KF #22. Nimble Learning Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Manu, welcome.

Manu Kapur
Thank you, Pete. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m so excited to talk about learning and failure, and you are a master of failure. I mean that in the best possible way. And so, I’d love it if you could kick us off with you sharing a tale of one of your personal, or professional, most productive failures.

Manu Kapur
You know, looking back, I think it started very early on in my teenage years when I wanted to be a professional soccer player, and it’s a story I tell. It only makes sense looking back, as I said. My coach used to have a philosophy of training, strengths training, where he’ll say, “You’ve got to push your body, you’ve got to do your push-ups and your pull-ups and your sprints and everything to failure, until you really buckle, until you really can’t, and then you push a little bit more, as long as it was safe.”

And his idea was, you know, good things happen on the other side of failure. You really have to push it to know what it feels like to be there. And it’s only after that, when you give the body a chance to recover, and the nutrition and rest, it comes out stronger on the other side. And that, at the time.

We used to really hate that training, but as a metaphor for, not just a metaphor, now a science for just learning and growth, whether it’s strengths training or learning, it’s something that has inspired me for many years.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And science, indeed. I’ve dug into those papers that powerlifters and bodybuilders look at. And, yes, progressive overload is absolutely the name of the game in strength training.

Manu Kapur
Super compensation, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And you’re saying this same principle is applicable in many domains of learning growth improvement.

Manu Kapur
Exactly. It’s the idea of bringing the system to rupture, to failure in a safe way, and then allowing it the chance and the support and the feedback and the resources to adapt and grow so that it comes out stronger from where it started. Yeah, we see this in a number of systems. In fact, it was the subject of one of my TED Talks recently as well, “How failure drives learning” in many different scenarios, in many different contexts.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, please share with us some other examples because I think some might say, “Well, yes, of course, that is just how the interesting biology of muscle fibers happen to work.” How is that working in other domains?

Manu Kapur
You know, if you just look at language itself, if I ask you to think about happy words or positive words, you may be able to start rattling off a few words. Now, if I ask you to think about negative words, negative emotion words, not only would you be able to rattle off faster, which also means that you will rattle off a lot more. And language itself has preserved this idea that negative emotions, things that are not happy or fun, they’re more salient because they convey more information for survival that we need to learn.

Because if you went out and you survive and you came back and you’re happy and fun, it’s really good, but it doesn’t help you learn or grow in any way. It’s only when you fail at something, you learn something and you develop a vocabulary for it. And conveying that vocabulary for how you felt, how you failed, and how you came out of that, that becomes very critical. So, it’s captured in a language as well but also, like I said, in biology and strength training.

In memory, for example, we see the similar effect. It’s when you introduce people at a party, for example, we often say, “Hi, I’m Manu. And you are?” and you would say, “Pete.” I often tell people you should not do that at all. You should say, “Hi, would you like to guess my name?” And you guess my name, a random name, right? You can say, “Oh, are you Mark?” I’d say, “No, I’m Manu.” And then when I say, “May I guess your name?” I’ll say, “Are you John?” And you’ll say, “No, no, I’m Pete.” You see, even a random failure of just guessing your name will help me remember your name more. I’m more likely to remember your name than if you were to just tell me your name.

Pete Mockaitis
Now that’s fascinating right there, it’s this completely contrived situation. And so, I’m curious, in terms of scientific literature, like, just how pronounced is this effect? Do I get, like, a little bit of a bump, like “Oh, I’m 3% more likely to remember a name?” Or is it like night and day?

Manu Kapur
It is a significant bump. I mean, I have to go back to the literature to look at the effect sizes, right? But it is a significantly strong effect that if you practice this method, it’s called retrieval practice, or a failed generation effect. If you’ve practice this, you are likely to strengthen what you’re trying remember over time.

In fact, the idea is you should allow, and here it gets even more interesting, is if you want to strengthen the memory of something, you should allow some forgetting because forgetting increases the chance that when you try to remember it, you will fail to remember it fully, and that failure to retrieve it fully actually gives you a better encoding when you learn to correct-think.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you know what is so amazing about what you’re saying is that this just happened to me last night. And this is the most small-scale example, but my wife asked me to open up the Waterpik, the water-flossing oral hygiene device. It has a reservoir of water on it, and it’s kind of tricky to remove it, and so I kept trying to remove it, and I was like, “Ah, shoot, I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on.”

And then she reminded me, she was like, “Oh, well, last time you did this, you said you were surprised. You thought you had to pull it one way, but you actually had to pull it the other way.” And I was like, “Wow, I have no memory of that,” but then I did it, and I was like, “Well, sure enough, that’s exactly right. I had to pull it down instead of out, or to the right.”

And then that experience just felt so novel and resonant to me, in terms of, like, “Wow, she remembered how I failed last time and I didn’t, and it’s just, like, this experience of being reminded in this way makes me…” I just have a feeling, we’ll see what happens in the years to come, but I am pretty sure this is locked in my brain now, the second time, how I’m going to open up this Waterpik.

Manu Kapur
That’s a really great demonstration from your life where you forgot how you did it, because you could do it at one point in time, you could remember it, you forgot how you did it, and then you failed to do it the second time around, but when somebody told you that “This is how you did it,” now the charge, now the encoding is even stronger. So, again, this idea that failure to retrieve something actually increases the strength of your memory, provided you get the correct thing, is really powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, can you share with us some other surprising discoveries here?

Manu Kapur
Then we go into the idea of, if memory can be improved by a failed retrieval effort, then can we go beyond memory? So, we’ve looked at, or researchers have looked at in tutoring situations, for example, people tutoring, tutor-tutee sort of interactions.

And they found that tutors tend to give a lot of explanations about how to solve the problems, and so on and so forth. But they found that the same explanation would have an effect on learning only if it comes at a point in time where the tutee is stuck in their efforts. So, if you’re a tutee and you are proceeding, you’re not stuck in your problem-solving efforts at all, and I give you an explanation of the correct explanation of the concepts required, you’re not likely to learn that at all.

It’s only when you get to a point of impasse, of getting stuck, that’s when you, if the explanation is timed at that point in time, that’s what leads to learning. So, it almost seems like that we need to be in the state, a cognitive state, or even an affective state, where we are stuck or we have failed to remember something or to do something, and if at that time somebody reminds us or somebody gives us the correct explanation, that’s when we learn really powerfully.

And in productive failure, we’ve taken that to the next level, where if you’re learning anything new from the get-go, how do you design for failure intentionally in this early learning process so that you can then bootstrap that failure for learning from an expert later on?

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, that is really cool. And it resonates in terms of when you’re stuck for a while, and then you hear the information, it seems like an epiphany, a revelation, an “Aha!” so much more high stakes, as opposed to someone just laying out the whole pathway, like, “Well, this is the basics of physics,” or whatever subject it is.

Manu Kapur
Exactly. And the reason that doesn’t work is, to understand something deeply, you need to be able to see “What is the underlying structure? What is so critical here?” So, imagine if you’re watching a movie, right? Say, it’s a very entertaining, very engaging movie. Now, if the person sitting you is an expert director, unless, I don’t know whether you make movies or not, how expert you are, but, say, you’re a novice at making movies.

Now, you come out of the movies and I ask you, “Did you see the same movie as the director?” Chances are, no, you did not. The director sees things that are right in front of you, right? It’s not that you were not engaged, you were not entertained, your attention was all there, the stimulus was right in front of you, yet the expert sees very different things from a novice. The expert sees the deep structure that the novice is just not able to see, because seeing is a function of what you know, not just a perceptual exercise, right?

And so, this is one of the reasons why experts just telling what they know, even in a very entertaining, very structured manner, is still not sufficient because what an expert sees in their presentation is not what a novice is seeing. And, therefore, the first job of learning something new is actually not to be told what the correct thing is. The first job is to preparing yourself to be in a state where you can then learn from.

The same explanation is very important, but getting into a state where you can process that information, see what is critical, and then code it properly and more deeply, that is even more important. And that’s what failure does, and that’s the whole system that we’ve designed.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, when you say preparing yourself to get into a state, I mean, it sounds like we just have to enter that state, is I guess we have many words in our vocabulary for it. It’s sort of like frustration, aggravated, stuck, like, “This doesn’t make any sense. Aargh!” I mean, it sounds like, well, you tell me. Is there a sweet spot in terms of, I guess, you don’t want to get utterly enraged that you quit and stomp out of the room? Help me out there.

Manu Kapur
So, let me take you through a thought experiment. Suppose I give you a task and you’re able to do it successfully, are you learning anything new other than knowing that, yeah, you’ve mastered this, you’ve done something successfully? So, I give you an even harder task, say, you’re able to do that too. You’re still not learning anything new. You’re just applying what you know.

I have to give you a task that is so hard, or just hard enough that you’re not able to do, and that’s when I know that you’ve entered the learning zone because failure gives you a signal that, “Here is something I cannot do. With all the capabilities that I have, I’m entering the failure zone. And in this zone, I’m bound to struggle, I’m bound to get anxious at times, but I can also try different things, different ideas, different solutions, and so on and so forth. And all of this is actually what prepares me for learning from the expert or a common resource later.”

So, getting in this state is really important, and knowing that these emotions, and normalizing the struggle in this state, is the norm, basically, it’s the expectation that helps you persist in that learning zone, so to speak. But you’re also right, it cannot be so hard that you just give up. So, there is like that Goldilocks zone where it is hard that you can’t do it by yourself, but it’s not so hard that you just give up, and you have to be in that zone.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, then tell us, how do we intentionally enter into experiences, or design it to be that way? So, it sounds like the wrong way, or old way, or non-Manu enlightened way is to just have the expert pontificate, and say, “Hey, here’s all the steps.” Or you can read the instruction booklet, and say, “Okay, this is the guide. I do A, then B, then C.” But then the superior way for retention and really learning growth is “I get in there, I feel stuck and frustrated, and then I absorb some brilliance.”

So, I’m wondering, so let’s say I want to learn how to make my first app. I want to figure out what’s up with these programming languages. So, maybe I, rather than just reading the book or watching the YouTube video, like, “Hey, here’s how to program Python,” or whatever, I would want to just kind of, following these principles, just give get up in there, and then get stuck, and then try to get the specific answer to what I’m stuck with?

Manu Kapur
Yeah, so it’s basically trying multiple ways of approaching that problem. So, try to design, maybe the app is too big sort of a construct. Maybe some aspect or a feature that you maybe you scope it down, maybe an email capture, or a visit capture feature, or you want to build an AI algorithm into it, whatever that thing is.

The important part is you try to design not one but different ways of putting that feature in place and then try to see whether there is a canonical way or there are more expert ways to sort of design those features. But, again, here I must say that if the goal is for you to be able to deeply understand how to do those things and why they work the way they do, then you need to do productive failure.

But if your goal is just achieving that it happens without necessarily understanding it so, then you do not need productive failure. Because the effect of productive failure is on deep learning and transfer and creativity. We are not always in situations where we need that. So, this is a personal thing that everybody has to ask, or a teacher or a trainer has to ask, “Is this something that people really need to deeply understand? Or is this something that is so procedural that we just need to get it done?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I think that’s very helpful for organizations as well, and just your whole life, in terms of, “Is my goal to become excellent at assembling IKEA furniture? Is that a thing that’s important to me?” So, in the domain of IKEA furniture or anything, maybe that sparks a bigger question of, “Is this even something we should be doing?”

And if it is something, so in a way, that’s almost kind of one key consideration is, “Well, if it’s something we want to be doing, it may make sense for us to learn a ton and be utter masters and have a deep, excellent competence in this thing. Or it might be something that we just want to be okay at and we’ll do it in-house fine. Or it might be something we don’t care at all about having that knowledge. Let’s totally outsource it.”

Manu Kapur
Exactly. Exactly. And that’s the distinction I mean between you want just high performance without understanding, just get the job done. So, there are many things at work and life we can just do, and do it to a certain level that we are happy with, and that’s it. But there are other things that we have a learning goal attached to it, the things we deeply want to master and understand and so on and so forth. And it’s only for those things that you may want to enter the failure zone and struggle and persist and then learn from an expert later on.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, then give us some more perspective on how we design such a situation up front.

Manu Kapur
So, for example, in, say, in schooling situations, whether you’re designing a course for somebody or something to learn, as we already established, if this is something they want to deeply understand, you don’t want to tell the person exactly what the thing is, and so quantificating doesn’t work. So, the first thing you want to design is, you want to design a task or a challenging activity that is beyond the learner’s skillsets and abilities.

You need to have a sense of where the learners are in terms of their knowledge and skillsets, and you want to design this problem-solving activity or a task that you want to give them that’s beyond that, right? But you also want to design them in a way that’s very intuitive. It should be intuitively accessible so that learners or people can try multiple approaches.

So, think at work, maybe you’re given a challenging project where you’ve never managed such a project before, and then you work with your team to strategize or design different approaches to getting this project done. But because this project is beyond your skillsets and abilities and beyond your team skillsets and abilities, chances are all the approaches or solutions or strategies that you develop are going to be either not going to lead to success or they will just be suboptimal in that way.

But giving people a chance to be in that space, and design that space and be in that space where they can explore different strategies, even if they don’t work, I think that is key. Also what this key is to tell people that it’s okay not to be able to get to the correct solution, because the goal of this learning task is the preparation, not the solution. And the more people explore different ideas and strategies and solutions, the more they are prepared to then learn from the experts.

So, it’s designing the space in that way that helps you then learn from the expert. And you can do this as a teacher, as a parent, as a trainer, as a manager, and so on.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love it if you could really paint a picture for just the sheer efficacy of this stuff. I want to hear about this meta-analysis of I the 50+ studies that showed students who were taught productive failure methods saw some really cool academic gains. Can you share with us what was that study’s findings? And paint a picture of sort of a beautiful scenario of these principles all used in practice and being amazing.

Manu Kapur
So, the context of the meta-analysis in learning experiments, in mathematics, and science and so on and so forth, so the context is an education context, so let me concretize. Suppose you’re trying to learn math. I don’t know how you learned math in your school but my teacher would come in and say, “Today, the new concept we’re learning is blah. Let me tell you what this concept is. Here’s the explanation. Here’s the formulation. Here are some examples, and we work through examples. Now it’s your turn to apply those examples and solve problems.” And that’s how you learn.

And this is a method that’s called direct instruction. You don’t know something, I tell you exactly what it is, and I explain it to you very clearly what it is, and I give you problems to solve. And this is the dominant way that even current educational practice actually runs. Now, in productive failure, we went into classrooms and say, “Well, before you teach somebody something, let’s design problem-solving activities based on productive failure principles where students are given a chance to explore solutions to a problem.”

And we know that the solutions they will generate will not be the correct one. We even tell students that “It’s okay not to be able to get to the correct one, that’s not even the point, but try different ideas, just try different approaches, and then we will teach you.” So, it’s like instead of going straight into the instruction, they first do generative problem solving, and then the teacher comes in and teaches.

So, we can put these methods side by side and say, “Okay, if you learn from one method or the other, and you conduct an experiment study where you equalize the time, the same teachers teaching for the same time using the same materials, and so on and so forth, so you create a nice experiment where you can compare and then people learn through these two methods. And in the end, you test them on different kinds of knowledge.”

So, we particularly tested them on three types. One is the basic knowledge, which is, “Do you understand the concept? Can you remember it? Can you apply it to solve problems that you’ve seen in the class?” And then, also on conceptual understanding and transfer, your ability to take what you have and apply it to novel contexts, which is really the holy grail of learning, is to take what you know and apply it to novel contexts. And then we compare these two groups of students in terms of how they do.

And we find that even though both methods are very good at developing basic knowledge, foundational knowledge, students who learn through productive failure actually develop deeper understanding of the concepts that they are trying to learn, that they learned, and their ability to creatively or adapt the knowledge that they have to solve new problems in novel contexts, that actually is significantly better.

Now, imagine, this is just one study that shows this, and how scientists proceed is they say, “Oh, this is one study. Let me try to replicate it.” And the logic of replication is that “I’m going to prove you’re wrong.” So, now they try to replicate it, and say the attempt to replication failed. They find the same effects that, roughly, as I found. So, now there are two studies.

Say, another person comes in, a new lab tries to replicate it, and again the attempt to fail fails. And over time, you get a series of studies, each trying to you know fail the basic hypothesis and they fail to do so. So, over time, you have many studies who have failed to fail the basic hypothesis. And that’s when scientists start to say, “Ah, because of this vast magnitude of studies in different contexts, in different countries, trying to explore the same experiment or similar experimental effect, that there’s something there now.”

What we call truth is really an attempt to fail has failed. And that’s what a meta-analysis does. It aggregates findings from all the studies that have tried to compare over the years, and those are the 50 study, 160-odd experimental effects, and we aggregate it and analyze that, and said, “What is the average effect across these multiple studies in the world for productive failure over this other method, the dominant method, direct instruction, and how strong is that effect?”

So, we found a positive effect in favor of productive failure. As I said, they understand better and they transfer better, they’re more creative. But how strong it is? Now, we found that if you learn with a good teacher for a year, and say the unit gain in your knowledge is, say, X, then if you learn using productive failure, on average your knowledge gain is 2X.

Pete Mockaitis
Twice? Okay. Double.

Manu Kapur
But if productive failure is carried out really well, because it’s a method, right, some teachers carry it out much better than others, if it’s carried out really well, then you can go up to 3X. And that’s a very, very strong effect in education, in learning situations, that you can do, that you can have this kind of an effect on learning. And so, that’s the evidence-based, that’s the research, the empirical-based, for example, for this body of research, and we know that it works.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, triple your learning feels like a headline, Manu. All right, we’re getting somewhere. So, could you really paint a picture for a specific classroom educator approach situation in which we see, “Wow, here’s this, all these productive failure principles and philosophies put into action masterfully”? What’s that really look like?

Manu Kapur
Well, that design itself is called productive failure. So it has certain features. So, A, it has to be beyond our current skillsets and knowledge. You should not be able to solve the problem using what you know. That’s one very simple feature that it has to have. B, the problem should admit multiple representations, multiple solutions, multiple strategies. It should not have a single answer or single way of approaching it. So, it has to have that multiplicity.

It has to have contrasting sort of cases. So, don’t just give people one example, one case to work with. Give them contrasting cases. An example in this situation and in that situation, data about this, say, football player compared to data about another football player, the performance of this company versus performance…so always work with contrasts in these cases. Again, design these contrasts in ways that some things are the same, other things are different, so that you can direct attention to what you want people to attend to.

Keep the computational load very low so that you know people are really working with the conceptual basis, not trying to compute things all the time. And, yeah, so, again, this is not a like a prescriptive set of features, it is still a design activity. So, even with this set of features, people can generate many different kinds of tasks. And so, the more you get trained in using these features to design tasks, the closer you get to the kind of a productive failure task that really works.

Now once, say, you have a task ready or it’s working really well, you need to design interaction around those tasks. So, if I give you the task to solve, you may say, “Oh, I think this is my solution. This is one solution I have.” “How do I facilitate your exploration in that task?” So, there’s a very simple two-step exploration scheme, or facilitation scheme. So, I will, in the first instance, I’ll come to you and say, “Oh, this is your solution? Can you please explain it to me?”

Just the idea, just asking you to explain your solution to me is likely to trigger thoughts in you for other ways of doing it. We’ve seen this in our research. So, because the goal is multiple solutions and strategies, just asking somebody to explain often triggers them to explore something else as well. Second, sometimes people are really sure that this is their method, or this is the solution, and they’re quite convinced that it might work, even though from an expert standpoint it doesn’t.

That’s when you need to sort of get them into a habit of hacking their own thinking. What do I mean by that? It’s like when somebody says, “This is what my solution looks like.” After I ask them to explain it, I say, “Can you think of a situation where your own solution is not going to work?”

Pete Mockaitis
I like that.

Manu Kapur
So, it’s creating the counterfactual, and developing a habit to hack your own solution and say, “This is when it does not work.” Because it’s easy to say, “Oh, I developed it, it works.” It’s much harder to develop the habit of finding a situation or a context where it does not work. And just between these two, if you do this facilitation really well, you really help people either generate more solutions or understand the limits of their own solutions, even if they don’t work, most likely.

And all of this is then carried out in what I call an envelope, a social surround, within which people have to be told certain expectations, norms. Those are part of the design as well. And here’s the idea that the expectation is that you will not be able to solve the problem. The goal is not for you to be able to solve the problem correctly. The goal is really, “Can you generate multiple approaches, solutions, ideas, strategies for solving the problem? And don’t worry about getting it right.” Very explicit messaging.

Because if people think that they have to solve the problem correctly, they give up. The sweet spot is very, very narrow. But if people are told, “Look, we don’t even expect you to solve it because you don’t have the knowledge. But the idea here is, generate different ideas based on what you know,” then I think people can go a little bit more, so that sweet spot becomes a little bit wider. People can persist a little bit longer. They can deal with their anxiety and frustration a little bit longer, because, “You know, yeah, I’m not expected to solve it anyway, but let me give it a few shots. Let me give it a few tries.”

But these norms and expectations have to be set and persisted with over time so that people can do this. And when people have, you know, they’ve done the exploration, people have generated multiple ideas, and then they are now ready to receive instruction or receive expert knowledge, and that’s how it all comes together. That initial failed exploration becomes productive because an expert comes and assembles it all together.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you share a story of, perhaps, one of the most brilliant, beautiful implementations of this that you’ve witnessed?

Manu Kapur
I think, sometimes, I’ve seen it in the classrooms, for example, when teachers do it really well, and you often see it in what the kinds of ideas the students produce. So, I remember a math classroom where, when we tried this and the teacher was really good, and she was also a very experienced teacher who had been working with us for a while, and after the problem-solving phase of productive failure where students are generating the solutions, I went up to a student, and said, “So how do you feel?” and the student said, “Oh, I feel like a mathematician today.”

And it’s astonishing because, he could not solve the problem correctly, and still the remark was that, “Oh, I feel like a mathematician today.” And this is so true because one of my colleagues is a mathematician, and he’s one of the top mathematicians in the world, and he told me, “You know, 95% of my efforts at solving problems are failures.” Ninety-five percent.

And he says, “But if I don’t have them, I’m not able to get to the correct solutions. I’m not able to get to the correct answers. 95% of the things just don’t work out, but they are the backdrop, the launchpad for me to then think about the things that can actually work.” And so, there’s something in how we just get to the really breakthrough ideas, real creativity, real innovation, and the path through that is failure, otherwise, we won’t get to it. And we’ve applied the similar dynamic, and sometimes it works out beautifully in the classrooms as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Boy, I like that a lot, “I feel like a mathematician today,” seems to really convey a sense of, “Oh, I am really wrestling with the kinds of issues and concepts and considerations that a real professional grapples with, and I’ve gained an understanding of that.” And I feel like I had that moment recently after the election. I learned all about these predictive prediction marketplaces, like PredictIt and Polymarket and Kalshi.

Manu Kapur
Prediction markets, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And I was like, “Whoa, this is wild!” So, I went into that rabbit hole, and so I’m thinking about, like, risks and probabilities, and bid-ask spreads, and I’m learning all these things. And then I had that thought, like, “I feel like a trader today because,” and though I’m not, I’m just some amateur schmo, but it’s like, “Those are the kinds of things they’re thinking about every day in terms of, ‘Oh, how much risk am I taking on? Is this appropriate? Da-da-da-da-da.’”

Manu Kapur
Exactly. Exactly. And this is the part of mathematics we don’t expose our students to. They learn a mathematics where a teacher just comes and pontificates and tells them, as though math is, people who do mathematics always know the solutions to all their problems, and it is far from the case. In fact, how people do mathematics is exactly how we can learn mathematics, provided we can design these failure-driven sort of problem-solving activities for students, and then teach them the concept.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, you’ve got a great turn of a phrase, “motivational hacking.” How do we do that?

Manu Kapur
So, being in this zone where you’re trying things is not easy, right? And there are a few motivational hacks that help you persist in this problem-solving mode where you’re trying different things and things are not working out. First is the sunk cost fallacy. And that is the idea that if you’ve invested time and effort into something, you tend to stick to it even if it’s not working.

Now in general parlance, it’s not a good thing because then we continue to stay in losing strategies longer than we should, we continue to stay in bad relationships longer than we should, and so on and so forth. So, in those situations, it’s not good.

But in a learning situation, where if you’ve given a problem, if you’ve tried multiple strategies, you’ve put in the effort, that’s a good sunk cost, and that actually has motivational benefits. That’s the first. Just putting in the effort to solve something keeps you in the game because then you want to know how to solve it correctly. So, the sunk cost is a very good motivation from a learning standpoint and productive failure designs for that.

But before that even, like, how do you get started even, right? And that is the idea that if you want to learn, or basically if you want to solve a problem that may seem very, very daunting, the idea is to take the first step. And suppose I do, for my exercise, I do swimming. On some certain days, I’m just not motivated to enter the pool. It’s just too much. I’m too tired, I just don’t feel like it. But I know I must, I want, I must go.

So, I tell myself on those days, “I’m going to enter the pool and I’m just going to do one lap, and that’s it. If I can just manage one lap today, that’s my goal. It’s a success. Normally, I do 20, but today I’m just going to do one.” And guess what happens after the first lap? Do I just come out? No. “I’m in it? Okay, let’s do more, right?”

So, again, I just hacked my motivation by convincing myself that if I just get out, after taking the first step, I’ll be totally fine. When, in fact, once you’re in it, you’re in it, you continue. So that’s the second. Take the first step or find a way to make just the first step your goal. Then there is the goal gradient effect. You find that the more you do, the more laps you do, the more you want to do it, the more you want to reach the goal.

So, there’s like a gradient effect. It’s just not linear. So, effort actually pays off. And when you’re really near, and that’s the fourth one, when you’re really near, the last lap, we actually derive, we somehow seem to find this extra motivation to just get to the completion. So, we want to complete, and you will notice that. You find this second wind, extra energy. The last leg is always people want to complete. And that’s called the completion effect.

And so, these are the four sort of kind of motivation, how motivational hacks that people can do, to take the first step, to go on the goal gradient, to get to near the completion, and then the sunk cost comes in because then you want to really know, “Why didn’t my work, why didn’t my methods did not work? What is the correct method?”

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

Manu Kapur
Did we talk about the mechanisms, the activation, awareness, affect, and assembly, the four A’s?

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s do it. Let’s cover it.

Manu Kapur
So, I call them, like, the underlying mechanisms of productive failure, and there are four umbrella mechanisms. There are sub mechanisms as well, but the four umbrella mechanisms, and they are the four A’s: activation, awareness, affect, and assembly. So, activation is the idea that if you want to learn something new, you need to activate your own knowledge so that you can process this new information.

If I start speaking in, say, Mandarin, and you have no knowledge about Mandarin, you can’t understand anything. So, new knowledge always requires prior knowledge to connect with and make sense. So, the more I can activate relevant knowledge in a learner, when you’re learning something new, the better they are prepared to learn that thing. And failure does a very good job at activation because it makes you try different things, different strategies, and that activates all the relevant knowledge. That’s the first A.

The second is what activation does. It shows you the limits of your own knowledge. You’ve tried multiple things, and they did not work or did not work optimally. You know the limits, “Here’s what I can do.” So, there is an awareness of a gap between what you know and the expert. That awareness itself is a very important mechanism. Having that awareness is a really important mechanism for learning because what that does is it creates an affect.

And by affect, I mean your motivation to find out what the expert knows, your interest in the solution, your orientation towards when the expert explains. You’re really oriented to understand why mine did not work, not just to see what the expert is saying, but really understand why mine did not work.

And also, the affect has emotions involved, and we talked about struggling and anxiety. And we found in our studies that sometimes negative emotions can have positive effects on learning, and other times not all positive emotions are positively associated with learning. So, it’s good to experience in a small dose, in a safe way some of these emotions around struggling and anxiety in a safe way because they can have positive effects on learning.

And affect encapsulates all of these sorts of constructs of interest, engagement, motivation, persistence, and emotions. So, you get into this affective state. So, your knowledge is activated, you’re aware of a gap, and you are in an affective state which is ready to learn. If at that point, an expert comes and assembles it, just shares with you, “Okay, what did you do? Let’s see why it did not work. Let me compare it with this other thing. Why that worked, why that did not work. Let me compare it with the expert strategy,” and slowly build up the canonical knowledge, the correct way or the correct ways of approaching those tasks or problems.

Assembly, that’s the fourth A. That’s what makes the whole thing click. So, activation, awareness, affect, and then assembly. That’s the science behind why intentionally designing for failure and then harnessing it for assembly works, makes failure productive.

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

Manu Kapur
Well, one of my favorite quotes is from my dad, actually, and it only makes sense looking back. He used to say, “Your ambition should always exceed your talent.”

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

Manu Kapur
Oh, those I have several, and one of the ones that I’d like to give examples are of children playing with toys. And here, and I also talk about that in the book, is people have studied how children play with toys in experiments where, suppose you’re a group of children and they’re given a new toy, and says, “Here’s a new toy. Would you like to play with it? And just play as you like.” So, they just see how children play with those toys.

And to other groups of children, they give the same toy, and they say, “It’s a new toy. You have not seen it or played with it. Let me show you how to play with it.” So, they learn from an adult how to play with the toy, and then they’re given the toy and then they play with it as they like. And then people experiment, scientists examine, “What are the differences between these two groups. Who’s more engaged with the toy? Who’s more inventive in playing with the toy? Who creates strategies to discover how the toy works?”

And, invariably, people find that it’s the first group, which was not shown how to play with the toy, who’s actually more interested, more engaged, more curious, inventive, and finds strategies to play with that toy. And this is the part that I really love because it means that our ability to explore and tinker and fail is built into us from the get-go. And that’s one of the reasons why… you may think of play with tangible toys as one thing, but knowledge is conceptual play. So, a big part of productive failure is “How do you bring conceptual play to start with, followed by instruction?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Manu Kapur
I would say one of my favorite ones is Shantaram.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Manu Kapur
Oh, making my bed.

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

Manu Kapur
Well, my online presence, so ManuKapur.com. If you want to learn about the book, it’s ProductiveFailure.com, or search on Amazon. I’m on LinkedIn as well, mainly, and also on Twitter or X, and Instagram. Or watch my two TED Talks.

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

Manu Kapur
Change mindsets. I think that’s the biggest thing that I want people to think about or take away in terms of our conversation today. That if you change your mindset, that if you don’t learn to fail, you will fail to learn and grow.

Pete Mockaiti
All right. Manu, thank you for this. I wish you many productive failures.

Manu Kapur
And you. Thank you so much, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Asheesh, welcome.

Asheesh Advani
It’s great to be on the show.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to hear about your wisdom. Can you kick us off by sharing a particularly surprising or fascinating or counterintuitive bit you discovered while putting together your book, Modern Achievement?

Asheesh Advani
So, I’ve been at this, trying to make this a high-quality, very readable book for several months now, and I really thought I was writing it for a younger audience, aspiring leaders, people in their 20s and early 30s who are at the beginning of their career.

What I’ve learned, now that people have started to read the book, is when you write a book for a certain audience and another audience reads it, they actually find it less threatening or direct. So, like lessons that you read written for somebody else, you’re actually more likely to take them in. That was very counterintuitive. People who are like 50 and 60, and people who are even high school kids are coming up to me and said, “Oh, my God, I love this lesson” even though it was written for somebody who’s from a different age group, and that’s very counterintuitive.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is fascinating. And you know what, I’ve lived that with my, I’ve got young kids, six, five, and one, and when we’re watching a show like, I don’t know, “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood” or “Bluey” or something, it’s like, “This lesson isn’t for me, it’s for the kids, and yet that’s really pretty good.” It happens over and over again.

Asheesh Advani
And I’ll tell you, I’ve got twin boys who just graduated high school and just started university, and one of my motivations for writing this book, which is all about life lessons for aspiring leaders, is they don’t listen to me at all. My kids do not listen to me. So, I figured this is a way for me to convey all the things I want them to know, and they can read it at a time that makes sense for them, not make sense for me. And you are a parent too so I think you know what I’m talking about.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so tell us, what’s sort of the big idea or core of thesis in your book, Modern Achievement?

Asheesh Advani
Well, most achievement books, historically, have been just written for a different age and different time. A young person graduating from high school or university today is, on average, going to have 20 different jobs at least, and potentially as many as seven different careers over the course of their working lives. That amount of change means the idea of achievement is also different.

So, most achievement books are written where you set a long-term goal, you write it down, you visualize it, and the universe helps it happen because you’ve been clear about it. But if you’re going to have that many jobs and that many different careers, the idea of achievement has to be not just about long-term goal attainment, but also about the process and the journey to achievement.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, could you give us an example of someone who’s perhaps made the switch or picked up this philosophy that’s more modern to their enrichment?

Asheesh Advani
Well, I think most young people are already starting to think this way. You know, one of the lessons in the book, for example, one of my favorites, actually, is make friends who are five to ten years older than you, and most young people tend to hang out with their peers who are their same age. So, you’ve got to be somewhat intentional.

If many of your career transitions are going to involve sort of networking, you have to be much more intentional about building these networks of people who will be one step ahead of you in your career, who can either promote you or help you, advise you, be mentors and role models, and that’s just an example of something which, at least, I’ve seen, there are young people already doing, and we share some of the stories because Junior Achievement, I don’t know if you know too much about JA but…

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I volunteered back in the day at Bain, and I just gave someone like the World of Work, or World at Work chart to help them think through career stuff, so I’m a fan. I’m on board.

Asheesh Advani
Oh, my God. You’re a fan. I love it. I love it. I didn’t know that when we agreed to do this. That’s awesome. So, yeah, so Junior Achievement has been around for over 100 years now, it’s an amazing organization. I’ve been in my role as CEO of JA Worldwide now for about nine years, and I’ve seen us become more global, really spread this way of thinking, being optimistic and being intentional about your career development to parts of the world where young people are hungry for this, really hungry for this knowledge.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. And that point about high-achieving folks hanging out with folks who are older than them is really resonating. I was just chatting yesterday with my buddy, Justin, who’s fantastic, and he is in our men’s group, and he is the youngest and all of us are five to ten, maybe a little more, years older than him. And yet, it is totally working for him because, sure enough, he is finding himself in career situations where he is widely recognized as a high performer. He’s doing great.

And part of that is he is just internalizing the wisdom and pro tips of people working in their jobs who have been working there longer, and they just share all the little tidbits they’ve learned and how they think about things, and he’s just getting those quicker and faster than others who are only hanging out with people their age.

Asheesh Advani
Well, when I wrote that lesson in the book, and I should mention the book is co-authored with Marshall Goldsmith, so we really collaborated on this, and Marshall is a celebrated leadership thinker and knows much more than me. He came back and said, “Asheesh, it’s not just about young people having these role models and friends that they can learn from, but it’s also people older looking sort of back and saying, ‘Other people five to ten years younger than me, who can help me with my next phase,’” because people are just living longer and having longer working lives. So, we adapted the life lesson to actually be both five to ten years older and five to ten years younger. And I’m not sure if you felt that you’ve learned from your friend, Justin, you said his name is?

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely, I sure have.

Asheesh Advani
So, I think it really works. It works both ways. It really does.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s good. Well, so then, I’m curious, you had a little tidbit in your book copy, “Classic books on achievement, like those by Napoleon Hill, Brian Tracy, and Stephen Covey, were written for a much different world. Today’s young leaders need a fresh approach for achieving success in their lives and careers.”

And so, I hear you in terms of we’ve got a different environment associated with, hey, more job switches, etc. I’m curious, if you think anything, let’s just pick on Stephen Covey, shall we? I’m curious if there’s any particular messages from Stephen Covey, like maybe there’s one of them seven habits that needs to be revamped or thought about differently in our environment today?

Asheesh Advani

Well, to be honest, I don’t remember all of the seven habits from Stephen Covey and which one I would adapt or change. I will say that in Napoleon Hill, particularly, at that moment in time, there was clearly the beginning of this idea of a job for life, right? The idea of the college you get into and the first job that you have will determine your path.

And, certainly, when I went to university, now well over 20 years ago, it really did feel that way. Like, everybody wanted that job in investment banking or consulting, which would give them a career path, which would then lead to the next good thing, which led to the next good thing, and getting into that one college got you the job in investment banking or consulting or law or medicine or whatever you were going to do.

And the reality is, today, that is just no longer the case. So, I don’t know, to answer your question, if Stephen Covey had anything that was directly as linear as what I saw in Napoleon Hill’s books. But the job market of today, and I really say this for all the parents, obsessing over what college your kid gets into and obsessing over the first job that they have is just no longer as needed as maybe 20 years ago when that’s where everyone’s head was.

Pete Mockaitis

You know, it’s funny, Asheesh, you mentioned your first job out of college having huge impact. I remember that was the exact thought process I went through when I thought, “Okay, what job do I want out of college? I want to have some skills and some network to do any number of things.” So, strategy consulting is what I want, and it worked out. I was at Bain for some time right out of college, and I thought that it has served me well.

And so, I guess back in the day, that was 2006 that I graduated from college and did that, and it seems like that was swell for me. Are you thinking now it makes less of an impact if we get that start at a top consulting firm or bank or Google or wherever is hot, fresh out of college now? And can you share the underlying evidence for that?

Asheesh Advani

Well, I will say that it’s always important to surround yourself with people who push you. It’s always important to surround yourself with opportunities that are sort of focused on giving you expansive knowledge, not just narrow and deep knowledge, particularly early in your career. So, I think consulting jobs are great. I started my career in strategy consulting as well so I know exactly what the motivation was for that job and exactly what some of the things, at least, I got out of it.

I will say today the linear path of, “Okay, I’m going to go to a top consulting firm, then go get a top MBA, then go into either an industry or a related field,” that path is fundamentally different today. Just to give you one data point, which I think drives this home. If you believe the World Economic Forum Future of Jobs data analysis, over 40% of our skills every five years will need to be re-learned or re-skilled, partly because of AI.

So, 40%, and even if you believe that number is too high, because the way they got that data was through surveys, so it’s possible that when you ask people, particularly during the hype of AI, they may over-exaggerate that number. So, let’s assume it’s half that number. Let’s assume that one-fifth of our skills, 20% of our skills, have to be re-learned or re-skilled in a different way every five years. That is a shockingly high number.

That means that you’re going to have to effectively reinvent yourself many times over the course of your career. So, the job to really have is one which encourages you to always be curious and be willing to learn new things.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, so then, here and now, let’s say we’ve got listeners, they’re in the middle of their careers, maybe the early side, maybe right in the middle, what are some of the top strategies and tactics that are implied by this new environment and your perspective on modern achievement?

Asheesh Advani

Well, so we’ve structured the book to have 30 lessons, and the lessons are organized into three sections: fixed, flexible, and freestyle. Some fixed lessons, like, for example, writing down your intentions and goals, have been around ever since the Stephen Covey and Napoleon Hill days, and we put that in the classic fixed section. So, these are things that don’t change based on time and place.

Flexible are things that do change based on time and place. So, for example, when you’re in your 30s or whether you work in a different type of organization versus small versus large, one of those might be how to manage your burn rate. So, one of the points I make in the book is to keep your burn rate low because it gives you lots of optionality. In a world of this much change, there may be times that you actually want to, for example, pursue an entrepreneurial path.

I’ll tell you one story. I’m a tech entrepreneur by background before I joined Junior Achievement, and I remember interviewing a senior executive for a role at one of the tech companies that I ran, and he really wanted to work with us, he really wanted to work with us, but he built up a cost structure that required him to not be able to take a job for less than $350,000 base salary.

Because he had, like, kids in private school, he was paying for his country club memberships, and other things that were really hard for him to let go of, and that dramatically limited his options for what he could do next. So, it made it impossible for him to accept, or actually we didn’t make him the offer because we said it’s just unsustainable over the long run.

So, I tell you that story because I think a lot of mid-career professionals are just surrounding themselves with peers that increase their burn rate through peer pressure, and that limits your options in an age where you’re going to have 20 jobs and seven careers.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And so, just to be clear, we’re talking about burn rate. This is the rate at which we burn through our own personal cash to live our life in terms of the food we eat, and the house we live in, and our recurring expenses.

Asheesh Advani

It’s entrepreneur speak for recurring expenses. I tell the story in the book as well of when I was in college, we did a magazine article asking recent graduates about their expenses and their salary and their bonus. It was, I think, one of the most popular articles we ever wrote…

Pete Mockaitis

Sounds good, people’s money.

Asheesh Advani

…because nobody knew anything about this. Everybody was aspiring for these jobs because of vague reputational goals, and they had no idea what it actually meant with regards to salary, bonus, and expenses. And the top, top graduates we interviewed had these amazing jobs at all the best banks and consulting firms, but they were not saving any money because they basically built up an expense side to keep up with the Joneses and were spending a lot on apartments and entertainment and travel.

So, it’s important to think about that in terms of the choices you make and the environments you surround yourself with.

Pete Mockaitis

You know, Asheesh, it’s funny, you’re bringing me, we’re talking about the back in the day, I’m thinking about my consulting time. I remember one time I was taking a bus to a party and my colleagues at Bain were kind of teasing me, they said, “You know we make a lot of money, right?” And I said, “Yes, thank you. I’m aware that for a 23-year-old, this salary is great. But I also have some plans associated with perhaps starting my own business in a couple of years, so I would like to have that flexibility, those options.”

And it’s so funny how that happens little by little, things get locked in, and then you do, you have fewer options. And it’s funny, when you said he couldn’t take that job, I guess I think about maybe words rather literally, it’s like, “Well, he could,” but he has to say, “Hey, honey, we’re pulling the kids out of private school and going to public school. We’re selling this house and getting a much smaller, not as nice house.”

And so, it might be impractical, but it’s sort of like, “Well, how badly do you want it?” And in practice, we’re rarely able to turn on a dime. Like, “Let’s change all the circumstances of our life quite quickly because of a cool opportunity. And the children and the family as a whole has gotten rather accustomed to how things have been, and they will probably not appreciate it being yanked away from them.”

Asheesh Advani

It feels like you’re going backwards at times, when, in reality, you’re just creating more options for yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s a great tip right there. Very practical, “Watch your burn rate. What are your recurring expenses?” And, hopefully, you’ve got a nice healthy buffer with some savings and some growing savings so you’ve got more options to do cool things, as you’re making career choices. Any other top strategies, tactics that are super handy for modern leaders?

Asheesh Advani

Well, one thing, is this idea of going meta. Going meta means stepping back and looking at yourself as if somebody else were looking at you. And in education theory now, teachers tell students to actually reflect on what they’ve learned, to write down, literally write down at the end of a lecture, what they learned.

We didn’t do that when we were in school. We didn’t take a step back and actually have to reflect on what we’d learned, and applying that to your life, I think, is very powerful. Things like mindfulness, in many ways, allow you to have a step back, and a lot of people don’t do it.

A lot of people do it at milestones like birthdays, anniversaries, and maybe when you write your annual resolutions. But regularly, being reflective, it’s actually very empowering to say, “Hey, I just went through this, this project was just done, or this initiative was just started and finished,” and taking a step back for a second and saying, “Okay, what did I actually learn from this?” and writing it down.

Pete Mockaitis

I love that. And so, now I’m thinking about our episode with B.J. Fogg with habits and sort of triggers or prompts. It sounds like, in this context, the trigger or the prompt is whenever you finish a thing, “Let’s reflect about that thing and be finished.”

Asheesh Advani

Well, I love Marshall’s book, Triggers. I know that’s a little bit of a different concept, but you’re absolutely right, this idea of pausing, reflecting at the end of a project. What Marshall tends to put in his books, particularly the Triggers book, is the way you ask a question is so important. So, he, for example, had me participate in a group which he calls LPR, Life Plan Review Group, where the way we asked ourselves questions had such an impact on our mindset.

So, for example, we asked ourselves questions every week over the course of a summer, “Have I done my best to …?” dot, dot, dot. And it changes the accountability from, “Geez, I’m trying to do this project,” “I want to be better at tennis,” “I want to be a better father,” “I want to be better at work,” from, “Oh, did this go right?” “Did I win the game in tennis?” “Did I do well at work on the project?” to, “Have I done my best to become good at tennis this week?” “Have I done my best to be a good father this week?” So powerful to just change the framing, it makes it all about your own personal efforts, not what the results are.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, that’s good. That’s good. Well, so I’m also curious, are there some things that you recommend we stop doing? Is there stuff that’s outdated that we should just forget about and stop doing because it’s no good anymore?

Asheesh Advani

Well, I’d say you are certainly well aware of the debate right now about technology and social media. One thing I recommend in the book is to connect beyond the screen. We spend so much of our time on Zoom calls. In fact, there’s all this great research now about how white-collar workers end up spending more time in meetings than ever in history, partly because Zoom calls have made that so easy.

And I recommend, in one of the chapters and one of the lessons, to connect with people beyond the screen and really be intentional about that. Another thing which I think is a big change is, I mentioned fixed and flexible. The third section of the book is freestyle. So, the framework is fixed, flexible, freestyle. I mentioned fixed are classic lessons, flexible change based on time and place. Freestyle are lessons and your reaction to rules are created by you based on your own unique strengths.

And at JA, we’ve introduced this framework to the organization, where there are fixed things that are global, flexible things that vary based on time and place, such as in Europe versus Africa, and freestyle things, which are truly determined by the organizations and staff on the ground in every geography that we operate in because we’re in 118 countries. And I do think there’s something very empowering and powerful about creating your own rules and having much more agency in some of the choices that you make.

And when we asked the young people to tell us about some of these rules, some people, like some young people talked about the importance of embracing your inexperience and cluelessness, or the importance of really experiencing a different path relative to what your friends are doing. So, we got some really good insights from young people who shared their own story with us.

Pete Mockaitis

And I think that’s a pretty handy framework in general as you think about your policies, your rules, “Is this fixed? Is it flexible? Is it freestyle? Is this always everywhere for everyone? Is it under these sorts of circumstances? Or is it totally individualized?” That’s useful in and of itself in terms of, as you think about a rule, a guideline, a policy, how ironclad and locked in is it. It’s just a useful way to think about stuff?

To follow up on your point with regard to social media, and meetings, and Zoom, is your suggestion that we do less of it and how?

Asheesh Advani

So, the how gets complicated because it depends on which organization you are part of and what role you have. If you’re a leader and you’ve got some degree of control over these or if you’re not yet a leader and you really have to participate because of where you are in your career. One recommendation I would have is to create protected time for yourself.

And I think that no matter what role you have, whether you have a leadership role or whether you don’t have full control over your calendar, I think you have the ability to protect time, and you can use that time for in-person meetings, you can use that time to actually get writing done if you’ve got the kind of role that it involves writing or producing.

But a lot of, I think, particularly young leaders are scared to block off time on their calendar for things that matter to them, and I do think in the world of 20 jobs and seven careers, where you’ve got to really invest in your own personal development, that’s important.

Pete Mockaitis

Now when you say scared to block off time, what are some of the underlying concerns there?

Asheesh Advani

Well, I think there’s this general feeling when you’re early in your career that you want to be in the meeting, that being in the meeting allows you to get knowledge, allows you to build relationships, keeps you connected. And they’re definitely, I would say, particularly for aspiring leader personalities, a desire to be in the action.

But that comes with some trade-offs, and you have to realize that it’s sometimes okay to not be in every meeting, and it’s okay to really own the project that you own, and make sure it goes well and spend that other time you’d otherwise be in these meetings where you get to hear and learn, really investing in your personal development and investing in other things that are important to you.

Pete Mockaitis

And when we do that investing in personal development, what do you find to be some of the most high-yield possible activities that we can do?

Asheesh Advani

Well, I mean, there’s such a wide range. Right now, I would say there’s both skillset things where you learn new skills, everything from obviously all the AI things that are coming out, through to mindset-oriented activities. And the mindset-oriented activities, I think, are very powerful. I’ll give you one example.

So, I asked somebody on one of our boards if I could job-shadow him for a day, and everyone can do this because almost everybody says yes if asked. It’s such a compliment to be asked to have somebody, basically, follow you around for a day and learn from you.

Pete Mockaitis

I’m imagining saying, “If you want, it’s going to be super boring, dude.”

Asheesh Advani

Well, because we’re all on Zoom calls that’s why it feels super boring. But I will say, certainly, and I did this before the pandemic, so, yes, the world has changed on this dimension. But, in fact, this particular person still goes in the office every day, so I guess it hasn’t changed for him. And I learned so much from spending the day with him.

I learned how he interacts with people, I learned new frameworks, he’s a CEO of a large organization, so I learned how he communicates and I really got to see the nuance of how he manages different types of people. I still talk about it because it’s happened, what, seven years ago now but it’s so powerful that I did that. We actually have a program at JA where we do job shadows where young people are allowed to shadow executives for a day and encouraged to do it as a career development exercise.

And we even have this amazing program called “Leaders for a Day” where some of the top students get to actually follow, like, world leaders for a day. And we get them in front of either politicians or CEOs or people who are very, very prominent who agree to do it, and it’s transformational because it allows, it opens up your mind to things you just didn’t know existed that you could achieve.

For a person who’s looking for a way to invest in their personal development beyond just reading great books and listening to great podcasts, I do think doing something experiential, like a job shadow, is transformational.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, and it’s so intriguing, this job shadow is one version is a job that you think you might want to do, or someone who’s more senior than you to get a sense for “What does that look like? Or what do those skills look like?” I’m also thinking it might be interesting even to pick a job of something that it would just be good for you to learn even though it might not be super senior.

For example, I’m thinking if you feel uncomfortable with conflict, it might be interesting to shadow a police officer as he’s doing a day of evictions, or a collections agency, like something, like, “What would be one of the most contentious, unpleasant, conflict-driven things, jobs? Let’s go shadow that.” And that may well be a harrowing experience that could also give you some real growth.

Asheesh Advani

I love that idea. I mean, we think of job shadow very much about mindset shift, exposing people to things they didn’t know existed, but you could absolutely apply it to skillsets as well, conflict resolution skillsets. We’ve got amazing lawyers, for example, who, all day, spend their time negotiating, and negotiation skills are sorely lacking for a lot of young people who haven’t had to do it. So, I love your idea of applying job shadows to skillsets. I might steal that wonderful idea.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, steal away. Tell me if it’s any good. This is just theoretical off the top of my head. That’s great. And so, when you say, when you ask, most people say yes. I would say, first, I guess I’m a little surprised by that. I think some people might say that that feels kind of intrusive, or “I kind of need my quiet, alone, introvert time, please.” How do you recommend framing this request?

Asheesh Advani

I mean, obviously, if you ask for a full day of somebody’s time, they may immediately go to one or two meetings which are personal in nature or confidential in nature, and they may decline based on knowing those are in their calendar. So, you need to phrase it based on, “And of course, if there’s any part of the day you don’t want me to shadow you, I’m happy to step away and do my own work.” So, really, it’s picking the two or three meetings that they feel very comfortable including you in.

But I think the power of it, honestly, is people feeling like you’re learning from them. And, of course, this is what happens. Actually, this is something I should definitely share. When we do these job shadows, we do it at scale, we do it in over 80 countries around the world, of course, the young people who shadow the executives get so much out of it, but the executives almost universally say they learned two things.

One, they learn from looking at their own job through somebody else’s eyes, so they love that. And the second is they actually learn almost like in a reverse mentoring way from the perspective of somebody who’s just has a different set of life experiences. So, when you’re asking the person who you want to shadow, I would encourage you to use a language which just makes them feel it truly is mutual, not just completely one way.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I guess I’m thinking some of the most powerful job-shadowing action, as I imagine the day, would be right after the meeting in terms of like, “Hey, I noticed you said this in that moment. What were you thinking about there?”

Asheesh Advani

Oh, I love that.

Pete Mockaitis

And they say, “Oh, yeah, well, I noticed that person felt seemed really concerned so I wanted to proactively make sure that we address their concerns by blah blah blah blah blah,” you know, whatever. So, that’s my intuition about how that would be most amazing.

Asheesh Advani

No, your intuition is spot on. In fact, we actually have this exercise called “I noticed.” We do it occasionally at work. We do it really often in a learning group I’m part of through the Young Presidents Organization, YPO. And in our YPO forum, we do an “I noticed” round after somebody has presented, and we all go around and literally just talk about what we noticed. It’s very powerful.

I’ve used it at work now and then. You can’t use it after every meeting. That takes up too long. But for certain types of meetings, people who are the presenters love getting the kind of input, and it doesn’t have to be, “Geez, I noticed you messed up the slide.” It’s usually, actually, “I noticed a connection to something you said three weeks ago,” or, “I noticed something I’m working on, that ties into something that you’re working on.” And it’s very powerful to make time for the “I noticed” for the right setting.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s great. Well, Asheesh, tell me anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Asheesh Advani

Well, there’s another lesson which I’m very proud of, which is learn to balance simplicity and complexity. I think for aspiring leaders, it’s a nuance, but it’s so important, which is if you become really great at taking complex things and making them simple, it is such a powerful skill. And I know this from at least my job because I ran two technology companies, and to be able to take things that are otherwise actually pretty hard to do and not brag about the fact that they were hard to do, but talk about how simple they are in terms of the benefit they create for whoever the user is, that’s where the power comes. So, we made it a life lesson and put it in this book as well.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, that’s super. And I think, often people don’t care, it sounds harsh, but they don’t, about sort of the underlying complexity and all that you had to go through, unless it’s really a caring mentor type figure who’s invested in your career and your development and your process. But for the most part, I’m thinking about customers or senior executives just sort of want to know, “So what’s the benefit? And how is this new and different and better now? Okay, understood. Thank you.”

Asheesh Advani

Well, we’re so busy showing the world how smart we are, we sometimes forget that that’s really not what it’s about. It’s about genuinely creating value for other people. And so, how do we become better, particularly, certainly when you’re communicating with boards and customers and stakeholders, where they, as you said, they don’t really care about the how, they just care about the true benefit, how do we put our ego aside a little bit and leave it for somebody else to learn, frankly, about all the hard work that was behind what we created? And that’s really hard for a lot of people.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Asheesh Advani

So, one of my favorite quotes, I’ve reframed in the book, is, “Success is moving from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”

Pete Mockaitis

I like it. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Asheesh Advani

So, we put in the book, “Life is moving from mess to mess with no loss of confidence.”

Asheesh Advani

So, the Minnesota Twin Study is one of the classic studies. I’ve got identical twins, so I’ve got a particular interest in nature versus nurture. And I think we, particularly in America, feel so strongly that so much of what is possible, comes down to our own efforts. It’s kind of humbling to actually read the Twin Study and see so much of what happens is actually nature and not nurture, which I think you can interpret as disempowering, but I don’t view it that way at all. I view it as something which is the reality of what science tells us, and we’ve got to work with what science tells us.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a favorite book?

Asheesh Advani

It’s called The Magic of Thinking Big, and David Schwartz. And one of the nice things about this book is it tells you that the amount of effort it takes to add a zero or two on any goal is so little compared to the amount of effort you’re going to do without the zeroes. So, you may as well have the zeroes because you can just make a bigger impact.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Asheesh Advani

Well, the sad truth of it is I’ve now use the word “double-click” so often people tease me about it.

Pete Mockaitis

I think there was just an article about that in, was it the New York Times or Wall Street Journal?

Asheesh Advani

Yes, I know, it’s awful. Let’s be appropriately self-deprecating here and take the blame. I’ve fallen into the abyss of using double-click and I can’t get out of the habit.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, while we’re here, when you say double-click, do you specifically mean to go deeper upon and expand on a topic or matter?

Asheesh Advani

Yes. Yes.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, I actually kind of like that in terms of I’m imagining the window is expanding, and so in some ways, my visual brain responds nicely to that, it’s like, “Okay, I’m actually imagining a program expanding with the whole animation.” So, I’m there.

Asheesh Advani

Well, we both started our career in consulting, so I think we’ve fallen into the trap of agreeing with each other about phrases, but for the rest of the world, apparently double-click, for whatever reason, brings up negative metaphors.

Pete Mockaitis

As long as the synergies are highly impactful, Asheesh, I think it’s okay.

Asheesh Advani

As long as you have a good two-by-two matrix to show how to get to the top quadrant, you’re good.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Asheesh Advani

So, JAWorldwide.org is our organizational website, and ModernAchievement.com is the book’s website.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Asheesh Advani

Well, I will say one of the ways that you can make a huge impact in the world and feel really positive is to find a young person and say something positive to them to encourage them to pursue either a career or a dream that they want to. It’s so powerful for young people to hear from people in their mid-career or late career that they can be successful. So, you’ve got that power, and use it.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Asheesh, thank you. I wish you much modern achievement.

Asheesh Advani

Thank you. This was awesome.

Pete Mockaitis
Matt, welcome.

Matt Beane
My pleasure. I’m delighted to be here. Thanks for the invite.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to learn how I can save human ability in an age of intelligent machines.

Matt Beane
I think we all should be, and I’ve been trying to be excited for a good long while now. So glad to be here and chat about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Well, kick us off, you know, there’s a lot of chatter about AI all the time. Can you maybe tell us something that is surprising, counterintuitive, kind of over- or underappreciated in the field since you really know what’s going on and the rest of us are just parroting the Wall Street Journal and New York Times?

Matt Beane
So, the core, the middle third of The Skill Code, the book, talks about a threat that I discovered initially in robotic surgeries. I was studying how you learn how to do that thing and how that’s different from how you learn how to do the good old-fashioned method of surgery, one way or another, and dear listener, trust me, I’m not going to get any more graphic than that.

But the short story there that I found really, really fast, standing in operating rooms at the top teaching hospitals around the world, is that intelligent technology in that case, AI-enabled robots, the AI there was very mild compared to what we’re all dealing with now, but it was there, that that was fantastic in many ways for productivity, for quality. A surgeon said it was like bumper bowling compared to traditional surgery, and it’s really true, actually.

When I’m in the operating room, it’s pretty amazing, especially when somebody’s really good at it. And novices, residents, would show up, help set up the robot, help attach it to a patient. They get a little bit of hands-on experience, and then they just sit down and watch for a four-and-a-half-hour procedure they’d be lucky to get 15 minutes of time on task because the robot allowed that surgeon to do the whole job themselves.

And that right there, I’ve spent the next nine and a half years looking into whether or not this is a generalizable problem and, dear reader, it is. That’s the whole point of the book. This is cutting across all sectors of the economy that I could find. I’ve been across more than 30 different kinds of occupations, different technologies, organizations, and so on now.

It turns out that we are needlessly, I think in many cases, sacrificing novice involvement in the work on the altar of productivity. That’s the basic deal that we’re striking right now, whether it’s with generative AI, whether it’s with robotics, many different kinds of technology now. And the short reason as to why is that that tech allows that expert to just do more, better, faster, some combination of those things, and part of the way you get there is you need less help.

Novices are, by definition, slower and make more mistakes, and they take coordination costs, mentoring and so on. It takes effort, time, attention. And so, in the short run, organizations love that deal, experts love that deal because, even if it’s a 5%, 8% productivity increase, you’re in more control. Experts love using their expertise. So, it’s attempting short-run target, and that’s the sort of hidden problem in the economy right now.

The best analysis I’ve been able to do, I think that is literally a trillion-dollar problem for the economy, it’s just that it shows up with a lag. You’re only going to find out a little later when those novices aren’t ready for duty.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Matt, there are so many, so many ways we can go with this. First, I think it’s beautiful in that.

You’re highlighting something that I’m really not hearing anywhere else. It’s, like, we are missing out on the opportunity for novices, apprentices, to do the initial helper, low-skill work, because at the moment, that’s kind of what AI is okay at. Like, I will say, “Hey, AI, give me 20 potential titles for this podcast episode.”

Matt Beane
You got it.

Pete Mockaitis
They’re still not as good as my team, just saying. Thanks, team. You’re awesome. But it does give me a little spark. It’s like, “Okay, that’s a good phrase. I’ll take that phrase and work that into something else that we got. Okay.”

Matt Beane
Yep, and that translates into, not always, but often the default deal is a little bit less struggle for that person who is trying to give you that feedstock. A little bit less complexity they have to deal with. In the lingo of the book, this is the skill code that’s up front. There’s three basic components to healthy skill development.

One of them is challenge, “Are you working close to but not at the bounds of your ability?” You do that, you’re literally sweating, you’re not doing as well as you could, but that’s where we learn mostly. It’s uncomfortable. It’s not fun. The middle one’s complexity, which is, “Are you not just getting a task done, but are you engaging with the broader universe of tasks you’re embedded in?” The other people’s jobs around you, the other technologies, asking broader questions, not just focused. That’s going sort of broad where a challenge is more deep.

And then human connection, human relationships, warm bonds of trust and respect between human beings. Those three things, you take that subtle, small, in your case, “just help me along a little bit” deal, which by the way is a much nicer version of what’s generally going on out there. You’ll just do it yourself in many cases if you can. Then all three of those things take a hit, but not for you. It’s for that next person trying to work up the chain.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And now you say this is a trillion-dollar problem. I’m curious what industries or professions do you think it’s going to hit the most hard? And, selfishly, are there any sort of market investment opportunities we should be exploiting, Matt? That’s what it’s all about, right?

Matt Beane
Yep. I’ll give you the one I care about most, which is to say there’s a huge potential upside here, yeah. So, you can sort of short the market. There are plenty of places where you should expect things to be more readily automatable with these technologies faster. And this fits in, I’ve got a piece in Harvard Business Review coming out in two or three weeks, or maybe a month on this.

Anything that is remote work right now means you don’t have to use your body to do it. In other words, it’s “Receive some information, process that information, communicate about that process, and send a changed work product off,” but it’s all digital. That’s a lot more straightforward for these kinds of technologies to handle, especially if it doesn’t involve multimodal data, just like text.

Some folks will lose their jobs there and that’s a serious issue for those affected. We should care about it. But they’re going to see, most folks are going to see a ton of job change. Like, what it means to do my job is going to radically change for that person who could entirely be remote versus somebody who has to show up and use their body for something. So you can go looking there, and you can look in places in the economy where the exposure to these technologies and the potential upside of using them is really high and concentrated in a job. A colleague of mine, Daniel Rock, who’s at Wharton, he recently, with co-authors at OpenAI, published a paper that maps this exposure across the economy. And if you want to make a smart bet about where there’s going to be the most change, look at those places.

The upside, though, is the one that I wrote the back third of the book about, basically, which is we like to romanticize this master-apprenticeship relation as if it’s somehow the peak of what humans can do in terms of transferring and developing skill, and we’ve relied on it for literally 160,000 years, so it ain’t broke exactly, but it can suck. And could it be better?

I think I’m very convinced, I’m trying to build technology like this now, that we can use the very technology that’s part of the insult to build new systems that, in fact, make that connection richer, better, more flexible than it ever was before, so that skill development functions better and from now forward than it ever could have in all of human history.

Companies that try to figure that out, reconfigure their systems so that just by using it, you’re nudged towards healthier skill and you get your productivity, that company’s going to kill. I mean, that’s such a great story. So, anyway, I think there’s opportunities in both directions.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds really cool. Could you paint a picture for what that looks like? And is that happening somewhere right now?

Matt Beane
It’s funny, you should ask, only a few folks have asked. I am now CEO of a startup called SkillBench. In about a month, we’re going to come out and put up a stealthy website or whatever. But we are building a technology that helps an organization see this joint optimization problem based on rich data from inside their own firm.

Like, think of those as two dimensions. You’ve got productivity that comes out of AI, like, “How much juice are we getting out of this stuff?” By the way, it’s going to be less than you expect. We can show you that.

Pete Mockaitis
I think that’s my vibe, yeah, impression.

Matt Beane
Yeah, but it’s not none, and sometimes it will be negative, but seeing what that is, is actually not trivial. But we frame it as a joint optimization problem, and we get data that will help you show, “Fine, you get plus one utils productivity-wise out of implementing AI. You’ve bought your 20,000 licenses like everybody else. What’s the simultaneous interdependent effect of that on the human capital, the people who repeatedly have to do that job that now involves AI? Are they getting up-skilled or down-skilled? Are they more or less motivated? And are they more or less connected with each other?”

You know, these kinds of things, we’re building a tool to automatically help organizations just get a live dashboard of that so that they can figure out, “Do we like the trade-off that we’re making?” In some places they will, and that’s fine, right? Sometimes it’s the right thing to do to sacrifice building human capital for sake of a giant productivity gain, if you’ve got one. But right now, you just said it, I think, earlier, maybe three, four minutes ago.

It’s not a problem you’d ever really heard of that this is a joint optimization problem. There’s this trade space between how much productivity boon are we getting out of this thing. Oh, but that’s also interrelated with what happens to the humans that are left in that job after we change that job. Sometimes it’s great, sometimes it’s up in both territories, in both categories.

But it’s like driving with no rear-view mirror. Organizations are not in the habit of gathering data on that second one at all, or interrelating them two together. So just getting a window on what the heck is going on in that trade space is what we’re doing. But there are numerous firms out there trying to build technology to use AI, for instance, to make better, high-quality, briefer matches between an expert and a novice on a specific project.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Can you zoom into a particular industry, like how we’d see that in practice?

Matt Beane
A good instance is in chip design, one firm that I recently got some data on. Basically, when you’re trying to lay out a new chip, the state of the art in the last, say, 10 years or so is you’re going to use automated software to sort of do this optimization problem of mapping out where all the different components go on that chip.

And so, increasingly, over those last 10 years, basically that junior engineer, who would have been sort of sleeves rolled up over a diagram and doing math that contributes upwards to that senior engineer, who’s doing the block diagram and laying things out, they’re just going to have less opportunity to play in that interaction of designing that chip. They might do some isolated analysis, and actually, the dynamic’s very similar in investment banking.

Well, it turns out that that is not true for all chip projects, for all types of components at all phases of the game. So, in fact, if somebody is a junior engineer, and they’re working on power optimization, that part of the problem, like, “How do I make sure there’s the right amount of power going to this certain amount of the chip?” maybe the chip that they’re currently working on, they would just lose out on that opportunity.

But, in fact, there’s somebody in a fab in Jakarta right now who is working on a chip that could use a little manual help because it’s an ASIC, for instance, which is just a custom piece of silicon as opposed to something you’d produce, mass produce. Well, in the world that we inhabited before this kind of information was available, no human could know that for this one- or two-week window, there’s a senior engineer in Jakarta who could use the help of a junior engineer in upstate New York.

But now you can get that real time work data and say, “Hey, no, this is not done. The capabilities here are underbaked.” But there are firms that have realized, “Oh, this is some sort of problem I got to manage, and maybe there’s a way to make better sort of work-related matches as opposed to just matches across a hierarchy.” That’s the old school way of doing it, that many firms are still deploying, and that’s not bad, but it’s just very coarse.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you. And with regard to, when you mentioned these things, like surgery, investment banking, chip making, which by the way, I read the book The Chip War. Extreme ultraviolet lithography is the most complicated thing I’ve ever heard of, and it blew my mind, which is actually a shoutout.

Matt Beane
It is pretty incredible, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Book recommendation there. But that really does paint a picture in terms of, at the at the highest level, yeah, there are some expertise that’s pretty high stakes – life or death, millions or billions of dollars, huge factory waste or safety matters – that, “Yeah, we’re going to be super careful associated with having a senior person and then a novice apprentice kind of learning under them and doing some work as they’re developing those skills.”

And, yes, it does seem kind of spooky that we could find ourselves in a place where those lesser experienced people don’t have the opportunity to do that thing anymore. And so, I’m curious, if some of us are already starting to find ourselves in that position, what should we do?

Matt Beane
First of all, in order to take effective action to address this problem, you got to know what an effective solution looks like. Like, “What would it look like if things were good for me, or the people that report to me, or the people that are in my profession, for building skill?”

There hasn’t really been a lot of proliferation of different views about what skill is, how you build it, and so on, and big theories that, sort of, “First, you do this, then you do this, then you do this, then you do that.” And I just realized this book was not going to be able to do that. Like, there are too many different ways of working now, different technologies and so on, different modalities of interacting.

But the raw ingredients, sort of like, and I use a DNA metaphor, that’s what’s on the cover of the book, if I could give you the amino acids of skill development, and they’re going to show up in different combinations in your setting, they’re going to show up in different sequences, different emphases. But for each one of those three things – the challenge, the complexity, the connection – I give you a 10-point checklist in the book.

You can immediately go look at your work scenario and say, “All right, how healthy is challenge for me? How am I doing on this, like, 10-point quiz? How healthy is complexity? How healthy is connection? And if it’s not great, then I, at least, know how and why it might change, because each one of those items is a specific set of interactions.”

For instance, in challenge, your challenge is healthiest when you have an expert nearby who can help you deal with the frustration that comes with not performing at your best. You can struggle on your own. You can get really far. A lot of autodidacts have shown us, like, you don’t really necessarily need someone to build skill but you need them to get superb progress towards skill.

And if you have an expert around who can help frame the difficulty you’re embedded in, in a broader context, like you want to be able to hit a fastball at major league speeds, well, the first goal is, “Why don’t you just try to even make contact? Like, forget about a fair ball. Get up and try to do that, and then you hit a foul ball, and instead of going, ‘Good job, dummy. That’s a foul ball,’ they can say, ‘Okay, you can hit a foul ball in the major leagues. Tomorrow we’re going to work on…’” right? They can sort of help you put that in context.

So, that’s just one tiny little micro example. That, I hope, the first three chapters can help anyone, in any role, in any job, look at that situation and say, “Is it healthy or is it not?” The next move that’s peppered throughout the book is, “Okay, assume in some cases, in some part of your life, in some part of your organization, this has been good or is currently great, what is it that is allowing for things to work well over there that’s not working well over here?”

Like, “The job I had last year, I was learning so much. Now, not so much.” What was happening back then that you could port? Or if you’re a manager in an organization, “Fine, skill development’s great over here. Why is it?” Because the job rotation program is so annoying. It turns out that rotating people through different jobs, no one likes that, and it is incredibly beneficial for your skills and career development. It gets you engaged with that complexity thing I was talking about in the middle of those three Cs.

So, lots of notes, angry notes, like, “I have to rotate through yet another function.” It’s like, “Yeah, you do.” And the job of the leader then is to say, “This is actually really critical for your career and it is no fun. So, I’m right there with you on it and we’re definitely doubling down on that,” that kind of thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, understood. So, it’s not so much, necessarily, that the wise expert mentor person has to be pouring forth, necessarily, expert nuanced insight wisdom, so much as they just have a bit of a broad perspective associated with, “Yeah, this sucks, it’s uncomfortable, it’s unpleasant in these ways, and also it’s useful.” And just that, in and of itself, is a huge value because the learner is able to then persist through the frustrations and rock and roll.

Matt Beane
Yep. And then, you know, I mean, technologists, people who are building these technologies that are currently enabling all this new potential productivity, and in some cases actual, they have a big choice about like how do they want to design their tech, how do they want to sell it. There are ways of doing that, the default ways, that will appeal to this monetary productivity-oriented logic that’s deeply embedded in business and firms, and they can win. And yet that doesn’t have to be that way.

I have a post on my Substack called “Don’t Let AI Dumb You Down.” And in the back third of that post, there are specific changes you can make to ChatGPT through its custom settings to have it nudge you towards more skill while you’re getting productivity out of it. It’s very straightforward. The interface is available, but that takes every single user doing that for themselves. That’s no way for the human species to win.

Like, OpenAI or Anthropic or Google, if they just made a few tweaks to that UX, anybody at the end of the day would be mildly annoyed, maybe more, by the technology because it keeps asking, “Do you know any other human beings you could connect with about this skill, rather than just me?” And it’s like, “No, I don’t want to debrief this interaction.” “No, I don’t want a harder version.” “No, I don’t want to try it myself.”

But if that’s the option, how many people, if it was turned on by default, would turn it off? Some, but a whole bunch of other folks, millions probably, would just know more about musicology at the end of the week for having used ChatGPT, or have made connections with other human beings in their local area.

This happens to me. Like, I am now connected to a rocket enthusiasts club in the Santa Barbara area because we all like to watch the rocket launches out of Vandenberg Air Force Base, and I just went into ChatGPT, asking for some code to predict when they were going to land the boosters back here in Santa Barbara. And because I had configured it that way, it said, “Is there any other human being locally you might connect with about that?” I’m like, “Oh, yeah, good one.” So, the tech, just so much power in the hands of the folks rolling this tech out, so it’s such easy changes.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really intriguing, this notion of these little nudges and how just transformational their impact can be. Like, 401k savings, it’s like, “Well, the default is this much is deployed into your 401k savings.” And people say, “Okay,” which is wild. You know, it’s like, “This is your money.” It’s like, “All right, sure, 8%, cool. Oh, you said, okay, nine? All right, nine, sure.” It’s like, “Whatever.” Like, most people just sort of roll with that default, and that’s interesting.

It’s funny, I have a calorie-tracking app, and I just changed the default to like, “Just assume that I burn fewer calories naturally.” Like, the threshold at which it turns green versus red is now different. And I know, I know I set it up to do that, and yet it does nudge me, it’s like, “Okay, maybe I’ll have a healthier snack so I can stay green because I want it.”

And so, that’s really clever how if we’re engaging frequently with ChatGPT or some of these things, if we can make the default setting to be one that nudges us in positive ways, we will benefit. And it’s funny, it’s sort of like, “Yes, I know talking to other people is generally a cool thing,” but it doesn’t occur to you in the moment. Likewise, it’s like, “Yes, I know I could look at the manual to figure this out.” I was like, “But, actually, yeah, maybe I will. I’d do that.” Because it said it, I was like, “Yeah, actually, maybe I’ll learn something else if I get the whole PDF manual of this appliance that’s giving me trouble right now.”

Matt Beane
Exactly. And, in fact, to the opposite, I lay out in the book, like there’s many cases where we grab for the manual and that hurts your skill development. It turns out that with, and in the book, I cite the research on this, that reading the manuals can be hazardous to your health of your skill. Basically, folks do it too soon, too early. We front load all kinds of explicit knowledge and learning into school, into work, formal training classes, checklists, SOPs, all this kind of stuff, when it’s generally better to get the minimally sufficient amount of explicit information and then just dive in the pool.

And then, after you’ve had a good struggle and a stroke and managed to get heaving and scuffing up to the edge of the pool, then somebody could say, “You want to learn a little bit about strokes now?” Humans are better at learning that way. So, a system like this, if you asked for the PDF, it could say, “You’re a little early in trying to deal with it. How about you just try a little harder? It’d probably be better for you.” I mean, it wouldn’t do that, because people would say, “No, go to hell, give me the PDF.”

But there are ways of doing that where, if you, as the user, specify, “Here’s my trade zone between getting my productivity,” and it’s like your 401k contribution. By the way, the returns on your skill are much better than the returns you will get by putting money in a 401k. So, if you set that slider, “So today I want to be pretty darn annoyed and learn a lot,” or, “I want to be not annoyed at all and not learn anything,” that’s your choice. But the technologists can make that available to people is the point. Like, that’s just a huge missed market opportunity, from my point of view.

Pete Mockaitis
And you say we can go ahead and do it ourselves. Is there a magic copy-pasted thing you recommend we shove in there? Or how do we get it done?

Matt Beane
Yes. I boiled down the entire book into two short paragraphs that I dumped into the custom instructions in ChatGPT, and that is in the bottom third of that post on my Substack. Substack is called WildWorldofWork.org, and the post is called “Don’t Let AI Dumb You Down.” I can send the URL after we’re done. But, yeah, the literal contents of those boxes, even as of today, I keep updating it whenever I make changes, is sitting right there.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, cool. And so, that’s nudged you to go meet some rocket people and has some other good impacts on your life as well?

Matt Beane
Yes, absolutely. And, you know, if I I’m perfectly candid, and most of the time, the thing says, “Hey, if you want more challenge, what about this? If you want more complexity, what about this? And how about some human connection?” And I wave it off 90% of the time, 94% of the time something. I could go get the data. And it’s always there though and I don’t not notice it.

And, by the way, what I have put together is the most basic ham-fisted, ridiculously coarse approach to this problem so it’s helped me. Yes, I have, for instance, I’ve learned a bunch more about coding because it itself suggested that I leave, you may have seen this yourself if you’re doing the sort of work where ChatGPT, or Claude, is generating code. You can turn a radio button on where you can watch that code getting written.

And it writes it at reasonable, it’s like 2x human speed or something, 2.5x, which is like listening to a podcast, you can track. And so, I’ve learned some stuff about coding just by watching, too. Like, I wasn’t ever a professional coder. I took some classes in graduate school. It had been 10 years for me or so since I’d tried to write any code to do anything, and now, kind of casually use code to solve problems. But you don’t learn anything about that if you just let the machine do its thing and take the output.

So, leaving that window open is a way where I just am like, it’s like pair coding, by the way, the best learning about how to code comes from sitting physically side-by-side with somebody where they’re coding and you’re watching and you’re chatting through the problem, that kind of thing. The best coders at Google are pair coding, side-by-side.

Anyway, this is all just one guy’s semi-random, I mean, fine, I wrote a book on the topic, and I know some stuff, but, come on, the world can do better than one guy. Like, we have to take wholesale effort. We have a huge opportunity to nudge all of humanity in a healthier direction on skill while getting crazy cool new things out of AI.

Pete Mockaitis
And it makes you wonder kind of about everything that we allow to be done for us, and like, “Is this trade-off worth it? And is it worth it every time? The dishwasher washes my dishes. Thank you, dishwasher.” But, in some ways, it can be kind of mindful, cathartic, Zen-like, just hot soapy water, physically cleaning some stuff, and sometimes that’s the right answer.

Likewise, the calculator or the GPS or anything that does anything for us, yeah, it productively accomplishes that thing faster. Cool. Thanks. But there may very well be times and places when I’d say, “No, no, autopilot. I want the control.” And it is enriching me in a skills development kind of a way and some other ways because I have wrest back control.

Matt Beane
Yes, exactly right. And it’s not obvious where you win by giving up the tech and in what ways you give it up. There are other cases, by the way, let’s be real clear, where by using the tech in its fullest capacity, you are going to build ridiculously more skill than you would have otherwise. So, in fact, there’s a win-win there where you were like just stabbing for productivity, and because you get to skip some stuff that is actually repetitive, annoying, you get to deal with the cool complex parts of the problem.

And so, we don’t pay a price at all. In fact, you learn a whole bunch more, “Oh, but maybe I’m sacrificing that novice’s involvement. Gosh, darn it, there’s no free lunches there.” So, it’s not just an optimization problem for me, Matt Beane, or you, Pete. It’s like, “I’m winning, but what about the people around me? What about the people who want to come up the ranks?”

It’s really, that’s a tall order to ask any one expert to be looking out for their own results and seeing that, in fact, if they don’t actively do something to support that novice, that person is out to sea. Whereas, in the past, to cycle, I skipped way past it in the beginning, like the traditional mode of doing surgery is a lot like doing lots of kind of work, which is, if you and I were doing it and you’re my mentor, there are four hands required for that job.

Like, somebody’s holding that patient open while the other person is doing something inside of them and that takes four hands. So, I can be at the shallow end of the pool, so to speak, if you decide I’m not really ready, but I’m not doing nothing. I’m on task the whole time. And so, that radical shift is the difference.

Like, that kind of shift as we’ve used new technologies to automate small parts of the work, the calculator for instance in accounting, that wasn’t such an extensive chunk of the work that the junior accountant was left hung out to dry. In minor ways, but that they were making up for by other forms of involvement. That’s the intensity and the pace of the change is really the main thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, if we could maybe think outside of AI entirely, when it comes to acquiring skills, we’ve laid out some of these fundamentals, the challenge, the complexity of the human connection, are there any particularly underrated do’s and don’ts you think that make a world of difference as we’re trying to develop skills?

Matt Beane
So, number one, when you are not performing at your best, when you are not having fun, and you are struggling to the point where you might be sweating and really can’t hear if somebody’s talking to you, like, you’re totally focused, that’s the domain where you’re appropriately challenged and will be learning the most.

So, it’s not a space that, you know, the minute you tell this to anybody, you’re like, “Yeah, there was that time where I kind of got a years’ worth of learning in four hours because everything was riding on me doing a good job. I did not do a great job, but, hey, I did it, and now I know how I can handle that situation, right?”

So that challenge, we, in many ways, have unintentionally created a sort of, the world of work has become a bit of a padded playground a little bit on this front. Like, being uncomfortable and real struggle is a status threat, like, you don’t look like you’re doing so hot, and so maybe you’re going to avoid doing that in front of people when you want to maintain an impression kind of thing. Or there are policies that will literally keep you away from challenge and so on.

Anyway, challenge is no fun, and it is absolutely necessary, and an expert, by the way, can really help you eat a lot more challenge than you could on your own. So having somebody there who can, if you can throw a flag to ask for help, or who can give you some key guidance at key points, there’s ways of amplifying, you know, eating even more of it. That’s one.

The second sort of counterintuitive one has to do with the complexity bit, which is getting your job done faster because of technology allows you, unintentionally, to skip by a whole bunch of collateral work and understanding that’s necessary for you to not have fragile or brittle skill. So, I did some research in warehousing, for instance, recently, and the people who really were good managers of their area were good because they knew about things like seasonality in the business. They knew about different vendors that they were using for staffing.

They knew about the technology, like the taping machine, and why that thing is rickety and how to shim it so that it doesn’t shake the packages too much as they go through. These are not things that you should be paying attention to in your job, but these people not only tried to get good at being a manager of a small group, but they wanted to understand more and more of the different jobs, different work, other skills that were connected to it so that when a shock came, for them, it was like, “Oh yeah, it’s wintertime, big jackets come through the building. We got this. Here’s what we do.”

And, usually, the way to do that is do not, first, go to the rulebook, do not, first, try to explain to a newbie in detail everything to expect. Give them the least information they need to get out on the field and try. So that’s kind of the opposite. Corporate training is show up. What’s the first thing you do? New employee orientation and training.

And that just front loads a bunch of concepts and knowledge into people’s heads that usually is just going to melt away, and then, at worst, they’re going to be clutching the rulebook while they’re out there for the first week trying to do whatever, instead of just trying to pay attention, do a good job and learn.

And the last one is that we write off human relationships as if they are somehow unconnected to how we build skill, and in particular, like trust and respect between human beings, when, in fact, it’s the main event. Like, number one, nobody’s going to give you a chance to build skill unless they trust and respect you, at least a little bit. So, if you’re not earning that, you don’t get to play. So, there’s an access bit.

But the other part is motivation. Like, I can point to the places in my career, but, also, it’s clear in the research. The reason you’re motivated to build that skill is because usually there’s somebody around whose trust and respect you want to earn, like you have a manager or an expert you work with, and you want to do a good job and you want them to recognize and see it, and say, “Hey, that was good.” Or, you know, “That was good, chef, and don’t do that again,” right?

You’re getting real feedback from somebody and you want a better chance to do something cooler next time, and so you’re going to work extra hard. You’re going to get up early in the morning to do a good job because of that human connection, not because of some, like, “I want to be competent,” abstract goal. Those are things that are important, of course, but like, un-divorce human relationships from your skill, like, they’re bound together.

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

Matt Beane
I’ll go for one that has been oriented my career for a long time, which is “The future’s already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.” People attribute that to William Gibson, a famous sci-fi writer, and he, it turns out, fun cocktail party fact, does not remember saying that, and thinks he never said it.

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

Matt Beane
The Milgram experiments with people’s willingness to obey an authority figure and administer potentially lethal shocks to somebody across a divide.

Obviously, that study has been debunked in a number of ways and so on. But seeing that as a 12-year-old kid, the video, I was just shown that in a class, woke me up to you can do research about this stuff, and, “Dear, God, people will do what for what reason?” Like, that just really just woke me up intellectually in a way that few pieces of research since have done.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Matt Beane
Well, the one I tend to go off about still, a couple years after reading about it, is one called There Is No Antimemetics Division by an author with no vowels in it, QNTM. They prefer to remain anonymous. I’ll leave it at that, because that book will, if you are into sci-fi at all, that will literally melt the head off your body. It is incredibly creative. It’s fantastic.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Matt Beane
That’s got to be sitting in the morning, almost every single morning, with my wife having coffee before the day starts. That’s sort of a sacrosanct thing that she and I have established over the last, like, 15 years.

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

Matt Beane
Yeah, “We’re sacrificing learning on the altar of productivity.” It’s one that I came out with for my TED Talk, and that’s one that I hear back a fair number of times, yeah.

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

Matt Beane
MattBeane.com. M-A-T-T-B-E-A-N-E.com. That will get you access to the book. It’ll also get you access to the Substack that I mentioned before. If you want the latest rulings coming out of my brain, that’ll take you to Twitter or X, whatever you want to call it, but it’s all there, sort of a central hub.

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

Matt Beane
Yeah. So, just figure out for yourself what kind of deal you’re making with AI around productivity, and what it might be costing you or others around you in terms of skill. It could be great, bully for you, and then your job is to help other people figure that out, but it probably isn’t. Go take a second look.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, Matt, thank you. I wish you all the best.

Matt Beane
Thank you very much. I appreciated the opportunity.

Pete Mockaitis

Marshall, welcome back.

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

This is indeed me, the human Marshall version.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

That is coming.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay.

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

Zero.

Pete Mockaitis

There you go. Cool.

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah. Okay. Cool. All right.

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

On top of that.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

Give it feedback.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. You’re like, “No.”

Marshall Goldsmith

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

Okay, sure.

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

You can’t beat it.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

Well, you need to train it.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

By the way, equally good.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

That’s right.

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

Daily questions.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

Very similar principle.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis
Now there is a challenge.

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

All right.

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marshall Goldsmith

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

Pete Mockaitis

Scott, welcome back.

Scott Young

Oh, thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

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

Scott Young

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scott Young

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

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

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

Scott Young

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

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

Scott Young

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

That’s the top takeaway from this interview.

Scott Young

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a favorite book?

Scott Young

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite habit?

Scott Young

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Scott Young

Oh, yeah, thank you for having me back.