at Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, and think, “Hmm, he probably should’ve thought about that a little harder.”

I think the way to get over the emotional either paralysis or impetuousness is to think about what things you can do – so curiosity, dragonfly perspective-taking, or experimentation – that you can do that are relatively quick, relatively low cost, and relatively low consequence when it goes wrong.

So, if you had those three things, “I can get feedback quickly, it doesn’t cost me too much to make this experiment, and the consequences of it going wrong are relatively modest, I can lean in and learn more about the game that’s being played, see the structure,” and, again, we can’t count on some historical structure, “see the structure that’s in the current game, and look at the behavior of the players that’s in the current game. That gives me information and allows me to be more confident about my next step even if what I did originally has some failures in it.”

I’ll give you an example because it’s always better to bring things to life, and it’s another Amazon example. So, Amazon is now a big player in what we call consumer financial services. They have something like a 24% share of all the transactions that occur online because people use Amazon Pay even when they’re not on the Amazon site. How did that happen?

Well, did Amazon use its giant balance sheet to buy a huge bank or consumer finance company? Nope, they didn’t. Well, why? So, what they did instead is, starting around 2008, they made a couple of little investments in fintech companies, they hired a team from a failed fintech company, they tried to build their own version of what was then called Square, which was a little payment device, which is now called Cube, and they bought some IP.

Almost all of those specific steps that I’ve just described ended in failure, meaning they no longer exist today, but each of those things built their understanding, built their skillset because they brought in people, and built their capabilities, ultimately, to become a competitor. And that allowed them to climb kind of an invisible staircase to be competent enough to begin to do the things in consumer financial services that they’re now known for, ultimately including an Amazon credit card and Amazon Pay. They did small low-consequence steps that, when apparently failed, actually helped build their capabilities and their confidence to become a real competitor in the space.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. Well, Charles, I really geek out at all the stuff. I love problem-solving and decision-making stuff. I think it’s just massively leveraged powerful skill that makes a world of difference in terms of if there’s a thing to learn, or to really invest in, it’s probably this and several organizations said, it’s like, the top skill for the decade or century that we’re in.

What I find interesting and intriguing is that sometimes in episodes where we’ve covered this, I see the data that my dear listeners aren’t as jazzed about this as I am, or so it seems, in terms of, “Huh, I thought this was one of the most killer episodes ever,” and then the download and engagement numbers are, like, modest, like, “Oh, yeah, it’s all right.”

And so, I scratch my head a little bit, but my leading hypothesis is that people say, “Well, yeah, I know I got tons of problems solved. I got lots of answers, and it doesn’t seem to go anywhere when I share them with my collaborators and colleagues in the organization.” So, I’d love to hear, you got Chapter 6: Show and Tell, Storytelling to Compel Action, what are your pro tips for when we’ve got a great solution ready to pop into the world, make its debut? How do we lead other people on board with that?

Charles Conn
What a great segue and setup. Yeah, no matter how good a problem-solver you are, on your own, you won’t make any change in the world. And I think it’s almost an icon, the brilliant person laboring by themselves without recognition or understanding, and I think that exists for a reason, which is the independence that allows some people to come up with brilliant ideas and solutions that are out of the norm doesn’t necessarily make them compelling to others.

And we love to go back to this very simple concept you did as a kid, probably in kindergarten or first grade, which is show and tell. And the way to bring people on board with your idea is to, literally, think about, “How would I show and tell this?” And sometimes smart people think, “Well, I’m going to give them the data. I’m going to give them a graph that tells them what the output is.”

What we’ve learned is, in a world where there’s more and more data produced every day, in a world of polarization that we live in today, that people don’t trust information the way they used to anymore. So, to break through with your idea, is actually much more difficult than it’s ever been before. And the critical insight here is to speak to people’s hearts, not just their minds. So, when you construct your stories, think about what people’s values are.

And I’ll give you an example here, which is if you’re in the nature conservancy, you want people to change their behavior about how they interact with the natural world. You could do that just by pointing out that we’re destroying the world, the temperature is going up, and species are dying. But people often don’t pull their Subarus over to the side of the road and change their behavior unless you talk about something they really do care about, which is, for example, their kids.

And even people who have very different political perspectives love their kids, and you can use something like that as a common ground to begin to build the story for change, which people will actually sign up for. And one of the reasons The Nature Conservancy has been quite a successful conservation organization is that it has incentives when it comes to telling stories that speak not only to the facts but also to the values that people care about.

Pete Mockaitis
So, that story can sound like, “Don’t you want your children to be able to enjoy these beautiful spaces? Or you want them to not live shorter lives because of pollution?” like that sort of thing?

Charles Conn
Better yet a demonstration. Sure, what you just said makes sense but what about a demonstration? So, I’ll give you a physical demonstration done by The Nature Conservancy. They were trying to convince wealthy donors that they should invest in building shellfish reefs in estuary areas because estuaries are where fresh water comes out, but there’s often pollution in that fresh water. And when it gets mixed with the saltwater, this is where a lot of creatures grow up in estuaries. This is where we create some of the biggest environmental crises.

If you put in oyster reefs, for example, or rather shellfish reefs, those tiny creatures that are inside the shells actually are filter feeders, and they filter out a lot of the toxins and pollution that comes out of estuaries. What the Conservancy did in one famous presentation in Australia is they put 17 10-liter buckets at the back of the room stacked in a beautiful pyramid.

So, everyone came into the room, and the first thing they noticed is these 17 beautiful green buckets stacked in a pyramid. Even before they said anything, they had the audience’s attention, the philanthropists’ attention, “What’s going on here?” And they said, “Do you know that each oyster filters 170 liters of water a day and cleans that as much as those 17 10-liter buckets holds each day?”

And by using that physical demonstration and tying it in, again, with values that people cared about, clean water for their kids, that demonstration opened up people’s wallets in a way that a PowerPoint presentation never could.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s fun, as I imagine the philanthropists, which I’ve done on a very tiny scale, is you get excited, like, “Wait, one oyster and all that water? Well, that sounds just like a kill on return on investment. Where do I write the check?”

Charles Conn
Exactly. So, here’s another example. Richard Feynman, he’s speaking before the Space Shuttle Disaster panel, and he thinks that the problem is with the O-rings because the launch was done at a low temperature. And he could’ve presented a table of data showing that O-rings fail at lower temperatures, which is true. What did he do? He had a glass of ice water on the desk in front of him, and an O-ring in his pocket.

He took out the O-ring, held it in the water with a little clamp that he purchased at the hardware store next door, and then he twisted the O-ring to show that it deformed and then cracked at that lower temperature, the temperature of ice water. Well, no one will ever forget his testimony. Even though he had a Nobel Prize and could’ve used all kinds of data, what he did was a short demonstration that grabbed people.

And if you want your ideas, after you’ve done your clever problem-solving, if you want your ideas to have currency, if you want your ideas to break through in the world that’s a blizzard of ideas, think about how you would do show and tell.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Well, if you could just give us a few rapid-fire bullets of examples. So, we’ve got the ice water O-rings. We’ve got the big buckets of water. What are some other ways that we show stuff visually that’s powerful?

Charles Conn
Well, there are some famous graphics in history that I always go back to. So, you know that there’s a famous nurse called Nightingale, Florence Nightingale. Very few people realize that Nightingale was also one of the best statisticians of her day, and she drew this thing that’s now sometimes called a rose crescent diagram to show the impact of, basically, the filthy conditions during the Crimean War in the middle 1800s.

And she showed that way more soldiers were dying from the bacterial infection of their wounds, or bad water, than were actually dying from bullets. And she did that by showing this amazing graphic that’s famous to this day, that grabbed everybody’s attention. She could’ve written 150-page or 250-page finding but that single graph convinced the British military that they needed to upgrade the public health facilities that were in the hospitals in Crimea, which eventually led, by the way, to a public health revolution back in the home country, Britain, because Queen Victoria paid attention to what was going on in Crimea.

And we don’t know this for sure, but apparently met Florence Nightingale. That’s a person who figured out show and tell, and she changed the world. That’s how we get public health. Not just a nurse, someone who changed everything.

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

Charles Conn
Yes. So, I’ll give you one more, which I think, in the world we live in today, we talked about it very briefly at the beginning, but think about collective intelligence whenever you’re trying to solve a problem, and where you can outsource incredibly great ideas that will help you solve your problem. There are platforms like Kaggle which allow you to bring in other people’s ideas for a small amount of price money, maybe an AI algorithm, maybe an AI swarm.

The Nature Conservancy used that very effectively to create a program called FishFace that allows computer recognition aboard boats to identify which fish are endangered species and should be put back in the water, and which fish are okay to eat. They didn’t have that capability internally at The Nature Conservancy so they outsourced it for $150,000 price via Kaggle.

That’s just one of thousands of good ideas that come from bringing other people’s expertise inside your organization even when you’re full of clever people. And so, that would round out the six mindsets that I think will give people confidence that despite the pace of change, and all the terrible things that are happening in the world, that we can step into that risk and confidently navigate our way.

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

Charles Conn
Einstein is famous for saying if he had an hour to spend solving a problem, he’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the nature of the problem, and five minutes solving it. So, he was a predictably clever guy, I think we can all agree, but there’s so much benefit that comes from thinking through your problem from different perspectives before you run off and try your favorite technique. So, that’s one of my favorite quotes.

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

Charles Conn
Yeah, I think the research behind the book called The Selfish Gene, which was a book published by Richard Dawkins in the late ‘70s, is the most concise encapsulation of how evolution works, which is this powerful engine that’s behind everything in the world today, including how humans compete with each other.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Charles Conn
I think my favorite book is probably E.O. Wilson’s Biodiversity which sort of naturally flows from the Dawkins book. Biodiversity comes from the impact of how evolution works.

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

Charles Conn
I actually love old-school woodworking tools. So, my personal favorite tool would be a woodworking plane. I think it’s amazing. They’ve been around for 3,000 years.

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

Charles Conn
Climb the stairs.

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

Charles Conn
Yeah, I think the thing that I’m hearing back now is around curiosity, which is people are thanking me for awakening them to their own curiosity and to the wellspring that comes from asking the question why.

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

Charles Conn
Yeah, so you can find me on LinkedIn, or you can find both the books I’ve published on LinkedIn, or you can find them on Amazon, or any other great booksellers. We also have a website which is called TheImperfectionist.org, or BulletproofProblemSolving.com.

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

Charles Conn
Yeah. So, don’t be afraid to lean into risks using relatively low cost, relatively reversible moves. You may make some mistakes but you’ll learn tons.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Charles, thank you. This has been so fun. I wish you lots of fun problem-solving and imperfection results, and, yeah, thanks for taking the time.

Charles Conn
It’s been terrific. Thanks so much for having me, Pete.

872: How to Get Unstuck and Break through Any Problem with Adam Alter

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Adam Alter says: "Action above all."

Adam Alter reveals the secret to breaking yourself out of any rut.

You’ll Learn:

  1. When it pays to lower your standards
  2. The question to ask for better insights
  3. The essential skill to accomplish your goals

About Adam

Adam Alter is a professor of marketing, and the Stansky Teaching Excellence Faculty Fellow at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He also holds an affiliated professorship in social psychology at NYU’s psychology department. In 2020 he was voted professor of the year by the faculty and student body at NYU’s Stern School of Business, and was among the Poets and Quants 40 Best Professors Under 40 in 2017. Alter is the New York Times bestselling author of two books: Drunk Tank Pink and Irresistible.

Resources Mentioned

Adam Alter Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Adam, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Adam Alter
Thanks for having me, Pete. Good to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about your latest book, Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most. But, first, I was really digging your TED Talk about screens, and I’m curious if, in the time that has elapsed, if you’ve discovered any other fun, interesting tactics or approaches to reduce phone time.

Adam Alter
I have been trying to acquire as many physical objects as I can that track my phone, so there are all sorts of interesting little cookie-jar type things that work for phones quite effectively. So, you put a little, that have timers, you could put a countdown on them, and say, “I don’t want to use my phone for the next hour,” and they trap your phone. I didn’t really talk about that in the TED Talk, that was a few years ago now, but I find those physical barriers very effective.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. So, the trap cookie jars, just leaving it elsewhere. I’m curious, so if you’re at a restaurant, where is your go-to hiding spot?

Adam Alter
So, my kids are small, they’re five and seven, so when we go to restaurants, we don’t really have any screens at all. We try to keep our phones either in the car or we try to keep them under the table in a bag somewhere, so I don’t have a great hiding spot for the phone. I certainly don’t bring the cookie jar into the restaurant. That would be a little unorthodox but we’re pretty good about keeping the phones as far away from the table as possible.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s talk about your book, Anatomy of a Breakthrough. I’m curious if there are any particularly surprising or eye-popping discoveries you’ve made while putting together this book.

Adam Alter
That’s a good question. There are a few. One of the really fun things about this book was that I did a huge amount of research into how extremely successful people, A, have got stuck in the past, and, B, how they’ve managed to find breakthroughs. And some of the stories, I found very surprising. Let me just pick one of them.

There’s a fantastic story about Lionel Messi, the soccer player, who I think is the best player today, and he’s one of the greatest players of all time. And the very interesting thing about Messi is that he is known for being extremely anxious, and so much so that early in his career, some of his coaches said to him, “I don’t know if this is going to be right that you’re going to be a professional because you’re obviously struggling with emotional consequences of playing high-stakes matches.”

And what he ended up doing was he established this really, really interesting technique where he would get on the field, and for big matches, for small matches, he spends the first three, four minutes of the game not moving. Basically, he ambles around, he barely moves. All the other players, the other 23, sorry, the other 21 players are darting around, and he’s basically still.

And he spends these minutes doing two things. One, he calms down. He has a sort of series of mantras that calms himself down, but the other thing he’s doing is he’s developing a strategic advantage because he’s watching all the other players in a way that no other player does, and learning how they’re interacting with each other, who seems to have a hidden injury, who’s connecting particularly well with a particular teammate, and then he uses that, he deploys in the remaining 85+ minutes of the game.

And he’s never scored in minutes one and two of any match, but has scored in every minute from three on, which shows you how he’s really, essentially, not a player on the field until minute three or four. And what I found totally fascinating about that is, A, here is the, what I would consider to be the greatest soccer player of the day, who’s stuck, he really was dealing with a major sticking point, but he found a tremendous breakthrough.

And that breakthrough, what’s so interesting about it is that it’s paradoxical. Instead of doing more to get unstuck, most of us kind of flail, he does less. And I found a lot of that kind of Zen-like do more to do less, do less to do more, there were some really interesting ideas that came up as I was researching for the book, and that was one of them.

Pete Mockaitis
That is intriguing. And that practice, it’s so cool in that, well, a lot of times performance anxiety issues boil down to we’re being self-conscious, “Oh, I hope I don’t screw up. I hope I don’t mess this up,” all that kind of chatter inside the head. And when your goal is to see, “All right, what’s the deal here with all these players?” it’s really quite the forcing function of the opposite of thinking about yourself and how you’re operating there.

Adam Alter
Yeah, because I think if he spent those few minutes just thinking about his heart rate, and saying, “Well, how’s my heart beating? Am I sweating? Am I nervous?” that would be counterproductive. But what’s brilliant about that strategy, as you’ve said, is that it’s outwardly focused. It gives him a task, it gives him something to do, and so he’s not just kind of biding his time.

He’s doing something that’s very valuable for the long run, but that also, because of its nature, it’s a little bit more cerebral instead of being something where you move around, it’s something that kind of calms his body down. He’s not really getting his heart rate up the way the other players are earlier on in the game.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, thank you. Well, now, let’s maybe zoom out a bit and hear about the main thesis of Anatomy of a Breakthrough. What do you mean by breakthrough? And what do you mean by unstuck? And what’s the big idea here?

Adam Alter
Yeah, so the kinds of sticking points I’m talking about are protracted ones. These are ones that last often months, years, in some cases, decades, or even entire lifetimes. So, I’m not really interested in the sort of trivial daily frustrations that we all deal with. I’m interested in the bigger sticking points that we actually also happen to deal with pretty much universally.

And I’m especially interested in the ones that are susceptible to strategic intervention. In other words, there’s something we can do about them. There are a lot of things that cause us to be stuck but we don’t have a lot of say in, we don’t have much that we can do about. During the early days of the pandemic, for example, a lot of people felt stuck, but if you were physically stuck in a particular location, and you couldn’t travel because of government regulations, that’s just how it was. There wasn’t much you could do about that, and I don’t think that’s especially psychologically interesting.

What’s interesting to me is that the vast majority of cases of this kind of protracted stuck-ness are cases where there’s something you could if you knew what to do. People sort of say to themselves, “I know there’s a way out of this. I just don’t know which direction to pour my energy.” And so, that’s what this book is. Essentially, it’s a sort of roadmap for what I call finding breakthroughs.

The breakthroughs are essentially what’s on the other side of whatever it is that’s your sticking point, getting over the hurdle, getting past the mire that’s in front of you that’s preventing you from moving forward. That’s what the breakthrough is. It’s the sort of flipside of being stuck.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. All right. Well, so how is it done? Are there some core principles? You mentioned heart, head, and habit.

Adam Alter
Yes, there are. Exactly. So, you’ve just listed the three sections that talk about the interventions. I actually start the book by talking about the idea that it’s surprisingly common for us to get stuck. I say it’s universal, and often people hide how stuck they are from the world, and as a result, we see a lot of success stories that make us feel a little bit inferior.

So, I talk a lot in the beginning stages of the book about licensing ourselves to be stuck in the first place, and that then segues into the first section of interventions that focus on the emotional consequence of being stuck because humans actually are well-designed, well-engineered to get unstuck physically. If you’re stuck or trapped in a particular place, your first instinct is to kind of fight, it’s to flail. And that’s very useful if you’re physically trapped.

There are these really interesting stories every now and again of people finding hysterical strength, is the term for it, when they lift up a car and somehow free themselves. Now, unfortunately, we get confused between that kind of stuck-ness and the stuck-ness that’s emotional or mental, and we give that same kind of flailing response to these situations, and it doesn’t do much good for us.

So, the first thing, really, is to calm down and to accept where you are, and then to start thinking about what the best strategies are. So, the second section starts to deal with those strategies. That’s a section called head, and that’s really about what goes on inside your head as you’re trying to get unstuck, and I suggest a whole range of different sort of strategies that we can use to either find creative breakthroughs, or breakthroughs in financial sticking points, or business sticking points, or relationship sticking points.

And then the last section of the book, which I think is probably the most important, is habit, which is the argument that it’s great to think about emotions and it’s great to think about strategy but, ultimately, you can’t get unstuck if you don’t act. And so, that last section is about action. And, in fact, the last chapter is titled “Action Above All” because I think privileging action when you’re stuck is the most important thing to do.

And I talk about how, when it feels impossible to act, you can act despite that sense that there’s nothing that can be done. So, that’s a sort of roadmap of the roadmap itself.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, could you give us some examples of success stories, interventions that could be particularly helpful for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs? I’m thinking about procrastination. I’m thinking about difficult office relationships. What are some of your faves?

Adam Alter
Yeah, one of my faves is it’s from the last chapter of the book. I was just talking about this idea that action above all is really important, that you’ve got to act. And Jeff Tweedy, the front man of the rock band Wilco, who’s also a writer, sort of all-around renaissance man, has talked a lot about the idea that it’s exhausting being someone who has to be creative and thoughtful every day for decades.

And some days you wake up and you don’t want to do the job. And it doesn’t matter whether your job is as Tweedy’s is, to write music and books, or whether it’s some other thing that requires that you bring your best self to the workplace. And so what he sort of described is if you absolutely have to be creative and you don’t want to be, one of the things you can do is you can lower your threshold as low as possible, right down to the ground.

Normally, we’re perfectionists, we want to do good work. He says the best thing to do when you first start is to say, “Anything is better than nothing.” He thinks of it as pouring out the bad ideas. And so, he says to himself, if he’s writing a particular, say, music track, he might say, “What’s the very worst musical phrase I could write right now?” And then he spends 15 minutes working on the worst musical phrases he can come up with.

Now, because he’s very good at his job, it’s very easy for him to do that. Most of us can do a bad job at the thing we’re good at or the thing that we spend a lot of time at. And even if that action is not itself useful, it’s sort of like moving sideways, it does two things. It shows you that you can move, that you’re not, by definition, stuck if you’re moving, but it also sometimes can grease the wheels for further action. It sort of shows you how to act. It shows you that you can act. It signals that you are someone who is capable of acting.

And, by contrast, if you’re coming up with bad ideas, sometimes that illuminates good ones. And so, he talks often about the fact that those first 15 minutes may be wasted but they often pave the way for many, many hours of much stronger work. He talks about it as though the crystal-clear water of creative ideas has a layer of muck on top of it. And once you pour out the muck, the good crystal-clear water is there, and the ideas pour forth.

And that’s, I think, absolutely true about general sticking points in the workplace. You just have to act, and the best way to act is to lower your expectations and standards, at least temporarily.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I like that a lot in terms of even if you, sure enough, produce nothing that feels good at all on that day, you’ve at least kept the habit, which I view as an asset in and of itself, alive and moving as oppose to, it’s like, well, getting momentum in the opposite direction, momentum towards nothingness.

Adam Alter
Yeah, and rumination as well, because what ends up happening is, if you’re not acting, you’re thinking. Sometimes thinking is very valuable and, actually, you should think for a long time before you act. But if you’re at the point where, more than anything, thought is not going to rescue you, you really need to do something.

And it’s funny, because people don’t have that instinct. Their instinct is, “If I don’t produce something phenomenal right now, it’s just not going to be good enough.” But very, very often, it’s even mediocre products that end up freeing us. So, when you hear stories, you hear George R.R. Martin who’s writing the Game of Thrones books, or the Song of Ice and Fire books, he’s talked about the fact that he’s sometimes stuck for a decade.

Now, you can imagine how high his standards must be. And, as a result of that, unless he cranks out these passages that rival his best work, he probably continues to feel stuck. And I think if I were going to be his personal consultant, I don’t know if he’d ever want one or if he’d ever take me seriously, the first thing I’d say is, “Write a hundred really terrible pages if you have to, because behind that will be some good stuff,” and that’s what Tweedy and others, and not just Tweedy, many other creatives have found.

Pete Mockaitis
That sounds really cool for creative work. And as I think a little bit about my own experiences there, sometimes I feel, it’s like, “Oh, you know what, young kids and get good sleep, having this or that, I’m just slightly sick,” whatever. It’s like I’m clearly not at my best, and I know it. And I also don’t want to do the thing, so there’s sort of a double whammy there.

And so, it’s very easy for me to delude myself to saying, “Well, you know, it’s probably not going to be worthwhile anyway, so maybe just skip it.” And yet I’ve found that when I really put it to the test, that I have actually had, sometimes, breakthrough excellence above and beyond average in sort of a tired funk state. And I don’t know whether that’s true, how we explain that. Maybe, in some ways, there’s benefit associated with, I don’t know, like slap-happy condition, like when things are hilarious.

It’s like different brain portions are operating, and sometimes that works out better, and sometimes it just unmasks the lie that you’ve been saying to yourself.

Adam Alter
Yeah, one of the key axioms in the book is that if you spend, say, a thousand days doing the same thing, you’re trying to find some sort of nugget of gold, maybe it’s a creative output, maybe it’s a good song, whatever it is, it doesn’t have to be creative work, but let’s say, you do your job for a thousand days. It’s actually very, very hard at the beginning of each day to predict whether it’s going to be a good one.

There’s a lot of research that suggests this. Sometimes this happens in lots of domains. It happens with athletic pursuits as well. You often think, “Oh, I had eight hours of sleep, it’s going to be a good day,” and then it turns out not to be. Other days you had three hours of sleep and you’re hung over, and you produce your best work.

And I give this talk to freshmen at NYU sometimes where I show them the four emails over the last 15 years that changed my professional life. They were these random emails that arrived, that, for example, introduced me to the world of book-writing, or to a kind of consulting that I now do. And with each one, I was convinced that this was a nothing, I was like, “Ah, I don’t have time for this nonsense. I’ve got all these other things that I’m worried about working on.”

And, ultimately, I ended up saying yes, and sending the follow-up email. But alongside those four emails that changed my life, I don’t know, 25,000 that did nothing for me, and you just don’t know when those moments will come up. So, I think you’re right about establishing the habit because you want to be in the game when those good things do happen. It’s like being in the stock market on those few days when there’s a big bump. You don’t want to be out of the game, and I think that’s true for work, in general.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we’ve talked a little bit about procrastination. I’m curious about sort of interpersonal relations that can feel stuck, like, “Oh, my boss or my colleague is a jerk, or I’m not good enough. They criticize everything I do. I just don’t want to be around them. They’re toxic,” kind of fill in the blank. When a relationship feels stuck, any cool stories or tactics there?

Adam Alter
Yeah, it’s a very different kind of situation when it’s a relationship that’s essential. That’s one of those kinds of stuck-ness, it’s where you may not have control over who your boss is. Then you have to try to figure out what you do have control over. And sometimes you have some control, sometimes you have very little control.

What you do have control over often is this question of whether, when things are really dire, this is the right either position for you at that particular company, or that particular organization, or whether perhaps you should jump ship, find something else. That’s always a question that’s worth asking, and certainly it’s worth exploring whether there are other options. If things really are that dire, that’s something worth asking.

But one of the really interesting ideas that, I think, if it’s not a truly toxic relationship, there are just people in the workplace who don’t get along. If it’s a toxic relationship, that’s problematic, and there needs to be a remedy put in place, often distancing or moving to another position, if possible. But when the relationship isn’t quite toxic, but perhaps the interactions are not all that fruitful, there’s some hopeful research that suggests that the kind of creative conflict that you have at work and in other situations is actually very good, or can be very good, as long as it’s not deeply emotionally aversive.

There’s fantastic work, for example, looking at how Pixar has come up with some of its best ideas and its best films, and its Academy Award-winning films, and a lot of them have happened where the producer, the one who’s most famous for this is Brad Bird. He will put someone, sort of a cat amongst the pigeons, he’ll bring someone in to cause creative conflict or general conflict. And you’ll have all the animators in Pixar who are famous for spending a huge amount of time getting the fur just right so it looks like fur, the water just right so it looks like water, and so on.

And these people will be brought in to, say, they’re storytelling experts, they’ll come in and say, “No one cares about the fur and the hair and the water. If the story is not compelling, you’ll lose them in five minutes. They’re not going to go away saying, ‘That story sucked but how about that fur.’ That’s not the way movies work.” And sometimes, these conflicts, if you can reframe it as a kind of challenge and you can rise through it, it could be very productive. But, again, if it’s toxic, that’s obviously not the recipe.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. The fur, boy, I had the exact same thought when I was getting a little too into audio editing, and seeing just what’s possible in terms of removing every errant thump or pop or hiss. And then I saw, I think it was iZotope who’s showing off their audio software, and I was like, “Wow, that is so amazing how they’re able to remove the wind in that scene.” I was like, “What movie is that?” And then I went over to IMDb, and people were just, like, trashing the movie for just being so terrible.

Adam Alter
Trashing the film, right.

Pete Mockaitis
And I was like, “Yeah, but nobody mentioned how they did an amazing job removing the wind sounds in that scene.” So, yeah, fur and wind, that’s exactly true.

Adam Alter
It’s easy to miss the point, right? It’s nice to have those black sheep, and they’re occasionally telling you, “Hey, you’re not paying attention to the right thing.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so I loved your example of Lionel Messi there. Anything else in the zone of people and their emotions, if it’s depression, if it’s anxiety, if it’s just they feel stuck in the sense that it is just hard to handle business with the stress and the emotions and the overload and overwhelm in their lives?

Adam Alter
Yeah, there is an excellent story, and this one is more about being a good leader, although it applies also to just working with other people in general. This is a story about the jazz pianist, the giant Herbie Hancock. And when Hancock was up and coming, he was a young pianist, he was trying out or he’s auditioning for Miles Davis’s band, and Miles Davis was terrifying to other musicians.

He would get on stage and he would shout at them, and he would tell them they weren’t doing the right thing. He was known for being a perfectionist and for knowing exactly what he was looking for. And even if you were very talented but you happened, in that moment, not to be giving him what he wanted, he would tell you, and he would do it publicly sometimes.

So, Hancock went in to an audition at Miles’ house, at Davis’s house, with some of the biggest jazz musicians of all time, I mean, the most prominent, the most impressive, the most technically gifted, and Hancock tells this story of walking into Miles Davis’s house, and all these musicians are there. He’s terrified because of the moment of the whole thing, but he’s also terrified of Davis and the fact that he’s going to shout at him. And he’s a young guy, he’s kind of concerned.

And they start the audition, and about five minutes in, Davis picks up his trumpet and he throws it on the couch, it looks like with disgust, and he goes upstairs, and they don’t see him for the next three days. And Hancock was convinced he’s blown the audition, “If Miles isn’t even there, how could this be going well?” But he starts to loosen up, he’s like, “How many chances in my life am I going to get to play with these giants of the jazz world?”

He starts experimenting, he gets a little bit expansive, played some great stuff, he’s happy with himself. At the end of the third day, Davis comes down the stairs, and he picks up his trumpet and he starts playing with the band again. And Hancock’s kind of confused, and he goes over to Davis at the end of the day, and he says, “I thought I’d lost you. You went upstairs after five minutes.” And Davis said to him, he often had this kind of Zen-like sayings, he basically just said to him, “I was on the intercom, man, and I heard everything, but I knew you wouldn’t play properly if I heard it live.”

So, he knew that. Even though he was this incredible hard ass, he knew that there were times when he has to take the pressure off, and that his musicians wouldn’t give him the best if he was there putting the screws on the whole time. And I think there’s something, obviously being a toxic leader who shouts at people on stage is bad, bad, bad, but the fact that Davis had this ability to recognize in Hancock that kind of nervous energy that could be produced or applied in the right direction under the right circumstances was, I think, something that a lot of leaders miss.

It’s really important to know when to push, and to say, “I expect a lot from you,” and it’s also really important to know when to give people space and safety to expand into their roles, especially when they’re young or when they’re early in a job. And I love that story because I think it’s a very, very powerful idea in terms of how to be a leader.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now, thinking about some of the head stuff, are there any magical mental phrases or reframes that are handy that come up again and again?

Adam Alter
Yeah, I think so. I think one of the things we do is we are often striving for genuine radical originality. That’s true in creative work, it’s true in the workplace, it’s true in businesses. It doesn’t matter what sort of work you do, you’re always trying for something new. And I think we put a big premium on newness, on novelty.

And radical originality is a myth. It’s this idea that there are certain things out there that are really new and different from everything else, and that’s just not true. There are a lot of great examples of this kind of myth. Bob Dylan is often pointed to as the kind of radical original voice of the 20th century, but when you go back, even Dylan himself said, “That’s not true. I was borrowing from all these different traditions.” And you can find the DNA of all sorts of other work in his songs.

It’s just very, very hard in any world to find this genuine originality, and, unfortunately, when we strive for it, it’s a little bit like striving for perfection. It makes us feel stuck because we can’t quite reach that standard. So, a much better thing to do that tends to be quite useful is what is known as recombination. This is when you take two existing things that are themselves not new, and you make some new product by combining them, by bringing them together.

And there are some amazing examples of this in business, in music, in art, in filmmaking. And one of the things I’ve done over the last 15 years or so that I find very useful is, any time I see a good idea, is I’ll put it down in this document that I have that’s now hundreds of lines long, and what I’ll occasionally do, if I’m stuck, I’ll go in and say, “Let’s look at idea 37 and idea 112, and let’s see. Can they be combined in a way that is new?”

And it’s a great exercise because it kind of makes you a little bit creatively limber but, also, if you’re ever stuck, just think about two things that you like that are interesting that haven’t been combined, combine them and you’ve got something that’s new, it’s a recombination. It’s a great way forward.

Pete Mockaitis
So, in your document that’s hundreds of lines long, it’s anything you saw that you thought was cool or a good idea of any domain.

Adam Alter
Yeah, that’s one version.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, can you give us a couple examples, like, you’re in the grocery store, you’re like, “Oh, that looks tasty”? Or, what are some lines?

Adam Alter
Yeah, so here are two lines. One line is I teach a case to my MBA students on a little alarm clock called the Clocky. I don’t know if you know about this clock, but when it rings, to stop you from hitting the snooze button, it’s on wheels and it runs away from you, and it runs around the room. So, you’ve probably heard of this. It’s a clever little alarm clock.

So, when I first heard about this, about maybe 15 or 20 years ago, I thought it was really clever. No, it’s probably 15 years ago. So, I put it in the diary, it’s in that document, and it sat there for a long time. And then a number of years later, I was writing about how we could stop ourselves from binge-watching too much Netflix or too much of whatever video platform is your poison.

And I was wondering, “Could you somehow marry this Clocky idea to the binge-watching that we do?” which, by the way, the way we binge-watch and why we binge-watch, it’s a brilliant piece of product engineering, that the next episode automatically plays, so I thought that was a very clever idea used a little bit nefariously.

And so, I took these two ideas, and one thing that I now do is if I don’t want to binge-watch, I don’t have Clocky because Clocky is a bit random for this purpose, but that kind of same principle of making it hard to hit the snooze button, I will set an alarm, put it in a different room of my house for, say, an hour and a half later. In that way, if I’m watching Netflix, I have two episodes in and I don’t want to watch a third, I timed the alarm to coincide with the end of the second episode. I have to get up and go turn the alarm off to continue watching.

It’s not like I cannot watch anymore, but it’s a good way to minimize the likelihood that I’m just going to sit there in a stupor, not moving and let the next episode play, and that’s been very effective for me. So, that’s just one example, a very personal one.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we have an example, Clocky, like it is necessary to move in order to shut the thing off. So, okay, nifty. So, I guess I’m wondering, in the course of just living life and capturing ideas, it’s just anything you think is clever in any domain?

Adam Alter
Pretty much. I’ve got different versions of the document. So, there’s a document that is called book ideas, and that’s like any idea that I think is interesting enough that, at some point, I might explore it for a book, to write a book about it, and see whether it’s thick enough and interesting enough to form a book. And there are a hundred of ideas in there, and that would be lifetimes of book-writing, so I won’t do many of them but it’s a useful exercise.

I’ve got one for research that I do as an academic, like the kinds of projects I want to do. And then I’ve got this sort of generally cool and interesting ideas document which sometimes comes up in consulting or speaking engagements. I’ll bring some of those in if I think they’re useful. And often they form the basis of case studies for teaching.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. In your book, you’ve got a section called 100 ways to get unstuck. Could you share one or two or three extra fantastic ways to get unstuck that are broadly applicable, highly powerful, provide a good ROI, and that we haven’t covered yet already?

Adam Alter
Yeah, absolutely. I think experimentalism. Experimentalism is a philosophy that makes adults more like children. So, the way this works is, you know, kids ask a million questions. I have a five-year-old and a seven-year-old, they don’t stop asking questions about everything, and they’re learning at an incredible rate because they don’t take anything for granted. No common wisdom is common wisdom to them. Everything has to be pushed and prodded. They’ve got questions for everything.

And we lose that somewhere between childhood and adulthood. We start to assume things are the way they are for a good reason, or at least we don’t really question it. Experimentalism is this philosophy, the sort of child-like philosophy of saying, “Is this really the best way things could be?” And what you find is many of the most successful people in all sorts of domains are chronic experimentalists. They question everything, or if there’s a particular area that matters to them, they specifically and sharply question all sorts of assumptions in that domain.

A really good example of this was an Olympic swimmer named Dave Berkoff who swam for the US in the ’88 and ’92 Olympic games. He was a backstroke swimmer but he wasn’t as tall or as broad shouldered as a lot of the backstroke swimmers. He didn’t have the same kind of natural talents as some of the other swimmers did. But what he did have was he was an experimentalist. He was incredibly curious.

He tried a whole lot of different techniques, a whole lot of tweaks, and his coach encouraged that in him. He ended up discovering a special technique that became known as the Berkoff blastoff, where he would go under water and stay under water for almost a full lap of the pool. And it turned out that that made him about 85% faster. And he broke world records that way until other swimmers caught on. He still ended up winning other medals because he was continuing to experiment.

But it’s a great illustration of how we take so much for granted, and often it’s deviating from the herd by experimenting that produces really interesting insights.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it. Okay, experimentalism. What else?

Adam Alter
I think I also really like the idea of exploring and exploiting, as these two basic approaches to growth and change. So, exploration is this period of time, where, let’s use sort of the hunter-gatherer approach. Imagine you’re on the plains, you’re a prehistoric person, you’re trying to find food. Exploring is when you say, “I don’t know where to even begin. I’m just going to try all sorts of different areas of the pasture in front of me. I’m going to go far. I’m going to go close. I’m going to go left. I’m going to go right. I’m going to try everything.”

After you do that for a while though, you might decide to say, “Well, there’s a little patch over here that seems promising. I’m going to spend all my time on that patch now. I’m going to exploit that patch for all it’s worth.” And that’s a really good metaphor for what we can do in the workplace. So, exploration, if you think about a painter like Jackson Pollock, Pollock became very well known for a certain style of painting – drip painting.

But before he did that, he tried five or six or seven other techniques for about five years, and then he hit on this drip technique, and he was like, “This is me. This is for me. This is my thing.” After exploring those other options, he switched into exploit mode, said no to anything that wasn’t about drip painting, and became an absolute expert in this one thing that he owned.

And it’s a great lesson, and actually, it turns out that when you look at the best periods in people’s careers, they almost always follow a period of exploration, followed by a period of exploitation. So, go broad and wide, say yes to everything, be an omnivore, consume whatever you can consume, try everything. But then at a certain point, you’ve got to say, “Well, what was the best of that?” And then you go deep in that thing and say no to everything else. You are single-minded. You say no to almost everything. And that is the recipe for the best creative and really professional outcomes, in general.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Any others?

Adam Alter
Yeah, there are plenty of others, there are hundreds. Let me try and pick which one I like best to hit off. All right, here’s a good one. I really like this one. There is an idea known as the creative cliff illusion. The creative cliff illusion is this illusion that our creative ideas are best when they first arrive. So, for example, if I say to you, “Come up with ten slogans for this particular company. Here’s a product, give me your best slogans for the product. Imagine we’re trying to sell as many as we can.”

You ask people, “Are your first five slogans going to be best or are your 15th to 20th slogan that you come up is going to be best or better?” And almost everyone has this instinct that the good stuff is easy to come by, which is the first stuff, it just kind of stumbles out. And then it gets hard, and then it’s probably kind of clunky and it’s not very good.

It turns out that that’s the illusion, that there’s a creative cliff, that our creative ideas fall off a cliff. The early stuff turns out to be trite and boring and that’s what everyone else is thinking, too. If you can push against the difficulty of that next phase when it stops being easy, that’s when you start to have divergent thinking. When you get a little bit idiosyncratic, you think about things in a way that makes you different from everyone else.

And so, the quality of ideas gets better if you can sit with that discomfort with further attempts. And so, that, I think, is a really profound idea because we often associate hardship with badness. But, in this case, it’s the hardship that signals or heralds the good things that are about to come.

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

Adam Alter
I’ll say one more thing. There’s a really interesting idea called teleoanticipation. Teleoanticipation is very important when we think about long-range goals, which is when we tend to get stuck, something that you’re doing for a long time, whether it’s a physical pursuit, like a marathon, or whether it’s something at work, like a project that takes six months or a year or five years to complete, or a long artwork that you’re working on that takes a long time to complete, or whatever it is.

Teleoanticipation is a term that basically means forecasting the end. And it’s a really important skill because it means that proportioning your energy, your creative energy, your physical energy, such that you have just enough to reach the final point. The best way to run a marathon is to collapse right after the finish line because then you’ve put everything in. Sometimes people put in too much a little bit early, and then they collapse before the finish line.

One of the best skills we can learn is to be better at teleoanticipation, to knowing how to proportion our energy so we don’t come out the starting blocks too fast either physically, when we’re doing a marathon, but also intellectually and creatively, when we’re doing creative tasks. It’s very, very important to know how to pace yourself. And it’s a skill that’s worth learning.

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

Adam Alter
I think, because so much of what we’ve discussed has been about creativity, I like the idea, this goes back to Henry Ford, the idea that instead of thinking about how to create a better horse and buggy. I can’t remember the quote itself, but we need to think about creating something altogether different, and that’s where the car comes in.

So, instead of trying to perfect something and make these little tweaks to it along the way, think about whether there’s a completely different alternative altogether. And that’s what the car did. It, essentially, changed the way we travelled altogether. So, even an inferior car was better than the best horse and buggy you could come up with.

And that goes a long way to that experimentalism idea that I mentioned earlier, that sometimes the very best version of what everyone else is doing is not as good as this new thing you could be doing. Even in its infancy as it’s half-formed, it could be a better way to do things. And so, I think that’s quite powerful.

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

Adam Alter
One of the pieces of research that I really love is this anthropological work that Bruce Feiler, a writer, he’s done, where he went around the United States and interviewed people about change, and found that on average, every roughly five to ten years we experience what he calls a life quake.

A life quake is a massive change. It can be something we invite into our lives. It could be something that we have no control over. It can be good. It can be bad. Things like birth of a child, death of a loved one, divorce, change of job, change of career, moving to a new country, and so on. And because those are universal, we all tend to have five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten of them in our lifetimes. It suggests that we need to be very nimble in the face of these changes.

And that’s why you essentially need a roadmap for these moments when you feel stuck in the face of this kind of change, because what you were doing in the past perhaps won’t serve you quite as well in the future.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Adam Alter
It’s summer, and every summer I read Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth. It’s a book that sort of explores the idea of good times, and the transience of good times, like a summer. That’s my favorite time of the year. And the book is essentially about this period in a young guy’s life that is bounded. It ends when the summer ends, and he goes back to college.

And I think one of the really nice insights there is that it’s so important to kind of leach out the very best from these periods, and make sure that you capitalize on them to the extent possible. I think we often look back on periods of our lives, and say, “Well, that was amazing, and I really miss it.” But one of the things that I do a lot in my research, and what a lot of my research focuses on, is on, “How do you, in the moment, extract as much juice as you can from that particular situation rather than looking back in the future and saying, ‘Oh, that was really nice. I wish I could have more of it’?”

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

Adam Alter
A favorite tool I would say is, I travel a huge amount, and I have a digital notepad. It’s called a Remarkable, and it goes everywhere with me. If I only have one thing with me when I travel, which happens sometimes, it’s my Remarkable because that’s where all those ideas go. I’m constantly hoovering up ideas and trying to make sure I don’t forget them.

I always worry about this, actually. I do a lot of my thinking when I’m running. And then when I get home, I’ve forgotten what I’ve thought about. But the Remarkable is a great tool because it goes everywhere. It seems like an endless capacity, and I use it constantly.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Adam Alter
A favorite habit is running, I would say, four times to five times a week for 30 or more miles a week. I’ve been doing that for long enough now that I can call it a habit.

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?

Adam Alter
Yeah, one of the things that I talk about a bit is the question of how we should structure the work week, which is obviously very relevant to work. And some of the first research I did that made me interested in what I do is in whether we should have a five-day eight-hour-a-day work week of 40 hours, a four-day ten-hour-a-day work week of 40 hours, or a three-day 13-hour-and-20-minute work week, which is also 40 hours.

And the research that I did suggests that three-day work week is the best one. And I think a lot of people find that a little surprising. They imagine 13 hours of work, and they’re overwhelmed by it. But, also, that gives you four days of the week when you can do other things. And that’s something that I hear talked about quite a lot.

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

Adam Alter
They can find me on LinkedIn, they can find me on Twitter, and they can find a lot of information at my website, AdamAlterAuthor.com.

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

Adam Alter
Yeah, I think action above all. I think do something ASAP, I would say today, tomorrow, whenever you can carve out a few minutes. If there’s something that’s been making you feel stuck, where you haven’t been able to make as much headway as you’d like, lower your threshold down, say, “It doesn’t matter whether I do a really bad job at this,” liberate yourself to do a poor job, but just do something in the general direction of the thing that you’re trying to achieve. And I think you’ll find that just that feedback you get from having done that is itself good medicine, and it pushes you in the right direction as you move forward.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Adam, this has been a treat. Thank you. I wish you much luck and many fun breakthroughs.

Adam Alter
Thanks so much for having me, Pete.

856: How to Awaken Your Genius and Become Extraordinary with Ozan Varol

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Ozan Varol says: "Embrace your useful idiosyncrasies, spend time on airplane mode, and be careful where you point your attention."

Ozan Varol reveals how to surface your unique talents that enable you to achieve extraordinary results.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The surprising technique writers of The Office used to keep their ideas fresh
  2. A powerful question for uncovering your hidden genius
  3. How being a people pleaser is killing your genius

About Ozan

Ozan Varol is a rocket scientist turned award-winning professor and #1 bestselling author. He is one of the world’s foremost experts in creativity, innovation, and critical thinking. His writing has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Time, Washington Post, and more. His latest book is called Awaken Your Genius: Escape Conformity, Ignite Creativity, and Become Extraordinary.

Resources Mentioned

Ozan Varol Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Ozan, welcome back to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Ozan Varol
Thanks so much for having me back, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to dig into your latest work Awaken Your Genius: Escape Conformity, Ignite Creativity, and Become Extraordinary. All things I enjoy doing, so it seems like we’re in the right place here. And to kick us off, I was so intrigued by one of your bullets. I love the show The Office. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen them all a couple times, and you say there’s a surprising strategy that boost creativity, that the folks who wrote The Office used right off the bat. Can you tell us about this?

Ozan Varol
Absolutely. The Office is also one of my favorite shows of all time, and one of the things that’s extraordinary about that show is that they had, I think, over 200 episodes, but they were able to maintain the quality of the show throughout, which is really, really difficult to do. And so, they did have this strategy that I talk about in the book, which is, in the writers’ room, when they got stuck in a rut, when they’re, like, the ideas stopped flowing, they would play a game.

So, they would stop working on The Office and they would start putting together an episode for Entourage. And if you remember, Entourage is an HBO series about Vincent Chase, this actor who lives in Hollywood with a bunch of his friends. And so, the writers of The Office didn’t work on the show but when they found themselves in a creative rut working on The Office, they would say, “Okay, let’s play a game. Let’s put together an episode for Entourage.” And whenever they played this game, they only had one rule. The episode had to end with Vincent Chase, the main character, winning the Oscar for Best Actor. And with that constraint in place, they would play.

And so, they do this for about, I don’t know, half an hour or so, and then they would go back to working on The Office, and something interesting happened whenever they did this. By virtue of playing this game, and coming back to their own work, their creativity would dramatically increase, like the ideas that weren’t there before, all of a sudden, would start to flow.

And I mention that, or I talk about that story in the section of the book about the importance of playing. And so, for the writers of The Office, this is a way of setting their own work aside, and then playing with someone else’s show, someone else’s project. And when they went back to their own work of actually writing an episode for The Office, that playful mindset would carry over.

It was like it’s a way of warming up your creativity muscles before you start doing really heavy lifts. And having done that, yeah, it would be much easier for them to actually creatively write the episode for The Office that they were working on.

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s interesting about that play there is it’s not that wild. It’s not, like, “Okay, go grab some Play-Doh,” or, “Imagine how I would make a rocket out of Sharpies.” It’s like, “Okay, we’re still writing a TV show,” and yet it’s play in the sense that, I guess, there are no stakes there.

Ozan Varol
Yup, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, “We’re not going to be putting this out into the world, so be thinking just be whatever you want.”

Ozan Varol
Exactly. And you hit the nail on the head there. It’s very low stakes, there’s actually no stakes at all. Like, the episode for Entourage can suck and it’s not going to matter at all because it’s never going to air. And so, people listening to this might see that as a waste of time but, again, for creativity to happen, especially when you’re stuck in a rut, play becomes really important.

And you don’t have to be a writer to do this, by the way. So, say, you’re in the marketing world, and if you find yourself stuck in a rut, take 10 minutes and come up with marketing ideas for a competitor’s product, like put together a Super Bowl commercial for a competitor’s product, and then come back to your own work, and you’ll find that that playful mindset, that you just created by taking just 10 minutes to play with somebody else’s problem, somebody else’s product, will carry you over to the issue or the problem that you’re working on.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s cool. Well, so you’ve got a number of these approaches in your book Awaken Your Genius. I’m curious to hear if there was a particularly striking, counterintuitive discovery you made that made you go, “Oh, wow, aha” along the way that’s really stuck with you.

Ozan Varol
One of the points that really stuck with me that I use probably on a daily basis is it goes back to something that my high school soccer coach would tell me, and then I came across a research study which essentially validated what he was saying all along. So, I’ll begin with what he would tell me, and then I’ll bring you to the research, and then share with you what I do on a day-to-day basis to implement this mindset.

He had this saying, he would say, “If you’re not in possession, get in position,” meaning if you’re not in possession of the ball, move to a different position on the field where you’re open to receive the ball. And it turns out that the same idea applies to you, regardless of the type of work that you do. And so, if you’re finding yourself stuck, if you’re finding yourself without the ball, if you’re finding yourself in a rut, move to a different position. So, physically move yourself away from the position that you’ve been sitting in into a different location.

What happens with the way that most of us work, we’re like sitting in the same position, in the same chair, looking at the same computer screen for hours and hours at a time, and that space we’re operating in gets associated with the same old thought patterns, traditional ideas, and so it becomes really hard to change the status quo and generate new ideas.

But the simple act of picking up your laptop and walking to a different location, it might be a café, or what I do at home is I walk to a different room in our house, with different decorations, different books on the shelves, different background, different everything, and when I do that, that space becomes this, like, blank canvass that I can project new ideas on, and because that space is not associated with the old though patterns that I’ve been operating under for a very long time.

This is why, by the way, research shows that smokers, for example, find it easier to quit when they’re traveling because the new location doesn’t have the same patterns associated with their smoking habit as their own home. And so, it’s really easy to implement in practice. If you’re finding yourself in a rut, pick up your laptop, move to a different place. Walking also helps. Research shows that walking significantly boosts creativity.

And walking, by the way, without audiobook, without podcast, without a phone call to keep you company, just you and your thoughts, there are so many stories of scientists, literally, walking themselves into the right answer. It seems like a really simple practice but it can really create a fundamental transformation in the quality and the quantity of the ideas that you might generate.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really cool. And that context stuff, you mentioned smokers, that’s wild. I’ve heard that some war, maybe it’s Vietnam, maybe it’s multiple wars, soldiers from the US, a good chunk of them, engage in some hardcore drugs, like cocaine or heroine or something, when they’re off in the theater of war. And then they came back, and the vast majority of them just had no problem.

This is mind-blowing because it’s, like, among the most addictive substances in existence, and then it’s like, “Oh, well, hey, you know, different people, different country, different scenery, different activities, and hardcore narcotics are just not part of my life anymore.” Just like that. Mind-blowing stuff.

Ozan Varol
Amazing. Yeah, I hadn’t heard of that but it makes sense if you think about it. So much of our behavior, our habits, our ways of working in the world are just tied to the environment. And the moment you put yourself in a drastically different environment, it becomes much easier to change. And this is why, by the way, one of the things I love most is international travel.

When you go to a foreign country, your whole world becomes topsy-turvy, like the majority becomes the minority, surrounded by echoes of this language that you’ve never heard before. You return to infancy when your mother tongue was foreign to you. You become a young fool again. And so, everything is new and it becomes so much easier to generate new ideas and get out of old patterns of thinking simply by breathing foreign air, which is pretty remarkable.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. All right. Well, we’ve got a number of fun strategies and ideas. Could you hit us with of the big idea, core thesis of the book Awaken Your Genius?

Ozan Varol
Sure. And I pick the word genius on purpose. So, genius, most often, is used to mean smartest, or the most intelligent, the most talented, and that’s not the way I used genius in the book. There’s a quote that opens the book from Thelonious Monk, he says, “Genius is the one most like himself.” Genius, in the Latin origin of the word, means the spirit attendant at birth in each and every person.

So, each of us is like Aladdin, and our genie, or our genius, is bottled up inside of us waiting to be awakened. And the core thesis of the book is this, no one can compete with you at being you.

Pete Mockaitis
“I’ll smoke them.”

Ozan Varol
You are the first and the last time that you’ll ever happen. And if your thinking is an extension of you, if what you’re building is a product of your inner wisdom, you’ll be in a league of your own. But if you suppress yourself, if you don’t claim that wisdom within, then it’s going to be lost. That genius is going to be lost both to you and to the world.

And so, at a time when so many people and so many businesses are looking externally for answers, outsourcing their thinking to algorithms, copying and pasting what their competitors are doing, I wanted to write a book to give people concrete tools to escape that culture of conformity and unlock original insights within their own depths and unleash their own unique genius.

Pete Mockaitis
So, if awakening the genius is what’s happening here, could you give us a cool story of a sleeping genius and how they awoke and what happened?

Ozan Varol
Yeah, the first name that popped to mind is Johnny Cash. In 1954, he walked into an audition room at Sun Records, and at the time he was a nobody. He was selling appliances door to door and playing gospel songs at night with two of his friends. He was broke. His marriage was in ruins. And for his audition, Cash picks a gospel song because that’s what he knew best, and gospel was really popular in 1954. Everyone else was singing it.

The audition doesn’t go as Johnny Cash plans. As Cash begins to sing this dreary slow gospel song, the record label owner, who’s name was Sam Phillips, he pretends to be interested for, like, 20 seconds before interrupting Cash. He says, “We already heard that song a hundred times, just like that, just like how you sang it. This song,” he says, “is the same Jimmy Davis tune we hear on the radio all day about your peace within, and how it’s real, and how you’re going to shout it.”

He looks at Cash, and he says, “Sing something different. Sing something real. Sing something you felt because that’s the kind of song that people want to hear. That’s the kind of song that truly saves people. It’s got nothing to do with believing in God, Mr. Cash,” he says. “It has to do with believing in yourself.” And that rant jolts Cash out of his conformist “Let me sing you some good old gospel” attitude. He collects himself. He starts strumming his guitar. And he starts playing the “Folsom Prison Blues” in that deep distinctive voice of his.

In that moment, he stops trying to become a gospel singer and he becomes Johnny Cash, all because he rejects the tendency to conform, and decides to embrace the genius within him. And I think that’s one of the best stories, the most memorable stories about how somebody who walks into that room as a sleeping conformist, and walks away by awakening the genius within him.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m curious, so Johnny Cash, he’s already got a pretty good sense at the time, I’m assuming, I’m not as familiar with the ins and outs of his story. He’s got a pretty good vibe that, “Music is the thing I care to do,” so he’s got a zone that he’s operating in. To your point about how we are one of a kind and the best at being us as we can be, so we want to be ourselves and tap into that fully.

I guess, I’m thinking, how do we even know where to start in terms of the zone that we’re going to be operating in if we’re not even at the point of Johnny Cash, “All right, I’m doing music”? I think many of us in a career, it’s like, “Well, I don’t know, I like helping people, I like figuring stuff out, I like communicating, and, I don’t know, I could do any number of jobs.” Where do we start?

Ozan Varol
Yeah, great question. I talk about a number of strategies in the book. I’ll share one of them here. One is to ask yourself, to look back on your life, and figure out what your useful idiosyncrasies are. And you might actually ask your partner or best friend about them, like, “What is it that makes me different from other people?” your superpower, the thing that you can do better than the average person, and see how you’ve used that power in the past. And I really encourage you to dig deep when you do this exercise.

So, for example, if you tell yourself, “Well, I’m really good at organizing events,” dig deeper into that. So, just because you’re a great event organizer doesn’t mean you can only be an event organizer. That means you’re great a communicating with people, that means you’re really good at rallying others, that means you’re really good at putting people together in a space and creating an informative entertaining event.

And so, the goal is to tease down those Lego blocks of your talents, interests, preferences, useful idiosyncrasies. And once you’ve got those Lego blocks figured out, then you can build other things with it, build other things with that you haven’t built in the past. And it might be staying within your current line of work, and switching from singing gospel to actually singing “Folsom Prison Blues.” It might also mean switching to an entirely different field.

But the first step is trying to figure out what your useful idiosyncrasies are. And this is really hard to do. It’s really hard to do in part because, at some point in your life, you were probably shamed for having those idiosyncrasies because they made you weird or different from other people. And so, we learn to conceal them, we learn to suppress our superpowers because they make us different from other people. But if you can figure out what those superpowers are and lean into what made you weird or different in the past in a useful way, that, in and of itself, can make you extraordinary.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. That phrase useful idiosyncrasies is way more useful in terms of surfacing the goods as oppose to “What’s your superpower?” which is a cool powerful useful question. I recommend interviewers ask it. Let’s understand that, hopefully, the interviewee has some self-knowledge to be able to disclose that. But if you’re kind of working towards that, useful idiosyncrasy is handy.

It’s funny, I’m thinking that when I was in high school, in the summer, I remember there were a few times, and I was ridiculed for this, I was hanging out with my friends for, yeah, a good long stretch of time, maybe six hours, and I thought, “You know what, I’d like to go home and read business books now,” and I’m, like, 15 and they didn’t care for that. They thought that was a little bit alienating, like, “You prefer to read business books than hang out with me.” I was like, “Well, we’ve been hanging out for a long time, and kind of…”

And so, this is a really fun job, getting to talk to people who write a lot of those such books. And so, yeah, that’s interesting, is that it’s useful and it did bring about modest ridicule from my friends there. Could you just lay it on us a bunch more examples of useful idiosyncrasies?

Ozan Varol
Sure. In my life, one of the useful idiosyncrasies has been storytelling. And if I look back, and this is also really useful, too, looking back at your middle school years, your high school years, before you became an adult, like you enjoyed reading business books, for example. I loved writing stories. Actually, from the first time I learned to read and write, I would type stories on my grandfather’s old typewriter.

And looking back on my life, that core ingredient, that useful idiosyncrasy, that basic Lego block has been there all along. So, I went into, for example, the practice of law. I was in rocket science first and then switched trajectories and went to law school, and became a practicing attorney. And as I was a practicing attorney, you’re writing briefs for the court, you’re in oral argument, which is essentially storytelling. You’re telling stories on behalf of your client.

And then I was in academia, and I was a law professor and taught these big classes filled with first year students who are taking these required classes, and many of them did not want to be in the classroom and so I had to come up with ways of telling engaging stories to that audience to get them excited and energized to be in the classroom.

And so, that core ingredient has been there all along, that ability to tell stories, but the recipe that I’ve made with it has changed over time. And so, now I use storytelling in my writing, in the books that I write, in terms of telling stories that are going to make principles stick in a way that, like, simply dry-listing something is not going to.

And so, that’s another example of a useful idiosyncrasy. And we all have them, and the beauty is they’re all different for each of us. So, people listening to this may not have storytelling as one of their Lego blocks, they may not have the desire to read business books for fun as one of their useful idiosyncrasies. But if you look back on your life and go back to the very beginning, before the world told you what you should be doing, what you were actually excited to do, you’ll begin to notice these themes and trends and core ingredients of useful idiosyncrasies that have carried over time.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s fun. As I’m thinking about my kids now, my son Johnny, who just loves to make some kind of a drawing, and there might be stickers or whatever, and then put it in an envelope and seal it, and then write “Mama, Dada,” whatever on it. So, he’s five and he can write a few words, and I just think it’s so funny because this happens almost every day.

And it’s funny because you think, “Oh, what a precious gift from my child.” And it was like, “Well, yeah, but I’ve got dozens and dozens of them, and I don’t know what I’m supposed…” It feels wrong to throw them away. It’s like, “Should I curate?” But it’s funny, he just keeps bringing it, and he loves giving these creative gifts to us. And I just wonder if that is a fad, a passing fancy, or if that’s going to be a core thing and where that will land.

Ozan Varol
Sure. It’s amazing that he does that, though.

Pete Mockaitis
It is.

Ozan Varol
If you think about it, it’s not like he learned that from anywhere. It’s just naturally coming to him. It’s so cool that he’s sharing that gift with you, and that you’re leaning in.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. It does. It feels good, like, “Oh, this is for me. Thank you.” Okay. So, we’ve got storytelling, we’ve got business books. I’d love to hear a few more just for people to see themselves in that.

Ozan Varol
Sure. For me, another one was programming, like, I fell in love with computers at a very young age, and I was definitely shamed for it. I was the president of my high school computer club, and that did not bode well for my dating life but it gave me crucial skills that I could use later on in life. And so, even now as a writer, I lean into technology in a way that most writers don’t.

And I think those rare combinations can also be really helpful. So, there’s really nothing novel about a singer who can dance, but a lawyer who can also do computer programming, or a doctor who knows something about the law, for example. Those rare combinations of ingredients, useful idiosyncrasies, can be really powerful because you can use those tools from very different fields to create things in your field that no one else can because they don’t have the depth of knowledge that you do.

So, they honestly can be anything. It could be effectively communicating with other people. It could be simplifying really complex things. So, some people are amazing at taking a really complicated thing and then explaining it to somebody who’s a complete beginner in language that they can understand. Really, really rare but extremely powerful skill.

Empathy is another one. People who can read the energy in the room can see what other people are feeling. Say, you’re marketer or a salesperson, and you can actually see the tension. You can see that the pitch you just gave to the potential client isn’t really resonating, it’s not really sitting well. The ability to recognize that in the moment, and then tailor your pitch accordingly, to lean in and get curious about the client’s perspective, is also a superpower that a lot of marketers don’t have.

And so, think about those skills that have been there from a very young age, and see what they might be. And then you can take those and build new things as you go along.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. It’s funny, I’m also thinking now about, I guess, another idiosyncrasy is that I just do an excessive amount of product research in terms of buying something just because I really like optimizing, in general, or finding the best toenail clipper. It’s like, “I’m only going to get one, so why don’t I just get the best one that there is, and you feel that decadent luxury because I’m not going to have the fanciest house or car in the world, but I could get the most high-performing nail clippers.”

And that’s also paid off in terms of guest selection. So, Ozan, not to toot your horn, but we do a boatload of careful prep, and research, and thought in choosing each guest, and it’s a blessing having tons of incoming pitches to be able to be so choosy. And it’s paid off in terms of show growth, and quality, and engaged listeners, and all that kind of thing.

Ozan Varol
I love that. And the example you just gave is a perfect one because you’re applying it in very different contexts. You’re applying it to selecting products that are going to be useful for you, but you’re also applying it to selecting podcast guests. And so, that useful idiosyncrasy of curation can be applied in very different contexts, so it’s not just limited to one. It can be applied to so many different areas.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Ozan, I’ve got just a few random things I want to know about because your table of contents and pitching things really intrigue me, but I want to give you the floor first. Is there anything that’s just so critical we must know about awakening genius that you want to make sure to get out there?

Ozan Varol
I think we already talked about the crux of the book, but I just want to add one thing. I think it goes back to the comment or the discussion we just had about useful idiosyncrasies, which is that there’s this desire to try to appease everybody, to appeal to everyone. And when people do that, you end up appealing to nobody. You actually reduce the force of your strength because you become ordinary, you become like every other gospel singer in the world.

And we notice things because of contrast, so something stands out because it’s different from what surrounds it. If there is no contrast, no anomaly, no fingerprints, no idiosyncrasy, you become invisible, you become the background. And the only way to step into your genius is to actually embrace, not erase, your idiosyncrasies, your useful idiosyncrasies.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I love that. Now, that’s making me think of Bo Burnham, if you know the comedian-musician.

Ozan Varol
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, I’m a little late to the game but I just saw his special “Inside,” which I just thought was so brilliant. And as compared to most comedy specials, we have a form we’re expecting: a stage, an audience, some jokes, a microphone. But then he does this thing where it’s all inside with different creative tidbits. And it has stuck with me like no comedy special ever has.

I’m thinking about it again and again, and it does feel all the more genius, and I’ve recommended it many times, and I guess, hey, and on the show. That contrast is powerful. And I’m sure it’s not for everybody, “This is really kind of weird,” and tune out but those it’s connecting with just go gaga for it, and share it, and grow it, and all kinds of good things happen.

Ozan Varol
Yeah, that’s exactly right. Because then you’re setting up this light beam and you’re attracting people to that light beam who really want what you’re offering. And I think a lot of people don’t do that. We’d rather fail singing the same gospel song that everybody else is singing than risk failing individually. Another talented person, an extraordinary person that comes to mind who did just that is Bruce Springsteen.

I recently saw him in concert, and I was blown away. Like, it was my first Bruce Springsteen concert, and here’s this 73-year-old guy who’s like jumping and dancing and sliding across stage, and pulling off all of these moves that would put people in their 30s to shame. And as I was watching him on stage, I was reflecting on how he’s had this sort of longevity that he had. He’s been doing this since 1965.

And it’s not his voice. So, his voice is not amazing, and he readily admits that. And he can play the guitar but, as he writes in his book, Born to Run, which is excellent, by the way, he says, “Look, the world is filled with great guitar players, and many of them my match or better.” But the thing he did, instead of trying to out-sing or outplay other musicians, he leaned on the one useful idiosyncrasy that made him different from everybody else, which was his ability to write song lyrics.

So, he became a sensation for writing lyrics that capture the blue-collar spirit, and tell the gap between the American dream and the American reality. And this man, who was initially dismissed by agents and bandmates and critics, just about everyone, eventually became rock and roll sensation because he leaned into the one quality, the one useful idiosyncrasy that actually made him different from other people.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. Thank you. All right. You’ve got a few teaser bullets I just got to know about. You say our most scarce resource is not time or money. What is it? And how does it matter for awakening your genius?

Ozan Varol
It is your attention because attention doesn’t scale. You can pay attention to only one thing at a time, and your reality on a moment-to-moment basis is defined by what you pay attention to. So, if you pay attention to junk, your life becomes junk. If you’re paying attention to useful sources of information, then your life becomes more colorful.

And so, I think, as they say in the movies, with the gun, like, “Be careful where you point that thing,” be careful where you point your attention because it’s going to fundamentally shape your reality. And there was a time in my life where, four or five years ago, I would wake up and the first thing I did in the morning was to grab my phone, immediately check email, immediately check the news, immediately check Instagram, and it was the digital equivalent of gorging on a bucket of M&Ms for breakfast every morning.

I would immediately pollute my mind, and then my mind and my output, by the way, would turn to junk because that’s what I was taking in, that’s what I was paying attention to. So, if you want to change your reality, start by changing what you’re paying attention to.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so good. Well, now I got to know, what do you read in the morning now instead?

Ozan Varol
I don’t read anything in the morning.

Pete Mockaitis
There you go.

Ozan Varol
My mornings now are reserved for creating. So, one of the first things I do in the morning is to journal, to free-write. So, not journalism, like I’m describing what I’m going to do or what I did the day before, but what kept me up at night, or an idea that keeps bugging me, something that has just been top of mind for me, and I just sit down and I write it. I do this thought dump in the morning, and that’s how I start my morning. And then I write in the morning.

And everyone is different, but for me, the morning is my most creative time. And so, I now reserve that morning for creation as opposed to consumption.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s cool. Now, how does detecting BS help us awaken our genius, and how do we do it?

Ozan Varol
Awakening your genius isn’t just about that inner journey of finding the wisdom within. It’s also about the outer journey, which is getting information from outside sources but, crucially, figuring out which sources are useful and which ones are not, filtering out low quality or sources of information that might mislead you. And I have an entire section of the book dedicated to providing readers with a toolkit for doing just that.

But one of the simple ways to do this, which most people don’t do, is to actually read the article. It’s become so prevalent to just read the headline and then jump to a conclusion based on the headline, hit the retweet button based on the headline. Just reading the original article is something that so few people do.

But if you just take a few minutes and read the actual source of the thing where that headline came from, and if you want to go down the rabbit hole, then actually go back to the primary source, which, again, most people don’t do. But that one thing is going to set you apart from other people, and you’re going to find things, little nuggets of information that people miss because they are just so focused on the headline.

And I’ll mention one more thing. There are ten strategies in the book on this. Pausing and asking yourself, before you accept what you read, a simple question, which is just, “Is this right? Is this right? How can I poke holes in a curious way?” So, skeptical curiosity, not just being skeptical of what you’re reading but approaching it with curiosity is such an important skill that most people don’t have.

And one of the examples I give in the book is from this Mars mission that I worked on where it was reported by a journalist in a tweet that one of the two rovers that I worked on, its final transmission to Earth was “My battery is low and it’s getting dark.” And it got retweeted like millions of times, a bunch of media sources picked it up, and the story is false.

Before the rover died, it sent back to Earth a bunch of routine code that included, among other things, its power levels and the outside light reading. And then a journalist, who didn’t let facts get in the way of a good story, then took a short section of that random code, paraphrased it into English, and then tweet it to the world that these were the rover’s final words, and then millions of people hit the retweet button, and a bunch of media outlets published stories all without pausing and asking, “How does a remote-controlled space robot spit out fully formed English sentences designed to tug at people’s heartstrings?”

It’s so useful to ask, step back, and ask, “Wait a minute. Is this right? How does a reporter know what the rover said?” And then that would lead to additional questions, like, “Well, how does a Martian rover communicate with Earth in the first place? Does it use fully formed English sentences? Like, how do we know what the rover is doing at any moment?” Those questions are guided by a skepticism of the reporter’s claims but, more importantly, by curiosity about the underlying truth. And questions like that will lead you to places that few others dare go.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And what’s your strategy for asking better questions?

Ozan Varol
One of the ways you can do this is to ask what I call a soliciting question, and it solicits a more insightful answer. I’ll give you an example from my life when I was a law professor. I would pause during class from time to time, and ask, “Does anyone have any questions?” Nine times out of ten, no one will raise their hands, and I’d move on, confident that I’d done an amazing job of explaining the material.

Well, I was wrong, there were plenty of students who were not getting it. The exam answers made that clear. So, I decided to run an experiment. Instead of saying, “Does anyone have any questions?” I began to say something like, “The material we just covered was really confusing. I expect many of you to have questions. Now is a great time to ask them.”

The number of hands that went up increased dramatically. And I realized in hindsight that “Does anyone have any questions?” was actually a stupid question. I’d forgotten how hard it was for a student to raise their hand around, like, hundred of their friends and admit that they didn’t get something or they didn’t understand something.

The way that I reframed that question normalized confusion. It made it easier for students to raise their hands and admit that they didn’t get it, they didn’t understand it, because I made it clear that this material was really difficult. And I think we ask stupid questions all the time outside the classroom as well.

So, if you’re a manager and you ask a team member, say, during a quarterly review, “Are you facing any challenges?” most people will say no. They will say no because they might fear that admitting that they’re facing a challenge is going to be seen as a weakness by their boss. But as a manager, if you say something like, “We just finished a really tough quarter. Everyone is facing significant challenges. I’d love to hear about yours.”

Now you’re much more likely to get a more honest, insightful response because, now, you’ve normalized challenges. Now, you’re saying, “Look, everybody in the company, everybody on the team is facing challenges. I’m just curious about the specific challenges that you’re facing.” And so, phrased that way, it becomes easier to create psychological safety and for people to open and give you a far more insightful answer than the one that you, otherwise, would’ve gotten.

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

Ozan Varol
I love this quote from Rumi, “As you walk on the way, the way appears.” The implication being that the way is not going to appear until you actually start to walk. I think most people ignore the fundamental tenet of that quote and they want perfect information about the precise destination and all the twists and turns that are going to get them there, but life doesn’t work that way.

Life has a way of lighting the path ahead only a few steps at a time. And as you take each step, you go from not knowing to knowing, from darkness to light. And the only way to know what comes next is to start walking before you think you’re ready.

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

Ozan Varol
There was a study I came across where they put students in a room, they took all of their devices away, and they were given the option of either doing nothing or administering themselves an electric shock. And I don’t remember the precise figures but a shockingly high percentage of people chose to shock themselves, and it was painful, rather than just sit there for 15 minutes just by themselves and their thoughts.

I like this research study because we’ve lost this ability to just sit and be with our thoughts without reaching for the nearest available distraction, whether it’s a shock from an electric device or a shock from your smartphone. And there’s so much value in putting yourself on airplane mode, and just sitting there with you and your thoughts, and letting yourself daydream.

That’s where the best ideas come from, and that’s why you get your best ideas in the shower is because it’s that few moments in your day where you’re actually completely free of notifications and distractions. It’s just you and your thoughts. Imagine the types of ideas that you might be able to generate if you replicate those shower-like conditions more frequently throughout the day.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Ozan Varol
Well, I have so many favorite books but the one that popped to mind is How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. It just opened my eyes into this whole new world. Well, actually, it was an older world because the research was done back in the ‘60s and ‘70s by using psychedelics for therapeutic purposes. And he goes back to the research and brings it back alive. And it just opened my eyes to these alternative forms of healing that I knew nothing about.

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

Ozan Varol
I love Roam Research for taking notes. When I mentioned free-writing and journaling before, that’s something that I journal in and write in. I keep it open on my browser throughout the day, and I just jot down whatever is coming up. And I have this setup in there where I can go back and review notes that I took three months ago, six months ago, and a year ago.

And I find that review process really helpful, to go back and what I was thinking about a year ago, or six months ago, because when you spot these same themes emerge, same ideas, same thought patterns keep repeating themselves, it becomes harder to ignore them.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Ozan Varol
I already mentioned it, but I’ll come back to it. Favorite habit is putting myself on airplane mode. So, just sitting with just a notepad and a pen and nothing else, or going out for a walk, no podcast, no audiobook, nothing, just me and my thoughts. And those moments in the day where it seems like nothing is happening end up being the most productive moments because that’s when my best ideas come.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you share a favorite resonant nugget, something you share that people seem to latch onto, retweet often, etc.?

Ozan Varol
“Creativity isn’t produced; it’s discovered,” is a quote that gets retweeted a lot, or gets repeated a lot, because we have this industrial-age mentality that we bring to knowledge work. Like, if you’re just sort of nose-to-the-grindstone is the best way to generate ideas, and that’s not accurate. Ideas actually come in moments of slack, not moments of hard labor.

Like, if you’re trying to innovate, you’re not going to do that by trying to hit inbox zero. They happen when you step away. And taking your foot off the pedal every now and then can actually be the best way to accelerate.

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

Ozan Varol
You can get Awaken Your Genius wherever books are sold. If you go to GeniusBook.net, there’s a special bonus that you can get there for ordering the book, which says free mini course that you can watch in less than 30 minutes with 10 life changing insights from the book, similar to the ones you heard here today.

And if you like to keep in touch with me, I’m not active on social media just because my attention, I found, is better pointed in other directions. So, the best way to keep in touch with me is to join my email list. I have one email that goes out every Thursday to over 45,000 subscribers, and that you can read in less than three minutes. And you can sign up for that by heading over to my website, which is OzanVarol.com, that’s O-Z-A-N, V as in victor, A-R-O-L.com.

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

Ozan Varol
I think just recapping what we covered so far, embrace your useful idiosyncrasies, spend time on airplane mode, and be careful where you point your attention.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Ozan, this has been a treat. I wish you much fun and moments of genius.

Ozan Varol
Thanks so much, Pete. Thanks for having me on.

853: The Four Workarounds that Help Solve Nearly any Problem with Paulo Savaget

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Paulo Savaget says: "The idea of working around requires adaptation, flexibility, and it is imperfection learning as well."

Paulo Savaget reveals unconventional tactics to solve just about any problem.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The four workarounds–and how to use them.
  2. How to maximize incentives to start change.
  3. Why you shouldn’t let limited resources stop you.

About Paulo

Paulo Savaget is associate professor at Oxford University’s Engineering Sciences Department and the Saïd Business School. He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge as a Gates Scholar and has a background working as a lecturer, consultant, entrepreneur, and researcher finding innovative solutions for a more inclusive world. As a consultant, he worked on projects for large companies, non-profits, government agencies in Latin America, and the OECD. He currently resides in Oxford.

Resources Mentioned

Paulo Savaget Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Paulo, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Paulo Savaget
Thank you very much for inviting me, Pete. It’s a pleasure to be here with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes. Well, I’m excited to be chatting about your wisdom. And I’d love to hear, you’ve seen a lot of creative solutions to a lot of interesting problems. Could you point to any particularly intriguing and creative solutions that have really stuck with you over time?

Paulo Savaget
I think I have to start with an example before defining the concept that I introduced in this book of workarounds. I work with these organizations in Zambia that address lack of access to diarrhea treatment. It’s an organization composed only by two staffs, so very small organization but feisty and creative in the ways they address the problem.

If you think of why medicines and many, including lifesaving medicines, that are cheap over the counter, that even populations living in extreme poverty could possibly afford, and if you try to understand the bottlenecks preventing these medicines from being found, you’re going to identify things like very poor infrastructure, or logistics, or governance issues, things that are very difficult to tackle.

And many organizations worldwide have been trying to address these bottlenecks but they might be very costly, there are many failures that arise throughout the process, failures that you may not be able to conceive from the outset.

So, what did this organization do? They realized that you don’t find these lifesaving medicines in remote regions, but you find things like Coca-Cola everywhere, even in the remotest places on earth, you find Coca-Cola and other fast moving consumer goods, like sugar, coffee, cooking oil. So, they started, literally, taking a free ride with Coca-Cola bottles to make medicines available in remote regions.

That’s what I call a workaround. It’s this idea that you don’t have to necessarily tackle an obstacle to get things done. There are many creative ways of addressing problems. And, in this case, as you can see, Pete, they bridge across silos, they addressed a problem in healthcare by piggybacking on the success of fast moving consumer goods.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, when we talk about a free ride in the Coca-Cola bottles, the medicines are literally placed inside the bottles of Coke?

Paulo Savaget
In the beginning, they started fitting medicines between bottles in a Coca-Cola crate. When I went to Zambia, I saw how the distribution of Coca-Cola happens, and it’s very decentralized. So, Coca-Cola doesn’t necessarily know where the bottles travel to. Let’s say that Coca-Cola produces Coca-Cola, and then there’s a local bottler that is outsourced, then many wholesalers, retailers, supermarkets, and people transporting Coca-Cola ranging from vans of hospitals, so even bicycles when they’re reaching the last mile.

I’ve seen, for example, someone riding a bike with a crate of Coca-Cola and, like, a goat strapped around the bike. So, it’s a very decentralized value chain that Coca-Cola doesn’t even know where the bottles end up going to sometimes. And it’s fascinating how robust and resilient the value chain is because these glass bottles, they return. They go and they return to the origin.

So, the idea that was initially fitting medicines between the bottles in Coca-Cola crates, so the medicine can take a free ride. And as they started this intervention, they realized that they could build and piggyback on the entire distribution chain that makes fast moving consumer goods so successful. It’s not simply fitting medicines between bottles to take a free ride, you can actually use the same actors that distribute and sell Coca-Cola to do that for diarrhea treatments, which is over the counter.

There’s no prescription and it doesn’t require refrigeration. People who live in even extreme poverty could afford this medicine. So, that’s how they evolve the intervention. And the uptake of the medicine, in a very short period of time, we’re talking about six, seven years, increased the intervention districts from less than 1% to more than 50%, saving thousands of lives.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Okay. So, there’s one right there, the piggyback, and so there, it’s quite literally distribution of something on top of something else. That’s really cool and beautiful to see the impact when that’s implemented.

Paulo Savaget
Pete, it doesn’t necessarily have to be distribution. You might piggyback, for example, in a marketing budget from another organization. For example, let me give an example that is not distribution-related. Airbnb, when it was very small, it started with this value proposition of matching people who had lodging to offer with people who needed lodging.

At that time, most people who didn’t want to stay at hotels and wanted these sorts of arrangements, would go to Craigslist, but Craigslist didn’t have a very good user experience because it had, literally, everything bad. It was sort of the yellow pages on the internet. So, when Airbnb started, they had a better platform with better user experience and offered a more customized service, including professional photography of the houses that would be listed.

The problem was that people didn’t know about Airbnb. So, what did they do, which was genius, this workaround that they pursued? They started piggybacking on their rival, on Craigslist, to increase the visibility for their listings. And how did they do that? Let’s say that I’m Airbnb and you are someone who want to list your house on Airbnb, and you are a first mover, you identified Airbnb pretty early and you post your listing to your own Airbnb. And then I would send you a message saying, “Hey, Pete, you listed your house here with us. And if we cross-post your listing on Craigslist, it’s going to increase your visibility because a lot of people use Craigslist, and it’s free, and we’re going to do that for you.”

And, of course, you would say, “Yes, go ahead,” because you have nothing to lose, not going to take any of your time or money, and it would increase your chances of getting your house rented. So, they did that, they cross-posted on Craigslist. And let’s say that someone else who’s going on Craigslist who did not know about the existence of Airbnb, and then they tried to find accommodation, then they see your listing that was much better, it looked better, it had professional photographs, once they click on it, they are redirected to Airbnb’s website.

So, what would happen to these people? They started going directly to Airbnb the next time they were searching for lodging. And that happened to a lot of people and it had an exponential impact as well because of word of mouth, they started talking about Airbnb. That was a way of scaling and increasing massively the user base of Airbnb without having to draw up diamond ads. They simply piggybacked on their rival. And when Craigslist realized that Airbnb was trying to poach their users, it was already late. Many users were already using Airbnb, and Airbnb took off.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. So, we got a piggyback there in the marketing domain, so beautiful. All right. Well, so we’ve got a couple fun examples of piggybacking, which is one of the four workarounds. Can we zoom out a bit and tell me what’s sort of the big idea or main thesis behind the book The Four Workarounds?

Paulo Savaget
The main idea is that we often find ourselves in complex situations, problems that you may not necessarily be able to solve, or that make you feel paralyzed, and workarounds can help you with that. They allow you to get things done in a very effective way but also in a resourceful way, getting quick results, and sometimes allowing you to make outsized impact as well.

So, workarounds are very accessible imperfection-loving methods that allow you to get things done in very different contexts. And I try to show that based on the knowledge and this research that I’ve done starting with computer hackers to see how they hack systems to make change so resourcefully, and sometimes with meager resources. They make these huge impacts in computer systems. And then with very scrappy organizations worldwide that were being hacky as they approached their own problems.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that makes sense as I imagine being in a computer situation, like, “Huh, how do we get this thing to go everywhere fast? Well, piggyback off something that’s already going everywhere fast. Okay, there’s a resourceful thing we just did there without a lot of developer time, without a lot of money. We made that happen.”

So, we talked about the piggyback. I understand there’s three other categories of workarounds in the book: the loophole, the roundabout, and the next best. Could you define and then give an example of each of these? For example, with the loophole, I was intrigued by the Brazilian ventilator case study. Can you lay it on us?

Paulo Savaget
Sure. The loophole consists of these approaches that reinterpret rules and that leverage ambiguity, and sometimes tap into different systems of rules that are not necessarily the most obvious but are applicable to your circumstance as well. In this case that came from Brazil was from a governor of the poorest state in Brazil, called Flavio Dino.

At the time, well, he’s a former judge, and he had a very good understanding of what the rules allow but also what they don’t, and he was an enemy of the then president Jair Bolsonaro, and he saw himself, as many other politicians at the time, struggling to get ventilators for the hospitals in the time that COVID hit in the very beginning. And it’s a state that is particularly challenged to offer healthcare because it’s one of the poorest ones.

So, he got some funds from local partners, many partners that were in the private sector, to buy ventilators but the problem was that every time they tried to purchase these ventilators something happened. So, once, for example, they tried to purchase ventilators, and because the ventilators were coming from China, and they had to stop somewhere to refuel because there’s no direct flight from China to Brazil, they first went to the United States, and because there was a shortage of ventilators, the ventilators were confiscated.

Then the second time they did that in Germany, and the same thing happened. The ventilators were confiscated in Germany. Then they thought, “We have to work around this,” and they worked around a series of obstacles to get these ventilators into his state, and they had to stack workaround after workaround.

So, the first one was that, because of the accountability and the bureaucracy from the state, it would take a lot of time to be able to procure directly these ventilators from the manufacturer in China. So, instead of getting the funds from the companies and purchasing through the government, the companies themselves were purchasing the ventilators and then donating to the state. So, that was a first way of speeding things up.

Then, because one of them was a supermarket, and the other one was a mining company, and both had operations in China and many suppliers in China, they had local connections, and these local connections went to these manufacturers, procured, and also waited until they actually got the ventilators.

Then they took a flight that wasn’t a commercial flight, as in the previous times that they failed. So, they got a plane to do this flight, and instead of going through more conventional routes, they stopped in Ethiopia to refuel because the chances of getting the ventilators confiscated in Ethiopia, or even monitored by local authorities, was not as high.

After refueling, they had to go to São Paulo. They couldn’t go directly to that state, so when they went there, the challenge was that all ventilators, at the time, were being controlled by the federal government, and redistributed by the federal government to the states. But these were being procured by a single state, the state of Maranhão. So, what did they do?

They went to São Paulo at the time in which they already had a second flight arranged in a way that they wouldn’t have to go through customs in São Paulo. They could do that in Maranhão because there was also custom services at the airport in Maranhão. But when they landed in Maranhão and everything was planned, it was a time that people who worked at customs were no longer working because it was after their work hours.

So, when it landed in Maranhão, the team of the governor took the ventilators to the hospital and signed the documents saying, “We’re going to come back here later to do the customs procedures, the necessary customs procedures that are our responsibility from the federal government.” So, they took the ventilators to the hospitals, they started being used immediately, and next day, they went there to file the paperwork for the federal government to do the customs procedure.

When the federal government realized, they were not happy because these ventilators were supposed to be taken by the federal government and redistributed, but they couldn’t go to the hospitals and take these ventilators that were already being used and already saving lives of people. They would never be able to do that. And when they tried to bring this case to court, they didn’t really have a strong case because the process was technically right, and it was a state of emergency as well, so they didn’t necessarily violate any rule.

They did the technical administrative procedure to get these ventilators through and to the hospitals in Maranhão but they found these ingenious ways of circumventing all these obstacles in the way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Well, keep them coming. Let’s hear about the roundabout.

Paulo Savaget
So, the first one, the piggyback, was about leveraging these different relationships, cross silos, finding unconventional pairings, like addressing lack of access in medicines with Coca-Cola’s value chain. And the second one, as I said, it’s about rules, reinterpreting or leveraging ambiguity, different sets of rules. The third one is about self-reinforcing behaviors.

Self-reinforcing behaviors, when I teach systems change here at Oxford, we describe them as positive feedback loops. It’s another terminology for that. That means that there are some behaviors that spiral out of control, and that normally they become…they’re seen as if they were inevitable. So, let me give a few examples, a very trivial one.

When I was a child and I have an older brother, I would fight against my brother very often, and I would flick him, he would slap me, I would punch him, and then, suddenly, like he was trying to choke me, and we were trying to kill each other. So, things spiral out of control. The same with a snowball, for example, that’s what we call self-reinforcing behavior.

And the workaround that I call roundabout offers the possibility of disturbing or disrupting a self-reinforcing behavior. A very critical example that I like to share is one that I noticed when I was in India. I was in Delhi, and I realized that some walls were drenched in urine because public urination is a very normalized behavior, and it’s a very gendered issue because women do not necessarily urinate in public spaces but men do.

And every time you talk to someone, and say, like, “Why is this issue still such a big problem here?” people would say, “Ah, it’s inevitable. It’s culture. It has existed for so long.” So, it’s this kind of self-reinforcing behavior that is very difficult to change, to tackle. Even the efforts, for example, to provide public toilet facilities have not necessarily generated the results that the policymakers expected.

So, this roundabout workaround that is so small but so genius was that some wall owners, who had their walls drenched in urine, started putting tiles of Hindu gods on the walls.

Pete Mockaitis
Tiles of what?

Paulo Savaget
Hindu gods, like Shiva.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Hindu gods. Okay.

Paulo Savaget
Yeah, because a man, regardless of their religion, in a country where the majority of the population is Hindu, they would not dare to urinate on a god. So, by putting these tiles of Hindu gods, they disturbed these self-reinforcing behaviors, and the walls that were once drenched in urine became cleaner, and cleaner, and cleaner, and they diverted the stream of urine to other places, not to their walls.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Paulo, this is fresh. We haven’t had a good urine example across 840 plus episodes, so I dig this. When I was reading through your book a bit, I don’t know if this example fits neatly into this categorization, but it kind of reminded me, like the reinforcing, the roundabout, when we invert it, we’d get a different result.

I remember one time I did some speeding. Naughty Pete. Drive safely, everybody. But I did some speeding, I was young and foolish, and I didn’t know that the speed limit changed quickly from a state route to, like, we’re inside a village. So, anyway, I got a ticket for big speeding, and they said, “Hey, if you go to this driver safety class, then we can reduce the fine and prevent it from being on your record and causing problems and insurance, whatever.” I was like, “Okay, yeah, let’s do that.”

And I thought I was so brilliant; this state police officer was teaching this class on safe driving that nobody wanted to be at. All of us just wanted to just, like, tuned out but that doesn’t make for a great educational environment in which you can really learn and retain things. So, he did what I think – Paulo, you tell me, this might be a roundabout. He ingeniously said, “Okay, every time you answer a question, or you contribute, I want to make a tally mark on this chalkboard, and that represents one minute that you get to leave earlier.”

So, the class was maybe four hours, I don’t know. And so then, suddenly the incentives were turned around, like, “Oh, well, we would like to leave sooner, and even though this is boring, we can achieve the objective of leaving sooner by participating.” And, sure enough, it made for a pretty engaging class on safe driving that none of us wanted to be at because he inverted our incentives on us.

Paulo Savaget
Exactly. That’s a great example that I hadn’t heard before, and it reminded me of an example that I didn’t include in the book but it’s kind of similar to what you said, also about speeding in Sweden, that they created this policy that they took the fines from people who were speeding, and created a lottery for people who did not speed.

So, let’s say that you didn’t get a fine that month, you would be joining the lottery, like you might make some money out of this. But, of course, we like the gamification aspect of this. We like lottery. We like the thrill. So, a lot of people stopped speeding, not because they didn’t want to pay the fine but because they wanted to be part of the lottery.

And that’s similar to what you’re saying, you change the incentive. You turn something negative into something positive. Or, the language of many economists, it would be turning the sticks into carrots, the idea of carrots and sticks.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Well, let’s hear about the fourth workaround here, the next best. You got a cool drone example. Could you share that?

Paulo Savaget
Of course, yeah. So, the next best is about repurposing resources or recombining them in ways that are unconventional and beyond the original design of these resources. And resources can be tangible or intangible. The drone example is from an organization called Zipline. As you know, there’s a lot of expectations about drones as technologies.

Perhaps the company Amazon will soon be delivering your products, Amazon Prime, Next Day with drones in New York, like going in San Francisco, but the reality is that it’s not viable yet. So, the many organizations that are interested in investing in drone delivery in places, where at places that are not as busy, and in a way that they can build capabilities, they can develop themselves, they can patent, and then later have this competitive advantage when a drone becomes viable in many places.

So, these organizations, I thought it was genius how they used drones to forge a hand in this game, and they used drones in Rwanda. Also, a case about the last mile, these very remote regions where healthcare is very difficult to get, and they deliver to remote regions, blood for blood transfusions, because blood is very challenging to deliver or to store in remote regions with very poor electricity and healthcare facilities but they are needed urgently, like you don’t have a lot of time, it cannot wait much if you need a blood transfusion.

So, they started shipping from a central facility in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, blood to these many rural regions that are so hard to reach via roads or normal more conventional transportation methods. And this has been extremely successful and has scaled to other places as well. And as they did this, they created patents, they understood better how to operate drones, to make deliveries with drones, and they built all these skill and knowledge while saving lives and contributing a lot to healthcare in Rwanda.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, beautiful, Paulo. So, we got a nice little rundown of these four workarounds. I’m curious, is there a type or category of problem or trigger that gets you thinking, since you know this stuff really well, “Ah, there’s probably one of the four workarounds I can use here.” What are some of those triggers or signals?

Paulo Savaget
They boil down to the core attributes. If there’s something that you think is paralyzing you because it’s a very normalized behavior, go with the roundabout. If there’s a rule, for example, that is constraining you, a legislation, a customary rule, something that is habit, for example, or something that is in the constitution but you think is unfair, go with the loophole.

If you have these possibilities of crossing boundaries and these lines that managers often draw, but they might be arbitrary. We don’t have to address healthcare problems only with the methods from healthcare. We can use fast moving consumer goods to deliver medicines to remote regions. That’s a good way of thinking of a piggyback, how you benefit or leverage the success of orders for your benefit as well.

And if you have resources at your disposal, and that you can repurpose or combine them in different ways beyond the original functions or the most conventional ways of using them, then go with the next best.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. All right. Well, let me just put you on the spot and throw some problems on you that I hear from listeners frequently. One, “I’m overwhelmed by too many projects, responsibilities, action items, emails, meetings.” How can we work around some of that?

Paulo Savaget
That’s great. I also face similar challenges and I try to constantly work around some of them. The idea of working around requires adaptation, flexibility, and it is imperfection learning as well. Like, you do something that is good enough. So, when you start with pursuing workarounds, it conduces to planning less and being more adaptive. It’s more pragmatic. It’s more practical. It’s less about long-term changes and behaviors.

Let me give an example of something that I’ve done that was related to sending emails that I think might resonate with some of our listeners. A long time ago, before I started studying workarounds, I was an intern and I had a boss who, very erratically, answered emails. And, of course, I was frustrated because I wanted my emails to be answered. Then I started talking to other people who worked with him, and I realized that he had a certain pattern of email answering that he normally started from the top of his emails, and he started answering emails very early in the morning because he was an early bird.

So, let’s say he woke up at, like, 5:00 a.m., and then he would answer emails for, like, two hours starting from the top. I infer that based on conversations and from the many emails I had sent him that were answered or not. So, what I started doing, I programmed my emails to be sent in the wee hours of the morning.

So, let’s say that I wrote the email at 6:00 p.m., I would program that email to be sent at, like, 3:47 a.m. because then it would go to the top of his pile of emails. And that increased a lot the rate of response for all these emails that I wanted to get answered. That was a workaround in our workplace that might…I still haven’t told that former boss what I’ve done.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, he’s not listening. And just to reinforce the learning, I guess we might call that a piggyback, in that you are piggybacking your way into the golden timeframe via simple software a bit. Or, what category would you put on that?

Paulo Savaget
I would actually consider that a next best because the next best is about resources and repurposing resources. I thought of emails and use them in different ways to communicate and identify the times that work best for my emails to be sent. We don’t normally think of the times that your email will be sent, and that’s how I repurposed, yeah, the ways I communicated. So, I would call it a next best.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s hear another one. This might be tricky when it’s about interpersonal relations. Like, let’s say someone says, “My boss, or my key colleague, I got to work with is just a jerk. They’re engaged in some toxic and narcissistic behaviors, and it is just tough being around them.” Any clever workarounds that can be put to this thorny interpersonal stuff?

Paulo Savaget
Definitely. One of the chapters in my book describes how you can pursue workarounds in your organization. And I try to challenge a little bit this idea that collaboration is necessarily beneficial or better in every circumstance. Sometimes you will face people that are toxic, that you don’t want to work with, or that might be too slow or not contributing much to your projects.

So, many of the cases and the ways that I describe workarounds is not about pleasing people. It’s about getting things done, and things that will benefit you or whichever goals you have in mind. Let me give an example that I covered. It’s a roundabout workaround.

In many organizations, the bosses will not necessarily allow employees to pursue their own innovative projects because it might not be the priority for the organization, it might not align with the goals or priorities of the organization. So, what do many employees do? It’s what is called boot lagging by innovation management scholars and has resulted into some of our most beloved projects, like the aspirin, or blue LED lights, or large screens by HP.

And the idea is that instead of getting the support or endorsement from bosses, they work around these direct orders, sometimes simply ignoring rules, sometimes actually ignoring what bosses said, so they can develop the innovative projects when the idea is still very rough in the beginning of innovations. It’s what we call sometimes hopeful monstrosities. They are hopeful but they are monstrous. They might not align. You don’t really know necessarily how it’s going to turn out to look like.

And then by working around direct orders, people can invest in these ideas, going underground, and develop the projects until the moment is right to communicate to others in the company. So, you pretty much buy time while developing your solution, your product, or technology. And once that becomes more viable and more attractive, then you make it public and you go to your bosses, and that will be a much better time for presenting that idea instead of in the early stages when the idea is still very crude.

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

Paulo Savaget
No, I think we’re good to shift.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Let’s hear about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring.

Paulo Savaget
That’s very difficult for a nerd like myself who works with so many quotes. But one that I use a lot is from this organization called Alight in Zambia and they describe how they embrace complexity, and instead of building riverbeds if there’s water flowing, you go with the water. You try to embrace those flows and make use of what is already there instead of trying to create things that might not be viable.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Paulo Savaget
Wow, that’s also a very difficult for a nerd like myself. The many books that I really enjoy in business, for example, some of the most recent ones that I’ve read includes Originals by Adam Grant that is very nicely written. I really enjoy the books by Malcolm Gladwell, for example.

And there’s a book by Caroline Criado-Perez called Invisible Women that is fascinating as well, describing how gender inequality impacts data, and how this data that we pretty much collect only from men impact the products we use and the services we have available to us as well.

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

Paulo Savaget
Well, l would say that my favorite tool or technology is a coffee machine because I need a lot of coffee. As a Brazilian, I’m constantly caffeinated. And in order to also get things done, I need to get a lot of coffee.

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

Paulo Savaget
I’m a bit hyperactive so I need to exercise very often, and it also helps me focus. So, I try to exercise every day. I swim, cycle, play tennis, do many different kinds of sports.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share, something that really seems to connect and resonate with folks when they’re talking about your stuff, they quote back to you often? Or, do you have any quotable Paulo original gems that folks, they’re Kindle book highlighting, they’re retweeting, they’re saying, “Man, when you said this, that really stuck with me.”

Paulo Savaget
One of the quotes that I have in the book that a lot of people enjoy, and I’ve heard many comments about, that was about deviants, that I said that deviants are frowned upon but I think we don’t deviate enough. And then I try to bake a case about how deviants is important as means of challenging the status quo, and how it’s different from disobedience.

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

Paulo Savaget
I would say reach out. I’m always very happy to talk and exchange. I really enjoy learning about workarounds that people have pursued after being exposed to my work or before as well, that they hadn’t really given much thought about. And, of course, my website and the profile that I have available on the Oxford website.

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

Paulo Savaget
I would say working with others can be much better and much more fruitful but sometimes we got to be adaptive and make sure that we don’t necessarily go for the people-pleasing solutions, that we can think of different ways of addressing our problems, and that workarounds might help you with that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Paulo, this has been a treat. I wish much fun and many good workarounds.

Paulo Savaget
Thank you very much. I hope you’re going to also face with many workarounds.

841: How to Get Creative on Demand with Baronfig’s Joey Cofone

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Joey Cofone says: "Creativity is not about creating. It is about combining."

Joey Cofone shares what it really means to be creative and why everyone can be creative in any role.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why creativity isn’t just for the “creatives”.
  2. Why we shouldn’t shy away from our fears.
  3. How to come up with ideas on the spot.

About Joey

Joey Cofone is the Founder & CEO of Baronfig, an award-winning designer and entrepreneur, and author of The Laws of Creativity.

Joey has designed and art directed over 100 products from zero to launch. His work has been featured in Fast Company, Bloomberg, New York Magazine, Newsweek, Bon Appétit, Quartz, Mashable, Print, and more. Joey was named a New Visual Artist and, separately, Wunderkind designer, by Print magazine. He is also a 1st place winner of the American Institute of Graphic Arts design competition, Command X.

Joey strives to make work that appeals to curious minds—work that’s beautiful, smart, and communicative. He believes that design is the least of a designer’s worries, that story is at the heart of all tasks, and jumping off cliffs is the only way to grow.

He lives in New York City with his wife, Ariana, and his dog (and writing buddy), Luigi.

Resources Mentioned

Joey Cofone Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Joey, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Joey Cofone
Hello. Hello. I am psyched.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m psyched too. I want to know so much about your insights, creativity, Baron Fig. I have one of your notebooks on my desk.

Joey Cofone
Surprise.

Pete Mockaitis
It was there before I knew I was talking to you.

Joey Cofone
Watching it the whole time.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I wanted to ask you about your hobby of playing video games but then I learned that you almost died in Tennessee, so I think we need to hear both of these tales. What’s the story here?

Joey Cofone
I did almost die in Tennessee. We discovered this before recording when I said, “Where are you?” and you said, “Tennessee,” and I said, “I almost died there.” And that is because I went hiking the Appalachian Trail when I was 20 maybe, 21. I was in phenomenal shape. I’m not in bad shape now but I was in killer shape then.

And so, it was just me and a buddy, went on the mountain, not underprepared. I will say we did our homework. However, we missed a spring, did not get water, the sun started going down, we became disoriented mentally and then, of course, disoriented because we couldn’t see anything, started not making sense, and we literally had to hang on to each other.

Two very large dudes, walking hand in hand like we were walking down the aisle, all the way through the mountains until we found water. And then we had to sit there and watch it boil before we could drink it. It took, like, 30 minutes to boil this on this little tiny thing. Anyway, I did almost die because I was about to lie down and give up.

And my friend, who is now the COO of Baron Fig, Jay, was there to give me his last little bit of water, and say, “We got to keep going, man.” So, I almost died in Tennessee, but here I am today with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, what a guy.

Joey Cofone
He did. It was his last sip of water and he gave it to me.

Pete Mockaitis
That is beautiful.

Joey Cofone
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m also thinking about Jeff Boyles, how you could’ve cut that 30 minutes way down.

Joey Cofone
Oh, man. You talk about waiting for a pot to boil, man, I thought it was a lifetime, and then it was the best-tasting water I had ever had in my life even though it was scalding hot.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, that’s good stuff. Good stuff.

Joey Cofone
Yeah, it was good.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m glad you’re alive and made it out of Tennessee.

Joey Cofone
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
And I also wanted to hear about you and video games. Some say they’re a waste of time. You, well, I want to know what you think, but that’s what you like to do, and you are a thought leader in the realm of creativity. So, I’d like to guess that there’s some sort of a connection between video games and creativity, but you tell me.

Joey Cofone
Sure. I would consider myself a thought leader in video games, as a consumer. I’ve been talking about video games and pro video games since I started Baron Fig, and have been interviewed all over the place, and that’s about just over a decade now. So, gaming has become significantly more mainstream in that time but, in my lifetime certainly, gaming has been viewed as a nerdy guy who sits in his parents’ basement type of activity for quite a long time. And only in the last, let’s say, five-ish, seven years has it become really, really mainstream, so I’m glad about that.

I personally prefer XBOX but I’ve owned them, played them all, and I think what’s beautiful about games is that it is, to me, and I’m going to say this, I think it is – ooh, it’s going to hurt too because this is going to come hard – but I believe it is one of the pinnacles of creative expression. And I say that because in a video game you have music, you have visual art, you have programming, you have storytelling, you have a host of other practices, cinematography, all coming together to not only tell you a story like a movie would or a book would, but put you in the center of it.

So, yeah, I love gaming. And if you’re going to sit in front of the TV, you might as well interact with it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I don’t find that statement to be controversial to me at all. Once, I took a look at what’s really going on in terms of was it the Unreal engine or some of the cutting-edge stuff, it is spectacular what is now possible visually. And then I saw, in the pandemic, I was watching, this game is called “Detroit: Become Human” which is fascinating. Fascinating stories.

And I was just watching the game play because I didn’t have my console yet and I was sick with COVID and nothing else to do. And then I saw some of the making of it, and it was nuts. This composer was just talking about how he invented new instruments in order to get the sounds he was going for, for each of the key characters, to really capture the emotional essence. And it’s, like, wow, that is hardcore.

And those millions of dollars spread across a huge staff really is exceptional in terms of many layers of creativity. So, yeah, that makes sense to me.

All right, we’re talking about creativity. You’ve learned a whole lot about it in your years in your career. Can you share with us any particularly surprising, counterintuitive, extra-fascinating discoveries you’ve made about creativity during this time?

Joey Cofone
Oh, my goodness. It is a boatload or, I should say, a book-load, there are so many. I can start with one of the most profound things that I discovered. Before that, let me tell you why I think creativity is so radically important and where it originated for me.

In the introduction to my book, I explained where creativity entered my life. So, it was first grade, seven years old. I walked into the classroom thinking it’s just any other day. Teacher hands out a worksheet. It has a cartoon worm on it. All you got to do is color it, cut it out, put it on the board. No problem, like every other Monday. But this Monday was different because I decided I wanted to have the best worm in the class. So, I get down, I put my arm around my paper, I take out my big-ass box of crayons, and I go to town. And I am thinking, “This is the greatest creation of all time.”

I cut out my worm, I walk up to the board, and I stopped dead in my tracks because, as I look there, on the board, all the other students who have put theirs up, even though it’s different, they color little dots here, maybe one is a little more red, a little more blue, they all feel the same. And so, now I’m like, “I can’t put my…” Little Joey is like, “There’s no way I’m putting my worm on this board. I cannot be one of many.”

And I don’t know where that came from that day but I went back to my desk, and I sat down, and I was about to cry. And I had my head in my hands, I was hiding because I didn’t want anyone to see how upset I was. When I looked down, and what do I see, but the shards of paper that I had cut out the worm. So, I’m taking a look this, crying, and a lightbulb ticks, and I realized I can use them.

So, I draw a microphone, a boombox, and a necklace, cut them out, put them on the worm, put that on the board. Now, the whole class walks up, the teacher gets up behind me, the assistant teacher comes up, and everybody is looking at my worm, and they go, “This is the most amazing thing I have ever seen,” and they’re all shocked.

It was in that moment that I became addicted to creativity. Literally, that feeling, I just wanted it all the time throughout my life. And so, now as I got older and I started Baron Fig and we made all this cool stuff, and then it became time to write a book, and I thought to myself, “You know what, that’s my personal experience. But how can I inject something really profound and extremely objective into the book?”

And so, I discovered what became the cornerstone of my desire to pursue this, which is NASA did a study that found that 98% of five-year-olds are creative geniuses. Okay, 98%. Take a guess what percent it goes down to by the time we hit adulthood.

Pete Mockaitis
Two percent.

Joey Cofone
Two percent. Nailed it.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent.

Joey Cofone
Somebody did his homework. And so, I realized that, “Wow, this is not an accident.” We are systemically doing a very good job at reducing creativity where it goes from 98% to 2%. And so, now I have my experiences, I have a reason to write this book, put them together, and here we are. And so, that was the very first thing that I encountered about creativity that I thought was incredibly interesting and profound.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so creativity, it seems like a cool good thing. Like, sure, yeah, better be creative than not creative. I’d love to get your hot take in terms of, for your average professional who’s interested in being more awesome at their job, let’s say they would assert, “You know, I’m not really in a creative role. I don’t sort of invent new stuff. I don’t have to come up with catchy ad campaigns. I just manage projects and interact with folks and go to meetings, and make my PowerPoints and do my analyses, and keep things humming along, and, hopefully, get some improvements in our operations here and there.” What’s the case for why creativity matters to such a person?

Joey Cofone
Well, for two reasons. Number one, everything you mentioned actually requires creativity.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Joey Cofone
The idea that creatives are people who make visual pictures or music or something is a common belief but is totally absurd. Creativity is simply the practice of ideas. And when you take and use your ideas, it’s self-expression. So, anytime you’re working on a spreadsheet, or you have to give a presentation, or you have to do a little project management, you are exercising your creativity. This is not a robot. This is not an automaton. You actually have to think about it and come up with a result, and that’s creativity. It doesn’t have to be some grand expression of it.

Every day, we have over 6,000 thoughts, for example, and the idea is that if you are…How do I say this in a way that doesn’t sound silly? If you are an intrepid person, which I hope you are, working on those 6,000 thoughts to make them even better is not only a good idea, it’s kind of a no-brainer to me because, to answer your second reason, is because, as an adult, it is proven that you are, number one, more happy if you involve creative exercises in your work, and, number two, you make more money. Like, statistically, you make 13% more than people who do not integrate creativity. And that’s just for adults.

Organizations, because I want to tie this all together, organizations who integrate creativity are more productive and they have higher revenue growth. So, as an individual and as a group, it is a no-brainer.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s say we say, “Ooh, I’d like to be in the integrate creativity camp, and see that 13% pay bump and more cool benefits,” can you paint a picture for what that looks like during the course of my work day of, “I’m a person who is integrating creativity” versus “I’m a person who is not integrating creativity”?

Joey Cofone
Yeah, it depends on what it is you do, and what it is you feel challenged by in your experience. For example, I’m a designer so that’s a little bit more obvious, but I don’t do design things all day. The last three weeks, for example, I set up a really complex notion series of documents that basically tracks out the company’s operating and how everybody is related to the projects that are going on. No one would look at that and go, “That’s some traditional creative stuff, bro.”

But it is, of course, creative because you have to problem-solve. So, day to day, it depends what you’re doing. But if you are taking in inputs and then assessing an optimal way to execute something, that’s creativity. It doesn’t have to be any more complex than that.

Pete Mockaitis
So, that’s what integrating creativity looks like, the 13% bump up camp. And then how does one live their work day without integrating creativity?

Joey Cofone
That’s a good point. It’s when you just take what’s given to you and you don’t do anything with it. You just are literally, as someone would call it, a paper-pusher, or you are not trying to make this better, you are not trying to improve in any way upon the processes or the deliverables or the requests that are handed to you. You simply process as if you were a fax machine or a typewriter or something. You get an input and you put an output. The only thing you’re there for is to execute it rather than assess and optimize and then execute.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, I guess I’m thinking about some roles…it’s funny, these are the very jobs I don’t like in terms of I have a spreadsheet of somebody’s hours, and I need to turn that into an invoice to say to somebody, “Pay me. Okay, so there’s, I guess I have to copy, paste, double-check, email.” Okay. Although, I could certainly integrate some creativity there in terms of, “Surely there’s a way I can get some automation going with this.”

Joey Cofone
I was just going to say that.

Pete Mockaitis
“Maybe I can do a research if there’s a software program that can do this, or a little bit of Visual Basic replications, VBA code to accelerate this. Do I want to use a sort or do I want to use a filter in terms of amending these spreadsheets?”

Joey Cofone
Precisely. And now you’re getting it because when you say it that way, it is a no-brainer, of course, that folks who do the latter, and say, “How can I automate this, or optimize it, or change it in a way where it actually takes work later even if it’s a little bit more work now?” they get paid more. It’s obvious. But, believe it or not, a lot of people don’t do it. The majority, unfortunately.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, I can’t believe it. Ooh, geez, when you say majority, it sounds like you’ve got some hard data. Bring it, Joey, what’s the state of the world in terms of folks integrating creativity?

Joey Cofone
I mean, 98% of folks don’t. That’s where we’re at.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, they’re not geniuses according to the NASA situation.

Joey Cofone
Correct.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, you mentioned the part about us systematically crushing the creativity and folks just they age. Do you have any idea for what are some of the drivers, the forces, the principles behind that?

Joey Cofone
Yeah, I do. It’s unfortunately the way we educate our youth is the systematic destruction of creativity. So, it is no wonder that, at five years old you peak, and then you go down. And five years old is when you start school. There are three reasons, primarily, that creativity decreases, things that we teach our kids.

First is that authority, like teachers, principals, deans, and so on, that they’re unquestionable. Well, that’s just not true because those people weren’t always in charge. There are other folks in charge, and those people had to supplant those folks, and so on and so forth. And so, it teaches us that you have to do number two, which is man-made rules have to be followed to a fault. And that means that whatever someone says goes, and you are taught not to question it.

And then the third and the most damaging of all is that the end is visible from the start, Pete. And this is terrible that we teach our kids this, but we teach the end is visible from the start. Now I’ll bring that down to earth. When you are given a book in third grade, and you have to read, I don’t know, Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. And then you know, in two weeks, on Friday, you have to hand in a five-page paper about the plot and my thoughts, including a synopsis.

Cool. Okay. Well, I know everything I have to do before I do anything. Same thing in math, “Solve these ten proofs, hand them in.” Same thing in science, “Read this chapter and build a volcano.” Whatever it is, we are always taught to know the end before we start. Then we go to work, and then in work, our bosses tell us what to do and lay it out so that we know what we have to do before we start.

The problem is we are never taught to deal with the unknown. We are never taught to start without knowing where it could end up. And because of that, people have, unfortunately, more anxiety than ever before, and can’t deal with the curve balls of life. And that’s just a metaphor for creativity, was to make something you have to not know exactly where you’ll end up.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, this anxiety, can you unpack that mechanism or link there? Because we see the end before we start, we are more anxious…

Joey Cofone
Because we don’t, yeah. So, essentially, the modern society right now – what did we have – we had the agricultural age that lasted a long time. Then we had, fast-forward to the industrial age, the information age. Those happened fairly quickly. However, our human instincts, our programming, lags behind by tens of thousands of years. We don’t just evolve, unfortunately, as fast as society changes.

So, what happened back in the day is that when you had fear, ten thousand years ago, 20,000 years ago, that was because it was your body and your instincts making you move away from something that could kill you, the unknown, “Don’t go into that cave because you could die. Don’t go into this unknown land because we don’t know who’s there and defending it.” Fear was a tool. We still have fear but we don’t have life-threatening experiences anymore.

So, this fear, that is a natural part of our programming, is making us move away from things it thinks we can die. In reality, we cannot die in that regard. What happens nowadays is, instead of death, it’s just your ego is bruised, or you’re embarrassed, or you screw up. And so, because of that, this fear that is still a part of our lives, in this totally evolving social structure and the way we go about doing things nowadays, we still feel fear.

And that leads to a ton of anxiety because we have fears, “But I don’t know what to do with them. I don’t know what’s going to happen.” And then we’re taught not to know what the unknown is. And so, when you combine all that, it’s a beautiful recipe for a ton of anxiety.

Pete Mockaitis
I see. So, in a world full of unknowns, when we’ve only been trained and built up our capabilities in a world where the outcome is known in advance, we are sort of ill-equipped for the realities that we are in.

Joey Cofone
Exactly. And then you combine that with the fact that our instinctual reaction, fear reaction, is not really serving us the way it used to.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Certainly. Well, let’s get some more creativity flowing. I’m curious, when you mentioned assigning, I think about work in a way that the end is not known before you start, with the difference when you’re making a request of someone, or of yourself, instead of, “I want to find a specific app that does thing,” so we’ve sort of narrowed it to we’re looking for a software application, to, “I need to find a solution which will enable me to pull off this outcome.” Is that sort of the idea, is we keep it open-ended, like, “It could look like any number of things that delivers the goods”?

Joey Cofone
Sure. You’re even already moving probably too far down the line in many cases, where someone comes up to a problem that they haven’t encountered before, and they haven’t even sussed out that they need to find a piece of software to solve it. It is just a bit of a shock and an anxiety-inducing moment, and that’s where we get fear.

And so, actually, fear nowadays is a positive rather than a negative. Thousands of years ago, fear was something that said, “Danger! Danger! Don’t go that direction.” Today, fear, if you are tuned to it, is a, “Hey, man, go in that direction.” Because you’re afraid, you have identified a boundary, “If you go in that direction, you’re able to break a boundary.” Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Joey Cofone
When I was, I think it was 13 years old, I was sitting in a parking lot, McDonald’s, with my uncle, and we always used to go in together, and have a Big Mac each, and it was a wonderful time. On this particular day, Uncle Ralph decides, “Joey is going in alone.” And I said, “I can’t do it.” And he said, “What do you mean you can’t do it? It’s right there. Just walk in. Order it. You’re a big kid.” I was six foot.

And I said, “I’m afraid.” And I was honest with my uncle. And he grabbed me by the shoulder, and he looked me dead in the eye, and he said, “Because you are afraid, now you must do it.” And sure enough, I went in and I did it, and I never forgot that. And it took me a long time to parse what he meant, but it meant that my fear was showing me a limitation, and when I was able to overcome it, I was able to expand the boundaries of my capabilities.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good stuff. And I don’t think it’s that uncommon. I remember, in high school, there would be times when you meet a group of people, it was like, “Oh, should we order pizza?” And maybe a third of the people in the group were genuinely uncomfortable picking up the phone to call the place to order the pizza. You don’t even have to look at them in the eye. And I found that it’s probably worse now, I’m guessing, in the year 2023, as compared to back in the day for me.

Joey Cofone
Pete, it is bad now. It is bad now. I don’t want to call anyone out but I have experienced people who are close to our age who still won’t pick up the phone and make a call for something simple. Just like saying, “Hey, what time are you guys open to?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Maybe this is why DoorDash is really doing so well because you don’t have to interact with a human but you still get to eat what you want without moving. It’s a winning offer. All right. Well, let’s talk about this book here, The Laws of Creativity: Unlock Your Originality and Awaken Your Creative Genius.

You got 37 of these laws. Can you list some of them, maybe the top three, four, five that you think are just transformational for a professional who wants to be more awesome at their job, things you can do that don’t take a whole lot of time, effort, energy, pain, and sacrifice, and yet liberate a lot of good creative juiciness?

Joey Cofone
Oh, sure. I can name 37 of them that are really damn good but, since you’re limiting me to a few, I will, I suppose, choose. I’ll tell you right now that Chapter One: Be weird, it’s the law of expression. And it is chapter one for a reason. And it is simply stated, embrace the parts of you that’s called weird. Don’t hide what makes you different. Allow them to flow to the top and be seen.

Now, what does that mean, Joey? That means that, you know how when you grow up, and your parents tell you that you’re really a unique butterfly. And then you get a little older and you realize everybody tells their parents that, and then you don’t feel so unique when you have the same problems and the same challenges that everyone feels, and you kind of feel like you’re not unique at all. Well, actually, you are incredibly unique. They were right.

As what my geometry teacher in high school, Mr. Allen, would say, “Right answer, wrong solution.” They were just saying it because it’s an encouraging thing to say, but, actually, you are incredibly unique. So, Pete, give me three interests that you have. Give me a favorite book, a favorite movie, a favorite video game, or just a…Now, if I say favorite, it might be too much, so just name one you like of each of those three things.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, sure thing. For a book, well, right now I’m reading The Count of Monte Cristo, which is thrilling.

Joey Cofone
So am I.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding?

Joey Cofone
How about that? That is wild. That is the book I’m reading.

Pete Mockaitis
I encountered it in an episode of “Wishbone,” the dog, if you watched that show. When I was 12 years old or so. I was like, “Well, that book is awesome.” And so, now, decades later, I was like, “Maybe I’ll go ahead and read that.” And so, that’s fun, about halfway through. No spoilers. So, that’s cool. For a game, boy, from my childhood, “Master of Orion.” You conquer the galaxy. Very strategic kind of form, the way I think, actually. So, we had book, game. And what else?

Joey Cofone
I would say movie.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s go with Batman, “The Dark Knight.”

Joey Cofone
Ooh, okay. So, we have “The Count of Monte Cristo.” What was the second one?

Pete Mockaitis
“Master of Orion.”

Joey Cofone
“Master of Orion.” I never heard of that one, man. “Master of Orion.” I’m writing these down. Good stuff. And then “The Dark Knight.” Okay. Cool. So, these are three things that you like. And now you have a lot of interests, we’re just going to take three. And let’s say, in each of those categories, we limit it to a thousand.

There are, just in those things, there is a billion permutations, okay? If there’s a thousand options of each. That means that, right away, if you can combine “The Count of Monte Cristo,” the “Master of Orion,” and “The Dark Knight” into something you create as really strong influences, you go from one in eight billion to one in one billion, okay? To one in eight, I’m sorry. My wife always says…

Pete Mockaitis
So, eight humans on the planet who…

Joey Cofone
That have this combination. You go from, I’m sorry, one in eight billion, to one in eight. Pretty interesting. Now, let’s add a fourth thing. Let’s say, what’s a TV show you like?

Pete Mockaitis
“Breaking Bad.”

Joey Cofone
“Breaking Bad.” Walter White.

Pete Mockaitis
I like it kind of dark, I think. It’s like I’m really a friendly person.

Joey Cofone
Oh, all these are like dark. Okay, so with the fourth added, permutations go up into trillion, and now you have 127 times the population of earth. When you put those four things into what you do, you become incredibly unique, and you’re way more than just four things, and there’s way more than just a thousand options. So, you can imagine the actual permutations, and when you get the stuff you like into what you’re doing, it is incredibly unique.

So, let’s take me, for example. I really like philosophy, I really like writing, and I really like the blank page. So, what did I do? I took philosophy, I took writing, and I added narrative, and the blank page, aka notebooks, and I combined those into a brand called Baron Fig that didn’t do notebooks the way I did before, and put it on Kickstarter, looking for 15Gs. We did $168,000 in 30 days, and this was 10 years ago before Kickstarter was a big deal, and that is rise and fall. And people loved it.

And to this day now, Baron Fig has, from that one product that we started with, the notebook, we now have made over 115 products, we ship in 95 countries, we have hundreds of thousands of customers, and we partner with incredible people like Netflix, James Clear, Roxane Gay to make wonderful things. And it is because I started by taking the things that I really liked and figuring out a way how to meld them together.

And anybody could do that, and you could do it on a big scale, like creating a company, you can do it on a small scale, like creating a presentation. But when you put yourself into your things, and as cliché as it sounds, when you be yourself, it becomes incredibly unique.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that makes sense mathematically. And I guess the holdup is just that people feel uncomfortable being weird, they think they’re going to get a social reprisal of some sort, like, “Ugh, okay.”

Joey Cofone
Pete, well said, dude. Well said. That is the chapter one, is that the problem is weird, the word itself has been weaponized. When we think about it, you are in grammar school, and, “Hey, don’t eat with the weird kid,” or you’re at work, “Don’t have lunch with the weird person.” “Okay, cool.” It’s literally weaponized and it ostracizes the folks in our bubble, in our everyday life, who are different than the rest. And the message it’s saying, the subtext is, “Be like us and conform.”

Now, here’s the really crazy thing though, and this is why the chapter is titled “Be weird” is because inside our bubbles, we force everybody to conform. However, outside of our bubbles, we absolutely celebrate and worship weird people. And I’m going to name a few people, these are not necessarily that I worship or care about but they’re good examples. Lady Gaga, weird, not in my bubble. We love her. Johnny Depp, weird dude. Jack Sparrow, super weird. Freaking love that. Elon Musk, Kanye West, so on and so forth. We celebrate weirdness as long as it’s not in my bubble. And so, when I say…

Pete Mockaitis
“You’re making me uncomfortable now that I have to live within you, but you’re being amazing in this in  the world that I’m enjoying consuming from afar.”

Joey Cofone
Right. So, I’ll end this by saying those folks inside our bubble that people are going, “Hey, don’t sit with that weird guy. Don’t talk to that weird guy,” what I see is the bravest person in the room because they’re the ones, despite being ostracized, are letting themselves be themselves.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s very beautiful. And I do love reading about the weird things that folks do. I heard Bill Gates when he was a youngster, he’d just be in his room for a long, long time. His mom would say, “Oh, Billy,” I don’t know what she called him. Let’s pretend it’s Billy, “Oh, Billy, can you come on down,” and he’d say, “Mom, I’m trying to think,” like he’s just faking for a long time. He still does. He thinks weeks or think weekends, where, “I’m just going to be completely silent and read a bunch of things that are stimulating and useful for my creativity.”

Or, the dude. Hey, you’ve been a game guy. This guy in Japan, I forgot his name, he is one of the geniuses behind Mario and many other super franchises.

Joey Cofone
Miyamoto.

Pete Mockaitis
There you go. Apparently, he just carries around with him a tape measure, and has people guess the length of different objects, he’ll say, “Hey, how long do you think this is?” Like, “I don’t know, seven inches.” They probably use metric over there, centimeters. And so, you check it out, and you thought, “Boy, that’s weird.” And yet there is a little bit of a connection, it becomes like, “Oh, well, so part of your whole genius is representing things in a confined space, the dimensions of a screen or a video game.”

And so, that kind of fits that, it goes down like that. So, it is really fun for me to see the weird things people do. One weird thing I do…Look at you, Joey, you’re already liberating me.

Joey Cofone
Go for it. Let your weird out.

Pete Mockaitis
As soon as I will think of just the most wildly inappropriate thing to say or do in a given situation…

Joey Cofone
And see how people react?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And, in a way, that really does support my strengths in terms of I am pretty good at formulating words that work and people respond to because I’m also good at identifying the exact wrong thing to say. But someone walks in the steam room, I don’t know, this is weird. Let’s say I’m in a sauna or steam room, and so when I’m about ready to get out, if someone just gets in, and I think, “I don’t want to get out immediately because I don’t want to hurt their feelings.” I guess I’m really considerate, not that they care. But the weird thing I’ll do is I’ll think of the exact opposite of that.

Joey Cofone
You scoot next to him?

Pete Mockaitis
And, like, they walk in, and I just sigh, and say, “You know what, F this. I’m out of here.” So, that’s weird and ridiculous.

Joey Cofone
That is ridiculous. I like it.

Pete Mockaitis
But in doing this all of the time, one, it keeps me amused and lighthearted and entertained, but, two, it does kind of hone one of my strengths, which is communicating stuff to folks in a way that’s effective, in terms of I’m effectively trying to learn something with interview questions or I’m effectively trying to persuade, and that’s just, I think it’s funny. Like, the weirdness often, but not always, has relationship or overlap into strengths, genius, giftedness.

Joey Cofone
It does. It does. I like to acronym things.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, let’s do it.

Joey Cofone
If you’re like, “Hey, I’m going to go to the store,” I’ll be like, “H-I-G-T-G-T-S,” and I try to do it as fast as I can, and I have no idea why, but I used to be really good when I was a kid. I would go to bed, acronym-ing every sentence I did. And, lo and behold, like I became an English major, and then I wrote a book, and I think it all kind of ties together the ability to dance around words and letters, and be comfortable with them.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. All right. Well, that’s just one law, be weird.

Joey Cofone
Yeah, let’s do another one. I think there’s a powerful one that people are always like, “Man, that makes so much sense.” So, creativity, what is the…? I forget, what are they called? What is the base word of creativity?

Pete Mockaitis
Create?

Joey Cofone
You got it, but you don’t create in creativity. It’s a complete misnomer. It’s ridiculous. Unfortunately, people do think that creativity is creating. It’s not and it sucks because that means people don’t think that they are creative when, in fact, they are. It’s just expressing yourself. So, the law of connection addresses this.

And it says, base concepts can neither be created nor destroyed. They simply merge to form new combinations. Creativity is not about creating. It is about combining. And then I give some examples, and I’m going to give you a few examples right now. The iPhone combines a computer and a phone. The Avengers combine the allure of the gods and the relatability of everybody people. Pokemon, the number one franchise on planet Earth, combines our love of pets and our fascination with fantasy worlds.

Pete Mockaitis
And I would say in collections, too. We like to be collectors.

Joey Cofone
Absolutely. It’s multidimensional for sure. I just base it down into something that you can parse. When you ask…now, I call it the grandparent test, which is when you say, “Hey, grandma or grandpa, what is Tesla?” And they say, “Oh, those are those cars with batteries.” Well, you just figured out exactly the two things that someone combined to make this new thing. Or, Instagram is photography and messaging, so on and so forth.

And so, the number one thing to take away is that when you are being creative, really, you are taking things that exists and just mushing them together. And it’s a much more palatable way of saying, “Hey, maybe I am creative. I do that all the time,” rather than thinking you are creating from scratch because that’s not real.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that sinks. Well, I’ll put you on the spot, Joey. So, your notebook, I’m holding one. What was the genius of combination that went down here?

Joey Cofone
Great question. The genius of combination is that I did not care about the question you just asked. So, it’s the first thing people say, “What’s so special about your notebook?” I don’t know, Pete, what’s so special about Starbucks’ coffee? Does anybody care? No. It’s the brand. It’s the differences, the story that a brand is telling.

So, when I started back in 2013, and all these notebook companies were telling people about the GSM of the paper, and how hard it was pressed, and if it’s soft – what do you call it – textured or smooth. I didn’t say any of that stuff. What I said is, “We made a really damn good notebook because it’s really, really important that you have a place that you can trust to put really important thoughts, because we all put a lot of really treasured ideas into our notebooks.”

When we’re journaling, our deepest thoughts go in there. When we’re brainstorming on a project, something that we’re really excited about, and that we cherish, and that we can see the future, goes in there. A notebook holds so much that’s important. And when I started Baron Fig in 2013, that’s what I spoke about.

Sure. Sure, I made a high-quality notebook. The paper is better than any other notebook. I made a binding that I actually patented that opens totally flat. And I made a cover with cloth that no one had done at the time, and the bookmark is much more high quality. But who cares? At the end of the day, no one is like, “Man, look at that. Look at that bookmark quality.” Doesn’t matter.

I made them good, but the point is I want you to go to our website, I want you to see that the product and the people who created the product speak to you as a human being that puts important things down on paper, that you care about, and that respects it. And that’s what we did, and that’s why we’re still here 10 years later selling notebooks.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Joey, I’d love to also get your take, let’s say you’re in the heat of battle, it’s time to create, there’s a proposal to write, a thing to make, and you’re just hitting a wall, you’ve got “writer’s block,” or artist block, or just things aren’t firing the way you’d like them to be and have fired historically. How do you get into the groove, the mode, the mojo, the vibe, the flow to make it happen?

Joey Cofone
Good question. I do 50s or 100s. What are they, Joey? Another good question. Fifties or hundreds is you list 50 or 100 ideas about something pertaining to the thing you’re trying to solve. And now here, the real twist is you’re going for quantity. You don’t judge. If it makes sense, you do it. So, I don’t know, if I’m writing or if I want to do a limited edition pen, I just got to write down 50. I don’t care if one is…I’m just coming up with it now.

A green pen, it’s called the pickle edition. Oh, a TV remote control edition. It has a sticker that’s a remote control that you slap on your forehead. Oh, let’s do the forehead edition where you roll the pen on your forehead and it creates really smooth feeling. They’re ridiculous ideas but they solve, even if they’re not good. And so, what happens is you detach yourself from the expectations of the outcome when you do these.

Pete, you’ve heard of the phrase quality over quantity?

Pete Mockaitis
Mm-hmm.

Joey Cofone
Now, very common and it makes sense. You want one nice thing over a bunch of mediocre things, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Joey Cofone
Totally fair. Problem is that phrase speaks to the destination, to the end. That’s like me saying, “Hey, Pete, go to the gym. Be strong.” And you’re like, “What do I do at the gym?” It skips over the middle. So, I’m going to rephrase it for us. Quality over quantity but quantity begets quality. And so, when you do a lot, you end up getting good. No one ever does their first shot on the court, or their first swing of a golf club, or their first chapter of a book, and says, “It came out perfect.”

Yet, when a lot of people who are uninitiated with doing some type of expression like that jump in, they get really upset that they didn’t succeed on the first shot, and that’s just ridiculous. Focus on doing a lot and the good stuff will come.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you.

Joey Cofone
Thank you, Pete.

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

Joey Cofone
No, I am an open book, man. How do I like to say it? I’m at your service.

Pete Mockaitis
You open and you stay flat.

Joey Cofone
I do stay flat. Patented, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Fashion. All right. How about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Joey Cofone
Favorite quote is without a doubt, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Socrates.

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

Joey Cofone
Favorite study is, huh, probably Schrodinger’s cat comes to mind just because it’s so misinterpreted. When he pulled that exercise, he was actually proving a point how silly it is that you could think that the cat is alive and dead at the same time. It was like a joke. But now people use it to prove that it’s a possibility, which is so ironic.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Joey Cofone
Favorite book, besides The Laws of Creativity, is The Phantom Tollbooth. Are you familiar with it?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Joey Cofone
The Phantom Tollbooth is a kids’ book, and it is about a kid who goes into a world of total creativity and playfulness, and the language and the pictures, and it’s absolutely great. You should read it once a year every year so it reminds you in 120 pages what it’s like to think with a kid full of wonder.

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

Joey Cofone
Coffee. Is that fair?

Pete Mockaitis
Sure.

Joey Cofone
Love coffee.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Joey Cofone
Favorite habit is I do at least one pushup every day.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now I’m intrigued. Does it often turn into more than one?

Joey Cofone
It does often turn into a lot more. But the idea that I only need to do one is great. Then I do pushups, then I do some squats, then I do some lunges, and then I do some pullups on the pullup bar. And then, huh, wow, that pushup turned to a lot.

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

Joey Cofone
Well, I gave you my favorite one, which is quantity begets quality, so I’m going to stick with that.

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

Joey Cofone
Go to JoeyCofone.com, and you will find all that you need.

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

Joey Cofone
Well, actually, yeah, I have a call to action. If you go to my website, you could take my free email course which will give you nine of the laws that you can judge for yourself whether you think you have it right about creativity or not.

Pete Mockaitis
Joey, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much fun and creativity.

Joey Cofone
Pete, thank you, man. It’s been a pleasure. And, everybody out there, thank you for listening. I hope you have a beautiful day.