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Decision-Making

Feb 28

267: Managing Self-Doubt to Tackle Bigger Challenges with Tara Mohr

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Tara Mohr says: "Playing big is being more loyal to your dreams than your fears."

Tara Mohr offers deep insight into how our fears and inner critic operate–and how to optimally respond.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The key drivers behind fear and self-doubt
  2. A handy Hebrew distinction for thinking about fear
  3. How to consult your inner critic–and inner mentor–wisely

About Tara

Tara Mohr is an expert on leadership and well-being. She helps people play bigger in sharing their voices and bringing forward their ideas in work and in life. Tara is the author of Playing Big: Practical Wisdom for Women Who Want to Speak Up, Create, and Lead, named a best book of the year by Apple’s iBooks and now in paperback. In the book, she shares her pioneering model for making the journey from playing small–being held back by fear and self-doubt–to playing big, taking bold action to pursue what you see as your callings.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Pete Mockaitis
Tara, thanks so much for joining us here on the How To Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Tara Mohr
Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I learned something fun what about you, which is that as a child your dreams were analyzed each morning with your parents along with breakfast. What’s the story here?

Tara Mohr
Yeah, I think I was very fortunate to grow up with a mom who was very interested in psychology and self-improvement, and believed she could start conversations about those things with me as a young child. And so, at a very young age she would say, “Did you have a dream last night?”, and then she would ask me about it and she would explain to me that the different characters in the dream could be different parts of myself, or they were symbols. And she would get out a yellow pad and we would diagram it, and she talked to me about architypes. And that’s how I grew up; that was just one example of how she brought the kind of conversation you have on this podcast. I was really lucky to grow up with that as an everyday matter in my house.

Pete Mockaitis
That is so cool. Tara, last night I dreamt that I got shot by a gun twice in different places. One was in just a value priced hotel, and the other was in my childhood home, recovering from the first gun shot.

Tara Mohr
Okay, that’s very interesting. We could really dive into that. And how did you feel in the dream after that?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I didn’t like it. Actually I woke up at 4:30 am against my will, and I was a little riled up. It took a while to calm down and fall back asleep.

Tara Mohr
Yeah. Have you ever heard the Buddhist phase “the second arrow”? Have you heard that?

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, no. Tell me about it.

Tara Mohr
So it sounds very much related to what happened in your dream. So there’s this idea of, in life there are things that wound us, or there are feelings we have that are hurt, and that’s the first arrow. But then we often impose the second arrow of our reaction or the story that we make up about what happened, or the shame or guilt we have, or the self-judgments we have for having the feelings we have. So, that whole idea of being shot twice is interesting, and of course I would ask did something that hurt or wounded you, and then you went back in your literal childhood home or kind of in your family self? Was there something in the recovery process that wounded you further? That would be the first place I would look.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, nothing is leaping to mind, but I’ll definitely chew on that and see what happens as I explore, because we could spend a full conversation on that alone.

Tara Mohr
We could. And that’s actually dream interpretation, although part of my childhood is really not the center of my work now.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, tell us about your most recent book – Playing Big. What’s the main idea here and why is it important?

Tara Mohr
Yeah. Well, I found when I went into the working world, I had come out of graduate school, I had had the benefit of a good education, I was an academically-oriented and achievement-oriented person, and I was very surprised to find that I didn’t feel confident in those first years in the working world, I didn’t feel comfortable sharing my ideas or my voice, and I also wasn’t really going for what I really wanted with my career. I was kind of in a job that was fine but not great, but didn’t really relate to the creative dreams or the entrepreneurial dreams that I had for myself.
And I was really curious about why I was getting so stuck around that. And then I knew I wanted to do work in the personal growth world, partly informed by how I grew up, and I got trained as a coach and I started coaching people just in the early mornings before I would go to work, or sometimes in the evenings, on the weekends, around my regular job. And I saw again and again actually at all stages of career my clients grappling with the same thing – self-doubt, not trusting their ideas and their voice, not really going for what they really wanted to do and believing there was some reason they couldn’t.
And I got really interested in this question of why do we play small and how can we play bigger? And my definition of playing big is it’s being more loyal to your dreams than your fears. So it’s whatever that means to you. It’s not necessarily anything that would look “big” in the eyes of the world, but you know it’s the real challenge, the real work for you to live that life or do that work. It’s an individual matter of discernment. And so I started to make that the focus of my coaching practice – how can people play bigger in that way, what are the tools and ideas that help us?
And I found there really were a set of things that made a transformational impact. And so that became kind of an arc that I would take my clients through, and then I started teaching large groups that all around the world, and then it became the topic of the book. And now for 10 years of really being immersed in working with people around defining what “playing big” means for them, and then most importantly doing the day-to-day practices and work to bring that vision into reality.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. Well, I like that simple distinction then – more so about your dreams than your fears. And it really kind of puts into focus in a hurry, in terms of what’s my thinking right now, the patterns, who’s sort of got the upper hand. And so, I’d love to get your view then, when it comes to these fears or lack of confidence and self-doubt, what are some of the key drivers behind it? Why is that there and what should be done about it?

Tara Mohr
Yeah. Well, I think that we all have a very strong safety instinct inside of us. And the safety instinct is a primal part of us that is a very deep part of our wiring to be on the lookout for any possible danger or threat, and make sure that we avoid it or we fight it, right? And our fight or flight instinct is there to make sure that if we see any possible risk to our survival, we go into fight or flight mode and we make sure we’re conquering in some way, or we’re avoiding.
And what we know now is that in our contemporary lives that same safety instinct gets misapplied to the emotional risks in our life. So, the safety instinct that should be very conservative and over-reactive if it’s trying to ensure the physical survival of people who are threatened by lots of predators or warring tribes or poisons, as our predecessors were – that instinct is now operating when we face everyday risks, like the risk of failure, the risk of feeling really uncomfortable, the risk of worrying.
We might feel like a beginner or feel clueless or be embarrassed or do something that really rocks the boat among our friends and family. And that safety instinct then tries to do everything it can to get us to stay in the comfort zone of the known or the familiar, and that includes making up a lot of narratives that feel believable but then aren’t true, like, “You aren’t qualified for that. Who do you think you are? You’re not enough of an expert in that. There’s too many other people doing that.” All those inner critic narratives we hear are really manifestations of the safety Instinct.
And the good news about that is it means that our inner critic is not going anywhere. And I know you have many listeners who are a little bit more in the earlier phases of their careers, and I think it’s so game-changing to understand early that confidence doesn’t actually come in an enduring way with experience.
There was just a study done through KPMG that looked at confidence levels among professional women, and they looked at how many women early in their career would say they’re confident, and then how many executive-level women, senior women, would say they feel confident in their work. And the difference between those two groups was only about 10%, in terms of how many indicated they were confident.
In other words, experience didn’t change it, because when you get into a new senior role – sure, you’re more confident about some things that you did a long time ago and you’ve been doing for a long time, but you have a new edge, and the voice of the inner critic and self-doubt comes up again because that safety instinct is perceiving more emotional risk, no matter what the situation. And so we’re really not looking to get rid of the inner critic or find some unfailing sense of confidence. The “playing big” process is in part about learning how do you hear your inner critic, let it be there, know it’s always going to be there when you’re doing important work, and just not take direction from it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you. So that is powerful, to assimilate that really inside your psyche there. The inner critic, as you said, it doesn’t go away – the KPMG study is pointing to that. And in a way, that kind of unmasks everything.

Tara Mohr
It does. And there are so many lies we tell ourselves. We tell ourselves, “Well, when I get to this stage in my career, then I’m going to feel confident.” We also tell ourselves, “If I get that additional certification or degree, then these uncomfortable feelings of self-doubt or uncertainty or fear will go away.” We tell ourselves, “If my weight changes and it’s this amount, then I’m going to feel confident getting up and sharing my point of view in front of a group.”
We fill a lot of things into that blank, and what we’re really doing there is making it convenient for ourselves to put risks on hold, put playing bigger on hold, put really stepping into our gifts and using our natural talents and gifts more, which is actually a very vulnerable thing – put that on hold thinking something is going to come along that’s going to bring confidence. But it doesn’t. And what we want to do is really learn to work effectively, live effectively with the voice of self-doubt, letting it be there but not taking direction from it, not letting it make our decisions.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so powerful. And so then the implication is that you’re going to feel some lack of confidence and some self-doubt till the day you die, right?

Tara Mohr
Hopefully, right? And I say “hopefully” because it comes up most strongly when you are on the edge of your comfort zone. So for those who might be sitting there right now thinking, “I don’t really hear my inner critic that much”, I would ask you two things. One – make sure you’re looking across all areas of your life, because sometimes people think, “I’ve kind of got it down at work”, but then they’ll realize, “Oh my gosh, in my dating life, or in my parenting, or my body image” or, “I’d love to play music again but I have that voice in my head saying…” So look across all areas of your life.
But second – notice where that lack of inner critic is just kind of a dead-end part of your life, where you are not pushing yourself to an edge, you’re not doing what really matters to you, you’re not being loyal to those dreams. The inner critic will come up when there’s vulnerability, and so if you’re doing something that is 100% in your comfort zone and routine to you and not very important to you, you might not hear it, but that’s not a good thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I’m with you there. And so then, I also want to get your view – now, there’s a bit of a postponement factor – the way that the inner critic can sound, in terms of, “Hey, if this changes – if I lost the weight, if I got the certification, if I had a certain preparation – then I would feel confident.” And so now, for the most part that seems like that is often a lie. It is a deception that is destructive, but at the same time there are times in which no, you really are not prepared for that opportunity or that dream that you’re thinking about, and some action, some preparation is necessary to get there. So, I’d love your view on, how could we prudently discern the difference, and what’s a wise means of thinking through that, so that you get the valid prep steps done but you don’t delay yourself till it never happens?

Tara Mohr
Yeah, yeah, and it’s so funny that you are asking that specific question, because I just got off of our course call and we were exactly talking about this piece today. So there’s a few things I’d offer around that. One is, pay attention to the evidence that you’re getting from the world. Are you getting clear repeated information from the stakeholders that matter to you, that you need more preparation? In other words, maybe you want to offer a support group for moms, and you do a trial day where you invite a few moms in your community to come together, and you put together a great little program for them or whatever.
And then you hand out feedback forms and you notice there’s really a theme on the feedback forms, that people felt like they wanted more content or more expertise. And you hear again and again that your audience is asking for a different level of preparation and knowledge for you – okay, then you have some evidence. But most people never get to that stage of even asking their intended audience for information. They make up a story in their head and it’s usually a convenience story that allows them to hide a little bit that they need to do a lot more preparatory work. So that’s one piece – is it coming to you in real information and evidence from the outside world?
A second is, what’s the energy that you have or the beliefs that you have around that preparation? If you notice that in a very sort of joyful, light, abundant kind of energy you feel like, “I’m going to go learn more so I can do even more here, and this is going to be an enriching process for me” – that can be a great thing to follow. But if you notice that you’re feeling, “I don’t know enough until…” or, “There’s no way I could contribute any value until…” – the sort of like “This will complete me.” It’s like the equivalent of the romantic “He or she will complete me” feeling. Notice that, and that’s kind of a clue that you’re probably putting a story there that is more about fear than about the external thing itself.
And then a third thing I would offer is… A real issue in our culture is that we tend to put all the emphasis on expertise, and have a kind of cultural narrative that the people who contribute value around a topic are the “experts”. And that’s a view that’s really enforced by our educational system, reinforced by our educational system that says if you want to do something in X topic – if you want to do something around history – go get your degree in history. If you want to do something in serving kids, go get X degree. We’re looking for, what information do I need to absorb to be able to contribute value on that topic?
And that is certainly important, and you’re talking to someone who really values education and has a graduate degree and I believe it’s very important that we have those places to get expertise and we have experts in our culture. But on any given subject there are people contributing value as the expert. Let’s take for example breast cancer. So we have our experts who have PhDs in breast cancer treatment and prevention and rehabilitation and so on. And they’re playing a certain role.
But then we have other people – we have people who are survivors, who have different insights and a different sensibility and can contribute something different, in terms of sharing a message, inspiring people, improving upon services, innovating. The experts can never bring what they can bring.
And we have other people who I would call “cross-trainers”, who come from a completely different type of expertise – maybe they come from the design world or the business world or the activism world, and they can take their lens and their expertise and look at a new topic. And because they don’t have formal training in it and they’re bringing a fresh lens, they add value in a different way. And I think we really deemphasize those things.
So that’s another question when you’re discerning, as you’re asking, Pete – do I get more training? Part of it is, who do I want to be? Is my calling to be the expert on this, or is my calling to contribute value in a different way? And really we can’t discount how significant the value is that people contribute, who are coming from that cross-trainer or survivor perspective, not from the formal expert perspective.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, so much good stuff. Okay, so we’ve amassed a big lie, we’ve got a nice distinction here associated with, is preparation necessary, and some indicators how the inner critic can be a useful indicator, in terms of maybe pushing harder toward the edge. So, that’s a lot of great stuff. So now I’d like to zoom in sort of in the heat of battle. You’re trying to do some bigger things, and tell us, what are the particular fears that arise and your pro tips for responding to them?

Tara Mohr
Well, I’ll share a little bit about how I look at fear. And in the book I call this “a very old new way of looking at fear”, because I’m drawing here on two terms that are actually Old Testament, ancient Hebrew terms. These are two words that are used in the Old Testament to describe types of fear. And when I came across these I kind of fell off my chair, because I felt like they were so illustrative of what I was seeing with my coaching clients, but I had never heard about them before. So let me walk you through the two.
So the first word is “pahad”. And pahad is defined as the fear of projected things or imagined things. So this is when we imagine the worst case scenario of what could happen. It’s when we project the movie of how things might play out. And most of the fear that you and I and our friends and colleagues experience on a day-to-day basis is this, right? We are imagining a potential outcome and feeling afraid. It’s an anticipatory feeling; it is not usually about what’s happening right now, in this moment, but about what we fear could happen.
We know – not from the Old Testament but from all the biological and neuroscience research that has come since – that this kind of fear is generally over-reactive and misleading. We know for example that when we learn to fear a particular thing through conditioning – let’s say we get bitten badly by a dog and then the way the human response to that works is we learn to fear being bitten by a dog. We also know that we have a very generalizing response to that experience, so we won’t just become afraid of that dog; we might become afraid of dogs in general.
And in the foundational experiment that was done on this in the 1920s, they could actually see how by priming a baby to be afraid of a small white mouse… The baby initially was not afraid of the white mouse, but then they paired it with a very loud startling noise, and so then the baby started to associate the two and would see the mouse and would have a fear response. But then the baby also became afraid of a white rabbit and a white cotton ball and a man with a white beard.
This is what we’re also doing in our adult lives, right? Whether that’s you had one negative relationship experience and now you’re generalizing that a certain type of relationship or a certain type of person – you’re going to fear that. Or maybe you did something in one professional environment that was met with really painful feedback, and then you come to fear a whole set of associated things. So that associative quality of our fear response means that fear misleads us, because of course that white rabbit and the white beard and the cotton ball are harmless, as are many of the things we come to fear.
Another way fear misleads us is that we learn what to fear not just from our own experiences but also by watching what the people around us fear. And that of course happens in early childhood for a lot of us, and happens in problematic ways because many times the fears that those around us have are based on their own false stories. So all to say when we have pahad kind of fear, we do not want to believe it or let it be in charge; we need to know, “Okay, I’m in pahad, I’m in that anticipatory fear. It is probably not accurately guiding me and I want to shift myself out of it.” And you can do all kinds of practices, whether it’s calming your nervous system through meditation or shifting into another energy. I like whenever I’m afraid to just focus on, “What can I be curious about in this situation? What can I get really interested in?” Because if you’re in curiosity, you can’t simultaneously be in fear. So we always want to be looking at shifting out of pahad.
Okay, the second kind of fear that is mentioned in the Old Testament is something we really don’t talk about in our culture, and the word for that is yirah, is the ancient Hebrew word. And that has three definitions. Yirah is what we feel when we are inhabiting a larger space than we’re used to. It’s what we feel when we suddenly have more energy, when we come into possession of more energy than we normally have. So think about in your life, like what lights you up, what fills you with energy, your passions, using your gifts, telling your truth – whatever gives you that infusion of energy. That kind of exhilarated, scared feeling that can come with that – that’s yirah. And the third definition is this is what we feel in the presence of the sacred. So in fact when Moses is at the burning bush, yirah is the word used to describe how he feels when he’s at the burning bush.
So this was very significant for me to see as a coach and as a human being, because I understood that when I was working with people and they really told the truth about what they wanted, or they made a momentous decision that really resonated with the core of them, this was the feeling they felt. And it did include fear; it also had awe and exhilaration in it. And yirah is really different that pahad. We don’t need to shift out of yirah; we kind of need to learn to tolerate it and breathe into it and not find it such an electric infusion of energy that we block it or numb out or avoid the things that bring it. So that is the framework we use in the “playing big” model for working with fear.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s so interesting when you say yirah, if I’m pronouncing it correctly. When you say “inhabiting a larger space”, this is kind of both literally and figuratively?

Tara Mohr
Exactly, exactly. So certainly when people step onto a bigger stage, speak to a bigger audience, maybe stand at the front of a bigger conference room, or whatever that might be. There’s literal spaces and then there’s the figurative, like I am reaching more people or I am being willing to take up more room. You can look at it that way as well.

Pete Mockaitis
That is so cool, because I really do find if I have a speaking engagement and I arrive there early, I actually love it. When I’m in the room and it’s completely empty but there are hundreds of seats there, there is a sensation – and now I’ve got a word for it, thank you – and I love it. It’s just so full of possibility. And it’s interesting you say “presence of the sacred” because it does often prompts me to pray – not because I’m terrified, but it’s just like there’s a bigness to it, and that’s just sort of a natural response for me. And that’s so cool and I think really eye-opening, because maybe my personality is I’m just like, “Oh yeah, I love that. Bring it on! I want some more of that in my life!” But you’re saying that for many of us, “Oh no, that’s just too big and I can’t even sort of abide there for very long without getting into maybe like a freak out type of sensation.”

Tara Mohr
Yeah, that’s what I find, that it’s both wonderful and it often feels wonderful when we’re in it, but there is a quality to it of, it’s a heightened state, it does take us out of our comfort zone a bit, it does have that component of fear or almost breathlessness in it. Sometimes it asks us to change, right? Like you could imagine that if you were in a different career and you were only doing speaking once a year or every 18 months and then you felt that feeling when you were speaking, when you were doing public speaking –that’s telling you something about your life and your career, which you may or may not want to hear at that point, because it might ask you to make some changes that require courage or trade-offs and so on. And so we do sometimes try and block the yirah or turn away from it.
I think also yirah, for a lot of people there’s kind of transcendence of the self that comes with it, and you may find when you’re doing that public speaking, you get into the zone, you get into flow state – you kind of lose the sense of Pete and you’re one with the words or you’re one with the audience. And then at the end it’s like, “Oh, where did I go? I went fully into that.” And that happens for a lot of people. The things that bring them yirah – they lose their normal sense of self while they’re doing them, and that’s that flow state, that kind of immersion, what Martin Seligman calls our “gratifications”. And that can be a little bit threatening to our ego sometimes, because our ego likes to be, “I’m Tara”, “I’m Pete”, “I’m in my mundane sense of self.” It doesn’t really like that transcendence of self, and so that could be another reason we resist it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Excellent, thank you. So then you say that’s kind of the different prescription then, in terms of with the projected things and fear. It’s a matter of, “Hey, slow it down, calm it down.” And with yirah the big stuff is being able to hold on for a bit.

Tara Mohr
Breathe into it, lean into it, notice what brings you it, pursue those things. Yeah, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So now thinking more a bit about self-doubt and it popping up – you say that confidence is not the prescription or the answer to self-doubt appearing. Tell us a little bit more about that, and what is?

Tara Mohr
Yeah. Well, just as we were talking about before – if confidence isn’t coming and if the inner critic is always going to be speaking up when we are on the edge of our comfort zone, we certainly don’t want to wait on confidence to do our most important work. And instead of looking for aiming for confidence, I believe we need a new relationship with our self-doubt. And so that has a couple of components. The first is being aware when you are hearing your inner critic.
For so many of us the inner critic is the background noise that we live with, it’s the music that has been playing in our head for a long time, we don’t even hear it anymore, it’s the water that we’re swimming in. It’s like, “Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve never been good at that kind of thing”, “Oh, those people over there are the ones who have it going on and I’m the outsider, “Oh, my body this and that” – whatever your inner critic lines are, many of them become just so habitual you don’t hear them anymore, or you hear them as those are true facts.
So step one here is starting to be able to notice and name your inner critic, so that in those moments you can say, “I’m hearing my inner critic right now.” Now, a lot of times that’s enough; it’s just like a mindfulness practice. That’s enough to let you go, “Oh, if I’m hearing my inner critic, then that’s certainly not the part of me I’m going to listen to.” But sometimes we do need a secondary tool, and there’s a whole range of things that can be effective – sometimes for people creating a character that personifies the inner critic so they can actually see, “Okay, my inner critic sounds like the perfect housewife”, or the stern old mean professor, and really getting a visual, so that when you are hearing your inner critic line you see it as coming from that character. And all of a sudden then there’s humor and you can have perspective on it.

Pete Mockaitis
What are some names that you’ve heard given to inner critics?

Tara Mohr
Oh gosh, all kinds of things. I feel like there was a year there where everywhere I would go and speak, the inner critic was always a Downton Abbey character. I’m trying to think of the name. The evil folks downstairs in Downton Abbey, and Harry Potter characters, and sometimes it’s a random name that comes to people and then I always have to hope there’s no one else in the class with that name. Sometimes they won’t write it down because it’s their colleague from down the hall and they don’t want that their worksheet from the program is seen by anyone later. So yeah, creating a character can be useful.
I really like using another tool, and I’ll share an example of how I used it for myself. When the Playing Big book was coming out, about six weeks before the publication date, I got an email from my editor at Penguin and she said, “Oh Tara, great news – we’ve piqued the interest of the editors of the Sunday Review section of the New York Times. They’d like you to write an essay based on Chapter 6 for their consideration for the Sunday Review.
So I see that and my mouth kind of fell open because I didn’t even know they were pitching them, or I had no idea that was even on the table. And my very first thoughts were, “Oh no, this is going to be a huge waste of time. I have an actual book launch to prepare for and a lot to do, and now I’m going to have to spend all this time writing this piece, which we know is never going to be published, because people who write for the Sunday Review section sound very grown-up and articulate in their writing, and Tara, you know you’ve never sounded that way.”
That was what the voice in my head said. And that voice and those thoughts pretty much stayed cycling that way for a few days. And then there were some other ones that got added in, like, “You can’t write about this for a co-ed audience because the book had been directed at women”, and, “There’s no way you can translate that chapter’s topics into an op-ed; it won’t make sense.” I had piling on every problem and excuse.
And on about the fourth day of this, somewhere there was a little graced thought that flew into my head that said, “You know, Tara, maybe that’s your inner critic talking.” Now, this is like a primary subject of the book that I had just written, but it took me four days because in our own minds the inner critic always sounds like truth. But on the fourth day… And that’s what I think we can get with practice – it might not be immediate but it didn’t take me six months at least. On the fourth day the voice said, “Maybe that’s the inner critic.” And of course internally my response was like, “No, no, no, it can’t be the inner critic. There’s no way you can pull off this piece. Your writing and your voice is just not mature enough.” But another voice said, “You know, this kind of sounds like an inner critic.”
And then I used this tool, which I love, which is to say, “Well, what does my safety instinct not like about this situation?” Because I know that my inner critic is always going to be a strategy of my safety Instinct. So, when I asked myself that question: “What does my safety instinct not like about this situation?”, the whole picture looked so different to me. I could suddenly see, “Wow, this is basically the worst nightmare of an emotional safety instinct”, because in one scenario here I’m going to write a piece that my editor thinks is not good and I’m worried she’s going to write back and be like, “It’s not good enough; I can’t pass it on”, and that’s going to be painful. Another scenario is the New York Times editors say that, and that will be painful because that will make me feel like I don’t measure up.
And even in the best case scenario, what’s my big reward? It’s that 3 million people are going to judge what I write and have opinions about it. And that’s scary for a part of us, for sure. And it can be especially, I would say, even more so often for women, because we are really socialized to not rock the boat and not do things that bring criticism. And I knew if I write an op-ed about some of these issues in the New York Times, they’re some controversial topics, there’s going to be a mixed reaction.
So then I could see, “Okay, I get it. I get what my safety instinct doesn’t like here.” And I’m going to lovingly parent that part of myself and say, “I get it. This feels really big and scary to you. We’re going to be okay. I’ve got this, and you’re allowed to be here with all these fears, but there’s another part of me that wants to be in charge here – the part that loves writing, that wants to get these ideas out, that likes taking a seat at the table in this way.” And that allowed me to proceed.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful, thank you. That’s a great illustration, and talking about the second arrow – coming full circle here. You’re beating yourself up maybe, associated with, “I’m supposed to be the expert on this and I can’t even…” There may be a risk of some self-judgment even when you’re trying to apply the tools and are aware of this wisdom here.

Tara Mohr
Yeah, and luckily I do. That part I feel very clear on, and I would offer that to people too, that I never have felt I need to be an expert on these things and be flawlessly playing big in my own life. I feel the opposite – I feel the only way I can stay interested in these topics and have something relevant to say about them is if I’m really grappling with them and I am compelled around these topics, because I’m a fellow traveler. And so I proudly use all these tools myself and always try and work my own playing big edges myself.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome, thank you. Well, Tara, tell me – is there anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some your favorite things?

Tara Mohr
I do want to mention inner mentor for a minute, because I think that’s such an important topic, and it’s really kind of the antidote to the inner critic; it’s the other voice in us that we talk about a lot in Playing Big. And the idea with the inner mentor is that rather than always seeking external mentors and looking for that person out there that has the answers for you, you come into contact with a sense of your own older, wiser self. And so in the book we do a guided visualization, so you can meet yourself 20 years in the future.
And what people find is they don’t just meet their older self, they sort of meet their elder, wise self, their authentic self. And then you can really consult and dialogue with that part of you as a mentor. And it is absolutely the best mentor you will ever have – all its answers are customized for you, it is always available to you. And so, that’s just been such a powerful tool and I want to make sure people know about it, because I’ve watched it be really, really pivotal for so many people now.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so interesting, and I’m right now imagining an older, wiser Pete with a cane, sitting on a log on an autumn day.

Tara Mohr
Well, we can do that right now. Yeah, so one thing that you are finding a
dilemma right now – just ask him for his perspective on it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, yeah. Well, so the silence there… Yeah, I was just thinking about, I just have a new baby. Yay! My first son.

Tara Mohr
Congratulations!

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. And so, I’m just thinking about, what’s prudent, in terms of kind of growing business without spending crazy hours, in kind of a way that would be troublesome for a family living. And so, it was only a few seconds, but what I’m picking up is the notion that there’s no need to sprint, rush, rush, do more, is kind of a wisdom nugget I’m starting to unpack there.

Tara Mohr
Yeah, and it sounds like… So did he kind of give you a vibe or a perspective around this question that was a little different than what you were holding in your mind before?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, kind of, yes. Because my instinct is to, “Alright, strategize, let’s figure out what is our optimal point of leverage”, as opposed to having a bit more of a calm, spacious, patient view of the matter.

Tara Mohr
Yeah. So Pete, it sounds like you tapped in really quickly, which is wonderful. Even without doing a longer visualization you could just call up a picture of him and then connect with a voice that was different than that of your everyday thinking, and that’s exactly it. And usually that inner mentor voice is more spacious, it’s more calm, it’s more loving, and it does give us something really different. I can’t tell you how many times people will come with like, “I don’t know, is it A or B? Is it A or B? And I’m stuck between A or B.”
And they check in with their inner mentor for a second and there is a C option that comes that they didn’t perceive before, that feels really right and gives them kind of a new path forward. So, it’s an amazing tool and it sounds like you have it right there at your fingertips. For people who feel like they need a little more help or if you just want to have a deeper experience with that, there’s an audio that you can use and a written form also in the book. But it’s a great tool to tap into.

Pete Mockaitis
That is wonderful, and I’m glad you highlighted it before we moved on to the next phase. And it’s so funny, I’m tempted – you tell me, is this a good idea or a bad idea – when it comes to the visualization, one of my knee-jerk reactions was, “Oh, I bet there is a website where I can put a photo of myself and see what I look like when I’m old.” And it was like, “Hm, on the one hand that could be interesting and help bring about a picture, but on the other hand, maybe I won’t like the picture.”

Tara Mohr
Yeah. I would say, let your subconscious mind do it because it’s sort of going back to our dream conversation – you’re going to see where this person lives, how they live, how they carry themselves. You want your right brain and your intuition to bring all that to you, rather than some computer-generated literal thing. So yeah, I’d say let your mind’s eye dream it up.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect, thank you. Okay, cool. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Tara Mohr
Oh, sure. Well, one of my favorite quotes comes from Marianne Williamson, and it is, “Ask to be a representative of love.” So, in any situation that you’re feeling stressed about… And I have used this in professional situations, including before I was an entrepreneur – very traditional professional situations – with amazing success and results, like going into a tense meeting where there was a lot of conflict and my prayer and inner intention was, I want to be a representative of love in the room. And what that allowed me to do was get out of myself and my fear and my ego, and contribute so much more value and be such a more helpful, mature voice in the room. So that’s always for me like a mantra, a favorite quote, a favorite practice.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. And how about a favorite book?

Tara Mohr
I have so many, but I just finished one that I think is outstanding and that your listeners will probably really enjoy. It’s called Einstein and the Rabbi. It’s by Rabbi Naomi Levy and it’s really a personal growth type book that is just very compelling and helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. And how about a favorite habit, a personal practice of yours that helps you be awesome at your job?

Tara Mohr
One of my favorite habits is surrender, by which I mean remembering that I’m not supposed to figure it out all on my own. So when I’m feeling overwhelmed or unclear, I can very consciously say, “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do in this situation.” I physically open up my hands to the world, the greater space and say “Help!” And then I kind of go through my day with a sensitive listening for the insights and answers. And I find that that surrender and asking for help really changes everything.

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

Tara Mohr
I’m at TaraMohr.com. And the Playing Big book is available on Amazon and everywhere that books are sold.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action you’d issue to folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Tara Mohr
I do. I would invite everyone to circle back to that idea we started our conversation with, and ask yourself are you being more loyal to your fears or your dreams? And what’s one thing you can do today to be more loyal to your dreams?

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Tara, thank you so much for sharing this. I wish you lots and lots of luck in your coaching and your book and all the cool things you’re up to!

Tara Mohr
Thank you! Likewise.

Jan 29

255: Minimizing Avoidable Failures with Russell Klusas

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Russ Klusas says: "Look for people who've been there and done that, and do that well."

Tradecraft founder Russ Klusas discusses optimal decision-making amid life goals, recognizing avoidable failures, and learning from the successes and failures of Silicon Valley.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to understand and use bounded rationality
  2. How to identify avoidable failures
  3. The good and the bad from Silicon Valley

About Russ 

Russell Klusas is the Founder of Tradecraft, a full time, in-person immersive training program for people who want to work in startups. He was also previously the CEO of Big Lobby, and the Entrepreneur-in-Residence of Founder Institute. He attended the University of Illinois.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Pete Mockaitis
Russ, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Russell Klusas
Oh, Pete, glad to join you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, this is going to be a whole lot of fun, I think, because we’ve had a lot of great conversations that probably should’ve been recorded over the years, and this time we’re doing one. And you’re in the minority, maybe only half a dozen guests are people I’ve known for years and prior to the episode. So, I want to put you on the spot and ask you to share with the world a favorite Russ & Pete memory.

Russell Klusas
Oh, what’s weird is that my strongest associative memory of you isn’t an actual event; it’s a hand gesture.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, boy. Okay.

Russell Klusas
And it’s yours, and it’s like this very particular like half Bill Clinton pointing fast, just really excited, like jazz hands thing that you do when something is really being optimized. Like every time I say your name or think of your name I always just imagine you like pointing out as you’ve made some really cool point and your hand kind of wiggles on its way down. It gets me excited.

Let’s see. If I had to actually talk about a favorite event, though, like looking back when that’s actually like relatively significant, if I go back and think about it, is when you and I we were in college, we spent one, I think, kind of like winter break working on some silly little idea called Connect Text.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Russell Klusas
Which we had decided that if we could text message blast everyone on campus on where they should go and where would be cool, and what bar was full, and what place was offering a new deal and whatnot that that would be great. And beyond being an idea that was a little bit ahead of its time, and it’s now then executed through things like Twitter and Instagram and Groupon and all these other things alike, if I look back on the group of people that worked on it there was me, and there was you, and there was Bo, and there was this guy named Sergei, and like pretty much everyone who worked on that has now gone on to do some pretty interesting and significant things in the tech world.

Like Sergei runs a vast majority of the product at Zillow; Bo started a company called FutureAdvisor that sold for a ton of money to, I think, BlackStone; I think Luke was kind of weighing in on some of that stuff who did MyMiniLife and Farmville; and you’re doing this stuff with this podcast and the coaching, and hearing about your more and more; then I’m kind of like pulling up the rear here by keeping myself busy here in the Valley.

Oddly, there’s pretty much nobody from that group who hasn’t gone on and done something relatively significant. I think that’s pretty cool.

Pete Mockaitis
That is cool. University of Illinois in action, that’s good. And as I’m thinking about the gesture, you say, my buddy Dave articulates it by saying, “Okay, I have some things up here, and I’m going to bring them over here.”

Russell Klusas
Yes. Yes. That is the thing. And, like, I can’t hear not only your name but I can’t hear any variation of the word optimal without thinking of that gesture first. I think if an associative memory is a high-valence events that tends to recall a very particular set of feelings for you then that word instantly recalls my memory and vision of you, and, I don’t know, I always found that interesting.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m flattered. Thank you. I’m encouraged to hear that. And I just think of, when I think of you, I think of not that this is to be like a 40-minute lovefest, but I just think of how you are just sort of seem to very quickly seem to get to know lots of impressive people really fast. And so, just like the folks that you get to have meetings with and are in the room with you it’s just sorts of astounding to me at times. So, impressive sort of the gift and the skillset you have associated with networking and relationship building is pretty awesome and hopefully we’ll learn a couple of those tidbits here today.

Russell Klusas
Well, it sounds good to me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, just to orient folks a little bit, could you maybe tell us the shorter two- three-minute version of your career story from where you started to what you’re up to right now?

Russell Klusas
Yeah, I would say like probably the most interesting part about my story is how early it started. I think I started my first real legit business, one that I probably should’ve filed taxes for and produced real revenue on when I was eight, that was a little snow shoveling business that I had started that ended up being kind of fun activity that I still talk about to this day with my parents and whatnot every time I see them.

But, basically, from the time that I was eight on, I have always kind of seen starting businesses as a really good excuse to go out and learn new things and to gotten to solve various problems I’ve seen in the world. So, that has saw like all these really eclectic path where, in high school, I ran a company that did PR for local small businesses, and I got to do really creative and fun things where I would be on a retainer for a local antique shop.

And in order to drive business for them I would end up throwing some party for high schoolers outside in their parking lot. And everyone would ask me, “Why are you doing that?” I’d say, “Well, because I’m going to make sure that the party runs over,” and all of these people need to be picked up by their parents. So, their parents wind up spending 20 minutes inside browsing while they’re waiting for their child to be done at this event.

So, in college, after I had sold the little PR company, I committed to the idea that I was going to have a normal college life. That lasted six days until my then girlfriend, and now wife, moved into her school, and I decided that the loft, the thing that actually raise the bed in her dorm room so that she can put her desk underneath it, just wasn’t up to my standards, and it was too expensive and not fit for the room and all this other stuff. So, then I started a furniture company that ended up blowing up on me one summer. I went away on vacation for a few minutes and came back and all of a sudden there was $100,000 in orders that I had to figure out how to solve. That was my first exposure to kind of explosive growth.

And really, since then, I’ve spent a vast majority of my career kind of floating back and forth between a kind of like a finance-heavy version of business where I invested in a lot of real estate and did some mergers and acquisitions on buying some small companies, and then kind of staying true to my roots which was more of a technology base and doing web design and marketing and software development for a variety of clients.

Until eventually I found myself out here in Silicon Valley where I now run a place called Tradecraft. And what we do at Tradecraft is we kind of help people figure out what’s next. One of the things that Silicon Valley is really good at is helping young founders and startups kind of succeed at the kind of company level. But there’s not a lot of focus on individual people and making sure that they don’t fail for avoidable reasons. Not the risk stuff, not the taking a chance but just like kind of the simple day-to-day things that make sure that they’re kind of achieving their highest and best use in the world.

So, we take people who are transitioning into technology. We take people who are trying to shift from another career or they’re trying to step up a level and kind of get a job that they, otherwise, wouldn’t qualified for and we kind of provide some mentorship and guidance and education, whatever it takes to kind of help them succeed.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. That’s right. And so, perfect, thank you for laying that out. That’s very helpful. So, now, I want to dig in a little bit. When it comes to working with folks on the full career perspective and helping them succeed, and cutting the avoidable failure, we’ve talked a number of times about sort of thinking tools and common mistakes that folks make when they’re putting the game plan together for their career.

And I love it, like you told me a great example of how someone said, “I want to work in Airbnb,” and then you say, “Well, why do you want to work for Airbnb?” And you sort of discovered that that’s not really the optimal path – there we go, optimal.

Russell Klusas
And the hand gesture starts.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, there it is – for them. So, can you share with me a little bit sort of how do you think about and guide folks as they’re sort of thinking through their next career move?

Russell Klusas
Yeah, when you actually kind of break it down and step back and look at the reasons that people both succeed and fail in their careers and, really, more holistically in their life in general, it can usually be traced back to this thing called bounded rationality. And not to get too geeky but a little Econ 101, like economics says that humans are these perfectly rational creatures and that we are constantly understanding what all of our options are and all our alternatives on how we can spend our time, and we have clear goals in mind, we understand our alternatives, we’ve collected all the information we can, we’re constantly selecting our own highest and best use in the market.

But, practically speaking, rationally, emotionally speaking, that’s not actually true. This guy named Herbert Simon, in the ‘50s, realized that humans are not optimizing creatures. We are boundedly rational which, to put it simply, means that when we’re making these big important life decisions we often find ourselves in situations where we don’t have enough information. We don’t actually have the key information that we need to make that decision.

If we did have that information, we don’t have what he called intelligence, but what I call insight, into why that information matters and how it will kind of play out in our lives. So, even if I gave you access to everything that you could possibly need when it comes to the actual raw data, because you haven’t developed an expertise around these subjects and around this thing that you’re about to do, you don’t understand how it all fits together, the greater system of it.

And, unfortunately, the last bit of it is that we are often in situations where we don’t have enough time to offset the first two, we don’t have enough time to go get that information or to really understand what that means. So, when you understand that bounded rationality is the reason why we tend to kind of miss stuff, then it makes it a lot easier to understand what it is that you have to provide somebody with in order to help them overcome that, right?

So, in some cases it’s just understanding what a career path looks like. And, for you, when you’re trying to break into a new industry, whether it’s tech or finance or anything else, it’s this unknown unknown, as Rumsfeld so famously told us. And it’s not even reasonable if you think about it to expect you to understand not only all of the options that you have but all the paths you can take, but what kind of opportunities and landmines you need to look out for along the way. You’ve never been there. You’ve never done that. It’s not that you are going to Google and being too lazy to do your research. It’s just you’re going to Google and you’re not even sure what to type in. You don’t know what the right questions are.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, you don’t know what you don’t know.

Russell Klusas
Yeah, it’s like if you were to take someone who is going into college in the next few months, or he’s going to start college the next fall, like having been through college, having been there and done that, you would have all these great advice to provide somebody with. But going in that first time like you wouldn’t even know what the questions are.

You haven’t been faced with the problems yet, so a lot of times you end up making, what hurt in retrospect, pretty obvious mistakes, things that aren’t really all that unique, mistakes that people have been making for millennia in some cases, and you end up having to reinvent the wheel and kind of recreate all of these possible ways out for things that could be avoided if you just had access to the right people with the right information at the right time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Go ahead.

Russell Klusas
So, when it comes to getting people over that, a lot of it is just a matter of recognizing where people are, in fact, boundedly rational and trying to act as that mentor, as that friend who can kind of help them through those times.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then, in practice, if someone is looking to make a career shift, or enter into any new sort of great unknown unknown, what would you recommend folks do in terms of gathering a bit of that context expertise sort of base-level backgrounder to reduce the odds they’re going to do something really dumb?

Russell Klusas
Well, historically speaking, when you look back all the way as far as you can go up till now, there’s only really been one form of solution that has worked consistently, and that’s something equating to mentorship or apprenticeship, right? Even if you go back to medieval days right up to now, like usually the best way that you can overcome the challenges you’re about to face in college is to have an older brother or to have a friend who’s already been there and done that and can guide you along the way and kind of help tell you, not what to do but like help you understand what decisions you have to make and what your options are.

So, what I would say is seek out mentorship, and sometimes that’s literally going and seeking somebody out and trying to find a way to be valuable to them so that they will be willing to spend a few minutes with you, hopefully share some of that wisdom. But in the cases where that’s not available, like seek out mentorship online in the form of all of the knowledge that exist there, the books, the podcasts, these types of things. Go find people who have been there and done that, and kind of look at what they did and work your way backwards.

A lot of times when people come to us at Tradecraft and they’re trying to figure out what their first job should be outside of Tradecraft, they go to Tradecraft, they get some kind of immersive learning experience, and they go get that first job, we often don’t tell them to start with figuring out what that next job is. We tell them to go try figure out what they want their job to be five years from now. We call it our TN plus two, or plus three. Not one-time period out but a few times periods out.

We say, “Go find that. Then go find a few people who have that job then look for a pattern between the people who that job that you want to have someday and what they did prior in their experience.” If they were visual designers straight out of college, go be a visual designer. If they were just hustlers at brand new companies, like go be a hustler. Look for people who’ve been there and done that, and do that well.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. And I think at the same time, while you’re having those conversations with them, make sure that’s what you actually want to do, like burst any bubbles that you might have in terms of poor assumptions and getting a realistic job interview.

Russell Klusas
Oh, yeah. I mean, far and away, the biggest ramification of bounded rationality is people avoiding it altogether. They avoid the big decisions. For some reason, the last 10 or 15 years it’s been like something approaching cool to like not have goals and to not spell them out because you’re supposed to just get on the rocket ship, as they say, or go where the world takes you, just pursue things. And that’s just ridiculous. When you talk to successful people one of the things they almost always have in common is they always have goals. They always have something that’s far and off out that’ll be kind of the north star of them in their day-to-day activities.

And when people think that if you pick a goal today then that means that has to remain your goal your entire career, and that’s not true. There’s nothing wrong with changing your goal as you get new information. But to not have a goal means that you can’t really evaluate whether or not you’re doing well. And for some people they find salvation in that, right? “If I don’t have a set of goals to compare myself to, to compare my performance to, then I’m definitely not doing bad because I just never ask that question.” Right?

But they almost always end up regretting it. They almost always end up looking back on it and having woken up one day, and going like, “Holy crap, I’m in my early or mid-30s and I don’t really like where I am. I’m not doing anything I care about. I’m not setup to have that senior-level position in the firm, or to have the influence or the impact that I want to have,” and it’s because they weren’t being mindful of their most valuable asset early in their career, which is time. On and on, the only thing that matters in the early stages of your career is time.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, when you say the only thing that matters is time. Do you mean in terms of how you’re spending it? And is that a wise use of the time?

Russell Klusas
Yes. Without a doubt, if I had to tell somebody like, “The asset in your life that you need to optimize for, especially early in your career, it is time.” Right? The thing that I would tell you to go seeking out in your early days is knowledge, right? In your early 20s when you have a low standard of living, a low burn rate and few responsibilities, that is the best time to make sacrifices and to dedicate yourself to learning and becoming an expert in your craft, going for mastery, if you will.

But the thing you need to be most careful of is time because that’s where this avoidable failure stuff really starts to kick in, not just in the small failures; the day-to-day stuff. But it’s a common thing you see out here in the Valley, it’s like people who go to law school, and they go to a great law school, they go to Harvard Law School and then they graduate and become a first-year associate in a top-tier firm in Manhattan, and then six months later they end up on my doorstep, and you go, “Whoa, wait a minute. What happened?”

There’s nothing wrong with deciding you want a different path in your life, but my question to them is always like, “Is there something that fundamentally changed about the field of law while you were in law school? Is there something about being a first-year associate that is different?” And they always go, “No, that’s how it’s fairly it’s always been.” And I said, “Well, if you had known that, if you had been forced to intern or something like that at a law firm for over three months, for the summer before you went to law school, would you have gone?” And they always go, “Oh, absolutely not.”

And it’s not that going to law school is bad. You and I, both, we have a bunch of friends who are lawyers and they love it and they really enjoy it. But, like, real avoidable failure isn’t often the stuff that you notice; it’s the stuff that you don’t even think that is failure. It’s going to law school and dedicating three years of your life there only to figure out that that’s not what you want to do, that’s not the vocation, the life’s work you want to have, and having lost that time, because time is valuable.

Pete Mockaitis
So, we talked about these avoidable failures, of these whoopsie-daisy kind of moments, like, “Oh, man, I wish I hadn’t done that.” Let’s talk about some of your pro tips to get a little bit of a preview or a test in advance. You talked about getting a peek from mentors and apprenticeship master type folks, you talked about doing an internship, and you talked about availing yourself to the books and podcasts that they give you a glance inside? What are some of your other favorite tactics for getting a feel for things in advance of doing the thing?

Russell Klusas
Well, I’ll tell you one that is one of my favorites but is almost the antithesis of the ethos here in the Valley, at least when you first start to see it, and that is I tend to focus more on avoiding failure than I do on having some world-changing success. And it’s not because I’m not an optimist, and it’s not because I’m not ambitious. I like to think that I, and the people that I work with, are both of those things.

Like anyone who tells you that they can give you the five steps to success, how to turn yourself into the next Mark Zuckerberg, anyone who’s promising you that you’re going to be the next X Factor, they’re lying because either they don’t know how complicated this stuff is, and you shouldn’t be listening to them, or they do know and they’re just trying to sell you something.

Like it is impossible to predict with any level of certainly what is going to make somebody fantastically successful. There’s just too many variables that have to line up, too many things you don’t have control over. And because of that, like I tend to focus more on, “Let’s just make sure that I don’t screw up all the time. I don’t waste my time and energy and money on things that can be avoided.”

Because I think it was like Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s investing partner who said, “If I can avoid death long enough,” and it’s like Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett, these days are kind of the most famous examples of people where they’re like they don’t really try and knock it out of the park that often. What they try and do is make sure that they’re not doing anything that’s going to cost them in a really, really big way.

So, I would say like, very practically speaking here, mental models and cognitive biases, there are lists of them, there are blogposts, a hundred different ways to find these things, but cognitive biases are those things that your emotional brain, mostly, uses to help you make quick decisions. But a lot of times your cognitive biases will betray you, right? You’ll have the recency effect, you’ll have the anchoring effect, there’s always kind of different things.

And the more you learn about them, it’s kind of like learning about your own weaknesses. And the more you learn about them, it makes sure they’re like every time I’m making a big decision I always run through the list of cognitive biases and kind of ask myself, “Am I susceptible to this one right now? Have I considered this from the other angle?”

Same thing with mental models which are usually just kind of a way of offsetting these cognitive biases and knowledge blockers. Like, play devil’s advocate for yourself. Always look at it the other way when you can. And like they said, one really great example, as I said, “If you want to figure out how to really, really help something, a classic mental model is to, instead, think about what would really, really hurt something,” right?

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Russell Klusas
If you say, “I want to have the biggest impact in India that I can have over the next 10 years to raise the poverty level. I want to bring people out of poverty.” Like, the best way to find out what you can do to help is to start with going like, “What’s the worst thing that could possibly happen?” And that’s when you start at identifying things like infrastructure, right? Where it’s like, “The internet would be great, but we need clean water first. We can’t worry about whether or not they’ve got one laptop per child until they have a way of charging that laptop.” And those things are often forgotten.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. So, I’d love to hear, when it comes to the mental models and the cognitive biases, you said there’s these books and there’s blogposts. Do you have a couple of favorites or go-tos that have helped you expand your thinking and arrive at your checklist?

Russell Klusas
Sure. What I would say is on the book front, there’s a book called Seeking Wisdom from Darwin to Munger by a guy named Peter Bevelin who’s a professor and who was an early investor in Berkshire and he’s just kind of written down a lot of the things that they learned over time, and it’s a great book. It’s one of my favorites.

I technically work in complex systems. I’m a system thinker as from a field’s perspective, and people always talk to me about like The Fifth Element and it’s kind of more pop culture type books, but I would take the Seeking Wisdom on any day of the week.

Pete Mockaitis
We had Matt Bodnar also mentioned that back in Episode 127, so two votes of confidence.

Russell Klusas
Yeah, for some reason I just find that like any time I bring up that book, and somebody has read it, I am almost instantly like kind of on the same wavelength as that person. It just works out great. The other one I would probably surface is the cognitive bias codex which you can find on Medium. It started off as like somebody just running through ever cognitive bias they can and trying to explain it, and then it turned into pretty elegant little poster. It’s gotten more and more kind of popular over the days, but like that’s a good place to start from a cognitive bias standpoint.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, beautiful. Thank you. Okay. Well, so then, I’d also like to get your take then in terms of that’s a great career tip in looking at the T plus two, T plus three, getting a real clear sense for, “What are we talking about here? In what ways might this totally go south or be disappointing?” Now, I’d love to get your take on, I’ve mentioned at the beginning, you’ve got quite a knack for networking, meeting people, building relationships. How do you do it? It seems like, I don’t want to mean this in a pejorative sense, but you mentioned a lot of names that’s very impressive. And like, “Dang, son, how did you end up in a room with Tony Robbins or whomever?” Like, what’s your philosophy and your best practices in this game?

Russell Klusas
Yeah, I would say that it’s actually kind of ironic that you would say that because nowadays, out here in Silicon Valley, as opposed to U of I, I think I’m actually one of the less impressive networker there is. There are some people here who are just truly amazing at it and they are actual extroverts as opposed to myself who’s an introvert kind of masquerading as an extrovert when I need to.

There are some people out there that I think are amazing at it that I would encourage them to continue to get. But I do think I have a couple, which is, the first one, like if you’re not an extrovert, if you’re not someone who naturally feels really comfortable like going out and striking up conversations with new people that you don’t know, get to know some people who are, befriend some people who are because I would tell you that a vast majority of what you’re saying are like impressive names that I’ve gotten to be in the room with, they’re not people that I reached out to cold.

They’re not people that I begged and borrowed and stole to kind of get in the room with them. They’re people where my friends knew them and decided that I should end up in a room with them at some point. It’s through a lot of introductions, so it’s just like understand in your industry who the kind of super connectors are, and try to defend those people, and tell them that.

If there’s one of the things that kind of openly tell people is like, “If there’s ever any one you think I should meet, up the ladder from me, down the ladder from me, regardless, like if there’s someone that you think I should meet, like just make an introduction, let me know. I will take the time.” Because I don’t do a lot of cold outreach, but I get a lot of great introductions. I meet some great people that way.

Pete Mockaitis
I see. And how does one go about identifying super connectors?

Russell Klusas
I think it’s kind of like with any, like for me, for example, my partner is just world class at this particular thing. He has traveled the world in his entire life from being a professional musician who’s on the road to living in a number of different countries with his wife who’s a diplomat. He’s a guy who’s had to kind of like drop into new communities and find his home over and over and over again, and he’s just really great at it.

And really early on in working with him and getting to know him, both as a friend and as kind of a business partner, I recognized that that was a weakness of mine in some cases and that he would be really great at helping me fill that. So, like you would generally know who they are once you meet them because they’re going to be the ones who immediately want to introduce you to somebody else, or the ones where you’re being introduced to them. It’s definitely one of these you-know-it-when-you-see-it kind of things.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Got you.

Russell Klusas
The other thing that I would say is probably as important if not more important than anything is always focus on creating more value than you capture. Like especially when you’re trying to kind of go upstream. The most important thing you can do if you really want to get in the room with somebody who’s important is be able to bring some value to their life.

It’s easy to think that just because they’re that really big and important, and you’re just getting started, that there’s nothing that you can do that’d be valuable to them, but that’s just not true. It’s just not. You have a certain hunger and a certain perspective on things that they just don’t have anymore. It’s just like always be thinking, “How can I find some way to provide value to these people?” And then offer that value up and just consistently commit yourself to creating more value than you try to capture. And, eventually, it will take hold and it will start to work.

And if you’re a kind of a good person, you’re willing to give back, you’ll continue to do that no matter what height you reach in your career, that’s how you just end up with a lot of really good friends, or a lot of people that you can kind of be on call when the time is needed.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it, yes. Generosity is a theme that’s come up numerous times and I’m totally, totally on board there. I’d also want to get your take when it comes to in your realm of Silicon Valley, startups, fast pace, everything changing so fast, what are your pro tips when it comes to learning quickly and adapting smartly as stuff evolve and changes?

Russell Klusas
One thing I’d say is having that goal in mind. The most important step in learning quickly is make sure you’re learning the right stuff. There are a lot of things that you can spend a lot of time learning that are kind of irrelevant to you. A good example of that is like I will often be asked by small business owners that I still run into whether or not they should learn to use WordPress or some other kind of site creator.

And I often tell them, like, “You should just pay somebody to do that.” And the reason isn’t that they can’t figure it out, or that it wouldn’t be interesting to them, it’s that the tools that are used to put websites together radically change every four or five years. And if you make a decent website as a small business, you shouldn’t be creating an entirely new website more than every four or five years.

Which means you’re spending all of this time upfront to learn something that by the time you need it again it won’t be relevant anymore. People forget that knowledge, like all other assets, has a decay rate. So, just make sure you’re learning the stuff that’s going to be valuable to you. The other benefit of kind of keeping that end goal in mind is it kind of forces you to remember that chances are, with the way the world is going, your job role will not exist in 30 years whether it’s artificial intelligence, globalization, automation, like there’s all these different things that come into play.

But the truth is your role isn’t going to exist, but if your job role isn’t going to exist, your job goal probably will.

Pete Mockaitis
Tweet that, it rhymes.

Russell Klusas
One of the things you notice about your job goal is that you start thinking about the people that you’re serving. If you’re a designer, people aren’t going to be using Sketch five years from now or ten years from now most likely. It’s just not a probable thing. But are they going to be trying to design great user experiences that help get people the exact information they wanted, the exact time they want it with the lowest friction as possible? Of course, they are.

Like, in psychology, learn these things that are kind of has a certain level of permanence. And the thing about having this kind of longer-term goal in mind is it helps focus you to make sure that you’re spending your time on the things that are really valuable so you don’t get surprised and kind of caught off guard.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Russell Klusas
One of the things that I worry about when I talk to a lot of young people today, especially people who are doing very, very well, is this kind of like – I don’t mean to harsh – but there’s like a certain level of hubris that our generation has around our own skillsets, right? Like the compare and contrast is like a web developer, a full stack developer here in Silicon Valley, versus like a coal miner, right?

And they look at these coal miners, and they go, “Oh, man, like that skillset, it’s completely useless. Their job, that’s not needed anymore. How could those people let the world kind of pass them by like that?” And I look at them and go, like, “Man, you know that’s going to happen to us, too, right? We’re not only going to disrupt all these other people. Eventually we’re going to disrupt ourselves. We’re one good algorithm away from not meeting a friend in engineering anymore.”

It’s like you have to assume that the time of you being able to join one company for your entire career, or stay in one role for your entire career, and just move up to levels of seniority, almost those have gone. You need to be constantly looking forward and seeing what you can do to make sure that you are always on kind of the cutting edge of what it is that it takes to fulfill the goals of your organization.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. And as we kind of move into the final phases, I want to get sort of your reflection. So, you’ve seen a lot of people and inserting them into a lot of roles at the cool companies, and the up and comers across Silicon Valley. And because it shows up in the news a lot that I think some people have like startup envy, like, “Oh, man, that’d be so cool. That’s be so sick to even work…” you know, fill in the blank, Airbnb, Facebook, Google, whatever.

So, I’d love to get your take on what are some things that the professional world at large can learn and model from Silicon Valley? And what are some things that Silicon Valley really needs to tone down and learn from the rest of the professional world?

Russell Klusas
Oh, yes, I’m very passionate about this topic.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Russell Klusas
What I’d say is I almost separate kind of old-school Silicon Valley to the one that you see today, and I’m sure that everybody says this about their particular time. But the inspiration that I think we can take from the old-school Silicon Valley is to think big. Be ambitious. Recognize that Moore’s Law and these things that we get to do with our time, they can fundamentally change the world. I mean, people forget there were no iPhones 11 years ago.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Russell Klusas
It’s only like 10 and a half years ago there was no iPhone at all. And from the first year of the iPhone there were no apps, there were no external apps, there’s no app market. Like imagine living your life without a smartphone, like the iPhone today, it’s crazy to think that. Like, in our parents’ lifetime the microwave was created.

These are transformative changes, and we have some huge problems that are facing the world right now, and to be even bigger ones that are likely to come with the kind of rapidly-changing market conditions we’re going to see with all this artificial intelligence stuff. Think big. Solve things that matter, right? Do work worth doing.

From today’s Silicon Valley, probably even more than the early days, the thing that we do really, really well here is we try to keep the cost of failure low. We look at things over longer-time horizons and more holistically than a lot of the rest of the world. Being from Chicago, not to mention friends that I have that are from East Asia and other kind of community-oriented societies, like failure hurt.

I failed a couple times when I was in Illinois. You feel like a failure and you feel like you’ve done something wrong. Whereas one of the things that Silicon Valley is really good at is recognizing that the 25-year old entrepreneur who raised half a million bucks from friends and family or angel investors or something like that, and spent a year and a half busting his butt trying to make something work, and fails miserably, like he may be a failed entrepreneur but he’s going to be the most qualified young employee you could possibly hire because they know what it’s like.

They say the best way to get promoted is to get your boss promoted. Like somebody who has tried and failed but had really worked for it, there’s very little that will prepare you to succeed in the world like being thrown in the deep end, and that’s something that the Valley is good at. We value it. The people whose startups failed here, they get recruiting calls all day long from the moment they accept it’s time to move on.

Now, on the flipside of that, I think we’re starting to see some of the pretty significant negative ramifications of what technology can do. And, on the one hand, there’s like the really surface level stuff. There’s things like, well, social media addiction, and the impact that that has on teenagers, and the impact that that has on relationships, the impact it has on the way we see the world.

Like, I am not someone who believes that teenagers posting things on Instagram, and then valuing themselves based on how many likes they get. I don’t believe that that’s going to be a good thing. And like so many other people are kind of starting to say, I think that social media addiction is going to become the sugar of this decade, and I think that Silicon Valley is definitely at fault for a lot of these things.

We do a lot of things that are right, and oftentimes just not out of any malicious intent but just out of ambitious excitement and kind of a little bit of naiveté, like we do what we can to make things grow as fast as we can, and increase engagement as much as we can, but those things, cognitive biases, that I just got done telling everyone, they should pay attention to so they don’t make mistakes.

Those things, cognitive biases, are used against people to get them to use products more and more and more and more. And I think Silicon Valley, nowadays, needs to start remembering that not everything is fail fast. There are some things that we should be thinking through the second and third order effects to make sure that we’re okay with where it is, right?

Like, Twitter is great. Without Twitter we probably don’t have Arab Spring. But without Twitter we also don’t have Donald Trump and fake news, right? Without Facebook and Instagram and some of these other things, we don’t have everyone being able to find – like if you go on the internet today you can find your tribe. You can find a group of people who are like you, and that’s amazing for that kid who felt like he was totally alone in his small town in the Midwest.

But we also have troll groups and there are things that make it worse. We need to start thinking through the ramifications of our actions, and sometimes we need to slow down a bit. And we need to make sure that we consider the real-world ramifications that some of this disruption will have because I don’t think that we’re always going to be happy with the results, and although I hope that everything that has already kind of been put out there already, I hope we’re going to figure out ways to kind of offset that and deal with it.

I spend a lot of time talking to people about automation and artificial intelligence, universal-based income, and, “What are we going to do when the world changes as things get even faster and faster here?” We got to be really careful about it from a systems perspective, like the number one job in 47 States is truck driver.

Most people are populated as truck drivers in 47 of our States, and Elon Musk could singlehandedly put all of those people out of business. And our economies are not setup to have 4% or 5% or 6% of the economy go unemployed all at once. And that’s what happens, because when semi-trucks become automated it’s not only all the truck drivers, it’s a lot of those mechanics, it’s all those little gas stations along the way, it’s all the little hotels and restaurants that are put all up and down I-80 running across the country. They’re going to have some big ramifications of these things and it’s kind of like our responsibility. If we’re going to break in, we’ve got to worry about how to fix it, too.

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

Russell Klusas
No, I would say listen to things like this, listen to podcasts and whatnot, but this should be the way that you get psyched up in the day. This is the way that you get motivated and you get excited and you get inspired. But, at some point, also turn these things off and just get to work. Just go do something. Go write something, go read something, go learn something that’s going to kind of move you forward at the end of every day.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Okay. Well, now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something that inspires you?

Russell Klusas
Oh, you gave me this one ahead of time that I was kind of torn on it. So, I have two, I’m going to share them both with you. The first one is kind of speaking directly to what we were just talking about, which is, “It’s not a super power if it can’t be used for evil.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Russell Klusas
And I think that people really underappreciate that. Like those things that can result in fantastic growth and wonderful success, there’s often a flipside to that, that do some real harm, and you’ve got to be appreciative of that and understand it so that you can be looking for it. It’s the defense against the dark arts, if you will.

And the other one is that people often don’t realize this, but like I used to play hockey, and I watched a lot of people who are figure skaters, kind of at practice. And one thing that I always notice was that professional figure skaters, the people who are really experts, they fall down a lot more than the amateurs do, and it’s because amateurs tend to practice what they’re good at because they’re looking for the reinforcement of, “Hey, I’m good at this. I know how to do this.” Whereas, professionals are always pushing. They’re always stretching themselves to try to accomplish something more, and they know that falling down is kind of part of the process.

Pete Mockaitis
I like how that is sort of clear contrast and visual. Nice. Thank you. How about a favorite study or bit of research?

Russell Klusas
I was originally going to say the Seeking Wisdom book is a good book to read. In the absence of that, if there was one like scientist that I would say that almost everyone should study, his name would be Claude Shannon, and he was the guy who created information theory, and was actually responsible for a huge percentage of the things that we do day in and day out right now when it comes to computer science and the early days of AI and whatnot.

But Claude Shannon was the guy who like technically he was working on encryptions for military stuff. But this guy, if you understand his work you’ll find yourself with a greater understanding of how people work and it’ll give you a high level of empathy because you’re going to start understanding that the world that you’re living in, the reality that you believe to be true is not reality for everyone else.

Everyone has their own interpretation of reality, and the sooner that you realize that, and the sooner you start focusing on, “What’s that other person’s reality? And how can I make sure that I understand and empathizing with that?” the farther you’ll go in life.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And any other key books you’d recommend?

Russell Klusas
Because I know a lot of the people here are talking about getting a job, look into something called The Minto Pyramid Principle.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes. Barbara Minto.

Russell Klusas
Great writing is important in your career, and being able to present your ideas is important in your career, and Barbara Minto is uniquely qualified to kind of help people organize those things.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And how about a favorite tool?

Russell Klusas
Like, honestly, my favorite tool is our Dry-Erase Markers, specifically Ultra Fine Tip Dry-Erase Markers because I have really small handwriting and I have a whole bunch of whiteboards in my office. That’s like my mid version of it, if you have an office with whiteboards. If you don’t have an office with whiteboards, get 11X17 paper because you can express a lot more ideas on a little bit bigger sheet and it gives a little bit extra consequence. And then when you have some money to burn, go buy yourself something called a Microsoft Studio because it’s amazing.

Pete Mockaitis
What is a Microsoft Studio?

Russell Klusas
You will notice that the moment you type it in Google because it’s it had this beautiful launch with this wonderful advertisement. It’s a 27-inch screen that you can push down to kind of like have a flat kind of drafting type surface and it has the pen tool on it. And as someone who spent my entire life trying to take the notes that I take on paper when I’m reading and writing and all the stuff, and put them onto a screen, the Studio is just amazing.

Now, if it’s just as a replacement for pen and paper, it’s just a ridiculous waste of money. It’s something that’s like $3500 or something like that, but it’s fantastic. It’s so good that I can’t convince myself to buy another one, so I literally will carry this desktop. I will put it into the original box and carry it back and forth to my house on the weekends to make sure that I can still get at it if I have a good idea. It’s great.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I love it. And how about a favorite habit?

Russell Klusas
Like, figure out how to find your own flow. I’m sure that flow has been talked about a number of times on this podcast. But you got to find your own routine and kind of the one that works for you. But you should know what it takes to get yourself into a mindset that allows for kind of maximal output.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, yeah. And what is it for you?

Russell Klusas
I have a very unique working schedule. Literally, the way that I space out and the way that I space out my week, like I have a true commitment to it where I do the exact same thing every week and it’s absolutely crazy. And I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody else, that it works for me. And it’s important to kind of keeping me centered.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d love to know, how do you enforce the rest of the world when they want a piece of you at certain times such that you stick with the schedule?

Russell Klusas
Ironically, that’s why my schedule exists. So, I am a person who is consistently in the maker category where I’m doing research and trying to create cool new things on my own. I’m in the manager category because I have a couple of businesses that I’m responsible for running and staff and clients and all those things.

I also have family, and I’ve got to find a way to serve those three people. Forgot about social and all that other stuff. Nobody has any of that if you have these three, but it’s hard to kind of make sure that I can fulfill my obligations to these groups of people that I really genuinely want to spend time with, but also find time to get in the zone myself and get stuff done.

So, I, for example, I work a lot of nights, so I will sometimes start my day at noon or at 1:00 o’clock and I’ll spend four or five hours with my staff, and then I’ll kind of work all night so that I can get stuff done, and so that I can be available to my kids when they wake up and when they go to bed. But that’s just kind of what works for me, and it’s really about prioritizing my time and making sure that I want to set myself up to have as much success as I can, and to kind of minimize the switching costs, the cognitive load of going from one thing to another.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. I see. And so, what are the sleep hours then?

Russell Klusas
I mean, these are ones that I literally would not recommend to anybody at all because I’ve been doing this – and you know this, as one of my older friends – I’ve been doing this for a very, very long time, maintaining these crazy schedules, but I generally come into work on Monday around 10:00 or 11:00, and then I stay at work until Tuesday night around 5:00 or 6:00, and I work that whole time.

Then I go home and see my kids Tuesday night, I wake up with my kids on Wednesday morning, and spend a few hours with them there. And then I do it again, I go in Wednesday afternoon, I work all night, I go home Thursday, and then I do it again on Friday.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding.

Russell Klusas
So, like for the last year or so, I’ve only slept four nights a week but it’s definitely not something I would recommend to the masses because it takes a while to get used to, and it’s also not something that I would do if it weren’t for the nature of my work right now. Like,       there are reasons why I don’t want to go to sleep with half of an idea, but I would expect that to change.

But it’s more about the fact that I found myself for too long feeling like I was always having to shortchange somebody, and I didn’t want to not be there for my kids ever, and not ever be home during the week, and I didn’t want to have to blow off my staff, and not be able to take new meetings. I also didn’t want to miss on the time that I felt was important for me continuing to make progress on my life’s work, and so this is the schedule that I found worked for me and it turns out that I don’t really value sleep probably that I should have, certainly not more than I value the other things.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow. That is fascinating. Thank you. I knew your hours were interesting but I didn’t know that they were so systematically repeated and in this fashion and it’s great.

Russell Klusas
Yeah, I’ve never been a big like World Wrestling Federation fan but I have become enamored with The Rock over the last kind of two or three years here, because oftentimes I am up at 3:00 o’clock in the morning or 4:00 o’clock in the morning, and for me that’s like mid-day a lot of times. I’m really just starting to get going.

I’ll take a break just to kind of give myself a little reset on something I’m working on, and I kept going online. And when I’ve opened Instagram, or something like that, I would see The Rock, and The Rock would also be up at 3:00 o’clock in the morning. He would be saying and doing the exact same thing I was saying and doing to myself. He’d be literally in the gym, in the Iron Paradise, he calls it, because he wants to make sure that he is the hardest worker in the room.

And I always thought to myself, like, “Man, this is the People’s sexiest man in the world, and the highest-earning actor, and all these things, and yet he always grounds himself by saying he does not sacrifice his time in the gym,” whether it’s a 12-hour day or a 30-hour day, that guy is in the gym because it’s not work for him. That’s how he keeps himself centered.

And I really, really, really respect his work ethic and I think he and I share the same mentality, that we’re either going to win or lose, but if we lose we’re going to be 100% sure that we did everything we could possibly do to succeed. Like I don’t like quitting, so that’s the only thing. I take a lot of risks in my life, and I’d failed plenty of times, but I don’t quit, and I like that mentality and then that keeps me focused.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. And is there a particular nugget that you share when you’re working with folks that really seems to connect and resonate with them, they’re taking notes and nodding their heads, like saying, “Yes, Russ. Yes”?

Russell Klusas
Honestly, I don’t know because that implies that I’m saying something that’s making them extra successful when in reality that’s not my job. Like, my job isn’t to make them fantastically successful. My job is just to kind of watch their back and make sure that they don’t fail. I’m Jiminy Cricket in a lot of their lives. So, a lot of times I’m having kind of like radically honest conversations with them about things that matter, but mostly I just want to make sure that they know that we’re there for them when we can be.

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

Russell Klusas
I’d probably point them to Tradecraft if we’re plugging something, go to Tradecraft.com. Otherwise, I would say go find yourself Claude Shannon because he will change your life.

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

Russell Klusas
Know what your TM plus two is. Make sure that the next job that you’re getting, like recognize that. Like I used to be a speechwriter, and I learned from some really great people on that, and they often told me, “You know what the point about first sentence is? To get someone to listen to the second sentence.” Like, it’s really stressful when you’re just trying to get odd jobs, especially early in your career when you’re in survival mode.

The money is kind of running out of your bank account, you’re getting pressure from your parents or see your friends get jobs. It’s really easy to kind of lose sight of the big picture. And just recognize that every job you get, every opportunity you take, it’s always about kind of going towards that greater goal – your vocation, your life’s work. Be thinking five years out because, I promise you, it’s easier. A lot of the details fade away. It’s not as scary when you’re thinking five years out. It just either feels right or it doesn’t.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Well, Russ, thanks so much for taking this time. This has been a ton of fun. We finally recorded a conversation of ours. Hopefully, it’s helpful to the world. And keep on rocking.

Russell Klusas
Thank you very much, Pete.

Nov 27

234: Sharper Critical Thinking for Better Solutions with Mike Figliuolo

By Podcasts No Comments

 

Mike Figliuolo says: "Before you say something... just stop and think."

Mike Figliuolo ponders on why critical thinking is becoming increasingly important and how to maximize your critical thinking skills.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why slowing down will help you better solve problems
  2. How to differentiate facts from judgments
  3. How to use the 5 “whys” and the 7 “so whats” to think more clearly about causes and effects

About Mike 

Mike Figliuolo is the Managing Director of thoughtLEADERS, a consulting and training firm that helps leaders think better. He’s authored numerous books on leadership, thinking, and communication.He graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point and served as a commissioned officer in the Army. He then joined McKinsey and Company as a management consultant. He later worked at Capital One Financial as Group Manager of Strategy & Analysis and as Director of Specialty Collections. He was responsible for ~$1B in collections, a $125MM budget and the performance of 150 employees. The initiatives his teams put in place delivered over $125MM in value.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Pete Mockaitis
Mike, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Mike Figliuolo
It’s my pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me as a guest.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yeah. Well, you’ve been on the list since Episode 3 with Victor Prince’s co-author, and now seemed like a fine time. So, I’m glad you made it happen.

Mike Figliuolo
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Now I understand you have a bit of a fondness for skydiving. What’s the backstory here?

Mike Figliuolo
Yeah, not really, and that’s what’s funny about it. So, I was in the army, and I’ve always hated heights. My father used to laugh at me when we would go up on the roof to clean out the gutters and I’m looking like Spider-Man plastered to the roof, just worried about falling off. So when I was in the army, they have you go to military schools during your summers when you’re at West Point. And one of my summers I put in for a specific type of very ground-based training, and the Army and its wisdom decided that I would be much better off jumping out of airplanes. So, I went through Airborne School down at Fort Benning, Georgia, jumped out of a plane five times, got my airborne wings and have never done it since. So, cool experience; not necessarily something that I want to go through again.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I totally misinterpreted that tidbit here. You’ve done it, but you didn’t enjoy it.

Mike Figliuolo
I mean, it was cool. It was cool. After the second jump you’re like, “Okay, I’m probably not going to die, so I may as well enjoy the view.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. I’ve done it once and I liked it. I could do it again. My wife isn’t a fan though of the idea.

Mike Figliuolo
It’s a little different when you’ve got on a rucksack and a simulated weapon and there’s eight of you going out the plane one after the other after the other and you got a static line yanking you around. And you’re only about a thousand feet up and you’re trying to hit that patch of really rough dirt below in the Fort Benning sun. So, you probably had a little bit more of a pleasurable experience.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it was. It was kind of cool, and the breeze falling through…

Mike Figliuolo
Yeah, we didn’t have that, no.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, tell us a little bit about your company thoughtLEADERS.

Mike Figliuolo
Yeah, we are a leadership development and training firm. We work mostly with large corporates like Google, Abbott, Discover Financial, the Federal Reserve, and we teach topics of leadership, communications, problem-solving, decision-making. I like to say we teach all the topics that everybody needs that nobody ever teaches you.

We have a really strong bias toward heavy hands-on application in the classroom, and the thing that I hold up as different about us is we’re all business people. We’re not academicians, we’re not career facilitators; we’re business people up on the podium. So, we understand the participants’ challenges and we’re able to help them bridge from our tools and frameworks to their reality, which then increases the likelihood that they apply our methods.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, excellent. So now, I kind of re-thought of you when I was checking out your LinkedIn learning course Critical Thinking, and I was digging in, enjoying it. And so I’d like to get your take on just the importance of critical thinking in the hierarchy of professional skills. I thought I had seen it somewhere in some report that it was like the top thing professionals need, but I couldn’t relocate it when I tried to Google and prep for today. So maybe you can orient us to that.

Mike Figliuolo
Yeah. So I believe part of it came out of a New York Times article that was based upon a report that LinkedIn actually put together. And LinkedIn went through people’s profiles, they looked at who got new jobs and what were the skills that they had either explicitly stated on their LinkedIn profile or that they could deduce from the person’s background. And critical thinking was one of the top ones, if not the top one on that list.

So, as I look around the importance of critical thinking increases every day, and reason for that is, the speed with which we’re making decisions is so incredible that if you don’t pause and really think through something, you’re going to create a bigger problem. You may have thought you solved the problem, but you just created an issue that is exponentially larger.

Pete

Mike Figliuolo
Yeah, it can either spiral or you can end up solving a problem and then solving it again and solving it again and solving it again, and it ends up being really wasteful and inefficient. And when you’re operating in a world where you need to be moving fast, you don’t have time to be wrong, which means you need to slow down and make sure that you’re right.

Pete

Mike Figliuolo
Yeah, you can take it to the world of construction – when you’re finishing a basement or an attic you’re always taught, “Measure twice, cut once”, and that’s deliberately slowing down, making sure you’re thinking about what you’re doing, and then you take action and the action is correct; rather than, “Measure once, cut once, because I’m really busy and I’ve got to move. Oh look, I just cut the two-by-four on the wrong side of the line and now it’s too short. And now I’ve got to cut another one and another one, and there’s waste involved.”

So just by slowing down, looking at what you’re trying to solve, assess the situation properly, come up with a solution and think through the impacts of that solution if you implement it, and then implement – the likelihood of doing something bad in that cycle, because you short circuit it, goes down dramatically.

Pete

Mike Figliuolo
That’s exactly where I was going to go. I don’t think it’s just politics; I think things have started moving so fast and people have so much information overload, that they’re trying to react to everything coming at them as quickly as they’re able, whether it’s an email or a text or a tweet or whatever it is, it requires an immediate reaction. Or they think it requires an immediate reaction – let me rephrase – they think it does. So, they react immediately without thinking it through.

And I’ll just use the examples – how many times have you seen an article go flying by on Facebook and it has some provocative headline, and all of a sudden you look at the comments and it’s clear that everybody’s getting all vitriolic or offering their perspective? And you realize 95% of those people didn’t even read the article, right? And it’s just we’re not stopping and thinking critically. Or we do read the article and we don’t step back and say, “Well, hang on a minute. Let’s look at who wrote this article, let’s look at if that person has an agenda, let’s understand how they’re trying to position the information, what information are they not sharing with us in order to influence me to do something.”

I had this conversation with a student, a graduate student, who was saying, “Well, I’m going to move to Texas.” I’m like, “Okay. Well, but you live in Pennsylvania. Why are you excited to move to Texas? Do you have family there?” “Well no, no, not at all.” “Okay, why?” They’re like, “I want to get a job in Texas.” “What’s driving this?” “Well, I read this report, and Texas has this and Texas has that and Texas has that, and all these jobs and all this growth and all this stuff.” I’m like, “Okay, so who wrote the report?” “Oh, it was published by the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce.” “Hm, you think maybe there’s an agenda there? Maybe?” And I’m not saying it’s a biased report, but I’m just saying, stop and understand the circumstances of what you are assessing at that moment, and challenge it, challenge yourself.

Pete

Mike Figliuolo
Yeah, so I was an American Politics major at school actually, and you study a lot of the information that’s put out there and how it’s positioned. And one of the things I was always taught was, understand the difference between facts and judgment. So, when you’re reading an article, ask yourself, “Is this a fact or is it the author’s judgments or the newscaster’s judgment of that fact? Is it their assessment of what that fact means, their interpretation?”

So by taking whatever piece of information you’re looking at, first of all separate it into the facts and judgments. Then look at the facts first and say, “Okay, are these facts accurate? What was the source of them? What facts are not being included here that could be included that may be skewing the actual facts themselves?” And once you have your arms around what the fact base is and how it may or may not be biased, just with the data collection and data sharing, then you are much better qualified to assess the assessments of those facts and say, “Is this a fair judgment? This author is saying that this company is doing bad things. Okay, based on the facts, would a reasonable person draw the same conclusion, or are they just extrapolating from a single data point?”

So by challenging each of those sort of assertions or each of those assessments – that’s critical thinking. That’s asking those questions versus just saying, “Oh yeah, that’s a bad company, of course. They did this one bad thing and therefore they hate people.” It’s like, “Really?” If you separate it out and really question both sides of that pile of information, I think you end up being much savvier, in terms of the information you consume.

I don’t watch the news. I go online, I have certain news sources where I am pulling facts from and I’m trying to get as unbiased a set of facts as I possibly can, and then I’m forming my own assessment. “What does this mean?” And sometimes I’m challenging other people’s assessments or I’m asking the questions of, “What’s not here? What’s not being presented?”, but I’m not letting somebody else interpret the facts for me. That’s not happening.

Pete

Mike Figliuolo
For me it ends up being, I’m looking at primary sources. You know what I like? I actually like a lot of the financial websites – places like MarketWatch or E-Trade or whatever. I’m reading business press releases – things about earnings or market research reports or whatever, because I want to get as close to primary facts as I possibly can. And when you go to financial sites, they tend to throw a little bit less assessment into the facts of what’s going on. It’s like, “Okay, here’s the new tax law, here’s what it means, here are the tax brackets, here’s how these deductions go away, here’s the average size of that deduction.” And they just give you the data.

And there may be a little bit of interpretation that goes there, there may be a little bit of bias, but that’s much less bias than if I go to CNN or Fox News, and it’s like, “And you get no deduction and you have to murder your first child.” It’s like, “Really?” It’s just so bombastic, because what people don’t understand is news media has become entertainment first and news second. And you need to understand that; you really need to understand what their agenda is. Their agenda is to attract eyeballs, which attracts advertisers, which attracts dollars. It’s really simple. And the way you attract the eyeballs is with very interesting content that I can consume and feeds my ingoing biases anyway, and tells me I’m right.

Pete

Mike Figliuolo
I guess for me it’s a question of, what’s the impact of that item on your life and the world around you, and how much importance do you sort of ascribe to that impact? So for example, I just got this wonderful letter in the mail from my health insurance company, telling me that my premiums for next year have gone from $960 a month to $1,600 a month. So we’re talking, what is that, an 80% increase, something like that? So we’re talking about a big impact on me – I want to understand the facts, and I have wanted to understand the facts for the last several years, around what are the changes in Affordable Care Act, what are the marketplace dynamics, who’s moving into the market, out of the market, because I’m sitting there trying to figure out where is healthcare going. I’ve got three kids – what’s going to be the right plan for me, how do I adjust to this?

So I do invest time and energy in understanding that information, seeking out facts and making my own assessment, because it’s going to govern my thoughts on a topic that’s pretty large. It’ll drive my voting behaviors, it’ll drive if I decide to support a particular political candidate one way or the other. Now, let’s contrast that with something that I say it really isn’t important to me and I’m not going to be able to have a big impact on it, other than every first Tuesday in November. So, am I going to really worry about that issue? And if the answer is “No”, then I’m not going to give it any air time; I’ve got better stuff to do.

Pete

Mike Figliuolo
Yeah, I think it’s definitely the 5 “Why’s” and the 7 “So what’s”. So, the 5 “Why’s” – when you see something happen, ask “Why” five times. And by the time you get to the fourth or fifth “Why”, there’s an insight there, there’s a root cause there. The way that works is, we had a client where I learned the 5 “Why’s” the first time, and I was an analyst on the team, and my engagement manager asked me, “Mike, what analysis did you do this morning?” I said, “Well, here are the numbers I ran, and it looks like this one metric is going up.” And he said, “Okay. Well, why?” I said, “What do you mean ‘Why’?” He said, “Why is that metric going up?” And I stopped and I thought and I said, “Well, the client is probably doing this.” And he said, “Okay, why?” I said, “What do you mean ‘Why’?” He said, “Why is the client doing that?” And I stopped and I thought a little bit harder and I said, “Well, they’re probably doing that because of this.” And he said, “Okay, why?” I’m like, “Dude, what is with the ‘Why’s’?” And he said, “Mike, our job is to have insights for our clients. We have to understand the root causes of what’s going on, because once we do, then we can actually make recommendations that address the true problem that they’re facing.”

So at that moment I understood what the 5 “Why’s” were, and we continued to walk that back and understand what is driving this behavior. And it turns out we were initially solving for a symptom, and it was something about their compensation plan that was driving a dysfunctional behavior, which drove another dysfunctional behavior, which was driving the metric to go up. So by walking that backward, just stopping and seeing something happening – some event, some symptom – and then walking it back, versus just jumping in to solve the symptom, helps you solve a deeper-seated problem. So that’s the 5 “Why’s”.

Pete

Mike Figliuolo
Yeah, sure. So, let’s see. Let’s talk about my health insurance. Let’s have some fun with this one, not that that’s a raw wound that we’re opening right now. But okay, so my health insurance premium went from $960 a month to $1,600 a month. Okay, why? Why did that happen? Well, it’s because the insurer raised their rates across the entire population. Okay, why? Why did the insurer raise their rates? Well, either because their losses have been going up and they were paying out a lot more in claims last year than they thought, or because they want to be a lot more profitable and they’re just going to start gouging consumers.

Now I’m at a fork where I say, “Okay, which of those seems more likely?” And they’re probably not going to gouge, because it’s just bad business to do that; you’re not going to be able to survive long in that market. So it’s probably because their losses are going up. Okay, why is that happening? Well, it’s probably because the risk pool got adjusted a few years ago when there was a change in the law, in terms of who is eligible, whether they’re going to accept pre-existing conditions, and we put a whole bunch of people in the risk pool for getting insurance that didn’t have it previously. So now it’s just a riskier population and those costs are going up. Okay, why? Why did that happen? Well, we were trying to insure more Americans.

Okay, now I get it. Now I understand what the root cause was – I changed the eligibility population, and that has these downstream impacts, in terms of the cost of my policy. And then you’ve got to get to a point where you say, “Okay, what do I do about that? Is there something I can do to change the way that we’re handling the people in the risk pool? Well, personally, can I change that? No, but could it inform the way I think about Medicare, Medicaid legislation? Can it inform the political candidates that I decide to back or not back?” And then you’ve also got to step back and say, “Okay, how much is for the greater good?” kind of thing. And that’s just one of those things that you walk it back that far and you understand what really made this happen.

Pete

Mike Figliuolo
I use a tool called a “logic map”, where you have a problem and then you look at what’s driving that problem, and then below that you say, “What are the drivers of that?”, and then below that you say, “What are the drivers of that?” And you just keep disaggregating that big problem into smaller ones. So for example, if my client’s company profits are down, that’s a really big problem; I can’t solve that in one fell swoop. So I break that down and say, “Well, what’s driving profits being being down? Well, it’s either revenues are down or costs are up, or some combination of those two.”

Okay well, those are still big problems – let me break those down. Well, if revenue’s down, it’s either prices are down or volume is down. And again, it might be a combination of those two. But that’s still a big problem. So I think the answer might be on the volume side, so let me break volume down. Well, volume is down either because current customers are buying less, or we’re not selling as many new customers. And all of a sudden I can start seeing some possible solutions emerge. I can get my arms around, current customers aren’t buying as much, so maybe I can go out and place some sales calls on my current customers, or I can go out and try and sell that one new customer along the way. So by breaking that big problem down and disaggregating it into its component parts, I can start seeing what the underlying issues are that are driving the big problem.

Pete

Mike Figliuolo
Yeah, a lot of folks hear about the 80/20, but they don’t know its origins. The 80/20 rule was first coined by a guy by the name of Vilfredo Pareto, who’s Italian, of course. And Pareto was a bit of an economist, and he noticed that in Italy, 80% of the land was owned by 20% of the people. And he said, “Well, that’s kind of interesting.” He was also a gardener, and he noticed that 80% of the peas in his garden came from 20% of the pods. And he said, “Well, that’s really interesting, that peas and real estate demonstrate the same behavior – that 20% of the causes drive 80% of the outcomes.” And he coined what’s called “the law of the vital few”, which is really getting you to focus on those 20% of the causes that are driving 80% of the effects.

And I had one situation where I was running a team, one of the people on my team had a portfolio of accounts he was responsible for – it was about 500,000 accounts. And he came to me one day and said, “Mike, you didn’t know I was doing this, but I built this awesome model that helps me totally predict behavior of some of the consumers in my portfolio.” I said, “Well, that’s really cool.” He said, “Yeah, and with that production I can take a differential action and I can have financial impact by treating those accounts differently.” I said, “That’s awesome.”

I said, “I have two questions. One, how many accounts in your portfolio demonstrate that behavior?” And he said, “Well, about 5,000.” I said, “Okay, second question. How many accounts are in your portfolio?” And he said, “About 500,000.” I said, “Hey, how about we focus on the other 495,000 accounts, because as cool as your model is, affecting 5,000 accounts will not have an impact on this business. So stop messing around with small stuff.” And his behavior building that model was a gross violation of the 80/20 rule.

Pete

Mike Figliuolo
I think the first place to do it is your inbox. And you look at the hundreds of emails that pile up in there, and just think through how much time you’re giving each one and which of those are the important ones and which are the ones that just aren’t. And I look at my inbox and it’s probably blown up right now and I’m constantly getting stuff in there, and I used to get a lot of unsolicited emails from sales people, business development people – since I run my business they’re trying to sell me their solutions or whatever.

So I get these all the time. And I used to be a pretty polite guy; I’d be like, “Okay, they’re running a business. I know what it’s like to be an entrepreneur.” I would write them back and say, “No, not really interested. Thanks for your note.” And then they would write me back invariably and say, “Well, are you sure, ’cause this could really work?” And then I’d write back, “No, not really. Definitely not sure.” And I finally sat there and said, “What am I doing? You idiot, you idiot. You’re giving them all this time, and time is your most valuable resource. You didn’t invite them into your inbox, you’re spending time on that 80% of stuff that will drive zero impact.”

And I just one day vowed I’m going to change my behavior. If I didn’t invite you to my inbox and it’s not something that with a 10-second glance I look at your email and say it’s a fit for what I do, I delete it. And if it shows up again the next time, I then block your email address, because I don’t even want to deal with the two nanoseconds it takes for me to delete a message. So, where I encourage people to go is, go to your inbox and sort of filter that stuff and say, “Of the 100 messages in there, which are the 20 that actually matter, in terms of my job performance, in terms of team performance? And then what’s the 80% that isn’t going to have any real impact, and how many of those can I delete, how many of those can I just sort of mail it in with a quick response?” And just sort of re-prioritize your work.

Pete

Mike Figliuolo
Well, my inbox is usually pretty manageable; I think right now I’ve got 30 emails in there total, and I’m freaking out a little bit because usually I’m under 15. And the way that I manage that is, I get to do one of three things when I get an email: I can read it and respond immediately; I can read it and delete it; or I can read it and act on it later if it’s something that’s big and meaningful.

And and you have to do it right when you read that email; you have to make one of those three choices, because there’s so much friction in our day of, I open an email, I look at it and I say, “Oh, I’ll get to this later.” And then later on I come back and I open it again and I go, “Oh, I’ll get to this later, I’ll get to this later.” And they keep piling up, and just the friction of opening and closing that email, and opening and closing it, will suck so much time out of your day. If instead you open it and say, “Okay, this is from Mike. I understand what he wants; I don’t need to answer this. Delete.” And you delete it in that moment – you’re going to be a lot more efficient, you’re going to actually save a lot of time.

Now, for folks that I coach – I do some executive coaching – and when they show me their inbox and there’s like 2,000 emails in there, the first thing we do is we stack it by name, and then we go in and find, “Okay, all of these from Mike – we don’t need those anymore. We highlight them all, we delete them.” After we do that by name and that deletion, then we go through and file ones that can be filed. So a lot of folks will have standard reports, and they’ll get that stack of emails from a report team. It’s like, “Okay, let’s highlight those all and and put them in the report folder, ’cause you don’t need them in your active inbox.”

Then we’ll sort by subject line, and we’ll go through. There’s that one thread with 30 messages in it – okay, let’s delete the other 29 in that thread so we’re down to one item in that thread. And usually just those two actions takes care of about 40 to 50% of the inbox, believe it or not, if somebody’s got a really clogged up inbox. And then from there, adopt the new behaviors of read and delete, read and respond, or read and do later, when you have a meaningful chunk of time to act on the request.

Pete

Mike Figliuolo
I think that’s really a function of your role and your style, and how you prefer to consume information. I am a sort of “instant in, instant out” – that’s how my brain works really well. So my email is always open, and when something comes in, I’ll throw an eye to it, and it’ll be read and respond, read and delete, or read and do later, typically. And it’s not like I’m just sitting there glued to the screen all day waiting for emails to come in. If I’m working on something meaningful, like this podcast conversation, my inbox is closed right now. And I know there’s emails coming in. As soon as I get off, I’m going to tackle it and just sort of whack through the things that I can get out of there and know what I’ll do later on.

Other people function much better in chunks, so they may do three blocks of email during the day – they may do a morning block, a lunchtime block, and an end-of-day block. But again, it’s still going to be the same behavior that I encourage, which is read and delete, read and respond, read and do later. And read and do later is for something that you can’t respond to in that moment, like I would have to run an analysis for you. I’ll read it and do it later, I’ll put the analysis actually on my calendar and say, “I’m going to block this one hour to do this one email”, and then I will get it done when it comes up on the calendar.

Pete

Mike Figliuolo
No, it’s not that simple. I wish it was, but it’s not.

Pete

Mike Figliuolo
So, when you look at a solution, and let’s say I’m going to fix something, I should ask, “Okay, if I fix this, so what? What happens? What’s the implication?” And then if that implication comes to pass, “Okay, so what? What happens if that gets fixed?” And then if that changes, “Okay, so what?” And what it’s preventing is the issue of, you think you fixed something now, but you created a new problem in the future that you now have to deal with. And by the way, it’s a bigger problem than you originally started with.

A lot of times I do this – I’ve finished basements, I’ve finished attics, putting up framing and Sheetrock and wiring and everything, and I don’t always do the “So what’s”. So, at one point I was doing a built-in sort of very simple entertainment center, and I said, “Well, this is going to be hard to construct in place, so what I’ll do is I’ll build the frame on the floor and then I’ll just pick it up and put it in place, and then do all the finishing up there.”

So I build this giant frame on the floor, and then I go to put it in place, and I start tilting it up, and I forgot about a guy by the name of Pythagoras, who would have told me, “Hey, you idiot, the hypotenuse when you start tilting this thing up is going to mean that it will get jammed on the ceiling before you put it into place.” So Mike didn’t think about the “So what” if I build this on the floor and I need to stand up, so what happens? Well, that means I’m going to need to stand it up and it’s going to be at an angle. Okay, it’s an angle. So what? Oh, the ceiling height is lower than that angle, which means this is going to get stuck and I’m going to be sitting there beating it with a 5-pound sledge hammer for about 45 minutes to get it into place. So it’s just seeing what new problems you can end up creating if you solve the problem at hand.

Pete

Mike Figliuolo
It does. So The Elegant Pitch is all about how do you create a clear and compelling recommendation with the right facts, the right data, and do so in a way that your stakeholders will buy into it and approve your idea. So, it does require the critical thought to say, “What does my stakeholder want? What is my recommendation and how does it tie to their objectives, therefore what’s the right information that I’m going to need to bring to the table to create a persuasive case? What’s the right way for me to structure my argument? Do I talk about financials and operations and marketing, or do I talk about marketing first, and then operations and financials?”

And just thinking about the logic of what’s going to underpin your argument, and then how do you package and share that idea in a clear and compelling way. And the biggest tide of critical thinking is, with critical thinking you come up with your solution – you figured out what the real problem is and you generated a solution – but unless you actually get to implement that solution, then all that thinking is worthless. So, what The Elegant Pitch does is helps you understand once you have that really cool solution, how do you then make it into something that people will sign off on and give you the resources to implement.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. Well tell me, Mike – is there anything else you want to make to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Mike Figliuolo
I just encourage folks to just pause. When you find yourself reading something, whether it’s in the workplace or on the news or anywhere – anytime you feel that reaction, just pause and say, “Okay, what’s really going on here?” And parse that and say, “What are the facts, and what are my assessments?” So you see a colleague do something in the workplace and we kind of blow up at it – “Joe is such a jerk and I can’t believe he did that” – it’s like, “Hang on, hang on a second.”

Let’s look at the facts of the situation. So, Joe did this. Joe left the printer cover open and therefore the printer wasn’t working.” That’s the fact of the matter. Now let’s draw an assessment from that; let’s come up with other possible causes of what’s going on. Maybe Joe didn’t notice that he left it open, maybe Joe meant to leave it open and he really is a jerk. But before we just jump off and say, “Joe is a jerk”, just stop, think about this for a second and separate fact from assessment, and really challenge those things.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, perfect. Now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Mike Figliuolo
For me, I go to Hemingway. And the quote is, “But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed, but not defeated.” And that comes from The Old Man and the Sea, and I read it when I was in 8th grade and you’re not exactly the most cerebral person in the world when you’re a 15-year old boy; you’ve got other things on your mind. And I remember I read that quote and it resonated. And I finally figured it out several years later. The quote stuck with me constantly, and I finally figured out why it spoke to me. And what he’s saying is man is not made for defeat. Defeat as a choice, defeat is, “I give up. I’ve tried as hard as I can, and I just give up” – that’s defeat. Destruction is an external force, and that’s me fighting as hard as I can, as long as I can, and I just lose because the world has bested me and I’ve been destroyed.

And what Hemingway’s saying is man is not made for defeat; it’s not in our nature as human beings to give up, it’s not how we’re wired. A man can be destroyed, but not defeated. So anytime I’m sitting there and feeling like something’s going wrong in my life, something’s going wrong with the business, we just lost a big account – whatever it is. And you sit there and you want to throw your hands in the air, it’s like, “Hang on. A man is not made for defeat, so what are you going to do about this? How are you going to tackle this problem that is before you?” And it’s always helped me reorient my thinking during those most challenging moments.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent, thank you. And how about a favorite book?

Mike Figliuolo
I can’t say any of mine, right? So I’m not allowed to say any of my books. Let’s see. One that I always go to is called The Obstacle is the Way, and it’s basically an exploration of stoicism as it was developed by Marcus Aurelius. Now, I know that sounds like some weighty stuff. The book is like 180 pages long; the first 90 is a study of what is stoicism and who are some famous stoics, and I’m not talking just about Greeks and Romans. He looks at business people, current business people who’ve taken a stoic approach to life as well.

And then the second half of the book is how can you apply the principles of stoicism to your life and be able to get through adversity, get over those obstacles that you face. And the reason the book resonated for me is when you go to West Point, which is where I did my undergrad, West Point is it an institution that sort of beats stoicism into you. It’s just daily adversity for four years and you best learn how to overcome those types of obstacles. So the book itself, The Obstacle is the Way, does a really nice job of capturing that school of thought, and then making it something that’s accessible and practical and applicable.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent, thank you. And how about a favorite tool?

Mike Figliuolo
Are we talking hand tools?

Mike Figliuolo
Yeah, for me it’s always just been the good old hammer. I’m a simple guy at heart. I was a tank platoon leader; when something was broken, you got out the hammer, you got out the ranch, and you got out the baling wire, because it’s one of those three things that’s going to solve your problem. I guess where I’m going with that is, I like simple tools. The tools that we teach in classes, the frameworks that we use tend to be very simple – the 5 “Why’s”, the 7 “So what’s”, a logic map, because if a tool is simple and you understand how to use it, you’re going to use it more frequently and eventually get really, really good with it.

And if I give you a big, complex tool with a lot of different moving parts and it’s got to be plugged in and it’s got 18 steps before you can use it, you’re not going to use it. You’re not going to use it and you’re never going to build any sort of facility with it; you’re going to be frustrated by that tool because it’s so complex. So, for me, I think a hammer is a pretty good metaphor for how I think about learning and training and how we apply our craft in the classroom.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool, thank you. And how about a favorite habit?

Mike Figliuolo
A favorite habit. A favorite habit is getting up same time every day and hitting the same morning routine every day, on days where it’s possible. If I’m getting on a plane – okay, the routine’s out the window. But it’s get up, hit the desk, read the news, update the finances, clear out some of the email from the night before, shower, get changed, have the green tea, and then start in on the day. But just that routine in the morning kind of gets the body moving, gets the brain moving in a certain direction, and it generates that initial momentum for me, that carries through the rest of the day. If you want to mess me up on a given day, change my morning routine. Screw something up in that sequence and I’m just off. And it may be just that I’m obsessive about the way my world works – I don’t know, but that routine is something that I encourage people to find ’cause it gets you in that rhythm pretty quickly each day.

Mike Figliuolo
I go to personal conversations really, from coaching or from classrooms, and I think one of the biggest things that’s always had a pretty powerful impact on folks when I’ve shared it with them is when I hear somebody say, “Well, I have to do X, Y and Z.” I stop them and I say, “Hang on. You don’t have to. You choose to.” And it’s like, “What? No, I have to go to this meeting with my boss.” I say, “No, you don’t. You choose to go to the meeting with your boss, because you understand there are consequences and you are choosing not to accept a different set of consequences. But you don’t have to do anything.”

And just by reframing that and helping people understand, “I am making a choice here” versus being forced to do something, it all of a sudden allows people to regain control of their lives. When you look at somebody who says, “My life is out of control”, they basically outsourced the ability to make decisions to the world around them. And you’ll hear them say a lot, “Well, I have to do this, I have to do that, I have to do that”, and they’ve given up control, and therefore they feel out of control and it’s very disconcerting.

Just by that small change in, “Hey, I choose to be on this interview right now, I choose to not send my dogs to daycare when I’m going to be on the interview, and the consequences.” I’ve got a poodle looking at me scratching to get in the room, and I’ve got a Jack Russell playing with a tennis ball over here and I’m hoping both of them don’t bark. But that was a choice – I don’t have to have them in the house when I do this; I made a choice, and there’s consequences to every choice we make.

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

Mike Figliuolo
They should go to ThoughtLeadersLLC.com. And you can find my contact info there, and our blog is there, and we share a lot of great info on the blog on a pretty regular basis.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action you’d issue to folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Mike Figliuolo
Stop and think. Just stop and think – before you say something, before you react, before you send that email where you’re upset, or you file that complaint, or you launch that new initiative – just stop and think. Think for like five minutes about the 5 “Why’s”, the 7 “So what’s”; think through what’s fact and what’s assessment. Just stop and think, because you’re going to get to a much better solution.

Mike Figliuolo
Great, thank you very much for having me.

Sep 29

211: Creating Great Choices to Resolve Tough Questions with Jennifer Riel

By Podcasts One Comment

 

Jennifer Riel says: "Spend time with people who challenge and provoke and totally disagree because it helps you understand where your own thinking is limited."

Jennifer Riel illustrates how successful thinkers can create great choices rather than tolerate unacceptable trade-offs via her practical methodology for implementing integrated thinking.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why you should fall in love with opposing approaches to solving a problem
  2. How to hold two approaches in tension to discover optimal solutions
  3. The three questions to creating better answers

About Jennifer

Jennifer Riel is an adjunct professor at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, specializing in creative problem solving. Her focus is on helping everyone, from undergraduate students to business executives, to create better choices, more of the time.

An award-winning teacher, Jennifer leads training on integrative thinking, strategy and innovation, both at the Rotman School and at organizations of all types, from small non-profits to some of the largest companies in the world.

 

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Aug 21

195: Wise and Effortless Decision-Making with Michael Nicholas

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Michael Nicholas says: "We... make thousands of decisions every day from very small to very big."

Award-winning thinker Michael Nicholas addresses the changes and challenges of modern decision-making–and how to enhance your decisions every day.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The tremendous power of continually making the optimal decision
  2. The science behind how we make decisions
  3. Keys to improving your decision-making

About Michael

An award-winning professional speaker and leadership coach, Michael Nicholas helps people improve their performance by challenging them to revolutionize their thinking and behavior. His insightful, results-oriented training is grounded in 30 years of real-world experience gained through working with leaders from a wide variety of industries, holding senior business positions, and serving on active duty as a military officer. He specializes in decision-making, emotional intelligence, and employee engagement.

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